Posted by Mary Augustina de Franco on July 18, 2004 at 14:55:33
"In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came to be,
not one thing had its being but through him.
All that came to be had life in him
and that life was the light of men,
a light that shines in the dark,
a light that darkness could not overpower."
(Jerusalem Bible)
This passage from the Gospel of St. John represents a great achievement in the Hellenic thought of the first century, inasmuch as the writer of John's Gospel translated key elements of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy into the Christian understanding of a particular human life--that of Jesus of Nazareth--and the Christian experience of that life after death.
The Artistotelian-Platonic assumption of the revelator John is that there is an immutable realm of Word, the form of the thing "with God" that brings matter--"all things (that) cam to be"--into physical existence. The manifestiation of Spirit into earthly form is in essence a Greek creation story. It is a teaching that found its way into Hebrew religious tradition in the first century before Christ.
The writer of John's Gospel was surely familiar with The Book of Wisdom, which is found in the catholic and orthodox canon, but not commonly found in the canon of sacred scripture that follow the King James revision.
The revelator of Wisdom in the first century BC was no doubt a well-educated hellenized Jew--a prophetic predecessor of the revelator John and the ecclesia (community of faith) within which John received his prophetic revelation and to whom the Word of God teaching was given in the first century AD.
The common repository of this written tradition is found in the Essene texts.