3-4 Jewish Influence On The Trinity
The true Christian believer has ever been under pressure from the
world. Paul wrote words of eternal relevance when he asked that we not
allow the world to press us into its mould, but rather allow Christ to
transform us. The acceptance of the trinity was a result of the world
pressurizing the church. The Roman and Jewish worlds which surrounded
the Christians had a way of divinizing human figures. If you concluded
a man had been a hero, then you applied Divine language to him- a form
of what the Greeks had called apotheosis. This is why some of the
Rabbinic commentary on men like Moses and Elijah use God-like language
about them, although clearly the intention was not to make them equal
to the one and only God of Israel whom they believed in. Yet the Greek
and Western world have unfortnately read the Hebraic Biblical documents
through their own worldviews, and have missed the fact that Hebrew
terms and approaches are quite different to their own.
There’s
no lack of evidence that Christians did this with regard to the
language used about Jesus, indeed there are examples of it in the New
Testament. And it has also been observed that some of the exalted
Jewish language used about Moses- e.g. “the one for and on account of
whom the world was created”- was purposefully appropriated by Paul and
applied to Jesus (1). Such glorified figures were also spoken of with
the language of pre-existence, as if they had existed from the
beginning of creation, even though that wasn’t literally the case. They
were “ascribed a prior, heavenly status or existence, however that was
understood” (2). But as Christianity generally turned against the Jews,
as Jewish Christians were thrown out of the church or returned to the
synagogues, the actual human roots of Jesus were overlooked. The Jewish
background to the language of exaltation used about Him was no longer
appreciated. Instead, Christ remained in the minds of many Christians
with just the Divine titles attached to Him; and so they ended up
concluding that He was God Himself. They preferred to stick with forms
of wording which were comfortable and familiar to them, rather than
searching out the meaning behind those words. And today, nothing much
has changed. Christians still remain almost wilfully ignorant of the
basic principle of ‘God manifestation’ which is found throughout
Scripture, whereby Divine language can be used of a person without
making them God Himself.
Vincent Taylor analyzes Paul’s
hymn of praise to the Lord Jesus in Phil. 2:6-11 and concludes that it
is an adaptation of a Jewish hymn which spoke of “the appearance of the
Heavenly Man on earth” (3). Paul was writing under inspiration, but it
seems he purposefully adapted a Jewish hymn and applied it to Jesus- to
indicate the status which should truly be ascribed to the Lord Jesus.
Col. 1:15-20, another poetic fragment which is likewise misunderstood
by those seeking to justify the false idea of a personal pre-existence
of the Lord, has also been identified as a Jewish hymn which Paul
modified (4). We must remember that Paul was inspired by God to answer
the claims of false teachers; and he was doing so by using and
re-interpreting the terms which they used. Nearly all the titles of
Christ used in the letter to the Hebrews are taken from Philo or the
Jewish book of Wisdom (5). The writer to the Hebrews is seeking to
apply them in their correct and true sense to the Lord Jesus. This
explains why some titles are used which can easily be misunderstood by
those not appreciating this background. For example, Philo speaks of
“the impress of God’s seal”, and Hebrews applies this to the Lord
Jesus. The phrase has been misinterpreted by trinitarians as meaning
that Jesus is therefore God; but this wasn’t at all the idea behind the
title in Philo’s writings, and neither was it when the letter to the
Hebrews took up the phrase and applied it to Jesus. This sort of thing
goes on far more often than we might think in the Bible- existing
theological ideas are re-cast and re-presented in their correct light,
especially with reference to the Lord Jesus. Arthur Gibson notes that
“there is an important second level within religious language: it is a
reflection upon, a criticism of, a correction of, or a more general
formulation of, expressions which previously occur” (6). He even shows
that the very Names ‘Yahweh’ and ‘El’ were an allusion to earlier
contemporary gods of a similar name and meaning- but the only true God,
Yahweh, the El of Israel, alludes to these false notions and presents
them as applying solely to Himself.
