The one verse, 2 Thessalonians 2:4, illustrates the three uses of the Sahidic Coptic articles: the Coptic zero article, the Coptic definite article, and the Coptic indefinite article.
This verse also illustrates the correct translation of Coptic John
1:1c.
In the Greek text of 2 Thessalonians 2:4 we have a)theos in the
accusative case; b) theos in the genitive, with the Greek definite article;
and c) anarthrous theos in the nominative.
Correspondingly, in the Sahidic Coptic text we have a) zero-articled
noute, where the Coptic zero-article indicates a general meaning or
characteristic: i.e., "god"; b) definite-articled p.noute, "the god" or "God"; and c) indefinite-articled ou.noute, "a god."
Transliterated, the Sahidic Coptic text reads:
pantikeimenos etjice mmof ejn ouon nim etoumoute eroou je noute houop hwste nfbwk ehoun eprpe mpnoute nfhmoos efouwnh mmof ebol je ounoute pe. (As found in the Sahidic Coptic New Testament by J. Warren Wells, 2006. Occurrences of noute, "god," emphasized by this writer)
Translated into English, the Coptic text of 2 Thessalonians 2:4 says:
"The one who is opposing and raising himself above everyone who is called 'god' or regarded with reverence, so that he goes into the temple of the god and sits down, declaring publicly that he is a god."
Being a careful translation of the Greek text, the Coptic version, properly translated into English, carries the same significance at 2 Thessalonians 2:4 as does the New World Translation and some other careful English versions. Whereas many English versions merely translate "God" wherever theos is found in the Greek text here, these careful versions bring out the grammatical differences:
"He is set in opposition and lifts himself up over everyone who is called 'god' or an object of reverence, so that he sits down in the temple of The God, publicly showing himself to be a god." -- New World Translation
"Who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god." -- New American Bible
"He who is in opposition to every so-called god or object of worship, so that he seats himself in God's temple, declaring himself to be a god." -- The Bible in Living English
"He rises in his pride against every god, so called, every object of men's worship, and even takes his seat in the temple of God claiming to be a god himself." -- The New English Bible
What I see here is that careful translators of the Greek text understood the Greek grammar in the same way, and translated 2 Thessalonians 2:4 into their own languages accordingly, from the 2nd century to the present day.
Therefore, in this one verse we see clearly the force of the Coptic zero, definite, and indefinite articles when used with the Coptic noun noute, "god":
ΝΟΥΤЄ (noute) = god
Π.ΝΟΥΤЄ (p.noute) = the god, God
ΟΥ.ΝΟΥΤЄ (ou.noute) = a god
And it is ΟΥ.ΝΟΥΤЄ (ou.noute), "a god" that is found in the Sahidic Coptic version of John 1:1c, in contrast with Π.ΝΟΥΤЄ (p.noute), "God," at John 1:1b.
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12 comments:
Excellent. Just excellent!
Thank you for your comments. It is always refreshing and rewarding to hear from those who appreciate accuracy and truth in translation.
Thank you very much, could you please however clarify the meaning of 1 tim 3:16, I dont know coptic but it seems that we find noute, in the text thank you (by the way if you need I speak arabic and hebrew)
Patrick
Thank you for your comments.
The Coptic texts do not say that "God was manifested in the flesh," but "auw Homologoumenws ounoC pe pmusthrion ntmntnoute pai entaFouwnH ebol Hn tsarx," which means "And confessedly great is the mystery of divinity, this who was manifested in the flesh." (See the English translation by G. W. Horner)
The word noute (god) appears at 1 Timothy 3:16 only as an adjective, bound to the Coptic prefix mnt- (mnt.noute). This adjective means "divinity" or "godliness," not God. (Crum's Coptic Dictionary, 23b). The one manifested in the flesh is not called noute, or God, but merely "pai," Coptic for "this (one)."
That corresponds with the best Greek texts of 1 Timothy 3:16, which do not say that "God" was manifested in the flesh, but "(he)who was manifested..."
Thank you very much Memra
Hola, donde puedo encontrar los códices coptos para leerlos?
A good article on this topic:
https://www.academia.edu/176411873
Your argument begins with a number of perfectly correct morphological observations, but then turns those observations into a semantic rule that Sahidic Coptic does not possess. That distinction is decisive. Nobody needs to deny that ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is morphologically definite, that ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is morphologically indefinite, or that bare ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ can occur with zero determination. The problem arises when you convert those three morphological facts into the rigid translation dictionary
ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = “god”
ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = “the God/God”
ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = “a god”
and then treat that dictionary as though 2 Thessalonians 2:4 had proved it for every syntactic environment, including John 1:1c. It has not.
