The Logos Concept during Antiquity
During antiquity, Judaism, Hellenism, and other cultures had a concept known as logos in the Greek language. It usually was understood as “word,” “mind,” or “reason.” It generally was believed that God or gods related to human beings and communicated to them by means of this logos. Regarding God, it often was understood as “the word of God.” Greeks Platonists conceived of a pleroma of aeons between divinity and humans, with the logos being chief among them. Among all of these cultures, there was debate about whether this logos was a personal being separate from God, or the gods, or not.
The books and letters of the Christian New Testament of the Bible originally were written in the Koine Greek language. The Greek New Testament has this concept of logos, translated “Word,” in the beginning of the Gospel of John. The King James Version, produced in 1611, translates logos therein as a personal being. Its first three verses read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him.”
Furthermore, the King James Version rightly translates John 1.14: “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us,” referring to Jesus of Nazareth.
The King James Version of the Bible
Catholic church fathers determined that “the Word” in John 1 was a personal being distinct and separate from “God.” They believed this Word was the preexistent Jesus, so that Jesus actually preexisted as the Word. They also believed that this supposed preexistence of Jesus indicated Jesus was God. And that became the official teaching of both the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Protestant Church.
But prior to the King James Version, many of the most popular English translations of the Bible did not translate autou in the Greek text of the third sentence in John 1.1-3 as “him,” that is, in “All Things were made by him.” Rather, they translated it as “it.” This indicated that these English translators did not think the Word was a personal entity separate from God, but somehow the word/Word was a part of God. Accordingly, Jesus did not preexist as a personal being, and this brings into question whether he was God.
The Tyndale Bible
For example, prior to the King James Version, the English translation of the Bible by William Tyndale was for a while the most popular in Great Britain. Its Gospel of John begins as follows: “In the beginnynge was the worde, and the worde was with God, and the worde was God. The same was in the beginnynge with God. All things were made by it.” Notice that “worde” is not capitalized, which is usually done when the translator thinks it refers to God. If we change this Old English into modern English, here is how the most popular English versions of the Bible (with their dates of publication) prior to the King James Version translated the beginning of the third sentence in the Gospel of John, that is, verse 3:
English Bibles Prior to the King James Version
1. “All things were made by it” (Tyndale, 1534).
2. “The word … All things were made by the same” (Coverdale, 1535).
4. “All things were made by it” (The Great Bible, 1539).
4. “All things were made by it” (Geneva Bible, 1560).
5. “All things were made by it” (Bishops’ Bible, 1568).
By 1611, when the King James Version of the Bible was first published, it had been nearly a century since the Protestant Reformation had begun, which occurred in 1517. Those early reformers, the two foremost being Martin Luther and John Calvin, had not scrutinized the Catholic Church doctrine of the Trinity and its corollary, the so-called deity of Christ. So, they accepted these teachings as being biblical. But the above English Bibles identifying the logos as “it” rather than “him” suggest otherwise.