Excuse me if this topic has been aired previously. John’s gospel begins with the doctrine of the Logos, the Word of God, which is usually interpreted to mean that Jesus is the Word that God spoke, as if in some undiscovered version of Genesis he said ‘Let there be Jesus’. More conventionally Jesus is both the Son of God and consubstantial with God, so where does ‘logos’ come into it? ‘Logos’ in Greek doesn’t mean ‘word’ in the way we mean ‘word’, i.e. a particle of speech. The Greek for that is ‘lexi’ giving us ‘lexicon’, ‘dyslexic’ etc. ‘Logos’ can mean ‘speech’ but more in the sense of ‘discourse’ or ‘rational argument’, the way Heraclitus used it. So we get ‘logic’ (the adjective from logos) and all the words with a suffix ‘logy’ like apology (‘argument from’), biology (study of life), astrology (what the stars mean) etc. etc. A much wider range of nuances and applications than just ‘word’. I’d be interested to know what you all think ‘logos’ in John’s gospel means, and what he’s trying to say. Thanks.
OK. So ‘logos’ has multiple meanings or rather an extensive spread of meaning. What I’m after is the real sense of ‘logos’ in John. Does he think God literally ‘spoke’ the world into existence, as if God has the same physical properties as a human being? Does he think God resembles humans with all their attributes including the larynx? Surely not. For ‘logos’ to mean the same thing in Epictetus (Long’s translation) and in Heraclitus, and in John, is a bit of a stretch.
Stoicism and Epicureanism reject Platonic metaphysics: there are no Forms in Stoicism, although there is a Reason (logos) while in Epicureanism, nothing exists but things and nothingness.
The Stoic universe is meant and harmonic; the Epicurean world is entropic where random acts fall endlessly through space, there is no direction and no meaning.
The Stoics intend to live in harmony with the universe, according to the logos which is both knowledge and virtue; the Epicurean, particularly, aims at pleasure (not pain).
Our previous Pope Ratzinger laments the successive attempts to remove the “logos” of Greek thought from the tradition of Christian thought, a process He called “dehellenization”.
Christianity bears within itself a synthesis between biblical faith and Greek rationality. The latter being the key to understand John.
Thanks for your contribution Janmaru.
Robert, I’ve been giving some thought to this Epictetus thing. I’ve looked at four translations of the first paragraph (not by Long) and every single one of them translates ἑνὶ λόγῳ as ‘in a word’. The trouble is, what follows ἑνὶ λόγῳ is not a word but five words. In English would you do that? Would you say ‘I am a dedicated follower of fashion. I keep an eye on trends in the street. In a word, it’s important to look good.’ No, you would not. You might say ‘in other words’, or ‘put it another way’, but you would not say ‘in a word’ unless you were speaking carelessly and you certainly wouldn’t write it carefully in a treatise.
From the context alone it’s pretty clear that ἑνὶ λόγῳ doesn’t mean ‘in a word’. No philosopher writing as carefully as he should would use it that way in that context. I surmise that all the translators of Epictetus have been led by mere convention to translate logos as ‘word’ when in fact it doesn’t mean that. Please correct me if I’m wrong, and provide solid proof. Thanks.
So what can logos mean in the first paragraph of Epictetus – and the first paragraph of John? It’s the same word, right?
In Epictetus it clearly means something like ‘core concept’, not ‘word’. In John it could also mean ‘core concept’ or something similar. An abstraction, not an identifiable thing. Since God is unknowable he is an abstraction, not tangible. This would equate God with the logos of Greek philosophy and it would not just mean ‘word’.
Christians have for two millennia thought that ‘God spoke’ (as in Genesis – dunno what the Hebrew is) and that Jesus is in some way a product of God’s speech. They have cited John, translating logos simply as ‘word’, when in fact it means something a lot more subtle and interesting.
Robert said
Should I look for more examples?
No please, enough already! I already knew that logos can, and perhaps usually does, mean ‘word’ or ‘talk’. What I wanted to know was what John could mean, if he meant anything other than ‘word’ or ‘talk’. There is nothing in the rest of his gospel account to give us a clue – as far as I know, and I have no doubt you’ll enlighten me if I’m wrong. Thanks.
Dirk Campbell
What does John mean by logos?
Steefen
Heraclitus held that all things come to be in accordance with the logos.
The later Stoics understood the Logos as “the account which governs everything.”
For Heraclitus, logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure.
Logos is that which is between 1) meditation or rational discourse and 3) manifestation.
1) meditation or rational discourse > 2) Logos > 3) manifestation
I think, we discuss, therefore something comes into existence via some process of execution.
In project management, there is 1) planning, 2) execution, and 3) product/service.
Actually, there are five steps in project management: 1) Concept/Initiation, 2) Planning,
3) Launch and Execution, 4) Monitoring and Control, and 5) Project Close.
According to Heraclitus and the later Stoics with “in accordance” and with “governance”, Logos would not just be execution, Logos would be execution with monitoring and control.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert