Sunday/Asimov and Logos

  

Where has Antifa been and why are they back?

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I saw a physician named Baden who said in an interview he was at the Epstein autopsy and he said it was a murder. I can't say why he had so little input.

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Bernie Kosar has been cut loose by the Browns for...gambling.

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Sunday/Asimov and Logos

John opens his gospel, and announces the birth of Christ, echoing Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are grouped together as the ‘Synoptic’ gospels, meaning ‘seeing together’. These three accounts all reflect each other to varying degrees with similar stories and wording, implying a common primary source, the theorized "Q" gospel or document. But the Gospel of John is quite different. Right from those opening words, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, John signaled that his account of Jesus’ life will be treating Jesus as much more than a human being.

‘In the beginning was the Word.’ What does John mean by ‘the Word’? The original Greek text uses 'Logos,' for which ‘the Word’ is the English translation. But ‘the Word’ is only a partial reflection of this densely significant word. This term, ‘the Word," is not found in the Old Testament, and its use in the New Testament is limited to John.

In Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament: 002, Isaac Asimov links John’s ‘In the beginning was the Word’ to the Greek philosophy of Thales of Miletus, who lived in the seventh century BC.

Thales argued that, contrary to the idea that the world was largely erratic and unpredictable in its operations, it was actually subject to rigid laws of nature, and that these laws could be discovered using reason and observation. This is the beginning of both rationalism and empiricism.

This argued that God – or, depending on which belief system you subscribed to, a whole pantheon of gods – created the world upon some clear and knowable principle, and that this principle is constant rather than changeable and arbitrary. One of Thales’ followers, Heraclitus, used the term ‘Logos’ to refer to this rational principle. So, while ‘Logos’ means ‘word,’ it also denotes the entire rational structure of knowledge as Thales and Heraclitus had theorized it.

As the term ‘Logos’ was taken up by more and more philosophers, it came to refer not to some abstract entity but to a thing, even a person: the person who had created this orderly system of knowledge and principle in the world. Logos became personified. This tradition spread beyond the Greek world and was taken up by the Jewish followers of Yahweh, or the Old Testament God. In Jesus’ time, a man named Philo the Jew popularised the term Logos as a reference to the rational aspect of Yahweh.

Thus spake Asimov.

So much for ‘In the beginning was the Word’; but what about the next part of John’s sentence? How was ‘the Word’ with God as well as being God?

According to Asimov, at the time John was writing, there were some philosophers who tried to keep God and Logos separate. Logos was not synonymous with God, but merely one element. God, being spiritual, was removed from the rational and scientific processes of the world: he could not be associated with material things, as an elision of ‘God’ with ‘Logos’ would imply. These philosophers and mystics were known as ‘Gnostics’, from the Greek meaning ‘ to know’.

I'm not so sure about the Gnostics, which is a general term applied to the anti-materialists from the Arians to the Cathars, but the concept and the division of materialism and anti-materialism have always existed here. And language can be uncertainly provocative as well as specific.