In
harmony with Jesus' command to them, the early Christians eagerly spread the
message of the good news of Jehovah's Kingdom far and wide. They made
translations of the koine Greek Gospels into several languages. By about the
year 200, the earliest of these were found in Syriac, Coptic, and Latin.1 Coptic was the language spoken
by Christians in Egypt, in the
Sahidic dialect, until replaced by the Fayyumic and the Bohairic dialects in
Coptic church liturgy in the 11th century C.E. Coptic itself was
the last stage of the Egyptian language spoken since the time of the
Pharaohs. Under the influence of the widespread use of koine Greek, the
Coptic language came to be written, not in hieroglyphs or the cursive
Egyptian script called Demotic, but in Greek letters supplemented by seven
characters derived from hieroglyphs. Coptic is a Hamito-Semitic language,
meaning that it shares elements of both Hamitic (north African) languages and
Semitic languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Much was made of it
in the scholarly world when an apocryphal gospel written in Coptic, titled
the "Gospel of Thomas," was discovered in Egypt near Nag Hammadi in December
1945. Yet, after an initial welcome, the scholarly world has been strangely
silent about an earlier and more significant find, the Sahidic Coptic
translation of the canonical Gospel of John, which may date from about the
late 2nd century C.E.2 This manuscript was introduced
to the English-speaking world in 1911 through the work of [Reverend] George
William Horner. Today, it is difficult even to find copies of Horner's
translation of the Coptic canonical Gospel of John. It has been largely
relegated to dusty library shelves, whereas copies of the "Gospel of
Thomas" (in English with Coptic text) line the lighted shelves of
popular bookstores. In the book, The
Text of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1987), Kurt and Barbara Aland,
editors of critical Greek New Testament texts, state:
"The
Coptic New Testament is among the primary resources for the
history of the New Testament text. Important as the Latin and Syriac versions
may be, it is of far greater importance to know precisely how
the text developed in Egypt." (Page 200, emphasis added)
The Sahidic Coptic
text of the Gospel of John has been found to be in the Alexandrian text
tradition of the well-regarded Codex Vaticanus (B) (Vatican 1209), one of the
best of the early extant Greek New Testament manuscripts. Coptic John also
shows affinities to the Greek Papyrus Bodmer XIV (p75) of the late 2nd/3rd
century.3 Concerning the Alexandrian
text tradition, Dr. Bruce Metzger states that it "is usually considered
to be the best text and the most faithful in preserving the original."4 Therefore, it is
all the more strange that insights of the Sahidic
Coptic text of John 1:1 are largely ignored by popular Bible translators.
Might that be because the Sahidic Coptic Gospel of John translates John 1:1c
in a way that is unpopular in Christendom? The Sahidic text renders John 1:1c
as auw
neunoute pe pshaje, clearly meaning literally "and was a god the Word."**% Unlike koine Greek, Sahidic
Coptic has both the definite article, p, and the indefinite article, u. The Coptic text of John 1:1b identifies
the first mention of noute as pnoute, "the god," i.e., God. This corresponds
to the koine Greek text, wherein theos, "god," has the definite article ho- at John 1:1b, i.e., "the
Word was with [the] God." The koine Greek
text indicates the indefiniteness of the word theos in its second mention (John
1:1c), "god," by omitting the definite article before it, because
koine Greek had no indefinite article. But Coptic does have an indefinite
article, and the text employs the indefinite article at John 1:1c. This makes
it clear that in reading the original Greek text, the ancient Coptic
translators understood it to say specifically that "the Word was a god." The early Coptic
Christians had a good understanding of both Greek and their own language, and
their translation of John's koine Greek here is very precise and accurate.
Because they actually employed the indefinite article before the word
"god," noute, the Sahidic Coptic translation of John 1:1c is
more precise than the translation found in the Latin Vulgate, since Latin has
neither a definite nor an indefinite article. Ancient Coptic translations
made after the Sahidic, in the Bohairic dialect, also employ the indefinite article before the Coptic word
for "god." The Coptic word neunoute (ne-u-noute) is made up of three parts: ne, a verbal prefix denoting
imperfect (past) tense, i.e., "was [being],"; u, the Coptic indefinite article,
denoting "a,"; and noute, the Coptic word for "god." Grammarians
state that the word noute, "god," takes the definite article when
it refers to the One God, whereas without the definite article it refers to
other gods. But in Coptic John 1:1c the word noute is not simply anarthrous,
lacking any article at all. Here the indefinite article is specifically
employed. Thus, whereas some scholars impute ambiguity to the Greek of John
1:1c, this early Coptic translation can be rendered accurately as "the
Word was a god." This is the careful way those 2nd century Coptic
translators understood it. The Coptic expression for "was a god," ne-u-noute pe, is the same Coptic
construction as found at John 18:40, where it says of Barabbas that he ne-u-soone pe, "was a robber," accurately
rendering the Greek original, en de ho barabbas lestes, wherein the word for
"robber" lestes, is anarthrous: "a robber." No English
version renders this, "Barabbas was Robber." Likewise, John 1:1c
should not be rendered to say, "the Word was God," whether the text
is Greek or Coptic, but "the Word was a god." In Horner's 1911
English translation from the Coptic, he gives this translation: "In the
beginning was being the word, and the word was being with God, and a God was
the word." It may be noted
that the earliest Coptic translation was likely made before Trinitarianism
gained a foothold in the churches of the 4th century. That may be
one reason why the Coptic translators saw no need to violate the sense of
John's Greek by translating it "the Word was God." In a way, then,
the ancient Sahidic Coptic translation of John 1:1c was the New World Translation of that day,
faithfully and accurately rendering the Greek text. That very point may
give some indication as to why the Sahidic Coptic translation of John 1:1c is
largely kept under wraps in academic religious circles today. Most new
English translations continue to translate this verse to say "the Word
was God." But the Coptic text provides clear evidence — from very
ancient times — that the New World Translation is correct in rendering
John 1:1c as "the Word was a god."
↑ Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on
the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition, United Bible
Societies, 1994, page 5
Other References:
Egyptian Grammar, 3rd
edition, by Sir Alan Gardiner (Griffith Institute, 1957)
The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, (with Coptic text) by Marvin
Meyer (Harper Collins, 1992)
#You may
need to download the New Athena Unicode
font to your machine to properly view the Coptic text appearing on this website.
**The translation
of the Sahidic Coptic version of John 1:1c into English can be diagrammed as:
ⲁⲩⲱ
ⲛⲉⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ
ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ auw ne-u-noute pe pshaje
auw = "and" ne = verbal prefix denoting past tense, i.e., "was (being)" u = Coptic indefinite article, "a" noute = "god" pe = Coptic particle meaning "is" or "this one is" p = Coptic definite article, "the" shaje = "word"
Literally the Coptic says, "and -
was being- a god - is- the -Word." Or more smoothly in literal English,
"and the Word was a god."
%The
text of the Coptic Bohairic version also has the indefinite article before
the word for "god," at John 1:1c, i.e., "a god":
Zechariah 12:10 - Although this does not have the
word "God", it does appear on at least one trinitarian site as
proof that Jesus is called "God". See: The One Pierced
bravenet.com