The Word Before All Things
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John opens his Gospel not with a birth narrative but with eternity itself, placing the Word alongside God before time began. This is a claim about identity and origin, that the Word was present with God and was God, existing before creation had a first moment. It is a high and weighty statement, one that has shaped Christian reflection for two thousand years.
But a claim this significant raises a natural question: how do we know this is actually what was written? Before we can ask whether such a statement is true, we have to ask whether we even have reliable access to the original words at all. This is exactly the kind of foundational question Sean McDowell explores with Dr. Michael Kruger, who has spent his career studying the earliest New Testament manuscripts to understand what the apostles actually wrote down.
Kruger's journey into this field began with a personal crisis of sorts, as a young student confronted with hard questions about the reliability of the biblical text. That experience pushed him toward textual criticism, the careful discipline of comparing manuscript evidence to understand how confident we can be in the text we now read. It is unglamorous, detailed work, but it matters enormously, because every theological truth, including the majestic opening of John's Gospel, rests on the assumption that we have real access to what was originally written.
There is something grounding about knowing that verses like John 1:1 are not isolated statements floating free of history, but words embedded in a long chain of manuscript transmission that scholars have carefully studied and tested. Faith in the Word made flesh is not asked to float apart from evidence; it is invited to stand on careful, patient scholarship about the words themselves.
If you want to go deeper into how we know what the apostles actually wrote, take some time with Sean McDowell's conversation, "5 Key Lessons from the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts | Michael Kruger." It is a thoughtful look at the evidence behind the words we read every day.
Read the source: Sean McDowell →