Jewish Myths Deconstructed
In
my study of the historical development of the common Christian
understanding of Satan, I found that Jewish myths played a particularly
strong role in influencing the early Christian positions- once
Christianity started to depart from a purely Biblical approach (7). The
same appears true for some elements of the false doctrines which led to
the development of the Trinity. The apocryphal Jewish Book of Enoch
held that the "Son of man" figure personally pre-existed (1 Enoch
48:2-6; 62:6,7). The idea of personal pre-existence was held by the
Samaritans, who believed that Moses personally pre-existed (8). Indeed
the idea of a pre-existent man, called by German theologians the urmensch ,
was likely picked up by the Jews from the Persians during the
captivity. Christians who believed that Jesus was the prophet greater
than Moses, that He was the "Son of man", yet who were influenced by
Jewish thinking, would therefore come to assume that Jesus also
personally pre-existed. And yet they drew that conclusion in defiance
of basic Biblical teaching to the opposite. Paul often appears to
allude to these Jewish ideas, which he would've been familiar with, in
order to refute and correct them. Thus when he compares Jesus and Adam
by saying: "The first man is of the earth, the second man is from
heaven" (1 Cor. 15:45-47), he is alluding to the idea of Philo that
there was an earthly and heavenly man; and one of the Nag Hammadi
documents On The Origin Of The World claims
that "the first Adam of the light is spiritual... the second Adam is
soul-endowed" (9). Paul's point is that the "second Adam" is the
now-exalted Lord Jesus in Heaven, and not some pre-existent being. Adam
was "a type of him who was to come" (Rom. 5:14); the one who brought
sin, whereas Christ brought salvation. Paul was alluding to and
correcting the false ideas- hence he at times appears to use language
which hints of pre-existence. But reading his writings in context shows
that he held no such idea, and was certainly not advocating the truth
of those myths and documents he alluded to.
The natural
human desire to downplay our own sin, and that of our race, led Judaism
to misinterpret the fall of Adam. They ended up calling Adam "the
Heavenly man" and believing that he was somehow alive and would be
re-incarnated in the Messiah. Philo, the great Jewish philosopher of
Alexandria, popularized this view. In The Real DevilI
comment how this kind of corrupt Judaism was partly responsible for
Christianity's adoption of pagan notions of the Devil. But the same
observation holds true in seeking to explain how early Christianity
also became corrupted in its understanding of Messiah-Jesus. Philo
argued that there were two "Adams" referred to in Genesis (based on his
failure to reconcile Gen. 1:27 with Gen. 2:2). Paul was fully aware of
these false ideas, and specifically alludes to them when explaining how
"the first Adam" was the historical Adam we meet in Genesis; and the
"second Adam" is a term only applicable to the Lord Jesus Christ after
His resurrection.
Martin Hengel suggests that Christians attempted to answer the Jewish ideas of pre-existent Torah, Wisdom and Logos
by developing the idea that Jesus pre-existed, as a kind of answer to
their claims (10). This would indicate that the Christians simply
sought to make their Jesus attractive to the surrounding world, paying
more attention to justifying their beliefs and silencing other
alternatives than to simply proclaiming the Biblical Christ. And so
many have repeated that error over history. Origen's reply to Celsus, a
critic of Christianity, reveals how a wrong understanding of Jesus
developed in response to the criticisms received by Christianity.
Celsus claimed that the Christians were making Jesus out to be a God by
worshipping Him (as quoted by Origen in Contra Celsum 8.12).
The response should've been that worship of Jesus doesn't require Him
to be one and the same person as God- for the same Greek words used in
the New Testament about 'worship' of Jesus are used about worship of men. But instead, Origen took the path of justifying the idea that Jesus is God.
C.H. Dodd throughout chapter 3 of his classic The Interpretation Of The Fourth Gospel
gives ample reason to believe his thesis that John's Gospel was written
[partly] in order to deconstruct the popular teachings of Philo in the
first century- and there are therefore many allusions to his writings.
