Is the KJV Crap?

This is an anti-vaxxer. This is a COVID denier who prophesied thousands of years prior to the arrival of COVID-19 that, that this was all going to happen. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. Uh, having a good time. Uh, you and I, we just recorded the after party for this year’s— or for this, this week’s episode. And, uh, over on Patreon if you want to get— if you want to get it. And we were talking about golf and talking about snowboarding, and now I kind of want to be outside and I want to be hanging out in, in the world. But no, we’re going to bring you a great show. So that is what we’re going to do. And today, we’re going to start off with a Twisted Scripture.

And we’re going to talk about— this was one of our patrons’ suggestions, actually, a few weeks ago. We’re going to talk about things— that pesky KJV, the King James Version, and things that are maybe unique to that, and that it might not have gotten entirely correct. We’re going to talk about it. Unicorns, problems. Yeah, don’t worry about it, we’ll get, we’ll get to all of it. And then in the second half of the show, we’re going to be heading over to, uh, we’re going to go to Philo, we’re going to get to Origen. Uh, it’s good, it’s going to be one of history’s mysteries. We’re going to be talking about— what are we talking about?

We’re going to talk about why certain authors like to use the word for God, but without the definite article, and they meant something specific by it.

I like it. Well, let’s leave it mysterious like that, and we’ll start the show with Twisted Scripture. The scripture that got twisted. Don’t get it twisted, is the KJV.

Yeah, so the, the whole Bible.

The Bible. Yeah, but a specific version. Well, we’ll get, we’ll get to why, uh, that specific version is, uh, is its own form of twisted. Uh, it’s— there are still lots of people out there who believe that it is the only English version that anyone should be looking at for anything. It is the inspired and true word of God, every bit of it, uh, uh, inerrant in every way. Uh, amen.

Yes, the, the, the degree of KJV-onlyism out there puts Poe’s Law to the test time after time after time, because I’m like, you cannot, cannot possibly be serious. Uh, for instance, folks who, uh, pastors who will insist that they will use the King James Version to correct the Greek. And so, and I’m like, no, that’s— no, you can’t be serious.

Um, but yeah, I, I, you know what, it takes a bold move to you to correct source material with the after, with the thing that came after.

Yeah, yeah, with the target translation. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, there, there’s a large degree of that. But the King James Version, while it remains— it is one of the most popular translations. I think it still may be the best-selling translation out there. It is not the most read translation out there. So it is kind of more of an icon, um, than an actual translation that people like to read because it’s a slog. Um, I think the NIV might be the most read translation out there, but it is an influential translation, so much so that Robert Alter recently published his own translation of the Hebrew Bible, and along with it, he published somewhat of a companion volume called The Art of Bible Translation.

Oh yeah.

And he talked about how all Bible translations into English these days operate in the shadow of the King James Version. And so you might as well, you need to lean into that, otherwise you’re just spitting into the wind.

Now, we’ve been saying the phrase King James Version, but can I correct us a little bit? Because when it first was released, it was “The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New, newly translated out of the original tongues, and with former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty’s special commandment.” Yes. That was the original title. Why don’t we go back to that?

It’s a little too wordy.

Instead of the KJV, it’s T-H-B-C-O-T-A-T-N-N-T. Okay. Yeah.

And it’s also not entirely accurate, because I mean, the degree to which it is a new translation is very small. It is a conservative revision of the Bishops’ Bible, specifically the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. In fact, they got several copies of the Bishops’ Bible and sent them to the translators, and they literally scratched words out and wrote the replacements in the margins.

Oh, wow.

And then they were collected, and they had folks who were the editors who would basically just transcribe the resulting cobbled-together translation. So, and, and there are, there are scholars who have estimated the, the New Testament of the King James Version, and, and like, we can see how close it is to the Bishop’s Bible. It’s incredibly close to the Bishop’s Bible, but it’s even incredibly close to Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, which is several versions removed from the Bishop’s Bible. Uh, they, they estimated 84% of the New Testament in the King James Version is word-for-word Tyndale’s translation.

Oh wow, I did not realize that. This is why it is the KJV and not the KJT.

I mean, the titles are pretty—there’s not a really strict set of rules for titles, but some people call it the KJB.

The King James Bible.

Oh, sure.

Where, and that way you just sidestep the claim that it’s its own translation. But yeah, it’s really just a revision of the Bishop’s Bible. And so a lot of the things that we’re going to talk about today as squirrely translations have actually existed for like a century before the King James Version was ever translated. So it’s not like the King James Version introduced all of these things, but certainly it perpetuated, and in the history since the publication of the King James Bible, it has been responsible for making sure those things remain influential.

Become cemented into the tradition or whatever, yeah.

