Hello, from Diego Garcia, Friends! This is Josef Stallings.

I decided to take a break from writing about homeshooling for a while, until Anne gives me permission to start up again. In the meanwhile, I am writing an exhaustive exegetical commentary on the New Testament book of John. This article is the first in a series of articles that will probably number…who knows; we’ll just see where this takes us.

John 1:1a: “In the beginning was the Word…”

This verse starts off with the word “in,” which is a preposition. This means that it is a word that usually proceeds a noun, and expresses relation to another word in the same sentence. In this instance, the relationship indicated by the word “in,” means that something is contained within something else. 

The word “in” can be understood as expressing the situation of something that is or appears to be enclosed or surrounded by something else. In this case, since we do not yet have any context for the word, we don’t know what the first something is, and we also don’t know what the “something else” is. In fact, it is simply a word that is sitting out there, without context, except for anticipation that something will be found to be within something else.

Some other possibilities for the word “in” could be that something is really cool, as in, “that shirt is really in right now.” In this case, the word would indicates that something is popular or represents the current style.

However, it is unlikely that this meaning of the word “in” is the one intended. If it were being used to indicate that something is stylish, it would probably not appear at the beginning of the sentence, and would follow the word meaning that thing that is intended to be indicated as being “in,” not to mention some form of the verb “to be,” which is actually a preposition and a verb. Double preposition sentences are rarely used at the beginning of paragraphs, except for in ancient Babylon, where such things were allowed. 

In the original Greek, the word “in” is actually “ev,” which looks like a word fragment, but is actually pronounced like the letter “n.” This makes no real sense until you realize that the letter that looks like a “v” is actually the letter “nu”; not “vu,” but “nu.” Go figure. So, the word “ev,” which is pronounced the same as the English letter “n,” has the same meaning as the word “in,” which sounds an awful lot like the word that it means.

If the word “in” were not at the beginning of this verse, then maybe the sentence would have more meaning, since it would be starting with a word that is easier to define. In this case, the word “the” would be at the beginning of the sentence, which would indicate that we’re going to find out the thing that the sentence was about, instead of what happened to it, as we are when the sentence starts with the word “in.”

From a pictorial perspective, the capital letter I in the word “in,” appears to look like an I-beam that is used in the construction of sky scrapers. This could mean that what is to follow in the sentence is going to be either very strong, or very high and majestic. Since I am reading from the King James Version (KJV), I would guess that the I-beam symbolism would indicate that the rest of the sentence is going to be majestic; it’s almost too obvious to include in even an exhaustive exegetical commentary.

The word “in” occurs 14,482 times in the English KJV Bible, making it a very important word. We should pay attention to this word, and carefully discern its meaning. However, my reasearch has shown that it doesn’t appear at all in the Chinese, Tamil, Urdu, Aramaic, Hebrew, Korean, or Russian translations of the Bible. This is curious, because for such an important word to be missing from any bible translation could signal a conspiracy of some sort. Of which sort, I am not certain, but I’m sure that there is a sort of conspiracy that would fit this situation.

That’s about all that I can say about the word “in.” In part 2 of this series, we will look at the word “the,” and its relationship to its predecessor word, “in.” 

I can’t wait! Until then, be sure to study hard, and don’t leave any words undefined!

Very respectfully, sincerely, and well-intentioned,

Josef Stallings