Words are interesting and powerful things. We constantly use them to communicate with one another and to formulate our thoughts. Their power lies in their meaning. What is curious about words and languages is that words can change in meaning over time and mean one thing in one language and something else in another language. For example, take the word “piano”. In English, when we use the word “piano”, we usually refer to a musical instrument with black and white keys, but how did that particular instrument get that name. The word “piano” comes from the Italian language. But, what is odd, is if you use the word “piano” in Italian you are not referring to a musical instrument, because in Italian that musical instrument is a “pianoforte”. In English the word is truncated and loses the meaning it had in Italian. In Italian, if your kids are playing loudly you say to them “piano”, meaning “quiet down”, which hints at the Italian meaning for “pianoforte”. Piano meaning quiet, forte meaning loud. A piano is a quiet-loud. If your kids are running around a pool, you might say to them “piano”, meaning slow down. Or if you say, that road is piano, piano means smooth or level. Or if you go into a store and ask to see a piano, you will be shown shelving, because shelving is smooth and level. In English “piano” has a pretty specific and limited meaning, but in Italian it has a different meaning and is much broader.
Now, if I say to you “the Word” or “the Word of God”, we likely think of the Bible, but in Scripture when we read “logos”, or “the word”, most often it is not referring to Scripture. In the early church of the first 300 years, when we read the church fathers, such as Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr or Irenaeus and they use “logos”, they most often were referring not to Scripture, but to Jesus.
In the 27 books of the New Testament, the Greek word “logos” is utilized over 330 times. Logos is found in every book of the New Testament except for Paul’s short letter to Philemon and the short letter known as Jude. In all the other 25 books of the New Testament we find occurrences of “logos”, with a range of meanings.
Let’s start with the usage in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The vast majority the uses of “logos” are related to Jesus’ words or teaching. See Matthew 7:28, where Jesus’ words/logos were used in the context of Jesus’ teaching. This usage was repeated in each of the Gospels. In the Sermon on the Mount the word is used to describe the cause or reason for a man to divorce his wife, where the English word “reason” is used to translate “logos” (Matthew 5:32).
Logos is also used to communicate an authoritative word, such as when the Centurion asked Jesus to say the word/logos and his servant would be healed. (Matthew 8:8). Again a few verses later in Matthew 8:16, Jesus cast out a demon from the man in the Gaderenes with a word/logos.
Later in Matthew logos is also used in conjunction with rhema, another Greek word translated as “word”, when Jesus says that we will be judged for every careless word/rhema we will give an accounting/logos. (Matthew 12:36). Logos here refers not so much to the word that was spoken but to the accounting for why it was spoken.
Occasionally logos is used in reference to the Old Testament as when Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for rendering ineffective the Word of God with their traditions (Mark 7:13). Luke also equated logos with a prophetic word when he used it in reference to the prophecy out of Isaiah that John the Baptist was a voice calling in the desert (Luke 3:4). Jesus declared the eternity of his words, when he declared that heaven and earth will pass away but his words will never pass away (Matthew 24:35).
In Acts the shift is made where logos is used in reference to the Apostles’ teaching, specifically the gospel. After Saul persecuted the church and the believers went out and preached the word/logos (Acts 8:4). The idea was that the apostles proclaimed the logos that Jesus had taught to them for the purpose of salvation and grace. Luke used it also to refer to his previous work, the gospel of Luke (Acts 1:1).
Due to the apostles preaching, Luke wrote that the word of God increased (Acts 6:7 and 12:24). This doesn’t mean that the content of the Gospel changed, but that more and more responded and the influence of the logos increased, implying the development of a community of believers built upon the logos. Like in the Gospels it was also used to refer to the prophetic declarations recorded in the Old Testament (Acts 15:15).
While John also used logos in ways similar to the other New Testament writers, he is the only one to tie logos to the person of Jesus. He does so in all of his writings, the Gospel of John, his 3 letters 1, 2, and 3 John as well as in Revelation. The wording of John 1:1 is fascinating and in my opinion the change of word order in English is unfortunate. English maintains a parallelism, the word was with God, the word was God. However, in Greek it literally reads, the word was with the God and God was the word. This is where the English word order is unfortunate, because the way John wrote it he linked all three references to logos to one and the same God. In Revelation 19:13, John equates “the word of God”, as Jesus’ name. Not only was Jesus himself the word, but the word was also his name.
So if the early church used “logos” to refer to Jesus, why do we use it to refer to the Bible? It is a good question. As time went on several hundred years later, the early church started compiling apostolic teaching and recognizing certain letters as Scripture, which with the translation of the Old Testament Scriptures from Greek into Latin and utilized the 27 books of the current New Testament. This volume in Latin was referred to as “The Vulgate”, which was the official and only recognized version of the Bible by the Roman Catholic Church until the Church Council Vatican II in the early 60’s. When the Vulgate was completed the Church began referring to it as the Holy Scriptures, and the Holy Word of God, which is how we refer to the Bible today, “The Word” or “the Word of God”.
So why is it important? Peter tells us in 1 Peter 3:15 that we should always be ready to give a defense for our faith. That means we should be able to explain why we believe what we believe. Even during Jesus’ own lifetime, the Jews were accepting of the life lessons Jesus taught, but they rejected Jesus himself. That same pattern of behavior has been repeated throughout history. During the Enlightenment, men such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as well as the French philosopher Voltaire, accepted Jesus’ morality and ethics, but rejected Jesus. Today, progressives who teach that we must care for the oppressed express Jesus’ moral teaching, but they reject Jesus himself. Christianity, however, merges the person of Jesus with his teaching in the word, logos. You can’t have salvation and reconciliation with God without both bending the knee to Jesus and following his teaching.
David Freitag 