"In the beginning." John opens on the first two words of Genesis — the Septuagint's ἐν ἀρχῇ, the very phrase the Greek Old Testament uses in Genesis 1:1 — and reaches back past the first day to what already was before anything was made. Six of the seven shelf versions keep "In the beginning" (the TLB paraphrases it away — "Before anything else existed"); the echo is the point, and this translation flags it as the first cross-reference between the testaments.

"the Word" — ho logos. Logos means "word, reason, account," and John is reaching for two streams at once. There is the Hebrew stream: the "word of Jehovah" by which the world is made (Genesis 1 says "and God said" ten times), and Wisdom, who was "with" God at creation in Proverbs 8. And there is the Greek stream: the logos of the philosophers — from Heraclitus to the Stoics to Philo — the rational principle that orders the cosmos. No English word carries all of that, so six of the seven shelf versions simply keep "the Word" (the TLB alone writes "there was Christ"), and so does this one.

"was with God" — pros ton theon. The preposition pros with the accusative suggests being turned toward, face-to-face; the Word is not merely near God but in relationship with him. "With" is the standard rendering across the shelf and here.

"and the Word was God" — or "divine," or "a god"? — kai theos ēn ho logos. This is the most argued clause in the New Testament, and the honest starting point is that the Greek grammar underdetermines it. The predicate noun theos has no article and stands before the verb, while the subject ho logos has the article. Three readings compete: definite ("the Word was God"), qualitative ("the Word was divine / what God was, the Word was" — stressing the Word's nature), and indefinite ("the Word was a god"). A definite predicate noun placed before its verb regularly drops the article in Greek — the observation behind "Colwell's rule" — so the missing article does not by itself force the indefinite "a god"; the closest study of the construction (Harner, 1973) found it usually qualitative, and concluded this clause is neither "the Word was God" nor "a god" but "the Word had the same nature as God." Five of the seven shelf versions read "the Word was God" (NIV KJV GNV DRB ASV), and the TLB paraphrases to the same effect ("is himself God"); the NWT alone reads "the Word was a god," resting its case on the absent article.

Mister takes the qualitative road — "and the Word was divine" — because it says what the construction most likely says (the Word shares fully in what God is) while keeping the distinction the next clause insists on: he was with God, so he is not simply the person "God." "Divine" is deliberately neither the flat "was God" (which an English reader can hear as "the Word is the Father" — a collapse the verse itself rules out) nor "a god" (which the grammar least supports, and which reads awkwardly against "besides me there is no god," Isaiah 44:6). This is the one place in the Gospel where whole traditions divide — is the Son fully God, a lesser divine being, or the highest of created beings? — so the note refuses to cast the deciding vote. The full argument, on every side (the grammar, "firstborn of all creation," the Angel of Jehovah, the prayer to the Father, and the counter-testimony), is gathered in the Ask Mr. Librarian post on this verse.

"came to be" — the drumbeat. The verb egeneto ("came to be, came into being") tolls through the whole Prologue, and it is set in deliberate contrast to the Word, who does not "come to be" but simply was (ēn, verses 1–2). Creation "came to be" through him; a man will "come" (verse 6); and finally the Word himself will "become" flesh (verse 14). Rendering it consistently "came to be" keeps the beat audible — the same instinct behind this translation's "and God said… and so it was" in Genesis 1.

The famous punctuation. The words ho gegonen ("that which has come to be") can be read with the end of verse 3 ("…not one thing came to be that has come to be") or with the start of verse 4 ("What has come to be — in him was life…"). The oldest manuscripts carried no punctuation at all, so both were heard in antiquity, and several early church fathers took it with verse 4. The modern critical editions (Nestle-Aland and the SBL text shown here) put the full stop before it — οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν — so that, although the verse number still files the two words under 3, their punctuation reads them with verse 4, and the NWT follows that ("What has come into existence by means of him was life"). Mister keeps the traditional English break instead, so that our verse 3 ends on the words that has come to be. The KJV NIV ASV break it the same way, against the critical editors' punctuation. It is a genuine fork in the road, and the note is here to say so rather than hide it.

"has not overcome" / "did not comprehend." The verb katelaben carries two senses at once: to seize, overpower and to grasp, understand. KJV GNV DRB hear the second — "the darkness comprehended it not"; NIV and most moderns hear the first — "has not overcome it" (NWT "has not overpowered it"); the ASV's "apprehended it not" straddles the two. John may well intend both: the darkness neither understood the light nor defeated it. Mister renders "has not overcome it" and flags the double meaning, because a footnote can hold what a single English verb cannot.

The drumbeat lands on a man. After three verses of the Word who simply was, the verb egeneto — "came to be" — now marks the appearance of a man in history: "there came a man." The hymn drops for a moment into a name and a date.

"witness" / "testify" — martyria, martyreō. This is one of the Gospel's master words, and it enters here. John's whole role is to testify; the text is careful, even insistent, that he "was not the light" but only its witness — a demotion the Gospel keeps making, probably against those in its own day who prized the Baptist too highly. (Note that the Gospel of John never names its own author; every "John" in this book is John the Baptist.)

