In the special context of late antique, Greek-speaking Judaism, and particularly in the work of Philo, the word had come to mean a very particular kind of divine reality, a secondary or derivative divine principle proceeding from the Most High God and mediating between God and the created order. There was a shared prejudice among many of the philosophical systems of late antiquity to the effect that the highest God, God proper, in his utter transcendence could not interact directly with or appear immediately within the created order; hence it was only through a "secondary god" or "expressed divine principle" that God made the world and revealed himself in it. It was assumed by many Jewish and then Christian thinkers that the theophanies of the Jewish scriptures were visitations of the Logos, God's self-expression in his divine intermediary or Son, as Philo called him. To an educated reader of the late first or early second century, the Logos of John's prologue would clearly have been just this divine principle: at once the Most High God's manifestation of himself in a secondary divine moment, and also the pervasive and underlying rational power creating, sustaining, and governing the cosmos.