GJohn 1.18
θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακεν πώποτε· μονογενὴς θεὸς ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known.
There is a textual variant here that has made this a very controversial verse. The question is whether the word God or son is the original reading. What textual critics do is use a set of guidelines that they have developed over the centuries in determining the original wording. They look at internal and external criteria. In this instance, the external criteria is evenly split between two texts, the Alexandrian (the early text) or the Byzantine (the later text).
Internally, and I am only going into one small piece of the debate, what you look for is would a scribe change only son or only God. God is the more difficult reading, which in textual criticism is important because it would be unusual for a scribe to change a common reading to a more difficult one. In other words, no scribe would change only begotten son to only begotten God. The later manuscripts have God and the more recent manuscripts have son.
So this is just some of the issues textual critics face when facing the undaunted task of determining which is the original reading. There are several other rules they go by, but this is one that is rather interesting because it is not necessarily intuitive until you start doing textual criticism.
Here's a paraphrase
“No one has seen God at any time. The unique One—fully God—the “I am” in the bosom of the Father, that One has explained him fully.”
θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακεν πώποτε· μονογενὴς θεὸς ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known.
There is a textual variant here that has made this a very controversial verse. The question is whether the word God or son is the original reading. What textual critics do is use a set of guidelines that they have developed over the centuries in determining the original wording. They look at internal and external criteria. In this instance, the external criteria is evenly split between two texts, the Alexandrian (the early text) or the Byzantine (the later text).
Internally, and I am only going into one small piece of the debate, what you look for is would a scribe change only son or only God. God is the more difficult reading, which in textual criticism is important because it would be unusual for a scribe to change a common reading to a more difficult one. In other words, no scribe would change only begotten son to only begotten God. The later manuscripts have God and the more recent manuscripts have son.
So this is just some of the issues textual critics face when facing the undaunted task of determining which is the original reading. There are several other rules they go by, but this is one that is rather interesting because it is not necessarily intuitive until you start doing textual criticism.
Here's a paraphrase
“No one has seen God at any time. The unique One—fully God—the “I am” in the bosom of the Father, that One has explained him fully.”
