Home / Topics / What "The Word" (Logos) Means in John 1
For centuries before John wrote, Greek philosophers had been searching for the logos β the rational principle that structured the universe, the reason behind everything. John opened his gospel by taking that exact word and saying: that logos is a person, and he pitched his tent in our neighborhood.
Get These Verses Daily β FreeβIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.β
Three clauses, each advancing the claim. The logos pre-exists creation, is in personal relationship with God, and shares the divine identity. John built the whole structure before introducing the incarnation.
βAnd the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.β
Eskenosen β tabernacled, pitched a tent. The word is charged with Exodus imagery: the presence that filled the wilderness tabernacle now dwells in a human body and a Palestinian village.
βAll things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.β
John gives the logos its Stoic due β the ordering principle of all creation β and then identifies it with the one who slept in the boat during the storm on Galilee.
βThe LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.β
Wisdom's speech in Proverbs 8 was already being read as a precursor to logos theology by the time John wrote. The pre-existent, creation-present divine principle had Hebrew roots as well as Greek ones.
βFor by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.β
Paul makes the same claim as John from a different angle: the logos/Christ is not merely the agent of creation but its telos β all things exist by him and toward him.
βHath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.β
The Stoic philosophers had developed the concept of the logos into one of the most sophisticated ideas in ancient philosophy. For them, the logos was the universal reason pervading and ordering all things β the principle that made the cosmos a cosmos (an ordered whole) rather than chaos. When Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, he was addressing himself to a universe structured by logos. Heraclitus, centuries earlier, had proposed that all things flow and change but the logos underlying them is eternal and constant. This was not an obscure academic concept. It was common intellectual currency across the Greco-Roman world.
The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, had already been working to synthesize the Greek logos concept with the Hebrew concept of the Word of God (dabar, memra). For Philo, the logos was the intermediary between the transcendent God and the created world β the first-born son of God, the instrument of creation. Philo never identified the logos with a historical person. He kept it as a philosophical concept. John's move was to name one.
When John wrote "In the beginning was the Word," the opening words en arche echoed Genesis 1:1 in Greek β "in the beginning God created." Every Jewish reader caught it. When he continued "and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," every Greek reader recognized the logos. John was speaking to both audiences at once, and both would have understood that something unprecedented was being claimed. The logos β the organizing principle of all reality β was personal, was with God, and was God. And then, in verse 14, the statement that no Greek philosopher had ever risked: "the Word became flesh."
Commentary is from a charismatic Protestant perspective, drawing on KJV text and public-domain sources including Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, and Matthew Henry.
The verb John uses in 1:14 for "dwelt" is eskenoosen β it pitched a tent, tabernacled. The image is deliberately Exodus-resonant. The tabernacle in the wilderness was where the shekinah glory of God dwelt among Israel. John is saying: what the tabernacle was β the dwelling of divine presence among the people β Jesus is, in permanent, personal, human form. The logos didn't merely visit. It moved into the neighborhood.
The implications for the rest of John's gospel are everywhere. When Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life," a Greek reader hears: the logos, the rational structure of reality, has named itself as the path through that reality. When Jesus acts as the agent of creation in verse 3 β "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" β John is giving the logos its philosophical due, then immediately binding it to a person who walked Galilean roads and attended weddings and wept at tombs. The cosmic and the local are inseparable in John's portrait. That inseparability was the offense and the good news simultaneously.
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