Evidence · Case 04 · The Trinity

The Word made all things, John 1:3

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

John says of the Word, who is then identified as Jesus, that “all things were made through him,” and that nothing that exists was made without him.

Sources

Couldn’t the Word in John 1 be God’s plan or utterance, personified, which became flesh in the sense of being embodied in Jesus’s life? Unitarians read it that way without any preexistent divine person.: That reading exists, and it struggles with John’s own text. The Word was with God (a relationship, not an attribute), the Word is called God, and in John 17:5 Jesus asks for the glory he had with the Father before the world existed, which is personal preexistence in Jesus’s own voice. Personified plans do not pray. The reading of the Logos as a distinct divine person is the one nearly all commentators, including non-Christian ones, take John to intend.
Jewish Wisdom literature (Proverbs 8, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo’s Logos) already describes God creating through a personified attribute. Isn’t John applying Wisdom language to Jesus poetically?: The Wisdom background is real and is where the language comes from. The difference is that Wisdom in those texts is a personification of God’s own attribute, not a creature, so if Jesus is identified with Wisdom he is placed on God’s side of the line, which is the claim. The alternative, that Jesus is a created being through whom God made other things, is Arius’s reading, and it requires an exception the text does not state. Poetic or not, all things were made through him leaves no created category for the Word to belong to.