In the last two posts we explored two facets of preexistence. In the first case, we looked at the claim to preexistence itself, and concluded (1) that it did not amount to a claim to divinity and (2) that it is most likely a poetic way of expressing faith in God’s sovereignty over human history. In the second case, we looked at the wisdom traditions in the background of the New Testament identification of Jesus with personified Wisdom and the attribution to him of agency in creation. We concluded (1) that at best this attributes to Jesus the status of first creature (an attribution that is explicit in Col 1:15), (2) that the idea of Jesus as “wisdom incarnate” was a way of comparing his significance to that of Torah, (3) that Jesus is not the only figure of whom it was said that the holy spirit (of wisdom) came to him at conception or came to indwell him, and though Jesus’ identification with wisdom is characterized as unique, that is owed to his role as eschatological agent of judgment, not to his alleged divinity, and finally, (4) that because the language of personified wisdom elsewhere in the Bible is patently metaphorical, we should not understand Jesus’ identification with personified wisdom in a literal sense; instead we should recognize in such language the claim that all of God’s intentions for his creation have been displayed in Jesus and are being brought to fruition through his agency as representative human.

Before we move on to address directly the significant preexistence (or alleged preexistence) texts in the New Testament (John 1:1-14; Col 1:15-20; Phil 2:5-11; Heb 1:1-4), we need to explore one more facet of this preexistence motif—that of the Logos, or Word. As many are aware, the concept of the Logos is multifaceted and very complex. The word “Word” itself takes a lot of diverse meanings in Greek and in Hebrew. On the one hand, Logos can just be understood as the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word dabar, which can sometimes be synonymous with wisdom. The “word” God speaks is the word of wisdom, so often they are almost interchangeable. Indeed, as we saw in the last post, John’s description of the Logos in his prologue parallels the Jewish wisdom tradition on numerous points (and we didn’t even examine half of the parallels).

Logos can also mean “plan,” or “calculation.” This, in fact, is how Logos was first used by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus in 600 BCE. It can and often does mean “reason” in the second temple period, in reference to the logic or motive behind an action. It was often used in Greek philosophy as a designation for the logic or order of the universe. In this very plain sense, the idea of “logos becoming flesh” could very simply be a way of saying that a plan or intention came into effect.

In this post, we are going to look only at the Jewish philosopher/theologian Philo, and examine the way he understands and uses Logos in his own attempts to make his religion intelligible to the same Hellenistic world from which Christianity was simultaneously emerging. We will see that for Philo, the Logos (1) is created, (2) is an archangel, (3) can be called “god,” (4) is the image of God after the likeness of which Adam was made, (5) is the firstborn of all creation, (6) is an intermediary between God and humanity, and (7) is the ideal “man of God.”

The Logos of God is over all the world, and is the most ancient, and the most universal of all things that are created. (Philo, Allegorical Interpretation, 3:175)

Here we see a motif we have encountered before in numerous places. Wisdom is said to have been the oldest of all God’s creatures, and is over all the earth. In another place, it is claimed that Jacob was God’s first creature, and has preeminent status over all creation. The same is said of Jesus in Colossians 1:15ff. Here it is unmistakable again. For Philo, it is the Logos that is God’s first creature, the creature which by virtue of its “firstborn” status is said to be “over all the world.”

And even if there be not as yet anyone who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labor earnestly to be adorned according to his firstborn Logos, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Logos, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel. (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 146)

Here the Logos is identified as the oldest of the angels. Philo identifies the Logos as the angel who bears the name of God in Exod 23:20-21. Philo also identifies the Logos as “he who sees Israel,” in parallel to the tradition in the Apocalypse of Abraham about the angel Yahoel who, in bearing the divine names, has “been appointed to be with [Abraham] and with the generation prepared to spring from [Abraham].” Philo also identifies the Logos as “man according to God’s image,” about which we will have more to say later.

This now being a symbol of a perfect disposition, thinks God himself his nourisher, and not the Logos: and he speaks of the angel, which is the Logos, as the physician of his maladies, in this speaking most naturally. (Philo, Allegorical Interpretation, 3:177)

Here Philo speaks of the Logos as an angel through whom God cares for his elect.

