The Drēam of the Mead Hall

Further reflections on a new translation of Beowulf

“In the beginning,” St. John tells us, “was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Though immediately recognizable to countless English-speaking Christians, the identification of Jesus Christ with “the word” is easily misunderstood. Apart from the inherently mysterious nature of this theological concept, the difficulty is largely a linguistic one: Greek logos does not mean “word” in its typical English sense. The better equivalent to English “word” is Greek lexis, which is not used in the first verse of John’s Gospel (and indeed, is not used anywhere in the New Testament). Instead we have only logos, which occurs three times and acquires a resonance that is lost in English renderings, because in the original Greek it is the final word in the statement:

      εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος

What does logos mean, then, if not “word”? The question is difficult to answer; in fact, I would suggest that it is an inherently problematic question, insofar as it imposes on ancient Greek a more modern relationship with verbal language. I would perhaps rephrase the question thus: What fundamental notion, what material or human or cosmic or divine reality, do we find at the core of logos? For logos “means” a great many things: its entry in Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon—an entry that, with usage examples and citations included, is thousands of words in length—consists of ten major definitions and numerous sub-definitions. We must look deep into this nexus of meanings (and integrate knowledge from other sources) to discover that St. John’s logos refers to coherent, narrative, revelatory speech, or even more fundamentally, to spoken words as the expression of reasoned thought. This is a concept that no modern language, and in this case not even Latin, can adequately express in one word.