Paidion wrote:I had already read your post. I respect you and your thoughts. Yet, from earliest Christian times, the Logos was understood to be the personal Son of God. I agree. There's no contradiction in this understanding, unless one thinks that John 1:1 is affirming that the Logos was the Father Himself.
Well we can agree that John wrote his Gospel to show us...
Joh 20:31 but these have been written
so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.
John never wrote a single word to teach us Jesus was God, but that He was the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God, not God Himself!
Actually, in Greek. Logos was considered to be God...
Info taken from...From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heraclitus
The writing of Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BCE) was the first place where the word logos was given special attention in ancient Greek philosophy.[4] Though Heraclitus "quite deliberately plays on the various meanings of logos",[5] there is no compelling reason to suppose that he used it in a special technical sense, significantly different from the way it was used in ordinary Greek of his time.[6]
This LOGOS holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this LOGOS, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep. (Diels-Kranz 22B1)
For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the LOGOS is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding. (Diels-Kranz 22B2)
Listening not to me but to the LOGOS it is wise to agree that all things are one. (Diels-Kranz 22B50)[7]
Notice any similar beliefs about the Logos written hundreds of years before Jesus came to this earth?
The Stoics
In Stoic philosophy, which began with Zeno of Citium c. 300 BCE, the logos was the active reason pervading the universe and animating it. It was conceived of as material,
and is usually identified with God or Nature. The Stoics also referred to the seminal logos, ("logos spermatikos") or the law of generation in the universe, which was the principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter. Humans, too, each possess a portion of the divine logos.[8]
Can you see a Greek world view being formulated around John 1:1 yet, considering John's own reason for writing his Gospel? John 20:31
Now add in the early Church Fathers...
AUGUSTINE: CONFESSIONS
Book 7 CHAPTER IX
13. And first of all, willing to show me how thou dost "resist the proud, but give grace to the humble,"[184] and how mercifully thou hast made known to men the way of humility in that thy Word "was made flesh and dwelt among men,"[185] thou didst procure for me, through one inflated with the most monstrous pride,
certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin.[186]
And therein I found, not indeed in the same words,
but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made." That which was made by him is "life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shined in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." Furthermore, I read that the soul of man, though it "bears witness to the light," yet itself "is not the light; but the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lights every man who comes into the world." And further, that "he was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not."[187] But that "he came unto his own, and his own received him not. And as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on his name"[188]--this I did not find there.
Our views have been affected by Men who came before us! What you read above is taught in Bible schools across the country, but with out the source of where these beliefs came about. It's taught as Biblical fact when it really originated out of Hellenistic beliefs systems, not Hebrew.
Paul