The Begotton God?:Major Theological Corruption of The Bible? Muslim Apologists Destroyed
Channel: Africa Without Borders
Date: 2021-02-20

http://www.bible-researcher.com/only-begotten.html

This author gives the translators who have preferred “only begotten” too little credit, as if this phrase in the early English versions were merely an unthinking imitation of the Vulgate’s unigenitus, and retained in some modern versions only by the force of a verbal tradition. But the translators of the King James Version were not just imitating the Vulgate when they translated μονογενής as “only begotten.” They translated it thus because they understood it thus, in agreement with the interpretation of the word given in the Nicene Creed. And the author’s contention that Jerome imposed the terminology of the Nicene creed onto the Scriptures when he used unigenitus is unjustifiable. It is no imposition on the word to translate it thus. 13 Athanasius and the other Greek Fathers of the early fourth century did not need any Latin version to interpret this word for them, and in their disputes with the Arians they frequently explained it in the sense, “only-begotten,” with exegetical emphasis on the “begotten.” In one place Athanasius says very plainly that Christ is called “Only-begotten, because of his generation from the Father.” 14 In other places his use of the word is so connected with other words for “begetting” that it is impossible to suppose that it did not carry the meaning “only begotten.” 15 If this were not enough, modern scholarly support for this understanding of the word is certainly not lacking either. “Only-begotten” is given as a sense for μονογενής in Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2nd ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003). In the 2nd ed. of the BAGD lexicon (1979) it is said that “the meanings only, unique may be quite adequate for all its occurrences” in the Johannine literature (p. 527), but the lexicon also presents the traditional view, in which the word is understood to mean “only-begotten.” See also the article on monogenes by Büchsel in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 4, pp. 737-41. Büchsel concludes that in John’s Gospel the word denotes “more than the uniqueness or incomparability of Jesus,” because it also “denotes the origin of Jesus ... as the only-begotten.” For a full discussion of this matter see John V. Dahms, “The Johannine Use of Monogenes Reconsidered,” New Testament Studies 29 (1983), pp. 222-232. Dahms concludes, “the external evidence, especially from Philo, Justin, and Tertullian, and the internal evidence from the context of its occurrences, makes clear that ‘only begotten’ is the most accurate translation after all.” 16 On the popular level, the recently published Reformation Study Bible (Ligonier Ministries, 2005), edited by a panel of respected conservative scholars, includes this note on the phrase “the only Son” in John 1:14 — “This phrase translates a single Greek word and explicitly points to the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity.” 17