Some modern translations appear to be so intent on preserving or promoting a particular theology, that they have changed the meanings of the verses, or pressed too far in theologizing the verses. A case in point is John 1:1. Not content even with the translation "the Word was God," at least one translation has "the Word was God Himself." (The New Testament, translated by Charles B. Williams, 1937) There is neither grammatical nor contextual authority for that. Far more in the spirit of what the apostle John actually wrote is a translation of John 1:1 similar to that by William Barclay (Westminster John Knox Press, 1968): "the nature of the Word was the same as the nature of God."
The beauty and significance of the Sahidic Coptic version is its general literalness and faithfulness to the context and spirit of the underlying Greek text(s). Below, we will consider several other Coptic renderings:
Romans 9:5 After mentioning Christ, does the sescond part of this verse refer to Christ as Almighty God, or does it have a second Being in view? The Coptic has pnoute etHiJn ouon nim petsmamaat Sa nieneH Hamhn. Interestingly, petsmamaat is the relative particle (p.et -) + the qualitative form of the Coptic verb smou (bless, praise), i.e., smamaat which means "be blessed." (Richard Smith's Coptic Dictionary, p. 27) Therefore, it could best be translated as a separate sentence referring, not to Christ, but to his Father: "God, who is over all, (is) the one who is blessed for ever." Whereas the Coptic text of Romans 9:5 has some ambiguity, it appears to be less so than the Greek, and points clearly to two entities -- Christ and God -- not to one God who is also Christ. (Compare the similar readings in the New American Bible and the Revised English Bible, i.e., "...from them by natural descent came the Messiah. May God, supreme over all, be blessed forever. Amen.")
Colossians 1:15. Some modern Bible translators don't like the concept of Christ being part of the creation by God, though that is what the Greek indicates literally. So, in their versions they change "firstborn of" to "supreme over" or "having primacy over" all creation. Colossians 1:15 in Coptic has no such mistranslation. It definitely and literally uses a Coptic term that unmistakably means "first-born," i.e. pSrp mmise, comprising the Coptic words for "first" and "born," or "generated." It customarily means "first born child." (Smith's Dictionary, p. 15) Coptic scholar George Horner's English translation of the Sahidic text correctly reads: "the firstborn of all creation" at Colossians 1:15. And the Coptic text specifically says "of" all creation, not "over" all creation.
What is a "Godhead"? This word at Colossians 2:9 (KJV, etc.) gives the wrong impression of some kind of three-faced god united in one head, as is found in some depictions of the Trinity in medieval church artifacts or paintings. The Sahidic Coptic version has tmntnoute, which simply means "divinity" in Coptic. (i.e., noute, "god," + the abstract prefix t.mnt-).
What about some of the various New Testament terms for Hell? Usually the Greek word hades is translated in the Sahidic Coptic version by the old Egyptian word amnte , meaning literally, "the west" (i.e., the place of sunset darkness; death). The Greek term gehenna is usually transliterated in the Coptic New Testament. The Copts had a 500-year influence of Greek to go by, and Greek was so well understood that some Greek words were naturalized in the text, rather than translated. For tartarus at 2 Peter 2:4 the Coptic version has p.noun, which signifies "the abyss, a deep place." The Bible associates neither conscious life nor torment with "Hell." The parable of the rich man in Hades was just that, a parable. And Gehenna was literally a garbage dump outside Jerusalem where fires were kept burning, to consume totally anything dead that was thrown there, not to torment it.