In fact, the King James Version has a lot to do with the language that we use, ‘cause English was moving away from the King James Version until the First and Second Great Awakenings, when suddenly it was like, “Bring back the King James Version!” And then a lot of words that had fallen out of use suddenly popped back into use only because of the influence of the King James Version. So like the word warfare—hmm, that we only use that word because the King James Version. Yeah, and there’s a, there’s scholarship that looks at a list of words that were no longer used until the Second Great Awakening and in the 19th century, and suddenly people started using these words again and they’re still used to this day. But we—and we got a lot of different examples of problematic passages in here because while it was based on—this revision was based on the best available scholarship of the day for the most part, the scholarship has advanced significantly.

Our resources have advanced.

I would hope so.

Yes. And probably the biggest thing is we have a lot more manuscripts that are available to us today. The science/art of textual criticism has advanced significantly, and we can make much more informed decisions about what readings are most likely earlier, particularly because we have access to a lot more New Testament manuscripts, we have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, all that kind of stuff. So some of the things we’ll talk about have to do with translations, some of the things have to do with manuscripts and what sources are being used.

So for instance, one of the first things, one of the biggest things, one of the most influential things is something known as the Comma Johanneum. Are you familiar with that phrase?

I’m familiar with the Oxford comma.

Okay, no, this is a different one.

This is a different comma.

Also known as the Johannine comma.

Right.

And comma here just means clause. Okay. And so it is 1 John 5:7-8. And these two verses read, “For there are three that bear record in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.” And so this is a central Trinitarian proof text, right?

Right.

Um, the only problem is it’s not in any early Greek manuscripts. It’s something that pops up in Latin manuscripts. And so the King James Version, the source text that the translators went to when they were like, “Why’d the Bishop’s Bible translate it this way?” They would go back to a source text for the Greek New Testament, and the source text they went back to was what became known as the Textus Receptus, which is a version of the Greek New Testament that was originally cobbled together at the beginning of the 16th century by Desiderius Erasmus.

And he basically just took them and and collated them and said, okay, I like this reading over here, I like this reading over here. And in the, uh, between the second and the third edition, some people started asking him why he didn’t include this verse. Or the— this, this is a, a clause that crosses two verses, and, um, there’s another part of one of the verses that’s not a part of this. But they said, where’s that phrase? And he was like, it’s not in any of the Greek manuscripts. And he got leaned on by people who had a lot of power and influence. And he basically said, “Look, I’m not going to include this unless I have a Greek manuscript that has it, because it’s not in any of the Greek manuscripts.” And lo and behold, somebody shows up with a Greek manuscript that has it.

I had it under my pillow, so—.

Yeah, and quite literally, it’s dated to more or less within a couple of years of, uh, of when it showed up at Erasmus’s doorstep. And scholars who have looked at it have said, yeah, it looks like somebody just translated the Latin back into Greek.

While transcribing this manuscript. So, um, but he said, okay, fine, I’ll include it in the third edition. So the third edition of his Textus Receptus, which was really called the Novum Instrumentum, a new instrument. Okay. The third edition has the Comma Johanneum, and it just so happens that the edition that the King James translators relied on for their revision was the third edition.

So the King James Version, of course, included the Johannine comma. And that’s one of the things that was stricken once we started doing more text critical work in the 1700s and then more earnestly in the 1800s.

So all you scholars and your— and, and how you’re trying to deceive everyone by taking scriptures out of the books.

Yeah, yeah, that’s— oh gosh. And there, there’s about— we’ve talked about this before, I think. The— yeah, there are about 16 verses in the New Testament that are commonly just omitted, just deleted from contemporary translations of the Bible, and it sends some people into conniptions. They just—.

That’s right.

Yeah, they’re like, “Woo-hoo!” And the reality is it’s a more accurate book. It’s a more accurate New Testament without it. So somebody added it to it. I want to talk about another one that’s relevant to the use of Erasmus’ Textus Receptus.

Oh, sure.

And this comes from the book of Revelation.

Revelation 22:19. And when Erasmus went and asked for all those manuscripts, what he got omitted the last chapter or so of the Book of Revelation. He did not have a manuscript that included the end of the Book of Revelation. So what he did was he took the Latin and he just translated the Latin back into Greek and just slapped that on the end of his, the end of his product. Okay, so it’s, it’s, it’s in Greek in the Textus Receptus, but it is Greek that was translated from a Latin manuscript. And part of Revelation 22:19 in the King James Version, it talks about somebody’s name, the people’s names being in the Book of Life, which in Latin would be libro. And, uh, so Erasmus’ Textus Receptus has “Book of Life.” All fine and good except for the fact that the Latin is wrong, um, or at least somebody was wrong in, uh, transmission because the Latin probably said “ligno,” which meant “tree,” because the Greek manuscripts all say “Tree of Life.” Oh, okay.

