The distinguished grammarian and Coptic scholar John Martin Plumley, former professor of Egyptology at Cambridge University and author of Introductory Coptic Grammar, (London: Home & Van Thal, 1948), had this to say about the significance of the Sahidic Coptic version:
"While there are limitations to the use which can be made of the Coptic version as an aid to the recovery of the original Greek text of the New Testament . . . it should also be recognized that by and large the Coptic version can be a valuable aid to the scholar engaged in textual criticism, and because in certain passages it preserves very ancient traditions of interpretation, it ought to be of considerable interest to the scholar working on the history and development of Christian doctrine." -- Quoted in The Early Versions of the New Testament, by Dr. Bruce M. Metzger
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Can you give us the rendering of the Coptic John for the folowing verses? Is it "a god" or "God"?
1v6
1v12
1v13
1v18
Regards,
John 1:6: "God" (p.noute)
John 1:12: "God" (p.noute)
John 1:13: "God" (p.noute)
John 1:18: "God: (p.noute)
In each verse above the Greek word theos (god) is anarthrous, but is the object of a preposition or a verb (i.e., either genitive or accusative case), so the Coptic translators saw the word "theos" in those verses as definite by context.
Hello Memra.
Excellent blog.
I have a question.
I remember reading through the forum on Coptic John 1:1 and somewhere it mentioned that the Boharic dialect version also was literally "...a god..." in the text, but the Cptic Church version just went with the standard Trinitarian rendering "...was God..." etc.
Is that true?
And can you post some information with references on that please.
Have great day.
P.S.
Have a look at my Blog. See what you think.
I am a Jehovahs Witness.
Haven't published much yet, but I got a lot info to come.
Heres the link:
http://matt13weedhacker.blogspot.com
P.S.AGAIN
Hey sorry to bug you.
But if you have any info on other dialects other than Boharic and Sihadic that would be great.
Specifically on John 1:1c, of course.
Thanks.
Matt13, I have just seen your comments.
Thanks for the link to your blog. The depth of information on it is fantastic. Your blog is very useful and well-researched.
To clarify about John 1:1 and the modern Coptic Church: Both the Sahidic Coptic version (2nd/3rd century) and the Bohairic Coptic version (5th century) say that "the Word was a god" at John 1:1c, using the Sahdic and Bohairic indefinite article before the Coptic word for God.
However, in published works in English by the Coptic Church, the church does not quote from their own Coptic translations. Rather, they use the English King James Version to quote John 1:1.
Since Athanasius (4th century), the Coptic Church has become Trinitarian, and the King James Version is more suitable to their adopted Trinitarian beliefs than is their own Coptic Bible.
It is a shame that the Coptic Church does not use its own Bible for John 1:1, but now their Bible does not fit their adopted theology.
Hello Memra.
I have a question.
The Coptic version is an old and significant witness to NT readings.
I was wondering what it says at 1st Thessalonians 4:13 through to verse 16 about Jesus having the voice of an archangel. And Hebrews chapters 1 & 2. I was wondering how these are rendered in the Coptic?
Could you do a blog post on the subject?
Or if you just want to leave a reply here that would be fine.
Also Isa 9:6 and Malachi 3:1 and Psalm 8:3-6 in the OT version of the Coptic would be very helpful. I particuarly interested to see wether it follows the LXX in Isa 9:6 "Angel of Grand Counsel".
And if there are variants between the dialects of Coptic aswell in these verses.
Looking forward to your reply.
Matt13weedhacker.
You can email me if you like at:
matt13weedhacker@gmail.com
Hello Memra.
Sorry to be a pain.
But if you can find what the OT & NT Coptic versions say on these scriptures:
Gen 6:1-5; 16:7-13; 18:1-19:? (Angels at Sodom) 22:24-30; (Jacob wrestling with Angel) 48:15,16; (Redeeming Angel) Exo 3:1-6,14; 13:21; 14:19; 23:20-23; (Angel name in him) 33:1-3,14,15; Deuteronomy 4:37; Joshua 5:14,15; Judges 2:1; Chap 13; 1st Kings 22:19-22; 2nd Chronicles 18:18-21; Job 1&2 (Satan & Sons of God accounts) Psalm 103:19; 148:1,2; Isaiah 63:9-14; Ezekial 34:23,24; 37:25; Daniel 10:13, 20,21; 12:1; Zechariah 3:1-3;
Matthew 25:31; Mark 8:38; Luke 2:9-15; John 5:25,28,29; 8:26; 12:49; Acts 7:30,35,38,53; 1st Cor 10:1-4; Galations 3:19; 4:14; Heb 2:2; Jude 1:9; Revelation 1:1,5-7; 12:1-17; 19:13-16;
I know this is asking alot from you and your time.
