Monday, February 8, 2010
Coptic John 1:1, Assumptions vs. Facts
ϨΝ ΤЄϨΟΥЄΙΤЄ ΝЄϤϢΟΟΠ ΝϬΙ ΠϢΑϪЄ
ΑΥШ ΠϢΑϪЄ ΝЄϤϢΟΟΠ ΝΝΑϨΡΜ ΠΝΟΥΤЄ
ΑΥШ ΝЄΥΝΟΥΤΕ ΠЄ ΠϢΑϪЄ -- John 1:1, Sahidic Coptic text
It has been postulated that the Egyptian Coptic translators of the 2nd-3rd centuries would not have meant to say that "the Word was a god" -- even though that is precisely what they wrote -- ΝЄΥΝΟΥΤΕ ΠЄ ΠϢΑϪЄ -- because their translation would have been informed by the theology of the great Egyptian theologians like Clement of Alexandria. As translated into English by (Trinitarian) scholars, the writings of Clement appear to promote the concept that "the Word was God."
But it is only an assumption, not fact, to suppose that the Coptic translators would have been influenced by Clement of Alexandria, who had left Egypt for Jerusalem and Antioch, Syria, by 202 AD. (Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 2, p. 167) Besides, Clement was a "pagan philosopher," a disciple of Socrates and Plato before adopting Christianity, and his works show his continued interest in such philosophy to the point where he has been accused of "corrupting the gospel with Greek philosophy." (Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 2, pp. 165, 166; Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, p. 216)
According to its own tradition, the Coptic Church was founded by the evangelist Mark. We need only read Mark's Gospel to see what he preached, and what the earliest Egyptian Christians would have believed. Mark's Gospel has the simplest of Christologies and there is no doctrine of the Trinitiy in the Gospel of Mark.
The Coptic translation of John 1:1c lacks the 'corruption of Greek philosophy' that found its way into the church after the death of the apostles of the Lord. And that is still another reason why the Coptic translation matters.
Coptic John 1:1c is a prime example. The Coptic translation says ne.u.noute pe p.Saje: "the Word was a god (or, divine)," not "the Word was God." That is documented evidence, a fact, not an assumption. The Coptic language has both indefinite and definite articles in its grammatical structure. If the Sahidic Coptic translators held the doctrine that "the Word was God," or if the Coptic translators understood the Greek text to say "the Word was God," the Coptic language had the grammatical tools to say so.
But they manifestly did not write "the Word was God." They wrote "the Word was a god." Unlike the assumptions, that is a fact. It is a fact that can be verified by reading the extant Coptic texts as evidence.
Facts are always better than assumptions.
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Hi Memra.
ReplyDeleteYou might or might not be interested in this link:
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=7240
Online Coptic texts in PDF format.
Thanks very much for this information!
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for this information!
ReplyDeleteThe contrast you frame as “assumptions vs. facts” turns on a category mistake. It treats the Sahidic sequence ⲛⲉ ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ as if Coptic articles mapped mechanically onto English ones, so that “ⲟⲩ- + noute” must mean nothing more or less than the English count phrase “a god.” But in Coptic nominal sentences the initial, indefinite predicate before a definite subject is the ordinary way to characterize the subject’s nature without identifying it as the very same person previously named. That is precisely the point of John 1:1c. In 1:1b the translator has just told us the Word was “with the God” (ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ), marking the Father personally and definitively. Repeating the definite form in 1:1c would risk a modalistic identification, while a bare, article-less predicate is normally excluded in this copular frame. The idiomatic solution in Sahidic is to place an indefinite predicate in front of the definite subject. In that position ⲟⲩ– often has qualitative force, the way Coptic predicates “is wisdom,” “is true,” or “is spirit” are rendered idiomatically in English without the article “a.” The translator’s choice therefore reflects grammar, not a shrinking from confessing Christ’s deity.
ReplyDeletePointing to Acts 28:6 as “proof” that ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ means “a god” actually demonstrates the opposite of what is claimed. In a polytheistic verdict by Maltese onlookers, “he is a god” is exactly the right sense, and the Coptic uses the same morphological tool to match that context. But John’s Prologue is not that context. It is rigorously monotheistic and, two lines later, ascribes creation itself to the Logos. The same morpheme can signal a count-indefinite in one setting, a numeric “one” in another (“one God, the Father,” where the indefinite base underlies the numeral), and a qualitative category in a third. Coptic itself forces that conclusion; it is not something imported from later dogma.
Nor does a Trinitarian reading depend on conjectured influence from Clement of Alexandria. Even if the Sahidic translators never read Clement, the issue is linguistic: how to reproduce in Coptic the Greek writer’s strategy of using an anarthrous predicate θεός to say what the Word is without equating him with “the God” he is with. The Sahidic does that elegantly. The claim that the translation preserves a purer, pre-philosophical Christianity therefore misses the central point. John’s high Christology does not arise from Platonism; it arises from Israel’s monotheism applied to the Logos who was “with God” and yet is what God is. Far from “corrupting the gospel,” the Greek of John and the Sahidic that mirrors it are both pressing a Jewish scriptural claim: God’s own Word, through whom all things came to be, has now become flesh.
