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
Two words are “protokos”, #4416, and “monogenes”, #3439.
Protokos is used at Col. 1:15-18 twice and seems to include a ranking as to importance as Paul calls Christ the “firstborn” from the dead. Others were resurrected before him but like Lazarus they died later. Christ was resurrected to a life like none before him hence rank in importance and time.
Momogenes is used at John 1:18 to mean only one, “only begotten god”, so not quite the same.