Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast, everyone. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. Because this episode is releasing on American Thanksgiving, it is a pre-recorded show, so don’t call this time; save your calls for next time. That said, we did get some voicemails from some of you that we will be including in this episode.

So tonight—or actually, it’s today when I’m recording, but whatever; you’re listening tonight!—we’re going to be continuing our four-part series on the Christology of the Old Testament; this is part two. Last time we talked about the Angel of the Lord, and this time we’re going to be discussing the Word of the Lord, or the Word of God. This is another phrase that gets people confused sometimes. What does “Word of God” mean exactly? Is it the Bible? Is it Christ? Can we use the phrase for both? Well, it turns out that the Scripture uses the phrase very consistently, so this episode is dedicated to taking a close look, not at every single example—that would be hours and hours long, not that that has ever really stopped us before, of course—but we’ll be looking at the paradigmatic uses of “the Word of God” or “the Word of the Lord” in the Bible, which will then tell us something very significant about the Christian faith.

So it’s got the word “word” in there, Father. So is this just talking about language?

Fr. Stephen De Young: No. [Laughter] I want to clarify something for the record, though, before we begin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: So I was perfectly willing to come and broadcast live on Thanksgiving night. I wanted to be with our listeners as they recovered from gorging on turkey to celebrate New England Puritanism and their revisionist history of the founding of the country.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not a beast—eating Leviathan…

Fr. Stephen: But I was alone in that desire.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: And so it’s going to be pre-recorded.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when people hear this, I’m going to be traveling to see family, and our producer, Trudi, will probably be doing good things with her own family. We’re letting her have the night off.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll probably be watching an old horror movie or something.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So enjoy, everyone!

Fr. Stephen: The Detroit Lions will have probably lost by that time.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! That’s the game with the pointed ball, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the one that looks like kibbeh.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, yes! Yes, right. That it does. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But I wanted to just lay that out for the record.

Fr. Andrew: So, to begin, I wanted to play one of the voicemails that we got from one of you, our listeners.

Olga: Hi, Fathers! My name is Olga Karpushina. I’m calling from Kazakhstan. My question is, as a former linguist, I would want to know, when we talk about the Word of God, the Word, what realm would that word belong to? In general linguistics, we have two terms, langue and parole; these terms were coined by a structural linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Basically, langue would be theoretical language that pre-exists any utterances, like Platonic ideals, I would say, whereas parole would be individual speech, concrete revealed language in use. So when we talk about the Word, which category will that Word belong to? Would it be the realm of langue or parole, and it if it is parole, if it is pronounced, then who pronounced that? Would it be Jesus Christ, because he is the only one who has the body, or what? Just curious. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so Olga from Kazakhstan—I think this might be our first call from Kazakhstan—

Fr. Stephen: At least, directly from Kazakhstan.

Fr. Andrew: That we’re aware of, yeah. So, Olga the Linguist, she was asking about whether the sense of the Word of the Lord or the Word of God, if it could be understood in terms of linguistic theory. Now, I had to dig deep within my memory banks to even refresh my mind as to what the terms she [is using mean], so forgive me. I am not a linguist. I just like to study the stuff that’s kind of linguistics-adjacent. So she was asking about—it’s called structuralism, which is a particular theory of linguistics that arose in the mid 20th century, and she mentioned Saussure, who is one of these theorists from that time. He came up with this distinction between—now, he’s using the French words, langue and parole, which we could translate into English roughly as language or speech. So the idea is language is… it’s the whole sort of world of conversation that exists within a culture, if that makes sense. And then speech is what one person is saying.

So she was asking whether this sense of the Word of the Lord or the Word of God, if it fits into one of those two categories—if I’m understanding correctly; forgive me, Olga, if I’m getting this wrong, but that’s my understanding, after having looked this up. So what do you think about that, Father? Does that schema work for this?

Fr. Stephen: Um, well, it doesn’t fit neatly into either category, because, of course, in the ancient world they didn’t have those terms. They didn’t speak French. But I think we’re going to see, as we go through here in the first half, where we’re going to talk about this in sort of a more conceptual level, and sort of a history of interpretation level, that, of the two, it is closer to langue, to the first category.

Fr. Andrew: Language, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, closer, but it doesn’t neatly fit there, because I think there’s a little bit more going on than just the linguistic level, as we’re going to see. So, yeah. Let’s get into that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: So one of the problems is that we’ve inherited from our aforementioned New England Puritan beginnings, at least in American Christianity, the tendency to use the phrase “Word of God”—and even “Word of the Lord” sometimes, but more commonly “Word of God”—to refer to the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: The Word o’ God! Pronounced exactly like that.

Fr. Stephen: And I’m going to say that has an O with an apostrophe in it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Word-o’-God. Like jack-o’-lantern.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, filet-o’-fish and tam-o’-shanter.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Obviously, people are free to invent technical terms and use them however they like; we can’t be the—as much as you’d like to, we can’t be the word police.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I would like to, believe me.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But we do have to point out that in the Bible, the phrase, “Word of God” or “Word of the Lord,” is never used to refer to the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s really what we’re focusing on, is how does the Bible use this language?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it’s the biblical use of it that’s then going to be picked up by the Church Fathers and picked up by later Christian tradition, and that’s not to say that there’s not some sense in which that could apply to the Bible, but it is to say if, when you think of the Word of God, what comes into your brain is the Bible, you’re going to end up misinterpreting a bunch of things when you see that phrase in the Bible. In fact, the Bible doesn’t call itself anything in the Bible, really, because the Bible doesn’t talk about the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not a singular book the way that we have it now.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It doesn’t talk about itself as sort of this cohesive unit. What you do have are references to Scriptures, to written things, literally. And so you will have texts in the Scriptures which are written later, referring to things written earlier as scriptures, as things written.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Now, does… I know that that happens in the New Testament, often referring to the Old Testament as “the Scriptures.” I can’t recall: do you get that in the Old Testament? Does the Old Testament ever refer to other Old Testament texts as “the Scriptures”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on what you mean by “the Old Testament.”

Fr. Andrew: Ah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So most of… If we’re talking about the Rabbinic and most Protestant canon, then not really.

Fr. Andrew: The short Old Testament, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because… I mean, you see the Torah, but it’s referred to as the Torah. It’s its own thing. It is referred to as a unit. When you get into some of what some folks would call the Deuterocanonical books or the longer canon or how you want to take that, you see the earlier books referred to in various ways, as the oracles of God or as things written, and that is picked up, then, in the texts that make up the New Testament, because every text that is in the New Testament is a piece of Second Temple Jewish literature, technically. So that is kind of picked up there. That starts before that.

But the particular reason for that reference, why “the things written down” is a meaningful statement… That’s not a meaningful statement for us today; we jot down notes, grocery lists, reminders, Post-It notes, so just the fact that somebody wrote something somewhere is kind of meaningless now, but at this time in history, remember, this is an incredibly expensive process; this is a process that requires skills that the vast majority of the people in the world do not have.

Fr. Andrew: I think that probably, if there is a modern equivalent, maybe our phrase, “set in stone” might be the closer… the only referent that we would use, the sense of: that’s going to be a very expensive, long-term proposition, actually carve this text in stone. That it’s so important and huge we’re going to go ahead and make a monument. Yeah, and when we were talking about this during our briefing for this episode, the thing that occurred to me was…

So back in, you know, the “before” times, when I was an undergrad, I actually took a course in Hindu traditions—not because I was ever interested in becoming a Hindu; I was just interested in world religions—but I remember the professor—and maybe I’m misremembering this or maybe he got it wrong; I don’t know—saying at one point that the Hindu scriptures, their tradition actually functions almost exactly the opposite way: that in their ancient period, just about the only thing that you find written down is really inconsequential things that you might be liable to forget, like a grocery list or whatever, and that the reason why they did it that way is because they spent a massive amount of time committing their sacred stories to memory, and they were passed on orally all this time.

But it’s interesting that within the world that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures arise, that it’s exactly the opposite: that it was so expensive and took so much work to put a text down, you would only put down something really important on paper or parchment or whatever. I imagine they probably had—they must have had some ways to jot down notes, but was that mostly done with a wax stylus or something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, most people weren’t literate at all, but you would make little notations and stuff, like numbers and that kind of thing, was done on pottery shards, which were everywhere, ostraca, the scratch paper of the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah, basically the internet of its day, because of all the garbage you would write on it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, and it’s not only the writing, but it’s the preserving: the copying and the preserving over time, protection from the elements and continuing to copy and recopy these things, which was also an expensive process. So, as you said, essentially these texts from the ancient world were sort of literary monuments, and so they were sort of treated as such. So the fact that something had been written down and preserved, this means it’s significant. So when you say, “It is written” or “Is it not written?” that that gives it this weight, not only of the initial investment in writing it down, but also that weight of tradition, of it now having been handed down to us as something that was vitally important from our forebears.

And yeah, so we’ve probably said on the show before, but it probably bears repeating in this context to give people an idea: in the first century, to get a copy of something the size of the book of Romans—just the book of Romans, which is 16 chapters, not that long; you can read it in one sitting—a copy of that would have cost the equivalent of $5,000 in the ancient world. So that gives you an idea. You didn’t go and put something down like that, and people didn’t pay to have copies made for just junk, for fanfic and random stuff. [Laughter] And so, yeah, the corollary of this, of course, is that if the expense and cost and time and effort required gave these things this great value, it means that things posted on the internet, which are Cheap as Free and require almost no thought or effort have no value whastsoever.

Fr. Andrew: And I just looked this up just for fun. So the book of Romans in most English translations is about a little over 7,000 words long, which, I mean, if you’re writing a 7,000-word paper in college, that’s about, what, 15-20 pages?

Fr. Stephen: 23 pages maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that would take a month to copy down well and to have it committed to… I mean, just to think about that. I can sit down and write 7,000 words probably in a couple days if I really know what I’m doing, but then the work… It’s really astonishing to think about the work required to do…

Fr. Stephen: You don’t have to make your own paper.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t have to make my own paper, I don’t have to have good handwriting, I don’t have to set it down really precisely so that it’s exact… And this is usually with ink or something like that, so erasing it would not be easy…

Fr. Stephen: You don’t have to make your own ink. We don’t think about that. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a lot of them are… If it’s parchment, that’s beaten-out reeds; if it’s vellum, that’s an animal skin that’s been cleaned. And the advantage of an animal skin is you could kind of erase, because you could scrape it. Now, you could only do that so much, but you could usually take off a layer and write over it. In fact, we have things that were copied over repeatedly that way. And then, the Dead Sea Scrolls, they made their ink using the soot from the oil lamps that they used.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That I did not know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then you’d have to sharpen a stylus, and you could only work while there was bright enough daylight for you to see, really, because trying to do that by candlelight was almost impossible, make a copy…

Fr. Andrew: I’ve spent a little bit of time looking at the Beowulf manuscript lately. I mean, we’re not doing our reading in the class from the manuscript, but occasionally we are looking at pages of manuscript, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to read or to copy. And there’s errors; we find scribal errors all over it. So it’s a really—it’s a very high level of qualification in order to be able to make a book in the ancient world. It’s not just about banging something out that’s a few thousand words and then sending it to your printer, boom. So, yes, the Scriptures, it has all this weight behind it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that’s probably the most common way “Word of God” is used. Now, some modern—mostly Protestant, though there’s some Roman Catholic theology that goes down this kind of road, this general kind of road also, that wants to kind of separate the concept of the Word of God, because it’s very clear that, again, in the Scriptures, the concept of the Word of God goes beyond the written word, to say the least.

And so there’s been an effort to kind of acknowledge that and separate it, but this is taking kind of a weird form, largely initiated by our 19th-century German friends, who did this by… And this is one particular paradigm, but I think it illustrates kind of what they’re doing: The idea that within the written text is found in some way the Word of God, but that’s like a kernel, and then the written word itself is like a husk. And so there is then some process by which sort of the Word of God is extracted or revealed or brought out or cleared from the written text. So that may be a particular interpretive process. Sometimes that’s a spiritual interpretive process, where it’s like the Holy Spirit enlightens the mind, and so you can extract the actual Word of God from the written text. That can be a much more material and mundane process, like you follow this particular exegetical method, this particular interpretive method, and this gives you the real Word of God and gets rid of the rest. If you’re Karl Barth, this is preaching: when the text is sort of preached and proclaimed, it becomes the Word of God in some sense, to the hearers.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That almost sounds like the Calvinist theory of the Eucharist, at least in my understanding of it.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s because Karl Barth was a Calvinist.

Fr. Andrew: There you are! Good night, everybody! [Laughter] How about that!

