John 1 is the first chapter of the Gospel of John. It begins with a proclamation that Jesus Christ has been born, which is followed by a description of his birth, his baptism, and his temptation by Satan. The chapter ends with Jesus’ proclamation that he is the light of the world and a promise that one day all who believe in him will have eternal life.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it
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John 1 is the first chapter of the Gospel of John, one of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament. It tells how God made the universe, how Jesus was sent to earth by God, and how Jesus became a human being.
The book begins with a prologue stating that the Word (“logos”) was in the beginning with God and later became flesh (1:1-2). A lot of people have asked over time why this is important – why did God choose to become human? Why not just send us his word through his angels or some other way? This chapter answers those questions by explaining that God wanted to be close to us. He wanted to experience what it felt like to live among us as we would experience it ourselves.
In the gospel of John, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about a very interesting topic: rebirth. The word “rebirth” might sound familiar to you—it’s often used in reference to religious practices such as baptism, or even in reference to reincarnation. But it’s not actually what Jesus is talking about when he talks about rebirth at all!
I’ll also discuss how we can use this idea of rebirth to help us understand what it means for us as Christians today.
John 1 in the bible
John 1:1 is the first verse in the opening
chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of
the Christian Bible. The traditional and majority translation of this
verse reads:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.[1][2][3][4]
The verse has been a source of much debate among Bible scholars and
translators.
“The Word,” a translation of the Greek λόγος (logos), is
widely interpreted as referring to Jesus, as indicated in other verses
later in the same chapter.[5] For example, “the Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14; cf. 1:15, 17).
This and other concepts in the Johannine literature set the stage
for the Logos-Christology in which the Apologists of the second and third
centuries connected the divine Word of John 1:1-5 to the Hebrew Wisdom
literature and to the divine Logos of contemporary Greek
philosophy.[6]
On the basis of John 1:1, Tertullian, early in the third century, argued for
two Gods where the Persons are distinct but the substance is undivided. But
Tertullian saw the Word as ontologically inferior because He is only “a portion
of the Whole.”
In John 1:1c, logos has the article but theos does not. Origen of
Alexandria, a teacher in Greek grammar of the third century, argued that John
uses the article when theos refers to “the uncreated cause of all
things.” But the Logos is named theos without the article because He
participates in the divinity of the Father because of “His being with the
Father.”
The main dispute with respect to this verse relates to John 1:1c (“the Word
was God”). One minority translation is “the Word was divine.” This is
based on the argument that the grammatical structure of the Greek does not
identify the Word as the Person of God but indicates a qualitative sense. The
point being made is that the Logos is of the same uncreated nature or
essence as God the Father. In that case, “the Word was God” may be misleading
because, in normal English, “God” is a proper noun, referring to the
person of the Father or corporately to the three persons of the Godhead.
With respect to John 1:1, Ernest Cadman Colwell writes:
The absence of the article does not make the predicate indefinite or
qualitative when it precedes the verb, it is indefinite in this position only
when the context demands it.
So, whether the predicate (theos) is definite, indefinite or qualitative
depends on the context. Consequently, this article raises the concern that
uncertainty with respect to the grammar may result in translations based on the
theology of the translator. The commonly held theology that Jesus is God
naturally leads to a corresponding translation. But a theology in which Jesus
is subordinate to God leads to the conclusion that “… a
god” or “… divine” is the proper
rendering.