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That's interesting about Romans 9:5, As I recall Bruce Metzger used the SH as evidence for the trinitarian interpretation of this verse
ReplyDeleteMore Words for Clarification, Please
ReplyDeleteMatt 25:46
Excuse me again but I do so love the additional witness given by the Coptic... and I have not had time to read all the threads of what has been written .. Much less understand them all after, sorry .) I am asking light, about the word for “pruning”or “cutting off” in Greek Kolazos or Kolasin and what you know about it from the Coptic Witness. Is Coptic understood as well as the Greek? This word Kolazo, kolasin. It is what I have been researching and would like more. . . trying to dig deeper. It seems it is one of the things they deliberately try to keep hidden, hide- for the support of their doctrine of immorality of soul and eternal torment. . . Or just have never questioned like the blindingly simple Parosia, verses their translating coming!!! Can we get that word also?!!!? Matt24:3! Please!
I know there are probably hundreds of other scriptures that show the wicked get cut off or are just gone...Prov 2:22. ( That is my next list)- but for now Could you please give us a literal translation of the cutting off word in Matt 25:46. Please shed some light on this by way of Coptic (and Greek if possible) wording. Please I am sorry if I bother you,
I am al-most ready to do the Coptic in Twenty Lessons” thing:)!( So you can be spared my twenty questions!:)
Also I was wondering if your web pages and threads could be organized according to “words” or scriptures? Or if it already is and I just cant see it?_ sorry again..It seems there is a lot more scriptures to compare besides John 1:1 It has been thoroughly exposed if any wants to dig deeply. Just look at the rest of the Bible and ask where does it say “God the Son”? Zero, Jesus the Father? Zero.! Where are all the spurious interpolations to be found and exposed? (thanks also for your list) The spurious scriptures Always occur in trying to incorporate the Trinity lie. But now lets smash the lies of Hellfire and eternal torment...Using the Coptic witness! That is what I would like to see on this blog.... a lot of other scriptures, thank you very much!
Your Fellow Worker in arms,
(and thanks again for the munitions)
Trish
I appreciate this article as I have been doing a lot of studying myself. Thank you for your insight and work.
ReplyDeleteYour appeal to “Coptic conservatism” repeatedly confuses three quite different questions: whether a Coptic translator rendered a Greek expression relatively literally, what semantic range the resulting Coptic construction possessed, and what theological conclusion follows from that construction in context. A formally conservative translation does not automatically become a theological commentary, still less a proof that one disputed interpretation is correct. In several of the texts you cite, the Coptic evidence either leaves precisely the same exegetical question open as the Greek or actually fits the Trinitarian interpretation quite comfortably. In a few cases, moreover, the historical or lexical claims on which you build your conclusion are themselves inaccurate.
ReplyDeleteYour opening treatment of John 1:1 is a good example of how the problem arises. If Charles B. Williams’s “the Word was God Himself” is intended to mean that the Logos is personally identical with the Father whom he is said to be “with” in the immediately preceding clause, then the addition “Himself” is indeed unnecessarily interpretive. The Greek does not contain an equivalent of English “himself,” and Trinitarian theology does not require such an identification. John distinguishes ὁ λόγος from τὸν θεόν personally in John 1:1b and then predicates θεός of the Logos in John 1:1c. A Trinitarian can therefore readily agree that “the Word was God” is preferable to an English formulation that might misleadingly suggest “the Word was the Father himself.”
But this concession gives you no support for a Jehovah’s Witness Christology. In fact, the William Barclay paraphrase that you approvingly quote—“the nature of the Word was the same as the nature of God”—moves in precisely the direction that mainstream grammatical analysis of John 1:1c has long taken. Philip B. Harner’s classic study of pre-verbal anarthrous predicate nouns concluded that θεός in John 1:1c is primarily qualitative: the construction emphasizes the nature or character of the Logos. Harner’s point was not that the Logos is one lesser deity among other deities, but that the Logos possesses the nature denoted by θεός. Thus the alternative to the mistaken equation “the Word = the Father” is not “the Word = a secondary god.” The natural distinction is between personal identity and predication of nature: the Logos is not the same person as the God with whom he is, yet what God is, the Logos is.
