The Word got a body

Every religion has holy books. One has a holy Book that says the Word is a Person.

John writes for readers on both sides of a wall. To a Jew, the word of the LORD is the thing that comes to prophets and makes worlds — the noun studied in Week One. To a Greek, logos is the rational principle holding the universe together, the reason behind everything, discussed by philosophers for four centuries.

John takes the word both audiences already owned and does something neither expected with it.

He says the Word was with God, which makes it distinct. He says the Word was God, which makes it not less. He puts both in one sentence and leaves them there.

And then, thirteen verses later, he does the thing nobody saw coming.

Became flesh. Not appeared as. Not seemed to be. Became.

And the verb behind dwelt is stranger still. It means to pitch a tent, to tabernacle — the same picture as the tent in the wilderness where God’s presence came down among a camp of former slaves. The Word pitched His tent in a human body and camped among us.

That single move changes the whole doctrine of Scripture, and it is why this volume could not skip it.

Which reorders everything. It means a man can master the text and miss the point — Jesus says exactly that to men who searched the Scriptures diligently and would not come to Him. It means the Bible is not a rival to Christ or a substitute for Him; it is the place He is made known, which is Jerome’s argument at the top of this week.

And it means the reverence a Christian gives Scripture is not book-worship. Nobody worships the letter. We revere what a letter carries, because of whose breath is in it and whose face is at the end of it.

It also guards the reader from two opposite errors at once. A man who treats the Book as an end in itself ends with a text and no Christ — which is the condition Jesus diagnoses in John 5. A man who claims Christ while holding the Book loosely ends with a Christ of his own construction, since there is no other place the real one is made known. Jerome’s sentence at the top of this week cuts both ways.

John spends his whole prologue keeping both truths in the same room. The Word made everything. The Word was in the world and the world did not know Him. The Word became flesh, and we have seen His glory. A man can hold a book like that in his hands and still be looking for something to hold him.

The Greek of verse 1 has occupied translators and grammarians for centuries. The last clause has no article before theos, which some have read as making it indefinite. The standard grammatical treatment is that a definite predicate noun preceding the verb regularly lacks the article — the construction indicates what the Word was in nature, not which person He was. Read the argument rather than taking anyone’s word for it, including mine.

The verb in verse 14 is built on the noun for tent, and it is the same root behind the Greek Old Testament’s word for the tabernacle. John is not reaching for a poetic flourish; he is reaching for Exodus 40, where the glory filled the tent and Moses could not enter.

The philosophical background is worth knowing but should not be overweighted. Heraclitus and the Stoics used logos for the ordering rationality of the cosmos, and Jewish writers in Greek had already begun blending that with Hebrew wisdom language. John borrows the vocabulary and then breaks it: no Greek philosopher ever suggested the logos would be born, get tired, weep, or be executed.

Revelation gives the title back to Him at the end. The rider on the white horse, robe dipped in blood, is named the Word of God — the same designation John opened his Gospel with, now on a figure coming in judgment. The prologue and the last book use the identical phrase, and between them lies everything else.

Colossians 1:15–17 says the same thing without the word: all things were created through Him and for Him, and in Him all things hold together. Paul and John, writing independently, place the same Person in the same role Genesis 1 assigns to the speech of God.

Look it upG3056 λόγος logos, word, reason, account · G4633 σκηνόω skenoo, to pitch a tent, tabernacle · G4561 σάρξ sarx, flesh · G3439 μονογενής monogenes, one and only

Then read John 5:39–40 beside the prologue, where searching the Scriptures and refusing to come to Him are described as happening in the same men at the same time.

Where this touchesJohn 1:1–18 · Genesis 1:3 · Exodus 40:34–35 · John 5:39–40 · Colossians 1:15–17 · Revelation 19:13. Dabar and rhema were Week One, Day Three; theopneustos was Week Two, Day Three.