We have inquired into the meaning of the three sentences of v. 1 without thus far showing any concern for the term around which they all revolve as around a common axis, the term ho logos. We have acted rightly to the degree that we have simply been studying the emphasis of the three sentences and have seen that in none of them does it fall on ho logos. We have also acted rightly to the degree that this concept (as a preliminary survey shows), although it is the subject of the three sentences of v. 1 which are so packed with content, obviously plays for the author the role of a locum tenens. It is simply the provisional designation of a place which something or someone else will later fill. That this apparently chief concept has the character of a quid pro quo will emerge, as we must show, from a correct exposition of v. 2. And it will be unequivocally plain at the very latest by the end of the prologue. In the prologue itself the term will recur only once, although then in the important statement in v. 14. Later, in the rest of the Gospel, it will never even be thought of explicitly. And in the rest of the New Testament there is only one place where it occurs unambiguously in the absolute use of John 1:1, namely, in the difficult verse Rev. 19:13, where it is said of the rider on the white horse that one of the diadems on his head bears his name, the name that no one knows (i.e., understands) except himself, and that this name, which all may read but only he can understand, this ideogram that he alone can solve, is ho logos tou theou. Here again the term holds a place representatively and in temporary concealment for another term, the true one, which the white rider himself knows, which consists of his very existence, as it were, and comes to expression in it. In the Gospel this relation is very clear. Already in the prologue ho logos is a substitute for Jesus Christ. His is the place which at one and the same time is occupied, reserved, and delimited by the predicates which are ascribed to the Logos, by the history which is narrated about him.
But whence and why and in what sense is the term Logos brought in for this purpose? This is the question that we must now answer. It is as well to realize that in asking about the whence and why and in what sense we have two different and not necessarily related questions. Historically and genetically, in asking whence the Logos is the subject of these preparatory statements, we are obviously saying that in using the concept the Evangelist, whether with or without outside stimulation, is borrowing a well-known term current in the popular philosophical and religious vocabulary of his day. That he took it from Philo has for a long time been for modern expositors a formula that supposedly meets all the facts. In opposition to this view both more conservative and more critical research has maintained and admittedly shown that John’s concept of the Logos is in important ways very different from Philo’s and certainly must be traced back to other sources. Again in opposition to this objection F. Overbeck (pp. 368ff.) has laid his finger on the point that Philo and John are very different writers, the one a philosopher, the other an Evangelist, so that the latter might well have adopted the Logos concept of the former and then, unconcerned about the special problems and systematizings of the former, freely used it in his own unphilosophical way and for his own purposes. Finally, investigations that are oriented to the history of religion have gone beyond the whole controversy by noting the role that the concept plays not only in Philo and the earlier and later philosophers of antiquity but also in the piety of the mysteries and in the popular religions of Hellenism. They have pointed out that in the age of Hellenism the name and functions of the Logos were assigned to the Greek Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth, and finally the Zoroastrian and Mandean deities of a personal, semi-personal, or impersonal character, the Mandean deities having been more closely examined only within the last decade. In answering the genetic question we thus face a whole ocean of possibilities within which it is a waste of time to seek the lost drop, i.e., the true source of John. First, we do not know at all in what specific form the Evangelist took over the concept, and second, we do not know to what reconstruction he subjected it when he did adopt it. How then can we know the decisive thing, namely, which of the various concepts he adopted? Especially as we do not know for certain that he did in fact “adopt” his concept, i.e., that he received a push in its direction from outside. Let us be content to assert that this at any rate is far more probable than the assumption that Theodor Zahn is making, if I understand him aright, namely, that with no such push from outside, with no reference to the ambivalent commonplace of his day, the Evangelist was led to the concept by inner necessity.
A more important and productive question is that of the meaning of the concept. In answering this question, of course, we turn, not to Philo or the Mandeans, but exclusively to John himself. That is to say, we rule out intrinsically possible meanings whereby the Logos is essentially and primarily a principle, whether in epistemology or in the metaphysical explanation of the world, e.g., as the supreme idea along the lines of Neoplatonism, as creative and ruling cosmic reason along the lines of Stoicism, or as the power of spirit mediating between God and the material world along the lines of Philo. If Philo in particular was the source of John, then, as Overbeck has shown, John has indeed used this source with a sovereign freedom that renders Philo virtually unrecognizable. The same is true of all the ancient philosophies, worldviews, and religions in which deities as principles of being or knowledge, as cosmic principles, are given the name logos or logoi. For there can be no doubt, as we see unmistakably from the cosmogonic role that is ascribed to the Logos in v. 3 and v. 10, that it is not for the sake of its significance in this regard that the Evangelist has taken up the term. Thus v. 3 recalls the mediating role of the Word in creation, but when we read it in the total context of the prologue it is obviously an episode, a subordinate element in the picture, past which the Evangelist strides on rapidly to his true goal, namely, that the Word is the bearer of life, of the life that was light, the light of humanity in the battle that it has constantly fought with darkness, the Word that today has appeared among us in the flesh, and as monogenēs, as theos, revealed to us the unknown God. No matter where the writer found his catchword, which is perhaps more than a catchword, this is the Johannine Logos: the Logos as the principle of revelation, not of being, as that which challenges all that is and all being by17 the divine address that is directed to humanity from person to person. Looking back at the genetic question, we are forced to say that if in relation to the use that John makes of the Logos concept we have to consider some stimulation from outside, then much more likely possibilities than Philo’s Logos are the Hellenistic concept of the hieros logos, i.e., of sacred and mysterious revelation in the cultus (W. Bauer, op. cit., 8), the Mandean deities, which primarily and essentially are bearers of revelation and are sometimes called “word,” and the Hermes and Thoth speculations and myths of the Greeks and Egyptians. But be that as it may, when we ask why John used the concept ho logos and not, e.g., the sophia of later Jewish speculation, we need not fail to answer. It was certainly not because, as W. Bauer (op. cit., 7) thinks, he wanted to equate the preexistent being about whom he planned to speak with a male person, and hence could not use sophia. Instead, it was because his interest focused on Jesus Christ, the content of his Gospel, for whom in this mysterious provisional way he substitutes this concept in the prologue, and who is for him the Revealer (and strictly only the Revealer according to Bultmann’s view). Everything else pales beside the fact