In his comment #24, Rob does a great job of explaining why in John 1:10 cannot mean what Dave suggests. It is truly devastating to Dave’s argument, imho. Rob’s comment #25 addressing the question of whether the Logos ceases to be the Logos is also spot on.

I am neither a logician nor a rhetorician. However, as one of the simple Readers Dave seems so keen to appeal to, I can say with confidence that neither the logic nor the rhetorical strategy of Dave’s overall argument is very persuasive, even apart from Rob’s responses. Dave has some really great points, but they just don’t seem to gel together into the argument he’s trying to advance. On other things, he’s just mistaken. Rob’s responses really make this clear.

THE PRINCIPLE OF AGENCY

Dave,

You wrote:

“Rob, you appear unfamiliar with the principle of agency.”

This isn’t the only time you have alleged without basis that I was ignorant of something. It’s beginning to look like a debating tactic of yours.

You wrote:

“Agents of God (such as Jesus) are typically granted various prerogatives and powers of God, including the authority to act on His behalf and bear His name.”

I agree that God can deputize created beings as his agents to do some things. However, creating and sustaining the universe and ruling over everyone and everything for all eternity would not be among those things. This is a fatal flaw in your appeal to this principle of agency.

You quoted James McGrath, who wrote:

“As I explained earlier, there were certain basic rules or assumptions connected with agency in the ancient world. The most basic of all was that, in the words of later Jewish rabbis, ‘The one who is sent is like the one who sent him.’ Or in words that are probably better known to those of us familiar with the New Testament, ‘He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives not me but the one who sent me’ (Matt. 10:40)…. The agent was thus functionally equal or equivalent to the one who sent him, precisely because he was subordinate and obedient to, and submitted to the will of, him who sent him” (The Only True God, 62).

McGrath misunderstands this concept of agency, and you fall prey to the same misunderstanding. The Jewish understanding of agency did not mean that creatures could perform all of the functions of God or that any creature might receive the worship, reverence, faith, and other honors due to God. Matthew 10:40 simply means that people who accepted the apostles and their message were accepting not just them but also accepting Jesus, and in turn those who accepted Jesus were accepting not just him but also the Father who sent him. The “principle” here is that accepting the representative is equivalent to accepting the one he represents. To press this principle into an interpretive golden key by which all statements that seem to attribute deity to Christ can be explained away as reflecting only his role as God’s agent is sheer nonsense. By this reasoning, the position that Jesus was only God’s agent becomes virtually non-falsifiable. The NT could call Jesus God a thousand times and it would “prove nothing.” What, was Thomas supposed to say, “My Lord and my God, and I am not simply addressing you as the functional agent of God”?

You quote the Didache (11.4) as saying, “Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord.” Curious, though, that you did not quote what the Didache says next: “But he shall not remain more than one day; or two days, if there’s a need. But if he remains three days, he is a false prophet.” Apparently, then, if Jesus himself were to show up, the Didache is saying not to let him stay longer than two days?

I think you know that the Didache did not mean that Christians were expected to worship the apostles, or to sing songs of praise to the apostles, or to ask the apostles to receive their spirit at the moment of their deaths. It did not mean that Christians were to credit the apostles with dying to atone for their sins. It did not mean that Christians referred to an apostle as “Jesus” or “Christ” or “the Son of Man.” It simply means that those who come to a Christian church or home should be welcomed as the Lord’s representative—but with some qualifications!

The statement in the Didache, in context, nicely illustrates the limited focus of the “agency” principle.

You wrote:

“Scripture provides many cases in which representatives of God exercise His divine authority and prerogatives.”

Let us look at some of the examples you gave.

Elijah and Elisha had the “power of life and death” (1 Kings 17:17-22; 2 Kings 1:10; 4:32-35). You’ve got to be kidding, right? Elijah could not have been clearer that he did not in any sense have that power. Elijah begged the Lord to let the dying child live: “O LORD my God, I pray you, let this child’s life return to him” (1 Kings 17:21). Elisha also “prayed to the LORD” for a boy to come back to life (2 Kings 4:33). Your other examples are even weaker, so I will not bother addressing them.

