I never did thank you for your kind words above, but I remember that they made that particular day for me.

Here is an article by Kenneth S. Wuest's Studies in the Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament for the English Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1976.) It is entitled 'Word,' and appears courtesy of my recently acquired scanner and some OCR software - TextBridgePro, version (I think) 8.something. Sure beats retyping stuff.

vM

WORD. The Lord Jesus is called THE WORD in John 1:1, 14; I John 1:1, 5:7; Rev. 19:13. In John 1:1 we have the preexistence of the Word, His fellowship with God the Father in His preincarnate state, and His absolute deity. In John :14 the incarnation of the Word is in view. I John 1:1 speaks of the things which the disciples heard and saw with reference to the earthly life of the Word. In I John 5:7, the name “The Word” is used as a designation of our Lord in connection with the names Father and Spirit. In Rev. 19:13 the descending Conqueror is called The Word.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the meaning and usage of the Greek word logos which is translated word in these passages, and thus come to understand its significance when used as a name of our Lord.

In classical Greek logos meant “the word or outward form by which the inward thought is expressed and made known,” or “the inward thought or reason itself.” Logos never meant in classical Greek a word in the grammatical sense as the mere name of a thing, but rather the thing referred to, the material, not the formal part. It also referred to the power of the mind which is manifested in speech, also to the reason. For instance, it is found in the phrase, “agreeably to reason.” It meant “examination by reason, reflection,” as opposed to “thoughtlessness, rashness.” It is used in the phrase “to allow himself reflection.” It was used in the sense of the esteem or regard one may have for another. The word is found in the phrase, “to be of no account or repute with one;” also in the phrase, “to make one of account;” also in the phrase “to make account,” that is, to put a value on a person or thing. These classical uses of logos provide us with a background and basis upon which to study its New Testament usage.

Cremer commences his discussion of logos by stating the fact that the Greek language has three words, hrema, onoma, and epos which designate a word in its grammatical sense, a function which logos does not have. He says that logos is used of the living spoken word, “the word not in its outward form, but with reference to the thought connected with the form, ... in short, not the word of language, but of conversation, of discourse; not the word as a part of speech, but the word as part of what is uttered.”

Cremer finds the Johannine usage of logos as a name of the Lord Jesus to be in “perfect accord with the progress of God’s gracious revelation in the Old Testament,” and that “John’s use of the term is the appropriate culmination of the view presented in other parts of the N.T., of the word of God, denoting . . . the mystery of Christ.” He says that the term “the word of the Lord” in the O.T., refers to the Lord Jesus in His preincarnate state. In Jer. 1:4,5, we have, “Then the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” Two acts which clearly imply personality, forming and knowing, are predicated of the Word of the Lord. Cremer quotes Neuman on Jer. 1:2 as follows; “The word of Go4 the self-revelation of the eternal Godhead from eternity in the Word, is the source and principle of all prophetic words; therein they have their divine basis.” He states that the Aramaic paraphrase of Numbers 7:89 according to the Targums is, “The Word spoke with him from off the mercy seat.” Cremer says, “God Himself is the word insofar as the word is the medium of His revelation of Himself, and the word, though personality and hypostasis are not yet attributed to it, occupies a middle place between God and man. - .. That this representation was included in the Jewish idea of the Messiah, is clear from Gen. 49:18 where the Jerusalem Targum has, ‘1 have waited, not for liberation through Sampson or Gideon, but for salvation through Thy Word.’”

This O.T., foregleam of the Lord Jesus as The Word, comes to full expression in the Logos of John in the N.T. The Lord Jesus in John’s writings is the Logos in that He is “the representative and expression of what God has to say to the world, in whom and by whom God’s mind and purposes towards the world find their expression” (Cremer).

The word logos was already in use among the Greeks before John used it. It was used to denote the principle which maintains order in the world. In connection with the Greek word for “seed” in its adjective form, it was used to express the generative principle or creative force in nature. The term was familiar to Greek philosophy. The word thus being already in use, among the Hebrews in a biblical way, and among the Greeks in a speculative and rather hazy, undefined way, John now proceeds to unfold the true nature of the Logos, Jesus Christ. Vincent quotes Godet as saying in this connection, “To those Hellenists and Hellenistic Jews, on the one hand, who were vainly philosophizing on the relations of the finite and infinite; to those investigators of the letter of the Scriptures, on the other, who speculated about the theocratic revelations, John said, by giving this name Logos to Jesus: ‘The unknown Mediator between God and the world, the knowledge of whom you are striving after, we have seen, heard, and touched. Your philosophical speculations and your scriptural subtleties will never raise you to Him. Believe as we do in Jesus, and you will possess in Him that divine Revealer who engages your thoughts’.”

Vincent says, “As Logos has the double meaning of thought and speech, so Christ is related to God as the word to the idea, the word being not merely a name for the idea, but the idea itself expressed.” He quotes the following from William Austin: “The name Word is most excellently given to our Saviour; for it expresses His nature in one, more than in any others. Therefore St. John, when he names the Person in the Trinity (I John 5:7), chooses rather to call Him Word than Son; for word is a phrase more communicable than son. Son hath only reference to the Father that begot Him; but word may refer to him that conceives it; to him that speaks it; to that which is spoken by it; to the voice that it is clad in; and to the effects it raises in him that hears it. So Christ, as He is the Word, not only refers to His Father that begot Him, and from whom He comes forth, bwt to all the creatures that were made by Him; to the flesh that He took to clothe Him; and to the doctrine He brought and taught, and which lives yet in the hearts of all them that obediently do hear it. He it is that is this Word; and any other, prophet or preacher, he is but a voice (Luke 3:4). Word is an inward conception of the mind; and voice is but a sign of intention. St. John was but a sign, a voice; not worthy to untie the shoe-latchet of this Word. Christ is the inner conception ‘in the bosom of His Father;’ and that is properly the Word. And yet the Word is the intention uttered forth, as well as conceived within; for Christ was no less the Word in the womb of the Virgin, or in the cradle of the manger, or on the altar of the cross, than He was in the beginning, ‘in the bosom of His Father.’ For as the intention departs not from the mind when the word is uttered, so Christ, proceeding from the Father by eternal generation, and after here by birth and incarnation, remains still in Him and with Him in essence; as the intention, which is conceived and born in the mind, remains still with it and in it, though the word be spoken. He is therefore rightly called the Word, both by His coming from, and yet remaining still in, the Father.”