‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son’: no verse of the New Testament is better known. What does ‘begotten’ mean, and why does the Qur’an insist that God ‘neither begets nor is born’?
Begotten in the Bible
The Greek word in John 3:16 is monogenēs, which the King James Version rendered ‘only begotten’. Many modern translations render it ‘only Son’.1 The Hebrew Bible calls Israel God’s firstborn son and the king God’s son, ‘this day have I begotten thee’, using sonship as a picture of God’s favour.2
The creed of 381
The creed of Nicaea, completed at Constantinople in 381, turned the word into doctrine: the Son is ‘begotten of the Father before all ages, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.’ Here ‘begotten’ means that the Son shares the Father’s very being. See The Council of Nicaea, 325.
The word in brief
The Greek monogenēs joins monos, only, to a root that can mean kind or birth, and scholars still debate whether John meant “only of its kind” or “only born”. The earliest Latin versions rendered it unicus, unique, and Jerome, revising them, chose unigenitus, from which the English phrase descends. The creed then took the second sense and built on it the eternal generation of the Son. Muslims read the same passage, and the Hebrew usage before it, as the language of love and election, which the Qur’an itself never uses of God, so as to close the door to any likeness between the Creator and His creatures.
Neither begets nor is born
The Qur’an answers in its shortest chapter:
قُلْ هُوَ ٱللَّهُ أَحَدٌ ١
Say, “He is Allāh, [who is] One,
ٱللَّهُ ٱلصَّمَدُ ٢
Allāh, the Eternal Refuge.
لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ ٣
He neither begets nor is born,
وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ ٤
Nor is there to Him any equivalent.”
Qur’an 112:1-43
Elsewhere it asks how God could have a son when He has no consort and created all things, and it says that it is not befitting for God to take a son: when He decrees a matter, He says only ‘Be’, and it is.4 The chapter answers the creed in its own vocabulary. Where the creed says ‘begotten, not made’, the Qur’an says that God neither begets nor is begotten, and that nothing is comparable to Him; whatever comes from God is made by His command. On this view the Jewish usage of the Hebrew Bible was right all along: ‘son of God’ described a servant God loved, and nothing more.
Further reading: Monotheism in the Abrahamic religions, The Council of Nicaea, 325.
Notes
- John 3:16, King James Version; cf. New Revised Standard Version, which reads ‘his only Son’. ↩
- Exodus 4:22; Psalm 2:7. ↩
- Qur’an 112:1-4, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩
- Qur’an 6:101; 19:35. ↩