So, uh, so Revelation 22:19 in the King James Version refers to the Book of Life, but it should refer to the Tree of Life, having your name written in the Tree of Life.

Who writes in trees? I mean, I guess people do.

Revelation talks a little bit about this, about this tree that grows alongside the river. But yeah, an interesting little variation that we see based on the fact that Erasmus is like, where’d the last chapter go? I’ll just translate it from Latin. That looks like the word book.

So wait, the Textus Receptus that he was creating was in Latin, right?

No, he was creating a Greek edition of the New Testament. He was basically—.

Oh, okay. So he’s taking original Greek sources and just cobbling together a Greek version.

Right.

Okay, I get it now.

This would be called an eclectic edition. Eclectic meaning it’s cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. The alternative would be a diplomatic edition. That’s where you’re just basing it on a single manuscript. So most critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, they’re based on the Leningrad Codex, they’re diplomatic editions. Most critical editions of the New Testament are based on a bunch of different manuscripts, they’re eclectic editions. But you can have the opposite. You can have a New Testament manuscript that’s based on Codex Sinaiticus or something like that. That would be a single manuscript, that’d be a diplomatic edition. And there’s an Oxford Hebrew Bible project that’s trying to put together an eclectic edition of the Hebrew Bible where incorporating Dead Sea Scroll readings and Septuagint readings and things like that. So yes, he was generating a Greek edition of the New Testament. It was the first widely available Greek edition of the New Testament.

Because up until him, if you wanted the Greek New Testament, you had to go find a manuscript. And most of the manuscripts that were— the early manuscripts didn’t cover the whole New Testament. And so his edition of the Greek New Testament is what made it possible for Martin Luther to translate the New Testament from Greek into German. Because before that, they were using the Latin. And this kind of caused this sea change where everybody was like, “All right, we’re leaving the Latin behind, we’re going back to the Greek.” So it was a big deal.

Yeah, I get it now. I had translation on my mind, and so I was thinking that he was translating to something, but I just hadn’t— Oh, yeah.

Anyway, now that I understand what we’re talking about, let’s continue going on with the KJV and ways that it might have gotten a few things a little wonky doodle. Let’s talk unicorns, because there’s something just delightful about a Bible— frankly, I don’t want to give this one up. I want there to be unicorns in the Bible. You’re about to tell me that I can’t have my unicorns and I’m about to be sad, but let’s talk about where they come from and what it’s trying to translate.

Yeah, so the King James Version has 9 occurrences, I think 6 occurrences in the singular unicorn, 3 occurrences of the plural unicorns. And when we look in the— the first place we can go is the Septuagint, because that’s the tradition that resulted in— that’s one of the traditions that the King James translators referred to. In fact, when we go all the way back to— in fact, I pulled up Tyndale’s Pentateuch, because William Tyndale translated more than the New Testament. He also translated the entire Pentateuch, which was published in 1530. But in Deuteronomy 33:17, we have a reference to this where it says his horns as the horns of an unicorn. And, you know, unicorn has a Y instead of an I and an E on the end and all that kind of stuff. But right. So the, the use of unicorn goes all the way back to, to Tyndale in English.

And it’s actually used in—something related is used in the Vulgate. I think they use rhinoceros. Let me just pull up the Vulgate real quick to make sure. But the Latin would be translating the Septuagint’s monokeros. Is it monokeros or monokeros? Yeah, it’s monokeros, which means one horn.

And so the Septuagint is probably the foundation of this misunderstanding. I think once you get into the Latin Vulgate, you get the— this was probably Jerome’s attempt to try to understand the Hebrew word by appealing to the Greek, because the Hebrew has reem, and that is kind of an unusual term. For a long time, people weren’t exactly sure what it was. Most scholars today would say it is a now extinct kind of ox called an aurochs.

Oh, okay.

Uh, but when you go, um, but they didn’t know this anciently. Uh, I’m looking in the— yeah, rhinoceros is what the Vulgate has in, uh, in Deuteronomy 33:17. So the— it sounds like the, the Vulgate is like, a one horn, what’s that? Well, we got these things called rhinoceroses, rhinoceri. Maybe that’s what’s going on. So the, the Vulgate is using that. The Greek is probably basing this translation on reports from Persia, uh, from people who are exploring and legends from even further, uh, east into, uh, you know, like the Indus Valley or something like that.

And that’s where the mythical creature probably comes from. And so this is like 5th, 4th century BCE, explorers writing in Greek are talking about these mythical creatures. And I think the Septuagint translator either was trying to reflect that idea or was just trying to reflect the idea of a rhinoceros.