What "was coming into the world" (v. 9)? The Greek participle can attach to "the true light" (the light was coming into the world) or to "everyone" (every person coming into the world). KJV takes the second — "every man that cometh into the world"; most moderns take the first, and so does Mister: it is the light that is coming.

"children of God," not "sons" (vv. 12–13). John keeps a careful distinction the whole Gospel through: he reserves "Son" (huios) for Jesus and calls believers "children" (tekna). NIV ASV and this translation keep "children"; KJV GNV blur it with "sons of God." These children are "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a husband, but of God" — a birth from above. (The Greek is plural, "who were born"; a few Old Latin witnesses read a singular "who was born," turning the line into a statement about the virgin birth — but the plural, about believers, is the text.)

"became flesh." The drumbeat reaches its shock: the Word who was in the beginning now became — egeneto — flesh. And it is flesh (sarx), the frail human stuff, not "a body" or "a man": the plainest, earthiest word available, chosen on purpose.

"pitched his tent among us." The verb eskēnōsen is built on skēnē, "tent, tabernacle." John says the Word literally "tented" among us — an unmistakable echo of the tabernacle of Exodus, where Jehovah's glory came to dwell in the middle of Israel's camp (the later Hebrew term for that indwelling presence, shekinah, is from the same root — shakan, "to dwell" — as mishkan, the Hebrew for "tabernacle"). Most versions flatten it — KJV "dwelt among us," NIV "made his dwelling among us." Mister keeps the tent: "pitched his tent among us," so the tabernacle and its glory — the next word — stay in view.

monogenēs — "only," not "only-begotten." The word is mono- ("only") + -genēs (from genos, "kind, kin") — "one of a kind, an only child" — not mono- + gennaō ("to beget"), despite the long "only-begotten" tradition, which entered English through the Latin unigenitus. KJV GNV ASV DRB NWT all read "only-begotten"; NIV reads "the one and only." Mister renders "the only Son" — "only" for monogenēs, "Son" supplied because the verse plainly means the Son — and lets the etymology-driven "begotten," which reads a later doctrine back into the word, go.

"grace and truth." The pair charis kai alētheia is almost certainly the Greek for a famous Hebrew pair — chesed ve-emet, "steadfast love and faithfulness" — the words Jehovah speaks over himself to Moses in Exodus 34:6. Held here, it sets a trap that verse 17 will spring.

John breaks in (v. 15). The Baptist's voice interrupts the hymn — the parenthesis is his — to say the thing he keeps saying: the one who comes after me (born later) ranks ahead of me, "because he was before me" (existed first). Later in time, first in rank and in being.

"grace upon grace" (v. 16). Charin anti charitos: anti can mean "in place of" (one grace replacing another) or "upon, in return for" (grace heaped on grace). Most render it "grace upon grace" and so does Mister.

Moses and the trap sprung (v. 17). "The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." This is not law against grace as enemies — it is the chesed ve-emet of Sinai (verse 14), now arriving in a person. And here, for the first time, the name: Jesus Christ. "Christ" (Christos) is Greek for "anointed," the Messiah — a title, not a surname, and the note flags it as such the first time it lands.

"No one has ever seen God" echoes Exodus 33:20, already on these pages — no one sees God and lives. What follows is one of the sharpest manuscript decisions in the Gospel, and exactly the kind of thing the New Testament introduction and its apparatus exist for.

The variant: "only God" or "only Son"? The earliest witnesses read monogenēs theos, "the only God" (or "God the only Son") — this is the text of the papyri P66 and P75 (c. 200), together with Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. The later Byzantine majority, and the King James tradition, read ho monogenēs huios, "the only Son." This split is precisely why NIV reads "the one and only Son, who is himself God" while KJV GNV ASV DRB read "the only begotten Son." Mister follows the early papyri: "the only God, who is at the Father's side." The harder, older reading is the one the manuscripts push us toward.

"has made him known" — exēgēsato, the root of "exegesis." The Son "explains, narrates" the God no one has seen. It is a quiet claim about the whole book to follow: the Gospel is that explanation.

"the Jewish leaders." John's term hoi Ioudaioi can mean "the Jews" broadly or "the Judean authorities" specifically — here, the temple establishment in Jerusalem sending its priests and Levites. The blanket rendering "the Jews," carried by KJV and most versions, has done real historical harm, read across later centuries as a charge against a whole people. Mister renders "the Jewish leaders" wherever the referent is plainly the authorities — and keeps "the Jews" where the text means the broader people, a festival, or a plain description ("the Passover of the Jews," "salvation is from the Jews") — and says why — the same plainness this translation brought to the curse-of-Ham verses in Genesis 9.

