Let us now consider the opening words of this Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not. There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came that he might bear witness of the light. There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.”[320] Here then are two fundamental ideas: first, the eternal existence and divine nature of Christ who is the Word, the Logos of philosophic speech, and second, the revelation of God to man through the incarnate Word—“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The concept of the Logos as the world-reason we saw first appear in the philosophy of Heraclitus; then the idea developed through the centuries until the Logos was equivalent to the reason of God, at once existing in God and being his expression. As such it was a part of Alexandrian thought, being found, for example, in Philo. The Logos of the philosopher, however, was the agent connecting a transcendental god with the divine creation, making and sustaining the world. In so far the Johannine statement is in accord with current thought and expression, although we should probably be wrong if we affirmed that the author was drawing on Philo directly; it is far more probable that he was simply using ideas and language common in the intellectual circles of the day. But if we compare the idea of the Logos in the Johannine prologue with that in Philo we observe a profound and striking difference between the two. For Philo, as we have just said, the Logos was an abstract entity which existed for cosmological purposes; in the Johannine thought, although the Logos is the creator of the world, he is much more: he is incarnate in mortal flesh that he may reveal God to man and bring man salvation. The author wished to show that the creator and revealer were one, that the Logos had appeared as a man on earth. Now this emphasis on the human side of Jesus, the son of God, was in all probability due to the arguments of some incipient Gnostics who denied that the Christ