So when we get into English, they’re like, “What?” They don’t really know what’s— either they don’t know what’s going on, or unicorn originally had a broader semantic range and could include a rhinoceros.

But very quickly, the idea was that this is a mythical creature, when in reality, the Hebrew reem would have just referred to this particular kind of ox. And one of the reasons, one of the confusing reasons, one of the reasons we know it is not a one-horned animal is because Deuteronomy 33:17 has, it talks about the plural horns of the reem in Hebrew. And so the animal is singular, the horns are plural.

Oh, okay.

You can use a singular word for an animal to speak collectively about multiple animals. Like we talked about that in Exodus where the plague of frogs just mentions a frog.

The plague of a frog.

Yes. So there’s like this kaiju frog going, “Grrr, grrr, grrr,” crawling out of the Nile. And also the word for bird. Every bird of the sky, all the birds, it’s just oph in the singular.

And so maybe that’s what’s going on. But when the King James Version translated Deuteronomy 33:17, it kind of fiddled with that a little bit. And it talks about the horns of unicorns in the plural. So they didn’t quite want to abandon the notion that this word referred to a single-horned animal, whether it was understood as natural or mythological.

But like the way that it talks about these animals in the Bible, it doesn’t seem like it’s referring to a mythical creature with magical abilities. It just seems like it’s referring to an animal that the people reading it would understand, would know. Yeah.

Right? Yeah.

Just like if we wrote about a bear, no one would think, oh, it’s mythical or whatever.

They would just— Yeah.

That’s a thing that exists and we all know what a bear is.

Yeah, and certainly some of these animals would have been better well-known than others. Because, you know, I think you’ve got plenty of examples of different regions, even in the United States, but especially around the world, where some people might know about a certain animal and people who don’t live very far away from them might be like, “What’s that?” Yeah, um, like when I— the, the first time I went to, uh, Israel-Palestine, I was in— I forget— the ruins of, of an ancient city, and I heard this, this high-pitched squeak, almost like a yell. And I was like, what is that? And, um, somebody was like, oh, it’s a hyrax. And I was like, and what pray tell is a hyrax? And they were like, oh, it’s kind of a— it’s kind of a rodent that, that hides out in, in rocky areas. And then I was I was like looking at a pile of basalt rocks and then this little rodent poked its head out and went, “Nyeh!” and yelled at me.

And I was like, “Oh, that’s a hyrax.” I heavily encourage everyone to look up hyraxes ‘cause they’re, I wouldn’t say cute, they look mad. They all look pretty mad.

Yeah, they do. Yeah, and they sound mad. Like they sound like they’re like, “Get outta here!” Hey, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah. So I had no idea what a hyrax was until I started getting shouted at by one. And I had to have some knowledge dropped on me. But yeah, so, you know, if somebody, you know, I tell this story and 2,000 years from now, somebody reads a transcript and they have, and they’ve, and you know, the knowledge of the hyrax has been lost because maybe it’s extinct or something like that. Then yeah, they might be like, “Hyrax, that kind of sounds like the Toyota Hilux, so it was probably an animal that looked a lot like a car.” Or I don’t know. Yeah, any number of things.

But sure, if you’re trying to translate a word that you don’t have a translation for, you kind of go with whatever you got.

Yeah, and in the King James Version, they’re using a lot of traditions that are found in the translations that precede them. And some of them are kind of silly.

One of the ones that I wanted to jump to— we don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to jump to how the KJV handles the word, how it translates a bunch of different words all to the word hell.

And doesn’t bother to distinguish any of them.

Yeah. So you got 3 different words. Well, one in Hebrew, Sheol, is translated hell in the King James Version. And this is just based on the assumption that, you know, the assumption of univocality. Well, we’re talking about the realm of the dead and it’s not particularly happy, that must mean hell. And the reality is that they did not have a concept of hell in the Hebrew Bible. Everybody went to the same place, good, bad.

Nor heaven, just Sheol.

Yeah, Sheol, which is just the realm of the dead. And it was a hazy, murky, not very exciting existence. Existence, and they didn’t know an awful lot about it. So, so right off the bat, yeah, that’s, that’s a mistranslation, uh, in the King James Version. And then you’ve got a few different words that are used in the New Testament. The main two are Hades and Gehenna. It’s really Gehenna in, uh, in Greek transliteration, but those are the two that are most commonly translated hell. And then you’ve got one occurrence of the word Tartarus. And in Greek, Gehenna is a Greek-Jewish term. It comes from Ge Hinnom, from the valley of the son of Hinnom. And this is this valley that comes around the south end of Jerusalem. And this is associated with child sacrifice in the pre-exilic period, the Topheth, which is where the pre-exilic kings were supposed to have offered their children as sacrifice, make make them pass through the fire, that, that, all that stuff.