The Sahidic evidence does not overturn this distinction. The often-repeated argument that the Coptic indefinite article at John 1:1c mechanically means “a god” in the English sense has been subjected to detailed examination by Brian J. Wright and Tim Ricchuiti in a peer-reviewed study in The Journal of Theological Studies. Their investigation surveyed how Sahidic rendered Greek anarthrous nominative singular θεός and found that the translators did not mechanically reproduce Greek anarthrousness with a Coptic indefinite article. Of twenty-five relevant instances, the great majority were rendered with the Coptic definite article, while the indefinite construction was exceptional. They therefore rejected the idea that Coptic article choice simply duplicates the presence or absence of the Greek article.
More importantly, Wright and Ricchuiti conclude that the indefinite article in John 1:1c is best interpreted descriptively or qualitatively. In their analysis, the Coptic translators understood the Logos as possessing the qualities or nature belonging to the God of the biblical context, not as introducing an ontological category of a lesser or intermediate god. They explicitly state that the other Coptic evidence they examine does not support some intermediate category of “sort of god” or subordinate deity. Whatever one ultimately thinks of every detail of their proposal, it is enough to demolish any claim that “Coptic conservatism” self-evidently supports the New World Translation’s theological reading. The Coptic form requires grammatical interpretation just as the Greek does.
The same methodological problem becomes even more obvious in your discussion of Romans 9:5. You argue that the Sahidic wording points “clearly to two entities,” Christ on the one hand and God the Father on the other. Yet you first concede that the Coptic itself retains some ambiguity and then, without supplying any new grammatical argument, convert that ambiguity into a clear distinction of referents. Those two claims are inconsistent. If the construction admits more than one syntactical connection, you cannot simply announce that it “points clearly” to the one your theology prefers.
DeleteThe current Sahidic text contains the sequence referring to Christ “according to the flesh,” followed by ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲉⲧϩⲓϫⲛ ⲟⲩⲟⲛ ⲛⲓⲙ, “God who is over everyone/all,” followed by ⲡⲉⲧⲥⲙⲁⲙⲁⲁⲧ ϣⲁ ⲛⲓⲉⲛⲉϩ, “the one who is blessed forever.” The fact that ⲡⲉⲧⲥⲙⲁⲙⲁⲁⲧ contains a relative formation and a qualitative form of the verb meaning “bless” does not tell you that its referent must be a newly introduced person different from Christ. “God who is over all, the one blessed forever” can function appositionally as a further description of the immediately preceding Messiah just as naturally as it can be segmented into a new doxological sentence. Morphology does not insert an ontological full stop.
Indeed, a peer-reviewed study of precisely Sahidic renderings of θεός expressly includes Romans 9:5 among the Coptic passages in which Jesus is the referent of “God.” Wright and Ricchuiti state this in their discussion of the Sahidic data while distinguishing it from passages whose referent is genuinely ambiguous. You may disagree with their judgment, but its existence alone shows that your description of the Coptic as “clearly” pointing to two entities is untenable. Coptic specialists can read this very wording christologically.
The Greek evidence is still more unfavorable to your assertion of clarity. Romans 9:5 reads, in the disputed portion, ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. The issue is chiefly one of syntactical attachment and punctuation, not textual variation. The most straightforward reading takes ὁ ὢν, “the one who is,” as continuing the description of the immediately preceding ὁ Χριστός: Christ, who according to the flesh is from Israel, is then described as the one “who is over all, God blessed forever.” The alternative punctuation separating the clause into an independent doxology to the Father is grammatically possible, and a scholarly Trinitarian exegesis should acknowledge that. But possibility is not probability.
Bruce Metzger’s well-known study of the punctuation of Romans 9:5 and Murray J. Harris’s extended treatment of the verse both argue that the Christological reading has stronger syntactical and stylistic support. The NET translators summarize the principal considerations: ὁ ὢν most naturally continues a preceding referent, while an independent Pauline doxology normally has a different word order, with the adjective “blessed” placed prominently before the divine name. They consequently judge the reference to Christ to be preferable while explicitly acknowledging the alternative. The responsible conclusion is therefore not that Romans 9:5 is incapable of a non-Christological punctuation, but that neither Greek nor Sahidic permits you to turn that punctuation into the obvious or “clear” reading.
