1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
My translation
1 It was God who inaugurated the heavens above and the earth below.
2 The earth at that time was suffused with confusion as bad as a void, and darkness loomed over the abyss; but the will of the living God came to brood over that helpless water.
3 And God said, “Let light come into being,” and light came into being.
4 And God saw the light, and how beautiful*1 it was, and he separated light and darkness.*2
5 And God named the light “day” and the darkness “night”; and evening arose, and morning arose, and this was the first day.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
7 The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
12 But as many as received him to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
My translation
1 First was the Living Idea, and the Idea was with God, and the Idea was God.
2 He was first with God.
3 Everything came into being through him, and apart from him not even a single thing arose. What has been born*3
4 in him was life, and the life was the light of humankind.
5 And the light still appears radiant in the darkness, which did not take hold of it.
6 There was born a person, sent with a purpose by God,*4 and his name was John.
7 He came to give testimony, to attest to the light, so that everyone could believe through him.
8 But this person was not the light; instead, he came to testify about the light.
9 The light was the true light, which gives light to every human being coming into the world.*5
10 The light was in the world, and the world was born through him, but the world did not recognize him.
11 He came into what belonged to him, but the people who belonged to him did not take him for themselves.
12 But to all those who accepted him, he gave the right to be born children of God, if they trusted in his name.
13 These are the people who have been engendered not in blood relationships, and not from what the body wants, and not from what a husband wants, but from God.
14 And the Idea became a body, flesh and blood, and pitched a tent and sojourned*6 among us, and we gazed on his splendor, the splendor that a father’s only son has, full of benevolence and truth.
*1 Why “beautiful”? Well, first of all, because I can: the Hebrew word tōv (normally translated as “good”) can easily mean that. Secondly, the English “good” is quite susceptible to ethical and pragmatic meanings, which hardly apply to a newly created universe (well, a newly ordered and dynamic one—there was some kind of matter and energy in existence before). What’s more, the English “good” isn’t all that suggestive of the deep spiritual comfort or wonder tōv can allude to. Here, God is impressed with his own creation, so it must be impressive indeed. Moreover, I think Saint Augustine is right: God is “beauty” and creates and presides over “beauties” less beautiful when subjected to the degraded human will and judgment. “Beautiful” is hence a letting-go sort of description on the human level: “What a sublime, inexplicable thing to exist. It’s so beautiful. Only God could have done that.”
The more specific Hebrew word for “beautiful,” by the way, wouldn’t have been considered by the author of this passage: it means beautiful in a quite limited way, as in a young girl’s prettiness.
*2 In the hope that attention to such nuances won’t get me yelled at as pedantic: darkness and light are here on the same syntactical footing (as in the Hebrew). There’s no “light divided from darkness” like wheat from chaff; neither entity looks privileged in this verse. Though God began creation itself, according to verse 3, by creating light, presumably to get the better of darkness (or proto-darkness), he is now just evenhandedly making the basic arrangements of time and space, and this includes assigning a limited darkness its proper function, and light its own, likewise.
*3 Notice the difference between sentence division here and in the King James Version. Verse divisions are modern, so scholars in some cases rethink them.
*4 This is the same verb that generated the noun we know in English as “apostle,” so I thought it should have a more pointed translation than just “sent.”
*5 It is unclear whether the light or the human being is coming.
*6 “Lived in his tent.” The word choice nicely reflects the patriarchs’ way of life and at the same time emphasizes that Jesus lived on earth only temporarily. There is also the “tabernacle” (which is from the Latin for “tent”), the holy tent in which the Israelites are said to have worshipped prior to the Temple’s existence. Also, tent-pitching has some metaphorical, metaphysical, philosophical background: see Sirach 24:8.