His next very bad comparison is to make me sound like I am inventing a translation akin the New World Translation (NWT) of the Jehovah's Witnesses. False. Since Simmons has not been schooled in Greek, and since he does not teach Greek, his "knowledge" here is deficient. The NWT makes a case that "a" god in John 1.1 is a legitimate grammatical point. Fact of the matter is Greek has no indefinite article (no "a"). The second fact of the matter is that my translation is a literal rendering of the Greek. Why, then, does English not bring out "the"? Simple. When we learned translation under the rigors of seminary training (which Kurt has none), we heard the concept of "smoothing out" the Greek to make it readable in English. To the Greek, "the death" was perfectly readable because it's Greek to the Greek! To the English reader, "the Jesus said" is not "smooth English." But, amazingly, Simmons is trying to make the point that since "the" is not in most of our English translations, then it is not really there, and of not much importance to exegetical considerations! If Simmons tried to sell this line of garbage to any Greek professor, they would laugh him out of the class and tell him to continue pursuing law. Score: Frost, 2; Simmons, 0.

Finally, I'll leave the reader with a quote from someone who actually knows Greek, wrote a well-received textbook on the subject, and should put this baby to rest. "There is no more important aspect of Greek grammar than the article to help shape our understanding of the thought and theology of the NT writers." And, "...[T]he article is able to turn just about any part of speech into a noun and, therefore, a concept. For example, "poor" expresses a quality, but the addition of an article turns it into an entity, "the poor." It is this ability to conceptualize that seems to be the basic force of the article" (Greek Grammar Beyond The Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament, Daniel B. Wallace, Zondervan, 1996, pp. 208,209). Now, Paul consistently used "the death" and "the sin." "Sin" is just a quality. "The Sin" is an entity, a concept. Paul is not, then, talking about individual sins, but the very concept and definition of the Sin. If Simmons would actually read technical commentaries that deal with the Greek text, he would see that they talk about the article and the concept of "death." Frost, 3; Simmons 0.