Yes, it's a totally wrong translation. No one seems to have hit on the some of the essential reasons why, which are linguistic. I are offered them in a comment at Faith-Promoting Rumor, but for some reason that comment was flagged as spam and has never appeared. Here it is below:
Symmachus (signo Eusebius) wrote:This translation of John 1:1 is as amusing as it is absurd. In that, it reminds me of many an ancient etymology; Isidore of Seville is a goldmine, but sources as far afield as Plato, Varro and the Talmud work the same way: link up two words by mining the margins of one word's meaning for superficial resemblances to the other. The Hall-Nibley translation of λόγος looks like that. Sure, λόγος has to do with speaking, but it doesn't follow that it can also mean "speaker" or "spokesman" or whatever. Even Google Translate doesn't make this basic error in reasoning.
Anyone relying on an argument about the general problems of ambiguity in any translation in order to lend any scholarly credibility to this translation still has to consider the following linguistic facts that are internal to the Greek language itself. Greek has an abundant and concrete lexicon for oratorical and deliberative activities, and if this translation held any philological water, it shouldn't be too hard to find a parallel in the literary, epigraphical, or papyrological corpora for that meaning of λόγος. Also, Greek has a series of productive suffixes and a rich use of participles to form agentive nouns (-τηρ, -τωρ, -της, -ης, -ων, etc.), whereas "λόγος" is a pretty standard -o grade noun from -e grade verbal root. From a historical-linguistic perspective, this means that it is basically denominative, not agentive: it's a noun used to describe the activity done by a verb (in this case λέγω = "speak," so = λόγος = "speaking," or as we say in technical parlance, "word"). It is the sort of formation we would expect to describe the activity (speaking) but not the person who performs that act (the speaker). Greek does that in other ways, with suffixes and participles. A counter-argument might be that there are some agentive nouns ending in -ός (παιδαγωγός, for example), but of course that has its own difficulties: the accent on the last syllable, -ός, means it is an active noun, and a word ending like λόγος would be passive, because of its accent on the next-to-last syllable. Thus, being as generous as I possibly can, at best Hall could stretch the translation to mean "the person spoken about," but not the one doing the speaking. Of course, pursuing that line of linguistic argument, it could also be "the thing spoken," which is basically identical to the traditional translation of λόγος, "word."
When I read these kinds of word games in the Talmud or Varro, I don't fault these ancient pseudo-philologists for not being better philologists. Unlike, say, a person with degrees in classics and a PhD in ancient history from the University of Pennsylvania, they had no training in even the most elementary rudiments of modern philology (e.g. looking for other uses of λόγος in that sense in other texts, which should be the immediate impulse of anyone with a degree in classics who was at least partly conscious during their studies) or anywhere near the access to data that we have. Of course, no one committed to that kind of old LDS scholarship or the new Snufferians is going to care, and in my view it's a little ridiculous to criticize lay people for not caring what a bunch of academics think about the Bible. But for an academic there is an ethical suspicion about this. What is the point of a degree if you're not going to apply your training in your work? As in the case of many of the Old FARMSians, secular education just provides a cover for what are basically religious activities.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