In Putting Jesus in His Place, I discuss the issue of Jesus’ miracles at some length and specifically whether they are no more evidence of his deity than would the miracles of such individuals as Elijah and Elisha be evidence that they were divine. Let me quote some excerpts and refer you and those interested to the whole discussion (198-201):

New Testament scholar Werner Kahl [New Testament Miracle Stories in Their Religious-Historical Setting (1994)] helpfully distinguishes three kinds of miracle workers. A person who has inherent healing power he calls a “bearer of numinous power” (BNP). He uses the term “petitioner of numinous power” (PNP) for those who ask God to perform the miracle. Between these two extremes is the category of “mediator of numinous power” (MNP), which applies to persons who mediate the numinous power of a BNP in order to produce a miracle. Being a MNP or PNP clearly is not evidence of deity, whereas being a BNP at least could be evidence of deity. Eric Eve, in his published dissertation The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles, observes that in the Old Testament, Yahweh is the only BNP; Moses is an example of a MNP; and Elijah is an example of a PNP…. According to Eve, the Gospel portrayals of Jesus break with Jewish tradition by characterizing Jesus as a “bearer of numinous power” (BNP) and his miracles as pointing to him as Yahweh. Although some of the miracle reports resemble accounts of prophetic miracles (notably those of Elisha), the dominant theme in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles with regard to his identity is that Jesus is unlike any other human being.—Putting Jesus in His Place, 198, 199.

Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, and Malachi had “divine foreknowledge”. I suppose everyone who spoke prophecies in the name of God had “divine foreknowledge” in the same sense that Jesus has it, right? If Isaiah presents an “oracle” (Is. 15:1), he is expressly not claiming any divine knowledge but is simply reporting what God made known to him. If Daniel reports a vision that God gave him, Daniel’s knowledge goes no further than the vision itself—so that, indeed, Daniel himself can express puzzlement about what his visions meant (Dan. 7:15-16). The very passages that you cite from the prophets show that they did not in any way possess divine knowledge! The OT prophetic books use the phrase “Thus says the LORD” some 400 times and “the word of the LORD came to [the prophet]” about 100 times. Jesus never speaks this way. He never says, “Thus says the Lord” or “Hear the word of my Father” or anything like that. Instead, Jesus says “I say to you” something like 170 times in the Gospels—customarily as an emphatic way of prefacing a statement he is about to make as the last word on the subject. About 75 times among those 170 statements, he uses the more elaborate introductory formula “Amen I say to you,” a use of “Amen” (to introduce one’s statement) essentially unparalleled in ancient literature (see further Putting Jesus in His Place, 213-15).

Jesus’ disciples granted “forgiveness of sins” (John 20:23). Let’s look first at what Jesus said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22b-23). The disciples’ reception of the Spirit is somehow connected with this matter of forgiving sins. In the context of what Jesus in the Gospel of John teaches about the Holy Spirit, the point seems to be that the disciples are now empowered to begin their ministry of testifying to Jesus Christ (John 15:26-27). This matter of “forgiveness” and “retention” of sins is not a prerogative that Jesus is transferring to individuals, as if an individual believer like me could “retain” your sins and so prevent you from being forgiven. Thankfully, no individual Christian has this authority! Jesus is speaking to the disciples corporately as the representative body of witnesses who will take the message of forgiveness of sins in his name to the world. If that corporate body of disciples, the church, extends that forgiveness to other groups of people, those people will receive forgiveness; if the church withholds the forgiveness that is found in the gospel from a group of people, that group will not receive forgiveness. For example, if the church had refused to share the gospel with Gentiles, then Gentiles would have been kept from forgiveness. That this is the correct understanding of what Jesus says in John 20:23 can be confirmed simply by reading the book of Acts and the rest of the NT. No one in Acts ever says to someone else, “Your sins are forgiven” or “I retain your sins” (or anything of the sort). Instead, they preach the gospel of forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ (Acts 2:38; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 26:18).

Moses “bearing God’s name” (Exodus 5:23). Sounds impressive, until you look up the verse: “Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.” This is not someone respectfully welcoming Moses as God; this is Moses speaking rather disrespectfully to God! No one is here calling Moses “God” or “YHWH” (and certainly Moses is not calling himself anything of the sort!). This is Moses saying that he spoke in Yahweh’s name, that is, he spoke on the authority of Yahweh, at Yahweh’s behest. That’s it. Likewise, Daniel 9:6 refers to the prophets who spoke in God’s name. These examples are absolutely and totally irrelevant.

Angels “bearing God’s name” (Ex. 3:2-4, cf. Acts 7:35; Ex. 23:20-21; Judg. 6:12-14). This is your best example—really your only plausible example—but there is a problem: Christians have traditionally believed that the “angel of the LORD” in such passages as Exodus 3 and Judges 6 was the preincarnate Christ. I know you will not agree with this view, but this view does have some basis in the NT (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:4, 9). One of the difficulties here is that the Hebrew mal’ak and the Greek angelos were functional terms meaning “messenger,” not ontological terms meaning “spirit creature.” Thus, one cannot assume that the “mal’ak of Yahweh” was ontologically what we call an “angel,” any more than we can assume that since the OT sometimes calls him a “man” (e.g., Gen. 32:24; Judg. 13:6, 8, 10-11) that he must have been ontologically human.

You wrote:

“Examples could be multiplied. I labour this as a point sadly obscured by centuries of poor exegesis.”

