“In the beginning”
This phrase appears twice in the Bible in relation to creation. The first and most well-known occasion is the Bible’s opening words in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That phrase, “in the beginning,” is translating a Hebrew word, bereshit. Genesis is the traditional Greek name for the book, from the Greek word génesis, which means “origin,” “source,” “birth,” or “genealogy.”
The main focus of this article will be the phrase’s second appearance speaking of creation, but let’s start with a few thoughts on Genesis. Reading those words, our first and most obvious question should be, “In the beginning . . . of what?” It’s easy to assume that the text is speaking of the creation of the universe as we know it—in other words, the furthest possible point back in time that we, today, with our modern scientific knowledge of cosmology, can imagine. A point immediately prior to the existence of any physical matter anywhere. But that isn’t actually what it says. Verse 2 tells us that “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In other words, there was already at this point “the earth,” “the deep,” and the “waters.” So, perhaps, “in the beginning” of measuring time? Of the world as we know it today? Of people like us?
We live in an age of science, in which our ability to find answers about the past has increased exponentially compared to the ancient world, so our interest tends to default toward science questions. Hence, we expect the Bible to be providing them for us in matters that it speaks about. We assume that the biblical writers “must have been” intending to answer the questions that we are interested in—or at least, that the divine co-authorship of the Bible (as God’s Word) means that God would have made sure the Bible answered them, even if the ancients had no interest in them at the time.
Scientific interest tends to revolve around “how?” questions—how the universe was made, in a manufacturing sense. Whereas the questions of the biblical writers and their audience revolved around “why?” questions and “who?” questions. Questions such as, “Who created what we see around us?” “Who is God?” “What is he like?” “How did we come to be his people?” and “Why are things the way that they are?” That last question would be all the more pertinent and poignant if Genesis was written in or around the time of the Babylonian exile (as one theory of its dating suggests).
These kinds of questions fit with Genesis being a story of origins—where Israel locates its roots and its relationship to God—an explanatory story of who they are and where they came from, in legend or fable form. The purpose of that genre is to convey (what we would call) “theological” truths rather than “cosmological” or “biological” truths.
To identify Genesis (or any other biblical account) as a legend or fable is not to accuse it of being false in a deceptive or fraudulent sense, it’s simply to recognize its genre as a piece of writing and then allow it to be what it is. We should not ask “Is this account true” (in a modern science sense) but “Is this account effectively conveying truths?” as an explanatory story in the manner that the writers intended, in order for it to be remembered and passed on. It’s impossible not to notice how easy it is, even for us as modern readers unused to oral culture, to remember the key points in the narrative in just one reading, because it’s being presented in storied form. This skill would have been all the more attuned in the oral culture of the ancient world prior to Genesis first being committed to writing.
Interestingly, elsewhere in the Old Testament the Hebrew word for “created” or “made”—bara—is never used in a manufacturing sense, always in a transformative or “bringing it about” sense. So for example, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10) self-evidently has nothing to do with heart transplant surgery.
We should always be careful of superimposing our own interests on the biblical text. We must always begin by asking what something meant (what it was “saying”) to its original audience and, equally importantly, why. It is disrespectful to assume that their questions and concerns “must have been” (or should have been) the same as ours. This is important because if we ask the Bible the wrong questions, with the wrong expectations, we will derive wrong answers. If we ignore the genre of what we’re reading, we will get wrong answers, and when we then seek to defend the truth of the Bible, we’ll be defending the wrong things.
Multiple clues in the Genesis account lead us away from the idea that we are being invited to treat everything as literal. For example, it actually has two different creation accounts (Genesis 1:1 through 2:4, and then 2:4 through 2:25), which can only be synthesized with the greatest of difficulty. Other questions include where the significance of sacrifice came from, underlying the Cain and Abel story (the text has said nothing about that). Perhaps more to the point, in terms of its literality, is where Cain’s wife comes from. When and how was she created? How could Cain be worried about retaliation from other people for killing his brother—“Whoever finds me will kill me”—when there were no other people at this point? It’s clearly not that Cain made a mistake. God does not respond, “Don’t worry, Cain, there are no other people yet!” Rather, it says, “The Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him.” And, how could Abraham be commended for having kept Torah (God’s commandments) in Genesis 26:5, before Torah was even given to Moses, in Exodus?
