“The Logos Within: From Philo and the Hermetica to Paul and John”

The question of how to translate John 1:14 has haunted my study of scripture and philosophy, not only because of the grammar but because of the implications that flow from the choice of words. The Greek phrase reads eskēnōsen en hēmin, which in its plainest sense means “tabernacled in us.” Yet almost every major English translation, beginning with the King James, has opted for “dwelt among us.” At first glance this may seem a minor adjustment, a matter of idiom, but in reality the difference is profound, for it is not a matter of textual variants—there are none—but of interpretive and theological orientation. To translate “in us” is to suggest a mystical indwelling, the Logos entering into human beings and making them its dwelling, whereas “among us” locates the incarnation strictly in the external, visible sphere of history. The difference exposes what translators and theologians are willing to affirm. Jerome in the Vulgate chose the literal sense, writing habitavit in nobis—“dwelt in us.” Raymond E. Brown, in his Anchor Bible commentary, admits that the Greek literally means “in us” but still prefers “among us,” reasoning that the context emphasizes public manifestation: “we beheld his glory.” C. K. Barrett likewise stresses that the prologue of John presents the incarnation as an event to be witnessed in history, something seen, touched, and heard, not merely experienced inwardly. Yet I cannot escape the question: if John only intended “among us,” why did he not use one of the more common Greek phrases for that meaning? Why use en hēmin, which everywhere else in the New Testament carries the more direct force of “in”?

The stakes of this choice become even clearer when compared with John 17. There Jesus prays that believers may be one “just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.” Here the preposition en is retained by every translator, for the language of indwelling cannot be softened. To render it “among” would destroy the meaning. The Father cannot be merely “among” the Son, nor the Son merely “among” the Father; this is mutual indwelling. Jesus then extends that same indwelling to his followers: “I in them and you in me.” The same vocabulary appears as in John 1:14, yet translators make different decisions because they sense different theological emphases. In John 1, they prefer to stress the historical, visible manifestation of the Word; in John 17, they recognize the relational and mystical union at stake. Both readings are grammatically possible, but the translator’s theology determines the choice.

Here the larger question of the Logos emerges. John’s prologue is not an isolated invention but a profound adaptation of intellectual traditions circulating in the first century. The Stoics had long spoken of the Logos as the rational principle that pervades the cosmos, the seed-bearing reason (logos spermatikos) that orders and animates all things. They believed that this Logos was immanent in every human being as a spark of the divine fire, the reason by which the universe lives and breathes. For them, to live according to nature was to live according to the Logos within. Philo of Alexandria, steeped in both Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy, described the Logos as the mediator between the transcendent God and the material world. He called it the “first-born of God,” the instrument of creation, the high priest standing between the Creator and humanity. The Logos, for Philo, was both the pattern of the world and the means by which God could be known without compromising divine transcendence. Meanwhile, in the Hermetic writings, particularly the Corpus Hermeticum, the Logos is identified with the Nous, the divine Mind, which emanates from the One and implants itself into the human soul. The Poimandres describes how the Nous, after the creation of the world, entered into human beings, awakening them to their divine origin and reminding them of their kinship with the eternal. The parallels to John are unmistakable: the Logos, which in these traditions is the rational structure of reality, the mediator, the divine voice, has now, according to John, become flesh.

What is radical in John is that the Logos does not remain abstract, nor does it hover only at the cosmic level—it takes on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And if we take the Greek seriously in John 1:14, this Logos does not only dwell externally among humanity but actually “tabernacles in us.” The verb skēnoō evokes the imagery of the tabernacle in the wilderness, where God’s glory dwelt in the midst of Israel. But now the tent is not pitched in a camp outside of us; it is pitched within. The divine presence has moved from the stone and fabric of the tabernacle into the living temple of human existence. This is precisely the theme that Paul makes central in his letters.

Paul speaks explicitly of Christ dwelling in believers in several key passages. In Romans 8:10, he writes, “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Galatians 2:20 offers the classic affirmation: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” In Galatians 4:19, Paul describes himself laboring “until Christ is formed in you.” In 2 Corinthians 13:5 he challenges the community: “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” And in Colossians 1:27 he declares, “the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Only here does he explicitly call “Christ in you” the mystery itself, the hidden plan now revealed. But the idea pervades his writings. Ephesians 3:17 speaks of Christ dwelling in hearts through faith. John’s Gospel resonates with the same theme in the language of abiding: “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). And the First Epistle of John adds the assurance: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Again and again the language of indwelling recurs, reinforcing that the incarnation is not merely about external revelation but about an internal transformation—the Logos in us.

Paul’s use of the word “mystery” underscores the weight of this teaching. The Greek term mystērion occurs twenty-seven times across the New Testament. In the Synoptics it refers to the mysteries of the kingdom of God (Matt 13:11; Mark 4:11; Luke 8:10). In Paul it becomes a central category. Romans 11:25 speaks of the mystery of Israel’s partial hardening, while Romans 16:25 refers to the gospel as a mystery long hidden. First Corinthians describes God’s wisdom as “in a mystery” (2:7) and calls the apostles “stewards of the mysteries of God” (4:1). Paul links mysteries to prophecy, tongues, and even resurrection: “Behold, I tell you a mystery, we shall not all sleep” (15:51). Ephesians repeatedly uses the word, describing the mystery of God’s will (1:9), the mystery revealed to Paul by revelation (3:3), the mystery of Jew and Gentile together in one body (3:6), the “profound mystery” of Christ and the church in marriage imagery (5:32), and the mystery of the gospel itself (6:19). Colossians develops it further, culminating in 1:27, where the mystery is identified as Christ in you. Elsewhere the word refers to the mystery of lawlessness already at work (2 Thess 2:7) and the mystery of godliness (1 Tim 3:16). In Revelation it surfaces again: the mystery of the seven stars (1:20), the mystery of God fulfilled (10:7), and the mystery of the woman and the beast (17:7). Out of all these, only Colossians 1:27 dares to equate the mystery directly with the indwelling of Christ. This suggests that Paul understood the climax of God’s hidden plan to be precisely this: the Logos dwelling not only among but within believers.

