Who, then, is Jesus Christ? Let John tell us. The Oriental world was
puzzled about the question of the origin of evil. They said, in brief,
a good God cannot make a bad world. Out of a good God, therefore,
there have emanated other gods, and out of these gods other gods,
until at last there came to be imperfect gods or bad gods. And the
world was made, some of them said, partly by a good god and partly by
a bad one; and others by an imperfect god who was an emanation of the
perfect one. Of these emanations one was Life, another was Light,
another was the Word. And John, writing in the age of Oriental
philosophy, uses the phraseology of Oriental philosophy in order that
he might tell mankind who and what Jesus Christ is. "In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was God." God never was an abstraction;
from the very beginning He was a speaking God, a living God, a
manifesting God, a forth-putting God. "The same was in the beginning
with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not
anything made that was made. And this Word became flesh and dwelt
among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten
of the Father), full of grace and truth.
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