“In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
                                                                                                --John
1:1

If you have not read the “Power of
the Word” entry prior to this one, you need to go back and read it. With this
entry, I am continuing a discussion I started last time, and I am going to just
pick up where I left off, with very little review.
The little bit of review I will
give is that I ended the last entry by saying that in English, the word order
of a sentence is: Subject – Verb – Object. In Greek, however, this is not the
case  And I gave an example of how the
same sentence might appear differently in Greek, depending on what the writer
intends to emphasize.
In addition, when the verb is an
action verb, the subject and the object of a sentence have different endings
(called “case endings”, if you’re interested). In such sentences, the case
ending gives away which is the subject and which is the object of a sentence.
So the case endings are used to
tell the subject from the object, and the word order tells you which is being
emphasized. However, like I said, this is when an action verb is being used. In
John 1:1, though, there is no action being performed. “The Word’ is performing
no action on “God”, and “God is performing no action on “The Word.” What we
call an equative verb is used. The two are being compared with each other. In
this case, one was the other.
Now, in sentences using the
equative verb, both the subject and the object have the same case ending. So in
comparing the two words, there is no way of knowing which is the subject and
which is the object. So the question is, Was the Word God, or was God the Word?
And as a side note, “God” appears first in the Greek: “And God was the Word.”
So we have a sentence with an
equative verb, and we have both nouns in the subjective case. And the word
order does not help in determining which is the subject and which is the
object. How are we to know?
Enter in the definite article.
Mounce explains that in such sentences, the subject is given the definite article.
In John 1:1, “Word” has the definite article, making “the Word” the subject of
the sentence. Hence, the proper rendering (in English) is “the Word was God,”
rather than “God was the Word.” And because of the kind of sentence it is, as
well as its surrounding context, the indefinite article does not come into
play. Just because John did not write, “the Word was the God,” that does not
mean (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses maintain) that John meant to say, “the word
was a god.”
Furthermore, the word order found
in the original language tells us that John was emphasizing the fact that the
Word was indeed God. Had the word order been reversed, John would be telling us
that it was indeed the Word that was God. As it is, John wants to convey to us
that everything God was, the Word also was. Everything that was true of God was
also true of the Word.
In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
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