The Word That Was

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

That’s how the Gospel of John opens. It’s one of the most famous sentences in the Bible. It’s been set in stained-glass windows, carved into pulpits, woven into the opening of countless Christmas services. In the beginning was the Word. You probably know the line. You probably know what comes next, too — and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. John is telling us that Jesus is the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became one of us.

In English, that lands a certain way. Word sounds like something said. A unit of speech. A message. We hear John 1:1 and we think of God speaking, and Jesus being God’s speech somehow — God’s message to the world made into a person we could see and touch. Which is true, as far as it goes. But it isn’t the whole thing John was saying.

Because the Greek word John reaches for there — the one English Bibles translate Word — is one of the most layered and storied words in the entire Greek language. It carries history English doesn’t see. It carries history English can’t see, because English doesn’t have a word that holds all of what this one holds. When John writes In the beginning was the Word, his Greek-speaking, Jewish-aware first audience would have heard at least two enormous things in that single word, simultaneously. The English flattens them into one quiet syllable. The Greek hands you both at once.

The word is λόγος (logos). And what follows is what the original audience would have heard.

Start with the Jewish layer first, because it’s the one John is leaning on hardest.

When a Jewish person in the first century heard the phrase in the beginning in any context, their mind went immediately to one place: Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That’s the very first verse of the Hebrew Bible. It’s the line every Jewish child memorized first. And John, in writing in the beginning was the Word, is deliberately echoing that opening — anyone reading the Greek would have heard the echo immediately. He isn’t making a generic statement about origins. He’s reaching back to Genesis 1 and asking the reader to read his sentence against it.

So what does Genesis 1 actually say happens at the beginning? It says God speaks. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God said, let there be a vault between the waters. And there was. And God said, let the land produce vegetation. And there was. The whole creation account in Genesis 1 is built around one repeated structure: God speaks, and what God speaks comes into being. The Hebrew word for that speech — for the creative word of God — is davar. Davar is what God does at creation. Davar is what God speaks through the prophets. Davar is the active, powerful, world-shaping speech of the living God.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the centuries before Christ — the Septuagint, which has come up in earlier chapters — the translators again and again reached for logos to render davar. The word of the LORD came to the prophet became the logos of the LORD came to the prophet. By the word of the LORD the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6) became by the logos of the LORD. By the time John was writing, any Greek-reading Jew knew that logos was the word the Greek Bible used for God’s creative, prophetic speech. Logos carried davar. Logos was the word the Septuagint had been using for the active speech of God for two centuries.

So when John writes in the beginning was the logos, the Jewish reader heard, immediately and unmistakably: in the beginning was God’s creative speech. The speech that made everything. The speech that came to the prophets. The speech that shaped the world. And then John says the next astonishing thing — and the logos was God. And then the most astonishing thing of all — and the logos became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That creative speech that made the world? That divine voice that spoke through the prophets? That voice became a man. That word came to live in your neighborhood.

That alone would have been enormous. But John isn’t done, because there’s a second layer to logos that the Greek-speaking world heard at the same time.

For five hundred years before John picked up his pen, Greek philosophers had been using logos as one of the most important technical words in their thinking. It started with Heraclitus, the philosopher who lived around 500 BC and famously said you cannot step in the same river twice. Heraclitus reached for the word logos to describe what he believed was the rational ordering principle of the universe — the underlying reason that held everything together even as everything else was changing. The world was in constant flux, Heraclitus said. But underneath the flux, holding it all together, was logos. The rational structure. The reason. The pattern that made sense of the changing world.

After Heraclitus, the Stoic philosophers took the idea further. The Stoics — one of the most influential philosophical schools in the Roman world John was writing into — taught that logos was the divine reason that animated the entire cosmos. Every rational being was a small spark of the universal logos. To live well was to align yourself with the logos that ordered the universe. Logos wasn’t just an idea; it was the divine principle behind everything that existed. By the first century AD, logos was as central to educated Greek thought as the word gravity is to modern science. It was the word for the cosmic intelligence behind the world.

And in Alexandria, in the very generation John was writing in, a Jewish philosopher named Philo had been trying to bring these two streams together. Philo of Alexandria, who lived from about 20 BC to 50 AD, was a deeply educated Jew who knew both his Hebrew Bible and his Greek philosophy. He wrote at length about the logos — and he tried to argue that the Greek philosophical logos and the Hebrew davar of God were, in some sense, the same thing. Philo’s logos was a kind of intermediary between God and the world, the rational principle through which God made everything. Philo’s work was widely read in Greek-speaking Jewish communities. And when John picked up his pen and wrote in the beginning was the logos, he was writing into a world where Philo had already been working at this connection for decades.

So consider what a first-century reader brought to John 1:1. A Jewish reader heard davar — the creative speech of God in Genesis 1. A Greek-educated reader heard logos in its philosophical sense — the rational order of the cosmos, the divine reason behind everything. And a Jewish reader who knew Greek philosophy (which, in Alexandria and elsewhere, was many of them) heard both at once. In the beginning was the logos. The creative word that spoke the world into being. The rational order that held the world together. The voice that came to the prophets. The reason behind the cosmos. All in one word. All at once.

And John says: and the logos became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright — whose work on Paul we drew on in chapter three — has written accessibly about this moment in John’s gospel in his commentary John for Everyone. Wright’s point, which he develops across the commentary, is that John isn’t picking between the Jewish and the Greek backgrounds. He’s reaching for a word that holds both at the same time, and then telling his readers that the whole thing — the creative speech of God, the rational order of the cosmos, the voice that spoke through the prophets, the reason behind everything that is — has now appeared as a person who walked the dusty roads of Galilee. The English word Word can’t carry that. Logos could, and did.

This is part of why John 1 has been read for two thousand years as one of the most theologically dense passages in scripture. The density isn’t John making things complicated. The density is what the Greek word he chose was already carrying. John didn’t have to spell out creative word of God and rational order of the cosmos and voice of the prophets and divine reason behind all things. He could write logos and his first audience heard all of it in one word.

So when we read John 1:1 again — in the beginning was the Word — we can hear what the Greek was already saying. Not just Jesus was God’s message to the world, though he was that. The creative speech that made the world. The rational order that holds the world together. The voice of God himself, reaching for the prophets and reaching for us. In the beginning was the logos. All of that, in one word, all at once. And the logos became flesh, and made his dwelling among us.

Reading this yourself

The next time you read John 1, slow down at the word Word. Try holding two things in your mind at the same time as you read it: the creative speech of God in Genesis 1, and the rational order of the universe. (You don’t need to be a philosopher to do this. You just need to remember that the Greek word John used carried both.) Then read the verse again with both layers in your ears. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. The verse will sit differently. You’ll start to hear why the early church read John 1 as one of the most concentrated statements about Christ anywhere in scripture.

The text didn’t change. The Greek didn’t change. Logos is what it always was — a word so full that English needed two thousand years and many quiet sermons to even start to unpack it. John reached for it on purpose. He knew exactly what his audience would hear. The Hebrew layer. The Greek layer. Both, at once. And then the impossible claim that the logos — all of it — had become a person his readers could have met. The older reading is the one that holds both. The one we’ve been missing is the one we can hear again. And once you can hear it, in the beginning was the Word stops being a quiet stained-glass sentence and starts sounding like what it actually is — the boldest opening line of any book in the New Testament.