I am afraid most of your examples are not only less than convincing, but are themselves examples “of poor exegesis” (if there is any “exegesis” involved at all).

PLURAL AND SINGULAR PRONOUNS

Dave,

You wrote:

“Rob has argued from Genesis 1:26 that the use of plural personal pronouns indicates God is a plurality of persons. Since he takes this line of reasoning, he must acknowledge the corollary: that the use of singular personal pronouns indicates God is only one person!”

This is far too facile. The Trinitarian view is quite consistent: the singular pronouns reflect the fact that God is one God, one indivisible, eternal Being, while the plural pronouns restricted to the pre-Abrahamic period reflect the plurality of persons within that one God. Hermeneutically, my approach is to view the grammatical form of the pronouns in context, and not simply read off from either singular or plural pronouns a theological conclusion that their grammatical form alone probably will not bear.

You wrote:

“The ‘plurality of persons’ argument from Genesis 1:26 was used for the first time in a heretical apocryphal book called The Shepherd of Hermas, written in the mid 2nd Century AD, more than 100 years after Jesus’ ascension. Prior to that time, nobody had used Genesis 1:26 for this purpose – not even the apostles, who knew Christ intimately.”

Guilt by association and argument from silence—the logical fallacies are piling up, Dave. I consulted the Shepherd of Hermas, and there is a possible allusion to Genesis 1:26, but that’s it. The view that the plural pronouns referred to the Father speaking to Christ was actually around before Hermas, since it was in the Epistle of Barnabas (written no later than about AD 135). Justin Martyr, writing about the same time as Hermas, also takes this view. So your attempted argument of guilt by association fails.

I know of no NT text that cites Isaiah 9:6 as referring to Jesus Christ. Does that mean it’s a bad argument to interpret Isaiah 9:6 as referring to Christ?

You wrote:

“Can Rob explain why it took so long for people to start using Genesis 1:26 in this way, and why the earliest forms of that argument did not refer to a plurality of persons within the Godhead, but to the idea that God was speaking to another pre-existent being distinct from Himself?”

First, it didn’t take “so long.” The early and mid-second century writings of the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, etc., are among the earliest Christian writings outside the NT. And it is quite understandable that it would take time for Christians to reflect on the biblical revelation and work out a theological understanding that accurately expressed what Scripture taught on these things.

In any case, it’s interesting that your comments on this issue fail to do the one thing needed, which is to defend a better interpretation of the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26 and 3:22.

JOHN 17:3—DOES THE NT ALWAYS CLEARLY DISTINGUISH JESUS FROM GOD?

Dave,

You wrote:

“Faithful people encountering Jesus recognised that his power and authority were derived from God and that he acted as God’s agent, but was not God himself.”

You then quoted statements in which people referred to Jesus as “a prophet” (Luke 24:19; John 4:19; 6:14; 9:17), “a man” (Luke 24:19; Acts 2:22-23), the Son of Man, the Christ, and the Son of God. You then concluded:

“Note the constant distinction between Jesus and God in Acts 2; the apostles are always so careful to do this.”

Actually, no, they are not. The apostles frequently seem to blur this distinction, since they call him “God” at least a few times and “Lord” many times in contexts where it appears to represent the divine name YHWH. You have an explanation for these statements that satisfies you, but it simply is not true that the apostles are always careful to express a distinction between Jesus and God. On this point, you wrote:

“You claim your interpretation is informed by verses calling Jesus God, but how can those verses overturn an exclusive statement of this sort [John 17:3]? Why not use this clear verse to inform your interpretation of the verses where you believe Jesus is referred to as God, given that Trinitarian scholars acknowledge those other verses are not clear?”

There are several problems with this line of criticism. (1) I don’t agree that John 17:3 is “clear” in denying that Jesus is God. I agree that John 17:3 clearly teaches that the Father is the only true God and that Jesus is distinct from the Father. (2) I explained in my opening comments in this second round of the debate why I refuse to follow a methodology in which supposedly “clear” texts trump those that are supposedly not “clear.” (3) Your premise that Trinitarian scholars think Johannine texts that call Jesus God are unclear is incorrect. In particular, we think that John 20:28 is quite clear! Admittedly, John 1:18 is a controversial text, but this cannot be said about John 20:28.

You wrote:

“Readers, ask yourselves how Rob would be treating John 17:3 if it said ‘This is eternal life – that they know us, the only true God, and our apostles, whom we sent.’ Do you think he would be arguing that there is room in the category of ‘only true God’ for Jesus, the Father and the apostles?”

This is a clever argument; do you mind if I respond to it, even though you addressed it to the readers instead of to me? After all, it appears that the “readers” are a distinct category from “Rob” in the above sentences (especially since you refer to “Rob” in the third person, “he”). Thus, it would seem that I am not supposed to ask myself your question, let alone offer an answer to it. Perhaps you get my point?