Your appeal to the New American Bible and Revised English Bible does not change this. A translation that chooses one of the grammatically possible punctuations is evidence that competent scholars have accepted that interpretation; it is not evidence that the Coptic syntax requires it. The existence of major modern versions taking the opposite construction, and scholarly arguments supporting them, shows precisely why you cannot use one translation tradition as though it were a grammatical adjudication of the underlying text.
Your treatment of Colossians 1:15 repeats the same mistake in a different form. You correctly observe that the Sahidic uses a genuine Coptic expression meaning “firstborn.” No Trinitarian argument of any scholarly seriousness requires denying that. The Greek word is πρωτότοκος and the Coptic translator correspondingly uses ⲡϣⲣⲡⲙⲙⲓⲥⲉ, “firstborn.” The issue has never been whether Paul secretly wrote “supreme” instead of “firstborn.” The issue is what the relational phrase “firstborn of all creation” means in this discourse.
DeleteYou say that “the Greek indicates literally” that Christ is part of God’s creation. That is precisely what the Greek does not “literally” state. The Greek literally gives you πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως. The semantic relationship between the head noun and the genitive must then be interpreted. A partitive analysis is one grammatically possible proposal; a relation of subordination, supremacy, reference, or priority is another. Greek genitive morphology does not contain a semantic tag reading “member of the class named by the genitive.”
This is why established Greek grammarians and commentators can render the expression “firstborn over all creation” without altering πρωτότοκος into another lexical item. Daniel Wallace classifies πάσης κτίσεως here as a genitive of subordination; the NET note follows that analysis and explicitly renders the construction “firstborn over all creation.” Murray Harris likewise emphasizes that πρωτότοκος can express either chronological primogeniture or preeminent rank, pointing especially to Psalm 89:27, where the Davidic king is designated God’s “firstborn” and immediately described as exalted among the kings of the earth. You may contest Wallace’s grammatical classification, but you cannot honestly call such a translation a mere alteration motivated by translators who “don’t like” Christ being a creature. It is a published syntactical analysis grounded in the Greek construction and its context.
Nor does George Horner’s “the firstborn of all creation” decide the question. That is a perfectly natural formally close translation. But English “of” does not itself establish membership. We speak of “the king of Israel,” “the lord of the house,” “the ruler of the nation,” and “the head of the department” without converting the governing person into one specimen of the thing governed. The semantic relation comes from the complete construction, not from the English preposition “of.”
The same is true of the Coptic relational marker. The Sahidic text unquestionably preserves the firstborn language, and the modern Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpus confirms the Sahidic Colossians tradition. But Coptic relational syntax is not a theological code in which every “of”-type construction means individual-to-class membership. Therefore the contrast you draw between Coptic “of” and English “over” is misleading. “Over” in translations such as the NIV or NET is not pretending that the source text contains an explicit preposition meaning “over.” It is an interpretive English representation of the semantic relationship that those translators believe the genitive expresses.
Most importantly, your appeal to “literalness” ignores Paul’s own explanatory clause. Verse 16 begins with ὅτι, “because/for”: Christ is called πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως because ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα, “in him all things were created.” Paul then spells out the scope of τὰ πάντα in sweeping terms: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities. He repeats that all things have been created δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτόν, “through him and for him,” and then adds that Christ is πρὸ πάντων, “before all things,” and that all things hold together in him. The interpretation “first-created member of creation” is therefore not something supplied simply by the word πρωτότοκος. It requires you first to construe the genitive partitively and then to impose an unexpressed exception upon the repeated τὰ πάντα: all created things, except Christ. The immediate discourse does not state that exception. The NET notes accordingly take verse 16’s causal explanation as a principal reason for understanding Christ’s “firstborn” status as supremacy relative to creation rather than creaturehood within it.
