[B-Greek] Word Order in John 1:1

Steve Klemetti sklemetti at softhome.net
Sat Oct 25 14:19:58 EDT 2003


Below you said: "and I don't think the standard literal English translation is
the most accurate."

That is the crux of the problem.

For example, Mandarin Chinese is a better conveyance of the meaning as shown by
this site below.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8381/luchen.html

A part of the article is:

One novel translation by Mr. Le may well rake up the century-old
question how to render the word 'God' in Chinese. As is well known,
there are two trends in the Protestant churches, one using throughout
the generic term shen, 'god', 'spirit', and the other using the
old designation Shangti, 'Lord-on-high', for 'God', retaining the
term shen for 'god', 'gods', 'divine'.

John 1:1, ho logos en pros ton theon kai theos en ho logos.
Usually the second theos is also translated 'God', but there is
also an interpretation taking this word rather to mean 'divine' here. L
always renders 'God' by Shangti, but here he translates the
second theos by shen, 'god'. He thus seems to have the
advantage of holding a middle position between 'God' and 'divine', but
on the other hand this translation may give rise to undesirable
speculations about the Trinity, suggesting subordination within it. The
difficulty, according to L, lies in the fact that Shangti seems
too narrow a term here, although in the formula 'God the Father, God the
Son, God the Holy Spirit' the term Shangti is used throughout.









Iver Larsen wrote:

> > You really don't think that the juxtaposition of the predicate compliment
> > with the verb is what makes it qualitative?
>
> No, Jason, I don't think so.
>
> > Take Mounce (first edition) as an example (please ignore the theological
> > overtones):
> >
> > "We know that "the Word" is the subject because it has the
> > definite article,
> > and we translate it accordingly: "and the Word was God." Two
> > questions, both
> > of theological import, should come to mind: (1) why was QEOS
> > thrown forward?
> > and (2) why does it lack the article? In brief, its *emphatic position
> > stresses its essence or quality*
>
> I have no quarrel with this. The emphatic position "stresses* its
> qualitative character, but it is not what *makes* it qualitative. We have
> discussed the translation of this at length on the b-translation list, and I
> don't think the standard literal English translation is the most accurate. I
> would prefer to say "the Word was like God"  or "the Word was God-like" or
> "the Word was divine" in order to clarify that we are not dealing with
> identity, but a likeness in quality and attributes. The problem is that God
> spelled with a capital is more definite and has a unique reference that the
> Greek QEOS does not have.
>
> > That is to say, *the word order* tells us that Jesus
> > Christ has all the divine attributes that the Father has
>
> Here, I am afraid I disagree. I believe the traditional teaching of Greek
> has not been able to handle the significance of word order properly.
>
> Iver Larsen
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek




More information about the B-Greek mailing list