The Word, from the Philosophers to the Gospel

Logos is a Greek word for "word," "reason" or "account," and the Christian doctrine of the Logos is the identification, in the prologue of John's Gospel, of that Word with the eternal Son who becomes incarnate in Jesus: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh" (John 1:1-14).

The term arrived carrying a long philosophical history. Heraclitus had used logos for the rational principle ordering the cosmos; the Stoics developed it into an immanent divine reason pervading all things. In the Hellenistic-Jewish world, Philo of Alexandria fused this with the creative Word of Genesis and the personified Wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures, making the Logos a mediating figure between the transcendent God and the world. John's prologue takes up this freighted word and does something none of the sources had done: it identifies the Logos not with a principle or an intermediary but with a person, who was God, was with God, and entered history as a particular man.