Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
Last time we gathered I was explaining to you why I very much do not prefer the English Standard Version of the Bible. To briefly recap: the English prose is unnecessarily clunky because it is hindered by a misguided translation philosophy that doesn’t fully get the source text into the target language, and because it began as a revision of the RSV it retains some (to me) unacceptable mistranslations from its source text.
Now I’d like to call your attention to a mystifying bit of translation. It is mystifying because this is not an instance of some artifact from the RSV inadvertently making it into the final ESV. Indeed, it is one of the most talked about, hotly debated, and celebrated verses in the New Testament: John 1:18.
“No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” (NIV84)
It is that second clause that remains a matter of intense scholarly interest: “God the One and Only.” This is the NIV’s attempt at translating two Greek words, both of which, as it happens, are hotly debated: monogenēs theos.
For ease, let me just start with the second word: theos. It means “God.” However, you might notice that most translations have “Son” instead of “God.” That is because the majority of Greek manuscripts read monogenēs huios: “Only Son,” not “Only God.” But counting manuscripts is no way to figure out what was on the original page written by John—the same copyist error could be multiplied a million times and it would still be an error. The fact is that some of the earliest and most reliable manuscripts have theos instead of huios. There is a textual variant here, a significant one.
Scholars have to ask themselves: which of these is the error? theos (God) or huios (Son)? They have all sorts of ways of reasoning through this, and one of them is to ask: which is the “harder” reading? That is, which one is more difficult to explain? Why would a scribe mistakenly write theos if the text he is copying reads huios? And vice versa? And the best explanation here, in my view, is that the original was theos and the scribe wrote huios because of… John 3:16! There, Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his monogenēs huios [“one and only Son” or “only begotten Son”] that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”
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