Joe Rogan’s conversation with geographer and author Jared Diamond on the Joe Rogan Experience wasn’t set up to be a theological showdown. The two spent most of their time discussing leadership, language, and the fragile mechanics of civilization.
The line in question comes from the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.”
It’s among the most quoted lines in the Bible, repeated in sermons and referenced across Western culture for centuries. Diamond explained that the phrase loses something essential in translation.
“The beginning of the gospel according to St. John, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God,” Diamond said. “So St. John was not written in English. It was written in Greek or translated into Greek and the Greek word for word is logos. The Greek word logos means word but it also means rational system.”
That distinction changes the sentence entirely. As Diamond put it, “When you translate the first line of the St. John gospel, in the beginning was the word, there was much more. In the beginning was a system and organization, not just a word.”
Rogan immediately grasped the weight of that gap.
“The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference. That is such a giant difference,” he said. “So there’s a giant difference in what it means and unfortunately it leaves, when you just have the term word, it leaves so much to interpretation. There’s so much spin that a pastor or someone who’s relaying this can say what it actually means if they don’t know the original language of it.”
Diamond used the moment to make a point about translation itself, one he returned to throughout the episode with examples from Italian, German, and the New Guinea languages he’s studied for decades. Words rarely map cleanly from one language to another, and religious texts, translated and retranslated across centuries, are especially vulnerable to that erosion.
Rogan brought up a friend who spent sixteen years teaching himself ancient Hebrew just so he could read the Bible without an intermediary. Diamond didn’t treat that as major. He treated it as the only real way to get close to what a text actually says, using the Iliad’s opening line in ancient Greek as another example of meaning and power that simply cannot survive the trip into English.
Diamond’s point wasn’t limited to the Bible. Much of his discussion with Rogan focused on how difficult it is to carry meaning from one language into another.
He gave examples that make the problem immediately obvious. In Italian, for instance, different verbs can express different forms of love. Choosing the wrong one can completely change what you’re communicating.
There is another example. The language distinguishes between verbs used for humans eating and animals eating. Using the wrong construction for a person can turn an ordinary statement into an insult.
And that becomes particularly important when dealing with texts that have been read, translated and interpreted for thousands of years.
