Bible Q&A: Will I See My Husband in Heaven?

Continued from page 1

I'm confused. Is drinking alcohol a sin? If it is, why did Jesus turn water into wine? A friend has told me that it wasn't really wine--it was just sweetened water. My belief is that drinking in moderation (e.g. having a glass of wine when having a meal) is fine. Am I wrong? -Ijeoma D.

You are not wrong. Wine in the Bible could range in alcoholic content from about 2% if it was `new wine' to much stronger (14%), in which case it was classified as `strong drink'. The Bible says nothing against having a glass of wine once in a while; in fact, Paul urges Timothy to have a glass to settle his stomach (1 Timothy 5:23). Wine was the replacement for water in antiquity for health reasons, as there were no water purification plants in antiquity. It was the normal table beverage.

In response to a previous column about the translation of the Bible by Jehovah's Witnesses:

John 1:1 was not falsified by Jehovah's Witnesses in order to prove that Jesus is not Almighty God. Jehovah's Witnesses, among many others, had challenged the capitalizing of "god" long before the appearance of the New World Translation, which endeavors accurately to render the original language. Five German Bible translators likewise use the term "a god" in that verse. At least 13 others have used expressions such as "of divine kind" or "godlike kind." These renderings agree with other parts of the Bible to show that, yes, Jesus in heaven is a god in the sense of being divine. But Jehovah and Jesus are not the same being, the same God.

Moffatt's translation:
John 1: 1-3
"The Logos existed in the very beginning,
the Logos was with God,
the Logos was divine.
He was with God in the very beginning:
through him all existence came into being,
no existence came into being apart from him."
--Robert L.

Thank you for your recent column in which you comment on [quote] "The Jehovah's Witness Bible." There you seem to agree with the contention that the New World Translation is part of "a scholarly conspiracy to amend the Bible to suit particular theological views" of Jehovah's Witnesses. Curiously, the example you chose to cite does not actually "amend the Bible" but simply includes a single solitary indefinite article ("a"), which is completely acceptable to secular Greek scholars. The only real objections to the NWT wording of John 1:1 come from within Christendom, rather than from strict academia. Isn't this an example of intellectual dishonesty on your part, your calling this "amending the Bible"? --Theresa A.

I will answer these two queries together. First of all, it is disingenuous to cite Moffat's translation of John 1:1-3 as if he meant something other than "God" by the word "divine" in that Scripture, when it is perfectly clear from reading the rest of his translation that he takes the two terms "God" and "divine" as synonymous. Moffatt was not a supporter of Jehovah's Witness ideas about the deity and would have been appalled that his translation might be used to suggest that Jesus ought not to be called God.

Secondly, there are at least seven or eight places in the New Testament where Jesus is simply called God, and there is no reason to think the term means anything less than God the Father. A good example of this would be in John 20:28, where Jesus is called both Lord and God by Thomas. Or one could point to Romans 9:5.

As for the second comment of Ms. A, I must explain the Greek in some detail. We are dealing with a predicate nominative in a sentence where the word order in the Greek would be backwards to an ordinary English sentence--it reads literally "and God was the Word." The author certainly does not want to say "and the God was the Word," because that would imply that the one called the Word exhausted the godhead, indeed replaced the Father. Our author's theology is that there are several persons in the godhead, including the Logos, or Word.

The fact that "the Word" is the subject of this Greek clause, but follows the verb, dictates what one does with the object of the verb, "God" which precedes the verb. In such a case in a Greek sentence, the object does not normally take a definite article and the absence of the article certainly doesn't provide warrant for a translation like "a god" or "divine." In this very same chapter the definite article is omitted in verses 6,12,13, and 18, where the term "God" refers not to the Word, but to God the Father. Again, the absence of the article tells us nothing about whether or not we should capitalize the noun Theos here.

B.M. Metzger, the leading Bible translator of the modern era (head of both the RSV and NRSV teams) stresses that "those who translate 'a god' [or divine] here prove nothing thereby save their ignorance of Greek grammar" (see C. Keener's discussion in his The Gospel of John. A Commentary, Vol. One, p. 373). There was a perfectly good Greek term for "divine"--"to theion"--which our author could have used if he wanted to merely say Jesus was "divine" in some lesser sense than God is divine. This phrase is never used of Jesus either in John's Gospel or elsewhere in the New Testament.

Therefore, I stand by my statement--the New World Translation is meant to bolster an ideology that is at odds with what the New Testament says and means by calling Jesus God.