“though being in the form of God (or a god - as either is possible from the text and context), did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped…”
That is what the Greek word means, and the teaching is that although Jesus existed in the form of God (or a god) - meaning that he existed as a glorious spirit entity like God and the other angels of God - he didn’t strive to be equal to his own God (as Satan and his followers did), but instead humbled himself and took on a much lower form to do the will of his and our God, Yahweh.
This is the big one. To understand this (and many other verses) you must first forget the age old false teaching that the Bible and the Hebrew culture is strictly monotheistic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible is loaded with many different gods - and one Most High God of all the other gods. These other gods are the spirit sons of Yahweh, and include Jesus, Satan, Michael, Gabriel, Dagon, Molech, Ashteroth, and many others. That in itself is a deep subject, and I’m happy to delve into it if you or anyone else is interested.
But if you already know about the many gods in the Bible, then understanding John 1 is fairly simple. Let me start with the NET Bible, which was produced by 25 Trinitarian scholars and contains some of the best and informative footnotes you can find anywhere. This is how they render John 1:1…
NET Bible
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.
You and I know that the word “fully” isn’t in the Greek text, but their addition of it should be enough to show you that these guys are 100% in the Trinitarian camp.
Here is the beginning of one of their footnotes on 1:1…
3 tn Or “and what God was the Word was.” Colwell’s Rule is often invoked to support the translation of θεός (qeos) as definite (“God”) rather than indefinite (“a god”) here. However, Colwell’s Rule merely permits , but does not demand, that a predicate nominative ahead of an equative verb be translated as definite rather than indefinite. Furthermore, Colwell’s Rule did not deal with a third possibility, that the anarthrous predicate noun may have more of a qualitative nuance when placed ahead of the verb. A definite meaning for the term is reflected in the traditional rendering “the word was God.” From a technical standpoint, though, it is preferable to see a qualitative aspect to anarthrous θεός in John 1:1c (ExSyn 266-69).
The first thing to understand is that “a god” is a perfectly honest possible translation of 1:1c, and that Trinitarians invoke Colwell’s Rule in an attempt to force a definite (the god) translation instead of the more natural indefinite (a god) translation.
Maybe I should point out for those who may not know that the Greek language doesn’t use indefinite articles (a, an) like we do in English. And so any time you see “a” or “an” in the NT, it was added by an English translator so that the statement makes sense to us who speak English.
The Greek language does use definite articles (the). So it is no accident that John used the definite article with god in part b (“the word was with the god”) but omitted it in part c (“and the word was god”). He could have easily said “and the word was the god” if that was what he intended to teach us. He specifically did not do that. And in almost every case in the Bible, anarthrous nouns (ones not preceded by a definite article) are supplied an indefinite article by the translator so that it makes sense to us.
I’ll stop here for now, but my point is that even Trinitarian scholars acknowledge that adding indefinite articles to the Greek text is commonplace throughout the NT, and that “the word was a god” is a perfectly acceptable literal translation of John 1:1c.
Thoughts? Rebuttals?
