The Rev. John Hamilton Thom on John 1:1 (1839)

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The Rev. John Hamilton Thom on John 1:1 (1839)

That the Greek words of John i. 1. admit the translation “the word was God,” I do not deny. I believe this to be the true translation. That they will admit the translation, “the word was a God,” God virtually, is, I think, equally certain; and to this effect only did I adduce Eusebius and Origen, who could not be in error on a matter of this kind. Whatever Origen’s error may have been respecting the actual use of the article in the New Testament, surely his authority is decisive as to the one point, that the words will bear the translation he puts upon them. How, in Greek, could the meaning “the Word was a God” be expressed if these words do not express it? Eusebius says: “The Evangelist has clearly shown what is the nature of the Word by subjoining, 'And the word was a God;’ although he might have said, “And the Word was God, with the addition of the article, if he had thought that the Father and the Son were one and the same, and the word is God over all.”

But you say the Greek of Origen and Eusebius was Alexandrian. And surely this is the very circumstance that rendered them unerring interpreters of the Greek of St. John. Can any of us pretend to be equal judges, in such a case, with the educated natives of a Greek Town, using Greek as a living language, so near the time of the Apostle? That their Greek was not Classic, but “corrupted” by the introduction of new terms, is nothing to the purpose. It was Hellenistic Greek they were interpreting. If by “the introduction of the article” being “a gross solecism,” you mean that the predicate of a proposition necessarily rejects it, so thought not Eusebius and Origen: and instances where the predicate takes the article in the New Testament are not rare. This, however, is quite irrelevant; for no one that I know disputes the correctness of the present translation, though they may think another tenable.

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