Did the Centurion Declare Jesus ‘the Son of God’?

For the purposes of this post, we are concerned only with Matthew 27:54 (not the parallel passages in Mark 15:39 and Luke 23:47). This will limit the scope and keep this post as concise as possible.

To paraphrase the question posed in the title: Upon witnessing the events at Jesus’ crucifixion, did the centurion make a Christian proclamation? The answer hinges, in part, on how the exegete interprets the specific syntax in this verse. Word order in the Greek makes this a bit ambiguous:

θεοῦ υἱὸς ἦν οὗτος
theou huios ēn houtos
of-God Son was this

To begin the process of disambiguation (clarification), we start by finding the subject. The pronoun οὗτος, “this” is clearly the subject.¹ Because it is placed after the verb (ἦν, “was”), it is emphatic: this.² The verb ἦν, “was” is a linking verb, also known as a copular or copulative verb (CV).³

Continuing backwards, υἱός, “son” is a noun, and so it is the predicate nominative (PN). Because it is placed before the verb (PN_CV), it is emphatic: son.⁴ The genitive (possessive) θεοῦ, “of-God” (or “God’s”) is typically placed behind the word it modifies, yet here it precedes the noun, thus marking it emphatic: of God.⁵ The tentative translation, then, is “This was son of God.”

So all except the verb have emphasis! But that’s not all there is to this sentence.

When the PN precedes the CV (PN_CV) and is without the Greek article ὁ (ho),”the” (-art), this particular construction (-artPN_CV) may be functioning in one of three ways: definite (“the son of God”), indefinite (“a son of God”) or qualitative (something akin to ‘in nature son of God’). These three exegetical possibilities must be kept top of mind before interpreting further.

To assist in narrowing these three exegetical possibilities, we might consider what the centurion could have said instead.⁶ That is, we could investigate other possible ways of phrasing this.

Had the centurion wanted to mark this indefinite, he could have placed θεοῦ υἱὸς behind the verb (CV_PN): ἦν οὗτος θεοῦ υἱὸς.⁷ This would then much more likely say “This was a son of God.

Had the centurion wanted to mark this definite, he could have simply added the Greek article ὁ (+art) to υἱός (+artPN_CV), which would then unambiguously read “This was the Son of God”. Alternatively, he could have placed θεοῦ υἱὸς after the verb and added the article ὁ to υἱός (CV_+artPN).⁸ This would unambiguously say “This was the Son of God”.

But since the above options were not taken, we are probably on firm ground to assume “Son of God” should be understood qualitatively. This, then, would focus on Jesus’ sonship.⁹ However, this is rather difficult to properly translate into English.

At any rate, from there we must consider historical context. The centurion was a Greek Roman and, accordingly, steeped in the polytheism of his day. Understood through this lens, he may have meant something like: “Surely, this individual had the qualities of a son of God!”

Yet his words appear to indicate he was not only taking note of the all the events occurring but also listening to Jesus’ mockers, some of whom specifically used the phrase “the Son of God” (27:39–44).¹⁰ With all this in mind, it is certainly possible the centurion, led by the Spirit, did make a Christian proclamation. To further support this, Harner and (separately) Wallace recognize that this specific syntactical structure tends toward qualitativeness and to a lesser extent definiteness; however, some can even be qualitative with a further nuance of definiteness.¹¹ This could possibly make the centurion’s proclamation something akin to:

“Surely, this individual had the qualities of the Son of God!”

It could even be: “Surely, this individual had the qualities of God’s Son!”

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¹ Finite verbs encode person and number and so contain a built in subject. In this case, the verb ἦν is third person singular (he, she, it), and we have the subject explicitly expressed as the demonstrative pronoun οὗτος.

² If the subject is expressed, as here, the usual placement is before the verb; so, placing it behind the verb indicates emphasis. Cf. Donald A Hagner, Matthew 14–28, WBC, Vol. 33B (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1995), p 848.

³ In English, “helping verbs” are sometimes used with participles in verb conjugations (“was going”, was trying”). This is not the verb’s usage here, though Greek does sometimes use such periphrastic constructions.

⁴  See Hagner, Matthew 14–28, p 848; cf. John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, Accordance electronic ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p 1220.

⁵ See Hagner, Matthew 14–28, p 424. Here Hagner compares the similar syntactical structure in 14:33.

⁶ Or what Matthew could have recorded the centurion as saying. The exegesis here might depend on the interpreter’s specific position on Scripture. While orthodoxy requires a belief in the inspiration of Scripture (that God superintended all Scripture), the individual may be somewhere on a continuum between very rigid or more flexible on what this entails. Are these words the words of the centurion verbatim? Or might the NT writer mean to convey the basic message of the events but portray them in a particular way to bring forth a particular emphasis (e.g., Christological)? See Craig S. Keener, Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019), esp. pp 123, 306, 350–351.

⁷ See Philip B. Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns: Mark 15:39 and John 1:1” Journal of Biblical Literature 92 (1973): p 76.

⁸ Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns”, pp 76–77.

⁹ Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns”, pp 80–81.

¹⁰ The formulations vary a bit.

¹¹ See Harner, “Qualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns”, pp 80–81, 82–83, 87. Cf. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), p 263, particularly Chart 27: The Semantic Range of Anarthrous Predicate Nominatives.