Grace
Theological Journal 4.2 (Spring 1963) 15-24
Copyright © 1963 by Grace
Theological Seminary. Cited with permission.
THE LOGOS CONCEPT
A Critical Monograph on John
1: 1
Abridged by the
Author
EDGAR J.
LOVELADY
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God."
The title
Logos was the chief theological term descriptive of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,
which was applied in the full-flowered Christology of the ancient
church, being in a very
distinct sense the basic content and starting-point of the doctrine of Christ.
And yet Biblically
this title is found only in the Johannine
group of New Testament writings; here in John 1: 1,
in I John 1: 1, and in Revelation 19: 13. Since John
presents Christ as Logos introductory to his
Gospel, he reveals that this title is convenient
and, more than that, absolutely essential to a
proper understanding of the relationship between the pre-existent Son of
God and the historically-
manifested divine revelation in the human life of Jesus. With stately
simplicity John introduces
the Lord Jesus Christ out of the eternal ages, representing Him not
only as the focal point of history,
but also as the expansion of history in relation to creation,
preservation, and revelation in the world.
Picture
yourself as a Jewish Christian familiar with the Book of Beginnings in the
Septuagint"
version. It begins, enarche,
just as in the opening words of John's Gospel. This would suggest John's
acquaintance with the Old Testament in Greek, as well as a conscious effort on
his part, by inspiration,
to take this appropriate and stimulating concept and use it to give
a new genesis account, now laid
bare in conformity with the One Who manifested revelation in its
several forms. This leads us to
several very important questions: What did John mean when he applied this
title to Christ? (And
he clearly did so, as in John 1: 14-18.) And since the idea of the
Logos was a widespread concept
in the ancient world, whence was the origin of this well-known
linguistic expression, and what of
its function in earlier usage?
Therefore it
will be our task to trace the Logos concept in most of its forms in its
historical
development; then to ascertain the extent and the effects of this concept in
its several distinct areas
upon John's identification of the Logos; and finally, to seek to
arrive at various distinctions and
syntheses relative to the problem. Once this has been accomplished, a brief
exegesis of the verse
itself will be undertaken, on the basis of the familiar structural
analysis.
VARIOUS
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE JOHANNINE SOURCE
1. The Philosophical Logos Concept.
The Hellenic concept of the Logos was a doctrine of the Logos
as the Divine Reason: the Logos was the rational principle or
impersonal energy which was responsible
for the founding and organization of the world. Thus the Logos was an
abstraction, not an hypostasis
(a
transliteration of the Greek hupostasis,
"substance," hereafter denoting a real personal subsistence or
person).
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2. The Pagan Gnostic Concept. This
view, held by Bultmann, is that the Logos was a
"mythological
intermediary being" between God and man. Here is an
approach to the Docetic heresy in that this
intermediary being at one time even became man, and saved the world by saving
himself.
3. The
Hebrew “Word” Source" Source. This
is the view that the theological usage of the term
Logos is derived directly either from the
true Old Testament concept of the debhar
Jahweh,
or the Palestinian Aramaic Memra,
in which the outward dynamic expression of the Word
was the chief feature. Of course, we must distinguish between
inspired and uninspired literature,
but
in both cases the same descriptive term "Word" was used as active,
instrumental, creative,
personal, and revelatory in function.
4. The Philonian Source. In short,
Philo's system provided that since God was so far above the
realm of creation, His contact with the world could only have been
through the medium of
intermediate powers, which, for Philo, became personalized
when he replaced the Platonic
term “Ideas” with the Old Testament term "the Word of God,"
using Logos as the Greek
equivalent of that Scriptural form.
5. The “Special Guidance of the Spirit”
View. Here is an opinion which holds
that it is useless
to inquire as to the origin of this idea in the mind of John; we
really have little to do with the
origin of the term; for if we believe that John was one of those men who
had the special guidance
of the Spirit, then the term Logos is applied to Christ by
God Himself, and it becomes us
only to inquire why it is so applied to Him.
6. The Hebrew “Wisdom” Source. J. Rendel Harris takes the prologue of John directly back to
the Wisdom references in Old Testament literature. It is asserted
that there is a connection
between the Logos and the Sophia which makes them practically
interchangeable. Proverbs
8:22-23 sets the stage for this linkage,
going on to elaborate on the activity of this "Wisdom,"
which is parallel in several ways to the Old Testament concept of the
creative Word, becoming
in later Judaism an intermediary personification, a Divine
hypostasis.
