Help With The Greek

[Costeon]

Originally Posted by Michael The Disciple

We have discussed this before but how about one more round? Is what I'm seeing a major breakthrough for Oneness doctrine or nothing?

John 1:1

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

In the Greek Interlinears the last 4 words are Theos en ho logos.

One speaking Greek would pronounce what as the last word of this sentence?

Bible Hub Interlinear:

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/john/1-1.htm

In John 1.1, a basic feature of Greek grammar shows exactly what the subject is and what the predicate nominative is. When two nouns in the nominative case (subjective case in English) appear in a sentence joined by a copulative verb, if only one of the nouns has the article "the" (ho), that is the subject. If both have an article, word order would reveal the subject. If neither have an article, context would have to be used to determine the subject. In John 1.1, logos has the article; theos does not. So, the subject is "the Word" (ho logos); the predicate nominative is "God" (theos). In English, this is translated as "The Word was God."

Why, though, would theos come before ho logos in the sentence? Since Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language (the endings of words change to indicate meaning), an author can vary the word order for emphasis or just variation in a way that languages like English cannot. English has lost most of its inflections and so depends on word order for meaning. We cannot, for example, write or say both "The man ate the bear " and "The bear ate the man" and basically mean the same thing. Word order shows what the subject is and what the object is, and so in my examples, the meaning is fundamentally different.

Greek word order is much more flexible, so if John wanted to emphasize something, say, that the Logos is God, he could, and did, put theos first. This doesn't make theos the subject. It's still the predicate nominative because it does not have the article, so in English we, again, translate it as the "Word was God," but to convey the emphasis, we might vary the intonation of the sentence and put the the emphasis on "God"--"And the Word was God."