Reading Your First Verse

Here is John 1:1 as the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) prints it: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. Seventeen words, three clauses, and only eight different words. Before you read any further, try to read it aloud yourself, using everything from Lessons 2 to 4. Then open the verse in the Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible interlinear and go through it with the tool, one word at a time, as this section does. For each word the tool will show you the Greek, a transliteration, an English gloss, a Strong's number, and a parsing, which tells you the word's grammatical form. Module 2 teaches you to read the parsing codes in full; this lesson gives the parsing in plain words.

Ἐν (en, in). A preposition, with a smooth breathing and no accent, because it is one of a few small words that lean on the word after them. It takes the dative case, which is what the next word is. ἀρχῇ (archē, beginning, origin). A noun, dative, feminine, singular, of ἀρχή, the word you met in Revelation 22:13. Look under the eta: there is the iota subscript, the sign of the dative, which Lesson 3 told you never to ignore. Notice there is no article. Greek can say in beginning where English must say in the beginning; the phrase is definite without it, and the BSB rightly supplies the. These two words are exactly the first two words of Genesis in the Septuagint, Ἐν ἀρχῇ, and no Greek-speaking reader of the Bible could miss the echo.

ἦν (ēn, was). A verb: imperfect indicative, third person singular, of εἰμί (eimi, I am). The tools label it imperfect active indicative; grammarians note that εἰμί does not really have a voice, but you will see the word active in the parsing and should not be troubled by it. The imperfect is the form Greek uses to present a past state or action as ongoing, as in progress, and it is the natural form for was of a continuing state. Do not make too much of it; Greek has only this form for was in the indicative of εἰμί. But do notice the contrast John draws. Of the Word in the beginning, he says ἦν, was. Of all created things in verse 3 he says ἐγένετο (egeneto, came to be), an aorist of γίνομαι (ginomai, I come to be). The Word did not come to be in the beginning. He was there.

ὁ λόγος (ho logos, the Word). ὁ is the article, nominative, masculine, singular; λόγος is a noun, nominative, masculine, singular. The nominative is the case of the subject, and Module 3 will teach it fully. λόγος has a wide range of meaning in ordinary Greek: word, message, account, reason, matter. Greek philosophers, the Stoics above all, had used it for the rational principle running through the universe, and the Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, wrote at length about the Logos of God. But the closest background for John is the Old Testament's word of the LORD, by which 'the heavens were made' (Psalm 33:6) and which came to the prophets. Scholars weigh how much each background matters; a lexicon cannot decide it, but the opening of Genesis, where God speaks and things come to be, is plainly in view.

καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν (kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, and the Word was with God). καί you know. πρός (pros) is a preposition that, with the accusative case, most often means toward or to, and here means with, in the sense of in company with, face to face with; 1 John 1:2 uses the same phrase of the eternal life that was πρὸς τὸν πατέρα (pros ton patera, with the Father). τόν is the article, accusative, masculine, singular, and θεόν is the noun θεός (theos, God), accusative, masculine, singular, because πρός takes the accusative. Notice the grave accents on πρὸς and τὸν, which Lesson 4 explained, and the acute on θεόν before the comma.

καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (kai theos ēn ho logos, and the Word was God). θεός, nominative, masculine, singular, without the article, and placed first. ἦν, was. ὁ λόγος, the Word, with the article, the subject. Read word for word it says and God was the Word. Every major English translation, the BSB included, renders it 'the Word was God.' Why the English reverses the order, and what the missing article means, are the subjects of the next three sections.

Greek has a definite article, the word for the, and it has three genders: ὁ (ho) masculine, ἡ (hē) feminine and τό (to) neuter, each with different forms for each case. You have now met ὁ, ἡ, τό, τόν, and τῇ in Acts 21:40. Greek has no indefinite article, no word for a or an. A Greek noun without the article may therefore be indefinite (a prophet), or definite for other reasons (in the beginning, where there is only one beginning), or qualitative, describing what kind of thing something is. English has to choose between the, a and nothing at all every time; Greek does not, and that is why translators have decisions to make.

The article does many jobs, and Module 3 gives a whole lesson to it. In John 1:1 it does two. In the second clause, τὸν θεόν points to a particular person: God, the one with whom the Word was. Since the Word was with him, he is distinct from the Word, and John's prologue goes on to name him as the Father (1:14, 1:18). In the third clause the article does a different job. It marks the subject.

