By Water & Blood

Chapter 18: Why the evangelist, beginning his writing, named the Son “Word”

Why, then, did the evangelist, at the beginning of his writing, call the only-begotten Son of God “Word”? To him we shall say: because of the prophecies concerning him that were veiled of old. For since in the case of each prophet it is said, “The word of the Lord which came,” let us say, “to Isaiah,” and “The beginning of the word of the Lord in Hosea,” and “The word of the Lord that came to Joel,” and “The word of the Lord came to Jonah,”

and likewise “to Micah,” and similarly to the other prophets—in each prophet’s case the word “came” was added (the divine Scripture marking exactly and necessarily that he was not in any of the prophets, but came to each one, approaching him according as each one’s capacity was able to receive, and supplying from himself to each one’s soul the corresponding spirit)—the evangelist, since he was now about to proclaim the intellectual economy of the Word, fittingly no longer teaches that the Word came to someone else, as in the case of the ancients, but that he himself assumed flesh and became man. Then, since he was about to proclaim to all his saving passage among men, saying next, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” he necessarily runs back to the beginning, showing who and what sort of being the Word was who was made flesh only yesterday or the day before;

and he theologizes him, proclaiming as good news at once the knowledge of him and his theophany among men. Then, since the ancients had learned beforehand from the divine readings of the Word that came to each prophet, he himself proclaims his more divine and singular beginning, which none of the prophets had disclosed to men so nakedly and without veil. Wherefore, handing down to all with a loud voice the hidden and secret mystery concerning the Word, he cried out, saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made.”

For, he says in effect, if, being instructed by the earlier divine Scriptures, you learned long ago that the word of the Lord came to this prophet, and in like manner came to another, and again to another, yet now it is necessary to proclaim to all, not how he came, but how he was in the beginning; and that he “was God”; and that “all things were made through him”; and that that very God the Word, “through whom are all things,” by the Father’s love for mankind “was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

These things John, the great disciple and apostle of Christ, proclaimed as good news, instructing all men in the new and fresh mysteries of the Saviour—not that God was rational, nor that he thought within himself and conversed with himself, saying, “Let us make man,” nor that he makes use of words that give orders about what is to be done. For anyone who denies the Son of God might say these things.

This is just what Marcellus does: he flees for refuge, as to a hiding place, to the old Scripture, and tries to gather together the commandments given to the Jewish people in its infancy, that they should not worship idols but should know and worship one God only. There, indeed, the teaching about the one God served him well—a teaching handed down usefully then, and in season, to Jews who were worshipping idols. And taking refuge there, and fencing himself in with Jewish hardness of heart as in a fortress, he put forward the denial of the Son of God.