<p>1:1 <em>In the beginning</em>- John's Gospel expresses the same truths as the other Gospels, but in more spiritual and abstract terms. He chooses to record the Lord's more enigmatic and spiritual words, whereas the synoptics tend to record His plainer speaking. The Gospel records are transcripts of how men like John taught the Gospel message. John's Gospel was clearly aimed by him at Jewish people who were under the influence of pagan ideas and concepts which later morphed into Gnosticism. He uses the very terms they used, but redefines them. This takes some getting used to, and we are handicapped by not knowing the full range of terms he was seeking to redefine and reposition in a Christian context.</p><p>&quot;The beginning&quot; refers to the beginning of the Lord's ministry, both later in John (Jn. 2:11; 8:25 &quot;the same I said unto you from the beginning&quot;; 15:27 &quot;You have been with me from the beginning&quot;; 16:4 &quot;These things I did not tell you at the beginning&quot;; also 1 Jn. 1:1; 2:7,13,14,24; 3:11); and in the other Gospels too (&quot;The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus&quot;, Mk. 1:1; &quot;we who from the beginning were eyewitnesses&quot;, Lk. 1:2). But there can be no doubt that the allusion is to the creation at the beginning of the physical world; but John is to use that in order to describe the huge power unleashed through the Spirit in the creation of a new world, a world of persons reborn, what Paul later terms the &quot;new creation&quot; (2 Cor. 5:17).</p><p>The Comforter passages make it clear that the disciples were to witness as Christ to this world exactly because they had been with the Lord from the beginning. John's gospel is his obedience to that. And so he explains that he is recounting how things were from the beginning off the Lord's ministry. And Luke does the same, writing that he too was a witness from the beginning and is therefore testifying to what he had seen (Lk. 1:2).</p><p>But just as the Lord's words can be read on various levels, so the ideas of John's Gospel can be. &quot;The beginning&quot; translates a noun, <em>arche</em>, a word which can just as comfortably be translated 'the chief one'. And indeed it is translated similarly at times throughout the New Testament- &quot;magistrate&quot;, &quot;corner&quot;, &quot;prince&quot; etc. The ultimate &quot;beginning&quot;, <em>arche</em>, chief one, was of course the Lord Jesus. Col. 1:18 is clear: &quot;Who is the beginning <em>arche</em>, the firstborn from the dead&quot;, of the new creation, the world of persons created in and through Him. So in the beginning, in the Lord Jesus, was the word, the <em>logos</em>, the message preached which had perfect congruence with His person. John's later writings also call Him &quot;the beginning&quot; (Rev. 1:8; 3:14; 21:6; 22:13).</p><p>The whole prologue is set out as a hymn. The New Testament is full of very high adoration for the Lord Jesus. Since those words and phrases were chosen under the inspiration of God, His Father, we would be better advised to stick with them rather than try to invent our own terms and analogies in order to express His greatness. The structure of the original text of the prologue to John's Gospel regarding the word, and also Phil. 2:9-11 regarding the exaltation of Jesus, are arranged in such a way that they appear to be hymns which were sung by the believers. Pliny the Younger (<em>Epistle</em> 10.96.7) writes of the Christians &quot;singing hymns to Christ as to a god&quot;; surely he had in mind these passages. It can often be that we adopt the very position falsely ascribed to us by our critics; and perhaps that's what happened here. The critics of early Christianity wrongly claimed that the Christians thought of Jesus as God; and this eventually became their position for the most part, <em>although it was not originally.</em></p><p><em>Was the Word-&nbsp; </em>&nbsp;<br />The essential <em>logos</em> of the Gospel is the message of Christ crucified. There in the cross is the kernel of everything; there was the &ldquo;beginning&quot; of the new creation. John later speaks of the Lord Jesus as being the &lsquo;faithful martyr&rsquo; in His death, and thereby being &ldquo;the beginning saw of the new creation of God&quot; (Rev. 3:14). The beginning was not only at the beginning of the Lord&rsquo;s ministry; the essential beginning of the new creation was when the blood and water came out of His side.&nbsp; Yahweh Himself was totally bound up in the death of His Son. God was there with Him and in Him, to the extent that He was in Christ there, reconciling the world unto Himself. In this sense, the <em>logos</em> of Christ and the death of the cross &ldquo;was God&quot;. There the Father &ldquo;was with&quot; the Son see notes under 16:25,32.