THE HISTORICO-LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND
Since the
Idea of the Logos was a concept of widespread usage in oriental-Semitic and
Greek literature both before and
contemporaneous with Christianity, it is not only profitable, but
essential for us to examine some of the actual material which presents the
various facets of the
Logos
concept. Of course, the very archaic forms must be
treated as ultimate sources which hark
back to revelation at creation, which have become corrupted due to the
depravity of human nature,
but which also have survived in one form or another, finally arriving
at the true, though perhaps
incomplete doctrine of the Creative Word in the Old Testament, and at last,
the perfect realization
of this doctrine in the identification made by John: "In the
beginning was the Word."
Some of the
earliest historical notices that we have come from
which in turn became one of the two cradles of civilization. In the
Egyptian cosmogony the divine
THE LOGOS
CONCEPT 17
creative activity was predominant in fashioning the gods and the elements
of heaven and earth
according to divine thought and the sacred oracle. Atum,
or Ptah, or Thoth
(according to historical
period and geographical location) became the "heart and
tongue" of the council of the gods, and
the utterance of the thought in the form of a divine fiat brought
forth the world. From the
Memphite theology comes
this illustrative text:
Ptab the
Great, that is, the heart and tongue of the Ennead; [Ptah]
...who gave birth to
gods;. ..There came into being as the heart
and there came into being as the tongue (something)
in the form of Atum.
The mighty Great One is Ptah, who transmitted [life]
to all gods, as
well as (to) their ka's
through this heart, by which Horus became Ptab, and
through this
tongue, by which Thoth became Ptab.. .And so Ptab was satisfied (or,
"rested"), after he
had made everything, as well as all the
divine order.1
Quite naturally, creation stories such as
this one offer divergences due to locality and time-
sequence, but the patterns and results are practically the same
throughout, although the
methodological symbolisms tend to vary.
This concept
is more forcefully presented in Sumero-Babylonian
thought in the form
of poetry which represented the word of the god as a powerful,
dynamic figure, the extension
of the divine energy in the realm of creation and earthly
affairs. All that the creating deity
had to do was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the
name.2 An Akkadian
hymn to the moon-god Sin portrays the dynamistic aspect of this
concept in
Thou! When
thy word is pronounced in heaven the
Igigi
prostrate themselves.
Thou! When
thy word is pronounced on earth the
Anunnaki kiss the ground.
Thou! When
thy word drifts along in heaven like
the wind
it makes rich the feeding and
drinking of the land.
Thou! When
thy word settles down on the earth
green
vegetation is produced.
Thou! Thy
word makes fat the sheepfold and stall;
it
makes living creatures widespread.
Thou! Thy
word causes truth and justice to be,
so that
the people speak the truth.
Thou! Thy
word which is far away in heaven, which
is
hidden in the earth is something no one sees.
Thou! Who
can comprehend thy word, who can equal it?3
Even apart
from such poetic representations, the Sumerian and Akkadian
terms
Enem and awatu linguistic evidence of the dynamistic association of the
"word."4 The
foregoing factors support our thesis that these ancient peoples conceived
of the divine
word under the image of physical-cosmic power, in which the voice of
the god acts
separately and distinctly as an entity possessing power. We take this as a
strong indication
that the "word" concept is basically of Near Eastern origin,
an oriental development long
before the Greeks launched into their more lauded speculations.
Quite naturally, these pagan references
indicate their own degeneration, since they
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exhibit a vast difference from the Biblical usage, as will be shown presently.
Our position on
matters of common expression in the ancient Near East is that in the
Biblical account the
concept is preserved from error, a factor which does not militate against
the statements of
truth found in profane sources, but which does account for the
differences.
In the
Canaanite literature discovered at the ancient site of
largely parallel to those of
demonstrate his command to men when he re-institutes prosperity on the earth.