Fr. Stephen: So there are those kind of theories, but the problem with those theories, too, is that it’s looking at the Word of God as some kind of discursive message. It’s still a text, whether you identify it with the text of Scripture, with a preached text, with a heard text, with a reality or an idea that comes into being in the brain or the mind or before the nous of the person who is reading and studying. In all of those cases, you’re still dealing with the Word of God in that kind of sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it’s mainly language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what we’re going to see, I think, as we go forward here tonight—it’s night somewhere—

Fr. Andrew: It’s night in Kazakhstan, I bet.

Fr. Stephen: —that it doesn’t just mean more than that; it means something different [from] that. There’s not just a quantitative issue; there’s a qualitative issue here as far as the understanding.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. So where do we go from here?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: The word—the word—that probably comes to most people’s minds when thinking about this, if they know that we’re not just talking about the Bible, is the word logos. I mean, this figures huge in especially the first chapter of John which—don’t worry, everybody, we’re going to dedicate an entire half in this episode to the beginning of John’s gospel—but it looms large in Greek philosophy; there’s all kinds of stuff like that. So how does logos, then, figure into all of this?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, most of modern scholarship has viewed that introduction to St. John’s gospel—that we’ll be talking about soon; soon™—as the sort of locus classicus for discussing logos in this sense, the Word of God, the logos theou. And as you might expect us to think, because this has been dominated by 19th-century Germans, they’ve kind of gone down a wrong road in doing that—not wrong in seeing that as the locus classicus, not going down the wrong road in terms of seeing that chapter as very important—that’s why we’re going to come back to it—but a wrong road in terms of how they approach that passage and then, once they’ve approached that passage that way, the way they then read their conclusions into all kinds of other things. So methodology, in most cases, determines your results. [Laughter]

And in this case, the primary way that they’ve approached it is, as you’ve mentioned, from this kind of philosophical background. So coming out of central European critical studies—I’ll try to lay off them a little; at least blame some French people, too—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, we started off this episode with a Frenchman, so…

Fr. Stephen: St. John’s gospel and the Johannine literature in general in the New Testament was seen as being very Greek. Now, you may say, “It’s written in Greek, so?”

Fr. Andrew: And Greeked. Like, it’s been Hellenized.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is part of a paradigm that comes out of—it’s not a coincidence that the parts of Europe that produce this is actually more Germany than France, and why it’s more Germany than France or Italy is that this is really coming out of early modern Protestant theological movements. This distinction gets made between what’s Hebraic or Semitic on one hand, and what is Greek or Hellenic or Hellenistic on the other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that the reason that that comes into play is because, in the Reformation, there’s this desire to scrape away all of the layers that Rome supposedly had accumulated on top of the pure Gospel. And so you can even see this, for instance, in the way that Martin Luther approaches putting together his own Bible in German, where he favors for the Old Testament texts that he can only find in Hebrew and disfavors ones that are only extant in Greek. And so there’s this idea that the pure, pristine Gospel is a sort of a Jewish thing, and then the reason that Rome stacks all this stuff on top is because of a Hellenizing—paganizing, even—impetus. And so then, what that does is it gives you a very neat project—or at least it seems to be a very neat project—of jumping backwards in time and saying, “Okay, we can just sort of ignore the Church Fathers”—although, to be fair, a number of the first Reformers had great respect for the Church Fathers and quoted them and so forth—but that it’s not really necessary to be… They’re not really authoritative; let’s just jump back to what’s before that, and we can find the pure, pristine Christian faith, and we don’t have to worry about any of this sort of Hellenizing stuff. But, as you mentioned, of course, that narrative gets picked up and even turned against the New Testament itself. Now, okay, even the New Testament is now suspect, because it also is Hellenized. Whoa, look, there’s even a logos at the beginning of John’s gospel. See what he’s doing!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as an Orthodox Christian, obviously, I agree that there were plenty of barnacles on the 16th-century Roman Catholic Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, for sure.

Fr. Stephen: But when you start scraping the barnacles, you have to stop at a certain point, or you’ll put holes in the hull and sink the ship. [Laughter] And, I mean, this even really started during the Reformation proper. You had people like Socinus; you had people who started saying, “Well, you know this whole doctrine of the Trinity thing sure looks Greek to me.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, right. You have these anti-Trinitarian writers. Thank God they didn’t really prevail very much, but they’re there for sure.

Fr. Stephen: They did—and they’re still around! There’s still folks around who are very— And make this same argument: This is just this Greek terminology that’s not in the Bible and it’s just philosophical stuff, and we need to get back to more Jewish stuff. And as you said, that then gets focused in on the New Testament itself, and the Johannine literature becomes very much their focus in saying, “This is…” They start saying it’s much later than the rest of the New Testament, that the early layer of the Church is very Hebrew and very Jewish, so stuff like the synoptic gospels, as opposed to St. John’s gospel, and St. Paul’s epistles as opposed to the general epistles—and so this gets stratified. It gets to the point where, in the early 20th century our German friends are just straight-out saying that they think St. John’s gospel and these kind of things are Gnostic or proto-Gnostic, but essentially they’re tending in the direction of Gnosticism because it is Hellenized over against Jewish.

So that means that, as they approach, for example, John 1, and say, “What does St. John mean by logos, by the Word of God? What does he mean?” they go straight to Greek philosophy. Do not pass the Old Testament; do not collect $200. [Laughter] And the first place where you really see a kind of important philosophical use of logos that really sets the tone for probably the most common way we still use words derived from the Greek word logos today is in Heraclitus, who uses logos to refer in two ways, first to refer to ordered structures out in the world, in nature, in the cosmos. There are these ordered structures out there, and then because there are these ordered structures out there in the world, we can then have an ordered account and discourse about those objects in the world

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s a logos out there, then we can express a logos of that stuff, which is then why you have all of these English words which end with “-ology.” It’s this idea that this is the human logos about this logos that we can observe. I mean, people will often gloss that suffix of sorts to mean: “It means ‘study of,’ ” but it doesn’t quite mean that, actually; it’s broader than that. It’s this idea, like you said, of an ordered account, a whole discourse about that particular subject, whatever it is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which, of course, then obviously has to presuppose that there is some order out there to be described in an orderly fashion, because if it’s just chaos out there, then you can’t give an ordered account of it, by definition.

Fr. Andrew: There’s no chaosology?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Aw man!

Fr. Stephen: Life on earth has an order to it, and so we can study biologos, biology, and ontology: being is ordered, so we can have ontology, and on and on and on and on. So that’s kind of an ur-layer of this that lies behind later philosophical uses. None of the later philosophical uses are going to deny that; they’re all going to nuance that or add to that, build upon that.

One of the most influential comes in Stoicism. The major change Stoicism makes when they talk about the logos is that the Stoics see the logos as an active force, not just as a sort of inert order, or just a structure, but as a sort of active force.

Fr. Andrew: An ordering, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they talk about a spermatikos logos, that is “seed” in the sense that the logos brings life from lifelessness. It’s like this positive organizing principle like a world soul or a demi-urge that’s in everything and that is actively working and producing things. That includes in people, and so there is this sort of element of the divine that’s in everyone and everything within Stoicism and that is actively doing something.

So then, on this journey to get to St. John, you inevitably stop in Philo of Alexandria, or Philo Alexandrinus, if you want to be fancy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, who is—usually the gloss of who he is is he’s a “Hellenistic Jew.” That’s the way he’s usually described.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because he lived in Alexandria, Egypt; he was part of the Egyptian Jewish community. Obviously Alexandria in Egypt was a center of great philosophical and general learning.

Fr. Andrew: He’s writing in Greek.

Fr. Stephen: He’s writing in Greek; he’s interacting with philosophical sources and philosophical ideas. And so the typical read of him, taken by these scholars, has been that he’s just what they call a middle Platonist, as opposed to a classical Platonist or a neo-Platonist. He’s a middle Platonist: he’s somewhere in between. And that he basically Hellenized Judaism, that he sort of took Judaism, pre-existing Judaism, and put it through the sausage machine and that grid ground it up to fit into Greek philosophical categories. So it’s kind of this melding, but that it’s not really true to pre-existing Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: That it’s a Hellenizing of Judaism.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this relates to something we’ve talked about a lot, this tendency for the people of any era, but especially in the modern era, to just assume that Old Testament Judaism is exactly like Rabbinic Judaism. And so you hold up Philo and you hold up Rabbinic Judaism, and they don’t look a lot alike. What he writes looks more like Greek literature than it looks like Rabbinic Judaism, therefore—see, Exhibit A. And there are a number of individual sort of topics within that, like they’ll point out: “Oh, well, see Philo thinks that you have to have these intermediary beings between God and creation, because God can’t lower himself to creation. See, that’s really Platonic; that’s almost Gnostic,” etc., etc. So we are going to, here in a little bit, come back to Philo and talk about a different way to read him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so here’s the kicker, is that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were dug up, which of course we refer to lots of times on this show, and they have all these texts in them from the Second Temple Jewish period, it’s actually shown that Philo is pretty much in alignment with them, and in fact he’s actually super Jewish and not Hellenizing it at all, and this trove of Second Temple Jewish literature that are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that actually there isn’t a Greek influence, and often abominates Hellenism entirely, and it’s very deliberately against it. So if you compare that against Philo, then you actually get a really different image and a really different image of the gospel of John as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because… So when we talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s two categories of Dead Sea Scrolls. One of them is copies of texts that we have elsewhere, so they have texts of most of the books of the Old Testament, they have texts that are in some people’s Old Testaments and not other people’s Old Testaments, they have a lot of copies of Enoch and Jubilees and some other texts like that, that we have other places. There are also what are called the sectarian documents or sectarian texts.

Fr. Andrew: What does that mean? Why are they called sectarian?

Fr. Stephen: They’re called that because these are specific to the community at Qumran that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Fr. Andrew: So they’re not found anywhere else?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s like if you went through all my books and papers, you would find copies of a lot of books that other people have copies of. You might also find the bound copy of my dissertation that other people don’t necessarily have, and you’d also find just a lot of papers of mine, like old school papers, seminar papers, papers of achievement, that weren’t published anywhere, that are just mine, and you would find signed documents and things that were particular to me and my house and all that. So the sectarian documents are all those things that are particular to that community and to their way of life and their organization and that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: So we can refer to your dissertation as your sectarian text, then.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, it is a De Young sectarian document. [Laughter] And apocryphal, because it is hidden! [Laughter] So when we look at those sectarian texts, that gives us an idea of the particular things about that community. The other texts give us an idea about more general shape of Judaism on a whole. But you can’t take the sectarian texts and say, “Oh, well, Jews everywhere believed X, Y, Z, because it’s here in this text that we only found at Qumran.” You have to just say, “Well, we know they thought it was important.”

So when you look at particularly those sectarian texts, you find a lot of the themes that are in St. John’s gospel and in his epistles and even the book of Revelation, and specifically you find a lot of the themes that people were pointing to to say he was Greek and borderline Gnostic, like a lot of dualisms between light and darkness, and children of light and children of darkness, and those who are of God and those who are of the devil—those were all thought to be: “Ah! Dualism! Plato! Ah, see! Ah!” [Laughter] But it turns out, that was very common Second Temple Jewish way of seeing things, like: insiders to the community, outsiders to the community; hostile world outside. That this was not uncommon.

So now not only has the whole “this is the least Jewish literature in the New Testament” thing been debunked, now there are a lot of scholars arguing that the Johannine literature is some of the most Jewish, some of the most deeply immersed in Second Temple Jewish thought, in terms of the thought-life and the worship-life. It’s not that St. Matthew’s gospel isn’t Jewish somehow, but in terms of reflecting that kind of theological and liturgical thought, you find actually more of that in the Johannine literature than in a lot of the other literature.

Well, so that means that if we’re going to say, “Okay, fair enough, for us as Christians, chapter one of St. John’s gospel, locus classicus for what logos theou, for what the Word of God is, then we have to come to it not by way of Greek philosophical traditions but by way of Hebrew and Jewish traditions. So we have to start in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: All right! We said all that to say this. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, well, you know, there are a lot of things that you’d think should go without saying, but if you want to understand the New Testament, start with the Old Testament—but that’s a big fight in scholarly circles! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, I mean, I was raised with this idea of St. John’s gospel, not to impugn it, but just simply to say, “Oh, well, St. John is using these pre-existing Greek philosophical concepts in order to begin sort of talking to the nations,” was the way that I think it was usually described to me; that he deliberately is using Greek logos philosophy to make his case. So, I mean, there is a kind of conservative version of all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This isn’t just all whack-jobs.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] There are some well-meaning people.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, but I think a lot of it just comes from, like you said, there’s this assumption that comes as a result of the concerns of the Reformation, and that it just sort of cascades from there in a lot of different ways.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it establishes a paradigm, and that paradigm then gets applied in ways that the people who came up with that paradigm didn’t necessarily intended. Some of them they would have been appalled by, but it sort of takes it—once you let something loose into the world, it sort of takes its own course.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’ll just say, before we get into what we’re really going to talk about in this episode, for those who are interested in maybe looking at this question in the other direction, temporally, like: “Okay, what does it look like for this Christianity in classical culture to interact? What does it look like after this New Testament stuff?” there is a great book that has exactly that title, Christianity and Classical Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan, and he shows, frankly, how what happens is, instead of the Church being Hellenized, Hellenism became Christianized, is what actually occurred, that the influence went the other way, that it transformed classical culture by virtue of its contact with Christianity. So just to put a plug out there for a book by a guy who really does know what he’s talking about. May God rest his soul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why we’re going to spend the time we’re about to spend on Philo, for example, is to understand that, because this paradigm isn’t just applied to Philo. Philo, at least you’re at least a little bit of a Bible nerd, you’ve probably never heard of him. He’s not a Church Father; he’s not a saint. Like, rehabilitating him is not crucial. But the paradigm and the judgment and the way of reading that’s applied to him is also applied by the same people to the Church Fathers, and there it becomes important, because you’re talking about undermining sort of fundamental Christian doctrines, which are no longer seen by some of our friends as fundamental Christian doctrines because they’re now “Greek.” They come in later.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so, but before all of that, way, way, deep into the Old Testament, you have this phrase exist in Hebrew. So what is it in Hebrew?

