09/17/2023 – Lesson 1 (Week 1 of 30) – “John’s Prologue” – John 1: 1-18. (“Sublimely amazed”)
Again, this is the “Bible Study Fellowship” (BSF) worldwide Bible study that runs for 30 weeks. The website is mybsf.org. If you establish account and login, you can: 1) pull up the entire course material which runs 400+ pages; 2). use other reference material; 3). look up the nearest group near you.
My current plan is to cover the sixth day review question that covers the entire reading for the week, and then perhaps selectively on other daily questions. Questions? Contact me at semikkah7@protonmail..com
The first question is from the fifth day, verse # 14:
“12. Read verse 14 carefully and write, phrase by phrase, what John is saying about Jesus and what each phrase means.
Phrases:
- “And the word was made flesh” – He took upon the entire human nature; a true body, a reasonable soul. Neither his human nor divine nature was altered. One person – two natures.
- “And divert among us” – “Shekinah” The majestic presence of God.
- “And we beheld His glory”: Equal to the father’s glory, transcendent to all creatures, ineffable and incomprehensible.
- “the glory, as the only begotten Father” – glory equal to the Father.
- “Full of grace and truth” – Jesus was fully acceptable to the Father as an atonement for our sins, for He was without sin. And the full Truth was in Him.
Sixth Day Review John 1: 1 – 18:
Jesus Christ is God – the only source of eternal life and light.
Question #15. What truth about Jesus stands out to you in John’s majestic prologue?
The mystery of God is incomprehensible; His love is unfathomable. The fear of the Lord overwhelms me; I am transfixed in awe of Him.
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Concerning the mystery of God, check out the link below. You will be amazed!
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/77656/john-11-14-memra-of-the-targum
Here is the question that this link explores:
How would the Jewish people in Jesus’ times have understood John 1:1-14, when John uses the word “logos” in light of Philo the Jewish philosopher and the Memra in the Targums?
John wrote the Gospel of John in Greek. The “Word” in verse 1 is the Greek word Logos, which means “the word“, and also “the reason of God”. The Targum was a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures to Aramaic, a necessity for over a century for Jews did not speak Hebrew anymore, excluding the educated elite.
The name for God the Father, revealed to Moses, was YHWH. It could not spoken, for the Jews made every effort to avoid anthropomorphism, in speaking of Him. So the Targums substituted the word of God for the name of God, a phrase that occurs no fewer than about three hundred and twenty times. As William Barclay notes in his Gospel of John commentary, “It was a phrase which any devout Jew would recognize because he heard it so often in the synagogue.” (*A)
(*A) – ISBN reference # 0-664-21304-9, page #30
The pagan Greeks had connected “logos” to “the mind of God”, even predating Plato perhaps with Heraclitus around 500 B.C. Philo was a Jewish scholar from Alexandria that lived around the time of Jesus. He studied the wisdom of two worlds, the Jewish and the Greek. Barclay reports that he indeed knew and loved “this idea of the Logos, the word, the reason of God, adding that “the Logos was the intermediary between the world and God and that the Logos was the priest who set the soul before God.” (*B)
(*B) See (*A) above, page #36
So, the point is that both Jewish and Greek converts were attuned to “the word.”, so John’s Gospel connected them to the Good News that transformed them on the path of God’s Truth.
Check this out:
“In the earlier period, they (the Jews) received some sympathy from philosophers; Theophrastus, the main disciple of Aristotle, writes in a famous fragment that Jews are ‘philosophers by race’, saying about them:
‘They converse with each other about the deity, and at night-time they make observations of the stars, gazing at them them and calling on God by prayer. (quoted in Diodorus Sculls, Bibliotheca Historical, 40.3.1-3)’. I’m with them!
Soli Deo Gloria!