One of my favorite characters is the Samaritan Woman at the Well in John 4. While she was unnamed in the story, later traditions called her Photini — The Luminous One — because she was the first person in John’s Gospel to recognize Jesus as the Messiah and bring others to Him.

Her later name may have been inspired, in part, by John 1:9 in the opening preface of the Gospel:
“The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.”

The word for “gives light” in the ESV is φωτίζω (phōtizō) and means:

• to shine / give light
• to illuminate something or someone
• to bring something into the light, hence reveal, make known, teach, or give understanding

A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG) includes the definition:

• “to make known in reference to the inner life or transcendent matters and thus enlighten”

John took a commonly used word with an established spiritual meaning and said that Jesus is a worldwide source of illumination. The Samaritan woman was the first in John’s Gospel to bring the light of Jesus to others, and thus one of the first able to see it.

The semantic question is not whether φωτίζω can mean “enlighten.” It plainly does. The exegetical question is what kind of illumination John intends, and what “every person” means in its context.

The personal implication is simple: wake up, check one’s eyesight, and walk in the light.

“The new way of being human has been unveiled.”

— N. T. Wright

Light In the Old Testament

By the first century, φωτίζω was not merely a word for physically shining. Greek usage already extended from illumination to disclosure, instruction, making hidden things known, and giving understanding. The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) is particularly important because it repeatedly uses φωτίζω both for literal illumination and for the Hebrew conceptual world of teaching and enlightened eyes.

“As a general principle, when expressing the Hebrew construal of the concept of light, the Greek lexical roots ΦΩ- and ΦΑ- appear to be used synonymously.”

— Joel D. Ruark

The Hebrew root אור corresponds in the LXX to the larger Greek pho (φω) family. We’ll look at the Greek LXX, understanding that the Jews predated the Roman Empire. Clement of Alexander argued that Greek philosophy was in great part derived from its own barbarians (outsiders), saying that “both [Plato] and Pythagoras learned the most and the noblest of their dogmas among the barbarians.”  

In another place, he said, “Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece” (Stromata, Book I, Chapter 15).

History seems to support it. I’ve written more about the East-West exchange of ideas in Emperor & Pyre. It’s all the same human narrative: semantics and ego account for most of our misunderstandings.

The conceptual relationship between light and instruction was pre-built into the Scriptural narrative.

Some other LXX examples include:

• Ezra 9:8 — “that our God may brighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our slavery.”
• Psalm 119:130 — “The unfolding/revelation of your words gives light.”

However, Isaiah 60:1-3 in the Greek Septuagint doesn’t explain enlightenment—it shouts it:
“Be enlightened, be enlightened, O Jerusalem…”

The ESV translation still captures the idea well, while showing enlightenment’s relation to salvation:

“Arise, shine, for your light has come,
    and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
    and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
    and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light,
    and kings to the brightness of your rising.”

The language is about a group of people waking up and becoming a nation of priests, a “city on a hill.” It does not erase the darkness, but shines in it. 

Giving light and giving instruction are semantic neighbors within the Jewish Scriptures that form the foundation of Christianity’s New Testament. The same vocabulary was also used significantly in the Book of Sirach, a popular Jewish wisdom writing at the time of Jesus.

John thus used an already-established Greek metaphorical range to show that the true Light brings light to everyone and has already come. Jews, peoples of the Ancient Near East, and Greco-Romans all had conceptual frameworks for illumination that extended beyond physical light. Gentiles and Jews were both being challenged to become the ideal essence of their own teachings, one with God, by using Jesus’ Gospel to infiltrate every empire and illuminate every shadow.

“If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways…”

— N. T. Wright

Enlightenment & Early Christians

By the second century, φωτισμός is explicitly used with baptism. Justin’s First Apology gives the clarifying statement: “this washing is called illumination.”

Justin immediately explains why: those being instructed in Christian teaching are illuminated in their understanding. In other words, illumination was not merely about a single act of baptism.

Clement of Alexandria makes the connection more explicit here:

“For this reason instruction, which reveals the hidden things, has been called illumination.”

Instruction reveals what was hidden, and this is called illumination in Scripture. Clement continues by describing illumination as that by which the divine is clearly seen, and explicitly connects illumination with knowledge.

So, baptism was not merely an act but part of a process of transformation.

The first Christians were as aware of Jesus’ baptism as they were of His forty days of fasting. They practiced baptism, fasting, prayer, instruction, communal meals, confession, worship, and other practices as part of entering and living within this new way.

Christianity emerged in a world where initiation, ritual meals, sacred instruction, ascetic discipline, communal identity, and claims about transformation were recognizable religious forms.

Christianity never simply copied mystery religions. It freed them. Early Christians understood Christianity as something anyone can enter, learn, practice, experience, and be transformed by.

Initiates into Christianity were entering a path of spiritual transformation, one that changed their dispositions, perspectives, and understanding of themselves and the world of humanity.

Rather than simply agreeing to a set of propositions and assuming belonging in a herd mentality, early Christians were moving through the motions of the Gospel and learning how to become more like Christ and experience the promises of his resurrection in real time.

The result was a people who understood themselves as transformed, radically different from civilization’s ordinary and often-justified norms, and a movement that spread across the Roman world.

There is also an interesting parallel in early Christian language surrounding the Eucharist.

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 33-108 AD), in Ephesians described communion in medicinal language that would have echoed in mystery cults, “medicine of immortality,” and called it an antidote against death, so that believers might live in Jesus Christ.

Clement elsewhere calls the whole Gospel “the medicine of immortality.”

