Now I assert that a few hours' conversation with any
Alexandrian Jew, or with any Christian convert from Alexandrian Judaism,
would have, _humanly speaking_, enabled the Apostle, even if he knew not
a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are
contained the whole Logos expression of the Fourth Gospel.
St. John must have been familiar with the teaching of traditional
interpretation respecting the Meymera as contained in the Chaldee
paraphrases; indeed, the more "unlearned" and "ignorant" he was, the
more he must have relied upon the Chaldee paraphrases for the knowledge
of the Old Testament, the Hebrew having been for centuries a dead
language. We have a Chaldee paraphrase of great antiquity on so early
and familiar a chapter as the third of Genesis, explaining the voice of
the Lord God by the voice of the Meymera, or Word of the Lord God
(Genesis iii.).
The natural rendering of this word into Greek would be Logos. I repeat,
then, that, humanly speaking, if he had never entertained the idea
before, a very short conversation with an Alexandrian Jew would have
furnished him with all the "philosophy" required to make the four
statements in which he simply identifies the Logos with the Divine
Nature of his Lord.
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