The overwhelming majority of grammarians agree that Colwell’s rule has no relevance to John 1:1, so I don’t understand why you’re still talking about it. There are grammatical reasons for not translating it “the word was a god” which have nothing to do with Colwell’s rule, and Colwell’s rule does not get you to the translation “the word was God” because it simply doesn’t apply to John 1:1. That’s why grammarians overwhelmingly approve of “the word was divine”.
I am not saying they both share some lesser quality either. I believe the word of God is an attribute of God, so it’s just as divine as God. But just as you don’t call your arm “a human” or “Bill Smith”, it also doesn’t make sense to describe an attribute of God, as God. Divine yes, God no.
I am sorry but you are simply wrong on this. Second Temple Period Jews describe archangels and attributes of God with the same exalted language, including giving them God’s name (Yahweh), and titles. Hurtado describes it thus.
“Jews were even willing to imagine beings who bear the divine name within them and can be referred to by one or more of God’s titles (e.g., Yahoel or Melchizedek as elohim or, later, Metatron as yahweh hakaton), beings so endowed with divine attributes as to make it difficult to distinguish them descriptively from God, beings who are very direct personal extensions of God’s powers and sovereignty. About this, there is clear evidence.” [1]
Hurtado of course tells us that the earliest Christians saw Jesus as the unique agent of God (the very point you have just denied).
“But this perfectly illustrates my point that, characteristically, earliest Christian devotion to, acclamation of, and claims about Jesus are all framed with reference to the one God. They all have a clear monotheistic tone, although this unquestionably is a monotheism with a novel feature for which we have no genuine analogy elsewhere in Jewish tradition of the time: Jesus as the unique principal agent of God.” [2]
You are of course at liberty to disagree with Hurtado on this matter.
Quite apart from the fact that if it was God’s aim to inspired writers to describe the Holy Spirit with masculine gender in order to tell us that the Holy Spirit is a (male), person then we might expect God to have done it in more than a couple of verses (and you might want to explain why the Holy Spirit is feminine throughout the Old Testament), if we actually read a real grammarian, who knows the Greek better than you or I, we find your claim simply isn’t true.
“The ἐκεῖνος reaches back to v 7, where παράκλητος is mentioned. Thus, since παράκλητος is masculine, so is the pronoun. Although one might argue that the Spirit’s personality is in view in these passages, the view must be based on the nature of a παράκλητος and the things said about the Comforter, not on any supposed grammatical subtleties. Indeed, it is difficult to find any text in which πνεῦμα is grammatically referred to with the masculine gender.” [3]
He adds in a footnote “Besides the Johanine texts, three other passages are occasionally used for this: Eph 1:14; 2 Thess 2:6-7; and 1 John 5:7. All of these have problems”, [4] and explains why these three passages can’t be used for the purpose either.
So what? It doesn’t personify the Spirit anywhere nearly as consistently or extensively as it personifies wisdom, yet, you don’t claim wisdom is a person. The only reason why you think the Spirit is a person, is Trinitarian tradition.
No I don’t assume that. I know full well that they didn’t understand everything they wrote. But when Jesus asks Peter who he thinks he is, and Peter replies “The Christ, the son of the living God”, Jesus praises him and says that this has been revealed to Peter by God Himself. He does not say “No Peter, you are wrong, why do you not understand that I am both the LIVING GOD and the SON OF THE LIVING GOD?”. Likewise, when John is inspired by God to write at the end of his gospel that “these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God”, I see no reason to believe that he was wrong, and that he should have written “these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, AND IS ALSO GOD”.
Threats of hellfire? Seriously, it’s the twenty first century, Bible knowledge isn’t stuck in the medieval era anymore; those myths have long been destroyed. The Bible never says that the test of orthodoxy is believing that Jesus is God. On the contrary, John tells us specifically that the true test of orthodoxy is believing that Jesus came in the flesh and that Jesus is from God (1 John 4:2-3), which is the opposite of what you’re saying. Why didn’t John tell us that the spirit of antichrist is denying that Jesus is God, instead of saying that the spirit of antichrist is denying that Jesus came from God? He just doesn’t say what you’re saying.
[1] Larry W Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), 128-129.
[2] Larry W Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), 44.
[3] Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Harper Collins, 1996), 332.
[4] Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Harper Collins, 1996), 332.