The fact is that we have absolutely no reason to think that the apostles were God. No biblical text calls them God. They do nothing that is distinctively a work of God. No text describes them as having distinctive attributes of deity. No text refers to them as receiving distinctive honors of deity (and indeed Paul and Barnabas refused worship, Acts 14:11-15). But the NT calls Jesus God and Lord (even “my Lord and my God”), states that he existed before all creation, that he made and sustains the universe, that he sits on God’s throne, that he is the proper recipient of worship, divine honor, prayer, fear, and doxological praise, and on and on!

It is possible with some ingenuity to construct a sentence that sounds syntactically parallel to John 17:3 and would seem to prove your point that the verse as written intentionally excludes Jesus Christ from the category of being “the only true God.” But if your clever sentence says something that is contrary to fact, which it does, then it really proves only your cleverness. Eternal life does not consist in knowing God and the apostles! The silliness of the sentence undermines your argument.

You wrote:

“A plural personal pronoun in John 17:3 would be a major coup for Rob’s Christology, but Jesus has no knowledge of a multi-personal God. Why not? Why does Jesus seem to believe that the Father is the only true God, while distinguishing himself from the only true God as a completely different ‘other’? Why doesn’t Jesus use this opportunity to leave a record of the triune Godhead; where is the Holy Spirit in all of this? Why doesn’t Jesus use the language of triune personality in this Christologically decisive place?”

The above paragraph is one repetitive argument from silence.

The bottom line for me is that what you are deriving from John 17:3 (that Jesus is not God except in an “agency” sense) is at best implicit, whereas other texts in John affirm explicitly that Christ is truly God (John 20:28) and identify him as the eternal Logos that has always been God (John 1:1, 14). Thus, I interpret the allegedly implicit in light of the explicit (which is not the same thing hermeneutically as the “clear” trumping the “unclear”).

JOHN 10:30 AND THE SHEMA

Dave,

You wrote:

“You claim John 10:30 = the Shema? Do you say it means ‘one’ or ‘one but with room for two more if I need them’?”

This isn’t a serious or fair-minded criticism of my position. I refuse to dignify it with any further response.

I have a multi-post series on John 10:30 on this blog (Part One is missing because the site was attacked some time back, but the remaining posts should make sense without it). It addresses the issue you raised with your quotation from Tasker (in fact, I cited Tasker specifically) and also comments at length on the comparison of John 10:30 to Jesus’ prayer in John 17. I cited the series in my post here, so I don’t need to cite it again.

DID JESUS DENY BEING GOD IN JOHN 10:31-39?

Dave,

You wrote:

“Yes; Jesus’ defence from Psalm 82:6 (where mortal men are called ‘gods’) is one place proving it. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless Jesus is refuting the false accusation he claims to be God. On the contrary, his correction insists that he has only claimed to be the Son of God, and that if mortal men can be called ‘god’ (as in Psalm 82:6) he has no case to answer.
Readers, why does Rob say nothing about Jesus’ use of Psalm 82:6? Standard commentaries identify the verse as critical support for Jesus’ argument.”

Frankly, I did not address the specific issue of the use of Psalm 82:6 because I did not have enough space to do so. The issue is complicated by the fact that biblical scholars hold varying views as to the identity of the ones called “gods” in Psalm 82:6 (among other complicating factors). You assume that Psalm 82:6 referred to mortal humans, and this is a venerable and possible interpretation. However, many biblical scholars today think the “gods” there are celestial beings (angels), members of the heavenly “divine council” mentioned in verse 1. Even scholars who identify the “gods” as humans have differing explanations: Israelites at Mount Sinai, corrupt Israelite judges during the period of the monarchy, false prophets, or foreign kings.

You seem to think that what Jesus said amounted to the following: “I didn’t say I was God, just the Son of God; and if they can be called gods in Psalm 82:6, then I can be called a god, too.” However, this is not what Jesus said, and it is at least disputable that this is what Jesus meant. In fact, you seem to be fusing two different interpretations of John 10:34-36. As James McGrath, whom you quote, points out, one of these interpretations understands Jesus to be reasoning a minori ad maius, from the lesser to the greater: “If others can be called ‘gods,’ how much more can I?” The other interpretation understands Jesus to be reasoning a maiori ad minus, from the greater to the lesser: “If others can be called ‘gods,’ then what is wrong with my lesser claim to be God’s son?” (McGrath, John’s Apologetic Christology [2001], 122). I don’t think you can have both interpretations at the same time.

