CX

In a previous thread a few days ago I outlined the problems with GJn 1:1c as a proof text for Jehovah's Witness Christology. Recall that the JW New World Translation translates GJn 1:1c as And the Word was a god.

In my original analysis I rendered this text as And God was the Word. This was technically off the mark by a significant margin. We need to recall two facts of Greek syntax. The first is that Greek has no indefinate article so in absence of the Greek definite article hO, we are left with context to determine whether an indefinite article is called for or not.

The second fact is that in Greek, unlike in English, word order is flexible and determines the inflected meaning of words. Whereas in English the phrase "And the Word was God" the word order determines the meaning of the individual parts of the phrase, in Greek this is not the case. Rather differing the word order in Greek places the emphasis in a different place.

What is important for the translator is to recognize which lexical element constitutes the subject and which element constitutes the direct object. Since the original Greek uses the nominative case ending S for both nouns we are left firstly understanding that the direct object is in the predicate nominative case and secondly that we can identify the subject of the clause by looking for the definite article. In GJn 1:1c the phrase is KAI QEOS HN hO LOGOS. The definite article hO immediately precedes the word LOGOS and we can safely say that "the Word" is the subject of this clause. So now then how do we determine whether QEOS implies an indefinite article or not? We are given a clue by it's placement at the beginning of the clause. In Koine Greek syntax this is a way to place emphasis on the direct object underlining it's preminence as the significant concept in the clause. From this we conclude that no indefinite article is implied so we can properly render the entire phrase in English as "And the Word was God".

This all tells us that both Sabellianism (And the word was the God) and Arianism (And the Word was a god) are incorrect. Martin Luther said of this proof text that the lack of an article is against Sabellianism and the word order is against Arianism. There are other instances where the Orthodox position doesn't fair as well, but in this case the traditional position holds.

Muad'Dib

Thanks for putting this up, CowboyX, it's a good piece of work.

Quick question--do you happen to remember who it was that firmly established this a while back (in the 70's, maybe)? I've been racking my brain for a while now and all I can remember is that he was at the University of Chicago at the time.

NOGO

Thanks CowboyX,

I would appreciate it if you can point me to some of those cases where the traditional view is not as clear.