Thus Heb. thought tended to represent God’s self-manifestation as mediated by an agent, more or less conceived as personal and yet blending with the divine personality itself. f the descriptive terms used, one of the commonest, and the one which seemed to rest directly on biblical language, was the ‘Word’; and many consider this the probable source of St. John’s phraseology. In favour of this may be urged the fact that St. John was a Pal. Jew; that his familiarity with current Jewish religious ideas is abundantly shown in his Gospel ; that in Rev 19% the title ‘the word of God’ is certainly drawn from Jewish, not Alex., habits of thought; that his writings evince loyalty to OT teaching’ (cf. ὅπ 127 910. 16. 4:5. 1520.45 7085 1 280-60 1959. *7) ; and that some expressions in the Gospel indicate his belief that Jesus was the full realiza- tion of the typical divine manifestations recorded in Heb. history (134 ἐσκήνωσεν, δόξαν, 7-51 219 314 055: 88, 48-50 858, Herhaps 1055. 85. 12"). The description also of revelation as the word of God, common to Jews and Christians (cf. Jn 10°), together with St. John’s view of Christ as the living embodiment of the Truth (cf. 11° 6 8" 11% 148 1 Jn 11-3 ete.), would furnish additional reason for the application of this current term to Him whom he wished to set forth as the personal divine organ through whom God ever has revealed Himself.
(Ὁ) The other source from which St. John might have derived his phraseology was the Alexandrian philosophy, ciel represented by Philo. Since the time of Heraclitus, a Logos doctrine had been developing in Greek thought for the purpose of explaining how Deity came into relation with the world. By the Logos, however, in this connexion, the Greeks meant reason. With Heraclitus the Logos was merely the universal law in accordance with which the evolution of the universe from primordial fire proceeds. When later thinkers fad risen to a clear distinction of mind from matter, and had perceived its formative and per- vasive presence in nature, the Logos came to denote the distinctively rational principle mani- fested in the cosmos. Plato, indeed, commonly employed for this the term νοῦς ; but he occasion- ally used λόγος as descriptive of the divine force from which the world has arisen (e.g. Tim. 38 C), and his doctrine of ‘ideas’ prepared the way for Philo. It was, however, the Stoics who formally developed the Logos idea. Interested mainly in the ethical τε τὲ of life, yet reverting to the earlier monism, they saw in the universe a rational Puneizle (the Logos), in one aspect divine and in another finite, at once the divine reason and governor of the cosmos and, as the ‘seminal Logos,’ distributed in
* In the Book of Enoch the term ‘ Word’ also occurs, and once (9085) is applied to Messiah; but most eritics, after Dillm., con sider this latter passage a gloss.
LOGOS
the rational germs from which all separate realities emerge. Finally, in the Jewish philosophy of Alexandria, Judaism united with Platonism and Stoicism for the purpose of showing that the OT taught the true philosophy, and expounded the Scriptures in this interest by allegorical inter- pesiesions: Philo adopted, after others, the term
os, probably because it was familiar to both Judaism and Hellenism, to denote the total mani- festation of divine powers and ideas in the uni- verse. God is abstract being, without qualities, but from Him has proceeded the Logos, His rational thought, which first existed, as the ideal world, in the divine mind, and then formed and inhabited the actual cosmos. The Logos is thus the former of the world out of amorphous matter, and the one through whom God may be rationally known. Eternally in God, it has been implanted and made active in the world, and has especially dis- closed itself to the Hebrews and in the Scrip- tures; and Philo describes the Logos in terms which often wear striking resemblance to NT descriptions of Christ.* The influence of this or similar speculation must have been felt among the Christians, and especially in Asia Minor; for the tendeney to unite Christianity with philosophy appears as early as the Epistle to the Colossians, and is combated in St. John’s first Epistle; Cer- inthus, John’s contemporary, was probably affected by the Alex. philosophy itself (see Neander, Ch.
ist. vol. i. p. 396); and from the middle of the 2nd cent. the influence of Philo can be clearly traced within the Church. Hence it is not improb- able that St. John’s phraseology was partly de- termined by the prevalence of this philosophic use of the term.
Yet it is clear that Alexandrian philosophy did not enter constructively into St. John’s doctrine. Philo’s conception of the Logos was radically different from St. John’s, as was the philosophy which underlay it. His Logos was the divine Reason, only attaining existence objective to God for the purpose of creation. It cannot be regarded as really personal, though constantly personified, and, if identical with divine thought, was in another aspect identical with the rationality pos- sessed by creation, being the otality of the many logoi (ideas) that exist in the world. God, more- over, according to Philo, may be known, b ecstatic intuition, more immediately than throug the Logos, and Philo’s notion of the whole relation of God and the world was dominated by his abstract conception of Deity and the impossibility