I have read numerous academic journal articles on Psalm 82 and John 10:34-36 and consulted numerous commentaries on these passages. In part because Jesus does not say whom he understood the “gods” to be, scholars have proposed several different interpretations of Jesus’ use of Psalm 82. In your comment, you don’t discuss any of these different views or even state what your own view is. Instead, you simply assert that the passage makes no sense unless Jesus is denying that he is God. In fact, although Jesus denies that he was blaspheming, he does not deny that he is God. He affirms that the Father consecrated him and sent him into the world (v. 36) that he does the works of his Father (v. 37), and that the Father is in him and he is in the Father (v. 38). I do not see a denial here that Jesus is God. In this context, Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 82:6 seems intended to show his detractors that their accusation of blasphemy is false, but what the connection is exactly depends on one’s understanding of Psalm 82 (or at least of what Jesus’ understanding of Psalm 82 was). Jesus may have been denying that he was “making himself out to be” God (that is, that he was a mere man arrogantly claiming to be something he was not), but I just don’t see anything here indicating that Jesus was denying that he was God.

I am happy to discuss Psalm 82 and John 10 further, but first you would need to present a specific interpretation as the basis for your conclusion that Jesus’ use of Psalm 82 somehow constituted a denial that he was God. Since the issue here is whether this passage says what you claim it says (that Jesus was denying being God), the burden of proof here falls on you.

[...] Rob Bowman on Jesus Christ [...]

JOHN 20:28

Dave, you wrote:

“As expected, Rob opens this section with John 20:28; one of only four places in the whole of Scripture where scholars (secular, Trinitarian or Biblical Unitarian) agree that Jesus is explicitly referred to as ‘theos’.”

I’m not clear what point you think you were making here. First of all, my discussion of John 20:28 did not open this round’s post. The only “section” where John 20:28 is the lead topic is the short section on John 20:26-31. Second, you seem to feel that you are scoring a point if you can say that you expected me to bring up a particular text. It would be odd in a marathon debate on the Trinity if I never brought up John 20:28, just as it would be odd if a Biblical Unitarian never brought up John 17:3.

Third, if there are four places in Scripture that refer to Jesus as theos so explicitly that even Biblical Unitarians are forced to admit those occurrences, the evidence that the Bible calls Jesus theos is pretty strong after all. In your second-round post, you had claimed with regard to texts cited as calling Jesus theos that “virtually all of them can be understood differently due to textual variations and contextual/grammatical issues.” You went on to discuss most of those texts, allowing only Hebrews 1:8 as a text that explicitly calls Jesus theos, though you said nothing in that post about John 1:1 or 20:28. In your comments responding here to my second-round post, you denied that John 1:1 calls Jesus theos. So you acknowledged only two places where Scripture explicitly refers to Jesus as theos. I think we would all be interested to know what those other two texts are.

You wrote:

“You criticise an article on the Biblical Unitarian website without addressing its substance, objecting only to the statement that ‘theos’ was ‘a descriptive title applied to a range of authorities.’”

If I failed to address some substantive point in the article, it’s strange that you did not specify what that point was. I went back and checked, and your criticism here is false. The Biblical Unitarian article made four numbered points, which I will summarize here:

1. Ancient Greek used theos with “a broader meaning” than just “God” in “the absolute sense.”
2. It is too “incredible” to believe that Thomas was actually calling Jesus God in a Trinitarian sense, so Thomas must have meant “God” in a lesser sense.
3. The disciples prior to Jesus’ death “had no knowledge of Trinitarian doctrine” and did not consider Jesus to be God in the absolute sense.
4. When Thomas saw that Jesus had risen from the dead, he acknowledged that Jesus was “God” in the more limited sense of one who had “God’s authority.” He could not have meant that Jesus was God in the Trinitarian sense because “there is no reason to believe that the disciples would have even been aware of such a doctrine.”

As you can see, we may easily and fairly reduce the Biblical Unitarian argument on John 20:28 to two claims. (1) We should understand its use of “God” as using the term in a non-absolute, broader sense. (2) Thomas and the disciples had no knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity and so Thomas could not have meant to call Jesus “God” in the absolute sense. I admit that I did not offer a response to the second point, but it is an a priori, question-begging argument, not an exegetical argument. I don’t claim that Thomas at the moment he spoke had a fully developed or explicit understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. I don’t know anyone who claims that he did. I do claim that Thomas’s statement, understood in the context of the rest of the Gospel of John, is best understood in a Trinitarian theological framework.

Regarding the point that ancient Jews used theos in other contexts than in reference to the true God, you wrote:

“Were you genuinely unaware of this, Rob? It’s in all the standard literature.”

Frankly, Dave, this was a rather obnoxious response from you. I said nothing to suggest that I was unaware of the usage of theos in reference to beings other than God. You seem to be attempting to mislead readers into thinking that I was “unaware” of something well known.

