Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael The Disciple
Thanks for your input. I have been out of school for 49 years and dont remember much about the rules of language so please bear with me.
All the Interlinears I have seen end the sentence with "God was the word". Is this leading the average guy astray?
Also if the Greek was the original and the Aramaic and the Latin were copies of it why do both of them end the sentence the same way as in the Interlinears?
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The interlinear that you linked to is just putting the English words directly under the Greek words they correspond to. It is giving no guidance on how to understand the word order or to render it in English. See the attached image of
John 1.1 in
The NKJV Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. Note the superscript numbers in "4God 3was 1the 2Word."
The 1, 2, 3, and 4 are showing the order to read the words in English, that is, "the Word was God."
I can't speak at all to the Aramaic. As far as the Latin goes, all that can be said is that Jerome, the translator, is just giving the most literal word for word rendering of the Greek into Latin. Unfortunately, Latin does not have an article at all, so there is no Latin equivalent for the Greek "ho." Context alone in Latin determines if something is definite or indefinite. Jerome obviously knew Greek and could see that logos alone had the article ho, but since Latin lacks an article, he could not include one before "Verbum." In short, what is ambiguous in Latin is unambiguous in Greek.
I've also attached an image of a section from an Intro to Greek book that explains the grammatical rule about the article I have mentioned in this post.