Some More Thoughts on John 1:1c

N.B. The paragraphs that follow below I published on a Jehovah's Witnesses-only forum.  I have edited it for inclusion on my blog Points d'Appui so that you will read here only the initials of a certain brother's name.  (I used, on the Witnesses-only forum, the brother's first and last names; he is a fellow member of the forum, and a personal friend of mine.)  This brother gave to responsible brothers in New York his research and conclusions on John 1:1c Coptic; they were then incorporated into some of the material published by The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

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John 8:54: ". . . (about) whom you are saying that QEOS of-you (he) is."

The predicate is anarthrous, and precedes the verb EIMI, which has for subject the understood pronoun "he."  The predicate is here definite! (Jesus is using the phrase "your QEOS" not as the semantic equivalent of "your Jehovah," which would be theologically incorrect, but rather uses it with the meaning "your Sovereign.") All the ones in the conversation understood that their God was not one among many other allegedly real Sovereigns in the invisible realm, but that their Sovereign/God was the only true One, the only truly living God, the Universal Sovereign, this no matter that other nations were championing this or that false God, this or that false Universal Sovereign. It is also unthinkable that Jesus was asserting that his Father was someone whom the Jews recognized to be merely some/a god of theirs; hence, the indefinite sense for the predicate at John 8:54 is certainly ruled out.

In view of the foregoing, the question is Why may some predicate count noun be, per context, definite or else indefinite and, regardless of that, it may yet be fronted before the linking verb EIMI? The fronting of a count-noun predicate does not, so it seems to me, focus upon some abstracted quality in the subject, a quality supposedly brought to the fore by use of that predicate. That last statement is contrary to what Philip Harner has written, which, so it seems to me, devolves to a position that sees the predicate as a mass noun so that, when we read it, we supposedly see reference to something that by its very nature is not countable, or at least not countable for the sense supposedly given, a sense supposedly demanded by the context in which the noun has been written. It seems to me more logical to say at most that a count-noun predicate may, perhaps, be fronted in order to focus on the subject's role or identity -- ergo something countable -- as named by that predicate. For example, DOULOS may be indefinite and yet come before or after the linking verb (cf. Gal. 4:7 with 1 Cor. 7:22), though argument (persuasive, convincing?) may be made that focus is given some identity or role explicitly named for the subject by that use of >>DOULOS<< as a count-noun predicate for the subject when that predicate is placed before its linking verb.

Context puts us right as to translation for John 1:1c, which is ". . . and the Word was a god"; however, ". . . and the Word was divine" just happens not to do any theological harm. We could also translate the Greek as ". . . and the Word was a divine being," for that is what a god by nature is, namely, an invisible, personal being who is superhuman.

The Coptic version certainly saw QEOS in the Greek at John 1:1c as an indefinite, count-noun predicate ("a god"). We should keep in mind here brother S. L.s' excellent research on the Coptic's use of the indefinite article for its translation of John 1:1c. All in all, the New World Translation cannot be improved for its rendering of John 1:1c; John 1:1c New World expresses on its face exactly all that the context demands.