And the Father who created the universe has given to his archangelic and most ancient Logos a pre-eminent gift, to stand on the confines of both, and separated that which had been created from the Creator. And this same Logos is continually a suppliant to the immortal God on behalf of the mortal race, which is exposed to affliction and misery; and is also the ambassador sent by the Ruler of all, to the subject race. And the Logos rejoices in the gift, and, exulting in it, announces it and boasts of it, saying, “And I stood in the midst between the Lord and you; neither being uncreated as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities, like a hostage, as it were, to both parties.” (Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things, 205-206)

As an aside, note first that “Father” here is applied to God without any reference to a “Son.” As argued earlier, the “Father/Son” motif in the New Testament has its home in the royalty tradition in Israelite religion and in the ancient near east more broadly. But it’s important to note that “Father” is an appellation for God that appears regularly outside of the context of a “Father/Son” relationship, and so we should not read occurrences of “God the Father” in the New Testament as implying the divinity of the Son (“God the Son” is a construction which never occurs). God is simply called Father. It should not be read as a crude, proto-trinitarian formula. Digression concluded.

Note again in the above quotation that the Logos is identified as an archangel. The Father of the universe gave a gift to his most ancient creature, the Logos, namely, the gift of mediation between Creator and created. The Logos is here described in language familiar to Christians. The Logos is said to intercede to the Father on behalf of mortals. Moreover, the Logos is in some way “an ambassador sent” by God to humankind. As Jesus is described in the New Testament, the Logos is here described as the appointed mediator between humans and God. Interestingly, the Logos says of himself that he is “not uncreated like God,” but neither is he “created as you.” Instead, he is “somewhere in the midst between these two extremities.” This should not be taken to mean that the Logos is not created. As we have seen above, Philo has clearly stated on numerous occasions that the Logos is created, the first of God’s creatures. “Nor yet created as you” does not mean that the Logos is not created, but that he is not created in the same way as humankind was created. In other words, the existence of the Logos is incorporeal, or spiritual, not physical like human beings. The meaning of this will become clearer as we proceed. But first, here is another text elucidating Philo’s belief that the Logos plays a mediatorial role between God and humankind:

But Melchizedek shall bring forward wine instead of water, and shall give your souls to drink, and shall cheer them with unmixed wine, in order that they may be wholly occupied with a divine intoxication, more sober than sobriety itself. For the Logos is a priest, having as its inheritance the true God, and entertaining lofty and sublime and magnificent ideas about him, “for he is the priest of the most high God” [Gen 14:18]. (Philo, Allegorical Interpretation, 3:82)

Just as the epistle to the Hebrews compares Jesus’ high priestly function to that of Melchizedek, so too does Philo with the Logos. (Note also the parallel imagery of turning water into wine, here as in John chapter two. Philo, who died long before the Gospel of John was written, sure seems to have a lot in common with John. What probably happened is John and Philo were roommates, and John had this whole gospel written, and then Philo stole John’s notes and published first, so John had to wait like forty years to publish, so the material could be considered fresh again. I hate it when that happens! Three screenplays I wrote in 2002 have since been made into movies.) We recall Philo’s words (quoted in an earlier post) from another of his books:

If one is to speak the real truth, he [the high priest] is a sort of nature bordering on God, inferior indeed to him, but superior to man; “for when,” the scriptures say, “the high priest goes into the Holy of Holies he will not be a man” [Lev 16:17]. What then will he be if he is not a man? Will he be a God? I would not venture to say that (for the chief prophet, Moses, did receive the inheritance of this name while he was still in Egypt, being called “the god of Pharaoh” [Exod 7:1]) nor again is he man, but he touches both these extremities as if he touched both the feet and the head. (Philo, On Dreams, 2:188-189)

Compare this with Philo’s description of the Logos in the first person: “And I stood in the midst between the Lord and you; neither being uncreated as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities.” This parallel coupled with the fact that in Allegorical Interpretation 3:82 Philo explicitly refers to the Logos as a priest indicates that in Philo’s mind, he saw the high priest of Israel as in some sense an embodiment of the Logos, at the very least functionally so.

Now let us turn our attention directly to a theme we have met in passing at least twice so far. Earlier we saw that among the names Philo could give to the Logos was “man according to God’s image.” We also noted that although it is clear that for Philo, the Logos is not uncreated like God, yet the Logos is yet not created as humans, and we explained that this meant the Logos is incorporeal whereas humans are corporeal: the Logos is not created in the same manner as humans. We will now explore several passages in which Philo explains what this means. In short, for Philo, the Logos is the ideal human, in a Platonic sense. Human beings below are shadows and copies of the Logos, who is in turn a copy of God. For Philo, humankind was made “after God’s image.” Well, “God’s image” is the Logos. The Logos is the image of God. For Philo, it was necessary for God to create the Logos because

no mortal thing could have been formed on the similitude of the supreme Father of the universe, but only after the pattern of the second god, who is the Logos of the supreme Being; since it is fitting that the rational soul of man should bear it the type of the divine Logos; since in his first Logos, God is superior to the most rational possible nature. And he [God] who is superior to the [second] Logos holds his rank in a better and most singular pre-eminence, and how could the creature possibly exhibit a likeness of him in himself? (Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, 2:62)

