Presented at the 2nd Human Jesus Conference
How do you know that a “pre-existing,” “pre-human”
Jesus is not a different Jesus from the Jesus of Scripture? “Another
Jesus” is to be avoided as highly dangerous and misleading, and exposed as
false Christology. How do you know that a Jesus, who began in a “pre-life,” a preexisting
life, as an angel or Son of God according to some, can also be the real Messiah,
Son of God, coming into existence = beginning to exist, in Mary (Matt. 1:20)?
This is one of the great, central, essential questions in the mind of Jesus,
the best theologian of all. “Who do you
say I am?” (Matt. 16:15). That is the question of all questions. It
matters as a matter of life and death. We dare not guess at the question as to
who Jesus is.
CSB 2 Corinthians 11:4 “For
if a person comes and preaches another Jesus, whom we did not preach, or you
receive a different spirit, which you had not received, or a different gospel,
which you had not accepted, you put up with it splendidly!”
Paul here shows his impatience!
Disagreement on this issue is not less than confusion
over the identity of God and His Son. As Dan Gill told us at the recent Kingdom
of God Missions Conference: “We must get God and Jesus right.” These are
non-negotiable issues of truth and error. Hebrews 1:1 says that God did not
speak in a Son in old times, i.e. in Old Testament times. That should
settle the issue about the identity of the real and only Son of God, easily.
If there is a pre-existing, pre-human Jesus, then that
would feature clearly in the NT Apostolic documents. Preexistence or not
dramatically affects who Jesus is! The whole NT is profoundly interested in
defining who Jesus is. But there is not a hint of any preexistence in
the first three gospels or Acts! You mean that Dr. Luke did not bother to tell
us about a so-called half-human, preexisting Jesus?
Raymond Brown: “There is no evidence that Luke had a theology of
Incarnation or preexistence. Rather for Luke in 1:35 divine sonship was brought
about through the virginal conception” (Birth of the Messiah, p. 432).
Can we not settle on that easy statement of fact?
Raymond Brown’s comments on Luke actually fully admit
that the “orthodox” idea of preexistence is false to the Bible. On Luke 1:35
Brown makes a fascinating comment on the words “for that reason [the
miracle in Mary] Jesus will be called the Son of God.” Brown observes that
“orthodoxy” disagrees with Luke:
“This [Luke 1:35] has embarrassed many
orthodox theologians, because in pre-existence
Christology a conception by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb does not bring about the
existence of God’s Son. Luke is unaware of such a Christology: Luke does not
think of a preexistent Son of God….The child is totally God’s work, a new
creation” (Birth of the Messiah, p. 314).
I am with Luke!
Come into Existence
The Greek word gennao means “to cause to come
into existence; to begin to exist or be.” Note too how John in his epistle
emphasizes this fact about the origin of the Son, Jesus. 1 John 5:18
tells us that “the one who was brought into existence [i.e. Jesus]
preserves and protects the believers.” It is quite obviously destructive of
Scripture and the identity of Jesus to contradict this easy idea, by holding
that the Son was existing before he began to exist!
The truth of the identity of Jesus must be taught
everywhere if it is taught at all — and it is not. If we have any regard for
the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20), we must teach all the truth, not just
one or two parts of it. In Hebrews 11:23 Moses was born, i.e. brought into
existence (same word gennao). So also was the Son of God (1 John 5:18;
Luke 1:35; Matt. 1:20). This is very easy truth about origins. Jesus, to
qualify as the second Adam, cannot possibly start as non-human!
Gnosticism
It is well-known that the church quickly departed from
truth, from the second century on, and Gnosticism was the evil, fatal influence!
Our own Kegan Chandler, among many, has very powerfully documented this truth in
his full account in The God of Jesus in the Light of Christian Dogma (see especially chapter 3 “Another Jesus.”)
