The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief

by James R. White

For now, we see that if John had placed the article before theos, he would have been making “God” and the “Word” ...

As we will see, John is very careful to differentiate between these terms here, for He is careful to differentiate between the Father and the S...

One commentator has rightly noted regarding the prologue, “John is not trying to show who is...

The structure of the third clause in verse 1, theos en ho logos, demands the translation “The Word was God.” Since logos has the article preceding it, it is marked out as the subject.

Had theos as well as logos been preceded by the article the meaning would have been that the Word was completely identical with God, which is impossible if the Word was also “with God.”

The NEB paraphrase “what God was, the Word was,” brings out the meaning of the clause as successfully as a paraphrase can.[13]

“In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God.”

Indefinite: hence, “a god.” Definite: hence, “God.” Qualitative: hence, “in nature God.”

Basically, the question we have to ask is this: how does John intend us to take the word qeov=x in the last clause?

Does he wish us to understand it as indefinite, so that no particular “god” is in mind, but instead, that Jesus is a god, one of at least two, or even more?[15] Or is θεός definite, so that the God is in view? Or does the position of the word (before the verb, adding emphasis), coupled with the lack of the article, indicate that John is directing us to a quality when he says the Word is θεός? That is, is John describing the nature of the Word, saying the Word is deity?

Monotheism in the Bible

The anarthrous θεός—If one is to dogmatically assert that any anarthrous noun must be indefinite and translated with an indefinite article, one must be able to do the same with the 282 other times θεός appears anarthrously.

Ignores the context—The translation tears the phrase from the immediately preceding context, leaving it alone and useless.

The uses of the Greek article, the functions of Greek prepositions, and the fine distinctions between Greek tenses are confidently expounded in public at times by men who find considerable difficulty in using these parts of speech accurately in their native tongue.

“the word was a god,” prove nothing thereby save their ignorance of Greek grammar.

So our decision, then, must be between the definite understanding of the word and the qualitative.

If we take θεός as definite, we are hard-pressed to avoid the same conclusion that we would reach if the word had the article; that is, if we wish to say the God in the same way as if the word had the article, we are making θεός and λόγος interchangeable. Yet the vast majority of translations render the ...

The last clause of John 1:1 tells us about the nature of the Word. The translation should be qualitative. We have already seen in the words of F. F. Bruce that John is telling us th...

The New English Bible renders the phrase “what God wa...

Kenneth Wuest puts it, “And the Word was as to His essenc...

It may be better to clearly affirm the NT teaching of the deity of Christ and then explain that he is not the Father, than to sound ambiguous on his deity and explain that he is God but is not the Father.[20]

The Word is eternal

The Word is personal

The Word is deity—The Word is God as to His nature.

“He” at the beginning of the phrase so that we could very well understand him to be saying, “This One” was in the beginning, or “This is the One” who has eternally existed in personal relationship with God (the Father, as we shall see in verse 18, and as John himself says in 1 John 1:2).

If it exists, it does so because it was created by the Logos.

“And the Word became flesh.” Here John uses egeneto, a verb that refers to an action in time. And the reason is clear: the Word entered into human existence, “became flesh,” at a particular point in time. The Logos was not eternally flesh. He existed in a nonfleshly manner in eternity past. But at a blessed point in time, at the Incarnation, the Logos became flesh. The Eternal experienced time.

We need to stop and consider this truth for just a moment. Sometimes Christians who have known God’s truth for a long time become somewhat hardened to the impact such a declaration was meant to carry. The Word, the Creator of all things, the Eternal One, became flesh. Maybe we think so highly of ourselves that we are not properly struck by such a statement.

We need to be amazed by the assertion, “The Word became flesh.” How can the unlimited enter into limi...

He is giving an eyewitness account. Jesus dwelt among us.

He really existed, He really lived. Why is John so concerned about this? We note that he repeats this emphasis in 1 John 1:1–5, and then goes so far as to say that anyone who denies that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is the antichrist (1 John 4:2–3)!

“Gnosticism.” This belief system teaches that everything that is spirit is good, and everything that is material (including flesh) is evil. This is known as the belief in “dualism.” Spirit is good, matter is evil.

So these teachers, known to the early church by the term Docetics,[23] denied that Jesus truly had a physical body so that they could keep the idea that He was good and pure and holy.

He leaves no stone unturned in his quest to make sure we understand: the eternal Logos, fully deity by nature, eternal Creator, the very source of life itself, became a human being. This is the only way to understand his words.

John insists that he and his companions observed the glory of the “only begotten from the Father.”

“only begotten” means. Huge misunderstandings have arisen about the use of this term. For

To summarize that information for our purposes here, the Greek term used is μονογενής (monogenes). The term does not refer to begetting, but to uniqueness. While the traditional translation is “only-begotten,” a better translation would be “unique” or “one of a kind.”

In verse 14, John uses the term as a title, “the glory of the ...

Immediately we see that the term monogenes has special meaning for John, for he speaks of the One and Only having “glory.” The O...

This is the first time John has specifically identified the Father by...

He differentiates the Father from the Logos, the “One and Only,” clearly directing us to two persons, ...

Yet the Logos is seen to have glory, to have a divine origin with the Father, and is said to b...

But before he closes his prologue, John uses what is often called the “bookends” technique. He provides a closing statement that sums up and repeats, in a different form, what he said in his introduction. And this is found in the final verse of the prologue, verse 18.

We have here a textual variant, pitting the earliest, oldest manuscripts of the gospel of John against the later bulk of manuscripts. Without going into a lot of detail,[24] there is every reason to accept the reading of the earliest manuscripts, and to see the later emendation as a natural mistake made by scribes who were accustomed to the phraseology “only begotten son.”

But even once we have established the proper reading of the text, how do we translate it? The phrase in question is μονογενής θεός (monogenes theos).

John tells us that no one has seen God at any time. Is this true? Are there not many instances of men seeing God in the Old Testament? Did not Isaiah say that he saw the Lord sitting upon His throne in the temple (Isaiah 6:1–3)? So what is John saying? How can we understand his words?

When John says “no one has seen God at any time,” he is referring to the Father. No man has seen the Father at any time.

The μονογενής has “made Him known” or “explained Him.”[26] The unique One has made the Father known. Or, in light of the use of the term Father, the Only Son has revealed the Father. But this is not merely a dim reflection, a partial revelation, provided by the Only Son. This is the monogenes theos, the Only Son who is God. The divine nature of the μονογενής is again plainly asserted, just as it was in verse 1. This is what forms the “bookend,” the assertion in verse 1 that the Logos is divine, repeated and reaffirmed here in verse 18 with the statement that the Only Son is God.[27]

with the prologue acting as a “lens,” giving you the proper perspective of who Jesus Christ truly is, you will find passages leaping from the page, all of which confirm and substantiate the proclamation of John 1:1–18: Jesus Christ is God in human flesh, the eternal Creator of all things, “the Only Son, who is God!”

There is a particular group of passages in the Holy Scriptures that uses the word “God” of the Lord Jesus. While we could wish this would be enough to banish all doubt, obviously it is not. The deity of Christ is the constant object of attack and denial, and the verses that bear testimony to this divine truth have been mistranslated, twisted, and in various other ways undermined by nearly every false prophet and false teacher over the past seventeen hundred years.