Fr. Stephen: So you have this phrase, dabar Yahweh, which Yahweh, obviously, is the name of the God of Israel, and then the word before that is debar, which is usually translated as “word.” So that phrase is usually translated—you’ll see it in your English Bibles; it’s not really translating it, but you’ll see it in your English Bibles as “the word of the LORD,” with “LORD” in all caps.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or sometimes “word of GOD,” and then “GOD” in all caps, because they’re trying to communicate “Yahweh” with that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is very similar to what we talked about last time when we talked about the Angel of the Lord, where it was malakh Yahweh, where you have the two words sort of set next to each other, and then they relate to each other and the word “of” is put there in English sort of to punt in terms of the relationship between the two. But so we have to start, in this case, with dabar and what that means. It can be translated “word,” but it has a very broad range of meanings. So if you go and decide: I’m going to learn biblical Hebrew today, and you go and you buy a set of biblical Hebrew flashcards, the flashcard for dabar will say on the back: “word, matter, thing.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is even broader than the Greek concept of logos.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s wide open, but you can tell from— And “matter” there is not like “material”; it’s like “a matter”: a matter of discussion, a matter for…

Fr. Andrew: An issue or a question.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is “word” kind of in the sense of “concept,” and it’s “thing” in the way we would say, “That’s not a thing.” [Laughter] Or, “That is a thing.” It’s definitely not limited to a written word or even a spoken word. It goes sort of beyond that. But it is the kind of thing that would be communicated in language. It is something that would be communicated, and language would be one way to communicate it, I should say. We’ve talked about others—music, art, ritual—but it’s what would be behind that. It would be the… If you talk about the sign and the thing signified, this would be the thing signified.

Fr. Andrew: The referent, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so when you put that—just like, as we talked about with the Angel of the Lord, when you put the two words together, there is a way in which that could be taken in a possessive sense, like Yahweh’s Word. And that’s borne out—there are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel refers to “my word.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that’s where you kind of get some space, then, for the English use of “of,” which we often use to refer to something as possessive or genitive.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but there are also other English ways to use the word “of,” like “fistful of dollars.” [Laughter] And one way is that it’s kind of adjectival, so another example from the Scriptures: if we say, “the crown of glory,” that’s not a crown that’s made of glory; glory’s not the substance that makes it up. And it’s not a crown that belongs to glory; it’s a glorious crown. It’s being used like an adjective. And so, just like we talked about with the Angel of the Lord, another way of reading this is just being the Yahweh Angel; this can be the Yahweh Word. And that’s another way to understand it, and that gets at, as we’re going to see, a way in which this is referred to in a personal sense. In the same way that the Yahweh Angel sort of is Yahweh, we’re going to see that the Word of Yahweh sort of is Yahweh.

Now, sometimes in the [Greek], they will use the word rhema instead of [logos], and this is a place where I’m going to have to reemphasize. I know how mad people got when I talked about the different words for “love”—they always do when I bring that up!—but synonyms are a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there are synonyms in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Synonyms are dabarim.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh!

Fr. Stephen: Ah, see what I did there!

Fr. Andrew: I see. [Laughter] Because I know much is made of this by especially in the Word of Faith Pentecostal movement, where they literally… It’s Rhema Bible College or the Rhema Institute. It’s “reema,” really; well, if you’re pronouncing it with modern Greek pronunciation. And it’s the idea that it’s the spoken word rather than the more conceptual word. But actual biblical usage pretty much makes them synonyms, [logos] and rhema? I mean, rhema is the Greek term.

Fr. Stephen: Logos and rhema, yeah. And they’re just synonyms sometimes. Sometimes there’s not a reason, it’s just a particular author’s preference or that kind of thing. To prove that they’re a technical term, you have to demonstrate that each term is only used one way in a given writer, and then you can prove that.

Now, again, a modern person is perfectly fine to make theological distinctions and label them with Greek words, in the modern day.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, but they shouldn’t say that that’s the way the Bible uses those words.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because then the problem is people go back and read those distinctions back into the Bible, and that gives you a false sense.

Fr. Andrew: And one of the proofs that these words are interchangeable, that they are synonyms, is the way it gets worked out in translations. What is a translation? A translation is, on some level, an interpretation, because it shows you what the understanding of the translator is when he translates a particular word.

One of the examples that I ran across actually while studying Old English… So Ælfric, who was an abbot in England that did a lot of translations of religious texts, he was translating Genesis 3 from the Vulgate, from the Latin Vulgate, into Old English, and—I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on this podcast before; I don’t think so—but he, when the serpent is speaking to Eve and he says to her, “Don’t you know you’ll be as gods,” that’s the word that’s used in the Latin; it’s the word for “gods,” whereas when Ælfric translated it, he has the serpent say, “Don’t you know you’ll be as angels.” It’s interesting, because Old English does have a word for “gods”—it’s basically “god,” by the way, god—but he translates this as “angels” which shows his understanding of what’s being talked about there is. And so that’s an example of the way the translation lets you know what the understanding of the translator is. And so that’s why you can then use translations as a way to triangulate backwards to see how these texts are received in particular communities and what the understanding of them is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and all translations require interpretation. There’s no such thing as a neutral translation.

Fr. Andrew: There’s no way around it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Words in one language do not equal words in another language. Even if they’re related etymologically, they still aren’t equal.

Fr. Andrew: Even if the languages are closely related.

Fr. Stephen: So with that in mind, what happens—and this is going to be sort of an object case, and then we’re sort of going to put this into practice with the rest of the Bible in the other two halves of the program—what if we approach Philo and the things that Philo says about the Logos from the perspective of the Old Testament, from the perspective of Second Temple Judaism, rather than from the perspective of Greek philosophy? And this discussion is going to owe a lot to Daniel Boyarin’s reappraisal of Philo. Daniel Boyarin is an Orthodox Jewish scholar of Second Temple Judaism, including teaching on the New Testament, because he sees it as firmly within Second Temple Judaism, and so he approaches it from that way, too, but he has done sort of a major reevaluation of Philo as an important part for him of his Jewish tradition and wanting to show how he actually brought Jewish ideas into middle Platonism rather than vice-versa. And so he wants to see Philo as Judaizing Hellenism, not Hellenizing Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, as we mentioned, that Pelikan book shows the Church Fathers doing basically exactly that: Christianizing Hellenism, not Hellenizing Christianity. So in that way, Philo is kind of functioning in a pre-patristic way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s doing a similar kind of thing in trying to explain Judaism to Greeks the way the early Fathers would be explaining Christianity to Greeks. And also, just to be—Judaizing Hellenism and Hellenizing Judaism, I know that sounds a lot alike. That sounds like maybe we’re playing a word game: You’ve got your peanut butter in my chocolate; you got your chocolate in my peanut butter: let’s try it. But the key here is which of the two is controlling; that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about which is the master and which is the servant in this relationship. For Philo, is it Judaism that’s in charge and he’s using Greek ideas in service of that, or is he appealing to Greek ideas and using Jewish language and ideas in service of that? And the same thing, then, with the Church Fathers and Christianity: Are they Christians who are using Greek language and Greek ideas to serve the explanation of the Christian faith, or are they, as they’ve been accused, basically just Greek amateur philosophers throwing in some Christian language here and there, just kind of in service of their Greek ideas?

Fr. Andrew: Right, and you can tell that our position, for Philo it’s Judaism that’s in charge, and for the Church Fathers it’s Christianity that’s in charge, and Hellenism is being put in service of those things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, just like translations, I am not neutral, and I make no pretense to neutrality, on this or anything else.

But looking at some of these same ideas that were used to say that Philo is basically a Platonist primarily, if we approach those from the perspective of the teaching of the Old Testament and the perspectives of Second Temple ideas… So let’s say we approach this impurity of the material world, where he talks about God having these intermediaries between himself and the material creation. Well, we’ve talked about that in past episodes. This is the Tower of Babel. That, because of the whole “death by holiness” problem, that produces the tabernacle, the Torah, the angelic princes of the nations, all of that is because, for God to be close to sinful humanity—it’s not that the material world is corrupt in and of itself by virtue of being material, but it has been corrupted and so God’s holiness is destructive—he has to step back and have these intermediaries out of love for his creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the “death by holiness” thing. That’s what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: And so it’s very clear when you read Philo from this perspective that Philo is talking about the Logos as sort of the supreme mediator between the two, because he’s the one who presides in the divine council; he’s the one who, among all of these beings, these angelic beings, whom Philo is not shy about calling gods, plural, but he is sort of supreme among them and sort of the commander of them, who mediate God and creation, and these intermediaries are not like Gnostic emanations from God; there’s not sort of this scale of being with God at the top and matter at the bottom and they’re somewhere in between on these different levels. These are, Philo is very clear, created beings; these are created gods, who are not worshiped in their own right, who were created by God and assigned sort of administrative duties.

Fr. Andrew: The divine council.

Fr. Stephen: And you look at… sort of a subset of this is he sees the Logos—the Logos, the Word—as being the instrument through which God creates the creation. Again, you can take that in the sort of Platonic way, the way the later Gnostics did, because Plato’s Timaeus, for example, was found amid the Nag Hammadi texts, just mixed in with the Gnostic texts—in Plato’s Timaeus there is, because the Good, being itself, can’t know lesser things, it’s sort of naturally detached from everything else that exists—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, contemplates only itself.

Fr. Stephen: There’s this lesser being, the Demi-urge, who sort of loves the Good and so fashions things sort of as best it can after the Good. And so if you approach Philo from that direction, you could say, “Oh, see, the Logos is like the Demi-urge. It’s this lesser thing that creates.” But if we approach this from the perspective of the Old Testament, you crack open Genesis 1: Right from the beginning, God creates by speaking the Word. That’s the instrument through which he creates, is the Word in Genesis; it’s got nothing to do with anything in the Timaeus.

Now, would Philo, if he was talking to a Platonist, would have pointed to that and drawn some connection to try to help the Platonist understand what he was saying about Genesis? Probably, but that doesn’t mean that he means the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: He could say, “Look, pal, it’s like the Demi-urge, but here’s some important ways in which that is not true as well.” Again, like one of the distinctions that we like to draw a lot, there’s continuities and there’s discontinuities. And the discontinuities are very important. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he not only has the Logos there at the beginning of the creation—remember, creation is putting things in order—and it’s not only that he puts things in order, but for Philo the Logos continues to be present and keep things in that order. And you can compare to that Colossians 1:17.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, so Colossians 1:17, saying about Christ: “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Fr. Stephen: So that same kind of idea. It’s coming from St. Paul. So one of the key discontinuities, as we were just mentioning, between some of these other views is that Philo clearly holds that the Logos is a person, a personal being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not an emanation or—I mean, that’s probably the most obvious thing.

Fr. Stephen: Or a power or force, like the Logos in Stoicism, where it’s this sort of force and power, but sees it as a person with an identity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one of the powers in heaven, one of the two powers in heaven. Yep.

Fr. Stephen: And Philo goes so far, at one point, to refer to the logos as the firstborn of God. Now, don’t get too excited. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I was about to get excited, but then I remembered the notes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “Oh wait, we got binitarianism at least here!” And Philo actually has three; he actually has a concept of the Spirit, too. But ultimately, when you get into the details, Philo was basically what we would later call a semi-Arian. He believed that the Logos and the Spirit sort of came into being, but they were produced from God’s own essence.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re kind of creations on some level.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but they’re not made of “other” stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s important, when we talk about Philo and we mention—up to this point, we would agree with pretty much all these things he says—we’re not claiming him as some shadow Church Father or whatever. He’s not a Christian; he does not have the Gospel presented to him, but it’s interesting how much he gets right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, what he’s reflecting is—he’s reflecting in Greek sort of the pre-existing ideas of Second Temple Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this stuff is in the air.

