If you’ve ever had the opportunity to speak with someone who follows the teachings of the Watchtower Society (better know as Jehovah’s Witnesses), you’ve probably run in to the issue of the different way they define Jesus’ divinity. Specifically, they are typically willing to say that Jesus was divine in some sense, or “a god,” but not “God” as we would conceive of Him, and certainly not the second member of the Trinity as the New Testament teaches. You may have even discovered that their version of the scriptures (called “The New World Translation”) translates John 1:1 as “In [the] beginning the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.”
This of course makes it hard to have a discussion, if your bible says “the Word was God” and theirs says “the Word was a god.” Fortunately, checking the language in which John wrote (Koine Greek) provides a way to know which translation more accurately reflects what John meant to say. Dr. Dan Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, helps us out here:
[First, a little Greek grammar primer. In Koine Greek,] the nominative case is the case that the subject [of the sentence] is in. When the subject takes an equative verb like “is” (i.e., a verb that equates the subject with something else) then another noun also appears in the nominative case–the predicate nominative. In the sentence, “John is a man,” “John” is the subject and “man” is the predicate nominative. In English the subject and predicate nominative are distinguished by word order (the subject comes first).
Not so in the Greek. Since word order in Greek is quite flexible and is used for emphasis rather than for strict grammatical function, other means are used to distinguish subject from predicate nominative. For example, if one of the two nouns has the definite article, it is the subject.
As we have said, word order is employed especially for the sake of emphasis. Generally speaking, when a word is thrown to the front of the clause it is done so for emphasis. When a predicate nominative is thrown in front of the verb, by virtue of word order it takes on emphasis. A good illustration of this is John 1:1c. The English versions typically have, “and the Word was God.” But in Greek, the word order has been reversed. It reads,
καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (kai theos en ho logos)
And God was the Word.
We know that “the Word” is the subject because it has the definite article, and we translate it accordingly: “and the Word was God.” Two questions, both of theological import, should come to mind: (1) why was (Greek) thrown forward? And (2) why does it lack the article? In brief, its emphatic position stresses its essence or quality: “What God was, the Word was” is how one translation brings out this force.
Its lack of a definite article keeps us from identifying the person of the Word (Jesus Christ) with the person of “God” (the Father). That is to say, the word order tells us that Jesus Christ has all the divine attributes that the Father has; lack of the article tells us that Jesus Christ is not the Father. John’s wording here is beautifully compact! It is, in fact, one of the most elegantly terse theological statements one could ever find. As Martin Luther said, the lack of an article is against Sabellianism; the word order is against Arianism.
To state this another way, look at how the different Greek constructions would be rendered [the first two examples are not what John wrote, but Wallace uses them here to show how the translation would have changed if John had used a different word order]:
καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν ὁ θεὸς (kai ho logos en ho theos)
“and the Word was the God” (i.e., the Father, Sabellianism)
καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν θεὸς (kai ho logos en theos)
“and the Word was a god” (Arianism) [This is the teaching of Jehovah’s Witnesses]
καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (kai theos en ho logos)
“and the Word was God” (Orthodoxy [this is what John wrote]).
Jesus Christ is God and has all the attributes that the Father has. But he is not the fist person of the Trinity. All of this is concisely affirmed in [the Greek] καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος [kai theos en ho logos].
[From Basics of Biblcal Greek by William Mounce.]