John 1:1 and the Jehovah’s Witnesses – Episode 12, The Word Was a…god?

“…and the Word was God…” (John 1:1c)
Kai theos ēn ho logos

The Word, Jesus, the Son of God who adopted human nature, was in the beginning, was, we should say, the beginner at the beginning, and was in fellowship with ho theos, God, and so was separate from, yet equal to, God. And John finishes this description by stating very clearly…well, what did he clearly state? That is the question.

The Proper Predicate Nominative and the Elusive Definite Article

With John’s third statement about the Word, we are once again thrown into the realm of grammar. There are some 722 predicate nominatives (see article) in the New Testament and about 40% of them are in John’s writings (his Gospel, three letters, and Revelation). A predicate nominative is a noun that is linked by a verb of being to the subject of that verb and thus forms a referencing description of that subject. In English we normally have the order subject, verb of being, and predicate nominative, as in the statement, “Jesus is the Lord.” Our most common verb of being is the verb ‘to be’ in all its forms. We could form it in past tense (Jesus was a teacher), future tense (Jesus will be king), the infinitive (We knew Jesus to be the savior), and the participle (Jesus being our master).

But in the Greek language, word order is not essential, and in fact, we see every possible word order in the New Testament. Here in John 1:1 the word order, if written in English, would be, “and God was the Word.” We suppose that “the Word” is the subject, since that has been John’s subject throughout, though the nature of a predicate nominative is that it equates the subject and the predicate. If the Word was God then it is also true that God was the Word.

The other grammatical issue in this verse, the one that Jehovah’s Witnesses capitalize on, is that the predicate nominative, “God,” does not have the definite article on it, as it did in the second part of this verse. Here is the verse in English with a transliterated Greek underneath it:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
en archē ēn ho logos,              kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon,    kai theos ēn ho logos

We see the definite article “the” (highlighted in bold) with “the Word,” logos, throughout, but with the word “God” we see the article with the first mention of God but not the second. How significant is that? It could be very significant. Let me explain the Greek usage of the definite article. The definite article makes a word definite. Which book am I talking about? I’m talking about “the” book. If I don’t intend any book in particular, in English I can say “a” book. Greek does the same thing, but the Greek language of the New Testament does not have an indefinite article “a” (“an” before words beginning with a vowel). The Greek language is less precise in this regard. For the Greek speaker to make a word intentionally indefinite he or she has to omit the definite article “the” from the noun.

But the odd thing about it is that just omitting a definite article from a noun doesn’t mean for the Greek speaker that he or she intends the noun to be indefinite. Here is an example:

“for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas” (John 18:13)

In the Greek there is not a definite article “the” with the noun “father-in-law,” but it would be a mistake to translate this, “He was ‘a’ father-in-law of Caiaphas,” unless Caiaphas had more than one wife, and therefore Caiaphas had more than one father-in-law. So we see that John, in this case, intended “father-in-law” to be definite but he did not use the article. And this situation is repeated over and over in the New Testament.

What this means is that it is up to the reader to interpret the author’s intended meaning. Does the author intend the noun to be viewed as definite or indefinite?  Could John have conceived of Jesus, the Word, as being “a god”?  There is a great deal of evidence to conclude that he could not.