This Sunday must, in theory, be at least the second time I heard the new translation of the beginning of John’s Gospel read at mass. But it’s the first time I noticed the use of the phrase “only begotten God” in v. 18. At the first mass, I thought the Deacon had just transposed “Son”; but when I heard the same thing again at the second mass, I read the official translation myself and found that, indeed, it says “only begotten God”.
In my ignorance, I was very surprised. So, when I got home, I got out my Nestle-Aland only to find that the variant chosen for their Greek New Testament, and an extremely well attested one at that, was not “only begotten Son” (or “only begotten [one]”) but “monogenes theos”: only begotten God. So, then I got out my translations (a not inconsiderable task) and how many of those used this translation? Zero. Almost all (including traditional translations like the Douay-Rheims, and “modern-traditional” like the Knox Bible, the REB, the NRSV, the NJB etc.) have some variation on “only begotten Son”.
I even checked the ESV Catholic Edition, on which the Lectionary is based, and it has “God the only Son”; a neat compromise. But the Catholic bishops must, for some reason, have felt that it wasn’t quite literal enough. The Spanish Navarre Bible has, like the Lectionary, “only begotten God”.
Although it sounds incongruous to English ears, there is a strong argument in its favour from the codexes and evidence of the Fathers. But why? What does “only-begotten God” signify? If it is primitive – which seems likely – it gives a real Biblical foundation to Nicene Christianity, because the “monogenes” must stand in relation to the ungenerated Father, to the “arche” of the Trinity. But at the same time, if the monogenes is also “theos” then he must be, in preserving the unity of God, the genuine and consubstantial Son, not some created thing. I suppose that is what the Bishops had in mind: a clear statement of Nicene orthodoxy, read at Mass.
Lost in Logres 