Avatar and St John

What a cool movie. 3D, aliens, environmental and colonial themes. What is an avatar anyway? In Hinduism, Avatar refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, it could be translated appearance. The term is most often associated with Vishnu, though it is also associated with other deities such as Krishna and Ganesh. The Hindus (and other faiths) create such personifications of God to somehow enable them to interact with the most high God.

The Apostle John was a cross cultural thinker and dealt with a similar concept, of logos (word). Inspired by the Spirit he wrote his Gospel for people who understood, and believed in, a Greek philosophical way of understanding the world.To them God was unattainable, a far off impersonal deity, unknowable and completely different to any of his creation. To solve this problem the Greeks created this concept of a logos, the Word, a demi-God, a rationality or a knowable person between God and people. Now John knew this so he used their language to explain who Jesus was and is.

In the beginning was the Word ( just as in Genesis only God was in the begining, Jesus was God)
and the Word was with God ( different to what the Greeks thought, so now he is not just in-between, he is with God the Father)
and the Word was God(so the logos-Word-Jesus is not just a demi-God but God himself).

And so flows the rest of the Gospel with allusions to the pagan language of the time. Now I don't think the parallel is enough to translate John 1:1 to "In the beginning was the Avatar" but it may help in explaining the gospel to a person of the Hindu faith.

1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus