In John 1:1, three times in a single verse, the verb is ἦν (ēn) — “was.” English readers slide right past it. It’s just “was,” the most ordinary word in the sentence. But in Greek it’s not just any “was.” It’s a specific form grammarians call the imperfect — the tense Greek reserves for ongoing, continuous action in the past. Not “was once,” but “was continuously,” “kept on being,” “had been being and still was.” The action simply keeps going, with no defined ending and, just as importantly, no defined beginning in view.

So when John writes that in origin the Logos ēn, a fuller rendering of the tense would be something like “the Logos was-continuously-existing.” There’s no starting line behind it, no moment where the being switched on. The verb itself, before any doctrine is layered on top, presents the Logos as durative — simply being, without a point of origin in the frame.

Why does a tense matter this much? Because of what John does two clauses later. In verse 3 he switches verbs entirely. All things, he says, ἐγένετο (egeneto) — they “came-to-be.” That’s a different tense, the aorist, the form Greek uses for point-action, a discrete event, something that happened at a particular moment. Things that egeneto are things that came into existence; they had a beginning, a moment when they weren’t and then were.

The contrast is surgical, and it’s the whole point. The Logos ēn — was-continuously-existing. All things egeneto — came-to-be. The Logos didn’t come into being; the Logos simply was, durative, no starting point in view. Everything else came into being. John is making the distinction with nothing but his choice of verbs, and that distinction quietly collapses in English, where both words flatten into “was” and “were made.” The reader never sees the seam.

Most of us, if we’ve heard this at all, heard it once in a sermon and forgot it by the parking lot. But the distinction is genuinely there in what John wrote. It doesn’t, by itself, settle the larger questions the prologue raises — whether the Logos is a pre-existent person, a divine principle, or something else again. The grammar doesn’t decide that. What the grammar does establish is narrower and sturdier: the Logos does not come into being the way created things come into being. That much is carried entirely in the tense.

What the first audience heard in that small, repeated ēn was not an event but a continuity — a being that was already underway when the story’s clock starts, and that the verb refuses to give a birthday.