in his utter transcendence could not interact directly with or appear immediately within the created order; hence it was only through a “secondary god” or “expressed divine principle” that God made the world and revealed himself in it. It was assumed by many Jewish and then Christian thinkers that the theophanies of the Jewish scriptures were visitations of the Logos, God’s self-expression in his divine intermediary or Son, as Philo called him. To an educated reader of the late first or early second century, the Logos of John’s prologue would clearly have been just this divine principle: at
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