It is quite true that in ancient Jewish literature generally theos could apply in various contexts to creatures. However, biblical examples of the singular theos (as distinguished from plural references to theoi which by definition could not be misunderstood as references to YHWH) applied in an approving way to a creature are rare and arguably nonexistent in the Bible.

Even more to the point in John 20:28, there are no examples where “my God” applies approvingly in biblical literature (or even extrabiblical Jewish literature, to my knowledge) to anyone other than the true God YHWH, unless you count Jesus himself as the one exception. The expression “my God” (theos mou) occurs about 148 times in the Greek Bible (including the Apocrypha) and not one of those occurrences refers to a created being (whether human or angelic) except for a couple of verses where a prophet mocks the pagan who worships an idol as “my god” (Is. 44:17; Hab. 1:11). If we expand (as we should) our search to all uses of the singular noun theos with personal pronouns (my, your, his, her, our, their), we find about 1,135 occurrences, and not one occurrence refers approvingly to anyone or anything other than the LORD God. (There are about 14 occurrences of “my god,” “his god,” “your god,” etc., all in reference to patently false gods or idols.) If you want to look for such expressions using the plural “gods” (theoi) I believe you will find that all such expressions (“our gods,” “their gods,” etc.) refer to false gods or idols. (I did a quick check and there are perhaps 50 or so such occurrences.)

This is rather overwhelming evidence in support of the point I made in my second-round statement here that when a faithful Jew called someone “my God” he was uniformly referring to the true God who was the Creator and Lord of all things. You cannot negate this evidence by referring to passages referring to angels or judges collectively as “gods” or to noncanonical works that call a figure such as Melchizedek “god.”

Ironically, in denying that Thomas was identifying Jesus as the one true God, you are really negating a core confessional point of the Shema, which is that the people of Israel confessed that YHWH alone was their God: “The LORD our God [ho theos hēmōn], the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). Thomas uses this language with the singular pronoun “my” instead of “our” in referring to Jesus as “my God.”

You asked, “Did you provide evidence Thomas is using either ‘God’ or ‘Lord’ from Psalm 35:23, as claimed?” I did not claim that Thomas was consciously citing Psalm 35:23 specifically. My point was that Thomas used language that clearly echoes Psalm 35:23, whether deliberately or not. It doesn’t really matter, because we have over a thousand OT texts in which biblical writers and speakers referred to the LORD as “my God,” “our God,” “your God,” and so forth, and never approvingly applied such language to anyone or anything else. But the allusion to Psalm 35:23 is more likely than not. As I pointed out, the whole statement of Thomas directly parallels Psalm 35:23, as follows:

ho theos mou kai ho kurios mou (Ps. 35:23 [34:23 LXX]
ho kurios mou kai ho theos mou (John 20:28)

In addition, there is something highly suggestive in Psalm 35:23 that appears to confirm the allusion. The Psalmist who is addressing “my God and my Lord” asks him to “be raised up” (exegerthēti, aorist passive imperative):

“Be raised up, Lord, and attend to my case, my God and my Lord!”

And of course, in the context of Thomas’s cry, he has just realized that Jesus Christ was indeed “raised up” from the dead! So perhaps the allusion was intentional. In any case, the uniform usage of “my (his, your, our, their) God” to refer exclusively to Israel’s God YHWH makes it explicit that Thomas’s words “my God” also identify Jesus as the LORD God.

You wrote: “Thomas knew the Messianic use of ‘kyrios’ (Psalm 110) and the OT Jewish use of ‘theos’ (Psalm 82:6) so where is the evidence for his departure from customary usage?” I have just answered that question, rather exhaustively. Neither Psalm 82:6 nor any other biblical text (nor any other Jewish text, to my knowledge) ever refers to a creature as “my God.” And you have provided no exegetical evidence whatsoever that either Psalm 82:6 or 110:1 is the textual background for John 20:28. Certainly you have offered nothing even remotely comparable to the apparent allusion to Psalm 35:23!

This is also my answer to James McGrath, whom you quote at length essentially making the same argument you made. McGrath says nothing whatsoever about the qualified expression “my God,” nor does he consider such possible specific allusions as Psalm 35:23. Thus, you have not even begun to offer anything like an effective rebuttal to John 20:28 as an example of a text that explicitly identifies Jesus Christ as truly God.

DID THE LOGOS CEASE TO BE THE LOGOS?

Dave,

On John 1:14, you wrote:

“So what does ‘made flesh’ mean here? It means to become a real flesh and blood person; to become a human being. The logos did not merely ‘take on’ flesh or ‘add human nature to himself’ as Trinitarianism teaches, and as John does not say; the logos became flesh. Readers, where are we ever told that God ‘added’ human nature to divine? A ‘dual nature’ is precluded; ‘the logos became flesh’ = ‘X became Y.’ When noun ‘X’ becomes noun ‘Y’, it is no longer noun ‘X.’ At Cana, the water ginomai wine; it did not ‘add wine nature to itself’ or ‘assume a dual water/wine nature.’ It became wine and ceased to be water.”

