Looks like I’ll be making some concessions here. I’ll divide this response into three separate parts; 1) Concessions, 2) Re-affirmations, and 3) Arguments. Although I’ve made a number of mistakes, I’ll demonstrate that they were mostly peripheral and that my arguments actually stand quite powerfully even taking into consideration all those mistakes. To note, you claim I only “skim read” your comment – by no means! I thought I responded, in detail, to most if not all your points. I think my last response was even slightly longer than your own.
Concessions
Here, I’ll be answering some of your firebreaks in specific. The concessions will be concessions no doubt, but they will be rather particular.
Firebreak: Do you understand that BDAG, ANLEX, and LSJ (three standard professional lexicons), state explicitly that “divine” is part of the standard lexical range of “theos”?
This one can be joined to your next firebreak:
Firebreak: Do you understand BDAG, TDNT, LSJ, and other standard professional Greek lexicons describe “theos” as having a range of meanings other than “God”, that these meanings are within the standard lexical range of the word, and that these standard, mainstream meanings are attested in a host of literature including the Old Testament (LXX), Second Temple Period literature, and the New Testament itself?
The answer is, now, “yes”. The primary meaning, as you yourself have said earlier, is ‘God’, but the semantic meaning can extend to various other definitions, including ‘divine’, and “A prince; a ruler; a magistrate or judge; an angel” etc according to Wesbter. They are attested in a number of mainstream sources.
Firebreak: Do you understand that Jesus himself used “theos” to refer to non-divine humans, quoting the Old Testament usage, and that his usage is cited in standard professional lexicons as an example of “theos” being applied to non-divine humans? Do you think Jesus understood the meaning of this word?
Here you refer to John 10:34. I will have something to say about this in the second part of response (Re-affirmations), but as far as concessions go, the word theos is used once in the Gospel of John to refer to, well, not God. You then give another firebreak that is mostly redundant to this one in your Point 5.
Firebreak: Do you understand that there are a range of constructions in Greek syntax in which word order defines meaning, and that when I cited one example from a professional Greek lexicon, you rejected the lexicon saying it was "an outright misundestanding [sic] of the Greek language?
Yes, there are.
Firebreak: Have you actually read Boyarin and Sommer yourself?
No, I’ve primarily relied on reviews for now. I’ve only begun reading academic monographs recently and so I’m still clearing out other parts of academia before I get to more nuanced books like those.
Firebreak: Can you list all the Second Temple Period sources which Sommer cites in his book as evidence for an “established and widespread tradition of a multi-personal God” with a single god which has two different person?
All? Even if I had the book I wouldn’t go through such trouble.
Do you understand how nouns can be used as adjectives in Greek?
Do you understand that the noun “theos” can be used as an adjective in two of its cases? Do you know which cases they are?
Do you know the syntactical construction in which “theos” in the nominative is used as an adjective?
Never heard of that before. Conceded. And perhaps I need a better lexicon, but the ones around right now are a hundred bucks, so I don’t know if Nestle Aland’s lexicon is getting into my possession any time soon. And I am in fact a rooky at Greek. I’d like to ask, what proficiency of Greek do you consider yourself to have?
Re-affirmations
Finally, I can start building up again. The majority of the concessions don’t actually bring down any of my main arguments, but I must say you did have a fun time shredding most of my rooky errors. I consider most of those mistakes peripheral, as we will soon see.
Firstly, the primary meaning of theos is, as we’ve mentioned earlier, God. This will be important later. Secondly, out of the 70 or so times theos is used in John, you have been able to point a single example where it is not translated as ‘God’ in the sense of the creator God, the Father or whatnot. That, in and of itself, should demonstrate the infrequency of the word theos being used in its non-primary form, even if this is within the range of meaning. If we laid out every single use of theos in the entire New Testament, are you confident that more than 10% of uses will have a preferrable translation other than God? If not, then we must understand that these non-primary uses of theos should only adopted when we have good reason from the context to support such a meaning.
Yous said “The claim that the original Greek says “and theos was the logos”, although technically correct, is misleading”. It isn’t misleading. That is literally the word order in the text.
I mean ‘misleading’ in the sense that you implied, or the way you wrote it seemed to imply some sort of gotcha! in regards to my view of the standard, scholarly translations produced by committees today. My point was that it is almost irrelevant that the word order is “theos was the logos” since that is as consistent with a translation of “God was the Word” as it is with a translation that runs “the Word was God”. My point was that this is a rather irrelevant point to make, there certainly is no grammatical problem with a translation that runs “the Word was God”. As for the syntax, I was exaggerating when I said that syntax has absolutely no use, of course it does, but the predominant importance has to do with inflection. Either way, such points aren’t very relevant to the point of contention and so I will try to only focus on points that are relevant here.
