A. T. Robertson and Dana-Mantey point out that the article in ancient Greek is not simply a haphazard use of speech:
"The vital thing is to see the matter from the Greek point of view and find the reason for the use of the article" (Robertson 756).
"It may be observed that in Homer 'the article marks contrast and not mere definiteness' " (Ibid., 755).
"The articular construction emphasizes identity; the anarthrous construction emphasizes character . . . It is certain that one engaged in exegesis cannot afford to disregard the article. The New Testament justifies the observation of Bultmann that 'the use of the article has everywhere its positive reason' " (D-M 140).
"Surely when Robertson says that QEOS, as to the article, 'is treated like a proper name and may have it or not have it"'(R. 761), he does not mean to intimate that the presence or absence of the article with QEOS has no special significance. We construe him to mean that there is no definite rule governing the use of the article with QEOS,
so that sometimes the writer's viewpoint is difficult to detect, which is entirely true" (D-M 140).
"A qualitative noun is a noun (in Greek always anarthrous) whose function in the sentence is not primarily or solely to designate by assignment to a class but to describe by the attribution of quality, i.e., of the quality or qualities that are the marks of the class designated by the noun. The effect is to ascribe to that which is modified the characteristics or qualities of a class and not merely to ascribe to it membership in that class. It is connotive rather than the denotive sense that emerges. In the sentence 'Frederick is a prince' the word 'prince' is either designative, marking Frederick as a member of a class, a son of a monarch, or qualitative, describing Frederick as the possessor of the superior character presumed to distinguish the son of a king" (Arthur W. Slaten (Qualitative Nouns in the Pauline Epistles and Their Translation in the Revised Version) [Chicago: Chicago UP, 1918], p. 5-7).
"In vs. 1c the Johannine hymn is bordering on the usage of 'God' for the Son, but by omitting the article it avoids any suggestion of personal identification of the Word with the Father. And for Gentile readers the line also avoids any suggestion that the Word was a second God in any Hellenistic sense" (Raymond Brown, Anchor Bible Commentary, Vol. 29, John I-XII, page 24).
"There is a further consideration, however. We have mentioned the suggestion by the Catholic scholar De Ausejo that the Word throughout the Prologue means the Word-become-flesh and that the whole hymn refers to Jesus Christ. If this is so, then perhaps there is justification for seeing in the use of the anarthrous QEOS something more humble than the use of hO QEOS for the Father. It is Jesus Christ who says in John 14:28, 'The Father is greater than I,' and who in [John] 17:3 speaks of the Father as 'the only true God.' The recognition of a humble position for Jesus Christ in relation to the Father is not strange to early Christian hymns, for Philippians 2:6, 7 speaks of Jesus as emptying himself and not clinging to the form of God" (Ibid., 25)
2 comments:
Hi Edgar,
"In vs. 1c the Johannine hymn is bordering on the usage of 'God' for the Son, but by omitting the article it avoids any suggestion of personal identification of the Word with the Father. And for Gentile readers the line also avoids any suggestion that the Word was a second God in any Hellenistic sense" (Raymond Brown, Anchor Bible Commentary, Vol. 29, John I-XII, page 24)."
C.H. Dodd appears to disagree:
"If translation were a matter of substituting words, a possible translation of [QEOS HN hO LOGOS] would be, `the Word was a god'. As a word for word translation it cannot be faulted, and to pagan Greeks who heard early Christian language, [QEOS HN hO LOGOS] might have seemed a perfectly sensible statement, in that sense. The reason why it is inacceptable is that it runs counter to the current of Johannine thought, and indeed of Christian thought as a whole." (The Bible Translator, Volume XXVIII, 1977), pp. 101-102
So "a god" would have seemed "perfectly sensible" to Gentile readers. This makes one ponder. They may have been pagans, but they spoke Koine, which means that, based on Dodd, "a god" is a valid way of understanding QEOS HN in the subject phrase in the common language of the time (of course, we knew this already). It seems to me that if John didn't mean to suggest that "the Word was a god" then he was taking a tall chance using wording in which the sense "a god" would have been "perfectly sensible" to those who spoke the common language. This is especially pertinent since the Trinity doctrine didn't exist when John penned the prologue as a conceptual grid into which the subject phrase could be placed in an effort (however misguided) to make it intelligible. If we avoid reading later theology back into the text then I would suggest that those who read "QEOS HN hO LOGOS" in context probably inferred what would be represented in English as "the Word was a god", but possibly inferred "the Word was god", where "god" is understood as an appropriate title for one of God's agents, in this case, his supreme agent.
~Kaz
Kaz,
It's been a while since I read Brown's Anchor Bible Commentary. I know that he wrote other things on Jn 1:1c where he took a stronger position on the verse than he did in the commentary.
Brown might have acknowledged that "a god" is a possible rendering of 1:1c; after all, the Catholic scholar and theologian McKenzie seems to have made a similar concession. But Brown could have meant that the Son is not presented as a deity in competition with the Father or that John did not mean to depoict the Son in a relationship like Athena was to Zeus, or Apollo to Zeus.
Ignatius later used hO QEOS and QEOS with reference to the Son. Yet C. C. Richardson argues that the Son was probably a superhuman being for Ignatius--a being who is inferior to the Father. We also have the famous discussion of John 1:1c in Origen's Johnannine commentary. What he says about QEOS without the article mirrors Philo's comments on the significance of the anarthrous QEOS.
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