He also
reveals his word in the phenomena of nature--whisper of stones, rustling
of trees, roar of
the deep, and celestial music.5 Baal gives forth his voice
from the clouds when he furnishes
rain in the form of a thunderstorm:
When Baal
gives forth his holy voice,
When Baal
keeps discharging the utterance of his lips,
his holy voice shakes the earth,
...the
mountains quake,
a-quiver are...east and west,
the high places of the earth rock.6
The significance of this usage is the poetic
representation given to the voice and speech of Baal in
the active fury of the re-instituted thunderstorm, showing the
conceptual relationship, mythologically
interpreted, between the emanation of Baal's voice and the active forces in
nature. The word of Baal
is not clearly hypostatized as a distinct conceptual being
having personal existence, but this usage
does show the concept of the divine word as more than mere
conversation; it indicates a tendency
of the Oriental mind to conceive of God's relation to the
forces and personages of this world as
being mediated through the almighty word of his voice.
The Hellenic
doctrine of the Logos has been influential in both philosophical and
Christian thought, for it deals with an
attempt to explain and comprehend God's relation to
the world, actually the basis of all religio-philosophical
speculation. And speculation it was,
for the Hellenic impartiality in combining a strong sense of reality
with an equally strong
power of abstraction enabled these Greeks at an early date to recognize
their religious ideas
for what they actually were: creations of artistic imagination.
Thereby they set a world of
ideas in place of a mythological world, a world built up by the
strength of independent human
thought, the Logos, which could claim to explain reality in a natural
way. For Heraclitus,
Logos meant a law, an impersonal law of
change.7 To Anaxagoras Logos was Mind, an
impersonal moving principle.8 Plato conceived the
Logos as the intermediate Demiurge
which God had to form matter from perfect Ideas.9 For the
Stoics, the intelligible structure
of the universe was the Logos: active, creative world-reason,
unfolding the divine plan in
world processes by myriad forms and laws which give individual divine
manifestation to
individual objects and their activities. This pantheistic
concept can be eminently seen in
Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus:
For that we
are Thine offspring; nay, all that in
myriad motion
Lives for
its day on the earth bears one impress--
thy
likeness--upon it. ..
Aye, for thy
conquering hands have a servant of
living fire--
THE LOGOS CONCEPT 19
Sharp is the bolt!--where it falls, Nature shrinks
at the
shock and doth shudder.
Thus thou directest the Word universal
that pulses
through all things...10
Thus in Greek thought there was no
personal transcendent God like the God of the
Old
Testament, much less that of the personalized Logos of the Gospel of John. And
the volatile usage of the word logos by the Hellenes does not
significantly indicate a
dynamistic conception so characteristic of Semitic literature.
The Old
Testament is an ancient book of Near Eastern geographical origin, and
in this sense contains various common conceptions found
generally in "the Fertile
Crescent." But the Hebrews made use
of Near Eastern representations not just to
represent their own views, but as a vehicle to convey truth
by way of illustration,
or for the purposes of aesthetic appreciation. One of these
conceptions which the
Old Testament has utilized for these
purposes is the idea surrounding the powerful
aspect of divine word. But there is an important distinction between the
two groups,
and this is one of form: in the Old Testament the word of Yahweh is
never a mere
force of nature as was the case in surrounding cultures, for the
extra-Biblical gods
were personified forces of nature, while Yahweh was personal,
transcendent, and
moral from the very beginning of Hebrew history; hence the debhar Yahweh is the
function of a conscious, moral personality. In profane Semitic literature
the "word'
of the god was a material, physical principle, while in the Old
Testament the Word
exists in the actuating expression of the transcendent God. This can be
seen in at least
four aspects in the Old Testament: (1) the Creative (Psa. 33:6; 104:7; 148: 1-5); (2)
the Mediatorial-Preservative (Psa. 107:20; 147:15-18; 148:6,8); (3) the Judicial
(Hos. 6:5; Isa. 11:4); and, (4)
the Prophetic (Isa. 9:8; Jer.
33: 14). The two strongest
passages which support an independent personification of the Word as divine
creative
activity are Psalm 33:6; "By the word of Jehovah were the heavens
made, and all the
host of them by the breath of his mouth" (A.S.V.), and Isaiah
55:10,11: "For as the
rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth
not thither, but watereth
the earth, and maketh it bring forth and
bud, and giveth seed to the eater; so shall my word
be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it
shall not return unto me void, but it shall
accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I
sent it." (A.S. V.)
From the
uninspired literature largely dating from the Inter-Testamental
period we are able to discern a departure from the Old Testament
terminology
surrounding the Word. In the canonical writings it was "the Word of
God," while
in these it is simply "the Word," perhaps the result of
yielding to extra-Jewish
pressures in a world that was rapidly becoming cosmopolitanized.
