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Page 7- John 1:1- Caveat Lector (Reader Beware)
The Views of Modern Scholars
Contemporary scholars are coming to the same conclusion about John’s opening words. Here are some renderings of John 1:1, 14 and comments which do not require the word to be a person before the birth of Jesus.
In the beginning there was the divine word and wisdom. The divine wisdom and word was there with God and it was what God was. (The Complete Gospels)8
In the beginning there was the Message. The Message was with God and the Message was deity. He was with God in the beginning. (Simple English Bible)
At the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God and was God, and he existed with God from the beginning. (Phillips New Testament in Plain English)9
In the beginning was the Word (the Logos, the expressed concept, here personified). (The Authentic New Testament)10
In the beginning was God’s purpose, and this purpose was revealed in a historical encounter.11
“The Word,” said John, “became flesh.” We could put it in another way — “the Mind of God became a person.”12
C.C. Torrey translates John 1:1c, “the word was god.”13 The professor aims with this rendering to tell us that the word has the quality of God but is not identical with God. His sensitivity to the nuances of the Greek is shared by James Denny who discussed the clause “The word was God”:
As for your remark that you missed an unequivocal statement that Jesus is God, I feel inclined to say that such a statement seems unattractive to me just because it is impossible to make it unequivocal. It is not the true way to say a true thing...The NT says that theos een o logos [the word was God], but it does not say o logos een o theos [the word was the one God], and it is this last which is really suggested to the English mind by “Jesus is God”...Probably the aversion I have to such an expression as Jesus is God is linguistic as much as theological. We are so thoroughly monotheistic now that the word God, to put it pedantically, has ceased to be an appellative and has become a proper noun: it identifies the being to whom it is applied so that it can stand as the subject of a sentence. In Greek, in the first century, it was quite different. You could say then “Jesus is Theos.” But the English equivalent of that is not “Jesus is God” (with a capital G), but, I say it as a believer in his true deity, Jesus is god (with a small g) — not a god, but a being in whom is the nature of the One God...Jesus is God is the same thing as Jesus=God. Jesus is a man as well as God, in some ways therefore both less and more than God; and consequently a form of proposition which in our idiom suggests inevitably the precise equivalence of Jesus and God does some injustice to the truth.14
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[8] Ed Miller, Annotated Scholars Version, revised, Harper, 1994.
[9] These two versions equivocate by insisting on the personal pronoun “he” for Message and expression.
[10] Hugh Schonfield.
[11] R.M. Grant, D.D., The Early Christian Doctrine of God, Macmillan, 1950. Dr. Grant is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Divinity School, University of Chicago.
[12] William Barclay, Gospel of John, Saint Andrews Press, 1957, Vol. 1, 14.
[13] The Four Gospels, A New Translation, New York: Harper, 1947.
[14] Letters of Principal James Denny to W. Robertson Nicoll, 1893 – 1917, Hodder and Stoughton, 1920, 121-125. While Denny retains his belief in the Trinity for reasons of his own, his testimony stands as evidence against a tradition of translation which has promoted belief in the Trinity on the part of many others. Such evidence has often been ignored by Trinitarians who are less cautious in their approach to translation.
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