[Jehovah’s Witnesses] misuse the evidence from the Sahidic Coptic version to try to support their rendering of John 1:1, and, imply (via misuse of a source) [1] that the Coptic indefinite always corresponds closely to the English indefinite article. (Other Witnesses misuse an English translation of the Sahidic Coptic to support Watchtower claims.) [2] This truly is unfortunate because they also ignore other uses of the indefinite article in Coptic where the same Coptic indefinite article is used with abstract nouns and with nouns of substance or of material, [3] is used to form adverbial phrases, [4] and is used to mark qualitative nouns as in nominal sentence predicates. [5] What they often ignore is that context, grammar, and not just reader choice, govern whether or not a noun is qualitative or indefinite. They also ignore the fact that a Coptic grammar also informs us that: “A Coptic Noun generally takes an article before it.” [6] So there generally needs to be either an indefinite or a definite article before nouns. In other words, if one does not use a definite article then it has to be the indefinite article that generally is to be used, and this may not be of as much theological significance as one might think when seeing such in a given passage.
The context o the rest of the writings of John also shows us
how John uses his predicates to make assertions regarding the nature of God,
and they typically are qualitative. Thus, it would be expected that the Coptic
indefinite article would be present in such texts translated from Greek. John
1:1c rather also makes an assertion regarding the nature of the Word in
relation to God. In the Bohairic Coptic text of John 1:14 we would not
translate the indefinite article to render the text to state that the Word became
“a flesh.” We would not translate the presence of the Coptic indefinite article
on the Coptic texts of 1 John 1:5 to say that God is “a light. All of the
predicates in these passages using the Coptic indefinite article really are
making assertions about the nature of God.
Likewise, we should not take the predicate of John 1:1c with the
presence of the Coptic indefinite article as indefinite. It makes an assertion
regarding the nature of the Word, just as John 1:14 does when the text states
that the Word became flesh, or, took upon himself the nature of flesh. This
meaning of that predicate is qualitative in its usage. Therefore, their claim,
like a great many others of their false claims in print, is misleading. And, a
closer look at the references that they use also shows that this really is the
case. For instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses either will quote or will cite Bentley
Layton’s introductory grammar of Coptic, attempting to “prove” that John 1:1c
should be translated: “And past tense marker-a-god is the-Word,” while omitting
the very net words (in the very same example!) that read: “= And the Word was
God.” [7]
Footnotes for the above:
[1] Lambin, Introduction to Sahidic Coptic (Macon:
Mercer University Press, 1983), 5. They quote him out of context in the
11/1/2008 issue of the Watchtower. They also conveniently do not mention
that Lambdin doesn’t’ say such always is true, or that he also admits
exceptions on the very same page!
[2] Typically that found in G. Horner’s The Coptic Version
of the New Testament in the Southern Dialect, third volume. While
indefinite articles are translated with the English indefinite article, Horner
marks them with brackets to indicate them as unnecessary in English
translation. In his later volumes of The Coptic Version of the New Testament
in the Northern Dialect he does not literally translate indefinite
articles, rather noting usage by “indef. art.).”
[3] Plumley, An Introductory Coptic Grammar (Sahidic
Dialect), 39.
[4] Plumley, An Introductory Coptic Grammar, ibid., 115-116.
[5] Bentley Layton, A Coptic Grammar With Chrestomathy and
Glossary Sahidic Dialect (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000), 43, 78,
201, 215, 227.
[6] Rev. Henry Tattam, A Compendious Grammar of the
Egyptian Language (London: John and Arthur Arch, Cornhill, 1830), 12.
[7] Bentley Layton, Coptic in 20 Lessons: Introduction to
Sahidic Coptic with Exercises & Vocabularies (Leuven/Paris/Dudley:
Peeters, 2007), 7. He there discusses so-called “bound groups,” and the meaning
of the hyphen, in the first lines of the Coptic text of John, and elsewhere.
D. Charles Pyle, I Have Said Ye Are Gods:
Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic
Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament (Revised and
Supplemented)
(North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace, 2018), 383-85