No room for alternate understanding—It ignores a basic tenet of translation: if you are going to insist on a translation, you must be prepared to defend it in such a way so as to provide a way for the author to have expressed the alternate translation. In other words, if θεός ἧν ό λόγος is “the Word was a god,” how could John have said “the Word was God?” We have already seen that if John had employed the article before θεός, he would have made the terms θεός and λόγος interchangeable, amounting to modalism.
