For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life … Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. [1]

The previous misconception (not posted) dealt with Jesus as the Son of God. Now we meet another sobriquet of Jesus: the ‘only begotten’ son, as some versions (for example, the King James and the American Standard) render it. However, the New International Version translates the word, ‘one and only’ Son.

The foundation of this misconception is the mistranslation of the Greek word monogenēs as ‘only begotten’. In the late 4th century a scholar named Jerome was commissioned to translate the Bible into Latin. He translated monogenēs as unigenitus (‘one sired, begotten’), rather than sui generis (‘his own class’).

The monos part is okay: it means “only”. It’s the second part of monogenēs that presents the problem. (When we divide a word like this, we need to beware that we’re not falling victim to the etymological fallacy [2].) That word, genēs, is an inflected form of the noun genos, which means ‘race, generation, kind’. Jerome may have been slightly inattentive when he read monogenēs, and thought that genēs came from gennaō (‘I beget’) [3]. However, gennaō has two ‘n’s; but genos has only one.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology states that

monogenēs … is only distantly related to gennaō, beget. The idea of ‘only begotten’ goes back to Jerome who used unigenitus in the Vulg.[ate] to counter the Arian claim that Jesus was not begotten but made. monogenēs reflects the Heb. yā((d of Isaac (Gen. 22:2, 12, 16) of whom it is used in Heb. 11:16. [4]

So monogenēs means ‘unique; special; the only one of its kind’. Isaac was not Abraham’s only son [5] – he also sired Ishmael and six others – but he was Abraham’s special (monogenēs [6]) son because God intended to fulfil His promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3) through Isaac’s offspring.

As monogenēs is used of Jesus, it points to Jesus’ unique relationship to God the Father. Although Jesus the Word of God has taken a human nature, He still retains his nature as deity: he is ontologically (by nature; in all essentials) equal to God the Father. But Jesus is functionally (in role/ position/ relationship) lesser than the Father because He chooses to allow the Father to have the final say: ‘Not my will, but yours be done.’ [7] It is not Jesus’ human nature that makes him lesser than the Father; it is his deliberate choice to submit to the Father’s will.

Jesus himself said that the Father was greater than He was (John 14:28), but He never said that the Father was superior (in nature) to Him. The Greek word for ‘greater than’ is meidzōn; the word for ‘superior to’ is kreittōn (or kreissōn). The letter to the Hebrews (1:4) describes Jesus’ nature as superior to (kreittōn) that of the angels’ [8].

By nature, Jesus the Word is equal to the Father; however, by role – and that through His own choice – He is lesser than the Father. Even if the Incarnation never happened, the Word would still be functionally lesser than the Father because of His choice to submit to the Father’s will. While the Father is greater than Jesus [9] by virtue of His position in the Trinity and his role in salvation history [10], Jesus is not inferior in nature to the Father: if He were, He wouldn’t be ‘in very nature God’ [11], and ‘the fullness of deity in bodily form’ [12].

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Footnotes

[1] John 3:16, 18
[2] The etymological fallacy is to interpret a word based on its original source or its parts. One example of this mistake would be that ‘butterfly’ means ‘an airborne tub of churned cream’. Another example would be that ‘nice’ really means ‘ignorant’ because that’s what it meant in its original Latin.
[3] gennaô is how the word would be found in a dictionary; but as it is actually used, you would find it written as gennô. An inflected language is one where the words change depending on their function in the sentence. English is a non-inflected language: the position of the word indicates its relationship to the other words. A sentence in English usually goes: subject – verb – object – indirect object. For example, “I was chased by an angry mongoose.” In John 1:14, the word is monogenous; in 1:18 it is monogenês. In verse 14, monogenous indicates the word is masculine in gender, singular in number, genitive in case. In verse 18, monogenês is masculine, singular and accusative (it is the object of the sentence).
[4] K.-H. Bartels, ‘Monogenēs’, NIDNTT. The words in square brackets are mine.
[5] Genesis 25:1-2.
[6] Hebrews 11:17.
[7] Matthew 26:39; John 5:19-30; 12:49-50.
[8] Although the text says that Jesus ‘became’ superior to the angels, this doesn’t imply that Jesus wasn’t or isn’t full deity. It may be a reference to Psalm 8 – ‘you made him [humanity] a little lower than the angels’ – which the writer of Hebrews later refers to (2:6-8).
[9] John 14:28.
[10] This reflects the idea that God is the same essentially as He is economically. In other words, He is the same by nature as He is when He acts in the world; where, inferentially, we can see those acts.
[11] Philippians 1:6.
[12] Colossians 2:9.

copyright Troy Grisgonelle 2007.