“And the Word was with God.” We’ve read it that way so long it sounds like the only way it could read. But the Greek word behind “with” is πρός (pros), and pros — at least in the form John uses here, paired with what grammarians call the accusative case — doesn’t really mean “with” in the static, standing-alongside sense at all. It’s a far more dynamic word than the English lets on.

When Greek wants to say “with” in the sense of accompanied by, in company with, together with, it has other prepositions ready to hand for exactly that. Pros isn’t one of them. Its core sense is directional: toward, facing, in relation to, oriented toward. It’s the preposition you reach for when one thing is moving toward another, or facing another, or standing in active relationship with another. It implies a posture, not merely a position.

So when John writes that the Logos was πρὸς τὸν θεόν (pros ton theon), the Greek isn’t simply reporting that the Logos was located near God, parked in the same vicinity. It’s saying the Logos was oriented toward God, facing God, in active relation with God. Several major commentators have suggested rendering it “face-to-face with God” or “in active communion with God,” precisely to recover what “with” quietly drops. The careful study of how pros behaves with the accusative — especially alongside a verb of being like the imperfect ēn — finds that the construction consistently implies orientation, relationship, communion, rather than mere co-location.

That’s a noticeably different picture than the one the standard English gives you. “The Word was with God” sets two figures side by side in the same room, like furniture against a wall. The Greek sets them face-to-face — two figures turned toward each other, in conversation, in dynamic relationship. The Logos isn’t sharing a space with God so much as facing God, leaning toward God, in a relation that is active rather than incidental.

There’s a small grammatical detail tucked into this phrase that becomes enormous a clause later. The word for God here is τὸν θεόν (ton theon) — the God, with the definite article in front. Greek uses that article to mark something specific, definite, identifiable: the one called God. Hold that, because in the very next clause John drops the article and writes simply theos, and the difference between the article being present and being absent is the hinge on which centuries of debate have turned.

What the first audience heard in pros wasn’t a snapshot of proximity. It was a relationship in motion — the Logos turned toward God, facing the one called the God, before the story of the world even begins. The intimacy was directional. The Word was not beside God so much as toward God.