</p><p>In Hebrew thought, it was quite common to speak of God as having an intention which was then fulfilled. Indeed, this kind of thing is found in the literature and epics of other Semitic languages. Thus the Exodus record records God's commands regarding the tabernacle, and then Moses' fulfilment of them. The prologue to John speaks of God's <em>logos</em>, His word or intention, coming to &quot;flesh&quot; in the Lord Jesus. This is classic Hebrew thinking, albeit written in Greek. We will demonstrate below that in Hebrew thought, a representative can be spoken of as being the person who sent them, or whom they represent. Thus the Hebrew way of reading John 1:1-14 would never come anywhere near interpreting it as meaning that 'Jesus is God'. This is a result of not reading the passage against its Hebrew background.</p><p><strong>&ldquo;The word&rdquo;</strong></p><p>Just look at the many times this phrase occurs in the Gospel records. It doesn&rsquo;t mean &lsquo;the whole Bible&rsquo;. It means clearly enough and without any dispute &lsquo;the Gospel message&rsquo; (e.g. Mk. 2:2; 4:33; 16:20; Lk. 3:2; Jn. 12:48; 14:24; Acts 4:4; 11:19). The Gospel was preached to Abraham in that it comprises the promises to Him and their fulfilment in Jesus (Gal. 3:8). That word of promise was &ldquo;made flesh&rdquo; in Jesus; &ldquo;the word of the oath&rdquo; of the new covenant, of the promises made to Abraham, &ldquo;makes the son&rdquo; (Heb. 7:28). This is just another way of saying that the word&ndash; of the promises, of the Gospel- was made flesh in Jesus. Note how in Rom. 9:6,9 &ldquo;the word&rdquo; is called &ldquo;the word of promise&rdquo;- those made to Abraham. The same Greek words translated 'Word' and 'made' occur together in 1 Cor. 15:54- where we read of the word AV &quot;saying&quot; of the Old Testament prophets being 'made' true by being fulfilled AV &quot;be brought to pass&quot;. The word of the promises was made flesh, it was fulfilled, in Jesus. The 'word was made flesh', in one sense, in that the Lord Jesus was &quot;<em>made</em>... of the seed of David according to the&nbsp;<em>flesh</em>&quot; (Rom. 1:3)- i.e. God's word of promise to David was fulfilled in the fleshly person of Jesus. The Greek words for &quot; made&quot; and &quot; flesh&quot; only occur together in these two places- as if Rom. 1:3 is interpreting Jn. 1:14 for us. But note the admission of a leading theologian: &ldquo;Neither the fourth Gospel nor Hebrews ever speaks of the eternal Word&hellip; in terms which compel us to regard it as a person&rdquo; (1).</p><p><strong>&quot; In the beginning was the word&quot;</strong></p><p>John&rsquo;s Gospel tends to repeat the ideas of the other gospel records but in more spiritual terms. Matthew and Luke begin their accounts of the message by giving the genealogies of Jesus, explaining that His birth was the fulfilment, the &lsquo;making flesh&rsquo;, of the promises to Abraham and David. And Mark begins by defining his &ldquo;beginning of the gospel&rdquo; as the fact that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophets. John is really doing the same, in essence. But he is using more spiritual language. In the beginning was the word- the word of promise, the word of prophecy, all through the Old Testament. And that word was &ldquo;made flesh&rdquo; in Jesus, and on account of that word, all things in the new creation had and would come into being. Whilst John is written in Greek, clearly enough Hebrew thought is behind the words. &quot;The Hebrew term&nbsp;<em>debarim</em>&nbsp;words can also mean 'history'&quot; (2). The whole salvation history of God, from the promise in Eden onwards, was about the Lord Jesus and was made flesh in His life and death.</p><p>Luke&rsquo;s prologue states that he was an &ldquo;<em>eyewitness</em>&nbsp;and minister of&nbsp;<em>the word</em>&hellip;from<em> the beginning</em>&rdquo;; he refers to the word of the Gospel that later became flesh in Jesus. John&rsquo;s prologue is so similar: &ldquo;That which was from&nbsp;<em>the beginning</em>, that which we have heard, which we have&nbsp;<em>seen with our eyes</em>, that which we&nbsp;<em>beheld</em>&hellip;<em>the word&nbsp;</em>of life&rdquo; (1 Jn. 1:1 RV). Jn. 1:14 matched this with: &ldquo;<em>The word</em>&nbsp;was made flesh, and&nbsp;<em>we beheld</em>&nbsp;his glory&rdquo;. John 6 shows how John seeks to present Jesus Himself as the words which give eternal life if eaten / digested (Jn. 6:63). And some commented: &ldquo;This is a hard saying, who can hear him?