At this point, the resonance with Stoic, Philonic, and Hermetic thought becomes striking. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos, the seed-bearing Logos planted in every soul, giving each person a share in divine reason. Paul’s language of Christ being formed in believers and living in them sounds remarkably like this tradition, except that for Paul the Logos is not a generic rational principle but the specific person of Christ, crucified and risen. Philo insisted that the Logos was the image of God by which humanity was created, the divine presence imprinted in the rational soul. Paul’s Christ in you carries that imprint to its fulfillment: the image of God is not merely an idea but an indwelling reality. The Hermetic Poimandres speaks of the divine Mind descending into humanity, awakening memory of divine origin. Paul’s mystery echoes this but anchors it in history: the Christ who indwells is the one who lived, died, and rose. In each case, the mystical intuition is the same: humanity is not cut off from the divine but contains the divine within. The New Testament boldly proclaims this mystery unveiled in Christ.

The translation decision in John 1:14, then, is no small matter. To say “among us” is to emphasize the external and historical, which is true enough, but it risks obscuring the mystical depth. To say “in us” is to affirm the incarnation not only as revelation before our eyes but as transformation within our being. Both senses are present in John’s Gospel, but translators, wary of theological confusion or doctrinal controversy, have often chosen the safer “among.” Still, the literal words stand, pressing us to consider their full weight: the Word became flesh and tabernacled in us. This aligns with Paul’s insistence that Christ is in us, the hope of glory, and with the entire tradition of mystery language in the New Testament.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. If the Logos—the rational principle of the Stoics, the mediator of Philo, the Nous of the Hermetica—has indeed chosen to pitch its tent within humanity, then humanity is not merely a spectator of divine revelation but a participant in it. The mystery of the ages, hidden and now revealed, is that Christ is in us. The external manifestation among us and the internal reality in us are not contradictory but complementary, two facets of the same truth. The incarnation is both public and personal, visible in history and transformative in the soul. To dwell “in us” is to fulfill the philosophical intuition that the divine inhabits the human, but to fulfill it in a concrete, historical, and theological sense that the ancients only glimpsed.

Thus a single preposition opens up centuries of speculation and revelation. En hēmin—in us, among us—encapsulates the deepest intuitions of Stoicism, Middle Platonism, Jewish philosophy, and Hermetic mysticism, and yet it is reframed by John and Paul in the light of Christ. The Stoics sensed the Logos within reason; Philo discerned the Logos as mediator; the Hermetists proclaimed the Nous entering humanity; John confessed the Logos became flesh; Paul declared the mystery revealed as Christ in you. These are not disparate strands but converging lines pointing to the same mystery, the unveiling of divine presence in the human. That mystery is not simply an intellectual puzzle but the hope of glory itself, the promise that the divine Logos has not remained aloof but has chosen to dwell, both among us and in us, to transform us into its likeness.

It may well be that this mystery was not simply Paul’s theological discovery or John’s poetic insight but something Jesus himself taught, in words and ways too subtle for his contemporaries to grasp. If we take seriously the union language in John’s Gospel—“I in you and you in me,” “I in them and you in me”—then perhaps Jesus was already pointing to the indwelling Logos as the essence of his message. Yet this teaching would have been so anachronistic, so far beyond the categories of Second Temple Judaism, that even his closest followers struggled to understand. They could accept him as Messiah, healer, teacher, even Son of God, but the deeper truth—that the eternal Word would tabernacle in them—was not easily received.

Paul, for all his brilliance, seems at times to gesture toward this reality without fully embracing it, speaking of “ages to come” when the fullness of God’s plan would be revealed. Perhaps even he was still working within categories that kept the mystery deferred, unable to state unequivocally that what Christ embodied was not only among them but already within them. This suggests that the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory, was the heart of Jesus’ teaching all along—not the foundation of a new religion, not a structure of law and doctrine, but an awakening to divine indwelling. What was hidden for ages and generations was not hidden because God withheld it but because humanity was not yet ready to hear. Religion may have risen around Jesus in the centuries that followed, but the mystery itself transcends religious structures. It was not about creating an institution but about awakening humanity to the presence of the divine within. In this light, the tension between “among us” and “in us” is not just a matter of translation but a window into the unfinished reception of Jesus’ own message, a reminder that the mystery continues to unfold as human consciousness catches up with what was revealed in him from the beginning.

 

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Citations

1. Jerome, Biblia Sacra Vulgata, John 1:14.
2. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII (Anchor Bible 29; New York: Doubleday, 1966), 14–15.
3. C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 162–163.
4. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 1048–1052.
5. F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 81–82.
6. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 838–841.
7. Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation, Who Is the Heir?, On Dreams I.
8. Corpus Hermeticum, esp. Poimandres and Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.
9. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 207–218.