You claim (citing Boyarin and Sommer), that it has been established that in pre-Christian Judaic circles, God could have been considered to be multi-personal". This was a particularly desperate attempt at an ad hoc argument. Do you actually know anything about their arguments? Do you understand, for example, that Sommer argues for an understanding of God which includes not just multiple selves but multiple bodies?
None of this is at all desperate. The works of Segal, Boyarin and Sommer collectively demonstrate that Judaic monotheism wasn’t as simple “one God one person one everything” – and that the multiplicity of the persons of God, not just the bodies, was known and not at all heretical in pre-Christian Judaism. In that sense, there is no contradiction at all in John 1:1 since it can be understood as referring to the multiplicity of God’s person. And even if there was absolutely zero multiplicity of God’s person before Christianity, which there surely was, then this could be explained as a new Christian interpretation and we can still understand John 1:1 as referring to God’s multiplicity and thus not have to deal with a contradiction. In other words, the only way John 1:1 can be self-contradictory is if we posit that the author could not have accepted a multiplicity of God’s person. If this is accepted, there is no contradiction.
You keep completely misquoting me on Hurtado, even changing the words I write (every time I write “bi-theism”, you say I wrote “di-theism”, for example).
I never changed your words. I quoted you saying “bitheism”, but I simply continued using the word “ditheism” as Fletcher-Louis did. Both terms are basically synonymous, “two gods”. But Hurtado doesn’t at all allow for two gods as an interpretation from his work, everything he writes is solely in the context of monotheism. If we agree on this, then there’s no problem.
Firebreak: Do you understand that the frequency with which a Greek word is translated in an English Bible has absolutely no relevance to whether or not the word has a particular meaning in a specific verse?
Actually, it most certainly has relevance. If we know the standard usage of a word in a language, then we must further know that we should only abandon understanding it in its primary sense if there is reason to do so.
This is a complete falsehood. I linked you directly to the NET’s reference for John 1:1, complete with the footnote. The idea that I was concealing this is simply untrue. Additionally, you totally avoid the whole reason why I cited the NET’s reference to Moffat; you were claiming that “theos” here cannot be qualitative. The NET footnote says explicitly that it is, and that Moffat’s translation captures that sense. As I have already pointed out, the only reason why the NET doesn’t render it “divine” is theological (as the footnote says clearly). They say nothing about it not capturing “the original Greek meaning”. Not only that, but they don’t translate it simply “God”, they translate it “and the word was fully God”, which they say captures the qualitative sense of Moffat and the NEB.
I wasn’t accusing you of concealing anything. A more accurate characterization of my ‘accusation’ is that I was accusing you of either missing the point of the footnote, or only mentioning the part relevant to your argument. In fact, I never accused you of saying the NEB says “divine”, I simply re-iterated that. As I understood it, you were claiming both the REB and Moffatt use ‘divine’. You explicitly claimed that the NET mentions “two” translatons that use divine:
The NET footnote not only identifies this as grammatically possible (contradicting your first point), but says it is preferable to see a qualitative aspect to theos here (also contradicting your first point), and then cites two translations which give this rendering (contradicting your second point). How could you say "I still have not found a translation that says “divine”" when the NET footnote cites two of them for you? Additionally, you didn’t comment on the NEB’s rendering, “what God was, the Word was”. Why not?
I was simply engaging in a process of elimination. The footnote mentions the NEB, the REB, and Moffatt. You claimed “two” of these translations use ‘divine’. Well, what are these ‘two’? Not the NEB, as we both have acknowledged earlier. I checked the REB, and it doesn’t use divine either – only the Moffatt does! So, in fact you claimed it cites two translations, when only one was present. The second point I noted is that the NET footnote actually criticizes Moffatt’s translation, as I demonstrated earlier, because again, it fails to capture the meaning of the text. When I say meaning of the text, I am of course referring to the collective whole of the context. You have repeatedly claimed that this is a “theological” translation, as if the scholars were reading their theology into John – in fact, every single scholar quoted so far has made the same point, over and over – ‘divine’ isn’t used because the context rules out a translation that may provide a meaning besides the Word being understood as fully God. This is, as we will see soon, why translations like the NRSV doesn’t even offer a footnote for the ‘divine’ option.
He says very clearly that on the basis of the grammar alone, “divine” is as far as you can get. He then says explicitly that identifying the Word with God is dependent on other considerations. From this point he makes the standard theological arguments (not grammatical).
