The Prologue

(The Gospel of John 1:1 - 1:18)

Logos, the embodiment of the divine creative force, existed from the beginning of time.  He was not only employed by the eternal God, Elohim, but was an integral part of him and has always been so.  It was through Logos that all the things in the universe were brought into existence by Elohim.  Indeed, nothing was created save through Logos.  From Logos sprung the life force of creation, and through him humankind was endowed with consciousness.  A revelation of spiritual enlightenment he brings to the ignorant, but, alas, they will fail to understand it and remain benighted.

There was a man called John who was sent by Elohim to bear witness to the eminent arrival of a divine spiritual teacher, a bringer of enlightenment, so that all might be prepared to receive him.  John was not himself that spiritual teacher; his role was to herald his coming. ---  “To enlighten all mankind the true spiritual teacher is coming into the world!” 

This divine teacher came down into the world that he had created, but that world ignored him.  He came to live among the people who were his own, but they did not accept him.  Yet, to those who did accept him, who believed in him, he granted the right to become the children of God, not children conceived in the natural, carnal way by a husband’s desire or the whimsical passions of the flesh, but spiritually born through God. 

Logos has become man incarnate!  And he made his habitation among us.  We indeed have witnessed his majesty, the majesty of a father's only son, full of integrity and humanity.

John, reporting truthfully of him, announced to the crowd, "This is the very one I was referring to when I claimed,  'He who comes after me will surpass me.  That is because he has lived before me.'" 

Because of him, we have been the recipients of great bounty, another means of achieving God's grace.  From Moses we have been given the law of the Torah; from Jesus the Messiah we have been given God's love and revealed truth.  No mortal man has ever seen God, yet his only son, who is an aspect of the Godhead, has made the divine known to us.

Notes
1.  The Greek word "Logos" is often translated as "The Word," but this is a very inadequate and misleading translation even though it is not far from a literal rendering of the Greek word.  By the time of the writing of the Gospel, Logos had been employed as a conceptual term by Hellenistic philosophers, though not always in identical ways.  The Hebrew philosopher Philo (born about 20 B.C.), who attempted to reconcile and form a synthesis between Greek philosophy and the Old Testament, used Logos to mean a creative force that existed as part of God.  Since God was a spiritual being, he could not directly connect with the material world.  Philo reasoned that a mediating agent, Logos, was necessary for the creation and manipulation of matter.  He saw this force as abstract and impersonal, though, while the author of John regarded it as personal, an intelligence that, though a part of the Godhead, was capable of being incarnated as a human being.  

2.  Rendering  "Logos" as "The Word" gives rise to a common misunderstanding, that "The Word" is synonymous with "The Word of God," that is, revealed knowledge, a set of divinely inspired beliefs, religious doctrine, or moral teachings; this is definitely not the case.  "Logos" or "The Word," as it is used here, means the divine creative force that was able to assume human form as Jesus the Messiah.

3.  There is no question that the author of John regarded Jesus as divine, an aspect of God, since he was an incarnation of Logos.  This, however, negates the commonly accepted view of God, the father, and Jesus, the son.  If Jesus, as Logos, had always existed and had always been divine, then how could he be a son, an offspring of God, who would, at some time, have to be born?  Technically, Jesus could only be a son of God in a purely physical sense, as would all humans.  His spirit and soul did not derive from God, because it was and always was a part of it.  Of course, throughout the New Testament Jesus is continually referred to as God's son, his only son, but here this should be interpreted loosely.  The philosophical concepts entertained by the author of John were, for the most part, ignored by early Christians whose pronouncements on the nature of the deity and the divine were purely theological, devised to be compatible with an established, if new, religious creed rather than the traditions of Greek philosophy.

4.  Jesus, as Logos, had created the world and the people in it; therefore, it is ironic that he is not accepted by his own creations.  But he will reward those who do accept him, an early reference to a basic tenet of Christianity, the rewarding those who merely believe.

5. There are two somewhat separate uses of the word "Light'" the Greek "phos."  Firstly, it is used to describe a person, the incarnate Logos/Jesus, probably to emphasize his role as a bringer of divinely inspired knowledge and enlightenment.  I have chosen to translate "phos" in this context as “divine spiritual teacher,” awkward, but the only words that give an accurate description.   Secondly, it is used metaphorically, meaning knowledge, insight, revelation, as opposed to darkness, symbolizing ignorance.  Light and dark are sometimes used as symbols of good and evil, but not here -- the context suggests only the contrast between knowledge and ignorance.  I have discarded the poetic analogy of light and darkness in order to make the meaning clearer.  The famous and elegant verse, rendered in the King James Version, "The light shines into the darkness, but the darkness comprehendeth it not," is not the sole acceptable translation.  The first clause is unambiguous, but the second clause can be variously rendered.  The darkness ignores, rejects, refutes, or fails to understand the light, or the darkness does not conquer, thwart, suppress, extinguish, quench, put out, overcome, or overpower the light.  Since the light we are speaking of is knowledge, or rather the dissemination or revelation of knowledge, and the darkness is ignorance or enmity to that dissemination of knowledge.  A light may be put out, but, dropping the analogy, and falling back into a literal expression of the sentence's meaning, knowledge cannot be extinguished, but can only be not understood or rejected.  This conforms with the later reference to the rejection of Jesus by the world and people he created.

6.  John, later to be called "the Baptist" refers, if obliquely, to the eternal nature of Jesus' spirit -- "he lived before me."

7.  Another important Christian concept is presented, a secondary means of attaining God's grace, not only through adherence to the laws promulgated by Moses, but through God's love granted to those who receive and believe in the teachings of Jesus the Messiah.

8.  It is interesting that the text unambiguously says that "no man has seen God," yet the Old Testament is full of men seeing God (Jehovah, that is) and having very physical contact with him.  One might suggest that the author of John took the accounts of Jehovah in the Old Testament with a grain of salt, even though he obviously believes the Torah was given to man by God.  From John one would conclude that Jesus represented the sole earthly communion between man and God.