Anything would be helpful and I would be grateful for what you do.
May Jehovah bless you in all you do.
Hello!,
May I ask where is this great facsimile of this Coptic Text!!? Where is the book,( or fragment) or what ever it is? Please help! I want to look closer at it. Where is it and Why is it not available for all to see?? ---- easily??? I searched, I see a study of Coptic is available and very much more. But to get us going- please post a large large picture some where .... I see small little images of this first of John Coptic, but I want to see very, very, very, up close and personal!! To see with my own two eyes-- Thank you very much! Please help! Please make this manuscript available or fragment picture available, for all to see if it is possible or help me find it. (Shall I start planning a trip?) Thank you very much, thank you before hand! Trish
Trish,
For background information on the Sahidic Coptic text, see:
http://sahidica.warpco.com/SahidicaIntro.htm
For the Sahidic Coptic text of the Gospel of John and the only English translation commercially available, see:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-coptic-version-of-the-new-testament-in-the-southern-dialect-volume-iii/6318420?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/2
Trish,
The last link should be:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-coptic-version-of-the-new-testament-in-the-southern-dialect-volume-iii/6318420?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/
center/2
Hi Memra.
I have a question on the Coptic text of Revelation 3:2
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary:
"...before God-Greek, "in the sight of God." The three oldest manuscripts, Vulgate, Syriac, and Coptic, read, "before (in the sight of) MY God..."
http://bible.cc/revelation/3-2.htm
But on my E-SWORD software it gives:
(CNT-ND-(eng)) Be thou then watchful, and confirm (the) remainder; otherwise thou wilt die: because I found not thy works fulfilled with my God.
(CNT-SD-(eng)) Become watchful, and confirm the rest also, these which are about to die: for I found not thy works fulfilled before God.
The Northern Dialect translation is from Henry Frowde
The Southern Dialect translation is from George William Horner.
Am I correct (or incorrect) in suspecting Horner has made bias reading here instead of what the literal Southern Coptic actually says?
Can you help?
There is a problem with the polytheism of the Watchtower. The Watchtower proclaims the existence of two gods, one with a big "G" and the other with a small "g". This is in direct contradiction with the Bible, which teaches strict monotheism (the belief in the existence of only ONE God). The Bible clearly teaches that there is explicitly only ONE God in existence. There are no other big "G" Gods or small "g" gods. Both Jews and Christians strictly advocate that there is only ONE being who is God by nature. All else are false Gods (or gods).
The Watchtower's own New World Translation clearly teaches that there is only ONE God:
ISAIAH 43:10 "YOU are my witnesses," is the utterance of Jehovah, "even
my servant whom I have chosen, in order that YOU may know and have faith in me, and that YOU may understand that I am the same One. Before me there was no God formed, and after me there continued to be none."
ISAIAH 44:6 This is what Jehovah has said, the King of Israel and the Repurchaser of him, Jehovah of armies, "I am the first and I am the last, and besides me, there is no God."
ISAIAH 45:5 I am Jehovah, and there is no one else. With the exception of me there is no God.
The Bible also teaches there is nothing in all of existence that even remotely shares His nature (or essence, or divinity).
The NWT supports this too:
1 CHRONICLES 17:20 O Jehovah, there is none like you, and there is no God except you in connection with all that we have heard with our ears.
ISAIAH 46:9 Remember the first things of long ago, that I am the Divine One, and there is no other God, nor anyone like me...
JEREMIAH 10:6 In no way is there anyone like you, O Jehovah.
With clear, strong words, you cannot mistake the message from each verse. There is nothing (whether person or thing) who is like Jehovah; who shares in His divine nature, or has a divine nature even remotely close to His. The John 1:1 renderings:
...and the Word was a god.
...and a god was the Word.
...and the Word was divine.
...and the Word was god-like.
are all in error by virtue of being contrary to biblical teaching. It has been demonstrated above that the Bible clearly teaches:
[1] there is only one being with the nature of God
[2] there are no other beings who share, or come close to sharing, that nature.
If you know of a being that does, then you know more than God; for as we have seen in the above texts, even God Himself knows of no other god or of any other being that is like Him.
The Word cannot be a god, for that flies in the face of biblical monotheism.
The Word cannot be god-like, divine, or godly, for that too flies in the face of biblical monotheism.
If John 1:1 is not a statement of quality, or a statement of entity, then what is it? WHAT is the Word? That is, of what essence is the Word? If he is the stuff of God then "the Word was God." If he is not of the same stuff as God, then what is he because he cannot be "a god", etc. What is John (or in this case, the Coptics) trying to tell us about the Word?
