θεός

Three translations of John 1:1, all rendering the same Greek:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (ESV)

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” (New World Translation, the Bible of the Jehovah’s Witnesses)

“When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was.” (New English Bible)

The Greek is identical in all three. En archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos. The difference is what the translators believed theos could and could not mean.

The third translation reaches for paraphrase to avoid saying what the Greek says. The second translation invents a meaning the Greek does not support. The first translation lets the Greek speak: theos ēn ho logos — the Word was God.

Most of the time, disagreement among English translations is a disagreement about emphasis or tone. Here, the disagreement is about the deity of Christ. Theos, the most foundational word in the New Testament’s vocabulary of God, sits at the center of the Christian confession — and at the center of the heresies the church has been required to refute. Volume One of this project opened with logos, the Word made flesh. Volume Two opens with theos, the God whose Word the Word is.

This chapter is about that word.

The Word

The Greek word is θεός (theos), pronounced in the academic Erasmian convention of this book as theh-OSS, with the accent on the second syllable. The diphthong eos is two distinct vowels: theh-OSS, not theez.

The word family is enormous. The most important relatives:

Theotēs (θεότης) — deity, the abstract quality of being God. Used at Colossians 2:9 (“in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”). This word will receive its own chapter (Chapter 5).

Theiotēs (θειότης) — divinity, divine nature. Used at Romans 1:20 (“his eternal power and divine nature”). Often treated as a near-synonym of theotēs, though confessional theologians have at times distinguished them carefully.

Theios (θεῖος) — divine, the adjectival form. Used at 2 Peter 1:3-4 (“his divine power… partakers of the divine nature”) and at Acts 17:29 in Paul’s Areopagus speech.

Theopneustos (θεόπνευστος) — God-breathed, inspired. The famous word from 2 Timothy 3:16 (“all Scripture is breathed out by God”), built from theos + the pneō root (to breathe). A hapax legomenon (a word occurring only once) in the New Testament, but theologically foundational.

Atheos (ἄθεος) — without God, godless. Used at Ephesians 2:12, where Paul describes the Gentiles before Christ as “having no hope and without God in the world.” The English word atheist derives from this Greek root, though the New Testament sense is closer to estranged from God than to denying God’s existence.

The etymology runs back through Indo-European roots, where the reconstructed ancestor of theos is related distantly to Latin deus (god), Latin dies (day), and Sanskrit dyaus (sky-god, the source of the Greek divine name Zeus). The etymological background is interesting but does not determine the New Testament meaning. By the time of the New Testament, theos was simply the standard Greek word for God or a god — used by pagans for their deities and by Greek-speaking Jews and Christians for the God of Abraham.

The Septuagint background is critical for understanding the New Testament’s use of theos. When Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek (the project we know as the LXX), they faced a choice about how to render the Hebrew words for God. Hebrew uses two main terms: Elohim (the generic word for God or gods) and the personal divine name YHWH (the Tetragrammaton, usually transliterated Yahweh, sometimes rendered Jehovah in older English Bibles). The LXX translators settled on a convention: theos would render Elohim, and kyrios (lord, master) would render YHWH.

This convention shapes the entire New Testament. When a New Testament writer says theos, he is using the Greek equivalent of Elohim. When he says kyrios, he is using the Greek equivalent of YHWH. The two words name the same God — but with different shades of emphasis. Theos names God in His divine being; kyrios names God by His personal name. The chapter on kyrios in Volume One treated this distinction at length.

The implication for theos in the New Testament is this: when the New Testament uses theos, it is drawing on the LXX’s vocabulary for the God of Israel — the Elohim of the Old Testament Scriptures. It is not introducing a new God. It is naming the same God, in the same vocabulary, with the added testimony that this God has now spoken finally in His Son.

Range of Meaning

Theos in the New Testament covers a meaningful range:

The one true God. The dominant New Testament usage. Theos names the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Redeemer. Hundreds of occurrences. This is the meaning a reader of the New Testament should assume by default.