DeleteThus the Sahidic translator’s use of an actual Coptic “firstborn” expression proves nothing that a Trinitarian needs to deny. Trinitarians read πρωτότοκος as “firstborn.” What they deny is your unproved equation “firstborn = first created.” The Coptic translation preserves the lexical title; it does not supply your ontological inference.
Your treatment of Colossians 2:9 contains a still more elementary error. You object to the King James word “Godhead” because, you suggest, it may give the impression of a “three-faced god united in one head,” such as certain medieval artistic representations. That is simply false etymology. The “head” in English “Godhead” is not anatomical “head.” “Godhead” descends from Middle English “godhead” and an Old English abstract formation; the suffix corresponds to “-hood” and denotes a state, nature, or condition. Historically the word means divinity, deity, or divine nature. It is related in formation to words such as “maidenhead,” not to an image of several faces attached to one skull.
Consequently, when the KJV translates θεότης as “Godhead,” it is not smuggling a medieval three-faced icon into Paul’s vocabulary. It is using an archaic English abstract noun meaning substantially what modern versions express with “deity” or “divine nature.” Modern English speakers can certainly be confused by the obsolete morphology, which is why “deity” is usually a clearer contemporary rendering. But that is an argument for modernizing English vocabulary, not an argument against Trinitarian exegesis.
Your observation that the Sahidic has ⲧⲙⲛⲧⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ is therefore not a counterexample to “Godhead” at all. It confirms the same basic semantic category. The Coptic Dictionary Online glosses ⲙⲛⲧⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ as “divinity” and even documents Coptic usage in which the expression refers to “the complete Godhead” and “the nature of God.” The Coptic abstract prefix ⲙⲛⲧ- performs precisely the sort of abstraction involved in English “-hood/-head”: it creates a noun denoting a state or quality from the underlying nominal concept. You therefore do not have Coptic “divinity” on one side and Trinitarian “Godhead” on the other. You have two different languages employing abstract nouns for substantially the same semantic field.
More decisive still is the Greek word Paul actually used: θεότης. Modern lexical resources gloss it “deity” or “divinity”; BDAG characterizes it as the state of being God, divine character or nature, deity, divinity. The Greek text does not say merely that Christ possesses one divine attribute or receives a measure of divine power. Paul says that πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος, “all the fullness of deity,” dwells in him σωματικῶς, “bodily.” One should be cautious about building the entire doctrine of the Trinity out of a lexical contrast between θεότης in Colossians 2:9 and θειότης in Romans 1:20, because the semantic overlap of the terms has been debated. But that caution does not turn θεότης into “a divine quality” in the weak sense of one creature possessing godlike attributes. The phrase is maximal: the whole fullness of what the noun denotes dwells bodily in Christ.
DeleteThe Coptic rendering therefore does exactly what you would expect a translation to do: it renders the Greek abstract noun for deity with a Coptic abstract noun for divinity. Nothing in that correspondence contradicts Trinitarian theology. If anything, your argument depends on creating an opposition between “Godhead” and “divinity” that neither the history of the English word nor the Greek and Coptic lexicons support.
Your final discussion of Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus suffers from a related but broader equivocation. You begin by correctly distinguishing several Greek terms that older English Bibles often collapsed under the single English word “hell.” That lexical distinction is useful. ᾅδης, γέεννα, and the verb ταρταρόω are not synonyms with identical histories or functions. But after making that correct distinction you immediately treat the Coptic translation equivalents as if they settled disputed questions about consciousness, punishment, and the final state of the wicked. They do not.
If Sahidic renders Greek ᾅδης with ⲁⲙⲛⲧⲉ, an Egyptian term associated historically with the west or realm of the dead, that tells you how the Coptic translator represented the Greek term. It does not tell you that every New Testament occurrence of Hades means merely an unconscious grave. Translation equivalence is not theological definition. The semantic contribution of a word in a particular passage is determined by that passage.
