Com2Jn11
(a) WHY does John 1:1 readsas "a
god"?
(b) Why the syriac and Coptic scriptures show that
they translated from Koine greek into Coptic as "a god" and were
fluent Koine Greek speakers at the time of translation - this is strong proof
by itself.
(c) When you look at John 1:1 you notice "ho theos" or "the
god" - Jehovah, and the word as "god", but why would John have
"the god" and the Word is just "god" .
However whne we look deeper at Koine Greek grammar, we see that the Greeks
quite often didnt use an indefinite article , but it
was understood as "a god".
(d) the following article from Solomon Landers ( a
witness I believe ) is very exhaustive in explaining things better ( heres a
quick summary though ):
"accurately rendering the Greek
original, en de ho barabbas lestes,
wherein the word for "robber"
lestes, is anarthrous: "a robber."
No English version renders this, "Barabbas was Robber." Likewise, John 1:1c should not be rendered to say,
"the Word was God," whether the text is Greek
or Coptic, but "the Word was a god." In Horner's 1911 English translation from the Coptic, he gives
this translation: "In the beginning was being the word, and the word was
being with God, and a God was the word."
An Early Coptic Translation and John 1:1c
Next The JW Expert a god or
ό θεός [God],"
Prepared
by Solomon Landers
January, 2006
From http://en.allexperts.com/q/Jehovah-s-Witness-1617/source-translation-JN1-1-1.htm.
Sahidic Coptic John#
Hn tehoueite nefSoop n[ipsaje
auw psaje nefsoop nnahrm pnoute
auw neunoute pe psaje
Transliteration
1:1a Hn tehoueite nefshoop nci
pshaje
1:1b Auw pshaje nefshoop
nnahrm pnoute
1:1c Auw neunoute pe pshaje
In harmony with Jesus' command to them, the early Christians eagerly spread the
message of the good news of Jehovah's Kingdom far and wide. They made
translations of the koine Greek Gospels into several languages. By about the year
200, the earliest of these were found in Syriac, Coptic, and Latin.1 Coptic was
the language spoken by Christians in Egypt, in the Sahidic dialect, until
replaced by the Fayyumic and the Bohairic dialects in Coptic church liturgy in
the 11th century C.E.
Coptic itself was the last stage of the Egyptian language spoken since the time
of the Pharaohs. Under the influence of the widespread use of koine Greek, the
Coptic language came to be written, not in hieroglyphs or the cursive Egyptian
script called Demotic, but in Greek letters supplemented by seven characters
derived from hieroglyphs. Coptic is a Hamito-Semitic language, meaning that it
shares elements of both Hamitic (north African)
languages and Semitic languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.
Much was made of it in the scholarly world when an apocryphal gospel written in
Coptic, titled the "Gospel of Thomas," was discovered in
In the book, The Text of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1987), Kurt and Barbara
Aland, editors of critical Greek New Testament texts, state:
"The Coptic New Testament is among the primary resources for the history
of the New Testament text. Important as the Latin and Syriac versions may be,
it is of far greater importance to know precisely how the text developed in
The Sahidic Coptic text of the Gospel of John has been found to be in the
Alexandrian text tradition of the well-regarded Codex Vaticanus (B) (Vatican
1209), one of the best of the early extant Greek New Testament manuscripts.
Coptic John also shows affinities to the Greek Papyrus Bodmer XIV (p75) of the
late 2nd/3rd century.3 Concerning the Alexandrian text tradition, Dr. Bruce
Metzger states that it "is usually considered to be the best text and the
most faithful in preserving the original."4
Therefore, it is all the more strange that insights of
the Sahidic Coptic text of John 1:1 are largely ignored by popular Bible
translators. Might that be because the Sahidic Coptic Gospel of John translates
John 1:1c in a way that is unpopular in Christendom? The Sahidic text renders
John 1:1c as auw neunoute pe pshaje, clearly meaning literally "and was a
god the Word."**% Unlike koine Greek, Sahidic
Coptic has both the definite article, p, and the indefinite article, u. The
Coptic text of John 1:1b identifies the first mention of noute as pnoute,
"the god," i.e., God. This corresponds to the koine Greek text,
wherein theos, "god," has the definite
article ho- at John 1:1b, i.e., "the Word was with [the] God."
