n in Christ Jesus.

Even more thrilling were those later days when in Ephesus the writer of
the Fourth Gospel faced a Hellenistic audience, to whom the forms of
thought in which Jesus hitherto had been interpreted were utterly unreal.
The first creed about Jesus proclaimed that he was the Messiah, but
Messiah was a Jewish term and to the folk of Ephesus it had no vital
meaning. John could not go on calling the Master that and that alone,
when he had hungry souls before him who needed the Master but to whom
Jewish terms had no significance. One thing those folk of Ephesus did
understand, the idea of the Logos. They had heard of that from the many
faiths whose pure or syncretized forms made the religious background of
their time. They knew about the Logos from Zoroastrianism, where beside
Ahura Mazdah stood Vohu Manah, the Mind of God; from Stoicism, at the
basis of whose philosophy lay the idea of the Logos; from Alexandrian
Hellenism, by means of which a Jew like Philo had endeavoured to marry
Greek philosophy and Hebrew orthodoxy. And the writer of the Fourth
Gospel used that new form of thought in which to present to his people
the personality of our Lord. "In the beginning was the Logos, and the
Logos was with God, and the Logos was God"--so begins the Fourth Gospel's
prologue, in words that every intelligent person in Ephesus could
understand and was familiar with, and that initial sermon in the book,
for it is a sermon, not philosophy, moves on in forms of thought which
the people knew about and habitually used, until the hidden purpose comes
to light: "The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his
glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and
truth." John was presenting his Lord to the people of his time in terms
that the people could understand.

Even within the New Testament, therefore, there is no static creed. For,
like a flowing river, the Church's thought of her Lord shaped itself to
the intellectual banks of the generation through which it moved, even
while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did
this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of
the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of
Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category
of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth Gospel. And if, in our
generation, a conservative scholar like the late D