&rdquo; (Jn. 6:60 RVmg.), as if to present Jesus the person as the embodiment of His sayings / words.</p><p>Jesus was the word of God shown in a real, live person. All the principles which Old Testament history had taught, the symbology of the law, the outworking of the types of history, all this was now living and speaking in a person. Luke&rsquo;s Gospel makes the same point as John&rsquo;s but in a different way. Over 90% of Luke&rsquo;s Greek is taken from the Septuagint. All the time he is consciously and unconsciously alluding to the Old Testament as having its fulfilment in the things of Jesus. As an example of unconscious allusion, consider Lk. 1:27: &ldquo;A virgin betrothed to a man&rdquo;. This is right out of Dt. 22:23 LXX &ldquo;If there be a virgin betrothed to a man&hellip;&rdquo;. The context is quite different, but the wording is the same. And in many other cases, Luke picks up phraseology from the LXX apparently without attention to the context. He saw the whole of the OT as having its fulfilment in the story of Jesus. He introduces his Gospel record as an account &ldquo;of those matters which have been fulfilled&rdquo; (Lk. 1:1 RV). And &ldquo;those matters&rdquo; he defines in Lk. 1:2 as the things of &ldquo;the word&rdquo;. The RV especially shows his stress on the theme of fulfilment (Lk. 1:20, 23, 37, 45, 54, 55, 57, 70). In essence he is introducing his Gospel just as John does.</p><p>In passing, it is interesting to reflect upon the Lord&rsquo;s comment that where two or three are gathered together in His Name, He is in their midst. For this evidently alludes to a Rabbinic saying preserved in the Mishnah (<em>Aboth&nbsp;</em>3.2) that &ldquo;If two sit together and study Torah the first five books of Moses, the divine presence rests between them&rdquo;. The Lord was likening Himself (His &lsquo;Name&rsquo;) to the Torah, the Old Testament word of God; and His presence would be felt if that Law was studied as it ought to be.</p><p>In confirmation of all this, it has been observed that &quot; The numerical use of&nbsp;<em>logos</em>&nbsp;in the Johannine writings overwhelmingly favours &quot; message&quot; (some 25 times), not a personified word; and elsewhere in the NT the use of &quot; word&quot; with genitival complement also support the message motif: &quot; word of God&quot; ... &quot;word of the Kingdom&quot; ... &quot;word of the cross&quot; &quot;&nbsp;(3). So our equation of &quot; the word&quot; with the essence of the Gospel message rather than Jesus personally is in harmony with other occurrences of&nbsp;<em>logos</em>. That said, there evidently is a personification of sorts going on. Personifications of the word of God weren't uncommon in the literature of the time. Thus Wisdom of Solomon 18:15 speaks of how &quot;Thine all powerful word leaped from heaven down from the royal throne&quot;. Because &quot;for the Hebrew the word once spoken has a kind of substantive existence of its own&quot; (4), e.g. a blessing or curse had a kind of life of their own, it's not surprising that&nbsp;<em>logos</em>&nbsp;is personified.</p><p>One way of understanding the prologue in Jn. 1 is to consider how it is interpreted in the prologue we find in John's first epistle. It appears that John's Gospel was the standard text for a group of converts that grew up around him; John then wrote his epistles in order to correct wrong interpretations of his Gospel record that were being introduced by itinerant false teachers into the house churches which he had founded. For example, &quot; God so loved the world...&quot; (Jn. 3:16) seems to have been misunderstood by the false prophets against whom John was contending, to mean that a believer can be of the world. Hence 1 Jn. 2:16 warns the brethren that they cannot 'love the world' in the sense of having worldly behaviour and desires. On the other hand, John saw the faithful churches to whom he was writing as those who had been faithful to the Gospel he had preached to them, as outlined in the Gospel of John. He had recorded there the promise that &quot; You will know the truth&quot; (Jn. 8:32), and he writes in his letters to a community &quot; who have come to know the truth&quot; (2 Jn. 1), i.e. who had fulfilled and obeyed the Gospel of Jesus which he had preached to them initially. This thesis is explained at length in Raymond Brown<a href=http://www.aletheiacollege.net/dbb/1-3In_The_Beginning_Was_The_Word.htm#n3>(5)</a>&nbsp;.