adition connects both the later Pauline epistles and the Fourth
Gospel with the Province of Asia, and especially with Ephesus. There
is no reason for doubting this tradition, but it is strange how soon
its {123} creative spirit passed to Alexandria, a Church of which the
origin is as obscure as the later history is famous.

Tantalising though many of these problems are, there is no doubt as to
the main characteristics of the Christianity of Ephesus and its
neighbourhood. Its Christology was the reverse of Adoptionist. It did
not think of Jesus as a man who had become divine, but as a God who had
become human. Moreover, an identification of this pre-existent being
with the Logos of the philosopher was gradually approached in the later
Epistles, and finally made in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel.

The word Logos has an intricate and long history which has often been
treated in books on the New Testament: it is quite unnecessary to
repeat it at length. But it has not usually been sufficiently noted
that the difficulty of the problems raised by it are mainly due to its
use in different ways in different systems of thought. The popular
Stoic philosophy, with its belief in a God immanent in the universe,
could use Logos in the sense of the governing principle of the world,
and as little less than a synonym, or, perhaps one should say,
description of God. On the other hand, a transcendental theology such
as Platonism, believing in a God entirely above all existence in the
universe, needed a connecting link between God and the world, and could
use Logos in this sense. Finally, a mediatising writer such as
Cornutus could explain that the Logos was Hermes, and so triumphantly
{124} reconcile philosophy and myth, by giving a mythological meaning
to a philosophic term.

All this is clear enough; but the difficulty begins when one asks in
which sense the writer of the Fourth Gospel used the phrase. Did he
mean that the Logos was the _anima mundi_? The phrase "the true light
which lighteth every one" is susceptible of such a meaning. But it
seems more probable that his theology was in the main transcendental,
and that the Logos was for him the connecting link between God and the
world. But how far is the Prologue really metaphysical and not
comparable in its identification of Jesus and the Logos to
Cornutus,[16] with his identification of Hermes and the Logos?

Further problems arise if an effort is made to reconstr