rist are never mentioned in the Fourth
Gospel. But however clear the view of the evangelist is, it nevertheless
remains obscure how he conceived the process of this incarnation of an
eternal being, transcending time and space and comprehending the whole
world, which lived among them, which, as is said in the Epistle of John,
was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen
with our eyes, that which we have beheld and our hands handled, the Word
of life,(33) etc. If we think ourselves for a moment into this view, into
the unity of the Divine that lives and moves in the Father, in the Logos,
and in all souls that have recognised the Logos, we shall comprehend the
meaning of the statement, that whoever believes in Jesus is born of God,
that whoever has the Son, has the life. To have the truth, to have eternal
life, to have the Son, to have the Father, all this then signifies one and
the same thing for the evangelist, and for the greatest among the
ante-Nicene fathers.

But second, the conception that the Logos was born in Jesus might simply
signify the same as Philo means, when he speaks of the Logos in Abraham
and in the prophets. This would be intelligible from Philo's point of view
in relation to Abraham, but clearly does not go far enough to explain the
deification of Christ as we find it in all the Evangelists.

There remains possible therefore only a third conception. Philo knows very
well that God has an infinite number of powers or ideas, all of which
might be called Logoi, and together constitute the Logos. If now, among
these Logoi, that of humanity were conceived as highest, and Jesus were
regarded as the incarnate Logos, as the expressed and perfectly realised
idea of man, all would be intelligible. Jesus would then be the ideal man,
the one among mortals who had fully realised the idea of man as it existed
in God, who on the one side was the son of God, on the other side the son
of man, the brother of all men, if they would only acknowledge Christ as
the Son of God, and emulate His example. This would be a correct and to us
a perfectly intelligible and acceptable conception. But many as are the
difficulties which this would remove, the objection remains that we can
produce no historical proof of such a conception of Jesus as Logos of
humanity. We are too poor in historical monuments of the first three
Christian centuries to be able to speak with assurance of the inner
processes of thou