The Watchtower makes the Word out to be a god, divine, or god-like; making the Word a minor deity next to Jehovah. So there are two being in existence that have the stuff of godhood, Jehovah and the Word (Michael the archangel). This is in direct violation of biblical monotheism. Jehovah's Witnesses then are polytheists which puts them far outside the realm of biblical Christianity, and along side the Hindus and Mormons. For decades the Watchtower has clung to their translation of John 1:1. And they cling tightly to the Coptic translation to support their claim that Jesus is a god (another God besides Jehovah God). They must be consistent then when accepting this translation, and they whole heartily do. For the translation they cling to clearly states that there is another god besides Jehovah, which logically means Jehovah's Witnesses are inescapably polytheists.
Thanks for mailing a lot of twisted crock all decent and thorough Bible readers will be able to see through the smoke and mirrors in this previous blog,,take care.
Thanks for mailing a lot of twisted crock all decent and thorough Bible readers will be able to see through the smoke and mirrors in this previous blog,,take care.
Carl S above fails to take into account that Biblical monotheism is monolatrism, the consistent worship of only one divine person in the divine/supernatural realm inhabited by divine/supernatural persons. The one divine person who receives full devotion and worship is the almighty creator.
This is explained further at my blog:
http://jimspace3000.blogspot.com/2011/01/biblical-monotheism-is-monolatrism.html
Thus, having an Almighty God in the divine court is obviously not polytheism, but is the arrangement of monolatrism.
Interested persons can also read on my blog how Trinitarianism is an anathematic misrepresentation of Biblical monotheism.
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ΑΥШ ΝЄΥΝΟΥΤЄ ΠЄ ΠϢΑϪЄ [auō neounoute pe pšaʤe]
The Sahidic Coptic translation, which dates back to the 3rd century, is particularly interesting because it includes both definite and indefinite articles. In John 1:1, the Sahidic Coptic text uses the term "ⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ" (noute, "god"), which indeed contains an indefinite article. Meanwhile, in John 1:18, it uses the definite article for the Son, "ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ" (pnoute, "the God").
Jehovah's Witnesses often refer to this translation, which they claim renders the text as "and the Word was a god." The Sahidic Coptic translation, having both definite and indefinite articles, is in this respect closer to modern languages (such as English) than to Greek. The Watchtower Society asserts that the Sahidic Coptic translation supports their interpretation. Firstly, even if this were true, the Coptic translation is obviously interpretative at this point because "divine" in Greek would not be "theos ēn" but "theios ēn". Furthermore, the theological background of this translation is unclear, considering that Coptic Christians were never Arians, unlike, for example, the Visigoths or the Vandals.
Coptic translators regularly used the definite article when referring to the biblical "God," but also applied the indefinite article when the context required it. Based on the analysis of tenses and sentence structures, the Coptic text seems to use the word "god" in a qualitative sense, meaning "divine" or "having a divine nature." Thus, the use of indefinite articles in Coptic translations was complex and often determined by the context.
Coptic language experts like Bentley Layton and Ariel Shisha-Halevy point out that the Coptic indefinite article is not identical to the English indefinite article. According to Layton, the Coptic structure can also be translated in a qualitative sense, such as "the Word was divine" or "of divine nature." Shisha-Halevy holds a similar view, noting that in the Coptic language, such structures tend to refer to the nature of the subject rather than to an indefinite entity. Wallace suggests that in Sahidic Coptic, the indefinite article can be used to denote class membership or properties, similar to what is called "qualitative usage" in Greek grammar.
In Sahidic Coptic, the indefinite article is often used with abstract nouns and material nouns, which is not common in modern languages. Analyses show that Sahidic Coptic translators often used articles in places where the Greek text did not have them. This indicates that the Sahidic Coptic translation simply followed its grammatical rules and does not necessarily reflect the exact meaning of the Greek text. Examples of qualitative usage in Coptic:
John 1:33: "This is the one who will baptize with [a] Holy Spirit and [a] fire" (Horner's translation).
John 3:6: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is [a] spirit."
In John 1:18b, the Greek "theos" without an article is translated into Coptic with a definite article: "God, the only Son" (Horner's translation). This consistency suggests that the Coptic translator likely attributed divine qualities to the Word in John 1:1, rather than treating it as an indefinite noun ("a god"). Therefore, the translator emphasized the divine quality here, not a separate (lesser) god. This contradicts the idea that John 1:1 should be translated as "a god."
In the October 2011 issue of the Journal of Theological Studies, Brian J. Wright and Tim Ricchuiti concluded that the indefinite article in the Coptic translation of John 1:1 has a qualitative meaning. They identified many such occurrences in the Coptic New Testament for qualitative nouns, including 1 John 1:5 and 1 John 4:8. Additionally, the indefinite article is used to refer to God in Numbers 4:31 and Malachi 2:10.
