1This is a faithful saying: someone who seeks to be an overseer desires a good work. 2The overseer therefore must be without reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, modest, hospitable, good at teaching; 3not a drinker, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous; 4one who rules his own house well, having children in subjection with all reverence; 5(for how could someone who doesn’t know how to rule his own house take care of God’s assembly?) 6not a new convert, lest being puffed up he fall into the same condemnation as the devil. 7Moreover he must have good testimony from those who are outside, to avoid falling into reproach and the snare of the devil.
8Servants, in the same way, must be reverent, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not greedy for money, 9holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience. 10Let them also first be tested; then let them serve if they are blameless. 11Their wives in the same way must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, and faithful in all things. 12Let servants be husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. 13For those who have served well gain for themselves a good standing and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.
14These things I write to you, hoping to come to you shortly, 15but if I wait long, that you may know how men ought to behave themselves in God’s house, which is the assembly of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. 16Without controversy, the mystery of godliness is great:
God was revealed in the flesh,
justified in the spirit,
seen by angels,
preached among the nations,
believed on in the world,
and received up in glory.
1 Timothy 3:16 “God was revealed in the flesh"
“And we all agree, our religion contains amazing revelation:
He was revealed in the flesh,
vindicated by the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.” (NET)
The line “He was revealed in the flesh,” however, is not found in all ancient manuscripts. Most of the later ones have instead “God was revealed in the flesh.”
The evidence that ‘he’ instead of ‘God’ is authentic, however, is compelling. First, the oldest and best manuscripts have ‘he’ here. In fact, no original wording of any manuscript before the 8th/9th century had ‘God.’ In Greek, the difference between ‘he’ and ‘God’ is a single letter: ‘he’ would be written ΟΣ; ‘God’ as ΘΣ (ancient mss often use abbreviated ΘΕΟΣ as ΘΣ, with a line above ΘΣ). One can easily imagine a scribe adding a stroke in the middle of the omicron to turn ‘he’ into ‘God.’ None of the ancient versions have ‘God’ and no church father testifies to ‘God’ here until the end of the 4th century.
Second, on the surface the grammar of ‘he’ is awkward. It is actually the relative pronoun ‘who,’ a reading that scribes would naturally want to change to something more suitable (the harder reading is usually the original reading, and is one that scribes routinely altered to an easier, more palpable reading). Significantly, the Latin manuscripts virtually all have ‘which,’ a reading that could not have come from ‘God’ but only from ‘who.’ They testify to a second-century Greek manuscript as their ancestor.
Is the word ‘he’ (or ‘who’) so difficult that it should be considered spurious? No. In reality, the line “He was revealed in the flesh” is the first line of a six-strophe hymn. Many hymns in the Greek New Testament started with the relative pronoun ‘who’ (e.g., Rom 4:25; Phil 2:6; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3). Once the genre is taken into account, the relative pronoun fits well in the passage and should be considered authentic.