LOGOS
Joe A. Friberg
JoeFriberg at email.msn.com
Wed Feb 23 20:25:46 EST 2000
----- Original Message -----
From: "George Goolde" <goolde at mtnempire.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 4:14 PM
<<If it were decided, however, that LOGOS carries implicit information which
is philosophical as well as linguistic, the use of transliteration
**could** signal a technical term that bears intentional connotation which
lies outside the culture of American (or British) English.
Would such a "translation" then be justified?>>
I would heartily agree that LOGOS *is* a technical term, and have stated
that already. Yet, I do not think that John is using the term in any one of
the 8 or 9+ ways that Larry Swain (and others) have outlined.
Nor do I think that John is using it in all 8+ ways simultaneously. Rather,
John is using LOGOS in a way that has a great many affinities to each of
many or all of the 8+ senses that were available and current in the use of
LOGOS within the first century cultural milieu.
Note that Stoics had their own particular sense of LOGOS; Philo had his own
particular sense of LOGOS, etc. Not everyone meant the same thing.
Nor did John mean the same thing as any one of them, though for apologetic
reasons he might well have discussed with representatives of each group how
the concept of what they called LOGOS was taken up in some sense and
subsumed under Christ, the referent identified by John's concept of
LOGOS.
What John calls LOGOS *refers to* the preincarnate Christ; moreover, the
*sense* of John's use of LOGOS is defined *in context* in his prologue. It
agrees with the sense of earlier uses of LOGOS only insofar as those uses
are consonant with John's contextual definition. John has taken a
multivalent technical (and common) term and appropriated it for his own
unique technical use.
Not only is the referent of LOGOS the preexistent Christ, but as a technical
term in his own vocabulary, even the *sense* of it is constrained to the
attributes relevant to the preincarnate Christ. The source of these
attributes would largely be expected to be found in the pool (or cauldron)
of the senses of those various prior technical terms, and from the common
non-tehcnical use of LOGOS.
Now to the task of translation:
We should do the same thing John did: create an appropriate (new) technical
term. To do that, we can start with a technical term in current use (as
John did), or we can start with a common term. In either case, the starting
term should have some appropriate components of meaning which lend
themselves to matching John's technical term. If philosophers or commoners
today were talking about preexistent things which were closely associated
with God, we would have a pool (cauldron) of technical terms to dip into and
appropriate. But we don't (to my knowledge), so we are left to look to
common terms that have something to offer inthe way of appropriate
components of meaning.
In this vein, IMHO, even 'word' is better than using the transliteration
'logos'! Readers at least start with a small bit of meaning and recognize
they are missing out on a greater meaning when they read 'word'; if 'logos'
is used in the translation, the meaning derived is an absolute zero--it is
like a magical name.
But I really think we can do better than 'word'. We should not expect to
come up with a term that *captures all* the multivalent nuances of LOGOS.
We do not have to. All we have to do is create an appropriate translation
term for *John's* use of LOGOS, such that, given what readers already know
about the senses of the common term, they are able to follow John's
development of *his definition-in-context* of LOGOS in the prologue of the
gospel.
God Bless y'all!
Joe A. Friberg
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