The 1 John 4:20 Test, Part 2: How did we get here?

(This is part 2 of 3. For part 1, in which I introduce the problem and create a chart, see: The 1 John 4:20 Test, Part 1: Introduction.)

It was early in my career as a pastor. In that congregation, we normally read from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) in worship. We read from New International Version (NIV) Bibles in class, because we had a bunch of them, and they were cheap, and anyway, it was widely considered to be about as good.

We were reading from 1st John, chapter 4, beginning with verse 20. Here is how it starts:

“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar.”

— 1 John 4:21a, NIV (1984)

“What do we learn about God from this verse?” we asked the class. It was our standard question.

There was a long pause, which was normal. Maybe the question would go away if no one answered? Alas, it did not. It never did. And so finally, hesitantly, one student held up her hand.

“I think maybe Satan is God’s brother,” Kenzie answered.

A Bible with its pages flipping in the wind, possibly, giving the impression that it just arrived here mysteriously, when in fact it is the result of human choices.

What in the what??? Is this a grammar problem?

Bear with me here.

“His” is a pronoun.

In grammar, as you probably learned in about 2nd grade, nouns are words that describe a person, place, or thing.

Pronouns are shorthand. They refer back to nouns, to keep us from having to repeat ourselves so much. For example, in that last sentence, “they” refers back to “pronouns”. The word that the pronoun refers back to is called its antecedent.

How did Kenzie come up with a whole alternate cosmology where Satan is God's brother? As far as I can tell, she started with a pronoun.

What does “his” refer back to? What is the antecedent? Whose brother are we talking about here?

Kenzie looked around the sentence and didn't see anything that looked promising. “His” is a male pronoun, she reasoned. It refers back to male people, places, or things. It can't refer back to “anyone”, because “anyone” means anyone, not just men.

So Kenzie did what you normally do when you are reading the Bible and you find a pronoun you can't place: you assume it refers to God. (Yes, of course God is not exactly male. We were working on that.)

At this point She had to guess. Who is God's brother? Maybe it's Satan! Therefore, according to this verse, we are not supposed to hate Satan.

The other pastor and I were taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to us that anyone wouldn’t realize that “his” referred back to anyone. It was clearly a generic “he”, meant to imply a generic male or female person.

But to Kenzie, that was not at all obvious. And that was our fault, not hers.

Yes, of course we explained it. In other words, we translated the verse into the language that she, like the rest of our students, actually spoke.

Why?

Why did we have to do that? Why did our students have to do that? Why do our students (still) have to do that? Why don't we just give them a translation that they can read in the first place?

Is this an English problem?

The Greek word is "autou". Grammatically, it is a masculine possessive pronoun. (Strictly speaking it is a genitive masculine singular personal  pronoun, but I am not explaining  the genitive case in this essay.)

In grammar, gender is simply a type of category. In languages that use this type of category, usually at least some of the words correlate to the other ways we use gender. “Man” in French is masculine, and “woman” is feminine. But why is "table" feminine? Why is “cake” masculine? For the purposes of the grammar, it doesn’t matter! You just have to learn which words go in which categories.

In the common spoken (Koine) Greek of the first century, the grammatically masculine form "autou" could be used either to refer to a male person OR generically, to refer to anyone.

100 years ago, you could do this in English, too, with the word “his”. Or anyway at least we said we could. It was always a bit performative. There have always been people who noticed that “generic” masculine was more masculine than generic.

However you interpret that history, Kenzie's story demonstrates that you can't do that in English in the 21st century. You can't use masculine words and assume people will know that you mean to include everyone. Some people might understand it that way, but for many people, today, “he” refers to someone who is male.

In Greek class in seminary, we referred to this kind of thing as “an English problem” (as opposed to “a Greek problem”, which comes up a lot when you are just starting out). The meaning in the Greek is clear in the Greek, but (modern) English can’t do that.

So, we have choices to make.

We can teach students about this old-fashioned grammar and hope they remember it better than we remember terms like antecedent.

We can let people go on assuming whatever they assume based on language they don't normally use.

Or we can give them translations that say what we tell people that they say.

(Stay tuned for part 3, “Where are we now?”, in which I discuss the results of further research, reflect on why this particular verse works so well as a test, and speculate about where we might possibly go from here.)