John 1:1 EN ARCH

Larry Swain swainl at calcite.rocky.edu
Tue Jul 7 12:51:09 EDT 1998


On Tue, 7 Jul 1998 dalmatia at eburg.com wrote:

> The Greek grammatically allows both, but I do not think that John's
> gospel means either one.  Its OT reference is clear enough, yet it is
> a time denotive word, and I have taken it to mean the origin of time
> with some success in understanding John's extensive use of the present
> tense throughout this gospel. 
> 
> On this approach, the origin of time is omnitemporal, without itself
> being temporal at all, and events that originate from it are always,
> of necessity, ongoing in the present.

I agree with everything that came before these paragraphs, but I don't
think either the ancient Hebrews nor the Hellenistic world had this
philosophical concept.  This is not to say that we understand ARCH as a
punctiliar beginning pin pointable to some date and hour and minute, but I
don't think that swinging the other way to an omnitemporal understanding
is what John or Hellenistic Greeks had in mind.

Larry Swain




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