"I Said You Are Gods": John 10:34 Must Be Understood in the Context of John 10:30

I’ve been asked how I would respond to a Jehovah’s Witness interpreting John 10:34-36 as evidence that the term god can be used to refer to human beings. Of course, the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim this passage as confirming their belief that Jesus is not God, but the most exalted of the sons of God (who can also legitimately be called gods).

Suggesting that John 10:34–36 supports the view that Jesus is not God does not fit with the evidence of John 10:30. I have argued in a previous post that in John 10:30 Jesus inserts himself into the Jewish Shema on a level equal with God the Father (see “Is Jesus God? The Significance of the Shema of Jesus in John 10:30”). Jesus’ opponents obviously understood that he was claiming to be equal with God, because they picked up stones to stone him (John 10:31) for the sin of blasphemy: “We are not stoning you for any good work, but for blasphemy, and because you, a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33). In the context, the word theon in v. 33 should be translated as God rather than as a god. The sin of blasphemy is considered in Judaism as being a sin against the name of YHWH. Jesus’ Jewish opponents wanted to stone him, because he had blasphemed the divine name by inserting his own name into the Shema, as if he were YHWH himself. This is exactly what Jesus was claiming. By inserting his name into the Shema, he was claiming to be YHWH himself. Therefore, Jesus’ Jewish opponents understood correctly that he was claiming to be equal with the Father, hence their desire to stone him.

In response to their desire to put him to death, Jesus quoted Ps 82:6: “I said, ‘You are gods’” (John 10:34), and argued as follows:

“If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” (John 10:35–36).

In order to understand Jesus’ argument, we need to understand Ps 82. This will be the subject of my next post. But however John 10:34–36 is to be understood, it must be consistent with the unequivocal evidence of John 10:30.

The New World Translation of John 1:1 and Colwell's Rule

I have been asked to comment of the interpretation of the third clause of John 1:1 in the light of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation and the Word was a god. To insist that John 1:1c should be translated and the Word was a god on the basis of Greek grammar is incorrect. Likewise, some people, seeking to defend the orthodox Christian translation of the clause, have misguidedly appealed to a grammatical rule called Colwell’s Rule.

Colwell stated that “definite predicate nouns [i.e., definite noun complements] which precede the verb usually lack the article” (E. C. Colwell, “A Definite Rule for the Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament,” JBL 52 [1933]: 20), approximately 87% of the time (David Alan Black, It’s Still Greek to Me: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Intermediate Greek [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998], 79). That may be true for pre-verbal definite noun complements, but others have pointed out that anarthrous (i.e., non-articular) pre-verbal noun complements are usually qualitative.

In the end, the proper translation of such clauses is dependent on the context, but the balance of probability strongly favors the pre-verbal definite noun complement as being qualitative, hence the suggestion by some that John 1:1c is best translated as and the Word was divine. Given the broader context that Jesus and his disciples accepted the Jewish monotheistic idea that God is one, the New World Translation is clearly a case of eisegesis dictating translation. The idea of the Word being divine is that he shares in the divine nature of the one true God.