What Does John 1:1 Say About The Nature of Jesus Christ?

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Cults that deny the Trinity focus on denying the deity of Christ. It is because a belief in the deity of Christ could lead to a belief in the Trinity. Thus, they try to water down verses that clearly teach that Jesus is God such as John 1:1.

           The key clause in this verse is “the Word was God.”[1] To deaden the impact of that clause, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in their NWT[2] rendered it, “the Word was a god.” On the other hand, the Iglesia ni Cristo argues that the meaning of λόγος or “Word” is merely a concept. So, they claim that Christ was just an idea or a plan of God. This study will show that “the Word was God” in its literary context teaches that by nature Jesus is God. Though we cannot build the doctrine of the Trinity on one verse, an exegetical analysis of John 1:1 in its grammatical-historical context is a necessary part of that teaching.

            Our passage is part of the prologue of the Gospel of John (1:1-18). It talked about the preexistence of the Word who became man. Here we see that “the only Son” (v. 14) is also called “the only God” (v. 18). The author expressly stated that the purpose why he wrote this book was that “[we] may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing [we] may have life in his name.” (20:31) To believe that Jesus is the Son of God is to believe that He is God. He started with introducing that “the Word was God” (1:1c) and ended with Thomas declaring Him, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28) This Gospel is full of references to the deity of Christ. For example, the Jews sought to kill Jesus because He claimed to be equal with God by “calling God his own Father” (5:18), by claiming the Divine Name for Himself (8:58), and by confessing that He and the Father are one (10:30). Therefore, to say that the clause “the Word was God” teaches that Jesus is God is really consistent with the whole tenor of the Gospel of John.

            Was John talking about a principle or a person when he talked about ὁ λόγος in John 1:1? As far as Greek philosophers are concerned, this generic Greek for “word” “stands usually for ‘reason’”.[3] This fits the interpretation that the Word refers to a mere principle. But, it appears the apostle John had a person in mind rather than reason when he used the term. From verses 1 to 14, John repeatedly used personal pronouns such as “he,” “him,” and “his” to refer to the Word. So, he was not talking about a principle or even a personification but about the person of Christ. Walls wrote, “But one refers naturally to Philo’s logos as ‘it,’ to John’s as ‘he.’”[4] Plus, not only that it shows the Word as the subject, the use of the definite article ὁ (“the”) shows that John was not just talking about any word but the Word. According to the TDNT, “Only in the Prologue do we find ho logós in the absolute.”[5] Here in this Gospel, only in this pericopé was Christ called the Word. After the Word became man in verse 14, He was no longer called the Word for the rest of the Gospel. The next time we see John called Jesus as the Word is in 1 John 1:1 where the apostle described Him as someone they related to. Then, the last time is in Rev. 19:13 where John said that “the name by which he is called is The Word of God.” Here we see that the Word is one of His titles. In all these usages of λόγος, he always referred to the person of Christ. In fact, it seems that only John referred to Jesus as the Word. However, the apostle Paul may be alluding to this term when he wrote that Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24, 30) since the λόγος “expression takes its suitability primarily from the OT connotation of ‘word’ and its personification of wisdom.”[6] Therefore, in its use of λόγος, John 1:1 was not talking about a concept but about the Christ. Yet, despite of this clear Johannine usage, the Iglesia ni Cristo insists that John 1:1 was talking about an idea in the mind of God. In their official magazine they declared, “before God created the world, Christ was foreknown or was already in God’s mind because He had planned to create the Messiah or Christ.”[7] In their desire to deny the pre-existence of Christ, this cult group committed a basic error in word study by sticking to a dictionary meaning that favors their bias against the deity of Christ and then insisting on that meaning alone in any context. But the context of the word clarifies its meaning. As already noted above, John was talking in ὁ λόγος about Christ Himself, not just an idea about Him. Also, John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word” (v. 1a). The copulative verb εἰμί (“was”) is in the imperfect, which “expresses continuous timeless existence”.[8] Christ was not from the beginning but He already existed even before the beginning. Both Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint and John 1:1 in the Greek New Testament used exactly the same prepositional phrase Ἐν ἀρχῇ and exactly the same parsing (preposition + noun-dative-singular-feminine), showing that “there is a deliberate allusion to Gen 1:1 here”.[9] So, the first clause of John 1:1 proves that the person of Christ pre-existed. In addition to that, according to John 1:1b, “the Word was with God”. The preposition πρὸς (“with”) shows “accompaniment”, that is, that the Word has a close, interpersonal relationship with God the Father.[10] He did not simply exist in the mind of God. The Word was not “in” God but “with” Him.

            The main focus of the debate regarding John 1:1 is with the last clause: καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (“and the Word was God”). Does it prove His deity? The first clause (“In the beginning was the Word”) directly proves the pre-existence of Christ but only implied His deity. Though the Iglesia ni Cristo might dispute His pre-existence, the Jehovah’s Witnesses can just simply say it reinforces their belief that Jesus “is the first of God’s creations, that he had a beginning.”[11] But John 1:1a does not say that Christ had a beginning but that He was already there in the beginning. He was not created but He was the creator (1:2-3). Nevertheless, John 1:1a talks about His pre-existence explicitly and His deity implicitly. The next clause (“the Word was with God,” 1:1b) proves that the person of the Word is distinct from the person of God the Father but not the deity of the Word. Both the Iglesia ni Cristo and the Jehovah’s Witnesses would happily agree with us when we affirm that our Lord Jesus is not God the Father. For them, that proves that Christ is different by nature from God. But we are only saying that He is distinct by personhood from the Father. Still, the second clause deals with His distinction and not His deity. So, the issue is with the third and last clause of John 1:1.