To see why, you need to know that Greek word order is free in a way English is not. In English, the dog bit the man and the man bit the dog mean different things, because the subject comes first. In Greek, the ending of each word tells you its job, so the words can come in almost any order. Usually the subject of a verb is in the nominative case and the object in the accusative, so the endings settle it. But the verb to be is different: with ἦν, both the subject and the thing said about it, the predicate, stand in the nominative. In καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, both θεός and λόγος are nominative. How does a reader know which is the subject? By the article. The noun with the article is the subject: ὁ λόγος, the Word. The noun without the article is the predicate: θεός, what the Word was. That is why every translation says the Word was God, and not God was the Word.

And why did John put θεός first? Greek often moves a word to the front for emphasis or prominence, and many grammarians think that is part of what happens here: the clause puts the weight on what the Word was. Module 6 teaches you to watch for this and also warns you against over-reading it, because Greek also fronts words for reasons of rhythm and flow. Here at least the effect is clear enough. John has just said the Word was with God; now, without taking it back, he says the Word was God.

Consider what John could have written instead. If he had written ὁ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, with the article on both nouns, he would have said that God and the Word were simply the same thing, so that the two could be swapped: everything that is God is the Word, and the Word is all there is of God. That would contradict the clause just before, where the Word is with God, and it would leave no room for the Father of 1:14 and 1:18. Many grammarians, Daniel Wallace in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (1996) among them, have pointed out that the form John chose avoids exactly that. Whatever one concludes about the last clause, its grammar is doing careful work.

The New World Translation, the Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses, first published in its New Testament form in 1950, renders the last clause 'the Word was a god.' A student should know their argument at its strongest, because he will meet it at his door. It runs like this. Greek has no indefinite article, so a noun without the article can be indefinite; English must then add a. John 4:19 and 6:70, which you looked at in the inquiry, are clear cases: a noun without the article, placed before the verb, rightly translated a prophet and a devil. In John 1:1 the second clause has τὸν θεόν, with the article, for the one God; the third clause drops the article. Witnesses argue that John made the change deliberately, to say that the Word was divine, a mighty one, but not the God he was with. They believe the Word is God's first creation, through whom everything else was made.

Part of that argument is simply true, and you should say so. The grammar of the clause does permit a noun without the article to be indefinite. The inquiry showed it. A Christian who tells a Witness that the Greek makes a god impossible is overstating the case, and an honest Witness who knows Greek will notice. The grammar allows three possibilities: definite (the Word was God, the one God), indefinite (the Word was a god), or qualitative (the Word was God in nature, had all that God is). The question is which one John means, and grammar alone cannot answer it. Context has to.

The context is where the indefinite reading struggles. First, John's own Gospel is fiercely monotheistic: it speaks of 'the only God' (John 5:44) and 'the only true God' (17:3), in line with Isaiah's 'Before Me no god was formed, and after Me none will come' (Isaiah 43:10). A second, lesser god alongside the true God fits nothing else in John's Jewish faith. Second, verse 3 says that through the Word 'all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.' If the Word were himself a thing that was made, then something was made without him, namely himself. John's sentence places the Word on the Creator's side of the line between Creator and creature. Third, the Gospel ends where it begins: Thomas confesses the risen Jesus as Ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου (ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou, my Lord and my God), with the article (John 20:28), and Jesus accepts it. Fourth, elsewhere in the prologue John uses θεός without the article for the one true God, as in 1:6, 'sent from God,' and 1:18, 'No one has ever seen God,' where nobody translates a god. Witnesses reply that those verses are built differently, and they are right that the constructions are not identical; but the pattern shows that John does not need the article to mean the one God.

This lesson is not the place for the whole conversation with a Jehovah's Witness. The Apologetics track has a full lesson on that, 'False Teaching and New Religions', which sets out what Witnesses believe as they would describe it and answers it from the whole of scripture. Go there when you need to. What this lesson gives you is the Greek: what it says, what it allows, and what it does not prove on its own. That is enough to keep you honest at the door.

You will hear, sooner or later, that 'Colwell's rule proves the Word was God.' It does not, and a student should know exactly why. In 1933 the American scholar E. C. Colwell published an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, 'A Definite Rule for the Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament.' He had studied sentences in which a predicate noun was clearly definite, and he observed that when such a definite predicate noun comes before the verb, it usually lacks the article, and when it comes after the verb, it usually has it. That is the rule, stated with its proper limits: definite predicate nouns that precede the verb usually lack the article.

Now notice what the rule does not say. It does not say that a predicate noun which lacks the article and precedes the verb is usually definite. That is the rule turned backwards, and it does not follow, any more than 'most bishops wear black' would mean 'most people who wear black are bishops.' Colwell started from nouns he already knew were definite, and asked how they behaved. He did not show that every noun behaving that way is definite. John 4:19 and 6:70 are exactly the kind of noun his rule does not cover: before the verb, without the article, and indefinite. Colwell himself thought his rule made a definite reading of John 1:1 likely, and argued that the missing article could not by itself make the noun indefinite or qualitative. But many who have quoted him since have pushed the rule further than its own evidence goes, and later grammarians have doubted whether it can carry even Colwell's own conclusion.