“The direct Apostolic
conflict with the Gnostic movement is easily detected in the late first-century
writings of the Apostle John…The Christians we find utilizing the most peculiar
metaphysical tenets of Trinitarians in the first two centuries of the Church
were, in fact, the Gnostics” (p. 83). “It cannot now be denied that the
Gnostic schools had a far-reaching effect on the subsequent formation of Christian
doctrine…Many of mainstream Christianity’s most treasured Christological ideas
may in fact be owed to the Gnostics early pressing of the historical Jesus
through the preexisting Platonic framework” (p. 84).
Exactly so, but are we on guard against repeating the
same mistake today? It was the Gnostics who used, or rather abused, the Gospel
of John to twist the truth and to promote a non-fully human Jesus.
Let us not ever risk believing this pagan Gnosticism.
In
fact John’s Gospel was abused as it still is to this day, and Gnosticism
introduced a second God Person by simply capitalizing the word as Word
in John 1:1. If we say it does not matter whether a person believes in a
pre-existing, pre-human Jesus — if we say that both preexistence and
non-preexistence are equally good and valid — then we might as well say
that truth and error please God and Jesus equally. How do we know that
we are not falling for the very lie which John called the spirit of antichrist
(1 John 4:2; 2 John 9)? These facts demand close attention in the interests of
saving truth and fleeing from error.
Note too that “there is nothing in Matthew’s narrative
either in 1:1 or the rest of the Gospel to suggest that he knew of or
subscribed to the notion that Christ had existed before his birth” (Bart
Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p. 76). How very
unreasonable then to force this view on John! A preexisting Son is a different
Jesus, and this is not a matter of indifference. Do we really want to
disagree with Luke and Matthew as to who the true Jesus is? Luke wrote more of
the NT than even Paul.
It is an assault on Scripture to find a preexisting
Son of God only in John! To do this is to follow the Gnostics and other
Protestants and the Catholics, that John is to be taken as superior to the
other Gospels (who said?!). To do this is to follow and repeat the same pattern
of apostasy as occurred nearly 2000 years ago.
I maintain that the Abrahamic Faith people in the 1830’s
recovered a colossal restoration of lost truth about who Jesus is, about his identity
as fully human, and about the Gospel of the Kingdom. It will be to our
shame to give this revelation away now! It would be a terrible slap in the face
to our predecessors, as well as to the Bible.
Kegan’s good historical analysis of how pagan Gnosticism
twisted the Bible is to be studied carefully. The danger to which Kegan and I
are pointing involves “a subtle embrace of the docetic Jesus” (p. 90), that is
a Jesus who only seems to be, but
really is not a fully human person. Kegan quotes Barnes: “John says that we
must accept only what John provides, that is only an acknowledgement of the
Christ as a real human being. That the Son of God was really a man” (p. 91).
Kegan italicizes this for emphasis!
“Orthodoxy” says that “First in Chalcedon Jesus is called ‘man’ in the generic sense (human)
but not ‘a man.’ He has a human nature but does not have a human personal
center.” The author of that remark, a Roman Catholic critical of the “orthodoxy”
of Chalcedon, says that Chalcedon “makes a genuine humanity impossible” (Hart, To Know and Follow Jesus, pp. 44,
46).
Lampe:
Wise Words from Cambridge
The late Regius Professor of Theology at Cambridge,
Geoffrey Lampe, was one of many who are critical of the Chalcedonian,
Trinitarian definition of Jesus. He argued that if Jesus preexisted his
human life as God, and was therefore fully God, then he could not also
be fully human. This, as we have seen, is admitted by the writers quoted above.
They confirm that a person who is not a human person cannot be fully
man! Lampe describes the unfortunate and confusing implications of the
traditional dogma that Jesus is God possessing “impersonal human nature.” What
Lampe says applies equally to any form of preexistence, Trinitarian or JW
Arian:
“The [Trinitarian] concept of the preexistent Son reduces
the real, socially and culturally conditioned personality of Jesus to the
metaphysical abstraction ‘human nature’...According to this Christology, the
‘eternal Son’ assumes a timeless human nature...which owes nothing essential to
geographical circumstances; it corresponds to nothing in the actual concrete
world; Jesus Christ has not, after all, come in the flesh” (God as
Spirit, p. 144, emphasis added, quoted with strong approval by Kegan on p.
90-91).