</p><p>With this in mind, it appears that the prologue of 1 Jn. is a conscious allusion to and clarification of that of Jn. 1. Consider the following links:</p><div align=center><table border=0 cellspacing=8 cellpadding=0>    <tbody>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p><strong>In the beginning was the word</strong></p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p><strong>What was from the beginning</strong></p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The word was with God</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The eternal life which was with Gk. in the presence of God</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>In the word was life</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The word of life</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The life was the light of men</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>God is light</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The light shines in darkness</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>In Him there is no darkness at all</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The word became flesh</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>This life was revealed</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>And dwelt amongst us</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>and was manifested to us</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>We beheld his glory</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>What we looked at</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>Of his fullness we have all received</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The fellowship which we have is with</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>Through Jesus Christ</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>the Father and with his son</p>            </td>        </tr>        <tr>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>The only Son of God</p>            </td>            <td width=295 valign=top>            <p>Jesus Christ</p>            </td>        </tr>    </tbody></table></div><p>You will note that the parallel for &quot;the word&quot; of Jn. 1 is 'the life' in 1 Jn. 1, the life which Jesus lived, the type of life which is lived by the Father in Heaven. That word was made flesh (Jn. 1:14) in the sense that this life was revealed to us in the life and death of Jesus. So the word becoming flesh has nothing to do with a pre-existent Jesus physically coming down from Heaven and being born of Mary. It could well be that the evident links between the prologue to John's Gospel and the prologue to his epistle are because he is correcting a misunderstanding that had arisen about the prologue to his Gospel. 1 Jn. 1:2 spells it out clearly- it was the impersonal &quot;eternal life&quot; which was &quot;with the Father&quot;, and it was this which &quot;became flesh&quot; in a form that had been personally touched and handled by John in the personal body of the Lord Jesus. And perhaps it is in the context of incipient trinitarianism that John warns that those who deny that Jesus was &quot;in the flesh&quot; are actually antiChrist.</p><div align=center><hr size=3 width=100% align=center /></div><p><strong>Notes</strong></p><p>(1) G.B. Caird,&nbsp;<em>Christ For Us Today</em>&nbsp;(London: SCM, 1968) p. 79.</p><p>(2) Oscar Cullmann,&nbsp;<em>The Christology Of The New Testament</em>&nbsp;(London: SCM, 1971) p. 261.</p><p>(3) Raymond Brown,&nbsp;<em>The Epistles of John</em>&nbsp;(Garden City: Doubleday, 1982) p. 164.</p><p>(4) C.H. Dodd,&nbsp;<em>The Interpretation Of The Fourth Gospel</em>&nbsp;(Cambridge: C.U.P., 1960) p. 264.</p><p>(5)&nbsp;<em>The Community of the Beloved Disciple</em>&nbsp;(New York: Paulist, 1979) and in his&nbsp;<em>The Epistles of John</em>&nbsp;(Garden City: Doubleday, 1982). These are lengthy and at times difficult reads, and I can't agree with all the conclusions, and yet I'd heartily recommend them to serious Bible students. One pleasing feature of his writings is his frequent admission that Trinitarian theology is an interpretation of what the NT writers, especially John, actually wrote- and they themselves didn&rsquo;t have the trinity in mind when they wrote as they did. He comments on the hymn of Phil. 2 about Christ taking the &ldquo;form of God&rdquo;: &ldquo;Many scholars today doubt that &ldquo;being in the form of God&rdquo; and &ldquo;accepting the form of a servant&rdquo; refers to incarnation&rdquo; <em>The Community Of The Beloved Disciple</em>&nbsp;p. 46.</p><p><em>And the word was towards God, and the word was Divine</em>- That is a strictly correct translation. The word of the Gospel, which is epitomized in the life and person of the mortal Lord Jesus, was Divine. John is writing for Jews, whose supreme focus upon God led them to ignore the possibility of His deep manifestation in other persons or things. John is emphasizing that the message of the Gospel, the life and person of His Son, is the essence of Him. To believe in God meant to believe the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. To reject that was to reject God Himself.