This article establishes that Sahidic Coptic translators did not always consistently translate the Greek "theos" without an article. While they mostly used the definite article, in some cases, "theos" appears with an indefinite article, such as in John 1:1, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Ephesians 4:6, and 2 Thessalonians 2:4. The authors apply their findings to John 1:1c, concluding that in the translation "and the Word was God," the "theos" has a qualitative interpretation. According to this approach, the Word possesses the same attributes as the biblical God. With this approach, the authors argue that the Sahidic Coptic translators did not intend to present a pagan or usurping god, but to emphasize the divine attributes of the Word. In summary, the study suggests that in the Sahidic Coptic New Testament, the use of the indefinite article in translating the Greek "theos" without an article primarily served a qualitative, descriptive distinction aimed at highlighting the divine attributes of the Word in John 1:1c.
Moreover, scholars like Jason BeDuhn and J. Warren Wells also agree that the Sahidic Coptic translation does not unequivocally support the "a god" interpretation. Even BeDuhn, who often defends the New World Translation, pointed out that it can be interpreted qualitatively, meaning that the Word was of divine nature, not a separate, lesser god, as the Watchtower Society's theology claims about the Son.
In conclusion, the solution of the Sahidic Coptic translation does not support either the New World Translation's rendering or the Watchtower Society's Christology.
As usual Nincsnevem people like him have no truth. Notice what this Biblical Scholar explains. 👇🏾
https://youtu.be/3lLsIEqv2nU?si=f1rYuOe5BEr2lse_
FYI: https://www.academia.edu/176411873
Why the Sahidic Coptic of John 1:1c Does Not Establish “The Word Was a God”: A Philological Response to Solomon Landers
Mr. Landers, the central factual observation on which your argument rests is not in dispute: the Sahidic Coptic of John 1:1c contains an indefinite article before ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, “god/God.” The text reads, in the familiar form, ⲁⲩⲱ ⲛⲉⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ, and the sequence ⲛⲉ-ⲟⲩ-ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, with regular contraction, contains an indefinite article. Any serious discussion should concede that immediately. The problem with your essay is therefore not that you have misidentified the article. The problem is that you repeatedly move from a correct morphological observation to a semantic conclusion that standard Coptic grammar expressly does not permit you to derive mechanically. You treat “formally indefinite” as though it necessarily meant “indefinite class-member in English,” and then treat the English phrase “a god” as though it necessarily denoted a second, lesser deity. Those are three separate analytical steps, and none follows automatically from the preceding one.
Before addressing that central grammatical issue, several historical claims in your introductory material need correction because they are used rhetorically to create an impression of an exceptionally early, suppressed, anti-Trinitarian witness. Coptic is indeed the latest historical stage of the Egyptian language, but your description of it as “Hamito-Semitic” in the sense of sharing components of “Hamitic” and Semitic languages reflects an obsolete taxonomy. Modern historical linguistics classifies Egyptian as an autonomous branch of Afroasiatic; the old binary notion of a “Hamitic” versus “Semitic” family has been abandoned. Likewise, the supplemental Coptic letters are immediately derived from Egyptian Demotic signs, not directly from hieroglyphic characters, although Demotic itself ultimately belongs to the Egyptian script tradition.
Your chronology is also too confident. A second-century beginning for Sahidic biblical translation has sometimes been proposed, especially in older scholarship, but it is not a datum that can simply be asserted as though we possessed a second-century Sahidic manuscript of John. Modern surveys are considerably more cautious. The Coptic Encyclopedia describes the Sahidic Scriptures as apparently originating in the third century and being completed by the fourth, while a recent linguistic reference places the formative biblical translations in the late third and early fourth centuries. Consequently, your recurring language about “those second-century Coptic translators” goes beyond what the evidence establishes. A translation tradition may preserve early material without allowing us to assign John 1:1c to a particular group of Christians in a particular decade.
Your account of the dialectal history is similarly compressed. Sahidic was not simply “eclipsed by Bohairic by the sixth century.” It remained the principal pan-Egyptian literary dialect for centuries. Bohairic began substantially displacing it only in the eighth and ninth centuries, and by approximately the eleventh century became the predominant ecclesiastical dialect. This matters because the history of the Coptic biblical traditions is more complicated than a sequence of discrete, independent theological votes: “Sahidic says X; Bohairic independently says X; therefore two early churches interpreted Greek X in the same theological fashion.” Modern study of the Coptic Gospel of John instead investigates translation technique, manuscript transmission, revision, and relationships among multiple dialectal versions. Christian Askeland’s monograph is devoted precisely to those questions, and his work distinguishes early and classical Bohairic and examines their relationship to Sahidic rather than treating each surviving dialect as an isolated referendum on Greek exegesis.
