of life” or “when there was as yet nothing.” Such expressions, however, depend entirely upon the idiomatic usage in the language into which the translation is being made. Otherwise such a rendering can be misleading. The term the Word has a rich heritage, by way of both its Greek and Jewish backgrounds. For the Greeks who held to a theistic view of the universe, it could be understood as the means by which God reveals himself to the world, while among those who were pantheistic in outlook, the Word