Some passages expressly identify the Logos and Wisdom; elsewhere Wisdom is represented as the spouse of God, and again as the mother of the Logos.
Commentary on the Book of Wisdom
So for Philo the Logos was Reason (meaning Ratio) but for the Book of John the Logos was the Son of God as a historical man....as was also the cause for the letters of Paul....in that transition of the Logos the Word of God spoken through a specific Man, got lost the Mother of Logos as Sophia, the wife of God...
The figure of Christ found in the early epistles such as in Paul and
Hebrews is represented as a heavenly cosmic being revealed through
the Hebrew scripture and not known from the revelation of the man
Jesus. Paul received his revelation from the Spirit and not from any
direct experience with a human Jesus.
4. Paul and early authors of the epistles place the death and resurrection
of Christ in a supernatural realm. Their information derives not from
historical events, but is deduced from Hebrew scripture.
The Christ of Paul’s epistles shared many features with the “savior
deities” of ancient “mystery cults” who had performed salvific acts.
7. Paul’s heavenly Christ was modeled on the Hellenistic concept of the
Greek Logos widespread in Philo’s version and of Jewish Wisdom from
the wisdom literature.
resurrection (an extension of the intermediary and suppliant role ascribed by Philo to the Logos). Justin tried to explain the doctrine
of the Logos by philosophical speculation using all available apparatus.
The Johannine Logos is nonphilosophical; it is based on the Old Testament
doctrine of the Word (Davar = Logos) as the expression of God in the creation
and revelation. Analysis of the texts shows that Justin’s interpretation of the
Logos in the religious context is a Philonic one as an intermediate between
transcendent God and man and as an agent of God or Second God, and not
the Stoic one as the universal reason. Justin’s Logos is Jesus Christ/Messiah
understood in the light of a fancy reading of the Old Testament “Word of
God” and Greek philosophy as an individual, pneumatic, and personified
intermediary of God.
One of them
assumes that we are led by Justin to believe that the Logos is immanent in
God as his attribute of reason, in the preexistent, innate, unbegotten form
(whatever it may mean) of the Son of God, similar to the Philonic concept of
immanent God’s Power (later described as the logos endiathetos), which “came
forth” as a separate pneumatic being (logos prophorikos) as the Christ,
same Pneuma (Spirit) that is mentioned in Genesis and is “said
to be borne upon the water.”86 This “begotten” pneumatic Logos/Christ in the
Justin version does not correspond to the concept of the expressed Logos of
Philo or Theophilus, which can be described as the logos prophorikos, because
Philo denied its numerical separation from the Father. Philo did not break with
the Jewish tradition of the “spoken word” as God’s action or expression of his
power. An interpretation of the Logos similar to Philo’s we may find in John’s
(Jn. 1:1) image where there is no generation of the Logos as being or Spirit
(Pneuma), but as a power with God, only it became incarnated in Jesus (i.e.,
it became the man Jesus). So in John’s scheme there was only one generation
of the Son of God – his incarnation or embodiment in the man Jesus who
became Christ/Messiah. In the Justin scheme, on the contrary, there are two
generations: the first before the creation as a being, the Pneumatic Logos, the
Son of God who has the name Christ because of his function and commission,
and the second as his incarnation into Jesus, the man.
Philo maintained that this “generation” of the Logos was eternal in accordance with his concept of eternal creation of the world as well.
Theophilus writes about the Logos:
Therefore God, having his own Logos innate in his own bowels, generated him together(fl. 169–182 AD) was the seventh bishop of Antioch and a significant early Christian apologist, noted for being the first known writer to use the term "Trinity" (trias) to describe God,
with his own Sophia, vomiting him forth before everything else. He used this Logos as
his servant in the things created by him, and through him he made all things. . . . It was
he, Spirit [Pneuma] of God and Beginning and Sophia and Power of the Most High
who came down into the prophets and spoke through them about the creation of the
world and all the rest.
For the divine scripture itself teaches us that Adam said he
“heard the voice.” What is the “voice” but the Logos of God, who is also his Son? –
not as the poets and mythographers describe sons of gods begotten of sexual union,
but as the truth describes the Logos, always innate [ἐνδιάθετον] in the heart of God. . . .
He did not deprive himself of the Logos but generated the Logos and constantly
converses with his Logos.
And in making reference to John (1:1–3), Theophilus continues quite in the
Philonic vein, but the text may imply more than what he intended to say,
namely that the Logos is a pneumatic being:
Since the Logos is God and has derived his nature from God, whenever the Father
of the universe wills to do so he sends him into some place where he is present and
is heard and seen.91
Theophilus thus is ambiguous about Logos and Wisdom (Sophia) and the
Holy Spirit (Pneuma). But he defines his Triad as God the Father, Logos, and
Wisdom and considers these entities as powers rather than as individuals.92
In Justin’s mind the event of the begetting of the Logos was linked with the
creation of the world (the begotten Logos was the instrument of creation), and
the event of the incarnation of the Logos was linked with the beginning of the
Christian people.
