the manner of God, stood and essentially stands beyond the line that is drawn by the beginning of all things. The Word was “with God”—therefore it was in the beginning.
But how could it be pros ton theon, or belong to God? The third statement gives the answer: kai theos ēn ho logos. If in the first two sentences we were right to put the stress on the statements made about the Logos, we may assume that the situation is the same in the third sentence, that we must once again reverse the statement, that we have to recognize in theos, even though it comes first, the predicate (cf. 4:24: pneuma ho theos), that this is where the emphasis lies, that the Logos was God, i.e., of divine nature or essence. It has rightly been pointed out that the predicate that is here ascribed to the Logos is theos, not ho theos. But it is doubtful whether one does well to follow W. Bauer (op cit., p. 10) in recalling the loose, improper use with which Philo calls the Logos theos, or to think with Theodor Zahn of the occasional way in which ha’ elohim in the OT is not a proper name but is used for a category, e.g., spirits, angels, or even men. At any rate, we are advised to treat with caution the usual inference that the Logos is not here identified with God. A distinction must be made. The nature of the Logos is here identified with the nature of the entity called ho theos. The theotēs of this entity is unreservedly ascribed to the Logos. Significantly, the He denoted by the definite article is not identical with the Logos. The Logos, who is three times in this verse described with the definite article, seems perhaps to stand over against this He as a second He who is distinct from the first but who partakes of the same nature and is thus identical in nature. This would be certain if, as must first be shown, we had the exegetical right to assume that the Logos is indeed meant to be characterized as a He by the definite article. I need not say that in this case our position very definitely points us once again (we have already said something of the same relative to the en archȩ̄ ēn) in the direction in which Nicea and the Athanasian Nicenes would later go with their doctrine of the homoousion, of the essential unity of the different persons or hypostases of the Father and the Son. But if this is so, then the idea of a so-called reduced deity of the Logos, which according to Theodor Zahn is possible on the basis of this verse and is only excluded by v. 2, is already ruled out completely by v. 1. The thought reached with the third sentence in v. 1 is that the Logos can belong to God and can be in the beginning with God, not because he is the person who has the required nature, essence, or operation in the first instance, or, as we should say in the language of dogmatics, is in the mode of the eternal Father, but because he is the second person, who, as we should say, in the mode of the eternal Son shares the same nature with the person of the Father in the same dignity and perfection. One must admit that the verse makes sense when it is read thus, with the eyes of what has been called orthodoxy since Nicea. Every word in it is then intelligible in its own place.
We have inquired into the meaning of the three sentences of v. 1 without thus far showing any concern for the term around which they all revolve as around a common axis, the term ho logos. We have acted rightly to the degree that we have simply been studying the emphasis of the three sentences and have seen that in none of them does it fall on ho logos. We have also acted rightly to the degree that this concept (as a preliminary survey shows), although it is the subject of the three sentences of v. 1 which are so packed with content, obviously plays for the author the role of a locum tenens. It is simply the provisional designation of a place which something or someone else will later fill. That this apparently chief concept has the character of a quid pro quo will emerge, as we must show, from a correct exposition of v. 2. And it will be unequivocally plain at the very latest by the end of the prologue. In the prologue itself the term will recur only once, although then in the important statement in v. 14. Later, in the rest of the Gospel, it will never even be thought of explicitly. And in the rest of the New Testament there is only one place where it occurs unambiguously in the absolute use of John 1:1, namely, in the difficult verse Rev. 19:13, where it is said of the rider on the white horse that one of the diadems on his head bears his name, the name that no one knows (i.e., understands) except himself, and that this name, which all may read but only he can understand, this ideogram that he alone can solve, is ho logos tou theou. Here again the term holds a place representatively and in temporary concealment for another term, the true one, which the white rider himself knows, which consists of his very existence, as it were, and comes to expression in it. In the Gospel this relation is very clear. Already in the prologue ho logos is a substitute for Jesus Christ. His is the place which at one and the same time is occupied, reserved, and delimited by the predicates which are ascribed to the Logos, by the history which is narrated about him.
But whence and why and in what sense is the term Logos brought in for this purpose? This is the question that we must now answer. It is as well to realize that in asking about the whence and why and in what sense we have two different and not necessarily related questions. Historically and genetically, in asking whence the Logos is the subject of these preparatory statements, we are obviously saying that in using the concept the Evangelist, whether with or without outside stimulation, is borrowing a well-known term current in the popular philosophical and religious vocabulary of his day. That he took it from Philo has for a long time been for modern expositors a formula that supposedly meets all the facts. In opposition to this view both more conservative and more critical research has maintained and admittedly shown that John’s concept of the Logos is in important ways very different from Philo’s and certainly must be traced back to other sources. Again in opposition to this objection F. Overbeck (pp. 368ff.) has laid his finger on the point that Philo and John are very different writers, the one a philosopher, the other an Evangelist, so that the latter might well have adopted the Logos concept of the former and then, unconcerned about the special problems and systematizings of the former, freely used it in his own unphilosophical way and for his own purposes. Finally, investigations that are oriented to the history of religion have gone beyond the whole controversy by noting the role that the concept plays not only in Philo and the earlier and later philosophers of antiquity but also in the piety of the mysteries and in the popular religions of Hellenism. They have pointed out that in the age of Hellenism the name and functions of the Logos were assigned to the Greek Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth, and finally the Zoroastrian and Mandean deities of a personal, semi-personal, or impersonal character, the Mandean deities having been more closely examined only within the last decade. In answering the genetic question we thus face a whole ocean of possibilities within which it is a waste of time to seek the lost drop, i.e., the true source of John. First, we do not know at all in what specific form the Evangelist took over the concept, and second, we do not know to what reconstruction he subjected it when he did adopt it. How then can we know the decisive thing, namely, which of the various concepts he adopted? Especially as we do not know for certain that he did in fact “adopt” his concept, i.e., that he received a push in its direction from outside. Let us be content to assert that this at any rate is far more probable than the assumption that Theodor Zahn is making, if I understand him aright, namely, that with no such push from outside, with no reference to the ambivalent commonplace of his day, the Evangelist was led to the concept by inner necessity.
A more important and productive question is that of the meaning of the concept. In answering this question, of course, we turn, not to Philo or the Mandeans, but exclusively to John himself. That is to say, we rule out intrinsically possible meanings whereby the Logos is essentially and primarily a principle, whether in epistemology or in the metaphysical explanation of the world, e.g., as the supreme idea along the lines of Neoplatonism, as creative and ruling cosmic reason along the lines of Stoicism, or as the power of spirit mediating between God and the material world along the lines of Philo. If Philo in particular was the source of John, then, as Overbeck has shown, John has indeed used this source with a sovereign freedom that renders Philo virtually unrecognizable. The same is true of all the ancient philosophies, worldviews, and religions in which deities as principles of being or knowledge, as cosmic principles, are given the name logos or logoi. For there can be no doubt, as we see unmistakably from the cosmogonic role that is ascribed to the Logos in v. 3 and v. 10, that it is not for the sake of its significance in this regard that the Evangelist has taken up the term. Thus v. 3 recalls the mediating role of the Word in creation, but when we read it in the total context of the prologue it is obviously an episode, a subordinate
