Beyond logos: extensions of the language ideology paradigm in the study of global Christianity

Called at once divine, the creator's " first born son," a "high priest," and reason itself by Philo, it is obvious that for him logos was a privileged cosmological term.1 While Philo, and his particular reading of logos, did not end up having many interlocutors among either the later Platonists or the post-temple rabbinic writers, there is strong reason to suspect that his reading of logos was directly or indirectly quite influential with another set-namely, the authors of the collection of epistles and biographic accounts that would become the New Testament (Runia 1993, Siegert 2009). The second difference is that now the Philonic logos is deployed not in the setting of philosophical speculation nor in the allegorical interpretation of Jewish law, but rather as part of an antinomian Jewish apocalyptic movement that would move on to reshape the Roman Empire and beyond.3 Given the peregrinations undertaken by the term logos and the conceptual baggage that it acquired on its Mediterranean walkabout, it is not surprising that the polysemy of the term gave it at once an ordering power and a mutagenic instability.