That’s supposed to be on the edge of the Valley of Hinnom. And in Greco-Roman period Jewish tradition, that location becomes associated with the bad place, uh, just because it is— there’s fire, there’s wickedness, there’s killing. That is the bad place. And so that becomes kind of an eschatological location of divine punishment. And so in the New Testament, that’s Gehenna. Hades is just— it’s largely borrowed from Greek mythology. And Tartarus in Greek mythology is one of the two places you can go within Hades. Hades is kind of a more generic realm of the dead. And for certain groups, if you’ve been good, you go to the Fields of Elysium. That is, you know, in Gladiator, That’s what he says. You are in Elysium. And then the other place is Tartarus. That’s if you’ve been bad. And you don’t want to end up in Tartarus.

But in borrowing that concept into the New Testament, Hades kind of has more of a negative tone. So it’s kind of conceptually merging with the idea of Gehenna. But Tartarus is, I think it’s used in one of the letters of Peter, and that’s more directly referring to the lake of fire kind of bad part of Hades.

It’d be— I’m trying to imagine what Christianity today would look like if those 3 words, 4 words, were each given a different translation, or were, you know what I mean, were separated out as 4 distinct concepts. I think it would— that’s a, that’s a big deal difference.

Well, yeah, you can, you can look in Mormonism for their three degrees of glory, if you really wanted to tread—.

Sure, man.

But no, it’s, although it’s not quite the hierarchy that Mormonism presents, but yeah, I think it would be fascinating if those different concepts were allowed to stay different. But that’s kind of the pattern is that everything gets kind of lumped together. You have the good side and the bad side and you know, all of the bad entities from the Hebrew Bible get just consolidated in, in Satan, whereas all the good, all the supernatural mediator figures from the Hebrew Bible get consolidated into Jesus, right? And all of the different concepts of postmortem divine punishment get consolidated into hell, whereas the idea of postmortem good stuff gets consolidated into heaven. There’s only one concept And yeah, I think that’s an outgrowth of the fact that everybody’s presupposing it all has to be pointed in the same direction.

Right.

But yeah, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment. Somebody will have to make a movie one day about Christianity that did not presuppose univocality.

Yeah, that would be interesting.

It would be a mess.

It would be a mess. And I don’t think— and I think that, you know, to some extent these consolidations kind of have to happen, or at least, like, some—.

Yeah, for any kind of unity, for any kind of consistency, you have to converge on some sort of understanding.

There’s also the way the KJV talked about the word kashaph. I don’t know how to say that, but sorcerer, diviner, or as in the KJV, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, which—.

Oh yeah, Exodus 22:18, right?

Yeah, so it should be 17 in the Hebrew. Yeah, so mekhashifah is the word in Hebrew, but it’s based on— it’s a noun form based on the verbal root kashaph, to practice sorcery. Yeah, and this is witch. Like, a lot of people say, “Oh, King James was anti-witch, and so he either told them to write this in or made them change it to witch or something like that. And, um—.

I mean, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for King James, so obviously he had a witch thing.

Yeah, but it’s just not true because it’s in the Bishops’ Bible, it’s in the Geneva Bible, it’s in the Great Bible, it’s in the Matthew Bible, it’s in the Coverdale Bible, it’s in the Tyndale translation. Like, it is “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” every single place it occurs in English up to and including the King James Version. But yeah, in Hebrew, it actually doesn’t address the law to you in the second person. It just says, “mekhashifah lo techaye,” which would be, “A witch shall not live.” Okay. So the verb is actually third feminine singular.

But is witch the right— I guess the problem that I have with the word witch in this case is that it’s gendered.

Yeah, and it’s a feminine noun in the Hebrew. Oh, okay. Now, interestingly enough, the ancient Greek translation not only changed it to masculine but changed it to plural.

And they have pharmakos, which, uh, is based on the word, um, pharmakon or pharmakos, which is— could be magician, could be sorcerer, but fundamentally it refers to someone who mixes up potions.

Thou shalt not suffer a pharmacist to live. I get it.

Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. This is an anti-vaxxer. This is a COVID denier who prophesied thousands of years prior to the arrival of COVID-19 that this was all going to happen and that Fauci, because, you know, the original Greek could be rendered Fauci if you just gotta, ‘cause it starts with an F. You just gotta change, you gotta, you know, elide the, uh, the rho and the mu, and then you gotta, um, kind of take the, uh, the kappa and render it more of a ch. So anyway, uh, yeah, for, for some weird reason, the, the Greek decided to just fiddle with it and make it, uh, and, and, uh, pharmakos can refer to potions for good or potions for bad. So you see the usage of the word in reference to people who are using it to heal. But you more commonly see it as in reference to people who are using these potions for ill. And so the pharmakeia became kind of a bad word in early Christianity, which, you know, gives rise now to all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories that I have to see on TikTok day after day after day.

