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The Mistranslation of John 1:1

[Be forewarned: for many, this may be difficult to understand.]

John 1:1 In [the] beginning was the Word…

When the Apostle John wrote this phrase, he did not include the definite article “the” before “beginning.” English-Bible translators have presumed that a “the” is implied, and so have included it.

This is a very questionable presumption. Such presumptions can be the bane of both the translation and the interpretation of a Scripture.

The Greek word translated as “beginning” is archē. Its root meaning is, according to Strong’s (#G746), “a commencement.” Jesus used the same word when He made this statement about Himself:

Revelation 22:13 “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Archē/Beginning/Commencement and the Telos/End/Completion.”

Here Jesus did use the definite article “the” before archē: thereby identifying Himself as The Archē. That is to say, He, the Divine Word, was and is the Commencement of all things.

And therein lies the problem with the traditional John 1:1 reading of “In the beginning…” Jesus was not, as that wording may easily be understood to mean, merely present at the event of the beginning: He was The Beginning. Knowing this, John correctly wrote,

In Commencement was the Word...

– that is, the Word was the very Commencement, the very First, of everything. [Note: In Greek, the subject of a sentence often follows the verb, as above; whereas in English, the subject is generally placed first. So the more normal English reading here should really be, “The Word was in Commencement, and the Word was pros/near to/with God, and the Word was God.”]

To sum up: God ‛spoke’ the Divine Word, which was of Himself and was Himself (“…and the Word was God”), and that Word was the Commencement of everything that came to be:

John 1:3 All things were made dia/through/by means of Him…

Thus Commencement has a dual use and meaning in these passages: it is used both as a personal titular name, and also as the act that that name signifies.

Now, for the same basic reasons as in verse 1, there is also no “the” in verse 2:

John 1:2 The same was in commencement pros/near to/with God.

That is, the Divine Word was ‛spoken’ by God, and thus closest to God, when that Word became the Commencement of all of Creation. However, much later,

Galatians 4:3 …when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, [to be] made of a woman…

John 1:2 And the Word was made flesh…

At that era in the course of the Creation, which era culminated at the Crucifixion, the Divine Word came to be farthest away from God. But after His sacrifice and resurrection, He began the process of the return of all of the redeemed from the fallen Creation back to God. (See 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 for the details.) When He becomes the Telos/Completion of that return, then “a new heaven and a new earth” will become the home of the righteous. Rev. 21:1

Addenda: There is also no “the,” in the Hebrew text, in the first phrase of Genesis:

Genesis 1:1 In reyshyth/beginning/commencement, God created the heavens and the earth.

This passage, when viewed in the light of what was shown above, can and should be understood to mean, “In Commencement [= the Divine Word], God created the heavens and the earth.” Like in Rev. 22:13 (quoted above), the Hebrew word reyshyth, equivalent to the Greek word archē, should be understood as a title, a name, and not merely as an event. All the worlds, and all events of time and space, commenced by means of the Word, among whose titles are Beginning/Commencement and End/Completion.

These are such deep mystical concepts that it is easy to understand why translators would choose to gloss over them: hence their added word “the” in Genesis 1:1 and in John 1:1.