John gave us a deliberate and clear test for
recognizing the difference between truth and error, and John warned us to shun
the error and embrace the true and only Jesus, the one who is fully human (who
came “in the flesh,” 1 John 4:2; 2 John 9, emphatically not “into the flesh”). No one can be
genuinely human if he is “pre-human”! So let us be warned.
John 1:1 and 1 John 1
“The
word” (not Word), John 1:1c said, “was God.” But note that it is illegitimate
to start with a huge preconception that word is really Word (capital W)! John
was well aware of how his Gospel could be confused and abused. In his first epistle,
John countered the errors already being made out of his own gospel of John!
John said six times that he had not said that the Son of God had
pre-existed, but that “eternal life” had preexisted with the Father. It
was “eternal life which was with God” (1 John 1:2). He called this a “that
which,” a “what” six times! It was “eternal life,” not the Messiah
pre-existing with the father. This is John’s own inspired and clarifying
and corrective comment on his earlier words in the Gospel of John. What preexisted was the word (not Word)
which, not who, was God in John 1:1c. Jesus is what the word became
in John 1:14.
In John 1:1c “God” is in emphatic position. The word,
not Word (capital W) was God Himself and not someone else. 1 John
tells us that by “God” in the Gospel, John means the Father. It is dangerous to
propose a non-human, pre-human Son of God based on John, twisting him and
contradicting the rest of the NT.
So John 1:1c tells us that the word in John 1:1 was
the Father and no one else.
The word was
God
The predicate noun “God” as found in John 1:1c is
never to be translated as “a god.” Look at John 1:18 in the same context. Here
too the sentence begins with theon,
God: “God, no one has ever seen at
any time” or “No one has ever seen God,”
definitely not “a god.” This would be impossible as equally in 2 John 9: “Whoever
in the name of progress does not remain in the teaching of Christ does not have
God (theon),” not “a god.” This cannot possibly mean “does not have a god.”
An exact parallel to “the word was God” is the
statement that “God is spirit” which was wrongly rendered as “God is a spirit” in the KJV (John 4:24). This
again shows that “the word was God” cannot be rendered as the word was “a god.”
We have also “God is love” and “God is light.” These
are not “God is a love” or “God is a light.” No standard modern translation
has in John 1:1c, “The Word was a god.”
There are only 2 NT examples of theos as “a god” — where Herod thought of himself as “a god,” and
where Paul was thought to be “a god,” when he was unharmed by a snake (Acts
12:22; 28:6).
If there was “a god” Jesus, preexisting as Son, where
is he mentioned in the Hebrew Bible? What did he say? What did he do? When was
he begotten as Son? He is just not there!
The
word “word”
In the OT “word” is found 727 times and never once
does it mean a person, Word (capital W). So a supposed preexisting Son disappears! Does not exist! The
whole idea should be firmly rejected.
In John’s Gospel “word” (no capital) is “God thinking
and planning.” That is the meaning of “word” throughout the OT. The
capitalizing of “word” in John 1 simply facilitated the appearance of a second
“God” or “god.” The truth is that “Jesus is what the word became, not
one to one equal with preexisting Word,” as Goppelt says in his Theology of
the NT, Vol. II, p. 297.
In John 1 “word” is a personification like “wisdom,”
and not a person. That is, not a person before Jesus “came,” i.e. was born. The
capital on Word in John 1:1 is not warranted by the Greek text.
It is essential to point out that many scholars
recognize that the Bible does not teach the “eternal generation” of the Son.
Many also recognize that John “is as undeviating a witness as any NT writer to
unitary monotheism (Rom. 3:30; James 2:19; Jn. 5:44; 17:3)” (Dr. J.A.T.
Robinson, Twelve More New Testament
Studies, p. 175).
In the flesh
The spirit of antichrist is to be recognized by this
test: Every teacher who does not confess Jesus as having come “in the flesh” (en
sarki), not “into the
flesh.” Jesus, the Son of God, came from the womb of his mother, as all humans
do (except Adam!)