            The noun θεὸς (“God”) in 1:1c is in the emphatic which “stresses [the] essence or quality”[12] of the λόγος. So, the Word has the same nature as God. Translators have attempted to draw out this particular meaning. The NEB[13] goes this way: “and what God was the Word was.” While the translators of the NET Bible conceded in its footnote of John 1:1 that the NEB has “perhaps the most nuanced rendering,” yet instead for the sake of clarity it translated the third clause as “the Word was fully God.” The NET Bible did bring out the force of its emphatic position. While λόγος has the article ὁ (“the”), θεὸς does not and, therefore, it is anarthrous (that is, without an article). John carefully worded the third clause in such a way that, while affirming the equality of the nature of the Word with God, he consistently distinguished the person of Jesus from the person of the Father just as he did in the second clause. So the Word is by nature God Himself. The third clause gave much sense to the first two clauses of John 1:1. The Word pre-existed because He is God. Though He is distinct from God, the Word is of the same essence as God.

            As mentioned above, the Jehovah’s Witnesses rendered 1:1c in the NWT as, “the Word was a god.” They defended their translation by arguing that θεὸς is anarthrous. So, they interpreted θεὸς as indefinite. But Wallace labels such rendition as “weak”, “simplistic”, and has “an insufficient basis.”[14] To be consistent, the NWT should have translated every anarthrous θεὸς in John 1 as “a god” but instead they rendered it as “God” (vv. 6, 12, 13 and 18). Plus, for the sake of argument, if the NWT was correct in its translation, the Greek construction of 1:1c should have been καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν θεὸς instead of καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.[15] The word order upholds the nature of the Word as equal with God. This is consistent with the language of John (“making himself equal with God.” 5:18c). Now the next question would be, if θεὸς is not indefinite, then does it follow that it is definite? The answer is also no. It is neither definite nor indefinite but actually qualitative. Harner argues that “the anarthrous predicate in [1:1c] has primarily a qualitative significance and that it would be definite only if there is some specific indication of definiteness in the meaning or context.”[16] But the context rule out definiteness because that it would make it appear that the Word is God the Father. Wallace explained that “calling θεὸς in 1:1c definite is the same as saying that if it had followed the verb it would have had the article.”[17] It is also interesting to note that the Jehovah’s Witnesses admitted that θεὸς is qualitative, that the anarthrous “points to a quality about someone.”[18] But, despite that, they still argued that “the text is not saying that Word (Jesus) was the same as the God with whom he was but, rather, that the Word was godlike, divine, a god”.[19] Sadly, they read their theological bias into the text rather than allowing the text to speak for itself. It appears the Jehovah’s Witnesses fell for the same (wrong) mindset of the Iglesia ni Cristo, that to say Jesus is God is tantamount to saying that Jesus is the Father. But that was the exact impression that John intended to avoid in his careful sentence construction of verse 1. Simply put, for John, Jesus is of the same essence with the Father but He is not Him.

            Putting it all together, in one compact verse, John expounded on the deity of Christ. He existed in eternity before the beginning of everything. He enjoyed a close, personal relationship with God the Father. His person is distinct from the person of the Father and yet Jesus definitely shares the same nature with Him.

            This study has shown that “the Word was God” in its literary context teaches that by nature Jesus is God. Instead of watering it down, we should allow the full force of John 1:1 to bear on our Christology. He is not just a god or a mere godly concept. He is God. Though it is not a surefire guarantee that believing in the deity of Christ would automatically lead to believing the Trinity because there are those who ended up thinking that He and the Father are one in person. But, as we have seen, Jesus is distinct in person from God but equal with God. They are equal in respect but not in aspect. Yet still, a belief in the deity of Christ forces us to seriously consider the belief in the Trinity. Thus, in view of that, we are left with only one option: That God is a triune God. Such confession is the only worthy way to worship God in truth (John 4:24).

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NOTE: We have moved to our new home, http://bibleexpose.org/.

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            [1]All Bible verses are from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Standard Bible Society, 2001) unless otherwise noted.

            [2]New World Translation.

       
            [3]A. F. Walls, “Logos,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 2d ed., ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1984, 2001), 696.

            [4]Ibid, 697. Emphasis his.

            [5]Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 513.

            [6]Elwell, 697.

            [7]Ruben D. Aromin, “Did Christ have Pre-existence,” Pasugo: God’s Message, November 2005, 12-3. 

            [8]Cleon L. Rogers, Jr. and Cleon L. Rogers III, The New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 175.

            [9]Ibid.

            [10]Ibid.

            [11]“Trinity,” Reasoning from the Scriptures (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1985, 1989), 409.

            [12]William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993, 2003), 27.

            [13]New English Bible.

            [14]Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 266-7. 

            [15]Mounce, 28.

            [16]Philip B. Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns: Mark 15:39 and John 1:1,” Journal of Biblical Literature 92, no. 1 (March 1973): 84.

            [17]Wallace, 268.

            [18]“Jesus Christ,” Reasoning, 212.

            [19]Ibid. Emphasis theirs.