In the Beginning Was the Word

The Opening of John's Gospel

John 1:1 — "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The Greek text reads: En archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος).

"In the Beginning" — En Archē

John opens with a deliberate echo of Genesis 1:1. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) begins: En archē epoiēsen ho theos — "In the beginning God created." John uses the same first two words, en archē (ἐν ἀρχῇ, Strong's G746 for archē).

The Greek archē means "beginning, origin, first cause, ruling principle." It is the word from which English derives archetype and archaeology. In Greek philosophy, archē was a technical term for the fundamental reality underlying existence.

John's opening words therefore work on two levels simultaneously: they point to Genesis 1 (a Jewish reader's frame) and to Greek philosophy (a Hellenistic reader's frame). This dual register is characteristic of the entire Johannine prologue.

"Was" — Ēn

The verb ēn (ἦν) is the imperfect tense of eimi ("to be"). It signals continuous, ongoing existence in the past — not a beginning or a completed action. John does not write "In the beginning the Word came to be" (which would be egeneto). He writes "In the beginning the Word was." The implication: at whatever point one places "the beginning," the Word was already.

This tense choice becomes sharper when egeneto does appear in the prologue. John 1:3 — "All things were made (egeneto) by him." Created things came into being; the Word was.

The Word — Logos

The term John uses is logos (λόγος, Strong's G3056), from legō, "to say, to speak." Its semantic range in koinē Greek is extraordinarily wide:

• Spoken word — a statement, a saying, an utterance.
• Reason, rational principle — the organizing logic of a thing. English "logic" descends from this sense.
• Discourse, argument — a connected line of thought.
• Account, reckoning — a tally, an accounting.

In the philosophical tradition, logos had been a loaded term for centuries before John wrote. The 6th-century-BC philosopher Heraclitus described the logos as the hidden rational order of the cosmos. The Stoics in the 3rd century BC developed this further: the logos spermatikos was the generative rational principle that structured all reality. The 1st-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo used logos to describe an intermediary between the transcendent God of Israel and the created world — a bridge between Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophical categories.

In the Hebrew/Aramaic line of influence, the word of the LORD (davar YHWH) in the Old Testament was both communication and creative agent. Psalm 33:6: "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made." In the Aramaic Targums (Jewish synagogue paraphrases of Scripture), the memra ("word") of God served as a circumlocution for God's active presence.

"With God" — Pros Ton Theon

The preposition pros (πρός) with the accusative means "toward, facing, in relation to." The clause "the Word was pros ton theon" suggests not mere proximity ("next to God") but relational orientation ("face-to-face with God"). The verb is again the imperfect ēn — ongoing, not beginning.

"And the Word Was God" — A Greek Word Order Question

The third clause is famous for its Greek word order: kai theos ēn ho logos — literally, "and God was the Word." Greek is an inflected language, so word order is flexible; here the absence of a definite article before theos (no ho theos) combined with its initial emphatic position conveys qualitative force.

Most grammarians summarize the meaning: the Word shares in the nature/essence of God, while remaining distinguishable from ho theos (the Father) of the second clause. The precise theological implications have been discussed since the earliest centuries of the church, and continue to be — but the grammatical structure itself is what every student of New Testament Greek meets in the first week.

Verse 14: The Word Became Flesh

John 1:14 — "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."

The verb here switches from ēn ("was") to egeneto ("became"). The pre-existent Word became flesh. The Greek sarx (σάρξ) is blunt — "meat, flesh" — and was chosen over more elegant alternatives. John's prologue builds a philosophically dense opening for the claim he is about to narrate across twenty chapters: that this logos is a named person — Jesus Christ (John 1:17).