[count-your-change]

“You appear to be taking the lack of a definite article as an inference of an indefinite object, yet you offered your own evidence that this is not the case, as your passage at John 4:19 demonstrates, and which is actually part of the point I was making. So I am confused as to why you would raise evidence against your own side. But that of course is up to you”

John 4:19 has no article in Greek so the translator can supply it in English which is exactly the situation in John 1:3) making “prophet” indefinite.
I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear.

“Your inaccurate rendition:

“All things came into being through him” (the Logos is an agent of creation as all things were through (dia) him.) “and without him not one thing came into being”

The words in ellipses are mine. The quotation is from The New Revised Standard Version that appears in the New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament, published by tthe United Bible Society. (p.s., They are trinitarians)

The NAB John 1:3, reads:

“All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be”.

It, then, is not my “inaccurate rendition” at all.

“This whole misadventure gives me pause. I am curious to know from what text you derived your mangled reading. Again, no Greek manuscript of which I am aware excludes the final “gegonen” which you omitted. Can you explain to me how you managed to omit it?”

I omitted nothing. I quoted a translation by a major Protestant body and now the approved translation for Catholics so if you want to call it a “mangled reading” take it up with their translators.

“But the broader context, which includes John 1:3 among others, does not allow a use of temporal beginning as with a created being, and so one of the other meanings must be chosen, unless you are willing to live with an outright contradiction in Scripture.”

This broader must include the way Paul described Christ, as he did at Col.1. and 1 Cor. 8:6.

If we use the trinitarian definition of God to analyze John 1:1-3 then we end up with defining the Logos as either the Father or as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Part of that broader context was how the term God or god was used in the Scriptures making it wholly correct to call the Logos “a god” since even Moses was called such.

“Broken down, this is what you have to deal with:

Panta —> All things
di —> by means of
autou —> him
egeneto —> were created
kai —> and
xoris —> without
autou —> him
egeneto —> was created
oude —> not even
ev —> one
ho gegonen —> created thing.”

Be aware the order of words in the Greek has little to do with the order when translated into English.

[Springfield Reformer]

Glad to hear the mangled text is not yours. But it is mangled nonetheless. The UBS has been on a bad trajectory for a long time . The NRSV is just one more manifestation that they ate abandoning verbal plenary inspiration as a cornerstone doctrine. Did you know that translation is one of the first new generation of politically correct bibles, where they are openly mistranslating male pronouns at every opportunity, just to avoid offending their liberal old line denominational pals?

As for john 1:3, what happened to you is the translators, after nearly two millennia, have finally decided to follow the Gnostic placement of the period. That moves the final ho gegonen to the beginning of the next sentence, which, BTW, renders verse 4 unintelligible, but hey, if you don’t believe every word is inspired, what’s a few garbled verses between friends.

It certainly didn’t bother the early gnostic editors who apparently were the first to recommend this punctuation. Chrysostom has happily recorded that it was recognized for the theologically motivated hack job it was as was rejected for that reason. I’d give you the quote but I’m tapping this out on my droid so maybe later.

As for firstborn, also need to do a longer response, but the short form is that there are two words in Greek that can be rendered as firstborn. One of these is constrained to our first in time notion in English, and this is used of Christ only in connection with his resurrection, not some alleged time of creation, which is good, because it prevents a contradiction with all those other passages which clearly make him eternal and uncreated. The other firstborn, when it is used of Christ and other subjects, again goes back to some form of primacy, but definitely not oriented toward first in time. More like first in authority, power, position of inheritance, etc.

Anyway, more later. Doing this with the droid is like boxing in a straightjacket. :)

Peace,

SR