Thus John records how in vain the Jews searched the Scriptures, because
in them they thought they had eternal life (Jn. 5:39)- when this is the
very thing that Philo claimed to do. This approach helps us understand
why, for example, the prologue to John is written in the way it is,
full of allusion to Jewish ideas about the logos. How John
writes is only confusing to us because we're not reading his inspired
words against the immediate background in which they were written-
which included the very popular false teachings of Philo about the logos. Thus Philo claimed that God had two sons, sent the younger into the world, and the elder, the logos, remained "by Him"- whereas John's prologue shows that the logos was an abstract idea, which was
sent into the world in the form of God's one and only Son, the Lord
Jesus. Dodd shows how constantly John is referring to Philo- e.g. Philo
denied any possibility of spiritual rebirth, whereas John (Jn. 3:3-5)
stresses how needful and possible it is in Christ. The very abstract
views of Philo are challenged when John comments that the logos
has become flesh- real and actual, handled and seen, in the person of
the Lord Jesus. Philo claimed that the logos was an Angel- whereas John effectively denies this by saying that the logos
became a real and actual human being. Those Christians who claim Jesus
was an Angel- and they range from Jehovah's Witnesses to those who
claim Jesus appeared as an Old Testament Angel- should all stand
corrected by John's argument against Philo. In chapter 11 of his book,
Dodd makes the observation that there was a tension between Jewish
monotheism, and the many gods of Greek mythology. He shows how these
ideas were reconciled by bringing the gods into some kind of family
relationship with each- thus Hermes and Apollo became sons of Zeus, and
all were seen as emanations of the one God. This is highly significant
for any study of how the Trinity came into existence- the stage was set
for the idea of a small family of gods to develop, all supposedly
emanations of one God.
The Samaritans
I
wish to share a theory which to me is significant in explaining the way
that Jewish conceptions came to influence Christian misunderstanding of
Jesus. My suggestion is that the Samaritan Christians came to import
into their theology a view of Jesus which was based upon the mixture of
Jewish-pagan ideas which they had held before their conversion to
Christianity. The letter to the Hebrews is clearly intended as a
rebuttal of wrong understandings of the Lord Jesus, and as noted above,
the language used about Jesus in Heb. 1 clearly alludes to incipient
Gnostic ideas of a pre-existent redeemer who was in some ways 'God'-
and the writer is clearly debunking those ideas. I write more about
this in The Divine Side Of Jesus. My suggestion is that
Hebrews was written specifically to Samaritan Christians. For starters,
it was Samaritans who called themselves Hebraioi; the Jews
tended not to use that term (11). And the reasoning of Hebrews is all
drawn from the tabernacle rather than the Jerusalem temple,
which the Samaritans didn't accept. The list of the faithful in Heb. 11
is drawn only from the Pentateuch and Joshua, which were the only Old
Testament books accepted by the Samaritans. Justin (First Apology 26) and Irenaeus (Against Heresies
i.23.1-4) both claimed that it was the Samaritans who were the first
Gnostics. John Macdonald in his extensive work The Theology Of The Samaritans
demonstrates that the Samaritans actually believed in a binity, two
Gods, called "The true one", and "The Glory" (12). They reasoned that
the two accounts of creation in Genesis were the work of these two
beings, and that Moses in Ex. 34 met two beings each called "Yahweh".
And yet the Samaritans were monotheists. They justified their belief in
only one God much as trinitarians do today- they argued that the one
God was incarnated in the other one, so that there was one God in a
kind of binity (13). And so in my opinion this group of Hebrew
Christians were likely to revert to their original beliefs, and make
Jesus out to be an incarnated God. And it is to them that the letter to
the Hebrews is written. It's significant that John's Gospel pays
attention to the theme of the Samaritans, and John 1 is full of
allusions to Genesis 1 and Exodus 34- the two passages which, as shown
above, the Samaritans used as the basis for their belief in a binity of
Gods. It's perhaps noteworthy that Paul mentions false apostles in
Corinth claiming to be 'Hebrews' rather than Ioudaioi, Jews
(2 Cor. 11:22). Significantly, a "Synagogue of the Hebrews", i.e.
