Journal of Biblical Literature:
Dale Moody, “God’s Only Son: The Translation of John 3:16 in the Revised Standard Version,” Journal of Biblical Literature 72, no. 4 (1953): 213–19.
Moody’s article defends the RSV’s translation of
MONOGENES, arguing that “only begotten” is an etymological, linguistic, and historical error. He certainly was not the first one to have made this case, but his arguments in particular seem to have influenced at least two generations of New Testament scholarship. I think this is due in no small part to the fact that Moody’s article is the first one cited in BDAG’s entry on
MONOGENES (BDAG is the most important and authoritative lexicon of New Testament words; see right). Anyone looking to BDAG for a definition of
MONOGENES is going to be confronted with the non-generative interpretation of the term that is reflected in Moody’s article.
(One interesting historical note: Dale Moody was a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary during its former liberal era. Moody’s work is apparently based on Francis Warden’s Ph.D. dissertation written at SBTS in 1938. Over the summer, I went to SBTS’s library and found the dissertation. It is still unpublished, but a
summary of Warden’s conclusions appeared in April of 1953 in the journal
Review & Expositor.
Moody’s article appeared later that same year in December in the
Journal of Biblical Literature.)
Many NT scholars view Moody’s article as the definitive word on
MONOGENES, but I believe that Moody was wrong—really wrong. And here’s why.
1. Moody claims the suffix –GENES means “kind” without any notion of generation.
Moody is correct that the Greek suffix –
GENES derives from the word
GENOS. But Moody is wrong about the semantic range of
GENOS and the suffix derived from it. In some contexts
GENOS means “kind,” but in other contexts it means “offspring.” In fact, in John’s one use of the term
GENOS, it clearly refers to “offspring” or “one that is begotten from another” (
Revelation 22:16). “Offspring” is the
only attested meaning for this term in John’s writings! Moody is also wrong about the semantic range of the –
GENES suffix. There are many examples of this suffix that indicate “begottenness.” For example,
OIKOGENES means “home-born” (
Gen. 15:3 LXX). Paul uses the term
EUGENES to mean “well-born” (
1 Cor. 1:26). Again, Moody has misconstrued both the meaning of
GENOS and the suffix derived from it.
2. Moody says that if John had meant “only-begotten” he would have used the term MONOGENNETOS.
Why does Moody claim that John would have used the term
MONOGENNETOS, not
MONOGENES, if he had meant “only begotten”? Because the former is derived from the verb
GENNAO, which everyone agrees denotes
generation. We’ve already seen that Moody is mistaken about
GENOS, but he’s also mistaken about
MONOGENNETOS. The term
MONOGENNETOS does not appear to be attested in ancient Greek literature before the second century (it does not appear in Liddell-Scott’s lexicon). If John were to have used the term, he would have to have been the one to coin it. But why would John coin a new term when
MONOGENES was ready at hand? This is a term, after all, that means “only-begotten” in numerous texts across ancient Greek literature (according to
Lee Irons’s recent research in which he has located 60+ examples of
MONOGENES in non-biblical Greek before the second century).
3. Moody argues that MONOGENES in Hebrews 11:17 cannot possibly mean “only-begotten.”
Moody cites
Hebrews 11:17 as decisive evidence against the “only-begotten” interpretation of
MONOGENES.
Hebrews 11:17 says that “Abraham… was offering up his
MONOGENES son.” Moody says that because Abraham had other children (e.g., Ishmael), the term can’t mean that Isaac was his “only begotten.”
MONOGENES must indicate that Isaac was his “unique” son. But this is mistaken as well. The writer of Hebrews is specifically pointing out that Isaac is “uniquely
begotten.” The author is showing incredible sensitivity to the wider context of Genesis in which Abraham had once questioned whether his heir would come from his own body (
Gen. 15:2-4) and whether that heir from his own body would be Ishmael (
Gen. 17:18,
21). “Begotten” addresses the first question, and “uniquely” addresses the second. In other words, the idea of “begottenness” is
necessary in this context. Moody has this completely backwards.
4. Moody’s linguistic arguments are not sensitive to the context of John’s use of the term.
In every instance that John uses the term
MONOGENES, it follows a passage/context in which he uses the term
GENNAO to refer to the “new birth”—every single instance (see
John 1:14,
18;
3:16,
18;
1 John 4:9). That is no accident. John is intentionally drawing a distinction between the new birth that we experience and the Son’s unique begottenness from the Father. John seems to be saying that while Christians have been “begotten” by the Holy Spirit, Jesus is the “uniquely begotten” Son of God. His “begottenness” is different from ours and indeed utterly without parallel.