The "Word"
is remarkably hypostatized in the Wisdom.of
Solomon 18: 15, 16:
Thine
all-powerful word leaped from heaven out of
the
royal throne,
A stern warrior, into the midst of the doomed land,
Bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned
commandment;
And standing it filled all things with death;
And while it touched heaven it trode upon the earth.
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This usage
is rather in line with the Aramaic Targumim, which
represented
the acts of God by the personification of his attributes. The reason for this substitution
in the Targumim was the matter of avoiding
the offense of anthropomorphisms, the
possible misinterpretation of the text, and desire of some overly-zealous
Jews to protect
the holiness of God by using terms which designated certain
attributes or aspects of His
personality. To quote Albright, "In Deut.
which is a consuming fire ."11 The Memra
(word) was objectivized as activities in the
terms of a mediator, but at the same time failing to identify the
mediator with the Messiah.
There are
two passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are claimed by some to have
a bearing on the doctrine of creation as found in the Johannine Prologue.12 In spite of
the superficial similarity to the Johannine
passage, the
identical at all because of one major difference: the Dead
Sea Scriptures attribute
creation to God, while John ascribes it to "the Word," Who, in
New Testament theology
is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, distinct from God the Father in
personality, though
not in essence. However, several
Semitic
conception of the dynamic word, at times approaching the Old Testament form.
The
Logos-doctrine was the bedrock of Philo's system, the focal-point of all
his views. He took Hellenic concepts and attempted to synthesize them
with the
Word of the transcendent God found in the
Old Testament. The result was the
Logos as an
intermediary being between God and the created world. His notable
weakness is in oscillating between a personal and impersonal being; that
is, it is
inconsistent to represent, as he does, the Logos as a person
distinct from God
and at the same time as only a property of God actively operating in
the world.
Without further elaboration we can state
confidently that in Philo the Logos differed
from the Logos in John with respect to person, deity, existence,
activity, historical
manifestation, and terminology, discrepancies which militate against the
possibility
that John directly borrowed the concept from Philo.
A POSITIVE
APPROACH TO THE ORIGIN OF THE JOHANNINE CONCEPT
We can
properly approach the problem of the Johannine usage
on the basis of
its alignment with the Semitic, and, more narrowly and
directly, Hebrew expressions.
This is not to minimize the extent to
which John introduced new elements and fresh
interpretation to the Logos concept by means of the
revelation of inspiration and the
historical manifestation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. But in view of
the extensive
quotation of Old Testament Scripture by the Christian authors stimulated by
the guidance
of the Holy Spirit along with their strongly-imbedded
personal familiarity with the
Jewish Scriptures, it is most natural to
look to such a source for the key to John's
employment of the term "”Word” And Christ Himself revealed such a
foundation
when He said to the Jews, “Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think
that in them
ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of
me" (John 5:39,40 A.S.V.).
From the Old
Testament come four lines of teaching which have a bearing on
John's doctrine, and with which the Johannine concept marvellously
agrees. These
are: (1) the Word of the personal God as causative divine formative
energy, responsible
for the present arrangement of the cosmos (Gen. 1); (2) the
appearance of the malach
Yahweh, the
"Angel of the Lord," God's
Messenger of revelation to the patriarchs
and prophets; (3) the activity of the debhar
Yahweh, the
Word of Jehovah," primarily in the Psalms and Prophets; and (4) the
prominent Wisdom passages of Proverbs 8 and Job 28.
This
Christological concept is unintelligible and inexplicable as a Christian
doctrine
outside its rich heritage in God's most ancient inspired revelation: John
interpreted what
he knew of the Word personally in unequivocal conformity with the
Old Testament.
And this thought is suggestive of our
whole approach to the issue: that the supreme
influence in John's mind was the Person of Christ Himself and the
realization that
in this pure and holy life of Christ on earth all of God's purposes
in revelation were
accomplished. This is the conclusion we reach after a study
of John's Gospel and
his other writings: he was simply overwhelmed by the truth
of Christ's message,
and this was explainable on no other grounds than that He in Himself was
the true
message He proclaimed, the very revelation of God, indeed, The Word.
John's
conviction on this matter was further heightened by an acute sensitivity to
the
Old Testament teaching that the Word was
mediator of creation and revelation, a
consideration further supported by other New Testament writers' use of the Old
Testament as
the only authoritative pre-Christian source of doctrine. This assertion
is further borne out by the impact of Christ Himself on other
authors of the New
Testament, along with their comparable
teaching of the eternal pre-existence of
Christ and His ministry in creation and
redemption, which at last becomes the
content of the Christian message: the word of recon-
ciliation.
