A discrepancy is defined as "a lack of agreement."1 This essay ponders an interesting disagreement in the Greek manuscripts at the end to the prologue (1:1-18) to John's Gospel. The issue is the following: what did the original flesh-and-blood author of the Gospel write in the original author's copy (the autograph) of John 1:18? As most regular readers of this blog are aware no autograph (original author's copy) of the Greek New Testament is known to exist. Only later copies (and copies of copies) of the autographs made through the years exist. A very few of the over 5000 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are dated in the second century but most (one might even say, virtually all) date from the third century and later.
In the late fourteenth century, the English translation of John 1:18 by Wycliffe-Purvey read (in Middle English, translated from the Latin):
No man sai euer God, no but the 'oon bigetun sone, that is in the bosom of the fadir, he hath teld out.2
In the sixteenth century the King James translation read (translated from the Greek):
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.3
The phrase in which I am interested appears here as "the only begotten son." The two English words "only begotten" are used to translate one Greek word, monogenēs, which carries the meaning of the only one of his kind, or the one and only. Thus, a clearer translation is "the only son." The term "begotten" is misleading since it suggests that the son had a beginning, which is specifically denied in John 1:1-3.
Here, however, the problems begin. Although the translation of "only son" corresponds well with the similar readings in John 3:16, 18 and 1 John 4:9, text critics consider the reading "son" (huios) to be an early scribal change of John 1:18 to agree with the passages just cited above.4 The earliest manuscripts to preserve this verse in John (P66 and P75), however, have the reading "unique God" (monogenēs theos) not "only son":
Unique God, the one being in the bosom of the Father— that one has made [him] known.5
What this unique God in the bosom of the Father makes known is the God whom no one has ever seen. This reading of John 1:18b was thought by a majority of the text critical committee considering the verse to be the earliest reading, although P75 (dated at the beginning of the third century) reads "the unique God" (o monogenēs Theos). The word "him," lacking in the Greek, refers to the invisible God whom no one has ever seen in the first half of verse 18. And that makes the conundrum facing the translator of John 1:18 evident: The sentence has [the] unique God revealing the God whom no one has ever seen. The reading "the only Son" (o monogenēs uios), which makes better sense, is regarded as a scribal correction because of the obvious difficulty. In textual criticism, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.
One member of the committee thought it doubtful that the original author would have written monogenēs Theos ("Only God") and suggested in an addendum to the full committee's report that even this earliest reading might itself be a primitive transcriptional error. This suggestion was printed in square brackets and signed A. W. (Allen Wikgren?).
As most text critics are aware, a reconstruction of the earliest reading is "if not the original, at least of the most reliable form of the text that can still be reached on the basis [o]f the material that has been preserved."6 Hence, the text situation in John 1:18 in the light of Wikgren's corrective comment points out the limitations of textual criticism as a critical study: it does not restore the original author's copy. In this case, however, the text-critical judgment of the Editorial Committee neither restores the original, nor restores the most reliable form of the text attainable given the material preserved from antiquity. And it raises the specter of a flawed original author's copy. Errors are something that every author knows only too well, as my correction of the quoted material in the first sentence of this paragraph demonstrates. Someone's typo there, after eluding the eagle eye of its author and the professional proofreaders of volume five of the NIDB, entered the print media world flawed.
Faced with this difficulty, modern translators of the Gospel of John find different ways to resolve the difficulty. The translations, to judge from those Bible translations on my shelf, print later scribal corrections to the Greek text in some cases. The reading that seems to occur with frequency is "the only son" (o monogenēs uios).
One creative solution is to punctuate the sentence differently so that there are three separate designations for the son: "monogenēs,7 God, the One That Is, in the bosom of the Father—that one has made him known"8 But few translators of the English language Bible have followed this suggestion.
How does your Bible read for John 1:18?
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
1Webster's New World College Dictionary (2002), under "discrepancy."
2Wycliffe Bible PDF, "Wycliffe Bible PDF Middle English," https://ebible.org/pdf/engWycliffe/
3The word him is written in italics because it is not in Greek.
4Bruce M. Metzger, ed. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed.; Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 2000), 169-70. The text critics in this case have also published the 28th revised edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament edited by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Germany.
5My translation.
6Joseph Verheyden, "TEXT, NT," in NIDB 5.540.
7The word monogenēs is actually an adjective but this solution reads it as if it were a noun.
8E. A. Abbott, Johannine Grammar (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 42, 55-56.