A pagan god. Used negatively or polemically. Acts 14:11 — the people of Lystra cry out that “the gods (theoi) have come down to us in the likeness of men.” 1 Corinthians 8:5 — “indeed there are many so-called gods in heaven or on earth.” The New Testament uses the word for false gods only to expose their falsity, never to legitimate them.

Divine beings or angels. Rare and contested. Some passages in the LXX use theoi (plural) for what the Hebrew calls elohim — beings in the divine council, possibly angels. The New Testament does not develop this usage in any substantial way.

Christ. This is the theologically loaded usage that drives much of this chapter. Theos is applied directly to Jesus Christ in several New Testament passages — John 1:1, John 1:18, John 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1, Hebrews 1:8. Seven direct attributions in passages that are not theologically disputable in their meaning, even if some are disputable in their punctuation. The pattern is too consistent to dismiss.

The Holy Spirit. By implication. Acts 5:3-4 — Peter says to Ananias, “you have not lied to man but to God,” after first identifying the lie as “lying to the Holy Spirit.” The two statements equate. The Spirit is theos.

The belly. Philippians 3:19 — Paul’s ironic description of the enemies of the cross: “their god is their belly.” Clearly satirical; the New Testament will sometimes use the word ironically to expose disordered worship.

The “god of this world.” 2 Corinthians 4:4 — Paul’s description of Satan, “the god of this world,” who blinds the minds of unbelievers. Used by analogy, not by ontology. Satan exercises rule over the unregenerate world, but he is not theos in the same sense the Father is.

The dominant usage — by far — is the first one. When the New Testament says theos without qualification, it means the one true God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ.

Where You’ll Meet It

John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The foundational New Testament text for understanding theos in its relation to the Word. The Greek deserves close attention: en archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos.

The three-clause structure is precise. First clause: en archē ēn ho logos — “in the beginning was the Word.” Second clause: kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon — “and the Word was with the God” (note the article — ton theon, “the God,” referring to the Father specifically). Third clause: kai theos ēn ho logos — “and the Word was God” (no article — theos, predicate nominative). The grammar carries the doctrine. The Word is distinguished from the Father (Clause 2: the Word was with the Father). The Word is identified as God (Clause 3: the Word was God). Trinitarian doctrine is not imposed on the verse by later church councils; it is right there in the Greek grammar.

John 20:28. “Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” In Greek: Ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou. This is the first New Testament instance of a believer addressing Jesus directly as theos. Notice the construction: both nouns carry the article and the personal pronoun. Thomas is not making an abstract theological statement; he is making a personal confession. My Lord and my God. Jesus accepts the address without correction — and the contrast with Revelation 22:9, where the angel refuses worship, is important. Jesus accepts what an angel must refuse. The text is one of the strongest in the New Testament for the deity of Christ.

Romans 9:5. “From their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” The verse is famously disputed at the level of punctuation: should “who is God over all” refer back to Christ, or should it begin a new doxology to the Father (“God who is over all, blessed forever”)? The Greek favors the first reading on grammatical and stylistic grounds — Paul’s word order, the natural flow of the participial phrase, and the comparative weight of doxologies elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. Most modern translations agree. Paul calls Christ theos.

1 Corinthians 8:6. “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” This is Paul’s Christianized version of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4 — “the LORD our God, the LORD is one”). Paul takes the Hebrew Shema’s two key terms — Yahweh (= kyrios in LXX) and Elohim (= theos) — and distributes them across Father and Son: theos belongs to the Father, kyrios to the Son. But the monotheistic confession of the Shema remains intact: one God, one Lord, and the God and the Lord are the same God. Paul is doing in two verses what the church would take centuries to articulate in creeds.

Hebrews 1:8. “But of the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.’” The author of Hebrews quotes Psalm 45:6 (LXX 44:7) and identifies the addressee as the Son. In other words: the Father addresses the Son as theos. The Old Testament’s Elohim of the Psalm becomes, in the New Testament’s reading, an address from the First Person of the Trinity to the Second. The text would not work this way if the Son were not fully theos. The verse is one of the cornerstones of the New Testament’s case for the deity of Christ.