role to “the Word of Yahve.” The prophets who received “a word of the Lord” understood it as a concrete thing with independent existence. They were mere agents of the transcendent Word of Yahve. In this connection it must be kept in mind that in an oral culture a word has a concrete, if not material, existence. The spoken word is powerful. Once spoken it cannot be retracted. It is like an arrow that has been dispatched from a bow. It cannot be stopped on its tracks by the one speaking. The story of Isaac’s blessing of Jacob, much to the dismay of Esau, makes this clear (Gen. 27:33 – 35). The Word of the Lord in the Scriptures, like some other attributes of God, acquired a quasi-independent status. This development was apparently encouraged by the recognition that the ancient anthropomorphic presentations of God were problematic as the Hebraic culture became more reflexive, and heaven and earth were conceived to be further and further apart. As the Wise Man says: “God is in heaven, and you upon earth” (Eccl. 5:2). The distinction of the two realms may not be overlooked. Thus the Wisdom, the Glory, and the Word of Yahve came to be seen as divine agents, or hypostases of God. In the Wisdom Literature, which is quite international in outlook, both the Word and Wisdom are credited with having been the agents of creation (Ps. 33:6; Prov. 8:12, 27 – 30). When the Johannine Christians identified the divine being who became incarnate as Logos, they were influenced by the tradition of the Word as the agent of creation, as the linking of Logos to “in the beginning” suggests; the following words make this explicit: “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (1:3).
Also, it is quite likely that they understood the philosophical connotations of the word logos. In that context, logos refers to the capacity to think, to entertain ideas, to express these ideas in words, to construct discourses using words. It is almost indistinguishable from the mind that thinks. The concepts of reason and mind, it must be noted, are unknown to the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures. Reason and mind are the factors that make human beings, though members of the animal kingdom, different from all other animals. Philosophers of Jesus’ time discussed among themselves whether of not there were other animals with logos. No doubt some animals distinguish themselves by their intelligence, by their capacity to organize themselves in order to complete a task together. Some animals have their own language and can communicate among themselves. Do they have logos? Philo of Alexandria, the most famous Jewish contemporary of Jesus, dedicated a whole treatise, De animalibus, to an investigation of this question. As a Jew thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures and a very competent philosopher fully informed in all the currents of thought in which his contemporaries expressed themselves, Philo understood logos as that which makes humans capable of participating in the divine.
Logos bridges one of the most formidable philosophical chasms: the line that separates that which is subjective from that which is objective. That is, logos makes possible to have an idea in one’s mind for which one has not yet found the adequate word. Philosophers distinguished expressed logos from unexpressed logos. The difference is not that in the second case we have failed to speak a word aloud for others to hear. Rather, the difference is that we have not yet found the word which captures the thought we hold in our mind in total subjectivity. We know this experience. More than once we have searched for the right word to express a thought. We considered this one, then that one, and then this other one, and rejected them all because they failed to express the thought we had, but which we did not have the means to express. Logos is what holds that thought for which we have not yet found a word in total subjectivity and is the reasoning that conducts the testing that determines the adequacy of different words and eventually matches the subjective thought to its objective expression in the proper word.
As the bridge over the chasm that separates subjectivity from objectivity it is an extremely rich philosophical word. Logos is a divine attribute, the ultimate faculty for communication and understanding. God, no doubt, expresses things in the most truthful manner. As Logos God is the essence of consciousness and intelligence. With this word, the narrator of According to John bridged the gap between the divine and the human. God as God and God as flesh is Logos. That is an amazing theological tour de force toward understanding the God who is both hidden in total subjectivity and expressed in humanity.
Besides the astonishing claim that the Logos incarnate is God we are given the further claim that Jesus is the expressed Logos of the unexpressed Logos, but in the rest of the gospel we never again find a personal identification of Jesus as the Logos. Thus, after having shocked us with the extraordinary claim that the incarnate expressed Logos is God, the gospel does not explicitly connect the One Sent with the Logos. Does this indicate that the prologue of the gospel is an addition to an already existing document with an account of Jesus’ life? It is a possibility. It is also likely that the members of the Johannine community had no difficulty identifying Jesus, the Logos, with the words, the logos Jesus spoke to them. As Jews of the first century they were quite aware of the dangers of anthropomorphisms. Thus, the Logos, who in the prologue of the gospel is declared to be both God and flesh, is recognized in the words which, as said above, in the Hebraic tradition are taken to be very concrete realities that accomplish the task assigned to them without the possibility of being thwarted. That the Word had been spoken, had been revealed, and had dwelt among humans, creating a way to live in the world, is the message that must be received and believed.
2. Making Himself Equal with God
The temptation with which at the garden of Eden the serpent confronted Eve was to make herself equal to God (Gen 3:5). According to an early Christian hymn, the temptation that the pre-existent Christ confronted and rejected was to make himself equal to God (Phil. 2:6). In the gospel According to John, to the contrary, Jesus explicitly accepts as accurate the accusation of making himself equal with God (5:18). This affirmation is at the center of its theology. To begin with, all Christians were Jews who worshipped at the temple of Jerusalem; many of them also belonged to synagogues where they studied the Scriptures and prayed. Because they held this opinion of Jesus, however, they were eventually expelled from the synagogues. Scholars think this happened sometime toward the end of the first century or early in the second.
The story of the man born blind ends with his expulsion from the synagogue (9:34). According to the Pharisees, the one who had been born blind was not only “ex-blind” but also an ex-Jew. The story also tells us that the parents of the ex-blind pleaded ignorance about the details of his life because of their fear of being expelled from the synagogue (9:22). They preferred to ensure their position within the synagogue. Their son preferred to confess what he knew and run the risk of expulsion. In chapter 16 we find another reference to expulsion from the synagogue as the disgrace Christians must be willing to endure for being disciples of Jesus (16:2). We also learn that Joseph of Arimathea was a secret disciple for fear of the Jews (19:38), and that the disciples after the crucifixion were in a room with the door locked “for fear of the Jews” (20:19).
We must note, in this connection, that Paul considered himself a faithful Jew all his life. This shows that the first Christians, who were all Jews, did not think it necessary to cease being Jews in order to be Christians. All Christians were as much Jews as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Covenanters of Qumran, the disciples of John (the Baptist), the Nazarites, etc. The temple of Jerusalem was the center that kept all the different Jews, Christians included, living in peace with each other (Acts 2:46; 3:1; 4:1). When it was destroyed by the Romans, Judaism as known until then ceased to be. Only two of its many varieties survived the catastrophe. Pharisaism survived by becoming Rabbinic Judaism, and the Movement of the disciples of Jesus survived by becoming Christianity. Both survivors claimed to be the only legitimate heir to the theological wealth of their religious mother. The struggle for the inheritance caused the two sister religions to engage in an acerbic polemic with disastrous and long-lasting consequences.
The center of the polemic soon came to be occupied by the only doctrine in Judaism. The Judaism of the Jerusalem temple and Rabbinic Judaism distinguish themselves by being religions of observance, not of doctrine. The exception that proves the rule is monotheism. While the temple built by Solomon stood, the people of Jerusalem worshipped many gods. At the altar of the Jerusalem temple sacrifices to Asherah, Moloch and other deities were offered frequently with royal sponsorship.