Nor can the assertion that Sahidic John has been “kept under wraps in academic religious circles” survive contact with the scholarly record. Whatever may have been true about the availability of Horner’s volumes in popular bookstores in 2006, bookstore shelf space is not evidence of scholarly suppression. Brian J. Wright and Tim Ricchuiti published an article devoted specifically to Sahidic ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ and John 1:1c in The Journal of Theological Studies in 2011. Askeland published an entire monograph on the Coptic translations of John in 2012. Most decisively, Hans Förster, Kerstin Sänger-Böhm, and Matthias Schulz published a new critical edition of the Sahidic Gospel of John in 2021 on the basis of 172 preserved witnesses, many fragmentary. It is openly available from a major academic publisher. To describe this material as hidden because English-language bookstores sell more copies of the Gospel of Thomas is not a scholarly argument. The Gospel of Thomas is a popular object because it is a noncanonical text recovered in a spectacular manuscript discovery; the canonical Gospel of John is already available in innumerable languages, while its Sahidic textual history is naturally the concern of Coptologists and textual critics rather than the general bookstore market.
The claim that Sahidic is broadly Alexandrian in textual character is much more defensible, but you draw an inference from it that does not follow. Textual affiliation concerns which Greek readings a version is likely to reflect. It does not tell us how a Coptic nominal predicate must be translated into English. A version can reproduce an excellent Greek Vorlage and still employ target-language structures whose semantic categories do not correspond one-to-one to Greek or English. Indeed, that is precisely why specialists distinguish textual criticism from translation technique. The value of Sahidic as a witness to an early Greek text does not transform every Coptic article into a transparent commentary on Greek ontology.
The first major grammatical error occurs when you say that Greek itself “indicates the indefiniteness” of θεός in John 1:1c by omitting the article. That is not how the Greek article works. Koine Greek has no indefinite article, but it does not follow that every noun lacking the definite article is therefore grammatically indefinite in the English sense. Anarthrous nouns can be indefinite, qualitative, definite from context, generic, or otherwise determined by syntax and discourse. This is especially important with predicate nominatives. Philip Harner’s classic study was written precisely because preverbal anarthrous predicate nouns such as θεὸς in John 1:1c often have a prominent qualitative force rather than simply identifying the subject as one specimen of a class. Your argument therefore begins by assigning Greek a binary article semantics that Greek does not possess.
The difference between John 1:1c and your favored comparison, John 18:40, is especially instructive. John 1:1c has θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, with the anarthrous predicate θεός before the copula. John 18:40 has ἦν δὲ ὁ Βαραββᾶς λῃστής, with λῃστής in a different word-order configuration and in a context whose lexical semantics plainly classify Barabbas by occupation or character: he was a robber. The fact that idiomatic English naturally supplies “a” before robber does not establish that every anarthrous common-noun predicate in every semantic environment must be rendered by English a. Harner’s entire analysis of preverbal predicate nouns arose precisely because predicate position and semantic function matter.
The same problem reappears, even more decisively, in your treatment of Coptic. You repeatedly reason as follows: ⲟⲩ- is called an indefinite article; ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is a count noun rather than an abstract or material noun; therefore ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ must denote “a god,” one member of a class of gods. Bentley Layton’s reference grammar directly contradicts that conclusion, and it does so with the exact lexeme under dispute.
Layton distinguishes two semantic functions of nominal predicates: denotation and description. A denotative predicate names the subject as an instance of a class; a descriptive predicate characterizes the subject by the quality expressed through the noun. He then states expressly that a gendered common-noun predicate can be ambiguous between these two functions and uses ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ as his example. His two interpretations are “He is a god” and “He is divine.” He immediately explains that descriptive predicates can themselves be indefinite article phrases and that gendered common nouns potentially possess both denotative and descriptive functions.
That single passage overturns the grammatical heart of your essay. It is not an analogy involving “water,” “gold,” “truth,” or another lexical category you can dismiss as irrelevant to the count noun ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. Layton uses ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ itself. Your argument that “god is not an abstract noun or a substance” therefore misses the point. The question is not whether ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is a count noun in its denotative use. Of course it can be. The question is whether a gendered common noun can function descriptively in a nominal predicate while retaining ⲟⲩ-. Layton says explicitly that it can, and he chooses “god/divine” to illustrate the phenomenon.
This is not an isolated remark. Earlier in the same grammar Layton explains the general semantic machinery. An entity term can either denote a specimen belonging to a lexical class or describe a specimen as having the quality of that lexical class. He gives ordinary gendered common nouns such as “person/human,” “light/luminous,” and “king/royal” as examples of precisely this denotation-description alternation. Thus an overt indefinite determiner in Coptic is a fact of morphosyntax; it does not guarantee that idiomatic English must reproduce the determiner with “a/an” if the noun phrase is functioning descriptively.
