AT THE CLOSE OF THE LAST CHAPTER I NOTED THAT THE “WORD OF YAHWEH” being a visible appearance of God as a man raised certain questions. One of those was how a first-century Jew would have parsed the idea of Jesus being the “Word made flesh.” True, there was Old Testament precedent for Yahweh being visible and embodied. That phenomenon would have helped a Jew accept at least the idea that God could show up in human form.
