Had a go at my own translation/interpretation of John 1:1-18, a passage which, for some reason, has stuck in my mind since Greek classes of long ago. Part of the challenge is how to treat 'logos', how to render it in English. See what you think.
It all began with communication – with God communicating God’s very self. God was communicating from the start. Everything that exists came about through this communication. Nothing came into being any other way.
The communication was alive and that life illuminated human beings, a light shining in the darkness that the darkness has never been able to extinguish.
God sent John to let people know about the light, so that those who heard him could learn to trust the light. He wasn’t the source of light, of course, his job was simply to let people see the light for what it is. The real light that illuminates everything was coming into the world, a world the light had created, yet the world didn’t understand it. Even when the light approached the ‘enlightened people’, they paid no attention. But there were some who opened to the light, who trusted it, and they are now the rightful children of God. They are children not in a physical sense, the result of a sexual act, they are the result of God’s own action.
And so God’s communication became embodied in a living human being, and we saw him shining, shining like a father’s only son, filled with integrity and self-giving love. He’s the one John was shouting about when he said, “That’s him the one I said though he came after me, he was always way ahead of me, for he existed long before me.”
We have all received gift upon gift from his abundance, for while Moses gave us the norms to follow, Jesus, God’s representative, gave us love and integrity. No one has ever seen God, but the son, the one integrally connected to the father, has shown us what God is really like.
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