"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
That's the powerfully poetic way John's Gospel begins, echoing Genesis.
(I am fairly certain I awoke this morning with those lines from John 1:1 in my head because I had been thinking, in my amateurish way, about Bird Dog's post on Monday about Important things that don't exist, virtual reality, and the power of abstract nouns.)
We do not know who this "John" was, or whether the prologue (which scholars believe to be an early Christian hymn) was added some time after the Gospel was written around 90 AD. It's probably the most powerful beginning of anything in the Bible (after Genesis.) The NAD has the first verses thus:
1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be 4 through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; 5 the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 6 A man named John was sent from God. 7 He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him. 12 But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, 13 who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man's decision but of God. 14 And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.
John draws a parallel between Christ's relationship to God (God in a human form) to Creation itself (God's idea, made real and tangible). In doing so, he uses the untranslatable Greek term "logos," which we translated in English to the humdrum "word." While being no student of epistemology, it was clear to me that the author was introducing a note of Platonic Idealism (the basis of all modern mathematics, and lots of other stuff too) to the early followers of Christ. (Here's the Wiki on Christ the Logos.)
"Logos" aside, whenever I wonder what words are all about I tend to go back to Roger Brown's classic Words and Things. Epistemolologic altitudes just make a practical fellow like me dizzily short on oxygen in the same way that contemplating the cosmos does: it makes me want to split some firewood, practice my drives, clean out some stalls, or have a Scotch.
Well, I will leave Logos and Platonic Idealism to the experts and scholars and our better-informed commenters. My preferred image of Christ is William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World," (image) where I have seen it hanging in St. Paul's Cathedral right down from Bread Street (where John Milton grew up, and where the Mermaid Tavern used to be). That image of the offer of illumination, with Christ knocking at the cottage door, works best for me.
As does Psalm 131, David's song of ascent to prayer:
1 My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
3 O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.