Appealing to Mark’s “simple Christology” does not unsettle this. Mark never recites fourth-century formulas, but he does ascribe to Jesus what belongs to God alone: he forgives sins, commands the elements, receives homage, declares lordship over the Sabbath, and identifies himself with the Danielic Son of Man enthroned at God’s right hand. Early Egyptian Christians reading Mark could confess one God and still recognize the Son’s divine identity; nothing in Mark obliges them to deny what John says. The Coptic translators did not need Nicene slogans to understand an anarthrous predicate used qualitatively, and they did not need to avoid it to remain monotheists.
DeleteThe assertion that “Coptic had the tools to say ‘the Word was God’ but did not” presumes that the only way to express full deity is to put the definite article on “God” in 1:1c. In Coptic, however, doing so in this clause would most naturally read as personal identity with the Father just mentioned. The translators chose the construction their language offers to say, with clarity, that the Word truly is what God is while remaining personally distinct from the God he is with. That is why later Coptic writers could both preserve John 1:1c in this form and confess in worship and creed that the Son is “True God of True God.” Their use of the ⲟⲩ-form there shows beyond dispute that in Coptic the indefinite morphology is fully compatible with absolute deity when the predicate is qualitative or categorial. In other words, the “fact” that ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ appears in 1:1c is not evidence that the translators taught a second, lesser god; it is evidence that they rendered the Greek’s qualitative predicate with the normal Sahidic equative pattern.
What is left, then, is not an opposition between “assumptions” and “facts,” but between a wooden interlinear gloss and the way Coptic actually communicates meaning. Read as Coptic, John 1:1c does exactly what the Greek does: it predicates of the Word the very quality of deity, without collapsing him into the Father. Rendered into idiomatic English, that is why “the Word was God” (understood qualitatively) or “the Word was divine” in the strongest sense accurately conveys what the Sahidic says, while “the Word was a god” suggests a second deity the text does not countenance.
Your argument begins by contrasting “assumptions” with “facts,” but the central difficulty is that you repeatedly present an interpretation of the Coptic as though it were itself a transcriptional fact. The indisputable fact is that the Sahidic predicate in John 1:1c is morphologically indefinite: ⲟⲩ- is present before ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. A morpheme-by-morpheme gloss such as “a-god” is therefore entirely legitimate. What does not follow is your repeated assertion that the translators therefore “wrote ‘the Word was a god,’ not ‘the Word was God.’” They did not write either English sentence. They wrote a Sahidic nominal predicate whose semantic function and idiomatic English rendering must still be determined from Sahidic grammar.
ReplyDeleteYou do not need to assume that the translators were influenced by Clement of Alexandria in order to make that distinction. If someone claimed that Clement personally dictated the Sahidic rendering, that claim would indeed require evidence. But the grammatical case does not depend upon Clement, Alexandrian theology, or a hypothetical line of ecclesiastical influence at all. It depends upon what Coptic grammar permits ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ to mean in predicate function. Your extensive discussion of whether Clement remained influenced by Greek philosophy therefore attacks an unnecessary premise. Even if Clement had never existed, the semantic question concerning ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ would remain exactly the same.
Your characterization of Clement also needs considerably greater historical precision. Clement could not literally have been “a disciple of Socrates and Plato before adopting Christianity”: Socrates and Plato lived centuries before Clement. You may mean that Clement was intellectually indebted to Platonic philosophical traditions, which is certainly true in a broad historical sense, but that is very different from the chronological claim your wording suggests. Likewise, calling his theology a “corruption of the gospel with Greek philosophy” is a theological evaluation, not a philological datum about Sahidic John 1:1. Whatever judgment you make about Clement’s philosophical synthesis cannot determine the semantics of a Coptic nominal predicate.
Your appeal to the Coptic Church’s traditional association with Mark does not improve the argument. Even if you accept without qualification the ecclesiastical tradition that Mark founded the Egyptian church, it does not follow that the Christology of later Egyptian Christians can be reconstructed simply by isolating Mark’s Gospel and treating it as their sole doctrinal inheritance. A community that revered Mark could also receive John, Paul, Hebrews, and the rest of the Christian scriptural tradition. Nor does the observation that Mark does not contain a fourth-century conciliar formulation of the Trinity establish the positive proposition you need, namely that early Egyptian Christians regarded the Logos as an ontologically subordinate individual god. The absence of later technical terminology is not evidence for its doctrinal contrary.
The crucial problem appears when you state that the Coptic means “the Word was a god (or, divine),” and then immediately insist that it does not mean “the Word was God.” Your own parenthesis already undermines that conclusion. If ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ may function descriptively as “divine,” then morphological indefiniteness has not by itself selected the English class-membership translation “a god.” The relevant question becomes whether the predicate is denotative or descriptive.