All right, well, that’s all the time we have for our Twisted Scripture for today. I mean, you know, KJV still has some of the best, some of the prettiest language of any of the translations.

Yeah, there are some renderings that you can’t get away from. You just gotta, just gotta lean into that King James English.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it was the time of Shakespeare. They say Shakespeare may have written some of it, but he probably didn’t.

Oh, gosh.

Come on. What is it, Psalms 46 or something? Oh, gosh. There’s a whole thing. Anyway. Look into it. Shakespeare, Psalms 46. Shakespeare. It’s all in there. 46 in, 46 in. All right. We’ll leave it at that. So we’ll move on to History’s Mysteries. So guide me in. Where— what are we doing? What are we talking about? Where are we here?

We’re talking about a weird thing that a lot of folks have observed in some of the early Jewish and Christian discussions about God and the use of the Greek word theos, because we know this word means God, and ostensibly early Jewish and Christian authors are all monotheists, and so there can only be one God. But we’ve got this weird thing where sometimes the word God might seem to be referring to somebody else.

But in some Greek texts, we have theos being used without the definite article in other instances where you would normally expect it. And a lot of folks who think that, that the Trinity is in the Bible are happy to imagine that this is still referring to the God of Israel. It’s just identifying Jesus as the God of Israel because obviously that’s what the Trinity is, baby. That’s— okay, that’s what the Bible is saying. But we’ve got a, we got a handful of very interesting commentary from people from before and after the Gospel of John, which is where this is most debated, okay, who actually directly address what they’re doing. And I want to start with Philo. Philo of Alexandria was born at the end of the 1st century BCE, died around 50-ish, 50, 60 CE, so was alive during the life of Jesus. And he wrote a lot of texts, way too much.

But, uh, he, he was Jewish, right?

Uh, he, yes, he was an early Jewish philosopher. So, um, he, he was incorporating a lot of Stoic and Middle Platonic philosophy into Judaism, kind of, um, it’s a little bit syncretistic, but basically trying to, to show that Judaism fits within a Greek philosophical worldview. But, uh, he’s— he talks a lot about the logos, and the— and, and this is translated word most of the time in English translations. The word of God, for instance, in Greek is logos. And, um, uh, and when he’s, uh, when he’s talking about the logos, he’s largely borrowing this framework from Greco-Roman philosophy, because starting with Plato but also including, uh, Stoicism they had this concept of the logos as God’s rationality, and it could be the rationality that was inside God’s head. So like you have an idea that’s inside your head, but then once you speak it, it is expressed and it is now outside of you and it is separate from you.

And so the logos can be both things.

But there’s a part where— When you say that it’s like rationality, then it makes sense to me that logos would be the root word of our logic.

Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, um, we have Philo in a text called On Dreams. Okay, like I said, he wrote about too many things, but he, he’s, he’s examining a lot of, uh, a lot of different ways that, that God is, is influencing dreams and stuff like that. But there’s one part where he’s talking about Genesis 31:13. And this is where God— well, it says that it’s the angel of the Lord appears to Jacob, and then in, in verse 13 says, I am the God of Bethel where you anointed the altar and all that kind of stuff. And Philo is quoting the Greek translation, which doesn’t say that. It says, I am the God, uh, that anointed you, uh, or that appeared to you in the place of God. Because Bethel means house of God. And so the Greek translators just thought, oh, this is a sentence, not a name. And so Philo’s like, huh, this is weird.

Let’s consider whether there are two gods. And, and now I’m quoting from On Dreams, Book 1, uh, section starting in Section 228. For we read, I am the god that appeared to thee not in my place but in the place of God. As though it were another’s. What are we to say then? He that is truly God is one, but those, those that are improperly so-called are more than one. Accordingly, the Holy Word in the present instance has indicated him who is truly God by means of the articles, saying, I am the God—definite article, the—while it omits the article when mentioning him who is improperly so-called. Saying, who appeared to thee in the place not of the God, but simply of God. Here it gives the title of God to his chief logos, his chief word, not from any superstitious nicety in applying names, but with one aim before him, to use words to express facts.

And so what, what Philo is basically saying is that you have one entity that is truly in essence God, and then you have other entities that can just be referred to as God without actually being God. And when the scriptures are referring to those entities as God, even though they’re not God, it omits the definite article.

And so they’re not the God, they’re not the God, they’re just God. That’s somehow a lower place in the—.