The terminology is significant: φάρμακον (pharmakon) and φαρμακεία (pharmakeia) are related. Pharmakon can mean medicine, remedy, drug, poison, or potion, while pharmakeia belongs to the broader semantic field of drugs, potions, and eventually sorcery. 

Communion is a place we go to die, remember Him, and experience the newness of life the Resurrection brings. It is the Gospel, in one practice, much like baptism is. Magic was never the sin. Distortion, dependency, and delusions were. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth are black magic’s heads. Over time, I’ve become convinced that the biblical word for “faith” (pistis) is equivalent to what we usually mean by good magic.

Prayer was similarly understood in transformative terms. A text attributed to John Chrysostom (c. 347–407 AD) said:

“Prayer is illumination of the soul, true knowledge of God … physician of the passions, an antidote for diseases.”

The language is the same: illumination, knowledge, healing, and transformation are placed together.

Fasting belongs in the same larger pattern, although I would not claim that early Christians commonly called fasting “illumination.” Fasting, prayer, instruction, baptism, Eucharist, and disciplined practice were part of a larger process of becoming capable of seeing and living differently.

“A disciple, or apprentice, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.”

— Dallas Willard

Illumination as Lived Christianity

After Mary’s song at the opening of Luke, the priest Zechariah prophesied:

“…to give knowledge of salvation to his people
    in the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
    whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
    to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

— Luke 1:77-79

Illumination was no mere doctrinal point but a personally experienced and collectively modeled phenomenon early Christians went through. The Apostle Paul placed awakening, salvation, and light into the same movement: “It is already the hour for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer now…The night is far gone; the day is at hand… [put on] the weapons of light.” (Romans 13:11–12).

Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus (“The Instructor”) was written in the late second or early third century, probably around AD 190–200. Clement was a Christian teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, and his work presented Christ as the divine Instructor who trains converts in how to live. 

In the Paedagogus, Clement wrote:

“Being baptized, we are illuminated; being illuminated, we become sons; being made sons, we are perfected; being perfected, we are made immortal.”

And:

“illumination, by which that holy saving light is contemplated, that is, by which we see the divine clearly.”

Clement was not waxing poetic. His language maps the same biblical pattern Paul uses, who had his eyes opened by Jesus, in Ephesians 1:17–18:

“that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,”

The imagery is remarkably consistent: the eyes are enlightened so that a person may know. Later, in Ephesians 5:14, Paul said, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” The immediate subject is walking as children of light rather than participating in darkness.

This is the pattern throughout the New Testament:

dead → alive
darkness → light
blindness → sight
ignorance → knowledge
asleep → awake

That is why salvation can be understood, in part, as this movement itself: being dead in sins, blind to reality, and then becoming awake and alive, finally beginning to see, and learning to keep growing and walking in what has been seen. 

Plato’s Cave is usually presented as a philosophical metaphor for moving from illusion toward reality. The New Testament repeatedly uses the same vocabulary for a similar movement: from darkness into light, ignorance into knowledge, death into life, and sleep into wakefulness. The only difference is that one was an allegory and the other the Way. The New Testament is a guide for those stuck in Plato’s Cave.

The difficult part is not comprehending the concept.

The difficult part is going through it and walking it out.

Seeing differently has a cost, especially for people deeply entrenched in other ways of living (Luke 14:28). Illumination exposes habits, attachments, assumptions, and patterns that were easier to maintain while they remained in the dark.

“It is well-nigh impossible to grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Irony In Modern Christianity

There is a modern stigma around the word enlightenment, because many Christians immediately associate it with Eastern religions, New Age spirituality, or other traditions. The irony is that Western science has, or at least used to, do the same thing. It has at least learned its lessons and started integrating Eastern teachings and practices. For example, Dialectical Behavior Therapy is largely based on Eastern principles.

The same conceptual frameworks that existed in the first century are now flooding our social media feeds. 

Historically, that reaction is difficult to sustain. Philosophically, it’s a false dichotomy. God is always looking for those who worship him in spirit and truth (John 4:4). There is no divide between Science (i.e., knowledge) and Spirit. The real question is not a matter of logic or Scripture, but of faith.

The vocabulary is already deeply embedded in Christianity’s own Scriptures and early tradition. It’s not its fault if Western society is just waking up to it. 

Paul warns Philippian Christians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), suggesting that salvation is neither passive nor assumed. Hebrews treats enlightenment as one of the concrete experiences of participation in the Christian reality and describes apostasy as a reversal after that experience:

“For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.”

— Hebrews 6:4–6

The issue is not whether enlightenment is Christian.

The more important question is whether we are willing to listen to what Scripture says.

John said at the beginning of his Gospel that “the true Light gives light to every person.” There has never been a time to fully find out what Jesus meant and follow through on it like in 2026.

Salvation is worked out in a human life, and it is a path that continues for the rest of life.

The first illumination is never the end, but the breaking of dawn after a long sleep, the cracking of a door. It is the beginning of learning how to walk in the light. 

Salvation (enlightenment) is an experienced state of participation in Christian life, not merely intellectual agreement or rote performance. Since enlightenment is something experienced and transformative, falling away is described as a profound reversal. If a person has been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of God’s word, and the powers of the age to come, and then somehow falls away from all of it, it’s essentially going right back into the cess-machine that put Jesus on the cross in the first place and just going along with it. 

Christian enlightenment is learning to see reality in the light of Christ, to recognize what was previously hidden, and then to learn how to live according to what has been seen. It means to see Christ in the stranger and our enemies, to love without condition, and to live not according to the patterns and schemes of the world.

It is the same concept of becoming “a kingdom of priests” (1 Peter 2:9) to be “all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 22:18). The Bible is the same story, told over and over again until it starts happening to us.

“You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.”

— Richard Rohr