“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So opens John’s Gospel in one of the most theologically dense sentences in Scripture. Christians know these words well. But most have not paused to ask: why did John call Christ the Word (Greek: Logos)? And why does he insist that God created all things through this Word?
Part of the answer involves a multi-century reflection on God’s creation by his Word (“let there be light”). While a fuller answer would include how Greco-Roman culture understands the notion of Word/Logos, I am not focusing on that aspect here.
Instead, I want to point out how John draws on a rich stream of biblical and Jewish reflection on the Word of God and his Wisdom, a tradition rooted in creation and Israel’s wisdom literature. When we trace this pattern of theological reasoning, John 1 begins to look like the culmination of certain threads of thought that theologians had emphasized over the centuries.
Wisdom in creation
The story that I am telling here begins with Proverbs 8, a passage in which Lady Wisdom speaks as a divine figure who co-manages and co-creates the cosmos. In this proverb, Wisdom declares that she existed before creation itself: “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” (Prov 8:22). She was present when God established the heavens and marked out the foundations of the earth. And remarkably, she describes herself as being “beside him, like a master workman” during creation (Prov 8:30).
Proverbs 3:19 makes the connection even more direct: “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens.” God did create in a solitary manner. Instead, he creates by his Wisdom; Wisdom is a divine attribute that somehow stands alongside God in the work of making all things. So God by his own Wisdom creates, and yet as Augustine recognized, God could only have created by his own Wisdom. Without being Wise, God would have been unwise and created without wisdom, which is an absurd notion. But God is Wise, and so by His Wisdom, he creates.
If this is the case, how can Proverbs 8 both speak of an attribute of God and yet distinguish this Wisdom from God? I’ll return to that question shortly. For now, note how the Psalms also speak of God creating by something in him. For example, Psalm 33:6 says, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all the stars by the breath of His mouth,” and 33:9 says, “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood fast.” God here creates by his own Word.
Now combine such passages with Genesis 1, where God creates by speaking: “Let there be light.” God’s Word brings the cosmos into existence. And Genesis 1 tells us that God created an ordered, structured, and intentional universe. In other words, God’s Wisdom ordered the cosmos in creation. So we might say that God’s Word is Wise, just as God is Wise, since the Word proceeds from God.
Ancient Jewish readers noticed something of this pattern. God creates by His Word. God creates by His Wisdom. By now, it should be clear that writers like John began to piece together these Scriptural teachings in light of Christ’s Incarnation.
Wisdom between the Testaments
Between the Old and New Testaments, Jewish writers explored this relation between God and his wisdom or word (or Torah) with increasing sophistication.
The Wisdom of Solomon, written in the first century BC, describes Wisdom thusly: “She is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty… a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis 7:25–26). Wisdom emanates from God, reflects his light, mirrors his work. She is divine, yet somehow distinguishable from the God from whom she proceeds.
Another ancient text, Sirach 24, presents Wisdom speaking in the first person, much like Proverbs 8. But Sirach adds an imprtant qualification. After describing Wisdom’s cosmic role, the text declares: “All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us” (Sir 24:23). God’s Wisdom is his Torah, his instruction, his Word given to Israel. The same Wisdom that ordered creation now addresses God’s people through Scripture.
The Letter of Baruch, written around the same period, makes a similar move. Its hymn to Wisdom concludes with the identification: “She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever” (Bar 4:1). And the Mishnah’s tractate Pirqe Avot, drawing on traditions that predate the New Testament, correlates Wisdom and Torah so closely that one rabbi could say: “If there is no Torah, there is no wisdom; if there is no wisdom, there is no Torah” (m. Avot 3:17).
Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher roughly contemporary with Jesus and Paul, wove these threads together using Greek philosophical vocabulary. He spoke of God’s Logos, his rational Word, as the means by which God created and ordered the cosmos. This Logos was “begotten” of God, the “image of God,” yet distinct from the Father. Philo wasn’t a Christian, but he was working with the same biblical materials that would shape Christian theology.
John and Paul receive Wisdom
When we return to John 1 with this background in view, the prologue’s logic becomes clearer.
- “In the beginning was the Logos,” that is, the Word, the Wisdom, the rational principle by which God creates.
- “The Logos was with God,” he who is distinct, standing with the Father as in Proverbs 8.
- “The Logos was God,” he who is divine, not a creature, sharing the Father’s own divinity.
- “All things were made through him,” and nothing was made apart from him, just as Proverbs and Genesis had taught.
John, therefore, did not invent this relation between God and his Word, but he made at least one important addition. He claims that this Word of God became human. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Wisdom that ordered creation, the Word by which God spoke all things into being, took humanity to Himself in Jesus of Nazareth.
The apostle Paul, who lived in the same intellectual world, calls Christ “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), echoing the Wisdom of Solomon’s description of Wisdom as God’s image. He declares that “in him all things were created” and “in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). He names Christ as the one “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3), and states plainly that Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24).
Both apostles drew on a shared tradition to name what they had encountered in Jesus. And it just so happened that this Logos theology resonated with the intellectual milieu of Greco-Roman philosophy, in which the Logos was sometimes viewed as the rational principle of the universe, such as in Stoicism.
Be Wise
Knowing John’s intellectual background matters for at least two reasons. First, it shows that Christological readings of the Old Testament aren’t arbitrary impositions. When Christians see Christ in Proverbs 8, they’re following a trajectory the text itself initiated, a trajectory that Jewish readers before Christ were already tracing. The apostles discerned Christ in the Wisdom of God’s creative act.
Second, it reminds us that Jesus fulfills not just prophecies about a coming Messiah, but the deepest structures of creation itself. The Wisdom by which God made the heavens is the same Word who took flesh to himself for our salvation. When we know Christ, we meet the one through whom and for whom all things exist, Wisdom itself, the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth.
