From Christology in the Making, Dunn, 1980, p 243.

The conclusion which seems to emerge from our analysis thus far is that it is only with v.14 that we can begin to speak of the personal Logos. The poem uses rather impersonal language (became flesh), but no Christian would fail to recognize a reference here to Jesus Christ — the Word became not flesh in general but Jesus Christ. Prior to v.14 we are in the same realm as pre-Christian talk of Wisdom and Logos, the same language and ideas that we find in the Wisdom tradition and in Philo, where, as we have seen, we are dealing with personifications rather than persons, personified actions of God rather than an individual divine being as such. The point is obscured by the fact that we have to translate the masculine Logos as he throughout the poem. But if we translated logos as God’s utterance instead, it would become clearer that the poem did not necessarily intend the Logos in vv.1-13 to be thought of as a personal divine being.

In other words, the revolutionary significance of v.14 may well be that it marks not only the transition in the thought of the poem from pre-existence to incarnation, but also the transition from impersonal personification to actual person).

This indeed is the astounding nature of the poem’s claim. If it had asserted simply that an individual divine being had become man, that would have raised fewer eyebrows. It is the fact that the Logos poet has taken language which any thoughtful Jew would recognize to be the language of personification and has identified it with a particular person, as a particular person, that would be so astonishing: the manifestation of God become a man! God’s utterance not merely come through a particu-lar individual, but actually become that one person, Jesus of Nazareth