The koine Greek text indicates the indefiniteness of the word theos in its second mention (John 1:1c), "god," by
omitting the definite article before it, because koine Greek had no indefinite
article. But Coptic does have an indefinite article, and the text employs the
indefinite article at John 1:1c. This makes it clear that in reading the
original Greek text, the ancient Coptic translators understood it to say
specifically that "the Word was a god."
The early Coptic Christians had a good understanding of both Greek and their
own language, and their translation of John's koine Greek here is very precise
and accurate. Because they actually employed the indefinite article before the
word "god," noute, the Sahidic Coptic translation of John 1:1c is
more precise than the translation found in the Latin Vulgate, since Latin has
neither a definite nor an indefinite article. Ancient Coptic translations made
after the Sahidic, in the Bohairic dialect, also employ the indefinite article
before the Coptic word for "god."
The Coptic word neunoute (ne-u-noute) is made up of three parts: ne, a verbal
prefix denoting imperfect (past) tense, i.e., "was [being],"; u, the Coptic indefinite article, denoting
"a,"; and noute, the Coptic word for "god." Grammarians
state that the word noute, "god," takes the definite article when it
refers to the One God, whereas without the definite article it refers to other
gods. But in Coptic John 1:1c the word noute is not simply anarthrous, lacking
any article at all. Here the indefinite article is specifically employed. Thus,
whereas some scholars impute ambiguity to the Greek of John 1:1c, this early
Coptic translation can be rendered accurately as "the Word was a
god." This is the careful way those 2nd century Coptic translators
understood it. The Coptic expression for "was a god," ne-u-noute pe,
is the same Coptic construction as found at John 18:40, where it says of
Barabbas that he ne-u-soone pe, "was a robber," accurately rendering
the Greek original, en de ho barabbas lestes, wherein the word for
"robber" lestes, is anarthrous: "a robber." No English
version renders this, "Barabbas was Robber." Likewise, John 1:1c
should not be rendered to say, "the Word was
God," whether the text is Greek or Coptic, but "the Word was a
god." In Horner's 1911 English translation from the Coptic, he gives this
translation: "In the beginning was being the word, and the word was being
with God, and a God was the word."
It may be noted that the earliest Coptic translation was likely made before
Trinitarianism gained a foothold in the churches of the 4th century. That may
be one reason why the Coptic translators saw no need to violate the sense of
John's Greek by translating it "the Word was God." In a way, then,
the ancient Sahidic Coptic translation of John 1:1c was the New World
Translation of that day, faithfully and accurately rendering the Greek text.
That very point may give some indication as to why the Sahidic Coptic
translation of John 1:1c is largely kept under wraps in academic religious
circles today. Most new English translations continue to translate this verse
to say "the Word was God." But the Coptic text provides clear
evidence — from very ancient times — that the New
World Translation is correct in rendering John 1:1c as "the Word was a
god."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes:
1. Aland, p. 68
2. George William Horner, The Coptic version of the New Testament in the
southern dialect, otherwise called Sahidic and Thebaic, 1911, pp. 398, 399
3. Aland, p. 91
4. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament,
2nd edition, United Bible Societies, 1994, page 5
Other References:
Egyptian Grammar, 3rd edition, by Sir Alan Gardiner (Griffith Institute, 1957)
The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, (with Coptic text) by Marvin
Meyer (Harper Collins, 1992)
Websites:
http://www.integlogic.com/sahidica/pages/sahidicpaper1990.html
http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/coptic/coptjohn.shtml
http://www.worldscriptures.org/pages/copticsahidic.html
#You will likely need to download the 'CS Coptic Font' package to your machine
to properly view the Coptic text appearing on this page. This can be downloaded
for free at copticchurch.net.