We would
stress, then, that the Biblical and Personal elements were the
foremost and immediate elements in the development of Johannine Christology,
making the employment of logos emphatically and distinctively a
Christian concept,
and more than that, a revelation by the Spirit of God. And what of
these extra-
Biblical
instances of hypostatical speculation? It
need not be absolutely denied
that John was acquainted with them, and did, indeed, enjoy in their
presentation
a preparation for the final, divinely-inspired view of the Logos, a
preparation
both in the partial truths these speculations contained, and by
way of antithesis
to their erroneous conceptions. But these were only secondary
and subordinate
to the Biblical and Personal aspects, which charged
John's message with that vital,
life-giving energy drawn from the Word Himself, the
"power of God unto
salvation," "even to them that believe on His name."
A BRIEF EXEGESIS OF THE VERSE
The Apostle John forcefully
introduces his theological life of Christ by the
first attribute predicated of the Logos, His Pre-existence, His
Eternity: "In the
beginning was the Word." The similarity of en arche to bere'sit
in Genesis 1: 1 is
prominent, the Genesis account marking the temporal initiation of creation.
By
this identification the writer is saying, "When the act of
creation took place the
Word was." The exact source of
regarding the Word's Eternity of Person is found
in the imperfect en, "was." This construction
features the durative aspect of the
imperfect tense, for" the augment throws linear action
into the past ."13 This
construction thus affirms that the Logos already was existing. prior to the
punctiliar act of
creation, throwing back the concept of the Word's Being
from the impact of creation into timeless eternity. From a
philosophical stand-
point John's construction may be inadequate, for to use en in order to
express
duration and continuance in an area where there is no possibility for such
a
designation (in eternity) would be a categorical contradiction. But the
existential
verb eimi, which designates a thing
as existing as
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distinguished from non-existent, coupled with the durative imperfect, comes as
close to representing pure, eternal Being as it is possible for the
tongue of man to
come in such a succinct statement.
The
second attribute of the Word, that of Equality with God, is
distinguished
by the Personality of the Logos as identified by the
preposition pros: “and the Word
was with God.” It was no accident that this preposition was used, for
the preposition
pros is distinctive above all others in the aspect of close proximity,
“denoting direction
towards a thing or postion and state looking
towards the object. One might correctly
say that this preposition gives the distinct impression of a tendency
toward, a
movement in the direction of, God. It has even been translated as “face to
face with
God.”15
This would require conceiving of a relationship between two persons,
the
one as absolute being, completely independent, sufficient within
Himself, towards
which the other continually tends (en). This fact-to-face
relationship is sustained
by two other passages, Mark 14:49, and II Cor.
5:8. In accord with these usages
Jon specifies the fellowship, and hence
the equality, that exists between the Logos
and God as between persons, and does not consider them as
abstract, metaphysical
concepts. At first glance there might be interpreted a
duality of Deity from this
phrase, or a subordination or creation-emanation from God, superficially
regarded.
John leaves it to the next phrase to
reconcile this problem, and the answer given
there shoes decisively that it is only the Personality of the Word that
is being
considered in this second proposition.
John 1:1 has
long been a battle-ground between orthodox Christians, who
would uphold the doctrine of the Trinity, and
the non-trinitarians,
who by their interpretations exhibit
tendencies toward polytheism,
Unitarianism, or Arianism. The focal point of this controversy is the third
proposition dealing with the Deity,
or Essence of the World stated by John in
this verse: “And the Word was God.” Defective views such as those of
Arianism were long ago rejected
by the common action of Christians who held
to the orthodox position of the Christian
faith. But in spite of this well-known
fact a form of the Arian heresy persists to
this day. The most active exponents
of this teaching are the “International
Bible Students,” more popularly know as
“Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Their view
of the Person of Christ is represented in this
quotation from their recent
literature:
He (the Logos) is the “only begotten Son”
because he is the only one whom God
himself created
directly without the agency or co-operation of any creature (John
A.V.;A.S.;Dy). If the Word Logos was not the first living
creature whom God created,
who, then, is God’s
first created Son, and how has this first living creature been
honored, and used
as the first-made one of the family of God’s sons? We know of no
one but the Word or
Logos.16
The absence
of the article ho with theos
in the predicate nominative construction
of this verse is claimed to support the
foregoing interpretation; that the Logos
was like God as a god, possessing same
of the qualities of God, but not God
Himself or a part of God. 17
To this we would apply the following refutation:
1. If John has wished to convey this impression he could have used theios—
"divine, deity, like God”—already used in II Pet. 1:3 and Acts
17:29.
