When 'arche' is a personal title

This is about Rev 3:14, and how to translate the Greek word 'arche' here, which here refers to Jesus, who is titled

‘the Amen, the Witness, the Faithful and True One, the [arche] of the creation of God’.

As I often say, meaning resides in function and context, and the place of grammar in translation should be treated in that context. Among a number of contextual features, particularly striking is the parallelism with an earlier verse, similarly about Jesus:

Rev 1:5:

‘the Witness, the Faithful One, the Firstborn of the Dead, and the Ruler [archwn] of the kings of the earth’ 

Rev 3:14:

‘the Amen, the Witness, the Faithful and True One, the Ruler [arche] of the creation (or kingdom - see below) of God’ 

The parallelism in the two verses will be our primary guide, because the book obviously intends that when you hear 3:14, your mind goes straight back to 1:5. The parallel words 'archwn' and 'arche' both naturally bear the weight of a similar meaning, which leads to the joint meaning of "ruler" in these lists of titles of Jesus. Arche has other frequently used meanings, which I'll come to, but those other meanings operate where the author hasn't structured this striking parallel! 

In 1:5, it's uncontroversial to produce the translation "Ruler of the kings of the earth." The parallel phrase in 3:14 needs more thought. 

Debate about translating 'arche' is frequently rehearsed and I'll come to that. But first, a clue ought to be recorded. It's the word translated as creation. It has been suggested that κτίσεως as 'creation' is a misunderstanding of the author's intentions. That is, κτίσεως can mean a system of authority, according to BDAG 572–573. In other words, I suggest, what we have is another form of "Ruler of the kingdom of God." 

Given κτίσεως being a system of authority, we can see all the more easily the parallel:

ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς

ἡ ἀρχὴ    τῆς κτίσεως τοῦ Θεοῦ

Context: The Amen

There is another interpretative assistance close to hand. As we saw in Revelation 3:14, Jesus also bears the title of the 'Amen':

‘the Amen, the Witness, the Faithful and True One, the Ruler of the creation/regime of God’.

In the Old Testament, when 'Amen' is used as a personal title, there is only one being who bears the title. It is of course Yahweh, the uncreated God (Isaiah 65:16). It is a title of God. It is therefore highly significant that it's Jesus' title in Revelation. 

This is part of the pattern in Revelation of ascribing to Jesus things that uniquely belong to Yahweh in the Old Testament. This title stands apart from other titles that can be applied to other beings. In other words, Jesus is identified with Yahweh, and is ruler over the kingdom of God.

Of course, words can be used with overtones of meaning. Words don't have to be binary in the hands of skilful writers, meaning either only one thing or the other. If κτίσεως gives us 'regime/kingdom,' it may still retain the overtone of 'creation.' Roger Forster's reading of the Amen is instructive here. 

"This almost certainly comes from Isaiah 65:15-17... Amen is clearly used as a name for God." The title being: the God of Amen. 

Using the 'creation' meaning for κτίσεως, Forster writes: "the context is 'The God of 'Amen' in Isaiah 65, which continues,' I create a new heaven and a new earth' (v17) - we are not looking backwards but forwards to the New Creation. God is doing something totally new, and Jesus, rising from the grave, is the head of this New Creation... So this is a wonderful, glorious statement: the Kingdom of God has arrived...'

(Roger Forster, Revelation: A Commentary for Our Time Part 1, Push Publishing, 2022. 171-72)

Forster translates the last title of Jesus then as "The Beginning of the creation of God" meaning that the resurrection has begun the New Creation. The meaning is forward-looking. Richard Bauckham disagrees with this line of interpretation. For him, the verse is looking back to the Genesis creation (translating 'the origin (arche) of God's creation') and with ‘arche’ as ‘origin/beginning’ meant to link it to God the Father and Jesus being titled "the Beginning and the End" in Rev 21:6-7 (the Father) and 22:12-13 (Jesus, obvious but made even clearer with v. 20). This link to the title 'The Beginning and The End' should be fairly obvious. Jesus as the source of creation is Bauckham's reading.

(Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, Cambridge University Press, 1993)

In summary, my preference is led by how Revelation 3:14 corresponds to Revelation 1:5: 

Rev 1:5:

‘the Witness, the Faithful One, the Firstborn of the Dead, and the Ruler [archwn] of the kings of the earth’ (ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς)

Rev 3:14:

‘the Amen, the Witness, the Faithful and True One, the Ruler [arche] of the kingdom of God’ (ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως τοῦ Θεοῦ)

Controversy

I am satisfied that this is the sensible choice of credible interpretations. However. when I first wrote about 3:14, it was because I saw anti-Trinitarians try to press the construction of the text to classify Jesus as a 'created' being, and not eternal. I have to say, giving Jesus the title "the Amen" would be a very strange way of trying to signal a 'created' being. 

 

It’s obvious that these words are all personal titles, and the degree of parallel between the verses is obvious too. It would be inconsistent, and would break the purpose of the sequence of titles, to suddenly mean that Jesus was a 'created' being as if that were what the passage is about. 

For anti-Trinitarians, this really turns on use of the word 'arche,' priming it by translating it as 'the beginning,' and then interpreting this to mean that Jesus was the first piece of creation made. The first jigsaw piece of all the stuff made, so to speak. I see little or nothing in the passage to commend this reading. Needless to say, in the New Testament, Jesus isn't the first piece of creation. Jesus "laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning" rather than being the beginning piece himself (Hebrews 1:10). Rather than being the beginning piece, he "was" already (past tense - John 1:1) with God in the beginning, as St Basil the Great pointed out in his On the Holy Spirit.

The word 'beginning' has worked just fine for Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians alike, but the forced interpretation of 'created being' is anti-Trinitarian. 

However, I'll just say a little more about translating arche as “ruler”, which I believe is a better translation in the context of these parallel verses. 

Context: it's a person

'Arche' can apply to prominent persons as ruler or leader, but that doesn't go for when it refers to things:

• When a prominent person is in view, translating arche as ‘ruler’ or 'rule' is within usage in translation (e.g. Luke 20:20 - τῇ ἀρχῇ καὶ τῇ ἐξουσίᾳ τοῦ ἡγεμόνος)
• When a person is not in view, but some other kind of object is in view, ‘beginning’ is common usage in translation (e.g. Mark 13:8 - ἀρχὴ ὠδίνων)

This is a factor regardless of the genitive construction found, the genitive which some anti-Trinitarians find more fascinating here. 

So, for example, where arche is applied to persons, the context is not unusually one of power and authority. Not related to the start of something. Hence, "ruler" fits. One can see similar with the closely related word ἀρχὴν in 1 Corinthians 15:24 and Jude 1:6 meaning 'domain' (whereas in other places it means 'beginning'). There are other examples where arche doesn't at all mean 'first created thing.' Prior to the New Testament, in philosophy, the Greek "arche" was the eternal archetype on which all created things are based according to BDAG 137-38. Note also Josephus' Antiquities 4:220 - αἱ ἀρχαὶ τῶν πόλεων - meaning leaders of cities. So all these things were around for Hellenised peoples, such as those highly educated ones reading and writing books in fluent Greek. Such as John.

In Revelation 3:14, arche is indeed the title of a person, and hence "ruler" fits. It's a string of titles:

‘the Amen, the Witness, the Faithful and True One, the Ruler of the creation/regime of God’.

In English translations, it's exceedingly rare for arche to mean any person having ‘The Beginning’ as a personal title. 

As said, in Revelation we have the title 'The Beginning and the End' including the Greek word arche, a title applied to both the Father (21:6-7) and the Son. So, although some anti-Trinitarians think that arche makes the Son a part of creation by way of being called (in that translation tradition) "the beginning of creation," that would be unjustifiably inconsistent. Indeed, the 'arche' language no more makes the Father a part of creation than it does the Son. So it's not a wide open gateway to being classified as 'created.'

In summary, the informative parallelism of 3:14 with 1:5, the pattern of personal titles in both verses, and the context of a prominent person, is the combination that supports ‘ruler’ in translation. But that is not to rule out 'beginning' as an overtone.