KJV vs AV

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Sun Dec 19 14:33:27 EST 1999


To: Cindy Smith,

<<   I believe "the Word" in Hebrews 4:12 refers to Jesus as the Word of 
God, just as in the Gospel of John.  >>

I personally would find such an interpretations of Hebrews 4:12 to be 
"forced." At the very least, there doesn't seem to anything in the 
immediate context of Hebrews 4:12 which suggests that this author had Jesus 
explicitly in mind. As for the Johannine gospel, the facts are quite 
against such a facile interpretation. For example, the Johannine Jesus 
says: "I do know him [God] and I keep his word" (Jn 8:55). If for John the 
God's LOGOS  was Jesus, how could the Johannine Jesus keep it? Another 
example, the Johannine Jesus says: "Whoever does not love me does not keep 
my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father 
who sent me" (Jn 14:24). Again, the Johannine Jesus speaks as if God's 
LOGOS is different from himself! Nowhere does John's gospel simply identify 
Jesus as God's LOGOS. The difference of interpretation of John 1:14 is 
rooted in the fact that some take God's LOGOS as a individual, while others 
(such as myself) take God's LOGOS in the Johannine prologue as an 
instrumental force.

To bring us back to the grammar of Hebrew 4:12, while some might take hO 
LOGOS TOU QEOU as a possessive genitive of a personified LOGOS, thus "God's 
Word";  I would take it as a subjective genitive meaning "the word from 
God" (without necessarily equating it with the scriptures as such). 
Grammatically there are a number of interpretations of the phrase hO LOGOS 
TOU QEOU which one can only resolved through an exegetical interpretation 
of the book of Hebrews.

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Disclaimer: "I'm just a simple house-husband (with no post-grad degree), 
what do I know?"




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