>>615867
I'm going to post the David Bentley Hart postscript on it. He ends his New Testament translation with a list of words he had trouble translating in the book. His rendering of John 1:1 is “In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD, and the Logos was god;” Here's what he says on the logos
>“The next word is λόγος (logos), which in certain special instances is quite impossible for a translator to reduce to a single word in English, or in any other tongue (though one standard Chinese version of the Bible renders logos in the prologue of John’s Gospel as 道 (tao), which is about as near as any translation could come to capturing the scope and depth of the word’s religious, philosophical, and metaphoric associations in those verses, while also carrying the additional meaning of “speech” or “discourse”).
>To be clear, in most contexts in the New Testament, logos can be correctly and satisfactorily rendered as “word,” “utterance,” “teaching,” “story,” “message,” “speech,” or “communication.” In the very special case of the prologue to John’s Gospel, however, any such translation is so inadequate as to produce nothing but a cipher without a key. Few modern readers or, for that matter, readers in any age could be expected to be cognizant of the complexities of late antique metaphysics, or to be familiar with the writings of Hellenistic Jewish philosophers like Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC–c. AD 50), or to be much acquainted with the speculative grammar of Hellenistic Judaism’s “Wisdom” literature. And so they could scarcely be aware of the vast range of meanings the word logos had acquired by the time John’s Gospel was written, many of which are unquestionably present in its use in the prologue.
>Over many centuries logos had come to mean “mind,” “reason,” “rational intellect,” “rational order,” “spirit”; as well as “expression,” “manifestation,” “revelation”; as well as “original principle,” “spiritual principle,” and even “divine principle.” Really, the full spectrum of its philosophical connotations could scarcely be contained in a single book. 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.
>For all of which reasons, I have chosen not to translate the word at all in the first chapter of John—or in, more controversially, John 5:38, 10:35; or in, yet more controversially, 1 John 1:1, 10; or in, most controversially of all, Revelation 19:13 (though perhaps for somewhat different reasons in this last case). In certain usages, the word is so capacious in its meanings and associations that it must be accounted unique; any attempt to limit it to a single English term would be to risk reducing it to a conceptual phantom of itself.