Layton makes the point even more transparently in his introductory textbook. Under his discussion of nouns used as “adjectival” predicates, he takes ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, “god,” and explicitly gives the very same forms with both interpretations. ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ can mean “he is divine” or “he is a god”; ⲟⲩⲣⲱⲙⲉ ⲡⲉ can mean “he is human” or “he is a person”; the corresponding light noun can mean either “luminous” or “a light.” That is exactly the distinction your argument declares unavailable for an ordinary count noun.
There is an additional irony. In the first lesson of the same textbook Layton actually prints John 1:1c. At the morpheme-gloss level he writes, effectively, “past tense marker–a-god is the-Word,” but his sentence-level English is “And the Word was God.” That is not an inconsistency in Layton. It is a demonstration of the distinction your essay fails to maintain. An interlinear gloss identifies morphological components; a translation represents the semantic contribution of the whole construction in the target language. “A-god” is an appropriate gloss for the morphologically indefinite bound group. It does not establish that “a god” is the only admissible English sentence translation.
Your handling of Horner commits the same error. Horner’s bracketed “[a] God” records the presence of a Coptic indefinite element while signaling that English need not reproduce it literally. You object that he did not bracket a in “Barabbas was a robber.” But that is not evidence of inconsistency unless one first proves the proposition at issue—that every morphologically indefinite nominal predicate must have precisely the same semantic function. Since Coptic grammar expressly distinguishes denotative predicates from descriptive predicates, Horner’s differing English treatment may simply reflect differing predicate semantics. “Barabbas was a robber” is a transparent instance of class-membership predication. “The Word was ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ” occurs in a monotheistic theological prologue and predicates ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ of an already identified personal subject. The surface determiner does not erase the lexical and discourse difference.
J. Martin Plumley furnishes an independent older illustration of the same phenomenon. In his treatment of predicate-first nominal sentences, he gives ⲟⲩⲛⲟϭ ⲡⲉ and translates it idiomatically “He is great,” while explaining the literal structure as approximately “a great one, he is.” He then describes the expanded Predicate–Particle–Subject construction. Thus even in an older grammar there is no valid rule of the form “Coptic ⲟⲩ- must become English “a/an” whenever its noun is formally countable.”
Your morpheme-by-morpheme diagram of John 1:1c also gives an excessively English-looking account of Coptic syntax. It is fair to identify ⲛⲉ- as providing past-time reference, ⲟⲩ- as the indefinite article, ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ as “god,” ⲡⲉ as the nominal nexus element, and ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ as “the Word.” But ⲛⲉ- is more precisely the preterite converter of a nominal sentence, not a finite English verb “was being,” and ⲡⲉ cannot simply be inserted into an English interlinear as another independent “is.” Layton’s Pattern 6 analyzes the structure as Predicate + ⲡⲉ + explicit subject and explicitly allows preterite conversion. His paradigmatic example is ⲟⲩⲙⲉ ⲡⲉ ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, “God is true,” literally something like “true is-he, God.” Coptic nominal syntax therefore cannot be translated by substituting an English word for each morpheme and then treating the resulting sequence as an English sentence.
Polotsky supplies another reason why one should not treat the article as a transparent exegetical annotation supplied by the translator. In his analysis of the binary nominal sentence, he observes that the otherwise important category of the absolute noun with zero article appears to be excluded from that construction and that the nominal lexeme receives access to predicate position through grammatical mediation by either the definite or indefinite article. This means that one cannot simply imagine three freely interchangeable forms—definite, indefinite, and zero—and conclude that the translator consciously chose ⲟⲩ- in order to tell his readers, “John means one god among several.” The article is part of Coptic syntax. Its presence is real, but the inference from its presence to a particular ontology is not.
This also exposes the weakness in your statement that ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ takes the definite article when it refers to the one biblical God and otherwise refers to other gods. That may function as a useful beginner’s generalization for ordinary referential uses, but it is not an exceptionless rule. The Sahidic biblical corpus itself uses ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ predicatively of the one God of Israel. Deuteronomy 4:31 calls the Lord ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲛϣⲁⲛϩⲧⲏϥ, a merciful God; Deuteronomy 6:15 uses an indefinite divine predicate in describing the Lord as jealous; Deuteronomy 32:4 has ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲙⲡⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ, a faithful God; Joshua 24:19 characterizes him as a holy God; Nahum 1:2 again predicates the indefinite ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ of the Lord; and Baruch 3:2 addresses the biblical God with the same indefinite morphology. oⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ
These texts do not prove that John 1:1c must be qualitative. They prove something more limited but fatal to your rule: indefinite morphology attached to ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ does not encode “not the true God” or “a secondary god.” The same morphology can participate in characterization of the unique biblical God. The theological value must therefore come from the complete predicate and its discourse context, not from the article alone.