Samaritans, has been uncovered at Corinth (14). Harry Whittaker and I
have offered independent studies showing the existence of a 'Jewish
plot' against Paul's work throughout the first century; perhaps that
thesis needs to be honed a little and applied specifically to this
group of Samaritan Christians (15).
The significance of
all this in our present context is that Paul and the apostolic writers
of the New Testament were already up against the idea that Jesus = God.
Michael Goulder sums it up: "There is evidence that these 'Hebrew'
missionaries introduced new doctrines to the ... churches in... the
teaching that Jesus was God become man [and] a glorifying and
dehumanizing of his earthly life" (16). The apostles dealt with these
ideas by alluding to and deconstructing the Gnostic and Samaritan ideas
which were at the root of them- and that, in my view, is the basis of
many of the passages which are seized upon by trinitarians in support
of their idea, whilst of course ignoring the mass of Bible teaching to
the contrary. As I have shown elsewhere, passages such as John 1 and
Hebrews 1 are in fact full of emphasis upon the fact that Jesus is not
God Himself; but their allusion to the prevailing views and literature
leads to their use of phrases from that literature which are seized
upon by careless Bible readers as evidence for their preconceived idea
of a trinity.
The Jewish View Of Angels
The
Jewish obsession with Angels influenced the early Christians in the
area of Christology [i.e. theories about Christ], just as it did on the
topic of the Devil. Chapters like Hebrews 1 and Colossians 2 deal with
this in detail, stressing that Jesus was not an Angel [something which the Watchtower movement of today needs to consider more fully]. The Jewish Testament Of Daniel
6.1 exhorts Israel to "draw near unto God and unto the angel that
intercedeth for you, for he is a mediator between God and man". This is
alluded to by Paul in 1 Tim. 2:5, when he underlines that to us
there is "one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus".
Clearly Paul is alluding to the apostate Jewish angelology and
correcting it- as in Hebrews 2, the point is laboured that Jesus was a man and not an Angel, and He is the only mediator. 3 Enoch [also known as The Hebrew Book Of Enoch]
spoke much of an Angel called Metatron, "the prince of the presence",
"the lesser Yahweh", who appeared as Yahweh to Moses in Ex. 23:21, sat
on "the throne of glory" etc (3 Enoch 10-14). Early Jewish Christianity
appears to have mistakenly reapplied these ideas to Jesus, resulting in
the idea the first of all Jesus was an Angel, and then coming to full
term in the doctrine of the Trinity. J. Danielou devotes the whole
fourth chapter of his survey of the development of Christian doctrine
to the study of how Jewish views of Angels actually led on to the
Trinity (17). Paul's style was not to baldly state that everything
believed in by the Jews was wrong; he recognized that the very nature
of apostasy is in the mixing of the true and the false. He speaks of
how Jesus truly has been exalted and sits at God's right hand (Rom.
8:34) and has been given God's Name, as the Angel was in Exodus (Phil.
2:9-11); but his whole point is that whilst that may indeed be common
ground with the Jewish ideas, the truth is that Jesus is not
an Angel. He came into physical existence through Mary ("made / born of
a woman", Gal. 4:4), and as the begotten Son of God has been exalted
above than any Angel. The language of Heb. 1:3-6 clearly alludes to the
Metatron myth and deconstructs it in very clear terms. For Jesus is
described as "being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image /
pattern of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his
power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right
hand of the Majesty on high; having become by so much better than the
angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they. For unto
which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, This day have
I begotten thee? and again, I will be to him a Father, And he shall be
to me a Son? And when he again bringeth in the firstborn into the world
he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him".