This is an interesting claim. The word egeneto (ginomai in this or in other forms) can be used in contexts where what you say applies. I don’t think John 2:9 is the best example, since wine is actually about 80 to 90 per cent water! Nevertheless, I agree that ginomai could be used in a context where “X” becomes “Y” and ceases to be “X.” However, the word ginomai does not denote or necessarily imply that such is the case. Back up from John 1:14 just two verses, and we find the following statement: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become [genesthai, aorist infinitive of ginomai] children of God” (John 1:12). Those who received Jesus and believed in his name did not cease being those who received Jesus and believed in his name when they “became” children of God. When Jesus said, “The water that I will give him will become [genēsetai] in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14), obviously the water did not cease to be water. So we will have to determine from the context and whatever we can learn from other passages whether such an implication is applicable in John 1:14.

Your claim, if I understand you correctly, is that the Logos ceased to be the Logos when it became flesh. This is an odd claim. If the Logos is the impersonal thought or word or reason or wisdom of God, as seems to be your position, then the Logos would seem to be an attribute of God, and so it seems problematic to assert that the Logos ceased to be the Logos when it became flesh.

From my perspective, given that the Logos is a person and is himself God (theos, John 1:1), as I have argued in the preceding comments, it follows that the Logos could not have ceased being the Logos when he became flesh. I take it as axiomatic that whatever is God cannot cease being God; therefore, since the Logos is God, he cannot have ceased being who and what he is when he became flesh.

IS THE LOGOS A PERSON IN JOHN 1?

Dave,

In your comments here on John 1:1-18, you attempt to disprove that the Logos was a preexistent person. However, in the course of your comments, you inadvertently contradicted yourself—or at least seemed to contradict yourself. In Part I of your reply on John 1, you wrote:

“God created directly and personally, without divine agency or proxy.”

However, in Part III, you wrote:

“The word ‘by’ is rendered ‘through’ (Greek dia, ‘through’ or ‘by means of’; not ‘ek’, ‘by’ or ‘from’). This better renders the original text, which tells us that the logos itself was the agent of creation but not the origin of creation.”

Thus, you state both that God created “without divine agency” and that God created with an “agent of creation,” specifically, the Logos. Now, obviously you meant that God created without a personal divine agent, but the verbal discrepancy exposes a serious difficulty with your position. The difficulty is evident when one compares the following texts:

“All things [ta panta] came into being through him [di’ autou egeneto], and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3).
“The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him [di’ autou egeneto]; yet the world did not know him” (John 1:9-10).

Clearly, “him” (autou) in 1:10 must have the same referent as “him” (autou) in verse 3, since autou in both occurrences of the words di’ autou egeneto must have the same referent. Yet you acknowledged that this “light” is “definitely a person: Jesus Christ,” when you wrote:

“In verses 3-14 John refers to ‘the light’. The light is equated with the ‘life’ which John describes as being ‘in’ the logos (verse 4: ‘In it was life, and the life was the light of mankind’). This life/light is definitely a person: Jesus Christ.”

You are right on this point, of course, but what you say here really disproves your view that the Logos is not a person. If “the light” in these verses (you said verses 3-14, but you clearly meant verses 4-14) is “definitely a person,” specifically Jesus Christ, then the Logos of verses 1-3 must also be “definitely a person,” because verse 10 simply repeats in slightly different words about the Light what verse 3 already said about the Logos. There is no plausible exegetical way to argue that “all things came into being through him” (v. 3) refers to something different from “the world came into being through him” (v. 10).

Speaking of implausible exegesis, in Part III you attempt to explain egeneto in verse 10 to mean “split” or “divided”:

“However, ginomai can also mean ‘split’ or ‘divided’, as Revelation 16:19 (“The great city was split [ginomai] into three parts”, NET; definition, full semantic range).”

What you have done here is to look through all of the different English words used in the NET Bible where the Greek has ginomai and seize on one that you think might fit an understanding of John 1:10 that would apply to Jesus’ earthly life. The truth is that the translation “split” (or “divided”) is no more relevant to John 1:10 than “developed,” “gripped,” “grieved,” or most of the other words that you found on that list. Your mistake is in thinking that these are all meanings of the individual word ginomai. They aren’t. The NET Bible, like any other decent translation, translates phrases and sentences, not simply individual words in isolation. In the case of Revelation 16:19, the relevant Greek linguistic unit is not egeneto in isolation, but the expression egeneto eis tria merē (word for word, “came to be into three parts”). Instead of woodenly translating “the great city came to be into three parts,” the NET Bible translates the Greek here into idiomatically smooth English, “the great city was split into three parts.” But ginomai itself never “means” to split or divide; it is the expression ginomai eis that can convey this meaning in some contexts. Of course, this usage does not appear in John 1:10 (or in 1:3).

