“The Word will set you free.”
“The Word is the Lord.”
“I follow the Word of the Lord.”
What is the “Word”? Is it the Bible and if so, which one?
Is it a voice in your head and if so, if others hear different voices who’s is right?
Is it a combination of both and if so, doesn’t this give you almost an infinite number of “Word” variations?
I believe most Christians would answer this question by quoting the first verses of the Gospel of John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended (overcame) it not.”
In other words, Jesus is/was the Word of God made human.
And this “answer” totally evades the question. We learn of Jesus through the Bible, so the choices now are:
Bird is the word.
All others are heresy.
Well, a wor is an unbound morpheme, a written or spoken unit of meaning… 
But somehow I think you’re asking what it’s supposed to mean in a Christian religious context. And I apologize in advance for the relative nutballery of the answer.
Start with the Neolithic concept that a monarch’s spoken word was law (at least if he ruled in accordance with local custom0. It didn’t take long to realize that the king’s word might be needed more places than he might physically conveniently be, and to transmit it in writing with formulaic and sigil verifiers. Hence his authority could be sent places he was not himself present (provided his followers were loyal).
Now, mix in a little cultural customs: naming something gives one authority over it, for example. By the time you were done with this, words began turning into magical entities, with power of their own.
Enter YHWH, the One True God, bigger ,meaner, and … yeah? OK, forget that last … bigger and meaner. YHWH speaks His word through prophets, whose message is a mixed bag, but with some consistent elements: YHWH is a green-eyed god who doesn’t want his followers cheating on him with Ba’al or Ishtar, or Dagon either; don’t lie, cheat, steal; keep it in your kilt unless you’re willing to take the woman and give her a home and security; stuff liek that. The messages of the prophets tended to get written down. (Note that they weren’t playing Jeane Dixon – ‘prophecy’ in this sense means “Speak in God’s name” in exactly the same sense as the heralds, governors, and such spoke in the king’s name under specific conditions. Only occasionally was there any predictive prophecy, and it was along the lines of, “If you don’t stop feasting and fucking, and start trusting in God and raising and training an army in His name, the armies of the King of Overthere are going to overrun the land, and you will fall and be food for ravens.”) And eventually writing prophets came along, ones that committed their prophesies to writing.
Now, one of the key points to this is that it used the same sort of formulary: “The word of the Lord came unto Hinkiel, saying,.‘Say to the men of Israel, …’” And of course the writings in which messages from God Hisself were preserved tended to get honored treatment. Now, let’s skip forward in time… it’s now about 100 BC, and Philo Judaeus is trying to make Greek philosophy and Jewish ideas mesh into one monotheistic philosophy. And one thing he comes up with is the concept of the Logos, the Word that emanates out from God and has a life of its own, just as the king’s messages and then the scrolls of the prophets carried his and their words places they had never been.
And then there was Jesus. And, keeping this purely separate from Christian dogma for a moment, the impact of His personality and His teachings seems to have been a very powerful one, within the limited enviornment He worked in. And when His gadfly message pissed off the local Establishment, they conned the Roman governor into executing Him. But, you know, you can’t keep a Good Man down – reports started circulating that He’d come back to life.
Now, I’m not going to argue for this here and now – the Resurrection is one of those things that you either believe in or you don’t. Biologically it’s outrageous – and the spiritual impact of its occurring is immense. So let’s not get sidetracked into the question of whather it actually happened – the point is that growing numbers across First Century Roman Empire and surrounding areas believed it did – believed it strongly enough to be willing to themselves die for it. And letters from His close followers and later, accounts of His life got written. And preserved in much the same way as the accounts of the prophets earlier.
Of the Twelve who were His closest companions, the youngest (and most imtimately connected with Him) lived to a ripe old age, while the others were getting themselves martyred. And he and the school that surrounded him tried to make sense out of Jesus’s more mystical teachings, and hit on the Logos concept to explain it.
Jesus, they said, was not merely the Son of God, some demidivine figure doing God’s work on Earth – He Himself was the Logos, the omni-effectuating Word that called all things into being, made flesh and dwelling among us, living and dying in humility as one of us.
As might be expected, over the years a bunch of writings sprung up explaining various people’s “revelations” and “insights” into what God really wanted. Certainly we’ve had some samples of that here, with lekatt, kanicbird, and the many witnessers who stop by to Save us with their pearls of wisdom. So the early Church attempted to sort wheat from chaff, and come out with a collection that accurately portrayed Jesus and/or conveyed accurately his followers’ message, as opposed to stuff made up out of whole cloth. End product of that canonizing process was the Bible.
The Bible itself uses “word of God” in three senses: 1. Jesus Himself as Logos, notably in the first chapter of John’s gospel and in John’s first epistle. 2. A specific prophecy spoken by a prophet and allegedly God’s own words coming through him. 3. The collective sum of all such prophecies taken as a single unit.
Jump forward to the 20th Century, and intellectual matters are in ferment. People are looking for security, for something they can rely on, as intellectual concepts and social norms shift, power-hungry men start aggressive wars, they want something to believe in. And lo and behold, here’s this Book that claims to contain God’s Own Word ™. Security!!
It’s a short step from “It contains God’s Wprd” to “it is God’s Word” and from there to “it’s the only way we can know God” and then to “if anything contradicts it, the Bible and not the relaity of nature must be the thing that’s right.”
But that’s here it comes from.
Thank you, Polycarp.
Well done, Polycarp. 