Besides drawing on the light-imagery in his gospel source, John, Nonnos' phrase ek phaeos phos "from light, light" at Paraphrase 1.3 alludes to the phrase phos ek photos "light from light" in the Nicene Creed. There are also various classical resonances.
Nonnos' first word for "light" is the uncontracted Homeric genitive phaeos , while the following word is the contracted nominative - accusative phos , which Homer never uses. There is, however, another, quite different Homeric word phos "man"; accordingly, there is a play on words at Paraphrase 1.3 between "surface" phos "light" and "hidden" phos "man". Much more than in the highly formalized Nicene Creed, in which phos , in its context, is unambiguously the neuter noun phos "light", Nonnos' phraseology suggests the human side of the divine subject of his poem. Further adumbration of this is provided by the fact that the most frequent noun-epithet combination in Homer for phos (14 out of 18 times) is isotheos phos "godlike man". Three times, though, Homer uses the phrase allotrios phos "alien man". As a secondary resonance, this too is relevant for appreciating Nonnos, inasmuch as the idea will soon be presented (John 1.9 = Paraphrase 1.30) that the Logos is a kind of sojourner or "alien", not recognized by the world.
It is also important to consider Nonnos' non-Homeric classical sources. Paraphrase 1.1, for example, juxtaposes arrhetoi "speechless, unspoken, ineffable", with logos "word", and so calls to mind the beginning of Hesiod, Works and Days, in which men, are described as being, because of Zeus, rhetoi t' arrhetoi te "both famous and not spoken of". Another non-Homeric source is Parmenides, fr. 14, in which Parmenides, modifying the Homeric phrase allotrios phos , describes the moon as allotrion phos "an alien light"; correspondingly, Parmenides illustrates the samephos-phos ambivalence that Nonnos, many centuries later, would also develop.