The ancient Greek philosophers known as the Stoics had extensive discussions of the divine Logos. The word Logos does mean “word”—as in the thing you speak—but it could carry much deeper and richer connotations and nuances. It is, obviously, the word from which we get the English term logic—and that’s because Logos can also mean reason—as in, “there is a reason for that” and “that view is quite reasonable.” Stoics believed that Logos—reason—was a divine element that infused all of existence. There is, in fact, a logic to the way things are, and if you want to understand this world—and more important, if you want to understand how best to live in this world—then you will seek to understand its underlying logic. As it turns out, this is possible because Logos is not only inherent in nature, it resides in us as human beings. We ourselves have a portion of Logos given to us, and when we apply our minds to the world, we can understand it. If we understand the world, we can see how to live in it. If we follow through on that understanding, we will indeed lead harmonious, peaceful, and enriched lives. But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.
Thinkers who saw themselves standing directly in the line of the great fifth-century BCE Plato took the idea of the Logos in a different direction. In Platonic thinking, there is a sharp divide between spiritual realities and this world of matter. God, in this thinking, is pure spirit. But how can something that is pure spirit have any contact with what is pure matter? For that to happen, some kind of link is needed, some kind of go-between that connects spirit and matter. For Platonists, the Logos is this go-between. The divine Logos is what allows the divine to interact with the nondivine, the spirit with matter.
We have Logos within our material bodies, so we too can connect with the divine, even though we are thoroughly entrenched in the material world. In some sense, the way to happiness and fulfillment is to escape our material attachments and attain to spiritual heights. Among other things, this means that we should not be too attached to the bodies we inhabit. We become attached by enjoying physical pleasures and thinking that pleasure is the ultimate good. But it’s not. Pleasure simply makes us long for more and keeps us attached to matter. We need to transcend matter if we are to find true meaning and fulfillment, and this means accessing the Logos of the universe with that part of the Logos that is within us.
In some respects it was quite simple for Jewish thinkers who were intimately familiar with their scriptures to connect them with some of these Stoic and Platonic philosophical ideas. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates all things by speaking a “word”: “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Creation happened by means of God uttering his Logos. The Logos comes from God, and since it is God’s Logos, in a sense it is God. But once he emits it, it stands apart from God as a distinct entity. This entity was sometimes thought of as a person distinct from God. The Logos came to be seen in some Jewish circles as a hypostasis.
Already in the Hebrew Bible the “word of the Lord” was sometimes identified as the Lord himself (see, for example, 1 Sam. 3:1, 6). In the hands of Philo of Alexandria, who was heavily influenced especially by the Platonic tradition, the Logos became a key factor in understanding both God and the world.
Philo maintained that the Logos was the highest of all beings, the image of God according to which and by which the universe is ordered. God’s Logos was, in particular, the paradigm according to which humans were created. It is easy to see here that Logos is taking on the function also assigned to Wisdom, which was thought to be the creator and ordering factor of all things. In some sense the Logos is in fact “born” of Wisdom. If wisdom is something that people have within themselves, then Logos is the outward manifestation of the wisdom when the person speaks. And so, in this understanding, Wisdom gives birth to Logos, which is, in fact, what Philo himself believed. Moreover, as the mind is to the body, so the Logos is to the world.
Since the Logos is God’s Logos, it is itself divine and can be called by divine names. Thus Philo calls Logos the “image of God” and the “Name of God” and the “firstborn son” (e.g., Agriculture 51).16 In one place he indicates that God “gives the title of ‘God’ to his chief Logos” (Dreams 1.230). Because the Logos is God, and God is God, Philo sometimes speaks of “two gods” and in other places speaks of Logos as “the second God” (Questions on Genesis 2.62). But there is a difference for Philo between “the God” and “a god” (in Greek between o theos—meaning “God”—and theos—meaning “god”). Logos is the latter.
As a divine being apart from God, Logos obviously sounds a lot like the Angel of the Lord discussed at the beginning of this chapter. And in fact, Philo sometimes maintained that Logos was indeed this Angel of the Lord (e.g., Changing of Names 87, Dreams 239). When God was manifest to humans, it was his Logos that made the appearance. Here we see Philo’s Platonic thought at work and combining with his knowledge of scripture. God does not have direct contact with the world of matter; his contact with the world is by means of his Logos. God does not speak directly to us; he speaks to us through his Logos.
In sum, for Philo the Logos is an incorporeal being that exists outside God but is his faculty of thinking; on occasion it becomes the actual figure of God who appears “like a man” so that people can know, and interact with, its presence. It is another divine being that is distinct from God in one sense, and yet is God in another.
Humans Who Become Divine
FOR THOSE WHO WANT to know how Jesus could become God in a Jewish religion that insisted on remaining monotheistic, even more important are Jewish texts which indicate that not just angels, hypostases, and other divine entities could be called God, but humans could be as well. As it turns out, such passages can be found even in the Bible. Just as within pagan circles the emperor was thought to be both the son of god and, in some sense, himself god, so too in ancient Judaism the king of Israel was considered both Son of God and—astonishingly enough—even God.
The King of Israel
There is nothing controversial in the claim that the king of Israel was thought of as standing in a uniquely close relationship to God and was in that sense considered the Son of God. This view is found scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible. A key passage occurs in 2 Samuel 7. At this point in the narrative, Israel has already had two kings: the first king, treated with considerable ambivalence in the narrative, Saul, and the great king of Israel’s golden age, David. Despite David’s many virtues, he had a number of vices as well, and for that reason, when he expressed his wish to build a temple for God, God refused to allow it. The backstory is that since the days of the exodus, more than two centuries earlier, Israel had worshiped God in a portable facility, a large tent, the tabernacle. Now that Israel is firmly ensconced in the land, David wants to build a permanent dwelling place, a house, for God. But God tells him no. Instead, he himself will build a (metaphorical) “house” for David. David will have a son (referring to Solomon) who will build God’s temple, and from this son God will raise a house—a dynasty—to David. Moreover, this son of David will be chosen by God himself, adopted as it were, to be his own son: “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sam. 7:12–14).