"I am not…" The delegation offers John three end-time roles and he refuses all three: the Messiah; Elijah, expected to return before the day of Jehovah (Malachi 4:5); and the Prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15). He claims only to be a voice — quoting Isaiah 40:3, "make straight the way of the Lord." Not the Word; a voice for it.

"whose sandal-strap I am not worthy to untie." Untying a master's sandal was a slave's job; John ranks himself below a slave to the one coming after him. Six of the seven shelf versions keep the image (shoe-latchet, sandal-strap, lace); the TLB spells out the point instead — "I am not even fit to be his slave."

"Bethany beyond the Jordan." Not the Bethany near Jerusalem (a different town two miles from the city) — a place east of the Jordan whose exact site was already lost early: Origen, in the third century, said he could not find a "Bethany" there and proposed reading "Bethabara" instead, a variant that entered some manuscripts (and the KJV). Mister keeps "Bethany beyond the Jordan," the reading of the earliest witnesses, and the map marks the site as undetermined rather than guess a pin.

"the Lamb of God." The image gathers several at once: the Passover lamb of Exodus 12, whose blood spared Israel; the lamb "led to the slaughter" of Isaiah 53; and, some hear, the ram God provided in place of Isaac at the binding (Genesis 22, where Abraham says "God will provide the lamb"). "Who takes away the sin of the world" widens the lamb's work from one nation to all.

"Look —" The Baptist's word here, and again in verse 36 and verse 47, is ide, "behold, look." This translation renders the Hebrew hineh as "Look —" all the way through Genesis; ide is its natural Greek heir, so Mister keeps "Look —" here, and the pointing gesture of the Old Testament carries straight into the New.

"the Chosen One of God" (v. 34) — another variant, and a closer call than verse 18. "The Chosen One" (ho eklektos, echoing the "chosen servant" of Isaiah 42:1) is the reading of the first hand of Codex Sinaiticus, probably of the papyrus P5, and of the Old Latin and Old Syriac; "the Son of God" (ho huios) is read by the papyri P66 and P75, by Codex Vaticanus, and by the later majority. Here, then, the great papyri stand on the other side from verse 18. The critical editors split — the SBL text shown here prints "Chosen," Nestle-Aland prints "Son" — and the editors who prefer "Chosen" do so because a scribe is far likelier to have conformed an unusual title to the familiar "Son of God" than the reverse. Mister follows the SBL text — "the Chosen One of God", as the NIV also does ("God's Chosen One") — and notes the "Son of God" of KJV ASV NWT and the majority. As at verse 18, both readings are shown, with their pedigrees.

The evangelist as translator. Three times in a few verses the Gospel stops to render a word for its Greek readers: "Rabbi (which means Teacher)," "the Messiah (which means Christ)," "Cephas (which is translated Peter)." The writer is doing, inside his own text, exactly what this project does in the margin — catching a word in the source tongue and handing across its meaning.

"the tenth hour" — about four in the afternoon, counting from dawn. It is the kind of detail a man remembers because he was there.

"you will be called Cephas." Aramaic kepha means "rock"; its Greek rendering is Petros. Jesus renames Simon on sight — a God-given name-change for a destiny, in the exact tradition of Abram becoming Abraham and Jacob becoming Israel (Genesis 32:29). This translation surfaced every Hebrew name-pun in Genesis; here the Gospel hands us the pun already translated, and we simply keep both halves — "Cephas … Peter."

"Follow me." The first direct call in this Gospel — two words, to Philip.

"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Nazareth was an obscure Galilean village, never named in the Old Testament, and Nathanael's snobbery is honest and unedited — the Gospel leaves it standing. Philip does not argue back; he answers with an invitation this chapter has already used once (verse 39): "Come and see." Behind it stands the larger claim — that Jesus is "the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and the prophets" — the whole Old Testament pointing forward.

"an Israelite in whom there is no deceit." The word for deceit is dolos, "guile," and it is chosen with care. The nation "Israel" is named for Jacob — and Jacob earned that name after a lifetime of guile: it is the very word the Greek Genesis puts in Isaac's mouth — "your brother came with deceit and took your blessing" (Genesis 27:35). Jesus sees in Nathanael a true son of Israel without Jacob's guile — a Jacob undeceived.

Jacob's ladder, and the whole chapter's key (v. 51). "You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man" quotes Jacob's dream at Bethel, where angels go up and down a stairway between earth and heaven (Genesis 28:12) and Jacob wakes to say "this is the gate of heaven" (28:17). Jesus puts himself where the ladder stood: the Son of Man — his own favored title, from Daniel 7:13, and its first appearance here — is now the meeting-place of heaven and earth, the true Bethel. That a chapter which opened "In the beginning" should close on Jacob's ladder is the Gospel telling you how to read it: Genesis, all the way down.

"Amen, amen." Jesus' solemn double amēn — his signature formula, unique to this Gospel in its doubled form. KJV renders it "Verily, verily," NIV "Very truly."Mister keeps "Amen, amen," because amen is itself a Hebrew word the Greek simply carried over untranslated — a loanword all the way down, best left as it stands.