**The translation of the Sahidic Coptic version of John 1:1c into English can
be diagrammed as:
auw neunoute pe psaje
auw ne-u-noute pe pshaje
auw = "and"
ne = verbal prefix denoting past tense, i.e., "was (being)"
u = Coptic indefinite article, "a"
noute = "god"
pe = Coptic particle meaning "is" or "this one is"
p = Coptic definite article, "the"
shaje = "word"
Literally the Coptic says, "and - was being- a god - is- the -Word."
Or more smoothly in literal English, "and the Word was a god."
%The text of the Coptic Bohairic version also has the indefinite article before
the word for "god," at John 1:1c, i.e., "a god":
Sahidic: neunoute
Bohairic: ne ounout
I see the stumbling block you have with the translation of John1:1c as
"the Word was god," is that of the "context within the Christian
community and it's roots in Judaism, that he would mean that there is more than
one God." What you mean in essence is that it does not seem to 'marry'
with the idea or belief in Monotheism.
However, note what a writer on this passage of scripture has said and see if
there is any real conflict with a rendering that says the "Word was a
god," and 'monotheism:
"[In]John 1:1, however, [we are told]of something
that was inexistence already in time primeval; astonishingly,it is not
"God." ...The Logos...is thereby elevated to such heights that it
almost becomes offensive. The expression is made tolerable only by virtue of
the continuation in "and the Logos was in the presence of God," viz',
in intimate,personal union with God.
"In order to avoid misunderstanding here, it may be inserted here that
[theos] and [ho theos]("god,divine" and
"the God)were not the same thing in this period. Philo has therefore
written: the [logos] means only[theos("divine")and
not [ho theos]("God")since the logos is not God in the strict sense.
Philo was not thinking of giving up Jewish monotheism. In similar fashion,
Origen, too, interprets: the Evangelist does not say that the logos is "God," but only that the logos is
"divine." In fact, for the author of the hymn, as for the Evangelist,
only the Father was "God"(ho theos; cf 17:3); "the Son" was
subordinate to him(cf.14:28). But that is only hinted
at in this passage because here the emphais is on the proximity of the one to
the other: the Logos was in "the presence of God," that is, in
intimate, personal fellowship with him....
"The Logos therefore was not a substitue for God in the beginning, but
lives in and out of this fellowship(
Regarding Haenchen's comment above "...In fact, for the author of the
hymn, as for the Evangelist, only the Father was "God"(ho theos; cf
17:3);.." Hans Kung comments on John 17.3 "...in this late, fourth
Gospel, we still have the statements like: 'And this is eternal life, that they
may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent'.... Here is a
clear distinction between God and Jesus Christ."- Judaism, p.382,
It is to be noted from the above that someone other than "the God,"
could bear the title or rather the term "god,"[Greek theos or QEOS] and not contradict or conflict with the
notion of monotheism at that time. We have to realise that such terms as
'monotheism,' 'polytheism' and 'henotheism' are relatively modern descriptive
terms. Polytheism is the belief and religious worship of more than one god.
Each god has a 'sphere' of their own. Jehovah's Witnesses are not polytheists.
Henotheism is the belief in and worship of one god without denying the
existence of others who also can recieve religious worship. Jehovah's Witnesses
are not henotheists. Monotheism has been defined as the belief in and religious
worship of one God only. Jehovah's Witnesses are then monotheists as they hold
to this. According to the Bible's monotheism the rendering "and the Word
was a god" would not teach polytheism nor henotheism as the Bible does not
say that the "Word," Jesus Christ should recieve religious worship,
that is, worship as the one true god. Can this be proved from the scriptures?
As well as the remarks by Haenchen re Philippians 2:6ff- Yes.
At this point though we would like to interject an interesting comment from the
book A Christian Theology of the Old Testament by George A.F.Knight(
"Again, the Person of God must have been in some sense present in the
human Moses. God explains to that hesitant and doubting creature: 'See, I have
made thee 'elohim to Pharaoh'!(Ex.7.1, P). Moreover,
we can define this last occurrence of the word 'elohim with more precision
because in the parallel passage from the pen of J we find 'I will be with thy
mouth'(Ex.4.12). In other words, Moses was meant to become the instrument of
the living Word of God, perhaps even its vehicle.
