The years have passed. I can no longer deceive myself.  The fantasy fades. I am not ageless.   Strangely I’m as awestruck by the hymn that opens the Gospel of John as when in my early 20s.  That has not changed.

In the beginning was the Word.  And the Word was with God,  And the Word was God.

I memorized those lines in New Testament Greek as a college student.  I also memorized the same lines in Japanese when I lived in Japan.  The first verse of John’s Gospel soars, and goes soul-deep with the intimation that one is in touch with something primal, something deep.

The lynch pin of the matter is the term logos, which has no exact translation in English. John uses the term logos in the first verse of his Gospel.

Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) speculated about the meaning of the term. A few fragments survive of what Heraclitus thought as one might imagine.  Like Anaxamander, Thales and others the ancient Greeks speculated that Reality was subject to Reason, —there was a Principle (a logos) underlying everything.

Heraclitus said that there is an underlying structure, a deep meaning to all of experienced reality –of which you and I are for the most part ignorant and unaware.  We are sleep walking, even when awake.  To paraphrase Heraclitus:

“We are ignorant, failing to notice what we do when we are awake, just as we forget what we have done when we are asleep.”  fragment 22B1

So, here in the first 14 verses of the first Chapter of Johns Gospel is the assertion that one man, the nobody-carpenter-from-Nazareth is the-human-expression-of-deep-meaning, the meta connection alluded to by the term Reality. He is “the guy.”  This assertion is analogous to shooting a basketball from the far end of the court at a basket 94 feet away–and making it, all net!

The opening hymn and verses of John’s Gospel launched an outrageous, scandalous proposition into the Greco-Roman society of late antiquity.  The Greeks were accustomed to “gods” as they were removed from the day to day, dwelling on Mt. Olympus.  The “Reason” of the philosophers also was tolerated.  Every culture has academic types, who keep to themselves in the academy.  But to assert that by all accounts, this guy of no status and negligible credentials from Nazareth is the human expression of the logos that underlies everything, is either an absurd joke, or a signal to pay attention….

More later…………