I will work from the scripture to answer your question.  One passage which tells us that Jesus is “begotten” is John 3:16.  Here we have Jesus as the “only begotten” Son of God.  The Greek word being translated as “only begotten” is monogeneis. Here, a single Greek word is translated by two English words.  What does this word mean?  It may be helpful to look at other translations into English.  The New International Version, rather than “only begotten” has “one and only.”  Several translations have “one and only Son.”  Others have “only Son.”  But it is not only the King James which has “only begotten.”  The New American Standard and others also have “only begotten.”  Note that the majority of translations do not have a word in English which corresponds to begotten.  You are asking what the word begotten means.  This seems to imply that the Son somehow comes from the Father.  But other translations do not even include a word which implies a secondary role to the Son compared to the Father.  So, who is right, and what does monogeneis actually mean?

Modern consensus is that the meaning of monogeneis is something like “the only one like that.” Geneis comes from the root word genos which means kind or class.  If this is correct, then the use of the word “begotten” in some translations may be a bit misleading as to the actual intent of the author.  What does begotten even mean?  Jesus is the one-of-a-kind Son of God.   If I am right, then there is no implication of the Son coming out of the Father.  Rather he is the unique, one-of-a-kind only Son of the Father.  In John 1 we have that Jesus was with the Father in the beginning.  Perhaps the implication of this phrase is that the Son was sent by the Father, and that the Son, in that sense, submits to the Father.  There are plenty of passages in which Jesus tells us that submits to the Father, for example John 14, in which Jesus tells us that the Son always does what the Father tells him to do.

To be honest, I am having a hard time wrapping this thing up.  Here is why.  You are asking me what the word begotten means, when I find myself doubting that the word begotten even belongs in our English translations.  The word begotten seems to have great theological implications, but what are they, given that there is no Greek word being translated as begotten?  In the final analysis, I believe that we will have to look at other passages that talk about the relationship between the Father and the Son to decide what John means when he tells us that Jesus is the monogeneis Son of God.  It may be easier to say what the word does NOT mean than to say what it does mean.  It certainly does not mean that Jesus was created–that the Son was created by the Father.  The authors of the Nicene Creed make that clear!  But it does mean that the Son is one-of-a-kind, but perhaps also that the Son is sent by, and in that sense subservient to the Father.  He was sent but not created by the Father.

I hope this helps.

John Oakes