Fr. Stephen: And the apostles are going to take this—because the apostles are worshiping the same way, believing the same things, reading the same texts—but they’re going to encounter the Person of Jesus Christ, and that’s going to let them connect the dots; that’s going to let them make the big important connection here. And, just as a call-back to our last episode, Philo also identifies the Logos as the Angel of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: How about that.

Fr. Stephen: So he says when dabar Yahweh (or malakh Yahweh) show up in the Old Testament, it’s the same person. It’s this same person, the same second power in heaven kind of idea that we’ve talked about before. And so, lastly—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is right before we go to our first break. We’re going to shift away from Alexandria and head back down into Palestine.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and its environs. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and thereabouts.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s to—we’re going to have fun with Aramaic briefly.

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: And that’s in what are called the targums. The targums are—they’re usually referred to as Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but they’re not exactly, and the reason… So what are they? By the first century, people in Palestine, in Israel, don’t speak Hebrew. It’s just a liturgical language by this point, and only those who are really educated in that actually will be able to speak it. So what they would do is if you go to the synagogue, the Scripture would be read in Hebrew by someone who could read out loud in Hebrew, and then there would be a targum recited, which is essentially a summary of the Hebrew text, but in Aramaic. So the idea—if you went there, since if you were a local, you would speak Aramaic or maybe Greek also, and you would hear it read in Hebrew, you wouldn’t know what it said, and then someone would read this targum that would basically say, “What he just said was…” and then he would read off the summary, and then you would be able to get that, because you would understand that in Aramaic. Because, again, Hebrew is not being a spoken language in the first century. It’s already just a liturgical language by that point.

Fr. Stephen: So we will now have a profound test of Fr. Andrew’s honesty.

Fr. Andrew: Oh no.

Fr. Stephen: Since this is pre-recorded. Because I am about to “Um, actually” again.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, go for it! Yeah, “Um, actually” me!

Fr. Stephen: Will this remain in the recorded episode, or will he edit it to make himself look better?

Fr. Andrew: Correct me! That was my best understanding.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so one of those things was not quite right. One of those things was the opposite of correct.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, great! Hook me up, yo.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the one that was not quite right was if you went to a synagogue in the first century in particular, you would be just as, depending on where you are in the world maybe more likely, to only hear the Scriptures read in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, that is true. I was thinking about the Palestinian…

Fr. Stephen: That’s the “not quite right” part, but even in Palestine, even in Galilee, for example, they were primarily using Greek, if you were in Judea. So the rule was you had to—this is how highly they respected, in pre-Christian Second Temple Judaism, the Greek translations of the Old Testament, was that you could read it instead of the Hebrew in synagogues. You could not read the Aramaic instead of the Hebrew. If you read the Aramaic, you had to also read the Hebrew. So that’s the part that wasn’t quite right.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So the part that was the opposite of correct is that… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: You can say “wrong.” It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: … instead of… We’ll, I’m kind of doing a Plato riff there. It’s subtle.

Fr. Andrew: It’s very nice, yes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the targums were actually not summaries; they were actually expansions of the Hebrew text.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I see. Well, I wasn’t as wrong as I suspected for a moment there that I was going to be. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They would… The text was translated into Aramaic, but then it was also expanded upon and elaborated, and different targums, which are usually named based on where they were found or based on a rabbi associated with them—there’s a bunch of different reasons: the city they were found in, like in Egypt, that kind of thing—different targums had different philosophies. So some of them would be more like The Message that we talked about last time, where it’s an expansion in the sense that it would get really colloquial or use, like, four or five words to explain the meaning of one Hebrew word, to kind of get at what they thought the idea was. This is why you couldn’t read it instead of the Hebrew, because it might give you the wrong idea. They weren’t necessarily endorsing what every commentator thought.

But some of them were even wilder than that. Some of them have whole stories that aren’t in the Hebrew text. Just inserted, like traditional stories and stuff. So you can find—there’s a wealth of literature from this period just found in the targums, in these versions of stories…

Fr. Andrew: Interesting. So they function as commentaries as well, then.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And one of the most interesting things—I’m just going to throw this out and then do nothing with it, so deal with it, everybody. Ha ha! As you try to fight off your turkey coma and keep listening to this episode. So when Christ famously from the cross says, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani,” and we know he’s quoting Psalm 22 because he’s praying Psalm 22, he’s praying the targum of it. That’s Aramaic, not Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: I knew he was doing Aramaic…

Fr. Stephen: And now I’m going to do nothing with that! I just threw it out there. Do with it what you will.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s not a big secret. See, I’m actually feeling okay that I wasn’t “Um, actually”-ed as hard as I suspected I was about to be.

Fr. Stephen: I try to be kind. I try.

Fr. Andrew: That’s very nice.

Fr. Stephen: I often fail, but I try.

Fr. Andrew: You can brutalize me when we hit the stop button. [Laughter] Okay, so targums.

Fr. Stephen: I withstood you to your face in Antioch… [Laughter] Right, so one of these minor expansions of the text, or commentaries on the text, is that we frequently see in targums—now, this is across several different targums—that places where Yahweh, where the Lord, the name of the God of Israel is mentioned, there will be inserted, where there isn’t in the Hebrew text, memra, which is the word “word.” Memra is “word” in Aramaic. And so it’s basically… even in places where it doesn’t say “the word of the Lord,” this will add it so it says “word of the Lord.”

And this isn’t haphazard; there’s a pattern. This gets added places where God is seen by somebody, where Yahweh is described as having body parts, where Yahweh eats with someone—any of those things that have to do with having a body or being seen, any of those where it isn’t already present, memra gets added, so it’s “the word of the Lord.” And this is a way, within this interpretation of the text, to deal with one of the problems we talked about last time, like in Exodus where in the same chapter, Moses talks to Yahweh face to face, mouth to mouth, the way a man speaks to his friend, and then—what is it, eight or nine verses later: “You can’t see me and live.” This is one of the ways of dealing with that. It’s making—they see this pattern in some parts of the text—and we’re going to go through those parts in our second half—they see this pattern in parts of the Old Testament where there’s this figure of the Word of Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, who’s seen and interacted with and does these things, and then there’s this other sense in which Yahweh can’t be seen. And their way of doing this is by: “Well, we’ll take this distinction that we see in some parts of the Old Testament, and we’ll just make it consistent across the whole thing.”

Fr. Andrew: Cool. All right, well, with that, we’re going to go ahead and go to our first break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the second half of the show. Normally we would take your calls, like you heard the Voice of Steve say, but, again, this is a pre-recorded episode. I hope everyone at least in the United States is having a great Thanksgiving. If you’re outside the United States, well, I hope you’re having a very nice day, wherever it is that you are. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’re really disappointed that this isn’t live, because you see no reason for it.

Fr. Andrew: I am. [Laughter] Well, we have another message that was left for us, and this one will kind of wonderfully introduce what we’re talking about in the second half. This one, our caller is asking about something he read in the book of Jubilees. So here it is.

Thano: Hello, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen. This is Thano from Illinois. I finally came and downloaded an audiobook version of the book of Jubilees, and as I was listening my ears perked up at the following verse from the beginning of chapter 14.

On the new moon of the third month, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a dream, saying, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy defender, and thy reward will be exceeding great.”

It seems like an Occam’s razor, but reading this passage would suggest that “the Word” here is just God’s immaterial voice, not necessarily the second Person of the Trinity. I wondered for quite some time, prior to the gospel of John, what evidence is there that the Word of the Lord is indeed the hypostasis of God, Christ? Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so Jubilees 14—it’s basically a rehashing of Genesis 15, isn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: A light remix, yes.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. A targum, maybe?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Sort of.

Fr. Andrew: As I’ve just learned.

Fr. Stephen: No, honestly, sort of, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a paper in that.

Fr. Stephen: It’s that kind of thing. Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Not for me! I’m not writing that paper! But, you know, dissertations…

Fr. Stephen: Not exactly, but there’s a “there” there. There’s something there. [Laughter] Yeah, and it’s a sort of light remix of Genesis 15:1-7.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Word of the Lord comes to Abram in a dream in Jubilees, and so that’s the basis of Thano’s question. But then in Genesis 15, it’s not a dream exactly; it’s—what’s the word that’s used there?

Fr. Stephen: It’s in a vision.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which… Dream, vision—these are often the same kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not totally dissimilar, and probably the connection is based on sort of a— I mean, Jubilees is written much later, so we’re probably talking in the post-exilic period, and so you have a lot in—as you see in the book of Daniel, in Bablyonian thought you have a lot of dream prophecy, whereas when you’re looking at that period of ancient Israel’s history that would be reflected in Genesis, prophets were seers, who saw visions. So that’s probably the connection there. It’s trying to get at the same idea, and that this is a prophetic thing.

But, yes, but if the Word of Yahweh comes to Abram in a vision, that tells you right off the bat that he’s seeing something.

Fr. Andrew: It’s visual, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s not, as it’s sometimes depicted in movies or just in our imagination, that the Word of the Lord coming to someone means that they hear a voice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a disembodied voice.

Fr. Stephen: They hear Morgan Freeman somewhere off, speaking… [Laughter] And that’s it. No, so they see someone. So Abram, in this instance in Genesis 15, in verse two and verse eight, he calls this person whom he’s seeing “the Lord Yahweh,” which creates kind of a problem for English translations, at least modern English translations, because they are sticking by the Rabbinic Jewish thing of not wanting to print the name “Yahweh,” but their general pattern is that when they get that, they replace it with “LORD” in all caps. But if they did that here, then Abram would be calling him “the Lord LORD.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they translate it usually as “Lord GOD,” and the word “GOD” in all caps.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, even though the word “God” is nowhere in the text. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It simply says, “Yahweh.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so add this to the list of reasons why we just go ahead and say it, to convey what’s actually there in the text. But the important thing here is that this figure, who is identified in the narrative of verse one as “the Word of Yahweh” who comes to him in a vision, is called by Abram “Lord Yahweh,” and the figure does not correct him. He doesn’t say, “Wait, wait, wait, I’m just messenger! I’m just this guy named Word.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so it’s clear that Abram refers to the Word of the Lord who comes to him as being Yahweh the God of Israel, and the Word of the Lord does not say, “No, no, no, no, don’t call me that.” He accepts it, because it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: And it isn’t that there’s a switcheroo that happens here, because in verse four, after the first time Abram calls him that, he is again referred to as “the Word of Yahweh.” And then in verse seven, “the Word of Yahweh” calls himself “Yahweh.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then in verse eight, Abram again calls him “Lord Yahweh.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we see here a pattern with the dabar Yahweh that we already saw last time with the Angel of the Lord, with the malakh Yahweh, that this figure, this person, is both identified as Yahweh the God of Israel, but also distinguished by the addition of another word, in this case the word “word,” in the last episode, the word “angel” or “messenger.” So that’s sort of our Exhibit A from the Old Testament. And as you mentioned at the beginning, I know last time we went through every mention of the Angel of the Lord, at least in passing, at least briefly. We honestly can’t do that for “Word of the Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a bunch.

Fr. Stephen: There’s too many. But so we’re going to talk about some very important ones, and then, after we’ve gone through some very significant ones, we’re going to sort of give some more general statements about certain portions of the Old Testament that will sort of convey the overall idea.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I should point out here—okay, so I just checked; I checked the ESV—mind you, different translations could do this differently, but I just checked the ESV, and there are 274 instances of “Word of the Lord” that exist in the ESV. Let’s check “Word of God.” 51 for “Word of God.” So…

Fr. Stephen: We don’t have time to do each of those, but we’re going to, I think, cover the ground adequately in this second half.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And if you disagree, send your hatemail to Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I’ll take it. Delete, delete, delete…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the next really significant one that we want to look at in a little depth is in 1 Samuel 3, and this—it’s the first 21 verses of that chapter, and this is basically the call of Samuel to be a prophet. So Samuel is at this point a “yout’ ”…

Fr. Andrew: A young guy.

Fr. Stephen: And he has gone to… I guess, because they’re trying to be consistent… There are a bunch of English translations that say he was in this passage that he was sleeping in the Temple of the Lord. Now, this is 1 Samuel. David isn’t even king yet. I don’t think David is even born yet, let alone Solomon. There is no Temple. It’s the “house” of the Lord. It’s talking about at Shiloh, the place the tabernacle was, the ark of the covenant. And when it says that he’s sleeping in the “Temple” of Yahweh, where the ark of the covenant was, it does not mean he’s sleeping in the holy of holies on a cot! [Laughter] It means the locale…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he lives there.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So, just to clarify that. And currently Eli is the high priest, and his sons, his ne’er-do-well sons are serving as priests, and so now this is the point where Samuel is going to be called to become a prophet. And in establishing that situation, in verse one of that chapter, in describing sort of the dire situation that Israel is still in—because, remember, we’re coming out of the book of Judges, so things are pretty dire, and they’re still dire—we’re told in that first verse that the Word of Yahweh is rare because “there are not many visions.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s an interesting way to put it, which, again, underlines that an encounter with the Word of the Lord is a visual encounter.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s an encounter with someone.