</p><p>Not believing in God and not believing in His word of the Gospel are paralleled in 1 Jn. 5:10. God is His word. The word &ldquo;is&rdquo; God in that God is so identified with His word. David parallels trusting in God and trusting in His word (Ps. 56:3,4). He learnt this, perhaps, through the experience of his sin with Bathsheba. For in that matter, David &quot;despised the commandment (word) of the Lord... you despised me&quot; (2 Sam. 12:9,10). David learnt that his attitude to God's word was his attitude to God- for the word of God, in that sense, was and is God. By our words we personally will be condemned or justified- because we too &lsquo;are&rsquo; our words. When Samuel told Eli of the prophetic vision which he had received, Eli commented: &ldquo;It is the Lord&rdquo; (1 Sam. 3:18). He meant &lsquo;It is the word of the Lord&rsquo;; but he saw God as effectively His word. &ldquo;The word&rdquo;, the &ldquo;word of the Kingdom&rdquo;, &ldquo;the Gospel&rdquo;, &ldquo;the word of God&rdquo; are all parallel expressions throughout the Gospels. The records of the parable of the sower speak of both &ldquo;the word of God&rdquo; (Lk. 8:11-15) and &ldquo;the word of the Kingdom&rdquo; (Mt. 13:19). The word / Gospel of God refers to the message which is about God, just as the &ldquo;word of the Kingdom&rdquo; means the word which is about the Kingdom, rather than suggesting that the word is one and the same as the Kingdom. &ldquo;The gospel of God&rdquo; means the Gospel which is about God, not the Gospel which is God Himself in person (Rom. 1:1; 15:16; 2 Cor. 11:7; 1 Thess. 2:2,8,9; 1 Pet. 4:17). So, the word of God, the word which was God, the Gospel of God, was made flesh in Jesus. &ldquo;The word of Jesus&rdquo; and &ldquo;the word of God&rdquo; are interchangeable (Acts 19:10 cp. 20; 1 Thess. 1:8 cp. 2:13); as is &ldquo;the word of the Gospel&rdquo; and &ldquo;the word of Jesus&rdquo; (Acts 15:7 cp. 35). The word wasn&rsquo;t directly equivalent to Jesus; He manifested the word, He showed us by His life and words and personality what the Kingdom was like, what God is like; for the word which He &ldquo;became&rdquo; was about God, and about the Kingdom. He was the entire Gospel, of God and of His Kingdom, made flesh. He could speak of His words abiding in us (Jn. 15:7), and yet make this parallel to He personally abiding in us (Jn. 15:4,5; 14:20). &quot;The word was God&quot; can't mean that the word is identical with God- for the word &quot;was with God&quot;, or &quot;was in God's presence&quot;. The NEB therefore renders: &quot;What God was, the Word was&quot;. G.B. Caird suggests the translation: &quot;In the beginning was a purpose, a purpose in the mind of God, a purpose which was God's own being&quot; (1). </p><p>In the person of Jesus, there was an uncanny and never before, never again experienced congruence between a human being and his words. And our witness should be modelled on His pattern- we should be the living embodiment of the doctrines we preach. The message or word of Jesus was far more than the words that He spoke from His lips. In one sense, He revealed to the disciples everything that He had heard from the Father (Jn. 15:15); and yet in another, more literal sense, He lamented that there was much more He could tell them in words, but they weren't able to bear it (Jn. 16:12). His person and character, which they would spend the rest of their lives reflecting upon, was the 'word' of God in flesh to its supremacy; but this doesn't necessarily mean that they heard all the literal words of God drop from the lips of Jesus. I have shown elsewhere that both the Father and Son use language, or words, very differently to how we normally do. The manifestation of God in Christ was not only a matter of the Christ speaking the right words about God. For as He said, His men couldn't have handled that in its entirety. The fullness of manifestation of the word was in His life, His character, and above all in His death, which Jn. 1:14 may be specifically referring to in speaking of how John himself beheld the glory of the word being made flesh. It seems to me that many of us need to learn these things in our hearts; for our preaching has so often been a matter of literal words, Bible lectures, seminars, flaunting our correct exposition of Bible passages and themes. When the essential witness must be of a life lived, a making flesh of the word which is God. To ignore