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Was It “the Word” That Was Made Flesh — Or Something Else?
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This sentence, the first verse in the Gospel of St. John, should be familiar, and the same can be said for this excerpt from that Gospel’s 14th verse, alluding to the birth and life of Christ: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
Less well known, however, is the fact that these verses in The King James Bible constitute a mistranslation of the original. The ultimate source of this error was St. Jerome — who chose the Latin word Verbum as a translation for the Greek word Lógos, substituting a term with an exceedingly narrow and precise meaning for a term much broader in its implications.