Yeah. And, and a way to think of it is, is to understand God here, theos, in the qualitative sense. Okay, sure. So it would be, it would be kind of like another word for God in English coming through different roots is deity. And you could say there’s the deity and then there’s deity. And so, so-and-so is not the deity, so-and-so is just deity. And so it kind of means divine. And Philo talks about this elsewhere. There’s a part where he’s talking about passage in Genesis where he’s wondering why God tells somebody to, um, uh, to come up to God, I think it is. And he says, why not come up to, to me, or something like that. And he says that, uh, it’s not proper to, to refer to, uh, this entity as, uh, as the God, because this is the second God.

God’s chief logos, God’s word. So Philo explicitly refers to the word of God as a second god. Okay. And so when this is being written less than a century prior to the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of John seems to be relying an awful lot on very similar philosophical frameworks, but then we get to this really interesting discussion in Justin Martyr. And Justin Martyr is Well, we should mention the part of the Gospel of John that—.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That we’re sort of talking about, which is John 1:1, right?

Well, John 1:1 is the main one, but there are a few places where you have theos being used without the definite article, where we might expect the definite article if it’s referring to the God of Israel. But yes, John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was pros ton theon,” which means with God or toward God or next to God. And then it says, “kai theos en ho logos,” “and theos was the Word. " And that’s traditionally translated, “and the Word was God,” which would identify the Word as the very God of Israel. But there’s no definite article there. And in this situation, the syntactical relationship indicates that the word theos is not being used to identify a specific god, but is used in the qualitative sense to mean deity or divine. And so the author could be appealing to something very close to what, what Philo is saying, that the logos—.

You’re saying that the author of the Gospel of John came after Philo? The Gospel was written after, so could have been aware of Philo’s writing?

I, I think almost certainly aware of Philo’s writing because there’s— because the, the logos theology that we find in John resonates quite a lot with the logos theology that we find in Philo.

Okay, so when the author of John excludes that definite article, it’s likely an intentional thing that’s informed by Philo’s ideas of how that definite article operates.

In this particular instance, we wouldn’t necessarily expect the definite article. So it’s, it’s not definitive there. Okay. But I, I think what the author is doing is it’s using the, the word God with this understanding that there can be the God and then there can be, uh, thing— the entities that are improperly so-called are, are people who carry the label without being God.

So, so you could say, and the Word was with God, and the Word was divine, or the Word was also deity in some way, but, but not conflate them as the same, right?

It’s not, it’s not equating them. And there’s another interesting occurrence in John 10 where a lot of people will point out that Jesus’s Jewish opponents understood that he was identifying as the very God of Israel when he says, “I and the Father are one,” and they take up rocks to stone him. And in verse 33, and, and Jesus is like, ah, for which of my good works are you stoning me? And they say, we’re not stoning you for your good works, we’re stoning you because you being human make yourself God. Now if you look in an English translation, that’s capital G God. It makes it sound like they’re saying you’re claiming to be the God of Israel, right? But I don’t think that’s what’s going on, because in the Greek there should be a definite article there. And there’s not. Okay. And so I think, and there are a lot of later manuscripts that add the definite article because they’re like, huh, why doesn’t it have a definite? It should have a definite article.

Put a definite article in there. But without the article, if we keep Philo’s statement in mind, the author of John could be representing the Jewish foes of Jesus as understanding Jesus to be claiming to be not necessarily the God of Israel, but at least divine. Right. Much like the logos. And I think there’s some parallelism going on here too, because the word anthropos, which means human, also does not have a definite article.

And so Jesus’s defense makes no sense if we understand this passage to be talking about the accusation that Jesus is claiming to be the very God of Israel. Right. And so there are a handful of instances in the Gospel of John where we have this use of theos without the definite article that in light of Philo’s statement probably indicates an intentional reference to the Logos as divine. Not as the very God of Israel. All right, interesting. And then you might say, well, that was so much later than Philo. John’s not doing that. But we find very similar statements or discussions in even later authors, as late as the 3rd century CE. But I want to stop first in Justin Martyr, who’s writing around 150 CE. AD, so right around the dead center of the 2nd century CE.

And Justin is actually talking to—this is a text called Dialogue with Trypho, and it’s this dialectic back and forth between Justin and a Jewish thinker, and Justin is just trying to prove Christianity true from the Jewish scriptures. But he says in this one section, I shall attempt to prove my assertion, namely that there exists and is mentioned in scripture another God and Lord under the Creator of all things, who is also called an angel. And we have multiple references to Jesus as the Logos, the angel, and another God, and a little bit down, he says, then if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three—and he’s talking about Genesis 18 where the three entities appear to Abraham—if I could not prove to you from the scriptures that one of these three is God and yet is termed an angel, because as stated above, he delivered the messages of God, the creator of all, to whomsoever God desires, and on and on and on.