In John 1:10, then, the statement that the world di’ autou egeneto simply does not mean that the world was divided through him, any more than John 1:3 means that all things were divided through him. Both statements mean that the totality of creation (all things, the world) came into being through him (the Logos/the true Light).

Elsewhere in your comments on the Johannine Prologue, you quote with approval James Dunn’s claim that the Logos is not personal until verse 14: “The conclusion which seems to emerge is that it is only with verse 14 that we can begin to speak of the personal logos…. Prior to verse 14 we are in the same realm as pre-Christian talk of Wisdom and logos, the same language and ideas that we find in the Wisdom tradition and in Philo, where, as we have seen, we are dealing with personifications rather than persons, personified actions of God rather than an individual divine being as such…. In other words, the revolutionary significance of v. 14 may well be that it marks not only the transition in the thought of the poem from pre-existence to incarnation, but also the transition from impersonal personification to actual person.”

I don’t know how this claim coheres with your claim that the Light of verses 9-10 is the person of Jesus Christ. I suppose you could argue that verse 14 tells us how the Logos became personal, while verses 9-10 anticipate the reaction of people when the Logos/Light became personal in Jesus. But in any case, verse 10 seems to pose a problem for your view.

These Johannine statements in John 1:3, 10 are comparable to confessional statements in other parts of the NT where the subject of the confession is explicitly the person we call Jesus Christ:

“For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom [di’ hou] are all things [ta panta] and we through him [di’ autou]” (1 Cor. 8:6).
“…all things [ta panta] have been created through him through him [di’ autou] and for him” (Col. 1:16b).
“…in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom [di’ hou] he also created the worlds” (Heb. 1:2).

1 Corinthians 8:6 explicitly applies the same language as John 1:3, that “all things” are “through him,” to the “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Colossians 1:16 says that “all things have been created through him,” that is, in context, through the Father’s “beloved Son” (see v. 13). Hebrews 1:2 explicitly and directly refers to the “Son” as the one “through whom” God created the worlds. To sum up:

All things came into being through him (the Logos, John 1:3)
The world came into being through him (the true Light, John 1:10)
All things are through him (the one Lord, Jesus Christ, 1 Cor. 8:6)
All things were created through him (the Father’s beloved Son, Col. 1:16)
God created the worlds through him (the Son, Heb. 1:2)

Thus, to claim that the Logos is not a person in John 1:1-3 really flies in the face of the consistent confessional tradition evident in all of these major, classic Christological passages in the NT, since in Paul and Hebrews these affirmations clearly understand the person of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the one through whom all things were created. Sorry, but with all due respect I must disagree with Dunn as well as with Colin Brown, whom you quote as criticizing the equation of the Logos with the Son. (Brown was my systematic theology professor at Fuller Seminary thirty years ago, by the way.) The Logos is the Son, as the above parallel confessional statements in context make abundantly clear. What John says about the Logos, Paul and Hebrews explicitly say about the Son. A careful side-by-side comparison of these confessional passages only adds further confirmation of this point:

• He is “God” (John 1:1, 18; Heb. 1:8)
• He existed before creation (John 1:1-2; Col. 1:17; implied, Heb. 1:2)
• All things/the world came into being/were created through him (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2)
• He is the “Son”/monogenēs (John 1:14, 18; Col. 1:13; Heb. 1:2)
• He is “the firstborn” (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:6; cf. monogenēs, John 1:14)
• He is exactly like God the Father (John 1:14; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3)
• He sustains or holds together all things (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3; implied in the term Logos, John 1:1)

Despite the fact that these three authors each have their own distinctive vocabulary, style, and approach, their affirmations about the Son show a remarkable degree of overlap and theological convergence. Given this shared Christological confessional perspective, the arguments denying the personhood of the preincarnate Logos in John 1 or to dispute that the Logos is identical to the Son must be rejected. They simply fail to engage all the evidence.

Finally, the rest of the Gospel of John makes statements about Christ and report statements by Christ himself that confirm that he existed as a real person prior to the “becoming flesh” of John 1:14. I discussed two of these in some detail in round 4 of this debate (John 13:3; 16:28), and there are others as well (e.g., John 8:58; 17:5). When we take these statements together with the evidence of the Prologue (instead of trying to divide and conquer them separately and therefore apart from their context in the book as a whole), the conclusion that Jesus existed as the Logos before his human life turns out to enjoy extremely solid support.