The Greek Word Mistranslated as "Word"

Sorry, but John never said that the "Word" was God.

Though I focus on Jesus’s words, I analyzed John 1:1 when I realized that the Greek word, logos, was mistranslated as “word,” never meaning that to the people of Jesus’s era.

The Greek word for "word" is lexis, a word Jesus never uses, a word not appearing in any version of the Greek New Testament, occurring once in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, in Job 36:2. This word isn’t even listed in Strong’s Concordance.

The Meaning of Logos

In the Bible, the most common Greek word translated into English as "word" is logos, translated variously as "computation", "relation", "explanation", "law", "rule of conduct", "continuous statement", "discussion," and so on.  Logos is the source of our English word "logic." It is also the root word for all the English words that end in "-ology," which we use to mean "the study of" something.

I am too lazy to research all the various ways logos is translated in Jesus’s words, but the KJV translates logos as "word" two hundred and sixteen times. Since “word” can’t always be made to work, it is also translated as "saying," fifty times, account (8x), speech (8x), thing (5x), and miscellaneous (32x). Two times, it is not translated at all.

Not only can we not tell when the word logos is used, we cannot always tell when we see “word” the it is translated from logos. Another Greek word translated as "word" is rhema, meaning "that which is spoken", "saying", "subject of speech", and so on. Jesus uses this word in ten verses.

So What Did John and Jesus Mean?

Jesus uses logos eighty times. The English words that come closest to capturing its meaning, as Jesus uses it, are "idea", "concept", “lesson,” or "explanation." The English word most directly descended from logos, "logic," doesn't work, too closely associated with reasoning, especially formal reasoning. Personally, I tend to gravitate to “idea" because it is simple, broad, and pithier.

Jesus seems to like words like logos, because of their different shades of meaning, allowing for various plays on words. In translation, however, we seek consistency so people can relate one part of the translated text to other parts. In some verses, however, such as Matthew 18:23 (“take account of his servants”) and Matthew 25:19, (“the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them”) Jesus uses logos in the sense of "accounting" or “calculation” since the context is numerical amounts, so "explanation" still works though “idea” doesn’t.

If we used “idea,” John 1.1 is transformed from the poetic, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” to the logical, “In origin was the idea, and the idea was from the Divine, and divine was the idea,” which is word-for-word in the original word order (ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος). Notice how the final “divine” does not have an article before it as it does when referring to God. This is worth thinking about, but I don’t write about theology.

Let us also look at how some of Jesus’s sayings are translated by consistent translation.

Matthew 12:37 changes from: “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” To “Because from those ideas of yours, you will be made right, and from those ideas of yours, you will be condemned.”

Matthew 19:11 changes from: “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.” To: “Not everyone digests this idea, rather, for those ones, it has been given.”

Matthew 24:35 changes from: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” To: “This sky and this earth will pass away, but my ideas might never pass away.” In this verse, the “might” is from the subjunctive form of the verb, which requires a “should” or “might.” The “never” is from a double negative form, the objective and subjective Greek negatives together, creating a stronger negative that we really don’t have in English.

Conclusion

My work here is about the “word.” I write about the meaning of words, their grammatical form, how context affects their meaning, and so on. I find it rather tragic that this particular word, so important in Jesus’s ideas, has been translated so inconsistently, so distant in meaning from what Jesus’s listeners heard.