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 4:24
God is spirit. Same construction as the last clause of John 1:1, and here nobody reads it as a god.
John 4:24, in every translation this tool compares.
Sam is the doctor. Sam is a doctor. Sam is doctor. The third one is not English, and it is what Greek does here. It says what God is by nature, not which spirit God is or that God is one of several.
Because it is the same grammatical situation as John 1:1 with the opposite outcome, and reading them together teaches the rule better than either does alone. Here every version does the qualitative thing without arguing about it.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
The King James reads a Spirit. Every modern version reads God is spirit, with no article at all, which is the qualitative rendering.
πνεῦμα pneuma · G4151
Pneuma stands before the verb with no article, the same shape as theos in John 1:1c. Nobody proposes rendering it a god there and a spirit here, yet the King James did exactly that. Modern versions corrected it, which is the strongest available evidence for how the construction works.
English forces an article or a bare noun and the bare noun sounds ungrammatical in most sentences. Here it does not, which is why the fix was possible.
When you want to test a grammatical claim, find the same construction in a verse where nothing theological is at stake. If translators handle it one way there and another way in the contested verse, the difference is not grammar.
No modern version defends a Spirit. The King James rendering is the outlier, and correcting it is the same move that produces God was the Word rather than a god in chapter one.
- The same anarthrous preverbal predicate construction at John 1:1c
- Philip Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns,” JBL 92 (1973): 75-87, treats both verses