A good example of the close relationship that obtains between God and his
angels, on the other hand, is to be found in Ps.82.1-6. There we discover the
following words: 'Elohim stand(s) in the congregation of 'el; in the midst of
elohim he judges', and again 'I have said, ye are elohim, and all of you are
sons of elyon'.
Following this he writes:
"Scholars today are being led to the conclusion that there is no means of
explaining the phenonemon of Moses without conceding that he was a truly a
monotheist as was Amos centuries later. But such a belief cannot be postulated
of the majority of the leaders of
We think that in this author is incorrect to think that some of the OT figures
between Moses and Amos were "henotheists" for he, like some
trinitarians today, with their incorrect charge that the theology of the
Witnesses is henotheistic rather than monotheistic, is based on a
mis-understanding of what is biblical monotheism, which is being explained on
this page, in that biblical monotheism is where only one god is the true god
and should be worshipped but that there are other beings under and dependent on
this one who are rightly called and even "are gods"(Ps.82.6)but do
not recieve worship. But also of interest is the parallel that this author
shows with Moses being God's mouth-piece and also called a
"god"(Ex.4.12; 7.1)and the pre-existent
Jesus as God's "Word"(God's 'mouth-piece') and also called
"theos"("god") in John 1.1. This agree
with what one will read below when we quote Jack T. Sanders Schismatics,
Sectarians, Dissisdents, Deviants: The First One Hundred Years of
Jewish-Christian Relations. Please remember this point here when you come to
our quoting this work. This shows the background of John's prologue and has a
bearing on how we might understand the Word being theos
like Moses.
That the Bible clearly states that there is only one God and that others could
be called "gods" is borne out from the following scriptures:
One God, Jehovah(YHWH):Gen.5:22, 24; 6:2, 4, 11; 17:18; 20:6; Ex.2:23; 3:1, 6,
11, 12, 13; De.4:35, 39; 7:9; Jos.14:6; 22:34; 1Ki.8:60; 12:22; 13:4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 11, 12, 14, 21, 26, 29, 31; Job 1:6; 2:1,10; Eze.31:9; Da.1:2, 9, 17. etc.
Angels=gods: Psalm 8:5,"Yet Thou hast made him little less than heavenly beings[Heb: elohim]and Thou hast crowned him with glory and
honor."-New Berkely Version.
Psalms 8:5 LXX, "Thou madest him a little less than angels, thou hast
crowned him with glory and honour."-Brenton. The writer of Hebrews quotes
Ps.8:5 at 2:7,9 and shows this to be the correct
translation.
Psalms 138.1: "...In front of other gods I shall make melody to you."
C.C.Broyles remarks on this verse: "It is possible the expression, before
the "gods," can refer to human "judges"...., but it is more
likely we should understand this term in the same sense as it is used in Psalm
82...., namely as "heavenly beings" (i.e., angels.)"-New
International Biblical Commentary, Psalms, Hendrickson, 1999. In The Jewish
Study Bible Featuring The Jewish Publication Society
Tanakh Translation we read: "I...sing a hymn to You before the divine
beings." In a marginal note its remarks: "Before the divine beings,
the divine council(82.1; 89.7-8; 95.3)." Hence,
"angels" the LXX translates here with aggelos, also the Latin Vulgate
similarly, are "gods, " that is,
"heavenly beings, " divine beings." This is the sense that
angels, spirits like Jehovah and within His heavenly "council" are
"gods." They are not rival "gods" as the foreign
"gods," or any "strange god"(Isaiah 43.12) of the nations
surrounding Jehovah God were and they are not "gods" that were due worship(which the "gods" of the nations were)which
only the one true "God"("god" in a unique sense, way,
"god" absolutely, hence "God" in English) should be. Hence,
there is no conflict with angels being "gods" and the concept of
there being only "one God."
a god or ό
θεός [God],"
From http://en.allexperts.com/q/Jehovah-s-Witness-1617/source-translation-JN1-1-1.htm.