James
Dunn quotes Tertullian, Justin, Epiphanius and Clement as all believing
that the Lord Jesus was an Angel: "so too Jewish Christians of the
second and third centuries specifically affirmed that Christ was an
angel or archangel... Justin's identification of the angel of Yahweh
with the [supposedly] pre-existent Christ" (18). It was this Jewish
obsession with Angels, and the desire to make Jesus understandable as
an Angel, which led to the idea that He personally pre-existed and was
not quite human. And hence the specific and repeated emphasis of the
New Testament that the Lord was not an Angel but because He was a man and not an Angel He has been exalted far above
Angels (Phil. 2:9-11; Col. 1:16; 2:8-10; Heb. 1; 1 Pet. 1:12; 3:22;
Rev. 5:11-14). It's the same with the idea of Melchizedek, whom the
Qumran community and writings understood as an Archangel. The
commentary upon Melchizedek in Hebrews stresses that he was a man ("consider how great this man was...", Heb. 7:4)- therefore not an Angel. He was a foreshadowing
of Christ, and not Christ Himself. It would appear that the commentary
upon Melchizedek in Hebrews is actually full of indirect references to
the Qumran claims about Melchizedek being an Angel and somehow being
the Messiah. Sadly, too many trinitarians today have made the same
mistake as the Jews- arguing that Melchizedek was somehow Jesus
personally. We examine that view in yet more detail in section 1-13.
The Jews of Qumran were quite obsessed with Angels- they also suggested
that Gabriel was somehow the pre-existent Messiah. Bearing that in
mind, it would appear that the descriptions of the Angel Gabriel
announcing the conception and birth of Jesus are almost purposefully
designed to show that Gabriel and Jesus are not the same but are two quite different persons (Mt. 1:20,24; 2:13,19; Lk. 1:11,19,26-38; 2:9).
The Jews believed that the shekinah,
the physical light of glory associated with the tabernacle, was somehow
a personal being associated with a Messiah figure. Paul deconstructs
this idea in 2 Cor. 3:17,18, where he says that the shekinah seen on the face of Moses was a fading
glory of the Old Covenant, having been made insignificant by the glory
of Christ. Thus Paul is attacking the common Jewish idea by saying that
the Lord Jesus was not the shekinah but is superior
to it. Indeed, he so often makes the same point by stressing that the
glorification of the Lord Jesus was at His resurrection and ascension.
He became "the Lord of glory" by what He suffered, and
received this glorification at the resurrection and ascension. If the
Lord's glory was somehow pre-existent before that, the wonder and
personal significance of the resurrection for Jesus is somehow lost
sight of; the idea of suffering and then being glorified, as
a pattern for us, is quite lost sight of. And yet this was the repeated
theme of Paul's inspired writings. Note in passing how when describing
the shekinah cloud in which the Angel dwelt, Paul comments
that the cloud was mere water, for at the Red Sea it played a part in
symbolizing Israel's baptism "into Moses in the cloud [water above
them] and in the sea [water on both sides of them]" (1 Cor. 10:2).
Moses and not the shekinah cloud was the type of Christ. Yet
Justin Martyr and many other careless Bible readers, coming to
Scripture in order to seek justification for their preconceived
trinitarian ideas, have interpreted the cloud as being the Angel which
was supposedly Jesus. Hebrews 1 clarifies that God spoke in Old
Testament times through Angels and prophets- but not through
His Son. This He began to do in the ministry of the human Jesus. That
path of thought alone should remove all possibility that any Old
Testament Angel was in fact the Lord Jesus.
