“In the beginning was the Word.” You have heard it so often that it has stopped meaning anything. The English does some of the damage. Word sounds like a unit of vocabulary, and the Greek is far bigger.
What John wrote
The word is logos. Over about a thousand years of Greek it meant a word or a speech, also an account or a reason you give for something. In mathematics it meant a ratio. It gave us logic, and the -ology at the end of biology.
Around 500 BC, the philosopher Heraclitus used it for the hidden structure of reality, the pattern that all things happen according to, even if most people do not notice. The Stoics made it central: a rational principle running through the universe and holding it together.
Jewish writers were on a parallel track. In Genesis, God speaks and things happen. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is beside God at creation, like a master builder. In the first century, Philo of Alexandria, a Jew writing in Greek, brought it all together and called the Logos the instrument through which God made the world.
So when John opened with those words, he was not using a religious term his readers would need explained. Philosophers and synagogue readers both knew it. His line lands somewhere else: and the Word became flesh. The structure of reality had a mother and got tired and ate fish.
Why it sounds new
Now consider what physicists have been saying for the last few decades. John Wheeler argued that every physical thing has an immaterial source, summarized in his phrase “it from bit.” Seth Lloyd describes the universe as a quantum computer computing itself. Whether or not they are right, educated people now routinely describe reality’s base layer as information and rule.
Set that next to John 1:1 and you have a strange feeling. A very old sentence seems to be describing the same picture: first the pattern, and then the stuff.
That is where this project starts. We are not claiming that John was secretly a computer scientist. We are saying that a question has come back around, and that the first people to work on it were not stupid.
How to read it now
Try the verse with the full word left in place. In the beginning was the reason. In the beginning was the account. In the beginning was the order that everything else would obey. Then read on to verse 14, and notice how shocking the claim still is.
Common questions
What does logos mean in Greek?
Logos has a wide range: word, speech, account, reason, ratio, and the rational principle behind the world. The English word logic comes from it.
Why does John 1:1 call Jesus the Word?
John borrowed a term his readers already knew. Greek philosophers used logos for the order running through the cosmos, and Jewish writers spoke of God's creative word and wisdom. John says that order became a person.