Luther could not deal with this “in flesh” in the
Johannine test for recognizing the only genuine human Jesus. And so Luther forged
the Greek of 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 9 to read “come into the flesh.” So desperate was he to make his traditional
theology of Jesus fit the Bible!
Raymond Brown observes that “come into the flesh” would be an attempt to force preexistence and thus
Incarnation into the text. Brown thus fully endorses my point that “come in the flesh” cannot support
Incarnation and thus does not support a literal preexistence! Brown rightly
points out that if Scripture supported a preexisting Son, such a Son would indeed
have come “into the flesh.” Luther was willing to alter Scripture to
make it fit with his traditional Incarnation of a preexisting Jesus. On no
account should we do this! This would be tampering with the Bible.
Not going back
There is a perfectly good Greek word for “preexist” in
the NT (prouparchein). It is never, ever used of Jesus. There is a
perfectly good word for “transform,” but no text ever says that Jesus was
transformed from pre-human to human.
There is a perfectly good word for “return, go back”
but Jesus is nowhere said to “return” or “go back” to the Father. See John 13:1, 3; 16:28; 20:17. That is
simply because Jesus had not been there before! But there is a “crime scene” in
some modern versions (including NIV), which do say that Jesus “went back” to the Father. This should alert
us to the tendency to want to make Jesus fit with the later error of
preexistence, which was the first step towards the Trinity!
How do you
know that a preexisting, pre-human Jesus is not a different and
false Jesus, to be exposed as antichristian and to be avoided as such?
All the Bible writers were obviously Socinian, i.e., non-literal
preexistence unitarians. The later move away from Jesus to an alien definition
of God as triune is one of the most remarkable shifts away from and loss of
essential information, in the history of (mis)communication. Jesus expressed
his unitarian confession of faith as we know by asserting that the “Father is
the only one who is true God” (John 17:3; 5:44). He told the Jews that his God
was the same one Person whom the Jews claimed as their God.
These unitarian texts merely repeat the 1300 NT
references to GOD as the equivalent of the Father. Jesus declares himself to be
not GOD, which would make two Gods, but God’s unique human agent.
John 17:3
The simplicity of the confession in John 17:3 may be
illustrated like this: “You [singular], Father [singular], are [singular] the
[singular] only [singular and exclusive] true [singular] God [singular].” [1]
Standard commentary finds itself obliged to write:
“How often may these last
solemn words of Jesus have stirred the soul of John. To this corresponds the
self-consciousness, as childlike as it is simple and clear in its elevation,
the victorious rest and peace of this prayer, which is the noblest and purest
pearl of devotion in the whole New Testament. For plain and simple as it
sounds, so deep rich and wide it is that none can fathom it” (Luther).
“Spener never ventured to preach on it because he felt
that its true understanding exceeded the ordinary measure of faith; but he
caused it to be read to him three times on the evening before his death”
(Meyer, 1884, p. 475).
Meyer comments, “Only one, the Father, can be
termed absolutely ‘the only true God,’ ‘the one who is above and over all”
(Rom. 9:5), not at the same time Christ (who is not even in 1 John 5:20 the
true God).” Meyer correctly says that the Son is in unity with the Father,
works as His commissioner (10:30) and is His representative (14:9, 10) and
unique agent or shaliach. Meyer later loses himself in a befuddling
confusion over the “genetic subsistence” of the Son, but he has already
admitted to the unitarian statement of Jesus.
The famous commentary by Barrett notes that in Wisdom
literature (Prov. 11:9) “through knowledge the righteous will be saved,” and
that the world will eventually be “filled with the knowledge of the glory of
the Lord” (Hab. 2:14), and that “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”
(Hos. 4:6; Isa. 5:13).
“Clearly then the notion of
knowledge as the ground of salvation is very widespread…knowledge and believing
are not set over against each other but are correlated. The God whom to know is
to have eternal life is the only being who may properly be so described; He,
and it must follow, He alone is truly God” (Commentary on John, pp.
419-20).
This is straightforward unitary, non-Trinitarian
monotheism.