2. To posit such an intermediary being would be to contradict the
strict
monotheism of Scripture.
THE LOGOS
CONCEPT 23
3. A study of predicate nouns with and
without the article occurring both before
and after the verb (by E.C. Colwell of the
of 112 definite predicates before the verb, only 15 are used with
the article (13%),
while 97 are used without the article (87%). From this and other
discussion he
concludes that word-order and not definiteness is the variable quantum in
passages
of this nature. The exceptions to the general rule that definite predicate
nouns regularly
take the article are: (1) definite predicate nouns which follow the
verb usually take the
article; (2) definite predicate nouns which precede the verb usually lack
the article; (3)
proper names regularly lack the article in the predicate.
4.The principles here outlined are at once destructive of the arguments
advanced by
those who would regard the construction as indefinite. The
study by Colwell shows
that a predicate nominative preceding the verb cannot be translated as
indefinite solely
because of the absence of the article, if the context
suggests that the predicate is definite,
clearly the case here.
5. The statement "and the Word was God”
is not strange in the prologue of the Gospel
that is climaxed by Thomas' confession, "My Lord and my God."
The
proposition as we have interpreted it recognized the Logos as God in the
fullest sense of all that man can conceive of God to be. It resolves the
seeming duality suggested
by the second proposition in affirming that the Word simply. This
leaves us with a paradox
which is irreconcilable by human logic and which stands logically
unresolved in the New
Testament. The Logos is God, and yet He is with God.
That is to say that God and the
Logos are not two beings, and yet they are
also not identical. The obvious conclusion is
that the Logos is God with respect to essence, while He
is distinct with reference to
personality, harmonizing with the testimony of other Scripture on the
distinctions and
unifying factors within the Trinity. We must take these Biblical
statements as they stand,
realizing that on the one hand the Persons of the Godhead are equal in
being, power, and
glory (Matt. 28: 19, II Cor. 13: 14), while
on the other, there exist certain distinctions of
activity and voluntary subordination between them, but these concern their
respective
functions. The primary function of the Logos, as we have seen, was to
reveal the action
of God in this earthly framework by the processes of creation,
preservation, and revelation,
and redemption. And He did all this because of Who He Was!
PARAPHRASE
"At the initiation of time when the
creation of the world took place, the Logos—
(the preexistent,
pre-incarnate Son of God, Who personally intervened in the cosmos
for the purposes of creation, preservation, and revelation)--this
Logos was already with
God the Father, and this same Word was the
essence of God in the most absolute sense."
` DOCUMENTATION
1.John A. Wilson, "The theology of
the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard (
2. S. N. Kramer, "Sumerian Theology
and Ethics, " The Harvard Theological Review,
XLIX (January 1954), pp. 53, 54.
3. Ibid., p. 50.
4. W. F. Albright From the Stone Age to Christianity
(Doubleday), p. 195
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5. H. L.Ginsberg,
"Poems about Baal and Anath," Religions
of the Ancient Near East, ed.
Isaac Mendelsohn (Liberal Arts Press), p. 245.
6. Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis(Doubleday), p. 197.
7. Gordon H. Clark, Thales to Dewey
(Houghton Mifflin), p. 19.
8. Ibid., p. 34.
9. Ibid, p. 94.
10. Frederick Mayer, A History of
Ancient & Medieval Philosophy (American book
pp.228. 229.
11. Albright,,op. cit., p. 372.
12. Theodor H. Gaster, The
13. James H. Moulton, A
Grammar of N.T. Greek (Clark), Vol. I, p. 128.
14. Joseph H. Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon(
15. A. T. Robertson, .A Grammar of the
Greek N.T.. (Broadman), p. 623. C
16. "The Word"--Who is He?
According to John (
17. Ibid., pp. 56, 58.
18. E.C. Colwell, "A Definite Rule
for the Use of the Article in the Greek N. T.," Reprint
from Journal of Biblical Literature, LII
(1933), p. 9.
This
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