John starts his gospel ripping off someone else's idea how nice!!
in the beginning was the word the word with god the word was god
(John 1:1)
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John blatantly plagiarised a Jewish philosopher by the name of Philo.
Philo decades before John came up with this formula of logos. But what did his concept of logos really mean!! Let's find out
I shall give you another testimony, my friends, from the Scriptures, that God begot before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos
(Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 61.)
Thus Philo saw God as only indirectly the Creator of the world: God is the author of the invisible, intelligible world which served as a model for the Logos. Philo says Moses called this archetypal heavenly power by various names: "the beginning, the image, and the sight of God." Following the views of Plato and the Stoics, Philo believed that
in all existing things there must be an active cause, and a passive subject; and that the active cause is the Logos of the universe, thoroughly unadulterated and thoroughly unmixed, superior to virtue and superior to science, superior even to abstract good and abstract beauty, while the passive subject is something inanimate and incapable of motion by any intrinsic power of its own, but having been set in motion, and fashioned, and endowed with life by the intellect, became transformed into that most perfect work, this world.
He gives the impression that he believed that the Logos functions like the Platonic "Soul of the World."
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The Angel of the Lord, Revealer of God
Philo describes the Logos as the revealer of God symbolized in the Scripture by an angel of the Lord:
But to those souls which are still in the body He [God] must appear in the resemblance of the angels, though without changing His nature (for He is unchangeable), but merely implanting in those who behold Him an idea of His having another form, so that they fancy that it is His image, not an imitation of him, but the very archetypal appearance itself.
Referring to Gen. 31:13, Philo states: "We must understand this, that He [God] on that occasion took the place of an angel, as far as appearance went, without changing His own real nature." Philo claims that the angel who appeared to Hagar in Gen. 16:8 was "the word (Logos) of God." The Logos is the first-born and the eldest and chief of the angels:
And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labor earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born Logos, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names, for he is called the Authority, and the name of God, and the Logos, and man according to God's image, and he who sees Israel. For which reason I was induced a little while ago to praise the principles of those who said, "We are all one man's sons." (Gen. 42:11). For even if we are not yet suitable to be called the sons of God, still we may deserve to be called the children of his eternal image, of his most sacred Logos; for the image of God is his most ancient Logos.
So Jesus wasn't really the logos according to the first thinkers!!
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