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 5:18
Making himself equal with God. The charge is the narrator's report of what they heard.
John 5:18, in every translation this tool compares.
They said he was claiming to be in charge. That tells you what they heard. It does not by itself tell you what he said.
Because the verse is regularly quoted as a claim Jesus made, and grammatically it is a charge the authorities made, which is a different kind of evidence.
Every version reads making himself equal with God.
ἴσον τῷ θεῷ ison to theo
The clause is part of the reason given for the hostility, reported by the narrator. John does this repeatedly: he states what the opposition concluded, then lets the following discourse address it. Verse 19 begins the answer.
English can carry this accurately. The difficulty is that a reported accusation reads like a narrator's endorsement when quoted on its own.
When a verse states what people concluded, the sentence is evidence about them. Whether the conclusion is right is answered elsewhere.
There is no translation choice to make here, English can only print making himself equal with God either way. What's contested is whether the accusation was fair, not how to render it.
- The structure of accusation and response at John 5:18-19
- The same pattern at John 8:52-58; 10:33-36
- Philippians 2:6 uses the same adjective
