John 1:2
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| John 1:2 | |
|---|---|
← 1:1 1:3 → | |
 John 1:1–3 in the page showing the first chapter of John in the King James Bible | |
| Book | Gospel of John |
| Christian Bible part | New Testament |
John 1:2 is the second verse in the first chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
In the original Greek according to Westcott-Hort, this verse is:
- Οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν.[1]
- Outos ēn en archē pros ton Theon.
In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:
- The same was in the beginning with God.
The New International Version translates the passage as:
- He was with God in the beginning.
Analysis
The author alludes to, or echoes, Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning...", but unlike in Genesis, his concern is with what was before the creation.[2] There is also an allusion to Proverbs 8:22, "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything, from the beginning".[2] For the German Protestant writer Heinrich Meyer, this verse "emphatically combines the first and second clauses of John 1:1 (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God) in order to connect them with the work of creation". He adds that these words form the "necessary premiss" for verse 3, All things were made through Him ..., so that it can be stated that "if it was this same Logos, and no other than He, who Himself was God, who lived in the beginning in fellowship with God, and consequently when creation began, [then] the whole creation, nothing excepted, must have come into existence through Him.[3]
Robert Witham notes that although the text has "this (ουτος) was in the beginning", the sense and construction is, "this word was in the beginning".[4]
This verse is often used to confute Arianism, which holds that God was created in the beginning, while this verse seems to imply that the word (λογος) simply existed in the beginning, and therefore always existed. Cornelius a Lapide asks the question why a beginning is spoken of at all, if the word (λογος) is eternal and has no beginning. To this he answers, "because of the weakness of the human intellect, which is not able to comprehend eternity".[5]