Fr. Andrew: And someone that you can see.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not just with an idea or a thought or a whisper or that kind of thing. And we’re told, in verse seven, that Samuel himself did not know Yahweh the God of Israel, because he hadn’t seen the Word of Yahweh, and the way that’s phrased… Usually in the English translation it’ll say something like, “The Word of Yahweh had not been revealed to him.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what it is in the ESV.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s kind of ambiguous as to exactly what that means, because “revealed to him” could be a voice, could be a printed text, could be… Right? But the word there in Hebrew actually means to uncover or unveil or display something.

Fr. Andrew: So I’m guessing that in the Greek Old Testament they use apocalypto for this.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Which literally means unveiling, or taking away the veil, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the idea is it’s there; you just can’t see it until the veil is removed. So, again, this is vision language again. And this establishes that the way he would have come to know the God of Israel is through seeing the Word of Yahweh. And so that first verse means that—“the Word of Yahweh has not revealed…” “not many visions”—the knowledge of God is kind of lost to Israel, and Samuel is being called as a prophet to counter that.

That also means that when we talk about, in the New Testament—St. John’s gospel again being a very important center of this idea—talking about people not being ablrot ope to come to know God apart from Christ, this is part and parcel of this same theology in the Old Testament, that there is this figure, there is this Person, the Word of Yahweh, through whom… It’s the only way people come to know Yahweh, is through an encounter with the Word or with someone whom the Word sends out, someone who does see the word and whom he then sends out to proclaim what he says, that is, the prophets.

puss on

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, the prophets, and, later, apostles.

Fr. Stephen: The apostles, right. And so, within this story, Samuel is a kid; he’s sleeping. And he hears this voice calling out to him. And three times the voice calls out to him and says, “Hey, Samuel. Samuel, wake up.” And he thinks it’s Eli, because Eli is now an old man. He’s the high priest; Samuel is there helping him. So he goes running over to Eli to see what he wants. And the first couple times, Eli’s like, “Go to bed! I didn’t say anything.” [Laughter] “Buzz off. Pas op, jonge,” if you’re Dutch. [Laughter] Sends him back to bed. The third time, Eli figures out something’s going on, because he’s like: “I’m not calling you, but clearly you’re hearing someone call to you.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and what’s interesting to me about that is that it sounds so much like a voice, like a human voice apparently, that Samuel can think that it’s Eli.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s not like thundering off the rafters. [Laughter] It isn’t metallic-sounding or anything. So that third time he says, “Well, next time say: Here I am. And see what it says to you.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.”

Fr. Stephen: And so he says, “Okay.” And so then, in verse 10 of that chapter, we get the fourth time, but we’re told that Yahweh comes and stands, as at the other times, calling to him. He stands by his bed. So that tells us that—since it’s “as the other times”—all four times—again, it’s not just a voice calling out to him, but Yahweh has come and stood next to his bed, which implies legs.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a bodily presence.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So after the call, he then… Samuel responds that time; he interacts with Yahweh the God of Israel, judgment is pronounced against Eli and his family, and then in verses 20 and 21, it summarizes what just happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says this:

And all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the Word of the Lord.

And again, that “revealed” is the sense of uncovering or unveiling or being displayed.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s that same word. “The Lord uncovered himself to Samuel by the Word of the Lord.” So the first time that verb is used, it’s used that the Word of Yahweh had not been unveiled to him, and here it said that he is certainly a prophet because Yahweh revealed himself to him.

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: By the Word of the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: So he came to know the God of Israel through seeing the dabar Yahweh, the Word of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Cool.

Fr. Stephen: So another, similar example comes in the first chapter of Jeremiah, and this is actually Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which as I recall hearing you say, St. Paul just totally cribs this when describing his own calling, which, I mean, rightfully—he’s not making stuff up, but…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that shows you how St. Paul sees his call to be an apostle, that he sees it as in continuity with what the prophets are doing when they are called.

Fr. Andrew: So Jeremiah 1:4-5; this is Jeremiah speaking.

Now the Word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the Word of Yahweh comes to him. It doesn’t say he heard the Word of Yahweh. So unless you think, like a sheaf of looseleaf paper with these words on it floated down out of the sky and landed in Jeremiah’s lap—which is very clearly not what it’s saying—the Word of the Lord is someone who speaks. And even though it’s identified as the Word of Yahweh, he says, in the first person, “I formed you in the womb… I knew you…”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so this is the Word of Yahweh, saying things that only Yahweh could say, that he created Jeremiah, that he knew him and consecrated him and appointed him to be a prophet to the nations.

Fr. Stephen: And then in verse six, the very next verse, when Jeremiah responds, he calls him, again, the Lord Yahweh, and you get the weird “Lord all-caps GOD” thing, because, again, “Lord LORD” sounds weird in English. And then in verse nine, we’re told that Yahweh puts out his hand and touches Jeremiah’s mouth. So if you had any doubts that he was there in person…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another very bodily experience.

Fr. Stephen: He puts out his hand and touches his mouth. And he says in that, after touching his mouth, “Behold, I have put my words”—plural—“in your mouth.” So the Word, capital W, puts words, puts his words, in the mouth of the prophet.

Fr. Andrew: We mentioned all of these instances—again, there’s hundreds and hundreds of usages of these phrases in the Bible; we can’t go over all of them, but we mention all of them to give you a kind of key for understanding when you read the Bible, when you see these hundreds of instances yourself, to understand what this phrase means, “the Word of the Lord” or “the Word of God, the Word of Yahweh.”

So there’s three things that I think are really important to understand here. Number one is that this is a person. This is a person talking to people and appearing to people. Number two, that, again this person is seen and interacts bodily with people, with the prophets especially. And then the third one is that this person is Yahweh, is the God of Israel, and is also distinguished from Yahweh, meaning that this is God, this is a second Person who is God. There’s God, the one most often simply called Yahweh, and then there’s also Yahweh, the Word Yahweh—that these are two Persons who are both Yahweh the God of Israel, and yet they’re not the same Person; they’re distinguished from each other. And if you keep these three things in mind, whenever you see that phrase, “the Word of the Lord” or “the Word of God,” in Scriptures, you’re going to be able to read that much more fruitfully, I think, whenever you see that in, again, hundreds of places that this is used.

Fr. Stephen: So the rest of this half, we’re going to talk about some general examples and ways that that plays out in different parts of the Old Testament. Again, we can’t go into detail on every single instance, but how that kind of plays out. For example, in what’s called the Hexateuch, which is when you lump in Joshua with the Pentateuch or the Torah— And there are valid reasons to do that, like, for example, Joshua—it’s in the book of Joshua that the conquest and everything that gets started at the end of Numbers and of Deuteronomy comes to completion, so there’s sort of an arc of the story, leading from Exodus to the end of Joshua, and even at the end of Joshua the conquest is sort of seen as completing, in a certain sense, the promises to Abraham concerning the land, so you’ve got this arc from Genesis through Joshua there, from Genesis 12 all the way to the end of Joshua, so there are reasons to do that thematically and literarily.

And there are themes that run through all six, and one of those is that there’s this way in which the phrase “the Word of the Lord, dabar Yahweh” is used vis-a-vis the behavior of the people. The people are said to be rebelling against the Word of the Lord or offending against the Word of the Lord or ignoring the Word of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which doesn’t mean they just broke a thing he said to them; it means they’re rebelling against this Person.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That would be a weird way of speaking. If you told your kid to do something and he didn’t do it, you wouldn’t go to him and say, “You have rebelled against the word which I spoke to you!”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I might say that kind of thing to them… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You might. That’s fair, okay. But most folks—

Fr. Andrew: Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: —who are not Fr. Andrew—

Fr. Andrew: My children do complain to me, like: “Why are you talking that way?” “Because it’s awesome, child!”

Fr. Stephen: Your house is just an issue of Thor, all the time, written by Stan Lee.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Basically, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So you wouldn’t say, “You rebelled against a piece of paper on the fridge that listed your chores.” You’d say, “You rebelled against me.”

Fr. Andrew: Which we do have two or three of those, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s an act of offense against the person who wrote the chores or who gave the command, that that’s whom it’s directed at. Now if we understand this identification of this figure—we talked last time about the Angel of the Lord who’s there with them in person during this stretch from the exodus through Joshua—that they’re actively rebelling against him, and then what did he say in Judges when he left? That they had ignored him, rebelled against him, grieved him: all of those things. So there is this Person whom they are rebelling against.

We see—there’s a few interesting things we could touch on real quick in the psalms, like Psalm 18:30.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is interesting. It says:

This God—his way is perfect;
the Word of the Lord proves true;
he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.

So again, if you read this as “the Word of the Lord” is just a thing that God says, then it doesn’t make sense that he would say immediately after that, “he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.” The Word of the Lord is this “he” who is this shield.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That is how he proves true is that he is a shield for all who take refuge in him. And then we even get some Holy Spirit as well in Psalm 33 (or 32 in the Greek):4-6.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so this is how this reads.

For the Word of the Lord is upright;
and all his work is done in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made;
and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

And, you know, for those of you who know a little bit of Hebrew or Greek, you can guess that “breath” there is ruah in Hebrew and pnevmati in Greek—spirit. The Spirit is what’s mentioned there: by the spirit of his mouth, all their host were made.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in verse six you get what is a reasonably common analogy in the Church Fathers regarding the Holy Trinity, of God, his Word, and the Breath that carries the Word, that’s coming right out of this psalm, but also, notice that the Word of the Lord is associated with the making of the heavens, so the setting in order, and the Spirit is then associated with the host, with filling it with life: those two aspects of creation that we talked about a few times on this show by now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and which you see all the way back in Genesis 1.

So, okay, Psalm 105:19; again, this is just very brief: “Until what he had said came to pass, the Word of the Lord tested him.” Which again doesn’t make sense if you’re just talking about “a word.” Like, you’re not tested by a word; he’s being tested by this Person, by the Lord himself.

Fr. Stephen: And then, of course, very commonly, and we saw specific examples of the Word actually appearing to prophets, usually at their calling, but that’s also just a common phrase all through all the prophets, is “the Word of the Lord came to… this prophet.” And then, when the prophet goes to pass on that information, encounters this Person, the Word of the Lord, is sent out to proclaim this, they will say, “Hear the Word of Yahweh; hear the Word of the Lord.” And then follow that up with, “The Word of the Lord says, the Word of Yahweh says…”

Fr. Andrew: The Word says. It’s not “and the word reads this way” or whatever. Again, he’s passing on a message because he saw and spoke with the Word of the Lord face to face.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when he says, “The Word of Yahweh says…” it’s not like he then quotes the Torah. This is: “When the Word of Yahweh came to me, he said… Now I’m relaying that to you.” And it’s used interchangeably. In the same prophet, during the same oracle, it will alternate between “the Word of Yahweh says” and just “Yahweh says.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting: one of the passages we looked at—I suggest to everybody to look this one up—in Malachi 1, in which it starts out this way: the Word of the Lord comes to him. And over and over again, you get: “The Lord of hosts says… The Lord of hosts says…” So in that chapter in particular, it’s underlined, this idea that the Word of the Lord is the Lord of hosts; he is the one who presides over the armies of God.

Fr. Stephen: And then there’s this pattern that you especially see—you see it in other places, too, but especially in 1 and 2 Kings. One locus where this happens a whole bunch of times is specifically in 1 Kings (or 3 Kingdoms) 13, because there’s seven times just in that one chapter where it talks about something being done “by the Word of Yahweh,” not in the sense of, like, somehow that strengthened me, but in the sense of the Word of Yahweh did this thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s a person; he’s doing stuff.

Fr. Stephen: “The Word of Yahweh said… The Word of Yahweh did…” where it’s an agent, which means it’s a person.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s another one—and this is a passage which should be familiar to all of us who listen to this show by now—1 Kings 22. This is where Ahab is about to get it. [Laughter] The Prophet Micaiah comes and tells him—warns him!—warns him what’s about to happen, and then he still doesn’t repent. But so Micaiah says to him in verse 19, “Therefore hear the Word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left.” Again, that’s a reference to the Word of the Lord as the Lord of hosts, the one who’s presiding in the divine council.

Fr. Stephen: And he’s the one particularly presiding in the council and sort of issuing the decree.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, he’s the spokesman. So I mean all of these are using these very personal terms to talk about the Word of the Lord. He does things, he says things, he’s the spokesman, he’s the ruler of the divine council—again, this is not just the words that God says. This is something much, much bigger than that.