The first thing you need to distinguish is morphological determination from predicate semantics. Bentley Layton’s standard ‘A Coptic Grammar’ explicitly does so. His discussion of the indefinite article allows an indefinite phrase to actualize either a specimen of a lexical class or a specimen characterized by the quality of that class (§50). More importantly, he distinguishes denotation from description for gendered common nouns (§93), and then, in his discussion of nominal-sentence predicates, uses the exact noun at issue here: ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ can mean either “he is a god” or “he is divine” (§292). His pedagogical ‘Coptic in 20 Lessons’ gives the same semantic contrast. In other words, the very Coptic expression you are trying to turn into an invariant English “a god” is explicitly used by a leading Coptologist to illustrate both denotative and descriptive predication.
That does not mean ⲟⲩ- somehow ceases to be an indefinite article when the predicate is descriptive. It remains morphologically indefinite. Nor does “qualitative” mean that Coptic has some mysterious third article alongside definite and indefinite articles. The morphology and the semantics are different analytical dimensions. An indefinitely determined nominal predicate may be denotative, approximately “X is an N,” or descriptive/property-oriented, approximately “X is N-like in the strong predicative sense” or, with ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, “X is divine.” Thus your argument commits a category mistake when it moves directly from “the article is indefinite” to “the sentence must be translated with English a.”
That distinction is not an artificial Trinitarian escape hatch invented for John 1:1. Layton gives the exact lexeme ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. Plisch likewise treats ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ as a qualifying predicate, and the Arabic-language Sahidic grammar of ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Nūr al-Dīn explicitly admits ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ to what it calls a descriptive predicate. The grammatical possibility of “divine” is therefore not being inferred from some unrelated abstract noun such as “truth” or from a mass noun such as “water.” It is directly attested with the common noun “god” itself.
Your appeal to 2 Thessalonians 2:4 does establish something, but much less than you make it establish. The verse does indeed contain different determinations of the divine noun in different constructions. That is real grammatical information. What it does NOT give you is a miniature Coptic theological dictionary in which zero determination means generic “god,” definite determination means the true God, and indefinite determination means “a god.” Those noun phrases occur in different syntactic environments and perform different discourse functions. You cannot simply erase those constructional differences and assign a universal English semantic value to each article pattern.
This is especially clear in the final clause, ϫⲉ ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ. Even Wright and Ricchuiti, whose corpus you are implicitly relying on, explicitly acknowledged in their peer-reviewed 2011 article that 2 Thessalonians 2:4 is semantically uncertain. They did not conclude that Coptic morphology had objectively settled the passage as “he is a god.” Their later popular treatment actually moved in the opposite direction and argued more positively for a descriptive/qualitative interpretation. So the very scholarly analysis of this small ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ corpus does not support your claim that 2 Thessalonians 2:4 establishes a fixed equation ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = a god.
George Horner’s actual translation practice makes your proposed rule even harder to sustain. In his Sahidic edition he renders the relevant 2 Thessalonians 2:4 clause, not “manifesting himself that he is a god,” but “manifesting himself that he is god.” That does not prove that the predicate must be qualitative; Horner’s English translation is not itself a semantic oracle. But it decisively shows that an editor who had the overt Coptic indefinite form in front of him did NOT think an English indefinite article was mechanically required. The most that morphology gives you is formal indefiniteness. The English realization still depends upon how the predicate functions.
Horner is even more explicit in his Bohairic work. In the translation principles to his ‘Northern Dialect’ edition he states that the Coptic indefinite article is normally represented by English “a,” but must be omitted in certain environments. At Bohairic John 1:1 itself he translates the predicate “God (indef. art.)”, not “a God.” That is an unusually clear historical demonstration of the distinction you are overlooking: Horner can mark that the Coptic morphology is indefinite while simultaneously judging that the corresponding idiomatic English predicate does not require a. His Sahidic edition likewise prints “[a] God” at John 1:1, and his bracket convention expressly indicates material represented in the Coptic but not required in idiomatic English.
So when you write that the “proper” translation of 2 Thessalonians 2:4 is “declaring publicly that he is a god,” you are giving one legitimate denotative construal and then quietly upgrading it into the only legitimate construal. That second step is precisely what the Coptic grammatical evidence does not permit. “A god” may be possible there. What does not follow is the universal proposition “whenever ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ occurs predicatively, English ‘a god’ is obligatory.”