Bentley Layton’s reference grammar addresses precisely that question, and it does so in a way that cannot be dismissed as an appeal to theology. His definition of the Coptic indefinite article includes not merely “one specimen of the lexical class of” but also “one specimen having the quality of the lexical class of.” In other words, the semantic range of ⲟⲩ- itself is not exhausted by numerical class-membership. He then explains that gendered common nouns can perform both denotative and descriptive functions: they can name an instance of a class, or they can characterize an entity by the quality associated with that lexical class.
DeleteMore decisively, when Layton turns specifically to nominal-sentence predicates, he uses the exact noun at issue here. He states that a gendered common-noun predicate is ambiguous between denotation and description and illustrates this with ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ, which he gives as both “He is a god” and “He is divine.” He defines the descriptive predicate as one that speaks of an entity by its quality without denoting it as an individual member of a class. This directly prevents you from turning the presence of ⲟⲩ- into the statement “therefore the translator must have classified the Logos as one god among others.”
Layton’s introductory textbook makes the same point even more transparently. Under his discussion of adjectival predicates, he explains that nouns may function adjectivally in the nominal sentence with the ordinary indefinite morphology. His chosen example is again ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ: the same ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ can mean “he is divine” or “he is a god,” and Layton expressly calls such predicates ambiguous. Thus the distinction is not between a “real” indefinite construction on your side and some invented qualitative construction on the other. The descriptive interpretation is itself an interpretation of a genuinely indefinite Coptic phrase.
This is why your statement that the translators “manifestly did not write ‘the Word was God’” equivocates between morphology and translation. Layton himself prints the Johannine clause with an interlinear representation corresponding to “a-god” and then gives the sentence-level English translation “And the Word was God.” Whatever theological conclusion you wish to draw, that fact alone disproves your claim that an expert Coptic analysis must regard “the Word was God” as grammatically excluded merely because ⲟⲩ- appears in the source.
Plumley independently illustrates the same broader principle. In his predicate-first nominal construction, ⲟⲩⲛⲟϭ ⲡⲉ is literally structured with an indefinite nominal expression, yet he translates it idiomatically as “He is great,” not “He is a great one.” This is not the same lexical item as ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, so it does not settle John 1:1c by analogy; what it establishes is the methodological point that overt indefinite morphology in Coptic predication need not be reproduced by an English indefinite article.
You are correct that Sahidic possesses both definite and indefinite articles. What you infer from that fact, however, is too simplistic. You reason that if the translators believed “the Word was God,” they could simply have used the definite article. But Coptic determination is not a two-position theological switch in which definite means “fully Almighty God” and indefinite means “a lesser god.” Layton notes that the unique biblical God, when named referentially, is regularly expressed by the definite ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. Yet the same grammar expressly allows ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in predicate position to describe someone as divine. The distinction is therefore between referential naming and predicative description, not between “true God” and “inferior god.”
That distinction matters especially in John 1:1. In the second clause, the text refers to the one with whom the Logos was; in the third clause, it predicates something of the Logos. A definite referring expression and an indefinite descriptive predicate perform different semantic jobs. If you simply replace the Coptic predicate with the definite referring expression and then argue that this would be the only way to say “the Word was God,” you have assumed that English predicative “God” must correspond to Coptic definite reference. Layton’s examples show that this assumption is false.
DeleteYour appeal to “facts” therefore needs to be reformulated much more narrowly. It is a fact that the Coptic has ⲟⲩ-. It is a fact that “a god” is a grammatically legitimate denotative interpretation. It is equally a fact, according to the standard grammar you are invoking, that the exact expression ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ can function descriptively and be rendered “he is divine.” It is also a fact that Layton himself can gloss the morpheme as “a-god” at the interlinear level while translating the complete Johannine clause “And the Word was God.” Those are not Trinitarian assumptions imposed upon the Coptic; they are statements found in Coptic grammatical literature.
Consequently, your final contrast between “what they could have written” and “what they manifestly wrote” does not establish what you think it does. The translators manifestly wrote a morphologically indefinite divine predicate. That excludes pretending that John 1:1c simply repeats the same definite referring expression found in the preceding clause. It does not exclude descriptive deity predication, because Sahidic grammar explicitly assigns that function to the same construction and the same noun. You may argue contextually that the denotative reading “a god” is preferable, but you cannot promote that preference into a grammatical fact merely by pointing to the article.
So the real distinction between fact and assumption runs differently from the one you propose. The fact is the form ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ; the assumption is that morphological indefiniteness must equal numerical class-membership in this predicate. The fact is that Coptic has a definite article; the assumption is that a translator wishing to predicate full deity would therefore have had to use definite ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. The fact is that Clement’s personal influence on the translators cannot simply be presumed; the assumption is that removing Clement from the equation somehow forces a subordinate-god interpretation. And the fact is that a developed conciliar doctrine is not stated in Mark; the assumption is that this absence establishes the opposite Christological ontology.
You are therefore entitled to say that Sahidic John 1:1c is morphologically indefinite and that “the Word was a god” is one possible construal. You are not entitled to present that construal as though the Coptic wording itself excludes “the Word was God” as an idiomatic rendering of descriptive deity predication. The very Coptic grammars relevant to your claim explicitly show otherwise.