John 1:1 says "a god"

In English, word order tells you the subject. “The Word was God” and “God was the Word” say different things. Greek uses the article instead. In theos ēn ho logos, “the Word” has the article, so it is the subject. Theos comes first for emphasis and has no article, so it is what is said about the Word.

If John had put the article on both nouns, he would have said the Word and God are interchangeable, as though everything true of “God” in the second clause were true of the Word. That would make the Word the same person John has said he was with. John avoids that. Leaving off the article lets him say what the Word is without saying the Word is the Father.

So the grammar gives you two claims in one verse. The Word is distinct from the God he was with. And the Word is, in nature, what that God is. “The Word was God” tries to carry both. So does “what God was, the Word was,” which some translators use. “A god” carries only the first claim and adds a third that John does not make: that the Word belongs to a second, lower category of god.

If a missing article required “a god,” you would expect to see “a god” every time theos appears without one. In John 1 it does not. Theos has no article in verse 6 (John the Baptist was “sent as a representative of God,” in the New World Translation’s words), verse 12 (“God’s children”), verse 13 (born “from God”), and verse 18 (“No man has seen God at any time”). The New World Translation renders all four as “God,” and rightly, because each one plainly means Jehovah.

Verse 18 is the closest parallel, because theon there is not after a preposition. It is the plain object of the verb, without the article, and it means the Almighty. The rule that turns verse 1 into “a god” is not applied in verse 18.

The grammar does not force “a god”; the translator chose it. That is no charge that the New World Translation is wrong everywhere or that every translator who chose “a god” was dishonest. It is a reason to ask what else supports the choice, and whether John’s own words do.

John 1:3 follows at once: “All things came into existence through him, and apart from him not even one thing came into existence,” in the New World Translation’s words. That is sweeping: not one thing that came into existence did so apart from the Word.

If the Word were a god Jehovah created, he would be one of the things that came into existence. Then he would have had to come into existence through himself, which is impossible. The only way verse 3 is true is if the Word is not on the list of things that came into existence.

John marks this with his verbs. The Word “was” (ēn) in the beginning, was with God, was God. Everything else “came into existence” (egeneto). He keeps the two verbs apart through the whole opening, until verse 14, where he says the Word “became flesh,” the one point at which the Word does come to be something he had not been. The pattern matches Colossians 1:16-17, where Paul says all things in heaven and on earth were created by means of the Son, and he is before all things.

Jehovah says in Isaiah 43:10, “Before me no God was formed, and after me there has been none,” in the New World Translation’s wording. If the Word is a god whom Jehovah formed, he is exactly what that verse says does not exist. See Isaiah 43:10.

You may answer that the Bible calls judges and Moses “gods” in a lesser sense, and it does. Look at how those uses work. The judges of Psalm 82 are called gods because they judge on God’s behalf, and in the next breath they are told, “you will die just as men do” (82:7, New World Translation). Moses is “like God to Pharaoh” for one task, speaking God’s word to a king. Both are titles for a role, given to human beings and meant to be understood as human.

John 1:1 is a different kind of statement. It is about what the Word was “in the beginning,” before anything was made, and John says the Word made everything. A being who existed before creation and through whom creation came is not a judge with a title. If he is “a god,” he is a god in the full sense, beside Jehovah, which is what Isaiah denies. If he is “God” in the sense John means, he is on Jehovah’s side of the line between Creator and creation.

John wrote his Gospel with a frame. It opens with the Word who was God. Near the end, Thomas sees the risen Jesus and says, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). The New World Translation renders it the same way. Here theos has the article: ho theos mou, “my God.” Thomas was a Jew who prayed to one God. He says it to Jesus, and Jesus does not correct him. He says, “Because you have seen me, have you believed? Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe” (20:29, New World Translation). See John 20:28.

Then John says why he wrote: “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (20:31). His readers are meant to believe what Thomas came to believe.

The New World Translation also renders John 1:18 as “the only-begotten god who is at the Father’s side.” So the translation agrees that John calls the Son theos in the same chapter. What is in dispute is whether John means a lesser god, and the frame he built around his Gospel points the other way.