u/Crookedmugmaker

Hello Greek speakers!
I have a question about a Bible verse.
The Bible verse is John 1:1

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

The KJV translates it as such:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The NWT translates it as such:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.

Which translation is better?

Here is why I am asking this question: I am a Christian, and I believe that Jesus Christ was God. However, there is a sect of Christianity called Jehovah’s Witnesses that believe Jesus was not “God”, but they believe he was “a god.” They were not satisfied with the existing translations which stated that the Word (Jesus) was God, so they published a version of the Bible (NWT) that adds an “a” to make him “a god.”

Would you please offer your insight into how this verse should be translated into English? If you would please include in your comment what credentials/experience you have to claim authority on Greek to English translation, that would be great. Thank you for your time.

I’m a carpenter and recently I spent about two weeks working at a clients house. A nice husband and wife who, come to find out, are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At the beginning of working there I knew of Jehovahs Witnesses, but I didn’t really know anything about them. As I am zealous for God, and as it turns out so is my client, we quickly struck conversation about God and the Bible and we had lots of nice discussions even on things we disagreed on. Keep in mind I am 22 and somewhat new to the faith and they are in their mid 50s and much more knowledgeable and researched so I definitely wasn’t able to defend my stances as strongly as they were able to defend theirs. But that experience lead me to do lots of research on Jehovahs Witnesses and to try and find out why I assume/believe certain things (like that Jesus is capital g God). There’s a list of things I want to bring up, but for the sake of the post I’ll keep it to three things

one
Theon vs Theos
One of the first things my client did was show me John 1:1, he presented it in both the Greek and English, and pointed out the use of two different Greek forms of the word “God”. They claimed the two different forms of the word meant the original author was describing two different beings, or two different “type of thing”. I found this quite compelling until I researched it myself, and it turns out, the two different forms don’t mean two different people/being/thing. For the sake of brevity I won’t explain it all here, you can easily google it yourself. But here’s an example I came up with: it’s like using “he” and “his” in the same sentence to refer to the same person. Although the word looks slightly different it does refer to the same thing. A quick google search will tell you this. Which leads me to point #2

Two
Why trust the NWT translators?
After looking into the early history of Jehovahs Witnesses, there’s a few red flags that come up for me. But I would like to hone in on one: the translators of the NWT were entirely incompetent to perform the task. Upon publication of the NWT, the translators were anonymous. However, they were eventually identified. On record, there seems to have been not a single Greek Scholar involved. Compare that to the KJV, which had a stacked team of scholars on the task. I won’t go into so much detail gonna keep this post short, but don’t take my word for it, go research yourself!
On the basis of scholarship alone, I will trust the KJV when it says “the word was God”.

Three
The Memorial of Jesus death
My client invited me to the memorial and I attended. It was my first JW event. It was quite uncomfortable when everyone passed around the bread and wine and nobody took of it. The plate got to me, and I did eat. I did not mean any disrespect by this, I know they probably would have preferred me not to eat, but the speaker said if you have the heavenly hope than you should eat. So I did.
Anyways, this event was entirely bizarre. Basically in the text message my client sent to invite me, he said “we commemorate it as Jesus asked us to in Luke 22:19.”
All I can say is the only thing similar between the memorial of Jesus death and Luke 22:19 was the presence of bread and wine. For a people so eager to do everything by the word of God, commemorating Jesus death by gathering together and not doing the one thing you claim he told you to do is bewildering. I have to be frank here- I find it disturbing to commemorate his death and not celebrate his resurrection. I’m not saying there needs to be Bunnys and chocolate eggs involved, but a little gathering together and wine and jumping for joy would go a long way for your Christian soul.

Thank you for your time, I am eager to know what Jehovahs Witnesses think of my observations.