Your own appeal to the various English translations of 2 Thessalonians 2:4 does not prove otherwise. The Greek has no indefinite article corresponding to English “a.” Consequently, when an English translation says “a god,” that is an interpretive rendering of an anarthrous Greek noun in context, not a mechanically encoded grammatical value. Other translators may choose “God,” “god,” “as God,” or “a god” depending upon how they understand the boast of the man of lawlessness. The fact that several English versions make one exegetical choice in THIS context does not create a cross-linguistic grammatical equation that can then be imposed on a different Coptic predicate in John 1:1.
The most revealing counterexample is actually supplied by the very small New Testament Coptic dataset you are using. The same surface form ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ occurs in 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Ephesians 4:6 with reference to the Father: “one God, the Father.” Horner’s Sahidic edition directly preserves these numerical “one God” constructions. The morphology plainly does not encode “an inferior god,” “a secondary divine being,” or “one god among others.” In those constructions the value of ⲟⲩ- is tied to the numeral “one.” This is exactly why one cannot assign an ontological meaning to the morpheme itself. The construction and discourse determine the force.
This matters directly for your conclusion about John 1:1. Yes, the Sahidic textual evidence at John 1:1c is remarkably stable in preserving an indefinitely determined predicate. The modern critical edition does not report a rival definite ⲡ- form or a zero-determined alternative at that locus. A Trinitarian analysis does not need to deny that fact. The question is not whether the Coptic form is indefinite; it is. The question is whether an indefinite nominal predicate must therefore be semantically denotative and translated “a god.” The standard grammar says it need not be.
That is why the contrast between ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in John 1:1b and ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ in John 1:1c does not produce the theology you attach to it. In 1:1b “God” functions referentially: the Word was with God. In 1:1c “God” is predicated of the Word. Referential identification and predication are not the same semantic operation. A descriptive predicate need not repeat the definite referring expression. Indeed, if the Coptic had simply made both expressions the same definite referring noun phrase, the result could tend toward identifying the Word with the very person with whom the preceding clause says he was. The indefinite predicate allows the discourse to maintain personal distinction while predicating deity of the Logos.
Thus “the Word was God” does not secretly translate ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ as though it were ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. English predicate ‘God’ does not have to function as the same definite referring expression as “the God.” You are treating English surface article usage as if it had to reproduce Coptic determination morpheme-for-morpheme, but that is exactly what both Layton’s examples and Horner’s translation practice show to be false.
Nor can you escape this by saying that, if the Coptic translator intended a quality, he should have used the zero article rather than ⲟⲩ-. Zero determination certainly exists in Sahidic. The mistake is assuming that zero determination is the obligatory marker of descriptive predication in the particular nominal-sentence construction of John 1:1c. It is not. Coptic zero determination is construction-sensitive, and Layton explicitly gives descriptive meaning with an indefinite predicate. The existence of a bare-noun strategy elsewhere therefore cannot make descriptive ⲟⲩ-N predication impossible here.
This is also why your three-line equation from 2 Thessalonians 2:4 fails. ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = god, ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = God, and ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ = a god can function as rough classroom glosses for morphological form. They cannot function as invariant semantic equations. If you intend the equations merely as glosses, there is little disagreement. If you intend them to determine predicate semantics independently of syntax and discourse, then they are contradicted by the grammatical descriptions and by actual Coptic usage.
Your claim that this grammatical understanding has been shared “from the 2nd century to the present day” is also too strong historically. The date of the earliest Sahidic New Testament translation is debated; the date of an extant manuscript must not be confused with the date of the underlying version, and the argument does not gain anything by assigning a particular pre-Nicene or second-century theology to a translator whom we cannot identify. The Coptic evidence should be allowed to say what its grammar says without inflating uncertain chronology into theological evidence.
Your appeal to 1 Timothy 3:16 does not repair the argument, although one part of what you say there is correct. The Sahidic text represented by Horner does not read a straightforward equivalent of the later Greek variant θεὸς ἐφανερώθη, “God was manifested.” Horner gives “great is the mystery of the godhead, this (one) who was manifested in the flesh,” and his apparatus reflects the textual distinction between the reading corresponding to Greek ὃς ἐφανερώθη, “who was manifested,” and the later θεός reading. On that narrow textual point, you do not need to be contradicted. The critical Greek text does not depend upon “God was manifested in the flesh.” Horner’s Sahidic text likewise has a pronominal expression rather than ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ as the grammatical subject of “was manifested.”
