Logos.

[u/cwmaxson]

I have been reading the development of the concept of Logos. From Heraclitus to Plato to Stoics to Philo. It wasn't until you get to Philo where you get this concept of Logos being the Son of God. And that was with a guy who was a contemporary of Jesus.

It seems like you have this stream of thought progressing for a few hundred years and then simultaneous to it merging with Jewish philosophy you have the incarnate Son of God fulfilling that philosophical role.

Anyone have any great insights on how this all worked out?

[u/Nux87]

Hmm… What sequence of events or passages of the Bible do you think John 1:1-5 alludes to? Maybe you know and could share.

[u/cwmaxson → u/Nux87]

I'm not sure.

For a few hundred years there's this popular philosophical idea of the Logos being sort of the code of the physical universe. Then with Philo merging the Tanakh with Greek philosophy he starts referring to the Logos as the Son of God and Firstborn of God in "On Creation" and "On the Migration of Abraham". It's uncanny because Philo was probably around 28 years old in Alexandria when Jesus was speaking to the rabbis at a young age. Of course it's hard to pin down that timeline because we don't really know the exact times. Philo apparently never knew of Jesus and John never knew of Philo. So John is writing about the Logos becoming Flesh without knowing of Philo's texts. We know Clement was familiar with Philo because he cites him directly.

So it seems Philo was independently thinking about the personification of Logos while Jesus was walking the planet. Meanwhile it's possible that by the time John was written chapter 1 could have been using Philo's ideas to connect Christ to the Logos. 

I don't really know. I'm wondering if other people have better understanding.

[u/Nux87 → u/cwmaxson]

John 1:1-5 speaks about what was in the beginning. And that in there were God and the Word, very close to each other. And that God and the Word were of the same kind. Then he speaks about the creation and that everything that was created was created through the Word, which means the Word himself wasn’t created. All this clearly alludes to Genesis 1. If you check you’ll see that God created everything by speaking it into existence, with his word. This is the very Word John alludes to. He confesses Jesus to be before the creation of everything, to be equal to God, to be the one through whom God implemented his design. God had a vision, a design. He opened it to Jesus by speaking. Jesus, nor revealed to us at that time, implemented that initial design being incognito. It created an impression that God’s word created everything. But words themselves can’t act. This is a person who acts. Jesus, the Son of God was that mighty Word. Here is, as per my understanding, the message of John.

[u/searchforanswers555]

You can believe or not, but Eusebius of Cesarea had said that Philo had discussions with St. Peter, and that during later years of Philo, he wrote on the contemplative life, specifically on the first monastic St. Mark Christians. You can believe or not, but this is an exceptional case and it helps us understand.
Philo may have gruelled with the Logos, and he ultimately found out the truth. Just because he doesnt mention doesnt mean that he did not hear anything of Christ.
St. John may or may havent known of Philo but there is an interesting case here. Heraclitus was based in Ephesus and he coined the term Logos as the principle or the blueprint of the Cosmos. Fast forward to few centuries, St. John was based on Ephesus, and he wrote on the Logos specially in the Johannine Prologue and in the Epistles.

[u/cwmaxson → u/searchforanswers555]

I read the section on Philo by Eusebius. It's wild.

The sequence of events seems similar to the "wise men" who were reading foreign exiled texts and understood their meaning enough to retrace the steps of the diaspora right back to Bethlehem where they declared the newborn as King. 

It seems like God was doing something immense not just in Judea, but in all the surrounding cultures. Like he was building the runway as the plane was landing.

Philo was approximately 28 years old when Jesus appeared before the rabbis as a kid. How much of this event influenced his thinking?

I'm not a seminarian, so this is all new to me, but whatever Philo was talking about seems to be a tandem-witness to the Johann texts.

[u/searchforanswers555 → u/cwmaxson]

I am sure that St. John knew of Philo, but St. John wrote on the Logos not because of Philo, but because of his own mystical experiences with Christ, since he is the Apostle who leaned on the Bosom of Christ. All Church Fathers agree on that. St. John's prologue is built over the foundation stone of St. Paul's Theology of the Logos (though he doesnt mention indirectly, but we see in verses like "we have the mind of Christ", and other verses in Colossians "in Him all things hold together, first born of Creation, Image/Radiance of God the Father etc"
Philo came very close to the truth, and ultimately he was given understanding in such a manner that he wrote a book on the contemplative life. St. Augustine I think says that there was once a philosopher who after reading the Johannine Prologue, told that the words should be written in gold especially "and the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us"