Apart from the palpably erroneous Trinitarian view of this familiar passage, the interpretation most commonly heard follows more or less these lines:
“The Word” is the eternal Divine Purpose in Christ, foreknown and planned from the very beginning. It was according to this eternal Purpose that all things in the universe came into existence. It embodies the growing light of God’s Revelation to men (through the Law and the Prophets), and came eventually to its fulness in the person of Christ, the Word now made flesh.
It is by this method—finding out how John himself uses the expressions which he employs—that a more exact and much more satisfying understanding of his Logos theme is to be arrived at. If it be investigated what are the precise meanings of such terms as the Word, the beginning, with God, all things, world, the Light, as they occur in John’s writings, the results ought to lead to a fairly exact idea of what John meant in his prologue. It is the more necessary to insist on this method because, as is fully recognized by all students of the New Testament, the apostle John has an idiom all his own. He frequently uses words and phrases with meanings quite different from those found elsewhere in Scripture.
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Author: Harry Whittaker
Keywords: Logos, John's prologue, prologue
Bible reference(s): John 1:1-5
Source: Studies in the Gospels.
Page indexed by: inWORD Bible Software.