The scholarly discussion did not end with Colwell. In 1973 Philip B. Harner, also in the Journal of Biblical Literature, studied the same construction and argued that nouns without the article placed before the verb are most often qualitative: they describe the nature or kind of the subject rather than identifying it. On that reading, John 1:1 says that the Word had the very nature of God, everything that God is, while remaining distinct from the God he was with. The New English Bible of 1961 tried to catch this with the rendering 'what God was, the Word was.' Daniel Wallace, in the grammar mentioned above, argued along similar lines that the qualitative sense fits the verse best. Other careful grammarians prefer the definite sense, and hold that John is identifying the Word as God in the fullest sense. Both readings stand within historic Christian faith and confess the full deity of the Word; they differ over how best to describe what the grammar is doing. The indefinite reading is the one that sits outside that faith, and the reasons are those given in section 3, from context, not from Colwell's rule.

So here is the honest summary for a preacher. The grammar of καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος marks the Word as the subject and God as what the Word was. It does not, by itself, choose between definite, qualitative and indefinite. Colwell's rule shows that the missing article is no obstacle to a definite reading, and no more. The context of John's Gospel, its monotheism, its claim that all things were made through the Word, and Thomas's confession, is what rules out a second, lesser god. When you preach John 1:1, you may say plainly that the Word was God, as every major translation does, and you need not claim more for the grammar than it can bear.

You have now done for one verse what you will do for every verse you study in this track. It is worth writing the method down, because it is the same every time, and it is the foundation for the study of your own passage at the end of the track.

One: read the verse in your own Bible, and write down what you think it says. Two: open the verse in the Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible interlinear, and copy the Greek, with every breathing, accent, iota subscript and punctuation mark. Three: read it aloud in Greek, slowly, using your own transliteration only where you need it. Four: go through it one word at a time with the tool, and for each word write down five things: the Greek form, the dictionary form (the tool calls it the root or lemma), the gloss, what kind of word it is (noun, verb, article, preposition and so on), and the parsing the tool gives. Five: mark every article, and every noun without one. Six: note anything the English hides, such as a plural you, a repeated word, a change of verb, or a word placed first. Seven: write one sentence on what you can now see in the verse that you could not see in step one, and one sentence on what you still do not know.

The seventh step matters as much as the others. A student who has read one verse with a tool has learned a great deal and still knows very little, and the honest sentence about what you do not yet know will keep you humble in the pulpit. Modules 2 to 8 will each add to step four, so that by the end of the track the parsing will tell you a great deal more than it does now.

Do not be discouraged that the method is slow. John 1:1 took a whole lesson. The next verse will take less time, and the one after that less again, because most of the words in the New Testament are words you will meet over and over. Seven of the eight different words in John 1:1, ἐν, εἰμί, ὁ, λόγος, καί, πρός and θεός, are among the commonest in the New Testament, and between them they account for a large share of every page you will read. The eighth, ἀρχή, is less common, about fifty-five times, but you have now met it twice. You have begun at the right place.

Turn to a fresh page of your notebook and head it John 1:1. Rule five columns across the page, and head them: Greek, lemma, gloss, kind of word, parsing. Using the interlinear, fill in one row for each of the seventeen words of the verse, in order. Where a word repeats, fill in its row again; repetition is part of learning. Under the table write the whole verse in Greek, mark the four articles and the two nouns without one, and write one sentence each on what the article does in the second clause and what it does in the third.

Then make the same five-column sheet for the first verse of your own passage, on the page after your My passage page, following all seven steps of the method in section 5. This is the first full word-by-word sheet of the passage you will study at the end of the track. If your first verse is long, do as many words as you can in three sessions this week, and finish the rest next week. Do not skip any word because it is small; the small words, the articles and the joining words, are often where the meaning turns.

This is also the week to settle your passage. Read it through again in English and in the interlinear, and ask whether it is the passage you want to live with for the rest of this track. If it is, write under its reference on the My passage page: Chosen, with the date. If it is not, choose another now, copy it out in English, and start its first verse sheet. From Module 2 onward each lesson's practical step will use it.

Finally, go back to what you wrote for the last inquiry question, about the Jehovah's Witnesses at your door. Rewrite it in three or four sentences, using what you now know. Say what the Greek of John 1:1 shows, say honestly what it allows, and say where the context of John's Gospel settles the question. Write it kindly, as if you were going to say it to someone you respect. Then add it to the Claims to test page at the back of your notebook, where you wrote down a 'Greek really means' claim in Lesson 1. You have now tested your first claim yourself, with the Greek in front of you.