Luke 16:19–31 makes this especially obvious. You dismiss the rich man and Lazarus account by saying that it “was just that, a parable.” But the classification “parable” does not make the narrated predicates semantically disappear. Jesus’ parables employ imagery to communicate propositions and warnings; one must determine what role the imagery plays rather than neutralize it by attaching the genre label “parable.” In Luke’s narrative the rich man dies, finds himself in Hades, is conscious, sees Abraham and Lazarus, speaks, remembers his brothers, experiences anguish, and describes himself as tormented. The Greek explicitly depicts him ἐν βασάνοις and later uses language of anguish or torment. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM likewise preserves the Sahidic text of the narrative; translating Hades through an Egyptian underworld term does not remove the conscious narrative action attributed to the dead man.
This does not mean that every detail of the parable should be converted into a literal map of the intermediate state. That would be as methodologically crude as declaring the whole passage doctrinally irrelevant because it is a parable. Scholarly interpretation is more careful. Sławomir Szkredka’s study of Luke 16, for example, explicitly recognizes the parable’s depiction of postmortem punishment and argues that the immediate postmortem scene is coherent with significant features of Luke’s eschatological outlook, even while discussing tensions and indeterminacies in Luke’s presentation. Even scholarship skeptical of using Luke 16 as a proof text for an inherently immortal soul still recognizes that the story itself narrates a conscious postmortem existence. The theological debate concerns how that narrative imagery relates to broader anthropology and eschatology; it is not settled by saying “parable.”
DeleteThus your sentence that “the Bible associates neither conscious life nor torment with ‘Hell’” is much too sweeping if you have just included Hades under the English category “Hell.” Luke 16 explicitly associates Hades with a conscious figure experiencing torment in the narrative. You can argue about the ontological literalness of that imagery; you cannot say the association is absent.
Your treatment of Gehenna contains an even clearer historical problem. You assert that Gehenna “was literally a garbage dump outside Jerusalem where fires were kept burning, to consume totally anything dead that was thrown there.” That familiar story is repeated constantly in popular sermons and older reference works, but it is not established by first-century evidence. Modern scholarship has repeatedly pointed out that no first-century literary or archaeological source identifies the Valley of Hinnom as Jerusalem’s perpetually burning municipal rubbish dump. Erin Runions, in a peer-reviewed study of the reception of Isaiah 66 and Gehenna, explicitly describes the burning-garbage-dump claim as a mistaken historical “fact” that entered later interpretation. The tradition is commonly traced to the medieval Jewish commentator David Kimhi, many centuries after the New Testament period. Even sources defending the Watch Tower interpretation ultimately appeal to that much later tradition.
The actual biblical history of the Valley of Hinnom is darker and better attested. The valley was associated with idolatrous rites and child sacrifice, especially the Topheth traditions condemned in Kings and Jeremiah, and became a symbolic landscape of divine judgment. The imagery of corpses, fire, disgrace, and judgment is therefore biblical without requiring an imaginary first-century municipal incinerator. Your annihilationist conclusion cannot be established by appealing to fires allegedly maintained by Jerusalem’s sanitation department when the historical premise itself lacks contemporary evidence.
Nor does the fact that γέεννα originates from a real geographical name mean that Jesus’ use of the term is exhausted by the literal valley. Ordinary metaphorical development does not work that way. “Gehenna” can originate as the name of the Hinnom Valley and become an eschatological judgment term, just as many religious and cultural words develop senses beyond their original topography. By the New Testament period Jesus can speak of being liable to Gehenna, being cast into Gehenna, or God destroying both soul and body in Gehenna. Whether those texts teach eternal conscious punishment, irreversible destruction, or something more complex has to be argued from the texts themselves. You cannot settle the debate by asserting that the valley was simply a garbage dump whose fires demonstrated annihilation.