Your appeal to Lambdin needs the same qualification. Lambdin’s statement that Coptic article usage “corresponds closely” to English is a pedagogical generalization, not a theorem of semantic identity. He immediately qualifies the correspondence with categories in which Coptic and English article usage diverge. It is perfectly legitimate for you to point out that his examples involving substances and abstractions do not by themselves prove that ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is qualitative. But that rejoinder does not rescue your conclusion, because Layton supplies the missing predicate-specific evidence with ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ itself. Lambdin demonstrates that “a god” is a grammatically available denotative interpretation. Layton demonstrates that it is not the only interpretation.
The comparison with Barabbas therefore proves much less than you suppose. ⲛⲉⲩⲥⲟⲟⲛⲉ ⲡⲉ can naturally be rendered “he was a robber,” because the predicate denotes Barabbas as belonging to the class designated by “robber.” But Coptic grammar nowhere states that two predicates sharing a formal construction must share the same denotational profile. Layton says the opposite: nominal predicates can denote or describe, and the interpretation of gendered common nouns is context-sensitive. To argue from “robber” to “god” as though lexical semantics were irrelevant is equivalent to reasoning in English that because “John is a doctor” uses an indefinite count noun, every sentence with the same copular structure must be classifying rather than qualitative. Grammar provides a construction; lexical semantics and discourse determine what the construction is doing in a particular sentence.
Your Greek comparison makes the analogy weaker still. Barabbas is described by a post-copular class noun; John 1:1c deliberately places θεός before ἦν. Harner’s analysis argues that this preverbal anarthrous arrangement characteristically foregrounds quality or nature. Thus the two verses are neither semantically equivalent in Coptic nor syntactically equivalent in Greek. The conclusion “therefore John 1:1c should likewise be translated ‘a god’” is not a grammatical demonstration; it is an analogy that presupposes the semantic identity it is supposed to prove.
The contrast between ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in John 1:1b and ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in 1:1c is real, but here again you interpret the contrast incorrectly. In 1:1b, ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is a referring expression: the Word was with God. In 1:1c, ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is a predicate characterizing the Word. Referential identification and predication are different semantic operations. If John wished to say that the Logos was numerically identical with the same person just designated as “the God,” the construction would create an obvious tension with “the Word was with God.” The traditional Trinitarian interpretation does not require that identification. It understands the clauses as maintaining personal distinction while predicating deity of the Logos. Consequently, English “the Word was God” is not equivalent to “the Word was the God” in an exhaustively convertible equation. It can function as an English qualitative predicate: the Word was what God is with respect to deity.
This is why the alternative “the Word was divine” must also be handled carefully. In contemporary English divine can mean merely godlike, heavenly, or associated with God. That weakened sense would not adequately represent a predicate asserting the divine nature. But that English ambiguity is not a reason to reject qualitative predication in Coptic. Layton’s “he is divine” is his technical translation of the descriptive function of ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ; he is not saying “he resembles a deity somewhat.” His grammar defines description as predicating the quality associated with the lexical class. In the case of ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, the issue is the quality of deity itself.
This is also why your preferred phrase “a divine being” is not a neutral compromise. It inserts the count noun BEING, which is not separately present in the Coptic, and encourages precisely the class-member interpretation that remains disputed. If ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is descriptive in context, “divine” or an English formulation such as “the Word was God” is closer to its predicate function than “a divine being.” Your own note acknowledging “alternatively, the Word was divine” therefore concedes the principal grammatical point that the body of your argument tries to deny: the indefinite morphology does not uniquely yield the English classifying phrase “a god.”
The same must be said of the Bohairic evidence. Classical Bohairic John 1:1c likewise exhibits indefinite divine morphology. That fact is interesting and should not be concealed. But it does not follow that Bohairic independently declares Christ to be one lesser deity among several. The semantic question recurs unchanged: what function does the morphologically indefinite divine predicate have? A repeated morphology does not become a repeated ontology simply because it appears in another dialect. Modern scholarship on the Coptic versions expressly studies their historical relationships and translation technique rather than counting each dialect as an independent doctrinal witness.
Your appeal to the allegedly pre-Nicene date of Sahidic is likewise rhetorically stronger than historically warranted. Even if one assumes a third-century form of the translation, “pre-Nicene” does not mean “non-Trinitarian” and still less “Arian.” Nicaea did not create the questions of Christ’s preexistence, divine status, relation to the Father, or role in creation; it supplied a conciliar answer to controversies already developing within Christian theology. More importantly for the present argument, an early date cannot alter the semantics of ⲟⲩ-. A third-century indefinite predicate remains subject to third-century Coptic grammar. Dating tells us when the evidence is relevant; it does not tell us what the construction means.
