The god of this age

Paul calls him theos, and English translations lowercase it, a theological decision made in the typesetting. Greek has no case distinction between "a god" and "God," so capitalization is an English convention translators impose on their own reading of whom Paul means. The earliest manuscripts that preserve the verse, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, write theos as a nomen sacrum, the abbreviated sacred form used for the true God elsewhere, which deepens the ambiguity, since the scribes may not have drawn the line modern translators draw. Most commentators and translations take the phrase as Satan; a minority reads it as God himself, since Paul elsewhere credits God with blinding unbelievers. DDD's Devil article (G. J. Riley) treats the title as one more name for the ruler of this world, whose kingdom of darkness takes in the whole world, the cosmos itself, and it reads 2 Corinthians 4:4 as naming how that rule works: the god of this age blinds minds to the light of the gospel.