Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 1:1c
Why call a person a Word? The Greek noun covers far more than a unit of speech, and two different backgrounds are competing for it.
John 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
You have my word. Word got around. He is a man of his word. Not one of those is about a unit of speech. English already stretches this noun a long way past its dictionary entry, and you have never once been confused by it. Greek stretched it further, in directions English never went.
Because it is the word everybody notices and nobody explains. The article entry on this same verse deliberately set logos aside, since the article is where the argument is. But a reader who has just been told the Word was God is entitled to ask why John called him a word in the first place, and the answer is not in any English dictionary.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Every English version reads Word, capitalised. A handful of older attempts tried Reason or Discourse and none of them stuck.
λόγος logos · G3056
Logos covers a spoken word, a statement, an account in the bookkeeping sense, a reasoned argument, and the rational principle ordering the universe. Greek philosophy, especially Stoic, had been using the last of those for centuries. Jewish writers in Greek had their own use: Philo of Alexandria made logos a mediating figure between God and the world, and the Aramaic targums habitually replace the name of God with memra, the word, in exactly the places where God acts.
English word means a unit of speech and very little else. There is no English noun that simultaneously means an utterance, a rational order, and a mediating agent, so a translator prints Word and adds a capital letter to warn you that more is going on.
When a translation capitalises a common noun, that is a translator making an interpretive decision in punctuation. Greek manuscripts were written without any case distinction at all. Ask what the capital is doing before you accept it.
The Greek-philosophy background makes John's opening a bid for a pagan audience, using their word for the ordering principle of reality and then telling them it became a man. The Jewish background makes it a comment on Genesis 1, where God speaks and things exist, and on the targums where the Word of the LORD does what the LORD does. The two are not exclusive and most commentators now take both, with the Genesis echo carrying more weight because John's first three words are the opening of Genesis.
- Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint opens with the same two words John opens with
- The Aramaic targums' use of memra for the divine name in passages of divine action
- Philo of Alexandria on the logos as intermediary: background, not source
- Standard commentary treatments of the Greek against Hebrew background question: Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC), at 1:1