The immediate Johannine context also makes the proposed classifying translation “a god” considerably less attractive than your treatment admits. John 1:1 distinguishes the Logos personally from God in the second clause and predicates θεός of him in the third. John 1:3 then places the Logos on the causal side of an exhaustive statement concerning created existence: πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being. A rendering of 1:1c as “a god” in the ordinary English sense of one subordinate supernatural member of a larger class therefore imports an ontology that the clause itself does not encode and that sits uneasily beside the prologue’s creation statement. The issue is not that the indefinite denotative reading is grammatically impossible in Coptic. It is that grammar leaves denotation and description open, and the discourse must adjudicate between them.
This distinction between grammatical possibility and contextual interpretation is essential. I would not claim that Sahidic “proves the Trinity,” that ⲟⲩ- means homoousios, or that “a god” is an impossible gloss. Those would simply reverse your methodological mistake. The defensible conclusion is more precise. The Sahidic predicate is morphologically indefinite. Coptic grammar expressly permits an indefinite gendered common-noun predicate to function either denotatively or descriptively. Layton expressly applies this distinction to ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, yielding both “he is a god” and “he is divine.” His introductory textbook even glosses the John 1:1 morphology with “a-god” while translating the sentence itself “the Word was God,” which demonstrates that morphemic gloss and idiomatic predicate translation are analytically distinct.
Consequently, the chain of inference on which your essay depends cannot be sustained:
indefinite article → English “a” → one member of a class of gods → a lesser deity distinct in nature from the one God.
Only the first proposition is directly supplied by the morphology. The second depends on predicate semantics; the third depends on a denotative rather than descriptive construal; the fourth is an ontological conclusion not encoded by the article at all.
Your contention that scholars somehow conceal this ancient evidence is especially difficult to maintain in light of subsequent scholarship. Wright and Ricchuiti’s 2011 Journal of Theological Studies article is devoted precisely to the question whether Sahidic translates Greek anarthrous θεός uniformly and what that evidence contributes to John 1:1c. The 2021 critical edition of Sahidic John, constructed from 172 manuscript witnesses, has replaced the situation in which Horner could be treated as the final documentary authority. Askeland’s research on the Coptic versions likewise treats translation technique and inter-versional relationships systematically. Far from being “kept under wraps,” the Coptic evidence has become substantially more accessible and more rigorously studied than when your essay was revised in 2006.
The deeper problem is therefore methodological rather than confessional. You consistently treat an ancient translation as though its determiners constituted an inspired interlinear commentary on the Greek article. But Coptic is a language with its own system of nominal determination and predication. The translator had to say something grammatical in Coptic. The correct question is not, “What English word do I substitute for ⲟⲩ-?” but, “What semantic function does this Coptic indefinite predicate perform in this construction and discourse?” Layton’s grammar shows why those questions are not equivalent.
The Sahidic version remains important evidence. It establishes that an early Egyptian translator or translation tradition did not render the predicate with the ordinary definite form ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. It establishes that the predicate was encoded with indefinite morphology. It shows that the Greek anarthrous θεός was not simply converted into an explicitly definite Coptic predicate. Those are legitimate conclusions. What it does not establish is that the translator understood John to posit two ontologically unequal gods or that the intended English equivalent must be “a god.” Coptic grammar itself prevents that stronger inference.
Nor does the lexical distinction in John 1:1 amount to the contradiction you allege between the Coptic Bible and Nicene Christianity. Trinitarian theology does not maintain that “the Word” and “the Father” are the same personal referent. It maintains precisely the distinction expressed in “the Word was with God,” while affirming that deity is truly predicated of the Word. A descriptive divine predicate is therefore entirely coherent with that distinction. The morphology need not identify the Logos with the personal referent ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in 1:1b in order to predicate what ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ denotes in nature or quality in 1:1c.
I would therefore reformulate the historical significance of Sahidic John 1:1c almost exactly opposite to the conclusion you draw from it. It is valuable precisely because it demonstrates how dangerous it is to confuse determination with ontology. The Coptic translator chose or inherited a morphologically indefinite predicate. That form can denote “a god,” but standard Coptic grammar also explicitly permits it to describe the subject as “divine.” The context, not the article in isolation, must decide between those functions. And once that distinction is respected, the claim that Sahidic furnishes “clear evidence” that the most accurate English translation is “the Word was a god” no longer follows.
The strongest conclusion the Coptic evidence permits is considerably more modest: “a god” is a grammatically possible denotative construal of the Sahidic predicate, while a qualitative/descriptive construal is equally grammatical and is explicitly illustrated by the standard grammar with the very noun ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. The claim that Coptic itself settles the verse in favor of the New World Translation therefore fails. The article tells us how the predicate is morphologically actualized. It does not tell us, by itself, whether the Logos is one deity among others or whether deity is being predicated of him.
And that is the decisive point your essay never successfully answers.
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