Justin is one of the first to develop a doctrine of the preexistent, begotten
Christ who is God, though he acknowledged that not all believers shared this
view:For, my friends, there are some of our race who acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ, but claim that he has a merely human origin. I naturally disagree with such persons, nor would I agree with them even if the majority of those who share my opinions were to say so.94
his, however, escaped the mentality of Justin, the authors of the Gospels, and
the ancient Hellenes, because they understood divine beings as constituted
of a divine substance, pneuma, therefore “physical.” Authors of the Gospels
would not have to assert that Mary was a virgin to avoid sexual connotation
in the generation of Jesus if they had the modern post-Cartesian concept of
“spirit” (modern pneuma). They believed, however, as well as Justin himself, 110
in the pneumatic God and in the real existence of the pneumatic Greek gods
and their modes of operation, and this is why we find a touch of uneasiness
in the description of the generation of Jesus in the Gospels.
pneuma of life (ζωτικὸν πνεῦμα).
Afterward, they will die (be annihilated), their
bodies will cease to exist, and their pneuma, the divine element in the human
soul, will return to its original source.169
There are also contradictory statements in which Justin claims that the
punishment of the souls of the wicked will be eternal, even in the eternal fire.
The demons will be punished in the eternal fire as well.
Dialogue with Trypho V.
169 Ibid., VI
The Son of God and the Spirit are the two substantive modes of divine manifestation in the
historical context, in the body of Christ in the external form and internally in the Spirit.
Platonist Numenius quite evidently exhibits an extraordinary affinity with the thinking of the second-century Christian Apologist Justin Martyr.
For in another fragment Philo seems to make the Logos a source of
wisdom and illuminating power among humans, which later was described by
Numenius as the Third God and among Christians as the Holy Spirit
In one form, the Hebrew Messiah figure was transformed into the cosmic Greek Logos of Numenius (fl. ca. 150) (his doctrine will be described in detail in Chapter 6) by Justin
Martyr (ca. 115–165) (Justin Martyr’s doctrine
Philo’s biblical concept identifying the Logos as the source of Wisdom. Moreover, Wisdom is sent down to earth to illuminate and instruct those who seek it [her] (see Wis.
8:1–21; 10:1–21). Later, this function of Wisdom, distributed among humanity,
will be described by Numenius as the Third God, equivalent to the trinitarian
Holy Spirit.
Once Philo identified the Logos with Wisdom, he ran into a grammatical
problem, for in the Greek language “wisdom” is feminine and “word” is
masculine. Philo solved the problem by indicating that, though Wisdom’s
name is feminine, her function and nature is masculine. Thus, he used the term
“logos” instead of “wisdom” (σοφία). For Philo, the Logos (Wisdom) was an
intermediary agency or God’s faculty between the transcendent creator and
the material world.
second God (or Mind) of Numenius, and the First Power of the God of Philo.
Justin fused these various traditions of the Logos with the function ascribed
to the Son of God and the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) and thus equated the Greek
Logos with his concept of the cosmic Son of God, the Second Pneuma.
Justin’s elaboration on the theme of the spermatic logos is also Numenius.4
We can deduce that Justin assumed
that the soul, as created and living only by the will of God, cannot be a living
principle by itself; but, because it partakes of life, which, according to Justin is
God, by being provided with a part of the “regal mind,” which is also called the
spermatic Logos,159 it is a part of God’s substance, the “pneuma of life” (ζωτικόν
πνεῦμα), if we agree to use this technical Greek term.
The Logos Son is thus a pneumatic effluence from
God, which view is confirmed by Justin in his treatment of the spermatic
Logos. We learn that the First-begotten, the Son, is the Logos and a Spirit
(Pneuma) and the Power of God. More explicitly, and following Philo and
the Middle Platonists directly, Justin teaches us that the Son is also the Power
and the Logos,............
This probably led to the expulsion of the Messianists from the synagogue and formation of
a Johannine community composed of Jewish Christians and Gentile converts subscribing
to the popular teachings of Philo. This resulted in assimilation of more Hellenistic ways
of describing the exalted Messiah and docetizing tendencies generally classified by the
scholars as Gnostic. During this stage the Gospel was written in its first redaction, and also
the Epistles of John were written. In the First Epistle, the author is concerned with the
faith of the believers and the numerical growth of the secessionists (1 Jn. 4:1–6; 2:22–25;
2 Jn. 7–10). In the next, third stage, to counteract these Gnostic tendencies within the
Christian community, the last redactor added a prologue (Jn. 1:1–5) and the additional
passages: John 1:6–18, chapter 6, John 11:1–46, John 12:9–11, chapters 15–17, and John
21:1–23. These additions add several new themes and emphasize the humanity of Jesus,
the real Son of God. The last, or fourth, stage represents dissolution of the community
when secessionists moved during the second century toward docetism, Gnosticism,
Cerinthianism. This would also explain, according to Brown, why the Fourth Gospel was
more frequently cited by the heterodox writers. Raymond E. Brown, The Community
of the Beloved Disciples: The Life, Loves and Hates of an Individual Church in New
Testament Times (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
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