Transcription
Doesn't the final clause of John 1:1 tell us that the word was God? Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlen; I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And no, the final clause of John 1:1 does not tell us that the word was God. That is an inaccurate translation. The Greek of this clause says, "en ho logos," which is literally "and the word," or "the logos," was "theos."
And if this were a reference to the very God of Israel, if this should be translated "capital G God," we would expect the definite article, because the word "theos" there is a predication, and it comes before the to-be verb in the clause. And in Greek, when that predication is definite, it usually takes the definite article, as we see in the clause right before, where it talks about the logos being with "pros ton theon," "ton" being the definite article—the god. And so, the can be definite ("the god"), it can be indefinite ("a god"), or it can be qualitative ("deity," "divine").
The majority of scholars today agree that the qualitative reading is the most likely one. And so, a more accurate translation would be "and the word was divine," or "the word was deity." And I actually like that translation more, because the English word "deity" can be used in a definite sense ("the deity"), an indefinite sense ("a deity"), or in a qualitative sense ("deity," which would mean "divine," or "having the qualities of deity" or "divinity").
And again, this is not me making this up; this is what the majority of scholars agree on. And this consensus was probably established most authoritatively by Daniel Wallace about 30 years ago in his book *Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics*. Here's a page where he concludes that the qualitative reading is probably the best reading. But I want to focus on the red box, which is where Wallace tries to read the Trinity back into this text, and I want to talk about why that is anachronistic; or, in other words, that does not fit the time period in which the Gospel of John was written.
He starts off: "Such an option does not at all impugn the deity of Christ; rather, it stresses that although the person of Christ is not the person of the father, their essence is identical." I don't think that is a good reading of John 1:1, because that is taking the later Trinitarian idea of multiple persons comprising the single essence or substance ("ousia" of God) and reading it into a text that was written well before that conceptual framework was developed. That is anachronistic. The first century CE does not know of anyone discussing God as a single "ousia" or essence comprising multiple different persons.
The first person to talk about Jesus's relationship to God as a question of multiple persons ("personae" in Latin) comprising the single "substantia" or substance of God is Tertullian, writing about a century after the Gospel of John was written. Prior to Tertullian, most people who are talking about the relationship of Jesus to God, and particularly talking about logos theology—which is precisely what John 1:1 is—talk about multiple persons being united by a single will or mind. That's what we find in the middle of the 2nd century CE in Justin Martyr, over and over again—that they are distinct in number but one in will or mind. And that is different from one in essence or substance.
And so, John 1:1 is expressing logos theology, which we find earlier in Philo of Alexandria, and then we find developing between Justin Martyr and Athenagoras and Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus and others. And there is a developmental trajectory where, initially, the logos is represented as more distinct from the deity. And basically, the idea of the logos is the idea of God's rationality. And so, that rationality existed within God's mind originally—that would be the "logos entos"—and then when God decided to express some rational articulation of something, it became the "logos prophorikos"—the expressed, spoken logos—at which point it became a separate entity. And that's why you have Justin Martyr saying they are distinct in number but they share the same will, because those words that are expressed came from the mind of God, came from the will of God, and so are identical to that mind and will, but again, not essence. That is a later idea. The idea of the person overlapped significantly with the idea of essence in those earlier periods; they had not yet decoupled them so that they could multiply the persons and maintain the single essence. That's really the philosophical innovation of the late 2nd, early 3rd century CE that allows philosophers to develop what would later become, at Nicaea, the Trinity—the idea of three co-eternal, co-equal, consubstantial persons comprising the single essence or substance of God.
So it is anachronistic to read that back into John 1:1, because we have no expression of that idea anywhere near the composition of John 1:1. That is a retrojection of later developed philosophical and theological concepts. But let's return to Wallace. Possible translations are as follows: "What God was," "the word was," or "the word was divine." In the second translation, "divine" is acceptable only if it is a term that can be applied only to true deity. However, in modern English, we use it with reference to angels, theologians, even a meal. Thus, "divine" could be misleading in an English translation. So there are some problems here, too.
When people talk about theologians or a meal as being divine, that is a figurative use of that English concept of "divine," and I don't think it's a plausible argument to make that we shouldn't render "divine" because someone might think they're using it figuratively, like we do when we're talking about succulent Chinese meals. That is not a good argument, and there's no part of the New Testament that supports this notion that angels are somehow not truly divine. There's certainly no notion of non-contingent deity and contingent deity; if that's the idea here, that again would be another retrojection of later developed theological philosophical concepts—this question of contingency. And so, "divine" is not really a problem unless you are, again, retrojecting later developed philosophical concepts like the contingency of deity, or if you're insisting that the God of Israel exhausts the category of deity, which is also not something found anywhere in the Gospel of John or the rest of the New Testament. That is again another later developed theological position.
So let's continue. The idea of a qualitative "theos" here is that the word had all the attributes and qualities that the god had. This is not necessarily accurate, again, unless you're presupposing that the god of Israel exhausts the category of deity, because "theos" does not refer only to the god of Israel. In fact, in the Gospel of John, you have Jesus appealing to the scriptures' use of the word "theos" in reference to humans, saying, "Hey, you cannot annul; you cannot violate the word of God," and it called the people to whom the word of God came "gods," and he's using that in defense of his own identity as the son of God. There's no grounds to say that the word "theos" in the New Testament is only supposed to evoke concepts of the very God of Israel and no other deities. That's again presupposing that the God of Israel exhausts the category of deity, which is not something we see anywhere in the New Testament. The God of Israel is the superlative; is the epitome; but does not exhaust the category.
In other words, he shared the essence of the father, though they differed in person. The construction the evangelist chose to express this idea was the most concise way he could have stated that the word was God and yet was distinct from the father. So once again, this is retrojecting later Trinitarian philosophical frameworks, specifically the idea that God is one essence or substance comprising three distinct persons. That idea is not found in the first century CE. There's not really a case to make that the author of the Gospel of John had that idea in mind, because no one would articulate that idea until a century later. So what is John 1:1 saying at the very end? Saying the word was divine, or the word was deity. And there are attempts to try to retroject later Trinitarian ideologies and conceptual frameworks into that passage on the part of a lot of folks who want this to be about the Trinity, but what they're doing is taking conceptual frameworks that were not developed until a century or more later and reading it back into the first century CE, where no one ever articulated those frameworks, and where we have no grounds for plausibly arguing that the author of John 1:1 had that in mind. There's no case to make that John 1:1c says, "and the word was God." And the fit for this video has been Gravity.