Professor Loofs described the
process of the early corruption of biblical Christianity:
“The Apologists [‘church
fathers’ like Justin Martyr, mid-2nd century] laid the foundation
for the perversion/corruption (Verkehrung) of Christianity into a
revealed [philosophical] teaching. Specifically, their Christology affected the
later development disastrously. By taking for granted the transfer of the
concept of Son of God onto the preexisting Christ, they were the cause
of the Christological problem of the fourth century. They caused a shift in the
point of departure of Christological thinking — away from the historical Christ and onto the issue of
preexistence. They thus shifted attention away from the historical life of
Jesus, putting it into the shadow and promoting instead the Incarnation [i.e.,
of a preexistent Son]. They tied Christology to cosmology and could not
tie it to soteriology.
“The Logos [i.e. preexisting Jesus]
teaching is not a ‘higher’ Christology than the customary one. It lags in fact
far behind the genuine appreciation of Christ. According to their teaching, it
is no longer God who reveals Himself in Christ, but the Logos, the inferior
God, a God who as God is subordinated to the Highest God (inferiorism or
subordinationism). In addition, the suppression of economic-trinitarian ideas
by metaphysical-pluralistic concepts of the divine triad (trias) can be traced to the Apologists” (Friedrich Loofs, Leitfaden zum Studium des Dogmengeschichte
[Manual for the Study of the History of Dogma], 1890, part 1 ch. 2,
section 18: “Christianity as a Revealed Philosophy. The Greek Apologists,”
Niemeyer Verlag, 1951, p. 97, translation mine).
Those who are dedicated to restoring the identity of
the biblical Jesus, Son of God, may take heart from the incisive words of a
leading systematic theologian of our times. He restores the biblical meaning of
the crucial title “Son of God,” rescuing it from the millennia-long obscurity
it has suffered from Platonically-minded church fathers and theologians.
Professor Colin Brown, who spoke at one of our “theological conferences,” general
editor of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology,
writes:
“The crux of the matter
lies in how we understand the term Son of God…The title Son of God is not in
itself an expression of personal Deity or the expression of metaphysical
distinctions within the Godhead. Indeed, to be a ‘Son of God’ one has to be a
being who is not God! It is a designation for a creature indicating a
special relationship with God. In particular, it denotes God’s representative,
God’s vice-regent. It is a designation of kingship, identifying the king as
God’s Son…
“In my view the term ‘Son of God’
ultimately converges on the term ‘image of God’ which is to be understood as
God’s representative, the one in whom God’s spirit dwells, and who is given
stewardship and authority to act on God’s behalf…
“It seems to me to be a fundamental
mistake to treat statements in the Fourth Gospel about the Son and his
relationship with the Father as expressions of inner-Trinitarian relationships.
But this kind of systematic misreading of the Fourth Gospel seems to underlie
much of social Trinitarian thinking…
“It is a common but patent misreading of
the opening of John’s Gospel to read it as if it said, ‘In the beginning was
the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was God.’
What has happened here is the substitution of Son for Word (Gk. logos)
and thereby the Son is made a member of the Godhead which existed from the
beginning” (“Trinity and Incarnation: Towards a Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Ex
Auditu, 7, 1991, pp. 87-89).
[1] Augustine,
finding this creedal statement incompatible with the Trinitarian creed of the
post-biblical Church, actually dared to alter the order of the sentence and
fraudulently twist the words of Jesus. In his Homilies on John he said
that John 17:3 ought to read: “This is eternal life, that they know you
[Father] and Jesus Christ whom you sent as the only true God.” Reader, take
careful note. The “church father” Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) conceded that the
Trinity, of which he was an architect, “does not harmonize with the Jewish
dogma” (he was referring to the strict monotheistic creed of Jesus and Israel
in Deut. 6:4; Mark 12:29). He thought that the Trinity destroyed “each heresy,”
i.e. the unitary monotheism of Jesus and Israel and the pagan polytheism of the
non-Jewish world, “and yet accepting what is useful from both” [the Shema and
paganism]. He argued that the Trinity was a truth which passes in the mean
between the two positions [Jewish and pagan].” Gregory unashamedly condemned
Jesus’ unitarian view of God as a “Jewish dogma” needing to be replaced.
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