John’s World: The Logos and the Jewish Recentering

Season 2 · Episode 20

Full episode description

The Gospel of John was not invented from nothing. It was assembled from three currents the author found ready to hand. A polytheistic Greek city where every street had a god. A Jewish Wisdom tradition that had been developing for centuries. an Hebrew framework that the gospel takes seriously and then radically recentres around one figure.

Part 1 walks the intellectual world John drew from:

• the city of Ephesus, the likely setting of the Johannine community, saturated with the cult of Artemis and the philosophical schools of the eastern empire
• the Wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, where Wisdom is a divine figure present at creation, beloved of God, sent into the world
• the Logos concept from Stoic and Platonic thought, where the divine principle ordered the universe
• the prologue of John 1, where Wisdom and Logos are fused, and the Word becomes flesh
• the Jewish framework that the gospel both honours and breaks, taking the symbols of the Temple, the festivals, and the prophets and recentring them on one figure
• the radical claim that the God of the Hebrew Bible was, and is, fully present in a Galilean teacher who was killed by Rome

This is the most ambitious theological move in the New Testament. It is also the move that makes Christianity philosophically portable across the Greco-Roman world. The Logos is a category educated pagans already knew. The flesh is the scandal that made the category Christian.

Part 2 will follow what John’s community produces. The Spirit. The persecution. The fracture.

Not from tradition. From evidence.