I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding you, but Voorvinde is definitely not claiming that ‘divine’ is in fact the correct grammatical reading. Voorvinde does not deny at all that ‘God’ is a correct grammatical reading, he is only saying that the grammar, on its own, does not get you to ‘God’ and leaves room for ‘divine’. All three are grammatically valid. This is where we must move into the last section of my reply.
Arguments
**Indeed, I have demonstrated in my previous post that not only is ‘divine’ a valid reading as you propose, but ‘a god’ is also grammatically valid. There are, in fact undoubtedly, three grammatically valid translations; 1) God, 2) a god, and 3) divine. The question is, which one? This is not the only time in the NT where there is more then one grammatically valid reading, this happens repeatedly in practically every book. The only way where we can determine which meaning is being used, if the grammar allows for more then one possibility, is the context. That’s what every scholar has repeated so far – John Fish, Al Garza, Daniel Wallace, and many others – contextually, the correct translation is ‘God’. ‘Divine’ is a valid translation insofar as it means that the Word is, in essence, encapsulating the full aforementioned deity. Now, what does the context tell us about the Word?
- The Word exists in the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with theos, and the Word was theos”. John 1:2 even says “He was in the beginning with God.”
- In John 1:3, we’re told “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” This is talking about the Word, the entire Johannine Prologue is talking about the Word (who is in fact Jesus, not only Jesus after the incarnation). According to John 1:3, EVERYTHING that came into being was through the Word, and if it were not for the Word, then nothing would have come into being.
- In John 1:14, we are told the Word is the “father’s only son”. It’s clear that the Word possesses a relationship with God the Father that, not only does not exist with any other being to the Father, but cannot exist with any other being to the Father.
These contextual considerations rule out anything less than the Word being, literally, God. (This is not to say that the Word isn’t suborindate to God.) And I do not even need to mention the christology of John. The sayings of Jesus in John are unequivocally self-referentially divine statements, as is the consensus of the overwheling majority of scholars. This is the first argument, the fact that the context demands, as scholars recognize, a translation of ‘God’. At this point, you have not yet defined what you think “and the Word was divine” means. What do you think John would mean by such a statement? That the Word is eternal and the medium through which all creation happened?
The second argument, of course, is to point out that almost every scholar in the world agrees that John makes out Jesus to be God, and mainstream translations don’t even offer a footnote to the ‘divine’ possibility unless, in the case of the NET, to criticize such a translation. Indeed, I will re-quote the NET on why it does not adopt the ‘divine’ translation.
Translations like the NEB, REB, and Moffatt are helpful in capturing the sense in John 1:1c, that the Word was fully deity in essence (just as much God as God the Father). However, in contemporary English “the Word was divine” (Moffatt) does not quite catch the meaning since “divine” as a descriptive term is not used in contemporary English exclusively of God. The translation “what God was the Word was” is perhaps the most nuanced rendering, conveying that everything God was in essence, the Word was too.
Indeed, the NET explicitly states that John meant that what God was, the Word was fully as well. In fact, unless I’m misreading it, it appears as though the NET takes this for granted. What is your explanation for this? That Christians run the academy and are trying to redefine John into a high christological text? Or perhaps the academy isn’t bright enough to just “get” what you know John is saying? Whatever explanation is adopted, it sounds conspiratorial to me. You note that Origen supposedly reads this as “divine”, but surely Origen thinks Jesus is God? Your citation goes to a decades old commentary on John by Robert Funk (and, the founder of the Jesus Seminar who was quite disattached from mainstream scholarship now, not to mention dead for a decade). The other author of that commentary died in 1975! Perhaps a bit more nuance can be brought by citing a much more recent commentary by FD Bruner (2012), where Bruner not only assumes the translation I am putting forth, but he makes it clear John understands the Word as God (pg. 9, see here).
The third argument must be that of consistency. It looks to me as throughout the Johannine Prologue, John uses certain themes, including ‘theos’ and ‘logos’ very consistently. It would be stunning to see a single divergence of ‘theos’ into ‘divine’ rather than ‘God’. It appears to me that the prologue, by function of its consistency, supports a translation of ‘God’ in verse 1 just like every other verse, including the very other use of theos in verse 1. **So, considering 1) The context of John 1:1, 2) The consensus of mainstream translations produced by committees, not century-old translations produced by one guy (cough, Moffatt) and 3) The consistency with which John uses the same word theos elsewhere in the Johannine Prologue and outside of it, it’s no wonder why the NRSV doesn’t even offer a footnote for the ‘divine’ possibility.
While I’m at it, I’ll throw a firebreak for you to make sure you clarify your position. In what sense do you think John thought Jesus was? How high was John’s christology in your view? You will need to explain this as you have been ambiguous by the word “divine” so far, since this word can also be taken to mean “literally God”. What does John mean when he calls Jesus “divine”?