Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 1:1
The Word was God, or the Word was a god. The difference is one missing article.
John 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Say it three ways. Sam is the doctor. That picks out one doctor, the one we were talking about. Sam is a doctor. That makes Sam one of many. Sam is doctor. That is not English, and your ear rejects it. But it is perfectly good Greek, and it means neither of the first two. It means Sam has the nature of a doctor. English gives you the and a and nothing else. Greek has a third option, and it is the one John used.
Because the clause is where the New Testament comes closest to a bare statement of the deity of Christ, and the entire weight of it sits on a word that is not printed. Logos gets the attention and is not in dispute. The article is in dispute, and it is the one an informed Jehovah's Witness at your door will be working from.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Every mainstream English version reads the Word was God. The New World Translation reads a god, and the entire argument turns on the article.
θεός theos · G2316
Greek has a definite article and no indefinite one. In the last clause the first God has the article, ton theon, and the second does not, theos. Word order also matters: theos stands before the verb. A Greek noun in that position without an article is normally qualitative. It is telling you what the Word is, not which individual the Word is.
English has to insert something. You must write the God, a god, or God, and each of those says more than the Greek did. The Greek had a way to say what something is by nature without identifying it as a particular individual, and English does not.
When your versions split between God and a god, or between the truth and truth, look for whether the Greek noun has the article. Absence of the article in Greek is not the same as a in English. It usually means the writer is talking about character rather than identity.
Rendering it a god takes the missing article as indefinite. Rendering it God takes it as qualitative. The qualitative reading is the standard grammatical one and it also makes sense of the middle clause: the Word was with God, so the Word is not simply identical to the one he was with, and yet is what that one is.
- Colwell's rule and the later refinements of it in Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, on anarthrous preverbal predicate nominatives
- Philip Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns,” JBL 92 (1973): 75-87
