Like Gen. 1:1 LXX, verse 1 begins with en arche (“in the beginning”). That is no mere coincidence; the agreement is intentional. But the differences are much greater than this scarcely accidental congruence: Gen. 1:1 narrates an event: God creates. John 1:1, however, tells of something that was in existence already in time primeval; astonishingly, it is not “God.” The hymn thus does not begin with God and his creation, but with the existence of the Logos in the beginning. The Logos (we have no word in either German or English that corresponds to the range of meaning of the Greek term) is thereby elevated to such heights that it almost becomes offensive. The expression is made tolerable only by virtue of the continuation in “and the Logos was in the presence of God,” viz., in intimate, personal, union with God.
In order to avoid misunderstanding, it may be inserted here that theos and ho theos (“god, divine” and “the God”) were not the same thing in this period. Philo has therefore written: the logos means only theos (“divine”) and not ho theos (“God”) since the logos is not God in the strict sense.(2) Philo was not thinking of giving up Jewish monotheism. In a similar fashion, Origen, too, interprets: the Evangelist does not say that the logos is “God,” but only that the logos is “divine.”(3) In fact, for the author of the hymn, as for the Evangelist, only the Father was “God” (ho theos; cf. 17:3); “the Son” was subordinate to him (cf. 14:28). But that is only hinted at in this passage because here the emphasis is on the proximity of the one to the other: the Logos was “in the presence of God,” that is, in intimate, personal fellowship with him. [Ernst Haenchen, John 1 – A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984) 109.]
2. De Somn. 1.229f.
3. Origen, Comm. in Joh. 2.2.13-15.
