[SeattleUte]

John 1:1 (KJV) states, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

"The Word" is translated from "the Logos" in the original Greek. There could be no better example than "Logos" that words in ancient texts have meanings not readily translatable into English (as Archea has noted). Logos had various shades of related meanings to philosophers and theologians in different epochs in antiquity. Logos is the root for our Engish word "logic," and, indeed, Aristotle saw Logos as meaning something like logic--essentially, as I understand, application of reason to data or evidence, reasoned argument. Plato called the mind the pilot of the soul, and said that philsophical inquiry and contemplation was the means to accessing the Good (God, more or less). This was his Logos, at least that's how later epochs came to see it.

The Septuagint in various places calls the words of God "Logos." As the ancients saw the universe as comparable to a living thing, the ancients came to see Logos as the Universe's mind. Often "the Word," or simply "Wisdom," became shorthand for Logos.

Later, around the time of Christ and the advent of the New Testament, Jews such as Philo of Alexandria (he lived from about 20 B.C. to about 50 A.D.), steeped in Greek philosophy, came to see the Logos as a mediator between earth and God. An abassador who enabled imperfect earthly beings to come into contact with God. Almost a separate personage from God, but not quite; more like a distinct manifestation of God.

Philo was a Hellenized Jew, never a Christian, but early on Christianity adopted him as one of the "Church fathers." According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philospophy, "Philo's philosophy represented contemporary Platonism which was its revised version incorporating Stoic doctrine and terminology. . . Philo made a synthesis of the two systems and attempted to explain Hebrew thought in terms of Greek philosophy by introducing the Stoic concept of the Logos into Judaism. In the process the Logos became transformed from a metaphysical entity into an extension of a divine and transcendental anthropomorphic being and mediator between God and men. . . Philo accepts the Stoic theory of the immanent Logos as the power or Law binding the opposites in the universe and mediating between them, and directing the world. . . .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 Philo designates as the Logos. He gives the impression that he believed that the Logos functions like the Platonic 'Soul of the World.'"

The anonymous author of the Gospel of John (certainly a Hellenized Jew or a Roman) finally made the Logos incarnate, saying Christ was the Logos. Tracing the evolution of the Logos seems to me one way to see how Judaism and Greek philosophy fused to create Christianity, and gives insight into development of the various permutations of the godhead.

Philo was a contemprary of Paul, though there is no evidence they ever knew one anther.

Any thoughts, insights or information on how the Logos concept influenced the development of the New Testament's characterization of Christ?