John says God's own self-expression, the Logos, became a human body of flesh and blood, not just a voice.
The phrase comes from John 1:14, where the Greek word behind "Word" is Logos. In Greek thought Logos could mean reason, order, the rational principle behind the universe, or simply speech. John takes that loaded word and does something startling with it: he says this Logos was with God, was God, and then became flesh. The verb is egeneto, "became" or "came to be" — the same word used for things coming into existence in Genesis. So the eternal one who never came to be, came to be human.
"Flesh" translates sarx, and John does not soften it. Sarx is the word for meat, for the physical stuff of a body, sometimes even for weakness and mortality. He could have written that the Word took a body, or put on humanity, gentler options available in Greek. He chose the blunt one. No single English phrase carries both the philosophical weight of Logos and the physical bluntness of sarx at once.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Establishes the Logos as eternal and divine before the incarnation described three verses later.
The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The verse the phrase comes from, using sarx and the verb 'became' without softening either.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have gazed upon and touched with our own hands—this is the Word of life. And this is the life that was revealed; we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.
The same writer insists this Word of life was heard, seen, and touched with hands.
By common confession, the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was proclaimed among the nations, was believed in throughout the world, was taken up in glory.
An early hymn fragment using the same sarx language for God manifested in the flesh.
Almost every English Bible keeps "the Word" for Logos, capitalised, because no substitute (Reason, Message, Utterance) has served both the philosophical resonance and the personal identity John gives it. "Flesh" for sarx is likewise kept nearly universal rather than softened to "human" or "a body," since translators want readers to feel the physical bluntness John intended, even though it can sound oddly graphic in modern English.
People sometimes assume "the Word" means the Bible, as if John 1:14 is saying scripture became a person. It isn't. Logos here names a living person, the one John identifies as Jesus, present before creation. Another common mistake, encouraged by pop word-studies, treats Logos as Greek philosophy's cold, impersonal cosmic principle finally getting a body — but John's whole point is that this Logos was always personal, always "with God," not an abstraction that later became one.
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