Fr. Stephen: And so what we’re going to see, when we come back in the third half and we finally now get to our actual topic—no! [Laughter] We finally get to the first chapter of St. John’s gospel, we’re going to see St. John is going to take all of this from the Hebrew Scriptures, from what would become the Christian Old Testament; he’s going to take all these ideas and this is going to be the basis for what he has to tell us concerning Christ and his Gospel, and he’s going to lay that out in the Prologue here at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits. Once again, it’s not a live show, so don’t call tonight. We’ll get back to your calls next time, but we do have a voicemail that was left for us by Photini who asks this.

Photini: Fathers, bless! This is Photini from Ankh-Morpork. I know you’ve spoken about this a little bit before, but in the beginning of John, when he talks about the Logos, I’ve heard even Orthodox people explain this as being entirely related to Scripture, that Scripture is kind of the only thing that’s meant here, that Scripture is the primary reference. And from what you’ve said about the Word of the Lord coming to people, particularly in the Old Testament, it feels like that’s not a great understanding, but I would like some more clarity on this; I’m sure other people would. Can you talk a little bit about what Logos means and what the Word of the Lord means in the gospel of John? Thank you so much for all that you do.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so on some level, we’ve already kind of debunked this idea that the Word of the Lord is a reference to the Bible, but I think probably the best way to really put the nail in this coffin is, as you said, we’re going to look at the beginning of St. John’s gospel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and she specifically kind of referred to the— even here, which is one of the weirder places to try to ramrod that definition in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: I do wonder if she was dressed as a bat while phoning in.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] She has threatened to come to Ancient Faith events dressed as a bat, so this is… I mean, it is possible that she is preparing herself for that eventuality.

Fr. Stephen: But, try as she might, she will never know what it’s like to really be one.

Fr. Andrew: She’d just be a person dressed up as a bat.

Fr. Stephen: I hate to be the one to break it to you, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, Photini.

Fr. Stephen: You may know what it’s like to be Batgirl or Batwoman, but not what it’s like to be an actual bat.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s okay. It’s okay. Well, the food is better for us humans. Just putting that out there. I mean, although maybe it’s great for them; maybe they love it, but we’ll never know, because we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, so St. John’s… This is called the Prologue, the first 18 verse of John’s first chapter in his gospel. And notably this is read in the Orthodox Church—now, I know it’s generalization, but I mean 99.99% of Orthodox churches read this gospel at Pascha, at the feast of the Lord’s resurrection. And that’s the only time; it doesn’t get read for anything else.

Fr. Stephen: And if you don’t, you’re the one who has to explain it, not me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go! Yes.

Fr. Stephen: You have the burden of proof.

Fr. Andrew: Although it should be— I should point out that in the small percentage of Orthodox churches, namely, the Western Rite churches, that don’t read this for Pascha, they actually read it at the end of every Mass. This is what they call the last gospel. So they’re reading it all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s overdoing it, I think. [Laughter] It’s not special any more if you do it every week!

Fr. Andrew: Is that how it works?

Fr. Stephen: That’s what they taught me before I was Orthodox. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: There are special things I do every day, and they’re special every time.

Fr. Stephen: You should do it at most three times a year, whether you need it or not. That’s all I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So anyway, it’s really underlined in one way or another in Christian liturgical tradition. So let’s just dive in. “In the beginning was the Word.”

Fr. Stephen: You can continue…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, you want me to keep going? [Laughter] I will continue. I’ll read the first couple of verses. This is the ESV, and we’re going to kind of take apart a lot of the translation as we go.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

So the first verse then, and we’re going to point this out… I’m going to read a little bit of Greek. The first verse goes like this.

En arxhe en o logos kai o logos en pros ton theon kai theos en o logos.

That’s how it goes in Greek. So let’s pull this apart, bit by bit, because this is really important.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and when we say we’re pulling apart the translation, this is not an attack up on the ESV or any other English translation. There’s not that much difference in how they translate John 1.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s sort of like “let’s take this apart to see how it works” kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right because— And, you know, the ESV, like most English translations, was done by a committee. They may question what that means, because I still hold that no committee has ever done anything. Some person on a committee did it, and the other ones, you know, argued about it, argued about what that one person did.

Fr. Andrew: Editing happened.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the point being: when something goes through a committee like that, especially with—since the ESV is the RSV—we’re talking about a committee that had various types of Protestant folks working on it, Roman Catholic folks involved, even Orthodox folks involved. You’re going to have to be really non-committal theologically; if you’re talking about any passage with important theology, you’re going to have to do lots of punts—lots of “of"s, lots of “and"s…

Fr. Andrew: Right, because, again, a translation is an interpretation. There’s just no way around that.

Fr. Stephen: So we’re going to dig a little deeper, past the committee, to get closer to the text itself.

Fr. Andrew: So en arche, that’s how it starts out, right?

Fr. Stephen: It starts with “in the beginning,” and that should take us back to the book of Genesis, which begins the exact same way in Greek, with those exact same words. So we’re going back to that point, of Genesis 1:1, and what we’re told by the second half of that first clause—now, in English, they’re following the order of the words in Greek when they say, “in the beginning was the Word”—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s exactly word for word, literally.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the word there that’s translated “was”—

Fr. Andrew: Which was en, eta-ni nu? ni… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to let you take all the heat from the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, great!

Fr. Stephen: I’m throwing you under the bus.

Fr. Andrew: I’ll take it. I don’t say it in that Erasmian way, or I try not to, anyway.

Fr. Stephen: The question is: Are you correctly saying it in the modern way?

Fr. Andrew: I know… [Laughter] I’m doing my best.

Fr. Stephen: With Greek, the tense system… We tend to think of verb tense purely in terms of time in English, because that’s most of what it does in English.

Fr. Andrew: Past, present, future, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s telling us primarily when the activity was taking place; that’s described by the verb. That’s not the case in ancient Greek. In ancient Greek, there is a temporal element—it’s not that it has nothing to do with time—but the primary thing that tense tells you in ancient Greek is it’s telling you the type or the quality of the activity. So, for example, there are two different Greek tenses that get translated by the English past tense. So this is “was”; “was” is past tense. There’s “is,” “was,” “will be”: present, past, future in English. But that past, that “was” does two different tenses. So one of those tenses is what’s called the aorist tense, which is spelled a-o-r-i-s-t. And people say crazy things about the aorist, but in actuality in ancient Greek, the aorist tense is basically telling you pretty much nothing about the activity; it’s sort of the neutral tense. It’s just telling you that something happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, neutral past tense, as it were, where it’s pretty close to English past tense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, it ends up… Again, the temporal element is not the primary element, but if something has happened, that means whoever’s talking or writing about it, it’s going to be in their past, because it’s happened already. So it de facto is going to end up being in the past.

The other tense that gets translated as past has a stronger temporal element. You are very deliberately saying that this was something that was going on in the past, and that is what’s called the Greek imperfect tense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which usually in English an imperfect verb is one that is typically a gerund: ends with -ing. So, like, “was being” or “had been being,” or, I mean, “I am walking”: that’s a present imperfect, or “I am talking.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, whereas this is… It has the aspect of continuous activity: this is something that was going on for a while, but that while is in the past. So a sort of very literal way of translating that first clause would be: “In the beginning, the Word was being,” meaning—

Fr. Andrew: “Had been being.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, or “already was.” So “in the beginning,” when we go back there to Genesis 1:1, when God starts creating everything, the Word, the Logos, already was, already was existing, already was being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which again doesn’t make any sense if you’re going to say that this is about the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, or even just words plural.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: God was already talking? That doesn’t make sense. But this also then is pre-existence, not just pre-existence of when Jesus was born on earth, but pre-existence as in pre-existing the creation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, in the beginning, when everything was about to be created, the Word had been being already, already was, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So then the second clause is, after the “and”… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Here we go! Write in; let me know how terrible my pronunciation is! Kai o logos en pros ton theon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s what’s usually translated: “and the Word was with God.”

Fr. Andrew: And that en there again is the same “had been being” or “already was” or “was being.”

Fr. Stephen: “Was being,” yeah. And then we’ve got the preposition pros. So prepositions in Greek do different things depending on what type of verb and what type of object they’re put with. So pros can mean motion towards. So if this was a verb of movement, if you said, “I was walking pros the store,” that would be: “I was walking to the store, toward the store.” And then it would depend on the verb tense. If I said, “walking, it would be “toward”; if it was past tense, “I walked,” it would be: “I walked to the store,” because it’s in the past.

But this is a being verb, not a verb of motion, and so pros in this case—“with” is not a bad translation, but it really has more of the concept of “at”: “at” like co-location, like: “There is a house at this street corner.” So you’re saying the street corner is there, and the house: they’re both there. Co-locative.

Fr. Andrew: So the Word was at God, although it’s not just God here. It’s not just theon; it’s ton theon. So why is that important that there’s this definite article there?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s an article.

Fr. Andrew: An article, excuse me!

Fr. Stephen: Don’t be so definite! [Laughter] Greek in this era did not technically have a definite article.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of demonstrative mostly, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this article is here because this is a common way, in Greek… When you read Jewish texts that are in Greek, there are certain distinctions that are made in certain ways in the Hebrew. So, for example, in the Hebrew of the Hebrew Scriptures, it’s very rare—not completely absent, but it’s very rare—that you see Yahweh the God of Israel referred to as just “El,” the word for God, spelled like “el” in English.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Ay-el.

Fr. Stephen: You almost always see it in the plural. We’ve talked before about what’s going on with the plural a little bit, but that’s also a way of distinguishing between— because El was also the name of a particular god, the father of Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a Canaanite pagan god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so a way of distinguishing between Yahweh the God of Israel and El was to not use that exact form of the word. And so “god” without an article can be used in a lot of ways in Greek. It can be indefinite—it can mean a god. It can be used sometimes to just sort of mean divine, or divinity as a concept. And so one of the ways that that would be expressed, the idea that this is God, the Most High God, is by putting the article there in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: “The” God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we of course don’t translate it as “the God,” because that would be weird. [Laughter] But this is saying that the Word is there, again, is co-located with God, the God, the creator God, the God of Israel, meaning they’re both existing together. They’re co-located here at the beginning, before anything is created.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a distinction. There’s two Persons that are both there at the beginning.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the last clause is kai theos en o logos.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now, notice— Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, which literally is: “and God was being the Word.”

Fr. Stephen: But in that word order, it’s important to note, there’s no definite—you have me doing it now. There’s no article there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: It’s just kai theos. So it’s not saying that the God was the Word. It’s not contradicting what we just saw and saying there is no distinction. There is an article before logos; there is not an article before theos, which means it is being predicated.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so “the word…”

Fr. Stephen: It’s a predicate.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which is usually why in English they flip the order and say, “The Word was God” rather than…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and with that same connotation of “was being.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly, that en, en, en. It’s three times in that verse.

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Was already being.” That rules out all of your what we now call adoptionist Christologies, that Christ at some point became God. This is saying he was already being God before anything was created, that this is not a sort of later thing. And these need to be ruled out. You say, “Why would this need to be ruled out? Wasn’t that a second-century heresy or something?” We’ve been talking about this second figure, this second power in heaven, this second figure in the Old Testament. There were lots of going theories within Second Temple Judaism as to who this was.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is John saying, “No, no, no, no. This is what’s true.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is pre-human. So here are some of the theories. It can’t be Enoch, it can’t be Adam, it can’t be Moses, it can’t be David.

Fr. Andrew: Because this one is “in the beginning.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, before any of that. So you have already here, just in that first verse, just like was done with the dabar Yahweh in the Old Testament, you have this figure who is distinguished from Yahweh the God of Israel and identified with Yahweh the God of Israel, and made co-eternal with Yahweh the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, and then you get verse two, which reads this way: outos en en arche pros ton theon, which is sort of doubling down. It’s what we call an apposition for the first verse; it’s just restating it in a slightly different way. Outos, that’s the demonstrative.

Fr. Stephen: Right, “this one.”

Fr. Andrew: This one: he’s underlining it. This one had been being or was already being, in the beginning, co-located with the God. Again, it’s really clumsy to see it that way, which is why you would probably never put that in a Bible translation into English, but that’s why it’s useful for us to kind of, like I said, take it apart a little bit and then have a look inside, so you can see what’s going on there as best as we possibly can.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so now we’ve started at Genesis 1:1, with—where is the Word? Where is the dabar Yahweh? Where is the Word of the Lord? At the beginning? He’s right there, co-located with God. He is both identified with the God of Israel, the Creator-God, and he is distinguished from the Person of the Creator-God. And so now we move forward into Genesis 1:2.

Fr. Andrew: Or John 1:2, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: No. No, no, no, no.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: In John 1:3, we’re moving into Genesis 1:2. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this is, in a lot of ways, what St. John is doing. He’s recapitulating Genesis. So this reads in English:

All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

And I’ll just read that real quick in Greek.

