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Talk:John 1-7 (Translated) (view source)
Revision as of 05:04, November 3, 2009
, 05:04, November 3, 2009→Aramaic solution to "Logos" controversy?
About Flusser phttp://www.jerusalemperspective.com/Default.aspx?tabid=27&ArticleID=1612[[User:BertSchlossberg|Bert Schlossberg]] 09:54, 2 November 2009 (EST)
About Flusser phttp://www.jerusalemperspective.com/Default.aspx?tabid=27&ArticleID=1612[[User:BertSchlossberg|Bert Schlossberg]] 09:54, 2 November 2009 (EST)
This discussion of the logos is certainly becoming fascinating. When I consider the difficulty we have had coming to terms with it, and the difficulty many have had with it, I began to wonder if the use of the term logos was an unfortunate event thrust upon us initially by Heraclitus. As Karl Jaspers pointed out, not even Heraclitus explicitly defined it, while Edward Hussey stated that he "end[ed] with a central difficulty that leaves things more mysterious than before". Philo, Ronald Williamson tells us, used the term logos "very frequently", but "partly because the ideas it was used to express are difficult and complex ones, and partly because Philo's own thought is also profound and complex, it is difficult to give a clear and coherent statement of Philo's thought in this area". Williamson even adds parenthetically "if indeed it can be said that he had a single Logos doctrine". In stating that "one god there is", Xenophanes reasoned that it was "contrary to divine law" that gods should be ruled by another god since it was contradictory that "gods should have masters". (Hussey, p. 13-14) But in attempting to imagine how the one god interacts with and brings order to the world, did the Greeks simply replace "the gods" with the logos? If that is the case, then why should we give the logos any more credence then we would "the gods"?
That said, John's use of the term logos would certainly have been familiar to his Greek-speaking audience. When Jesus said that we must be born "from above", someone familiar with Stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius, could well have responded with "what is born of the earth to the earth returns; but what is born from above, to heaven returns". But John's gospel would not have said too much unfamiliar to a Jewish audience, either. Frank Kermode in his essay on John's gospel in The Literary Guide to the Bible, mentions the times that John alluded to Scriptural texts without acknowledging them. References to sheep and shepherds, Kermode writes, are derived from Ezekiel 34, "but John does not say so, preferring to work the allusions into a highly developed parable . . in which Jesus himself is (ego eimi) shepherd . ." The parable of the vine in John 15 "is adapted without acknowledgment from Psalm 80". As Bert Schlossberg said, such unacknowledged allusions may have been noticed by a Gentile who was interested in Judaism. But a Jew would no doubt notice it. Similarly, such a Gentile and a Jew would have noticed a similarity between Philo's use of the term logos, and John's.
Seeing how the LXX translated the "word" of God in the Hebrew text as the logos of God prompted Philo to use the term as well, according to Williamson. But Philo would have also been aware that the idea of the logos mirrored the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God had many of the same "attributes and functions" as the logos of God, as found in the Hebrew text at Psalm 104:24, and Proverbs 3:19. But it was also in Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon where the qualities of Wisdom could be compared with the logos. In the Wisdom of Solomon we read that Wisdom is the "fashioner of all things"; "the breath of the power of God". (7:22, 24-25) But what made the logos win out over wisdom was most likely that logos is masculine, while wisdom - sophia - is feminine, making it "much more useful because of its masculinity to both Jewish and Christian writers in the first century AD" - according to Williamson (p. 104-5) If John was one of those first century writers so influenced, then it is easy to see how his reading of the Wisdom of Solomon 9:15 - substituting logos for wisdom - could have influenced his gospel: "For a perishable body weighs down the soul, And its earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind". In his gospel, verse 1:14, John wrote that the logos became flesh, and "pitched its tent" among us. John may have been communicating to both a Greek and Jewish audience in terms that they would understand. But he was also deeply influenced by both the Greek and Jewish world in which he lived, and which helped shape his gospel. - Danielitld