But you overstate the linguistic point when you say that “the word noute appears … only as an adjective, bound to the Coptic prefix mnt-.” ⲙⲛⲧ- is an abstract-forming element; ⲙⲛⲧⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is an abstract nominal expression, variously rendered according to context as “godhead,” “divinity,” or “godliness.” Calling it simply “the word noute used as an adjective” confuses derivational morphology with syntactic function. Horner himself renders the phrase in 1 Timothy 3:16 “the mystery of the godhead.” Elsewhere related abstract forms can naturally correspond to “godliness.” The point is not that 1 Timothy 3:16 directly names the manifested person ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ; it does not. The point is that the derived abstract noun tells you nothing about whether a completely different construction—an ordinary gendered common noun used as a nominal predicate—can be descriptive in John 1:1. Layton expressly says it can.
In fact, using 1 Timothy 3:16 as an argument against a descriptive reading of John 1:1 would involve exactly the wrong inference. The fact that Coptic can form an abstract noun meaning “divinity/godhead/godliness” does not mean that it must use that abstract noun whenever deity is predicated as a property. English can say both “John possesses humanity” and “John is human”; the existence of the abstract noun humanity does not make adjectival or descriptive predication impossible. Sahidic likewise has more than one way of expressing property-oriented meaning. Layton even discusses alternative adjectival strategies and nevertheless gives ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ itself as capable of meaning “he is divine.” The existence of ⲙⲛⲧⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ therefore cannot function as an exclusion test against descriptive ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. Sahidic John 1,1c
Likewise, the fact that 1 Timothy 3:16 uses ⲡⲁⲓ, “this one/this,” rather than writing “God,” does not amount to saying “the manifested one is not God.” A pronoun does not carry the proposition “not God.” It simply does not lexically repeat a noun. Horner’s own translation makes the personal force quite clear: “this (one) who was manifested in the flesh,” followed by the sequence “he was justified in the spirit,” “he was manifested to the angels,” “he was preached among the Gentiles,” “he was trusted in the world,” and “he was taken up in glory.” The Sahidic text therefore follows the relative/pronominal textual form without turning that grammatical choice into a denial of the identity or nature of the person being described.
A Trinitarian does not need to defend the secondary Greek reading “God was manifested in the flesh” in order to confess Christ’s deity. If ὃς ἐφανερώθη is the earlier reading—and that is the standard critical judgment—the correct conclusion is simply that 1 Timothy 3:16 does not contain the explicit noun “God” as the subject of that relative clause. It does not follow that the subject therefore cannot be divine. That would be the same invalid move you make with John 1:1 in reverse: asking one morphological or textual feature to settle an ontological question it does not encode.
So the central flaw in your argument is not your recognition of the three formal Coptic possibilities. Those are real. The flaw is your assumption that they amount to three invariant English meanings and three invariant theological categories. Coptic grammar does not permit that shortcut. ⲡ- marks definite determination; ⲟⲩ- marks indefinite determination; zero determination is another formal strategy. But those morphological categories must then be interpreted within the particular syntactic construction, lexical item, and discourse. They do not mean, as a universal theological code, “the true God,” “a lesser god,” and “generic divinity.”
Consequently, 2 Thessalonians 2:4 does not “illustrate the correct translation” of John 1:1c in the sense you require. At most, it shows that ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ can receive a denotative interpretation in an appropriate context. No Trinitarian needs to deny that. What you have not shown—and what Layton’s grammar positively prevents you from simply assuming—is that this is the only semantic function available to an indefinite divine predicate. The Coptic of John 1:1c is indeed morphologically indefinite, but its predicate can be denotative or descriptive. Once that distinction is admitted, the equation “ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ therefore means ‘a god,’ therefore the Logos is a separate created subordinate deity” collapses at both steps. The first “therefore” is not required by Coptic predicate semantics, and the second “therefore” is not contained in the phrase even if a denotative rendering were provisionally adopted.
That is the point you must actually establish if you want the Sahidic version to function as evidence for Jehovah’s Witness Christology. It is not enough to prove that the Coptic predicate is indefinite. Everyone can grant that. You would have to prove that an indefinite ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ predicate cannot be descriptive, despite Layton’s explicit contrary example; that English “a” is obligatory despite Horner’s own translation practice; and, beyond that, that “a god” lexically entails “created, ontologically inferior, and not fully divine.” None of those propositions follows from the Coptic evidence.
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