Now to the second appearance of “In the beginning.” Just as that phrase begins Genesis 1, so too, John 1, in the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This seemingly-odd term is clearly speaking of Jesus the Son. It’s identifying the human Jesus whom they know with a pre-existent divine person who has existed from the beginning. But why, “the Word”?
The Greek word is logos. Unsurprisingly, one of its several meanings is “words” in the customary sense of “language” (we get the word “theology” from a combination of logos and theos—theology is thoughts about God that we express in words). But simply translating logos as “the Word” (even with a capital letter) by no means tells the full story; in fact, it scarcely tells it at all.
To grasp what the author, John, is talking about, we need to understand how his audience would have understood logos in the first instance. Two streams of thought come together here: one derives from Greek philosophy, going back to Plato and Aristotle, and especially through Middle Platonism, and the other derives from Jewish wisdom literature, especially through the writings of Philo of Alexandria. It is likely that John had both in mind and that his audience was familiar with both.
At risk of over-simplification (this is a blog article, after all; and what I’m about to try to explain is a complex subject!), Middle Platonism—the Platonic tradition during the New Testament era—understood God in two aspects: one that was aloof and transcendent and one that was the active divine power for the creation and ordering of the material world. This active force of God in the world was referenced as the logos.
This perspective influenced Hellenistic Jewish thinking at the time of Jesus, and particularly Philo, who came from an Alexandrian Jewish family but was well-educated in Greek philosophy. Philo identified the significant Jewish theme of wisdom with logos. For him, the logos was “the intermediate reality between God, who was essentially transcendent, and the universe.”* “The logos was both the power through which the universe was originally ordered and the power by which the universe continued to be ordered.” Philo also spoke of the logos as “the image of God, the highest of all beings … the one closest to God, the only truly existent.”
The logos was the image of God in two ways: one as a reflection of God, and the other as “a model on the basis of which the rest of the universe below was ordered.” It is interesting to read John 1:1-18 (known as “the Prologue”) with this background in mind. If we compare the attributes of the logos in the Prologue and 1 John 1:1-4 with the attributes of personified wisdom in Jewish wisdom literature (Proverbs, Sirach, Baruch, and Wisdom of Solomon) we see striking parallels in every Johannine clause. “Both the logos in the Prologue and wisdom in Jewish wisdom literature are with God in the beginning; both are involved in the creation of the world; both seek to find a place among humankind; [and] both are within a Jewish tradition of speculation about the deeper meaning of the early chapters of Genesis.” Both Philo and John associate the logos with “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1; with the “instrument” through which the universe was created; with “light”; and with “becoming children of God.” John’s unique take is, of course, his identification of the logos with Jesus. Stated bluntly, he’s saying that the logos was Jesus the Son! Personified wisdom was Jesus the Son!
In sum, translating logos as “the Word” in our English Bibles scarcely begins to communicate its significance in John 1 and 1 John 1. Reading back on what I’ve written here, I may be guilty of the same failing! I worried about that halfway through writing this piece, but I decided that I’d started so I’d finish!
It’s easy to see John’s apologetic intent here, reaching out to explain Jesus to an audience familiar with both Greek philosophy and Jewish thought. By “apologetic,” I mean he’s seeking to present Jesus as the pre-existent Son by starting with already familiar ideas from their worlds. He’s explaining how the Jesus they know is the personification of divine logos and divine wisdom.
What lessons might we learn in explaining Jesus by starting from already familiar ideas in our world?
*The quotations in this article are from The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary entry, “Logos,” volume 4, especially pages 350 and 353-4. Emphases added.