background in the Mandaean literature, the other in the Hermetica. Both of these backgrounds are dubious even on the grounds of the dating of the sources; yet both scholars proceed to ascribe to the words of John’s prologue the meanings of similar or identical words in fundamentally different corpora. Neither scholar exhibits much linguistic sensitivity to the need for contrastive paradigmatic equivalence or, more broadly, for equivalent contracts in the semantic fields of the texts being compared. I