INTRODUCTION
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book of Wisdom. John, however, shows that the fond hope of
Ecclesiasticus that Wisdom should find a home among Israel was not
immediately realized, for `He came unto His own, and His own
received Him not'.
The following is a quotation from The Wisdom of Solomon - a
passage which it is difficult to read without thinking of John 1 and
Hebrews 1:
`For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure effluence
from the Almighty ... For she is the brightness of the everlasting
light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of
His goodness' (Wisdom of Solomon, 7).
There is something comparable, also, between The Wisdom of
Solomon 18:15 and Revelation 19:
`Thine Almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of Thy royal
throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of
destruction'.
While the Targums or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament
were not committed to writing until after the Christian era, they
embody teaching that was current from a much earlier period, and in
these Targums we frequently meet the word Memra, `The Word'. For
example, in the Targum of Onkelos on Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve are
said to have heard the voice of the Word of the Lord walking in the
garden. And in Deuteronomy 5:5, the Targum reads:
`I stood between the Word (Memra) of the Lord and you, to
announce to you at that time the word (pithgama) of the Lord'.
It will be seen that the Targum differentiates here between `the
Word' (Memra), and the spoken word. It is `the Word' (the Memra)
that creates, preserves and redeems. The Targums, however, fall short
of the complete truth, for they never seem to have identified the
Memra with the Messiah. It is this identification that is the peculiar
office of the Gospel according to John.
Our account of Hebrew thought as to the Logos would be
incomplete without a reference to the Apocalyptic Book of Enoch, of
which one authority has said: `The influence of Enoch in the New
Testament has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal and
pseudepigraphal books taken together'. This does not mean that John