Panta di aftou egeneto kai choris aftou egeneto oude en o gegonen.

Yeah, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know how the panda got in there.

Fr. Andrew: Panta. Wow. [Laughter] Pandamonium.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is—remember, Genesis 1:2. In the beginning, what does God do? He creates the heavens and the earth, and then the earth was without form and void. So we have that statement first. So it’s literally saying all things through him came into being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not “made” exactly. It’s not ptio or ktizo, which are the usual words for making something.

Fr. Stephen: Or creating.

Fr. Andrew: It’s egeneto, came into being.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, came to be. So all things came to be through him, and then to clarify that in the second clause: and, separate from him, apart from him.

Fr. Andrew: Kai choris aftou.

Fr. Stephen: Cut off from him, almost literally, not one thing that came into being, came into being. [Laughter] So you have this category: all the things that came into being.

Fr. Andrew: All the things.

Fr. Stephen: All the things, everything that’s a thing; all things came into being came into being through him. Nothing in that category came into being apart from him. What does that imply? Well, that implies he is not in that category.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not a created thing.

Fr. Stephen: He is not in the category of things that came into being.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, not-sorry, Arians!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Sort of definitionally there. And then, secondly, that he is this instrument—the Logos is the instrument through which God creates. And what is creation, as we’ve said several times? It’s putting things in order, meaning the Logos is here for St. John both this creative intermediary—so he’s already serving this function as an intermediary between God and the creation—and he’s also then the organizing principle, the logos in that sense, of structure, of rational structure within the created order. He is then that principle by which things are put in order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can just imagine Philo of Alexandria going, “Okay, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, okay.” [Laughter] So far he’s really on board with all of this! Okay, it’s been interesting up to this point, but this is the part where a lot of this was a little bit new to me and just is awesome. So I just had to say that to everybody. So verses four and five… I mean, I don’t mean it’s new to me in the sense that I’ve never read this before, but understanding what’s going on here in a deeper way, that’s what’s new. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You have been to a Pascha service, is what you’re saying.

Fr. Andrew: I have been, yes. Yes, many, many, many times now. Okay, so verses four and five:

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Which, okay… So the way I had been understanding this verse was essentially it’s talking about Jesus is the light of the world, which, I mean, he says that in another place: “I am the light of the world.” And that he’s shining in the darkness, and so forth. But okay, “the life was the light of men,” that’s something; that’s kind of interesting. So what’s going on inside this?

Fr. Stephen: So we’re still in Genesis 1. We’re now at the first day of creation.

Fr. Andrew: “Let there be light.”

Fr. Stephen: And the light and the darkness are separated. And so this is identifying the light of that first day of creation. What is that light? Because the sun, moon, and stars haven’t been created yet; that’s Day 4, which is in parallel to this but isn’t this. And this is identifying that light that shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it, that was separated, that pushed back the darkness on that first day—that light is the life that is in Christ, the life that is in the Logos, which is the life of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So, just to make sure everybody’s following along here, when God says, “Let there be light,” this is—St. John is interpreting that here as saying that that light is the life of Christ shining out from him. That’s what’s going on here. And it’s about to get even cooler.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the life of God that is in Christ, that shines forth. And this is later on in St. John’s gospel. The Father has given it to the Son to have life in himself. But notice also that that life was the light of—it’s translated “of men,” but it’s actually “humanity.” This is from anthropos, and the other word for “man” is going to be used later in this same passage, so it’s a deliberate thing here. So this is “humanity.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the way that I’ve generally understood that is, “Oh, yes, he enlightens mankind. They’re receiving light from him,” which, I mean, is not wrong. It’s not wrong, but it’s actually way deeper than that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because there aren’t any humans yet, on the first day of creation.

Fr. Andrew: Right. We have to remember that this is still the first day of creation.

Fr. Stephen: So what does that mean? This is telling us that this relationship between the life of God that is in Christ, that is in the Logos, that is in the eternal Logos, this life of Christ has this purpose, of being the light of men. So that means that humanity is in view. God sharing his life with humanity, through Christ, through his Word, is in view as the purpose for the beginning of creation.

Fr. Andrew: From that moment of “Let there be light,” that humanity is already the purpose.

Fr. Stephen: In view, and not just the creation of humans to roam around on this world, but for God to share his divine life with humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and in case you kind of wonder, “Are they going out on a limb here, saying that that is what St. John is saying, that this is about the first day of creation?” In case you wondered that, St. Paul does the exact same thing, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, where he says, “For God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” St. Paul’s saying exactly the same thing here. He’s expanding a little bit on it, talking about the glory of God, the face of Jesus Christ, but it’s again that same thing, that the light that shines in the darkness at the very beginning of creation is sent out to shine in the hearts of human beings to give them the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That’s exactly what St. Paul says.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that comes to us through Christ. And so this means that what we call theosis—sharing in God’s life, becoming like God, becoming sons of God—this is the purpose of creation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it begins at the moment of creation. Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And so the light that we’re talking about is the life of God in Christ, it’s theosis, it’s salvation. That’s what the light is. The light is not just another way, as we’re going to see here in a minute—it’s not just another way to refer to Christ poetically. This light that we’re talking about is salvation, and this all through the Old Testament. The main language that’s used to talk about theosis, to talk about salvation, is shining like the stars, from Abraham to Daniel, to the book of Wisdom, that the righteous shine like the stars in the day of the Lord. And the stars, we know of that association with angels, with the angelic sons of God, so this is the light that’s being talked about.

Fr. Andrew: That’s so cool. Yeah, the light is the life of God in Christ. It is salvation. Salvation shines out in the darkness. I mean, it becomes salvation in the sense that when human beings cooperate with that, then it becomes— But it’s Christ doing his— He begins to save us from the very moment of the beginning of creation. That’s just astonishing. That’s really cool. Okay, so, moving on…

Fr. Stephen: But St. John is not done!

Fr. Andrew: He’s not done, I know! I could just say, “Good night!” right now; I really could. Okay, so verse six; I’m going to read 6-9.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light but came to bear witness about the light. The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

So just to disambiguate a touch here, when St. John the Evangelist, the apostle, says, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John,” he’s not talking about himself; it’s John the Forerunner, John the Baptist, who’s being mentioned here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so St. John is this man—now notice he’s a man, right off the bat; he’s human—who’s sent from God, and he’s sent to witness, to bear witness—what that means is that’s talking about testifying, like if you were called to give testimony in a court case or adjudication—to testify about the light. Now our English translation they have, “that all might believe through him.” It’s not clear: believe what? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s “become faithful.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, “to become faithful,” because what is it that he’s bearing witness about? The light. Remember, the light is this salvation. St. John comes to prepare the way, to prepare the path. So he bears witness; he testifies to the path to salvation. He was not the light; he didn’t have salvation in himself. St. John didn’t come to save everyone himself, but he came to bear witness to it. And then we finally read that the true light which enlightens—it’s “every human” or “all humans,” was coming into the world. Now, that “was,” the pronoun that’s used there is a neuter pronoun. The Logos is referred to throughout this passage with masculine singular pronouns. So the true light again is not the Person of the Logos; it’s not the Person of Christ. The true light here is that salvation, that life which is in Christ, the life of God which is in Christ, which is now coming into the world: salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly, so again, Christ does at other points say, “I am the light of the world,” but this is not what this use of “light” is about. In this case, light is the thing that’s coming from Christ rather than being used to identify him. And, as you said, there’s differences in pronouns here that lets you know that’s what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so now when we get into the next section, people are going to be tempted to jump ahead, because you say, “Oh, well, we’re done with Genesis now. We’ve jumped all the way to St. John the Forerunner,” but something interesting is going to happen here, because in the next few verses that we’re about to read, St. John the Evangelist is still in the Old Testament. He’s describing the Old Testament period of the prophets. So why did he talk about St. John first? Because St. John the Forerunner is the paradigm for the prophets, even though he’s the last one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this was another thing that was a little surprising to me, but it makes way more sense to read it this way, that St. John is here again recapitulating the whole of the Old Testament within just a few verses here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so St. John sort of supremely testifies to the way of salvation. He is the capstone of the prophets; he’s the seal of the prophets. But all of the prophets of the period of the prophets of the Old Testament were doing that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. So moving on, I’m going to read verses 10-13.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

Yeah, so let’s take this apart, because this is actually a big sweep of history. It’s not simply talking about when Christ— St. John is actually not talking about what’s about to happen in the rest of his gospel. This is still prologue; this is not…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, spoilers, the Incarnation is going to happen in verse 14.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so when it says, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him,” that’s talking about… that’s before the Incarnation still.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s before the Word becomes flesh. The Word was—was being; this is that same tense—was being in the world, continuously, before he became flesh. And the world was made through him, as we saw: he created the whole world. But the world out there did not know him: the nations did not know him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then it moves forward; he moves forward and it says, “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is now Moses. He came to his own; he came to his own people. He was in the world, but then he came particularly—the Logos, the Word of God, came particularly to his own people, and his own people did not receive him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he appears over and over again to the prophets, and they bring him to them, but they, over and over again, reject him and turn away from him and rebel against him. That’s what this verse 11 is. It’s not about the rejection that he’s about to experience as the incarnate Christ. This is about the unfaithfulness of Israel and the old covenant.

Fr. Stephen: Right, though that is certainly part of this pattern.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah! Sure, sure, sure, of course.

Fr. Stephen: The story of the Old Testament is the story of God drawing close to his people Israel, and Israel rejecting him, over and over again, and that’s verse 11. Verse 12, then, “but to whoever received him”—that’s what it literally says—“to whoever received him”: so again there’s this remnant idea. So there was this group within Israel who did receive him, even though Israel as a whole, his people as a whole, did not. And to those he gave them authority—it’s exousia in Greek; it’s like freedom to act; it’s like agency. He gave them the agency to become children of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is “children” here, by the way; it’s not “sons.” It’s tekna, which obviously includes sons, but it’s children in general.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it is the same kind of idea. This is talking about theosis again. So it’s not just that there were prophets pointing that way; it’s that to those who did receive him and did follow that way, that— So, again, Christ is the means, the logos theou, the Word of God—he’s the means of salvation in the Old Testament also. Sorry, Dispensationalist friends.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, not sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And notice also this language. They translate “who believed in his name”—I don’t know exactly what that would mean, but it’s more “those who were faithful to his name.” Remember what we talked about last time with the Angel of the Lord. He’s the one who had his name placed in him. The tabernacle and the Temple were the places where Yahweh put his name. Those who were faithful to his name: they received him and who were faithful to his name—they’re the ones who receive this.

And then, just in case you’re not clear on exactly what this agency to become children of God is, verse 13 makes it pretty clear that we’re talking about theosis, because they’re born—they’re begotten, literally—“not of blood”—meaning physical birth, where there’s blood—“nor of the will of the flesh”—we’ll keep it PG; you can guess what the will of the flesh is referring to in terms of producing children—“nor of the will of man”—now this “man” is a man; it’s aner, the word for a man: not for the will of a man: some guy decided he wanted to have a child—“but of God”—they’re begotten of God: that’s how they become children.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and just again to underline this, St. Paul writes in Romans 8:20-23 essentially this same kind of thing. He says:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption, and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

So this is St. Paul again, saying that the whole telos of creation, its whole purpose, is the revelation of the sons of God, the adoption as sons, that we’re born of the will of God, and that that’s the purpose of creation itself right there, and we’re now in the stage of waiting eagerly for that, because it hasn’t yet come to its fullness.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So now in verse 14, now we get to what St. John’s gospel is going to be about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is about the Incarnation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and St. John’s gospel, remember, doesn’t have a birth narrative.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t—this verse 14, this is talking about Jesus being born.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, that stuff was covered by St. Luke. I mean, really, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

So I mean the first thing there is again: this is that language of the Word, and that he came to be flesh…

Fr. Stephen: The same Word, the same Logos we were talking about from back in Genesis 1 and all through Israel’s history.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. And then “dwelt among us,” which is okay, but it actually said, “tented” or “tabernacled” you get in some translations.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “tabernacled” is the real, literal…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which has this sense of… it’s a sojourning, it’s a temporary… He didn’t build a palace amongst us. He tented among us; he tabernacled among us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and also then Christ as… I mean, later on in St. John’s gospel we’re going to get “Destroy this temple, and I’ll rebuild it in three days,” and St. John helpfully gives us the editorial comment, “By the way, he was referring to the temple of his body.” [Laughter] And so that’s how we have to understand this “glory” language, because what happens in the tabernacle?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the glory of God.

Fr. Stephen: It’s filled with the theophanic glory cloud. The glory of God comes and fills the tabernacle. So the logos theou becomes flesh, tabernacles among us, and the glory of God, the presence of God, is within him. And this is “glory”… now…

Fr. Andrew: Here we go!