So he’s talking about how there’s a being that is not God that is referred to as God. Yeah. Then he says, let us return to the scriptures and I shall try to convince you that he who is said to have appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses is called God. Now all these times Jesus has been referred to as God. Justin Martyr has omitted the definite article. Mm. And he says, he who is said to have appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses and is called God is distinct from God the Creator, distinct, that is, in number, but not in mind. And the word in Greek gnome, which is translated here mind, is like will, intent. It doesn’t mean substance or essence, it just means in intent or in will. So Justin Martyr is doing the same thing that Philo explains, using the word God without the definite article to refer to the Word of God, to the Logos, whom Justin understands to be Jesus.

And then I think one of the most illuminating references comes from Origen of Alexandria. So this is a writer, a theologian, and all, who’s in Alexandria in the early 3rd century CE and is talking about John 1:1. And he says, John has used the articles in one place and omitted them in another very precisely, and not as though he did not understand the precision of the Greek language. In the case of the word, he adds the article “the,” but in the case of the noun “God,” he inserts it in one place and omits it in another, for he adds the article when the noun “God” stands for the uncreated cause of the universe, but he omits it when the Word is referred to as God. And as the God and God differ in these places, so perhaps the Word and Word differ.

And he goes on to talk about, for like 3 pages, about what it means for God and the Word to be referred to as the God versus just God and the Word versus just word. So even as late as the third—this is like 220, 230 CE. This is almost 200 years after Philo is writing. We have multiple authors who are, who are either mimicking what Philo is talking about or are quite explicitly addressing what John is talking about as reflecting Philo’s idea that this is—there’s a distinction to be made here between ho theos, the god, and just theos, God.

I guess one of the questions that that Origen quote brings up for me is, was the author of the Gospel of John a good writer? Was he a careful and good writer? Because if so, then yeah, it stands to reason that these would be conscious choices that this writer is making. Yeah, if they are, you know, expert in the language, then it makes sense to say that these were conscious decisions.

Yeah, the author of the Gospel of John is generally treated as a competent writer. Certainly not the most flowery prose that has ever prosed, but is definitely not a clumsy or an uncareful writer. Now, in terms of editing, that’s another story, as we’ve talked about with Hugo Mendez. But, um, but in terms of the Greek, yeah, I think the author is considered competent. And, and I want to read one more portion from Origen. Oh, okay. He says, “The God, therefore, is the true God. The others are gods formed according to him as images of the prototype.” But again, the archetypal image of the many images is the Word with the God who was in the beginning. By being with the God, he always continues to be God without the definite article.

So, so very clearly, Origen is, is, has either noticed what Philo is doing and, and noticed that John is doing the same thing, or has just noticed this pattern in John independent of Philo and is arriving at a very similar conclusion. I happen to think he probably is aware of Philo and is saying, hey, that’s, that’s a framework for understanding what the author of the Gospel of John is doing. But Origen was also probably the quintessential proto-Trinitarian who thought that Jesus was God. So we— I think what, what’s happening is, is this is a discussion about this vestige of the way earlier authors are talking about the Word as distinct from God, and, and Origen is noticing it even though he’s already developing a far more sophisticated Trinitarian philosophy, even though I think he was a bit of a subordinationist and, and thought that the Word and Jesus was less than.

Even if there are some scholars who argue that he was no subordinationist and was one of the first true Trinitarians, but that remains to be seen in my opinion.

Well, and it points out that, you know, as we discuss the Trinity and whatever, and we’ve talked about the Trinity idea before, it was a later innovation. It was not like— it developed over a long time after all of this was written after all of the books of the New Testament were written.

Yeah. And even after Justin Martyr, because I think he says multiple times, “The Word is another god.” So yeah, you don’t have the, “No, no, it’s very God from very God,” quite yet.

Yeah. Interesting. There you go. I like it when we do a little bit of grammatical geek outery. I enjoy those. Those moments. I think that’s a lot of fun. I think so too. So, okay, I want to hear the DMV, the Dan McClellan translation of John 1:1.

How would you do it? So for an academic audience, I would say, “And the Word was deity.” But that would require translating theos as deity in the other places as well. And the Word was with the deity. And the Word was deity. I think that would be most precise, but deity is a, is a pretty cumbersome word for a lot of people. So for the general public, I would translate it divine. Okay, okay.

So, and the Word was with God, and the Word was divine. Yeah. Okay, interesting. Well, there you have it, friends. Uh, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week, every, uh, episode, you can go to our Patreon over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma, sign up there, give us a little bit of money. You get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get access to the after-party with bonus content every week, and you can make our hearts swell with joy, and that’s always nice. Uh, thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer, and we’ll talk to you all next time. Bye, everybody. Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.

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