I wrote this about 4 years ago summarising the video
John's Prologue - Part 1 on The Trinity Delusion channel. The video description says:
John 1:1-5 is John's introductory statement to his Gospel account and from verses 1 to 5 John tells us what he will be describing in his Gospel. The beginning in question is the beginning of the Christian faith by Jesus Christ who authored our faith by means of his ministry from his baptism by John to his death and resurrection. In his ministry, Jesus proclaimed the word of God he received at the Jordan river by the Spirit when heaven was opened to him. The word proclaimed through Jesus was God the Father Himself, the word was God. The man Jesus made the Father known to us; the word was God. No one has ever seen God but the fleshly man Jesus declared HIM, the Father. The word proclaimed by Jesus was God, that is, making the Father known to the world. Everything which came to pass in this beginning, the ministry of Jesus, did come to pass through the word proclaimed by Jesus and nothing came to pass apart from the word proclaimed by Jesus.
My summary of the video (split into two posts because it's over 10,000 characters):
Occasionally we may come across a different interpretation of a passage of Scripture that makes us realise that we had been misunderstanding it for years! For example, you may not have heard the following explanation of the prologue to John’s Gospel - John 1:1-5:
1) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2) The same was in the beginning with God.
3) All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4) In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5) And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
In his prologue (John 1:1-5) John is introducing what his gospel is all about – the ministry of Jesus. John uses Genesis language and imagery in his introductory statements. He starts off with “In the beginning”, the same words as the first words of Genesis 1:1. He says that everything that came to be was through the Word (verse 3), just as we see in Genesis (God spoke, and it came to pass). In verse 5 John says, “The light shines in the darkness”, and in Genesis it says there was darkness and God said “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3).
Most Christians have been taught the Trinitarian viewpoint, which assumes that John’s use of Genesis language is to set the time frame of what is occurring in verse 1. But what if that assumption is wrong? Genesis 1:1 is an introductory statement that introduces a description of how God created the heavens and the earth. It is referring to a time period – the six days of creation. The ‘beginning’ was that time period of six days. Although John uses Genesis imagery throughout the first five verses, verse 4 and the latter part of verse 5 do not fit the creation account, but they do perfectly fit the ministry of Jesus, and that was also a time period. This tells us that John may have been referring to the ministry of Jesus.
Trinitarian commentators have themselves observed that John uses creation imagery throughout his Gospel to refer to the
new creation. Jesus’ ministry is how the new creation began. The new creation of God is the result of Jesus’ ministry, beginning with his baptism through to his death and resurrection. Jesus is the firstfruits of the new creation of God (“But now is Christ risen from the dead,
and become the firstfruits of them that slept”, 1 Corinthians 15:20).
In Genesis, God created by means of His spoken word. But now God creates things anew by means of His
word which became flesh - “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth”, John 1:14. For example, humans can now become new creations in Christ Jesus, and this is only because of the ministry of Jesus - “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”, John 1:12,13.
Since John 1:1-5 is his introductory statement, we should expect him to be introducing what his gospel account is about, and what is contained in his gospel, and that is what he is doing right from verse 1. Jesus’ ministry is the beginning of the Christian faith, and Jesus is the author, the beginning, of our salvation and faith, and his ministry is how the new creation began (“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new”, 2 Corinthians 5:17).
Verse one is often used by believers in the Trinity to claim that Jesus was God, despite other Scripture verses that prove that can’t be true. To interpret verse 1 Trinitarians resort to interpretation by imagination. John did not say, “In the beginning was the son”, nor “the son was with God” and nor did he say “the son was God”. Neither did he say “the son became flesh”. Just because in Revelation 19:13 it says the rider on the white horse was named “The word of God”, we should not assume that John meant in his introduction that the Word was God’s son.
In verses 3 and 4 most translations use the word ‘him’. However, unlike English, in Greek nouns have a gender, so inanimate things have a gender. For example
petra, a rock, is feminine. The Greek word
logos (which means a spoken word, and is translated as ‘word’) is masculine, so the pronoun ‘him’ is used to match the gender of the noun it refers to. It is a matter of grammar. A spoken word,
logos, is masculine in Greek, but that doesn’t mean that a spoken word is a person.
Without having knowledge of the Greek language, English speaking readers are easily duped into thinking that John is identifying the ‘word’ of verses 1 and 2 as a person. However, the Greek word translated as ‘him’ (
autos) is not equivalent to the English word ‘him’. It would be equally valid to translate it as herself or itself. Likewise the Greek word
houtos in verse 2, usually translated as “the same” but sometimes translated as ‘he’, does not necessarily imply it’s referring to a person.
The Greek words
autos and
houtos are not like the English words him, her and it. We can only deduce which English pronoun to use when referring to the context. The Greek words are more like the English word ‘this’, which can refer to a person or an object, e.g. “This is my wife”, “This is an apple”. John 6:60 is extremely instructive of this, it includes the statement “
This word is hard; who is able to hear
it?” (YLT), where the words translated as ‘This’, ‘word’ and ‘it’ are
Houtos,
logos and
autos. Likewise the words translated as ‘He’ and ‘him’ in John 1:2-4 should be translated as ‘this’ and ‘it’. So all that the Greek text of verses 1-3 tells us is:
In the beginning was
the word, and the
word was with God, and
the word was God. 2
The word was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came to be through
the word; and apart from
the word nothing came to be that has come to be.
In the Trinity world you have God in Genesis creating by means of two different words: by a word that is spoken, and by a person called “the word”. That doesn’t make sense. But if “the word” is referring to the word, or message, proclaimed by the ministry of Jesus, the word Jesus said he kept, his food, his bread, to do the will of the Father and to continue His work, the Good News of the Kingdom of God, then it starts to make a lot more sense.
Mark and Luke also open their Gospel accounts in a similar manner:
Mark 1:1 -
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;
Luke 1:1-2 (WEB) - Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from
the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of
the word delivered them to us,
So if the word is the word proclaimed by Jesus during his ministry, what does “the word was with [
pros] God, and the word was God” mean? There are numerous examples of the Greek word
pros in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), e.g. Zechariah 1:1 - “In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word [
logos] of the LORD unto [
pros] Zechariah, … saying,”. This is saying that the word of God was with Zechariah, and Zechariah proclaimed that word. Similarly in John 1:1 it means that the word of God was with God, and it was God Himself expressing the word. It then says that the word was God. Verse 18 says, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”. It is Jesus that expressed and proclaimed the Father; the Father was the word that was proclaimed to the world – the word was God. Verse 18 is the summary of John’s prologue, summing up what he introduced in verse 1. The word proclaimed in the ministry of Jesus was the revelation of God, the Father, Himself – God expressing and revealing Himself through Jesus.
(To be continued.)