this will lead us into literalistic definitions of literal words, arguments about statements of faith, endless additions of words and clauses to clarify other words...whereas &quot; the word&quot; which the Lord Jesus manifested was not merely human words. There was far more to it than that. It was and is and must ever be a word made flesh. This is why nothing can replace personal witness and personal, one on one teaching as the way that conversions are really made. And yet increasingly we tend to try to use media to preach- TV, CDs, internet, video, tapes etc. There is nothing personally 'live' in all this; there can be no communication of truths through their incarnation in our own personalities. And yet this was how God communicated with us in His Son; and how we too reveal His word in flesh to others.</p><p>&ldquo;The word was God&rdquo;. The words of the Lord Jesus were the words which He had 'heard' from the Father. But this doesn't mean that He was a mere fax machine, relaying literal words which the Father whispered in His ear to a listening world. When the disciples finally grasped something of the real measure of Jesus, they gasped: &quot;You do not even need that a person ask you questions&quot; (Jn. 16:30). They had previously treated Jesus as a Rabbi, of whom questions were asked by his disciples and then cleverly answered by him. They finally perceived that here was more than a Jewish Rabbi. They came to that conclusion, they imply, not by asking Him questions comprised of words and hearing the cleverly ordered words that comprised His answers. The words He spoke and manifested were of an altogether higher quality and nature than mere lexical items strung together. Here was none other than the Son of God, the Word made flesh in person. And this, of course, was why the unbelieving Jews just didn't understand the literal words which He spoke. They asked Him to speak plainly to them (Jn. 10:24); and the Lord's response was that their underlying problem was not with His language, but with the simple fact that they did not believe that He, the carpenter from Nazareth, was the Son of God. Is it going too far to suggest that all intellectual failure to understand the teaching of Jesus is rooted in a simple lack of faith and perception of Him as a person? </p><p>As the word of God, the message of God in flesh, Jesus was God&rsquo;s agent, and as such could be counted as God, although He was not God Himself in person. P. Borgen brings this out in an article &lsquo;God&rsquo;s Agent In The Fourth Gospel&rsquo; (2). He quotes the halakhic or legal principle of the rabbis, that &ldquo;An agent is the like the one who sent him&rdquo;, and quotes the Babylonian Talmud Qiddushin 43a: &ldquo;He ranks as his master&rsquo;s own person&rdquo;. This, therefore, was how those in the 1st century who understood Jesus to be God&rsquo;s agent would have understood Him. John Robinson, one time Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, observed that popular Christianity &ldquo;says simply that Jesus was God, in such a way that the terms &lsquo;Christ&rsquo; and &lsquo;God&rsquo; are interchangeable. But nowhere in Biblical usage is this so. The New Testament says that Jesus was the Word of God, it says that God was in Christ, it says that Jesus is the Son of God; but it does not say that Jesus was God, simply like that&rdquo; (3). And he goes on to apply this good sense to an analysis of the phrase &ldquo;the word was God&rdquo; in John 1. He argues that this translation is untenable because: &ldquo;In Greek this translation &ldquo;the word was God&rdquo; would most naturally be represented by &lsquo;God&rsquo; with the article, not <i>theos</i> but <i>ho theos</i>. Equally, St. John is not saying that Jesus is a &lsquo;divine&rsquo; man&hellip; that would be <i>theios</i>. The NEB, I believe, gets the sense pretty exactly with its rendering, &lsquo;And what God was, the Word was&rsquo;. In other words, if one looked at Jesus, one saw God&rdquo;- in the sense that His perfect character reflected that of the Father (4). The lack of article &quot;the before &quot;God&quot; is significant. &quot;In omitting the article before <i>theos</i>, the author intends to say that the Logos is not actually God but only... a divine emanation&quot; (5).</p><p>Notes<br />(1) G.B. Caird<i>, The Language And Imagery Of The Bible</i> (London: Duckworth, 1988) p. 102. <br />(2) In <i>Religions In Antiquity</i> (Leiden: Brill, 1968) pp. 137-148.<br />(3) John Robinson, <i>Honest To God</i> (London: S.C.M., 1963) p. 70.<br />(4) <i>Ibid</i> p. 71.<br />(5) Oscar Cullmann, <i>The Christology Of The New Testament</i> (London: S.C.M., 1971) p. 266.</p>