The Logos: Deconstructing the Apostle John's 'Prologue'
“In the Beginning was the ‘Logos’ and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God...All things were made through [the Logos], and without [the Logos] was not any thing made that was made. In [the Logos] was life,a and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The Apostle John was a mystical poet or a poetic mystic.
Dubbed ‘the Prologue’, the above opening lines are a literary masterpiece wherein John appropriated and claimed that the human being Jesus of Nazareth was the Logos, the ubiqoutous ‘secular’ philosophical concept that denotes the fundamental organizing principal of Creation/reality, and unequivocally elevated and claimed Jesus to be YHWH, the eternal, all-powerful Creator of the Universe.
John was the youngest disciple and outlived Christ (who died at age 33) by more than 50-years, having died on the island of Patmos of natural causes after being exiled by the Roman Emperor Domitian.
"In the beginning"
More than just "when God created": the phrase denotes a period before God created, when God the Father and Jesus the Logos, co-existed as a single entity. “In the beginning” = before the Big Bang, before creation. Since ‘time’ is an element of Creation, perhaps a better conception would be to say ‘outside of time’ and/or ‘for all time’: the sublime poetic expression indicates there was never a time when the Word didn’t exist.
"The Word"
Most know the Word is the translation of the Greek word Logos, the root word of logic. Logos was a dominant theme in Greek and Roman philosophy, featuring in the works of Plato and Aristotle and playing a central role in the thought of Heraclitus, the Stoics, and Neoplatonists. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines it thuslyt: "Logos...[is], the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning." Living in the Greek world, John was obviously familiar with the concept and like the Psalmist before him (“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge”, 19:1-2) and the Apostle Paul after (“For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made“ 1:20) - as well as the Greeks and Romans around him, even pre-dating Christ(!) - John believed he saw order in the Universe and that order reflected the personhood of Jesus the Nazarene.
“In him was life and the life was the light of men”
Zoe, psyche, and bios are all Greek words for life. Bios in an organic, bodily sense; psyche, typically translated "breath" as in the 'breath of life' or soul/ animating force of a person - today, we might call it "mind" or "will". John used zoe, which is defined by Thayer's Greek Lexicon: as "1) the state of one who is possessed of vitality…2) of the absolute fulness of life, both essential and ethical..."
John here claims that Jesus contained and was the sole source (he exists outside of time!) of a life-force that was essential and vital for human beings. Contrast this to the Greek concept of Thanatos which was basically sin but a believed that in all human beings was this dark side that sub-consciously desired even their own death. Jesus was the exact opposite: his zoe was a light to all other people, inspiring them to hope and calling them to himself. It was abundant, inexhaustible, morally and ethically perfect, incontrovertibly good and attractive to all.