Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was an attribute of God, and the word was God.
John 1.1 (my translation)
This isn’t a topic I’d normally write about, because it’s so basic: it seems like low-hanging fruit. But I was a little staggered today to be directed to a Youtube video where a biblical scholar, with a PhD, who ostensibly knows Greek, spends 45 minutes discussing theological reasons why the phrase θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (‘the word was God’) doesn’t have a definite article before the word ‘God’.
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| The opening of John in the codex Sinaiticus, fol. 247r. (Image source: Codex Sinaiticus website) |
It’s a sensationalised video, to be sure — the title has an emoji! But when you’re learning ancient Greek, this is covered in week 1. ‘God’ can’t have an article. Because it’s a complement.
Articles in ancient Greek
Ancient Greek had a definite article, ὁ ἡ τό (and other inflected forms), corresponding to English ‘the’. It started out as a demonstrative pronoun, and acquired its role as an article in the Archaic period, ca. 600 BCE. It has hung around to the present day. If an ancient Greek-speaker wanted to refer to a specific individual thing, or person, they normally put an article before it: ὁ ἄνθρωπος ‘the person’, ἡ ἀγορά ‘the agora’, τὸ δένδρον ‘the tree’, and of course ὁ θεός ‘the god’.
The article is common (but not used invariably) in some situations where English doesn’t use an article, particularly with names. It’s perfectly normal to refer to Sokrates as ὁ Σωκράτης. In the Bible it’s perfectly normal to refer to God as ὁ θεός. So you have to rely on context to tell whether ὁ θεός should be translated as ‘the god’ or ‘God’.
Strictly speaking it might be best to refer to the article not as ‘definite’, but as ‘definitive’, since it often plays a deictic role: Sokrates, that guy right there. Modern German has a loose parallel, in the use of the definite article before personal names: the difference between saying die Ulrike and just Ulrike is subtle, but the first one carries a reminder of which Ulrike we’re talking about.
| For details of when names do and don’t have articles, see Smyth 1916: 211–213 (§768–779). |
Ancient Greek didn’t have an indefinite article, corresponding to English ‘a, an, some’. (Modern Demotic Greek does, but it’s a much later arrival.) So when a noun appears in ancient Greek without an article — δένδρον instead of τὸ δένδρον — it will generally be because it’s indefinite: ‘a tree’. There are cases where the article can be optional, as with personal names.
There are also situations where it an article is invariably used, and situations where an article is invariably omitted. One of those situations is a sentence with the form ‘A is B’.
The confusion
C. J. Cornthwaite starts with the question of whether θεός is substantival (‘the word was God’) or adjectival (‘the word was divine’). That is technically a legitimate question — though I personally see no reason to prefer reading a noun as adjectival when it works perfectly well as a noun. In thinking about that, he spends a great deal of time questioning why it’s θεός instead of ὁ θεός, and what the significance of that is.
That tells me there’s a serious problem with how Greek is being taught. But just as importantly, because he’s a very popular para-academic, he’s going to be leading a lot of people astray. So it seems like it’d be wise to address the matter.
Here’s the bit where he states the options as he sees them:
So, the way I see it, there are three different ways to read this text based on Greek grammatical rules.
So. The first is just reading this as saying ‘the Word was God’. Basically like, we're talking about God, you know, ... the one true God. ...
The second way to read this would be to say that θεός here is actually functioning as a way to signify that the Word was ‘divine’ or ‘godlike in quality’. ...
And the third way that you could translate this is the way that the Jehovah's Witness Bible translated it, as ‘the Word was a god.’ So, this kind of sounds like you're saying it was, like, one of many, because it's indefinite.
In terms of understanding this problem, those are the three options. And all of them come from the difficulty of knowing why John left the article off here, and what that is supposed to mean.
Cornthwaite 2025, 6:03–7:25
and then he spends several minutes talking about how the Septuagint, an ancient Greek form of the Jewish scriptures, sometimes refer to God without an article, and why that might be. His discussion involves logos theology, construct chains in Hebrew syntax, and why translators ‘chose’ to omit an article in some situations.
What the discussion doesn’t involve is Greek syntax. The answer is so much more basic, and it has nothing to do with theology or stylistic choices.
The ancient Greek complement: an introduction
A sentence of the form ‘A is B’ has three elements: A, also called the ‘subject’; a copulative verb, like ‘is’ or ‘was’; and B, also called a ‘complement’.
It’ll always be obvious which bit is the verb. But A and B are the same part of speech: they’ll both be nouns, or names, or some other kind of substantive. Yet they have distinct syntactical roles. So how do you tell which is which?
In English, it’s done by word order. The sequence of the three elements is fixed: A, verb, B. (Unless you’re Yoda, in which case it’s A, B, verb.) You always know that the thing that appears first is the subject, and the thing that appears later is the complement.
But in ancient Greek, the three elements can be placed in any order. Word order doesn’t tell you which is A and which is B. So the way Greek tells you which is the subject and which is the complement is by using ... (drumroll) ... an article.
The rule is very simple and universal:
- The subject, A, must normally have an article.
- The complement, B, must normally not have an article.
As a result, the following all mean the same thing, just with slight shifts in emphasis:
ὁ Ὅμηρος ἦν ῥαψῳδός.
ῥαψῳδός ἦν ὁ Ὅμηρος.
ὁ Ὅμηρος ἦν ῥαψῳδός.
ὁ Ὅμηρος ῥαψῳδός ἦν.
ἦν ῥαψῳδός ὁ Ὅμηρος.Homer was a rhapsode.
And that’s all that’s going on in John 1.1 θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. λόγος has an article to show that it’s the subject; θεός doesn’t have an article, to show that it’s the complement.
There’s no deep theology going on there. Well, there is — this still doesn’t tell you whether to translate θεός as ‘God’ or ‘divine’ — but that question has nothing at all to do with the presence or absence of an article. Either way, θεός is still a complement, so it won’t have an article.
Don’t believe me? Fine: here’s a standard textbook, Reading Greek, 2nd edition, published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. Here’s a snippet from the introductory chapter, Section I.
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| §47 in Reading Greek, JACT 2001, page 37. |
Athenaze covers this too, but only by example: it doesn’t state it as an explicit general rule. So does Smyth’s Greek grammar (Smyth 1916: 214, §784–786), but because Smyth lists some unusual exceptions where both A and B have articles, that may give a false impression that the rule is somehow optional. Reading Greek is refreshing because it directly tells the beginner the thing that they need to know.
It boggles my mind that actual scholars could have any uncertainty over this. It makes me wonder what Greek textbook is being used in Religious Studies departments.
By the way, my translation at the start isn’t ideal: a first century reader would certainly understand John as using Stoic terminology, as I explained here a couple of years ago. It’s just that that would be a bit too unfamiliar to hit modern readers with right away. Someone living in the philosophical framework of the time would most naturally interpret John 1.1 as
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
In the beginning was the principle of intelligibility, and the principle of intelligibility was an attribute of God, and the principle of intelligibility was God.
John 1.1 (my preferred translation)
References
- Cornthwaite, C. J. 2025. ‘The Origins of John 1:1 will BLOW YOUR MIND! 🤯 - WARNING! Greek & Hebrew DEEP DIVE.’ ‘C. J. Cornthwaite’ channel, 3 April 2025. [Youtube]
- JACT 2001. Reading Greek: grammar and exercises, 2nd edition. Cambridge.
- Smyth, H. W. 1916. A Greek grammar for schools and colleges. New York.