Fr. Stephen: The English you read says, “of the only Son from the Father.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in some translations you get “of the only-begotten from the Father.” It doesn’t have the word “Son” there.

Fr. Stephen: At all.

Fr. Andrew: At all. That’s a sort of—again, every translation is an interpretation. It’s monogenous is how it is in its inflected form there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s a couple of different words that can end up giving you monogenes, essentially, and then it gets declined. So “only-begotten” is what you’ll see in the King James and that kind of thing. So why would we saw that it doesn’t necessarily mean that here? Well, that’s context. So we just had, in verse 13, the use of that verb, “begotten,” that exact verb, to talk about the ones who become the children of God. So if now, in the very next verse, St. John says that Christ is the only one who is begotten, that doesn’t make sense and it contradicts itself. The other meaning of monogenes is “of its own genus,” meaning “unique.”

Fr. Andrew: One of a kind, literally, a single of a kind.

Fr. Stephen: One of a kind, right, and so even if we’re carrying over the “begotten” idea—because we do have here, for the first time in this passage, o theos here referred to as “the Father”—it’s the same Person—so if you want to carry that idea, we still want to say that Christ is unique among sons, uniquely begotten: he’s different [from] other children of God or sons of God. So the uniqueness is what’s being emphasized here, minimally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, however you translate the word, you need to have some sense of Christ’s being unique.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but further, in the context here, it’s the one who is uniquely from the Father. Why would he need to say “from the Father in a unique sense”? Well, because he’s just talked about— Remember, when he brought up St. John the Forerunner, he was carefully distinguishing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “There was a man sent from God.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so St. John was the paradigm, then, for the other prophets. So there are these other men sent from God. Christ is uniquely from the Father. Christ is from the Father in a different sense. He comes from the Father in a different sense than prophets, even though prophets are also sent by God; this is not—this is a different thing. This is unique. And backing up that interpretation is that in the very next verse, verse 15, St. John refers—St. John the Evangelist—returns to St. John the Forerunner with this parenthetical comment to differentiate them again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which again—the parentheses are not in the original Greek text, but it’s a good… It makes sense to interpret it, translate it with parentheses. So verse 15:

John bore witness about him and cried out: “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s literally with that verb tense again: He was being before me; he existed before I existed. So St. John is one of those people and things that comes into being, whereas Christ always was being.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is important because, in the way that traditional cultures tend to think, whatever comes after something else is usually lesser or lower ranked. So every son is obedient to his father, and his father is greater than he, is the way that it generally goes. And so St. John is saying, “Look, even though he’s coming after me… Like, I’m here on the scene first”—and John is literally just a few months older—he’s saying, “Even though he comes a few months after me, he’s actually before me. He ranks before me because he always was being. He is from of old, and so I’m actually the lesser person here.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s the newcomer. So again, this is not that… there is now in the Incarnation: there is a new thing. There was this pattern he talked about in the Old Testament, but now this is a break of pattern. The Word becoming flesh is not just another instance of the Word coming to humanity the way he came to humanity throughout the Old Testament. This is now different, in a different sense. And then that’s what’s developed further in verses 16 and 17.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so those read like this:

For from his fullness we all received grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

And you’ll notice I emphasized—and we’ll talk about this in just a second here—”given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” but probably the first thing I think that, to me, underlines what’s going on in these two verses is the phrase that gets translated by the ESV as “grace upon grace,” but you said that you think it should be translated “grace after grace.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, yes. “Grace after grace.” Both of the things mentioned in verse 17 are in the category “grace.” The Torah, the Law, is in the category “grace”—sorry, Martin Luther—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry, not-sorry. We’ve had several of those this time around.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s “grace after grace.” And then 17: “For”—that’s “because” in both cases. So in verse 16, “Because,” and that’s saying: Why is it different? How is it different?

Fr. Andrew: It’s given in this case, that’s the verb, through Moses. Oh, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. First, how is the Incarnation of Christ, the enfleshment of the Word, how is that different from that pattern. It’s different because, from the fullness of the Logos, we have all received grace after grace.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, okay. Excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: Because the first grace, grace number one, is that the Law was given through Moses, the verb being “given.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s coming from someone else.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There is a Giver, and it isn’t Moses. It wasn’t given by Moses; it was given through him. So someone else gave it. Who? The Logos. That was part of that Old Testament pattern. So that was given to us, but grace and truth came, and that “came” is that “came into being” word again, and in this kind of context, it has an idea like “arrived”: came into this world, arrived—through Jesus Christ.

Fr. Andrew: At least my understanding of why we shouldn’t translate that as “come into being” exactly is because grace and truth are not objects; they’re not created objects.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They aren’t things that didn’t exist before. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, they arrived.

Fr. Stephen: They arrived through the Person of Jesus Christ, and both of these [have] the Logos as the agent, because the Logos is Jesus Christ, who is full of grace and truth, as we saw in verse 14, and the Logos is the one who gave the Torah through Moses. The Logos is behind both of those, but now he has arrived. He is present, fully present.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so saying that, it might make people think that verse 18 doesn’t make any sense. [Laughter] Because the first thing it says—and this really is our wrap-up verse here, everybody:

No one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

Okay, so how can St. John say, “No one has ever seen God,” given everything that he just said?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this isn’t a retcon, where it’s like: “All that stuff where it says he saw God, forget about it.” [Laughter] So he mentions the Father here. “No one’s ever seen…” So no one’s ever seen the Father, but—and that word that’s translated “only” in the ESV that you read is really this monogenes again.

Fr. Andrew: Monogenes, yeah. Unique.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Unique: the unique God. And there’s a textual variant here. The ESV is kind of updated, because they had access to older forms of the text. The oldest form of the text has monogenes theos...

Fr. Andrew: The unique God.

Fr. Stephen: The unique God. A lot of later texts have monogenes uios…

Fr. Andrew: The unique Son.

Fr. Stephen: Unique Son. For our purposes here of what St. John is saying, it actually doesn’t matter which it is, and our understanding that Christ is God, even in this text—read verse 1. [Laughter] Even if we are to read uios here, fine; we still understand that Christ is God. The idea there is the uniqueness: this unique One, this unique One who is God and who is the Son also, is the One who has made him known throughout history.

Fr. Andrew: The point here when John says, “No one has ever seen God,” he’s speaking of the Father. No one has ever seen the Father, but he is revealed to mankind, he is made known, by the Son. That’s the one.

Fr. Stephen: Right. By the unique God, by the logos theou, by the dabar Yahweh, which is what we saw in the Old Testament. St. John is just reading that from the Old Testament. So that means that the Person whom Moses spoke to face to face—is the Logos, is Christ. The Person who came and stood by Samuel’s bed—is Christ. The Person who touched Jeremiah’s lips—is Christ. That’s what St. John is saying here.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And you might wonder, “Okay, he’s pulling all of this out of the Old Testament. What’s new here?” There is something new, which is St. John is identifying Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, born in Bethlehem. He’s saying this One that came and dwelt among us, tabernacled among us, is this Word of the Lord, whom we’ve always known. That’s what’s going on. He’s making this identification is what’s happening here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then what’s going to now unfold in the gospel proceeds from that point. This One, the dabar Yahweh, the second power in heaven, this Person who is acting all through the Old Testament, became flesh and dwelt among us, and now here’s the story of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So in trying to think about ways of summarizing this in my mind—not that you can really summarize it well, but trying to think about what I can lodge in my mind to understand, especially this phrase, “Word of the Lord” or “Word of God”—the first thing that came to mind for me was that this is talking about Christ, the Son of God, in his revelatory role. This is him revealing God to mankind, revealing the truth. But it’s not quite enough, actually. I mean, it’s true; that is true. Better, I think, would be to understand that the Word of the Lord or the Word of God is our Lord Jesus Christ as the kind of interface from God to creation. So this is thinking in the top-down sense. This is God reaching out to his creation. And it’s manifest in multiple ways, this notion that the Son of God is the Word of the Lord. So, yes, revelation for sure. He speaks and he tells things to the prophets. He teaches the apostles and so forth.

But, as we just saw in St. John’s gospel, at the beginning, creation itself—again, this is God interfacing with the creation—the act of creation itself is by the Word of the Lord. He’s the One by whom, for whom, through whom all things were made. And then also—and this was the part that you just already heard me… I’m just astonished about this, really. He’s not only the One who—in whom we become as God, in whom we are divinized, deified, theosis, adoption as sons of God, but he sends his light out from the very beginning of creation itself—this is the Word of the Lord—sends that light out, so that the humanity that he’s about to create would receive it, would receive the glory that we see in his face, that we receive that light, that love of God that would transform us and make us into the sons of God.

There’s so many different kinds of language that are used to talk about our Lord Jesus Christ in Scripture, and it’s so appropriate. This episode we’re focusing on this one phrase, “the Word of the Lord” or “the Word of God.” And this, to me, is the way to understand… I don’t want to say “this side” of Christ—he doesn’t have “sides”—but at least this way of talking about him, is that this is God reaching out to his creation, sometimes just to create, sometimes to speak, but always to save and always, from the very beginning, to save, to transfigure, to enlighten, to fill us up with himself, to, as he prayed in his great high priestly prayer in John 17, that the glory that he received from the Father before all time will be given then to those who become faithful to him, who are given this ability to become the sons of God. And my prayer for all of us is that we would see and receive that light as much as we’re able. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a couple things here, but the main one that I kind of want to focus on is what this means in terms of our view of the relationship between Christ and the world, and therefore between Christianity and our lives, because we’ve been taught for a long time to compartmentalize our life—our mental life, our emotional life, our physical life—into these sort of discrete sections and discrete areas. And some of them are not supposed to intrude on the others; we’re told explicitly that that’s bad if that happens. And what that does is it kind of splits our thinking and our brain and our understanding, so we think we can understand how to have a successful marriage or how to raise kids or how to conduct ourselves in the workplace or carry out a career or even be on the parish council at our church—whatever it is, we think we can understand that without any direct reference to religion, because that’s over in its own category. And of course, Christ is there in that “religion” category.

But if we take seriously what the Scriptures are telling us about the Word of God and his relationship to creation, both at the beginning when it was created, throughout time and holding it together, in his interactions with humanity for salvation throughout, it’s about setting in order, creating and putting things in order, establishing this rational order of the creation and within ourselves such that Christ not only is the agent of that, but he also is that order.

What does that mean? I mean, that’s rarefied air. What that means is we can’t understand anything if we don’t understand and come to know Christ. We can’t understand the simplest task in our everyday life. We can’t understand the experiences we have every day. We can’t understand the interactions we have with other people. We can’t understand who we are, what it means to be human. We can’t understand anything—how to interact, how to conduct ourselves, how to conduct ourselves as a community, as a polity, in any context—until we come to know Christ. The more we come to know Christ, the more we ourselves are set in order, and then everything else starts to fall into place. Everything else starts to make sense, because he’s the sense that lies behind it. He’s the purpose that lies behind it. Anything we want to know, anything we want to accomplish, anything we want to heal, anything we want to fix, anything we want to understand, the only way to that is through Christ.

That’s coming at it one way, but it’s also true the other way. It’s true the other way. One of the other things that’s happened due to that compartmentalization is once you separate these things, once you separate religion and you separate Christianity from all these other aspects of life—once they’re separated, you can then pit them against each other. We have a long heritage, especially in the United States but probably, I’m thinking, elsewhere in the West as well, of pitting religion, sometimes just referred to as “faith,” but pitting religion, pitting Christ, pitting the Gospel over against science, learning, academics, studying, the learning of the creation.

People have retreated as a result of overreacting to our 19th-century German friends into this kind of trench warfare, where you’re following one or the other. But if the reality is that Christ is the sense that lies behind all these things, then any knowledge that is real knowledge, any knowledge that is true, that expresses truth, is knowledge of Christ. As we come to understand the creation, not just the material creation vis-a-vis science, but creation in terms of art and beauty and nature and emotional connections between people, the world around us—the more we come to understand it, the more deeply it will lead us to know Christ.

And this creates a reciprocal relationship. Coming to know Christ allows us to understand the world and ourselves; coming to understand the world and ourselves leads us to come to know Christ, when we’re healthy and we’re doing this effectively. Any knowledge that seeks to pull you away from Christ or attack your relationship with Christ, your closeness with Christ, is knowledge falsely so called. It’s not knowledge; it’s a lie, by definition, because anything opposed to the truth is a lie, and anything that is the truth is of Christ.

So that’s what I wanted to emphasize. I think this is a very important part. We’ve got two more parts of this series to go, talking about Christ in the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament Scriptures, but to me this is the especially important part of Christ as the logos theou who in these last days has become incarnate for our salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If your message did not get included in this episode, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but cannot respond to everything, and we do save some of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

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Fr. Stephen: And finally, while you’re remembering that Jamestown preceded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, good night, and God bless you.