Stewart D. F. Salmond and Alexander J. Grieve

“ The appearances recorded in the Old Testament are manifestations of the Logos, and the knowledge of God possessed by the great leaders and teachers of Israel is due to the same source; (2) as the agency whereby man, enmeshed by illusion, lays hold of the higher spiritual life and rising above his partial point of view participates in the universal reason. The Logos is thus the means of redemption; those who realize its activity being emancipated from the tyranny of circumstance into the freedom of the eternal. ”

“ Much greater stress is laid upon the redemptive than upon the creative function. The latter indeed is glanced at (“All things were made by him”) , merely to provide a link with earlier speculation, but what the writer is concerned about is not the mode in which the world came into being but the spiritual life which resides in the Logos and is communicated by him to men. (3) The idea of λόγος as Reason becomes subordinated to the idea of λόγος as Word, the expression of God’s will and power, the outgoing of the divine energy, life, love and light. ”

“ In all those passages of the Old Testament where anthropomorphic terms are used of God, the Memra is substituted for God. The Memra proceeds from God, and retains the creaturely relation to God. It does not seem to have been identified with the Messiah. ”

“ This distinction between Logos as ratio and Logos as oratio, so much used subsequently by Philo and the Christian fathers, had been so far anticipated by Aristotle’s distinction between the ἔξω λόγος and the λόγος ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ. It forms the point of attachment by which the Logos doctrine connected itself with Christianity. The Logos of the Stoics (q.v.) is a reason in the world gifted with intelligence, and analogous to the reason in man. ”

“ In the Platonic and Aristotelian systems, too, the theory of ideas involved an absolute separation between the material world and the world of higher reality, and though the term Logos is found the conception is vague and undeveloped. With Plato the term selected for the expression of the principle to which the order visible in the universe is due is νοῦς or σοφία, not λόγος. It is in the pseudo-Platonic Epinomis that λόγος appears as a synonym for νοῦς. ”

“ In the Jewish theology God is represented as purely transcendent, having no likeness of nature with man, and making no personal entrance into history. Instead of the immediate relation of God to the world the Targums introduce the ideas of the Mēmrā (word) and the Shechīnā (real presence) . ”

“ It assumes that the Logos idea is familiar in Christian theology, and vividly summarizes the main features of the Philonic conception—the eternal existence of the Logos, its relation to God (πρὸς τὸν θεόν, yet distinct) , its creative, illuminative and redemptive activity. But the adaptation of the idea to John’s account of a historical person involved at least three profound modifications:— (1) the Logos, instead of the abstraction or semi-personification of Philo, becomes fully personified. ”