The event of Christ’s baptism in the River Jordan is described by all four Evangelists. The most important theological details, however, are provided in the Gospel according to John, and precisely those details are falsified in the translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The reason is clear: these details are incompatible with their heretical Christology and antitrinitarian (Arian) theology.
Two verses from the Gospel according to John are crucial here. The first is John 1:15:
Ἰωάννης μαρτυρεῖ περὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ κέκραγεν λέγων· οὗτος ἦν ὃν εἶπον· ὁ ὀπίσω μου ἐρχόμενος ἔμπροσθέν μου γέγονεν, ὅτι πρῶτός μου ἦν.
The translation into Serbian reads: John bore witness of Him [Christ] and cried out, saying: This was He of whom I said: He who comes after me has surpassed me, for He was before me.
The second important verse is John 1:30:
οὗτός ἐστιν ὑπὲρ οὗ ἐγὼ εἶπον· ὀπίσω μου ἔρχεται ἀνὴρ ὃς ἔμπροσθέν μου γέγονεν, ὅτι πρῶτός μου ἦν.
The translation into Serbian reads: This is He of whom I said: After me comes a man who has surpassed me, for He was before me.
We have already mentioned the significance of the imperfect form of the verb “to be” (ἦν), particularly in the theological context of St John the Evangelist. To repeat: that imperfect—was—in this context indicates the eternal being of the One of whom the Apostle speaks: the eternal being of the Son of God, who is co-eternal with the Father. Naturally, this crucial detail is omitted in the translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses:
John bore witness about him. He cried out, saying: “This is the man about whom I said, ‘The one coming after me has surpassed me, because he existed before me.’” (John 1:15)
and:
“This is the one about whom I said, ‘The man coming after me has surpassed me, because he existed before me.’” (John 1:30).
Not only are the verbs “to be” and “to exist” distinct in Greek, but in the theological context they carry completely different connotations, as we have already explained in previous texts. But do the Jehovah’s Witnesses merely, and inadvertently, replace one verb with the other? Of course not—nothing here is accidental. Their main goal is to deny the eternity of the Son of God. At the same time, they have no difficulty admitting, in their distorted translation, that the Lord Jesus Christ—who appears before John the Baptist as a man at the Jordan—“existed” before him, even though it is well known that, according to physical birth, St John the Baptist was six months older than the Lord Jesus Christ. Did the Jehovah’s Witnesses overlook this and thereby fall into serious inconsistency? No. Everything remains logically consistent, but the eternity of the Son of God is nevertheless denied.
Thus, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the statement “who was before me” does not refer to Christ’s divinity. St John the Baptist, pointing to Christ, says: After me comes a man who was before me, for he was before me. St John affirms that the man who comes after him was before him, for he was before him. But, as we have already said, the man in Christ (that is, His human aspect) could not have been before the man John the Baptist, since the latter was older than the former (cf. Luke 1:39–44). This passage in Luke is translated more or less correctly even by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, so it is impossible that they failed to notice that the words of John the Baptist could not possibly refer to the man Jesus Christ. Precisely for this reason the imperfect “was” is of great importance. By this word, St John indicates what it means that Christ was before him—namely, that it refers to Christ’s divine nature, as the Apostle John himself described at the beginning of his Gospel: In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God (John 1:1).
It is clear, therefore, why the imperfect was disappears in the translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For if these words of St John the Baptist do not refer to the human nature of Christ—according to which He is younger than His kinsman John the Baptist, which is something the Jehovah’s Witnesses also know—then to what do they refer? Who, in fact, is Jesus Christ, if, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, He is not the eternal God? Here, then, is the answer of these neo-Arian heretics.
On their website, in the section where they interpret particular biblical passages, the Jehovah’s Witnesses also comment on God’s creation of man in the Book of Genesis. They note that God speaks in the plural—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). With whom, then, does the one God take counsel? The answer of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is the following: God first created a powerful spiritual being who later became known as Jesus, and then, together with him, created “all things in heaven and on earth” (Col. 1:16). Jesus, they argue, is so similar to Jehovah in attributes that he can be called “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Therefore, God said to him: “Let us make man in our image.”
Thus, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Son of God is a powerful spiritual being/creature (whatever that may mean), whom God-Jehovah created before all else. Then, together with that powerful spiritual creature, He created everything else—and it is with this spiritual being that God-Jehovah takes counsel in the creation of man; hence, He speaks in the plural.
This is nothing other than a literal repetition of the ancient Arian heresy. What the Jehovah’s Witnesses affirm here was described by many of the Holy Fathers when speaking of Arianism. For instance, St Gregory the Theologian, in his Dogmatic Poem, compares this Arian teaching (that God first created the Son, and then through him everything else) to a hammer in the hands of a blacksmith—“as a blacksmith makes a hammer in order to fashion a wagon,” says St Gregory.
This interpretation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is not only the long-condemned Arian heresy, which as such has no foundation whatsoever in Holy Scripture, but it is also internally inconsistent and inaccurate. The logic of the Jehovah’s Witnesses runs as follows: a powerful spiritual being (as they call the Son of God) is similar to God, and man is also created in the likeness of God, so it is said: “Let us make man in our image.” Therefore, God-Jehovah, the “powerful spiritual being,” and man supposedly share certain common attributes (which, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are qualities of love, compassion, and justice).
Yet, when the text of Genesis is carefully read, this construction collapses like a house of cards. First, we have the divine counsel: “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” (Gen. 1:26). Here the Jehovah’s Witnesses would claim that God-Jehovah is consulting with His “powerful spiritual creature/being” (the Son of God). From this it follows, and they indeed develop such an interpretation, that God-Jehovah, together with His “powerful spiritual being,” creates man.
However, Scripture itself does not say this: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…” (Gen. 1:27). Here it is explicit and unambiguous: God—and not God together with a “powerful spiritual being”—creates man, and He creates him in the image of God, not according to some common attributes shared between God and a “powerful spiritual creature.”
From this point, if one takes the interpretation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses seriously, only two possible conclusions follow: either God-Jehovah creates man alone, without the “powerful spiritual being,” or the God who creates includes both the Father and the Son. The first possibility is excluded, since the text clearly speaks in the plural: “Let us make man…” The only remaining possibility is the second—that God the Father creates through His Logos, in the Holy Spirit, and that this Trinity is one God. The Logos of God is not some “powerful spiritual creature,” but the One who “in the beginning was with God, and who was God” (John 1:1). The imperfect of the verb to be is the key!
Let us add yet another passage from the Gospel according to John. In John 6:46 it is said of the Son of God:
οὐχ ὅτι τὸν πατέρα ἑώρακέν τις εἰ μὴ ὁ ὢν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ἑώρακεν τὸν πατέρα.
The translation into Serbian reads: Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God—He has seen the Father.
The translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses reads: But no one has seen the Father except the one who has come from him. He has seen the Father.
The problematic part of the verse is the phrase referring to the Son: ὁ ὢν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ—the One who is from the Father. He indeed is from the Father in His very being, as the Only-Begotten Son. The Jehovah’s Witnesses conceal this ontological truth about the Son by means of a distorted translation—the one who has come from him (the Father). They render the participle of the verb to be (ὢν) as an act of “coming,” in the sense of the Son’s being sent by the Father.
But no, this verse does not speak of the mission of the Son; it speaks of His very being. The Son is the One who subsists from the Father, the One who is from the Father. If His being is from the Father, then He is of one essence with Him: God from God, Light from Light.
“Take heed that you are not deceived.” (Luke 21:8)
Presbyter Dr Aleksandar Milojkov
