Logos, but the Logos was regarded as being neither God nor man.  The Christian

revelation also stresses the need for the mediating Logos, but reveals the glorious fact that

He is both God and Man. In other words, the passage in John 1: 14: "The Word became

flesh and dwelt among us", together with its complement in John 11: 25: "I am the

resurrection, and the life" contain the truth which Plato and Philo sought, but sought in

vain. When we consider these earnest seekers after the truth and compare their position

with our own, how grateful we should be for the light vouchsafed to us in this day of

John reveals that God is transcendent in His nature (John 1: 18), but that in the Logos

He is also immanent throughout the extent of His creation.  Creation, revelation,

incarnation, redemption, ascension are all possible and necessary, if the Logos of John 1:

be true.

The Rabbinical School at Alexandria, where Philo lived, urged the transcendental

aspect of the nature of God to its extreme, setting its face against all forms of

anthropomorphism. Philo, for instance, says that, to accept in their literal sense the

words: "It repented God that He had made man", is to be guilty of an impiety greater

than any that was drowned in the flood. For Philo God was an abstraction, and His

nature only capable of being shadowed forth by negatives. We can only know what He is

not.

How comforting to turn from such a view for a moment to the reassuring words of

John 14: 9: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father", even though, at the same time,

we must not forget the utter transcendentalism of such passages as John 5: 37: "Ye have

neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His shape" (John 5: 37). As we realize the

immensity of the gulf that yawned between the far-off Platonist God, and the things of

time and sense, we may perhaps better understand why the Lord uses the figure of

Jacob's ladder as representing Himself in John 1: 51.

Philo uses the following names and titles in his description of the Logos:

The "Son of God"; the "First-born Son" (protogonos, 1: 414); the "Image of God"

(eikon Theo, 1: 6); "God" (1: 655 de Sommus Theos); "Second God" (ho deuteros Theos,

Fragments 2: 625); "archetypal man" (ho kat' eikona anthropos, 1: 427).  When one

reads and listens to many Christians to-day as they speak of the Lord Jesus Christ, one

wonders whether they have got any further than Philo's "Second God"!

Philo speaks of the "seamless robe", when referring to the indissoluble texture of the

universe, and it is surely no accident that this apparently irrelevant detail is incorporated

in John 19: 23, for we must constantly bear in mind that the doctrine of the prologue of

John 1: 1-18 is elaborated and illustrated throughout the record of the Gospel. Philo

refers to the Divine Word as flowing like a river, which may be compared with John's

reference to the living water. He also speaks of the Logos as the "Heavenly Bread",

which is parallel with the Gospel reference to Christ as the Bread that came down from