[B-Greek] NWT: Is it an accurate translation of the Greek?

Doug Hoxworth doughoxworth at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 23 12:34:21 EST 2006


><Gene>
>The definite article (the) appears before the first
occurrence of the·os´ (God) but not before the second.

>I would like to hear the opinions of the forum as to
the accuracy of this rendering.

<doug>
it is important to understand that because of the
construction of the sentence (i.e., two nominative
nouns connected by a copulative verb) that the
sentence would be potentially ambigious if both nouns
had the article. i believe it is colwell's rule that
deals with this issue.

needless to say, the fact that LOGOS has the definite
article tells us that it is the subject of the
sentence. the absence of the article on QEOS does not
unequivocally tell us whether or not this noun is
definite or indefinite. this is not determined by the
grammar alone; rather, it is determined by the
context.

it is my opinion that it is not a good translation
when context is considered (as mondo said). is the NWT
reading grammatically possible? sure. but so is the
more traditional translation. just because it is
grammatically possible does not answer the question
for us. grammatical possibility does not mean that
this was what the author had in mind when he wrote
this. that is important to understand because many
think that if they can establish it as a grammatical
possibility that they have thereby proven that that
must have been what it meant/be what it means. if
we're interested in the truth, we need to dig a little
deeper than this. and this equally applies to
adherents of either translation.

Doug Hoxworth
Luther Rice Seminary

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