The language is convoluted, but in a nutshell, Philo is saying that God is too great to make humankind like himself; so God created a copy of himself (the Logos), and from that copy, God made another copy (Adam). The Logos is therefore both the image of God and the model human. (And yet, the Logos is also an archangel, or as Philo put it above, “the second god.”) Because Philo is a Platonist, the Logos is very real. In fact, the Logos is more real than humankind. The Logos is what humankind hopes to attain to. It is the perfect “man of God.”

In On Flight and Finding 72 and Allegorical Interpretation 1:31, Philo identifies the Logos as the ideal, heavenly version of man, created by God when God created earthly man. The heavenly man, or Logos, is the image of God after the pattern of which Adam was created. This is stated most clearly in Questions and Answers on Genesis 1:4:

What is the man who was created? And how is that man distinguished who was made after the image of God? This man was created as perceptible to the senses, and in the similitude of a being [the Logos] appreciable only by the intellect; but he who in respect of his form is intellectual and incorporeal, is the similitude of the archetypal model as to appearance, and he is the form of the principal character; but this is the Logos of God, the first beginning of all things, the original species or the archetypal idea, the first measure of the universe. Moreover, that man who was to be created as a vessel is formed by a potter, was formed out of dust and clay as far as his body was concerned; but he received his soul by God breathing the breath of life into his face, so that the temperament of his nature was combined of what was corruptible and of what was incorruptible. But the other man [the Logos], he who is only so in form, is found to be unalloyed without any mixture proceeding from an invisible, simple, and transparent nature.

Similarly:

In reference to which I admire those who say, “We are all one man’s sons, we are men of peace,” because of their well-adapted agreement; since how, I should say, could you, O excellent men, avoid being grieved at war, and delighted in peace, being the sons of one and the same father, and he not mortal but immortal, the man of God, who being the Logos of the everlasting God, is of necessity himself also immortal. (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 41)

Here the Logos is identified as “immortal” (as Adam was intended to be). He is identified as “the man of God,” because he is the ideal human form. He is also identified as the “father” of all humans. If we were to turn this into a Lukan genealogy then, it would conclude thus: “son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of the Logos, son of God.” Again:

One of them [the Logos] being the archetypal pattern and above us, and the other [Adam] being the copy of the former and abiding among us. And Moses [Genesis] calls the one which is above us the image of God, and the one which abides among us as the impression of that image, “For,” says he, “God made man,” not an image, but “after that image.” So that the mind which is in each of us, which is in reality and truth the man, is a third image proceeding from the Creator. But the intermediate one [the Logos] is a model of the one [Adam] and a copy of the other [God].” (Philo, Who Is the Heir of Divine Things, 230-31)

And finally:

I have also heard of one of the companions of Moses having uttered such a speech as this: “Behold, a man whose name is the East!” A very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul; but if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being [the Logos] who in no respect differs from the divine image, you will then agree that the name of the east has been given to him with great felicity. For the Father of the universe has caused him to spring up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn; and he who is thus born, imitating the ways of his Father, has formed such and such species [humankind], looking to his archetypal patterns. (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 62-63)

Compare again the language of Philo with that of Paul. The Logos is the “firstborn,” the “eldest son,” who is “the divine image.” And Paul: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15). Without arguing for Philo’s direct influence on Paul, it is striking that two Jews trained in Hellenistic philosophy came to speak so similarly about such elusive concepts. Both believed in an intermediary figure who was (1) created by God,¹ (2) subordinate to God,² (3) a perfect image of God,³ and (4) in a significant sense, fully human.⁴ The similarities between Philo and John are no less striking, but John’s prologue will be the subject of the next post.

To conclude, we will just reiterate some of Philo’s descriptions of the Logos. For Philo, the Logos (1) is created, (2) is an archangel, (3) can be called “god,” (4) is the image of God after the likeness of which Adam was made, (5) is the firstborn of all creation, (6) is an intermediary between God and humanity, and (7) is the ideal “man of God.” There are more, of course, but seven is a good number to end on. (A sentence ending with a preposition, however, is not.)

1. Alleg. Int. 3:175; Col 1:15 [BACK]
2. Quest. Gen. 2:62; 1 Cor 15:28 [BACK]
3. Conf. Tong. 62; Col 2:9 [BACK]
4. Conf. Tong. 146; Rom 5:19 [BACK]