Imagine yourself as one of Jesus’ followers during the
first century. Suppose you wanted to communicate who Jesus is and what he does
for us to the people around you. Imagine further that the people around you fit
into two different cultures. You know fellow Jews like yourself, but you also
know Greeks who have no knowledge whatsoever of the Hebrew Scriptures. And
suppose that you want to communicate to these two diverse groups who Jesus is
and what he does using just one term. What term would you use?
That was the situation faced by the author of the
Gospel of John. The term that John came up with, to communicate who Jesus is
and what he does, was the logos, the word. The logos was a concept meaningful
to Jews and Greeks.
Professor John Patterson once wrote, “The spoken
word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive…. It was a unit of energy charged with
power. It flies like a bullet to its billet.” For that reason, the Hebrew
language has fewer than 10,000 words whereas Greek has 200,000.
Most of the Old Testament was originally written in
Hebrew. However, by Jesus’ time the majority of Jews no longer spoke Hebrew.
Rather, they spoke a language called Aramaic that was a development of Hebrew.
The Old Testament was therefore translated into Aramaic and these translations
were called the Targums. Interestingly enough, the Targums, when referring to
God, would often replace God’s name with the phrase the word of God.
However, that is only half of the story. John also
wanted to communicate Christ to the Greeks. The Greeks had a term, Logos, which had a very interesting
history. In 560 BC there was a Greek philosopher named Heraclitus who believed
that everything in the world was constantly changing. His famous illustration
of this was that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Why?
Because if you step into a river, step out, and step in again, the water you
first stepped into has flown downstream.
Now, if life is in a complete state of flux then
why is not everything in chaos? Heraclitus’ answer was that change in the
universe is not haphazard; it is controlled by the Logos, or the Word, the
Reasoning power behind the universe. The Logos was to Heraclitus also the power
that enabled human beings to reason and to tell right from wrong.
Once the Greeks got hold of this idea of the Logos,
they never let go of it. Heraclitus’ ideas about the Logos caught on and became
firmly embedded in Greek culture and the Greek way of thinking.
Therefore, when John came along and wanted to
communicate to Jews and to Greeks who Jesus is and what he does, he found a
ready concept in the Jewish and the Greek cultures. That concept was summed up
in one Greek word. Thus, John introduces us to Jesus using that term, the
Logos, in the opening eighteen verses of his Gospel.
I like what C. S. Lewis has to say about the
Logos….
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the
true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of
good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e.,
for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a
particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth
specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth)
or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not
use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of
which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the
whole nature & purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for
use as weapons. (From a letter to Mrs. Johnson, November 8, 1952)
You can listen to sermons on these chapters from the Gospel of John here: Power for Living.
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