We may
wonder why John is at such pains to point out that Christ "came in the
flesh", and why he pronounced anathema upon those who denied that (2
Jn. 7-9). It seems to me that his converts had come up against Jewish
attempts to re-interpret Jesus in terms of apostate Jewish thinking
about Angels and the whole nature of existence, the kind of heresy
battled against in Hebrews and Colossians. Take Jewish views of the
Angels who appeared to Abraham. Josephus says they "gave him to believe
that they did eat" (Antiquities 1.197); Philo claimed that "though they neither ate nor drank, they gave the appearance of both eating and drinking" (Abraham
118). The Bible states simply that they ate. And that Jesus likewise
ate after His resurrection. John emphasizes that the Lord Jesus had
been fully tangible, the disciples touched and felt Him (1 Jn. 1:1-4);
and that His death was equally real (1 Jn. 1:7; 2:2; 4:10; 5:6-9). And
he presses the point that this is what had been believed "from the
beginning", indicating that already new ideas were coming into the
Christian communities about the nature of Jesus. This of itself shows
that the whole issue of who Jesus is does matter; that the Christ was and is the real
Christ was for John crucially important, as it is for me. Hence this
book. The inspired apostle didn't simply shrug off these new ideas as
well meaning misunderstandings. He speaks against them in the toughest
possible terms.
The Jewish Background To The Logos
Much
has been made of the similarities between Jn. 1:1-3 and the 'Wisdom'
literature of the Jews. Judaism believed in a number of intermediaries
who interceded between God and Israel- Wisdom, the Shekinah [glory],
the Logos / word. The Torah [law] had become so elevated and
personified that it was spoken of almost as a separate 'God' (19). John
and Paul are picking up these terms and explaining their true meaning-
Jesus is the glory [shekinah] of God, He alone is the
one and only true mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5). By
stressing that the mediator was "the man Christ Jesus", Paul is also
taking a swipe at the Greek idea of a superhuman mediator between the
world and the world's creator, sometimes called a "second God". And
when it comes to the Logos, John is explaining in his prologue that the
theme of all God's word in the Old Testament was ultimately about
Jesus, and that 'word' became flesh in a person, i.e. Jesus, in His
life and death. Understanding this background helps us understand why
John appears to use very 'Divine' language about the logos.
He's doing so because he's alluding to the mistaken beliefs of Judaism
and showing where the truth really lies in Jesus.
Jewish Influence On The 'Pre-existence' Idea
The
false notion that the Lord Jesus literally pre-existed and was then
somehow incarnated, or re-incarnated, was a pagan idea that had become
popular in Judaism around the time of Christ. In fact the road to the
Trinity began with Justin and other 'church fathers' coming to teach
that Jesus personally pre-existed- even though they initially denied
that He was God Himself. The Qumran sect, some of whose followers
became the first Christians, believed that the "Teacher of
Righteousness" pre-existed as the former prophets and would be an
incarnation of them. This explains why they thought Messiah had
previously been incarnated as Moses, Elijah and the prophets. In this
lies the significance of the account in Mt. 16:14-18. Jesus enquires
who the people think He is- and the disciples answer that the popular
view is that Jesus of Nazareth is Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the
prophets reincarnated. But this was exactly who first century Judaism
thought Messiah would be (20). So the crowd view was indeed that Jesus
was Messiah- but "Messiah" as they understood Messiah would be. The
significance of the incident lies in Peter's affirmation that Jesus,
whom he accepted as Messiah, was not a re-incarnation of a pre-existent
prophet but was the begotten Son of God. Note in passing that the false
doctrine of pre-existence is connected to the pagan myth of incarnation
and re-incarnation. If, for example, Jesus really was existing in Old
Testament times, then somehow He would have had to have been
re-incarnated in Mary's womb.
Peter's rejection of
these ideas and declaration instead that Jesus is the Son of God gave
the Lord Jesus great joy; and so too will our faith in Him as the
actual Son of God, not a pre-existent being somehow incarnated inside
Mary. The Jesus who to this day remembers early childhood with Mary
knows full well that He didn't pre-exist before that. We too, you and
I, know how frustrating it is to have our origins and essential being
misunderstood, and to hear others insisting that their false images of
us are in fact true. It may not mean that we break all relationship
with them just because of this- but it is surely so that our correct
understanding of the nature and essence of Jesus rejoices His heart and
draws us closer in our relationship. This is my perspective on the
issue of "So how important is it to reject the idea of a pre-existent
Jesus?". I cannot speak for His ultimate judgment of men and women,
although I do know that many will call Him "Lord, Lord" at the last day
and realize they never knew Him and He never knew them (Mt. 7:22,23).
