New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John Vol. 1. William Barclay
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a Greek who was interested in Christianity be routed through Jewish Messianic ideas and through Jewish ways of thinking, or could some new approach be found which would speak out of his background to his mind and heart?’ The problem was how to present Christianity in such a way that it would be understandable to Greeks.
Round about the year AD 100, there was a man in Ephesus who was fascinated by that problem. His name was John. He lived in a Greek city. He dealt with Greeks to whom Jewish ideas were strange and unintelligible and even uncouth. How could he find a way to present Christianity to these Greeks in a way that they would welcome and understand? Suddenly the solution flashed upon him. In both Greek and Jewish thought, there existed the conception of the word. Here was something which could be worked out to meet the double world of Greek and Jew. Here was something which belonged to the heritage of both races and that both could understand.
Let us then begin by looking at the two backgrounds of the conception of the word.
The Jewish Background
In the Jewish background, four strands contributed something to the idea of the word.
(1) To Jews, a word was far more than a mere sound; it was something which had an independent existence and which actually did things. As Professor John Paterson, in his book The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets, has put it: ‘The spoken word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive . . . It was a unit of energy charged with power. It flies like a bullet to its billet.’ For that very reason, the Hebrew language was sparing of words. Hebrew speech has fewer than 10,000; Greek speech has 200,000.
One poet tells how a certain man who had performed a heroic act found it impossible to tell it to his fellow tribesmen for lack of words – whereupon there arose another ‘afflicted with the necessary magic of words’, and he told the story in terms so vivid and so moving that ‘the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of his hearers’. The words of the poet became a power. History has many an example of that kind of thing.
When John Knox preached in the days of the Reformation in Scotland, it was said that the voice of that one man put more courage into the hearts of his hearers than 10,000 trumpets braying in their ears. His words did things to people. In the days of the French Revolution, Rouget de Lisle wrote the ‘Marseillaise’, and that song sent men marching to revolution. The words did things. In the days of the Second World War, when Britain was bereft alike of allies and of weapons, the words of the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, as he broadcast to the nation, did things to people.
It was even more so in the middle east, and still is. To the people of this region, a word is not merely a sound; it is a power which does things. Once when the biblical scholar Sir George Adam Smith was travelling in the desert, a group of Muslims gave his party the customary greeting: ‘Peace be upon you.’ At first they failed to notice that he was a Christian. When they discovered that they had spoken a blessing to an infidel, they hurried back to ask for the blessing back again. The word was like a thing which could be sent out to do things and which could be brought back again. In ‘The First Settler’s Story’, Will Carleton, the poet, expresses something like that:
Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds;
You can’t do that way when you’re flying words:
‘Careful with fire,’ is good advice we know,
‘Careful with words,’ is ten times doubly so.
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,
But God himself can’t kill them when they’re said.
We can well understand how to the people of the middle east words had an independent, power-filled existence.
(2) The Old Testament is full of that general idea of the power of words. Once Isaac had been deceived into blessing Jacob instead of Esau, nothing he could do could take that word of blessing back again (Genesis 27). The word had gone out and had begun to act, and nothing could stop it. In particular, we see the word of God in action in the creation story. At every stage of it, we read: ‘And God said . . .’ (Genesis 1:3, 6, 11). The word of God is the creating power. Again and again we get this idea of the creative, acting, dynamic word of God. ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made’ (Psalm 33:6). ‘He sent out his word and healed them’ (Psalm 107:20). ‘He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly’ (Psalm 147:15). ‘So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (Isaiah 55:11). ‘Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’ (Jeremiah 23:29). ‘You spoke at the beginning of creation, and said on the first day, “Let heaven and earth be made,” and your word accomplished the work’ (4 Ezra [2 Esdras] 6:38). The writer of the Book of Wisdom addresses God as the one ‘who have made all things by your word’ (Wisdom 9:1). Everywhere in the Old Testament there is this idea of the powerful, creative word. Even human words have a kind of dynamic activity; how much more must it be so with God?
(3) There came into Hebrew religious life something which greatly accentuated the development of this idea of the word of God. For 100 years and more before the coming of Jesus, Hebrew was a forgotten language. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but the Jews no longer knew the language. The scholars knew it, but not the ordinary people. They spoke a development of Hebrew called Aramaic, which relates to Hebrew rather as modern English relates to Anglo-Saxon. Since that was so, the Scriptures of the Old Testament had to be translated into this language that the people could understand, and these translations were called the Targums. In the synagogue, the Scriptures were read in the original Hebrew, but then they were translated into Aramaic, and Targums were used as translations.
The Targums were produced in a time when people were fascinated by the transcendence of God and could think of nothing but the distance and the difference of God. Because of that, those who made the Targums were very much afraid of attributing human thoughts and feelings and actions to God. To put it in technical language, they made every effort to avoid anthropomorphism in speaking of him.
Now the Old Testament regularly speaks of God in a human way; and wherever they met a thing like that, the Targums substituted the word of God for the name of God. Let us see how this custom worked. In Exodus 19:17, we read that ‘Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God.’ The Targums thought that was too human a way to speak of God, so they said that Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet the word of God. In Exodus 31:13, we read that God said to the people that the Sabbath ‘is a sign between me and you throughout your generations’. That was far too human a way to speak for the Targums, and so they said that the Sabbath is a sign ‘between my word and you’. Deuteronomy 9:3 says that God is a consuming fire, but the Targums translated it that the word of God is a consuming fire. Isaiah 48:13 has a great picture of creation: ‘My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens.’ That was much too human a picture of God for the Targums, and they made God say: ‘By my word I have founded the earth; and by my strength I have hung up the heavens.’ Even so wonderful a passage as Deuteronomy 33:27 which in the Authorized and Revised Standard Versions speaks of God’s ‘everlasting arms’ was changed, and became: ‘The eternal God is thy refuge, and by his word the world was created.’
In the Jonathan Targum, the phrase the word of God occurs no fewer than about 320 times. It is quite true that it is simply a roundabout way of referring to the name of God; but the fact remains that the word of God became one of the commonest forms of Jewish expression. It was a phrase which any devout Jew would recognize because he heard it so often in the synagogue when Scripture was read. Every Jew was used to speaking of the Memra, the word of God.
(4) At this stage, we must look more fully at something we already began to look at in the introduction. The Greek term for word is Logos; but Logos does not only mean word; it also means reason. For John, and for all the great thinkers who made use of this idea, these two meanings were always closely intertwined. Whenever they used Logos, the twin ideas of the word of God