Your discussion of Tartarus at 2 Peter 2:4 is partly correct but proves considerably less than you claim. The Greek does not actually contain the noun “Tartarus”; it uses the verb ταρταρόω, effectively “cast into Tartarus.” The background is the Greek conception of Tartarus transformed through Jewish apocalyptic traditions concerning rebellious angels. Scholarly comparison with 1 Enoch is particularly important here: 2 Peter depicts sinful angels confined in darkness and kept for judgment in a way closely related to the Watchers tradition.
DeleteIf the Sahidic translator used ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲛ, “the abyss/deep,” that is an intelligible functional translation of the imagery. But once again, the translation does not cancel the Greek source concept. A Coptic translator rendering a culturally specific Greek underworld term with an Egyptian term for an abyss does not thereby tell you that Peter believed Tartarus meant nothing more than a figurative condition of inactivity or nonexistence. Peter’s own description is of angels being confined in gloomy darkness and reserved for judgment.
At the same time, a careful Trinitarian or traditional Christian argument should not use 2 Peter 2:4 as though it directly described the final destiny of wicked human beings. It does not. The immediate referents are sinful angels, and their confinement precedes a future judgment. On this limited point, your caution is justified. But that concession does not establish your larger proposition that the Bible never associates postmortem punishment with conscious existence. It simply establishes that 2 Peter 2:4 is about imprisoned angels rather than dead human beings.
The cumulative problem with your argument is therefore not that the Sahidic Coptic version is unimportant. It is important. Ancient versions can illuminate how translators understood their Greek exemplars, preserve textual history, and reveal interpretive tendencies. The error lies in treating a translation choice as though it automatically adjudicated the theological semantics of the original.
At John 1:1, a major peer-reviewed investigation of the Sahidic indefinite article concludes that it is best understood qualitatively and explicitly rejects the notion that the translator was classifying the Logos as some intermediate lesser deity. At Romans 9:5, the Sahidic phrase does not force a new referent after Christ, and published study of the Sahidic θεός material itself treats Christ as the referent there. At Colossians 1:15, the Coptic accurately preserves “firstborn,” but neither its “of”-type relational syntax nor Horner’s literal English “of” proves a partitive relation; the Greek genitive remains a matter of contextual analysis, and the causal explanation in verses 16–17 strongly motivates the traditional reading of Christ as standing in comprehensive causal and sovereign relation to creation. At Colossians 2:9, Coptic “divinity” is not a correction of English “Godhead” at all: “Godhead” historically means divinity or divine nature, and both the Greek θεότης and the Coptic ⲙⲛⲧⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ occupy precisely that semantic field. And with Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus, the ancient Coptic translation equivalents cannot be converted into a doctrine of unconscious extinction; Luke explicitly narrates conscious torment in Hades, the perpetually burning garbage-dump story about Gehenna lacks first-century evidence, and 2 Peter’s Tartarus language describes conscious angelic confinement awaiting judgment rather than providing a definition of “hell” as mere nonexistence.
DeleteYour underlying methodological slogan—Greek theology versus conservative Coptic literalism—therefore collapses upon examination. The Coptic evidence is neither uniformly non-Trinitarian nor semantically self-interpreting. Sometimes it preserves an ambiguous Greek relation; sometimes it translates a qualitative predication through its own article system; sometimes it uses an ordinary Coptic abstract noun corresponding closely to the Greek; and sometimes it substitutes an Egyptian lexical equivalent for a Greek cultural image. In none of these cases can you move directly from “this is what the Coptic words literally say” to the theological conclusion you wish to draw without performing the very contextual and semantic interpretation that you accuse modern translators of performing. The issue is not whether the Coptic is valuable. It is whether you are allowing Coptic grammar to say only what it actually says. In these examples, you repeatedly ask it to say considerably more.