JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

198
"The absence of the article indicates that the Word is God, but is not the only
being of whom this is true; if ho theos had been written it would have implied
that no divine being existed outside the second person of the Trinity."17
John could have said, "The Word was divine." Theios is the Greek word which means
"godlike" or "godly." This would be in total harmony with Jehovah's Witnesses teaching. But
it is not what John intended to say.
The Jehovah's Witnesses cite James Moffatt, Bible translator, for rendering John 1:1 as
"the Word was divine." But they fail to understand what Moffatt meant by this. He explains:
"'The Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh,' simply means 'The Word
was divine. . . . And the Word became human.' The Nicene faith, in the Chalcedon
definition, was intended to conserve both of these truths against theories that failed
to present Jesus as truly God and truly man. . . ."18
The Jehovah's Witnesses also defend their interpretation by citing from William Barclay's
book, Many Witnesses, One Lord, where he argues that in John 1:1 theos, because it lacks the
definite article, "becomes a description, and more of an adjective than a noun," and therefore
concludes that John "does not say that Jesus was God."19 However the Jehovah's Witnesses
failed to include Barclay's crucial remarks in this same section as he explained:
"The only modern translator who fairly and squarely faced this problem is
Kenneth Wuest, who said: 'The Word was as to his essence essential deity.' But
it is here that the NEB [New English Bible] has brilliantly solved the problem
with the absolutely correct rendering: 'What God was the Word was.'"20
When Barclay found out that the Jehovah's Witnesses had used his partial statements to
buttress their own interpretation, he responded:
"The Watchtower article has, by judicious cutting, made me say the opposite of what
I meant to say. What I was meaning to say, as you well know, is that Jesus is not the
same as God, to put it more crudely, that he is of the same stuff as God, that is of
the same being as God, but the way the Watchtower has printed my stuff has simply
left the conclusion that Jesus is not God in a way that suits themselves. If they missed
from their answer the translation of Kenneth Wuest and the N.E.B., they missed the
whole point."21
When Barclay, therefore, states that John "does not say that Jesus was God" he is merely
making the observation that by not saying "the Word as the God" John was avoiding identifying
the Word as God the Father.