All I can say is that correct understanding of our Lord's nature will
deeply enrich our relationship with Him- and this is what the daily
essence of following Him is all about.
We know from
Acts 8 that people from Samaria formed a significant part of the
earliest Christian community. Yet all converts are prone to return to
their former beliefs in some ways at some times. The Samaritan view of
Messiah was likewise that he would be the re-incarnation of a prophet,
specifically Moses (Jn. 4:19,25). It therefore seems likely that the
idea of a pre-existent Christ / Messiah developed as a result of the
early Jewish and Samaritan converts returning to their previous
conceptions of Messiah. For these were less taxing to their faith than
the radical idea that an illiterate Jewish teenager called Marryam in
some dumb Galileean village actually conceived a baby direct from God
Almighty. Uninspired documents such as the Preaching Of Peter and the Gospel Of The Hebrews
also make the false connection between Jesus and a re-incarnated Moses,
Elijah etc. Clearly enough, the idea of a pre-existent, incarnated
Jesus had its roots in paganism and apostate Judaism. The descriptions
of Jesus as a "man", a human being, have little meaning if in fact He
pre-existed as God for millions of years before. The descriptions of
Him as "begotten" (passive of gennan in Mt. 1:16,20) make no
suggestion of pre-existence at all. And the words of the Lord Jesus and
His general behaviour would have to be read as all being purposefully
deceptive, if in fact He was really a pre-existent god. There is no
hint of any belief in a pre-existent Jesus until the writings of Justin
Martyr in the second century- and he only develops the idea in his
dialogue with Trypho the Jew. The Biblical accounts of the Lord's
conception and birth just flatly contradict the idea of pre-existence.
This contradiction leads trinitarians into the most impossible
statements. Take Kenneth Wuest, leading Evangelical and trinitarian:
"Jesus proceeded by eternal generation as the Son of God from the
Father in a birth that never took place because it always was" (21).
This is meaningless verbiage- all necessitated by a desire to accept
the Trinity tradition above God's word. And Wuest makes that incredible
statement in a book entitled "Great truths to live by". Nobody can live
a victorious spiritual life on the basis of such 'truths'.
Time
and again we have to remind ourselves that in reading the Bible, we are
reading literature which was relevant to the time in which it was
written, and which is inevitably going to freely use the current
terminology without as it were giving footnoted explanations for 21st
century readers. The whole language of pre-existence in Heaven must be
understood against the Jewish background in which it was first used in
the Biblical writings. "When the Jew wished to designate something as
predestined, he spoke of it as already 'existing' in heaven" (22).
Moses (especially in The Testament Of Moses
1:13,14), the Torah etc. are all spoken of in this sense in Jewish
writings of the time. "Attribution of preexistence indicates religious
importance of the highest order. Rabbinic theology speaks of the Law,
of God's throne of glory, of Israel... as things which were already
present with [God] before the creation of the world. The same is also
true of the Messiah... in Pesikta Rabbati 152b it is said
that "from the beginning of the creation of the world the King Messiah
was born, for he came up in the thought of God before the world was
created". This means that from all eternity it was the will of God that
the Messiah should come into existence, and should do his work in the
world to fulfill God's eternal saving purpose" (23). We must not read
the New Testament through Greek / Western eyes, but rather try to
understand it against its original Jewish / Hebrew background of
thought. It's a failure to do this which has given rise to
trinitarianism and its associated misconceptions. Thus when we read of
Jesus being "with" God, the Greek / Western mind can assume this means
sitting literally together with Him. But time and again in the Hebrew
Bible, the idea of being "with" someone means [according to the Brown,
Driver and Briggs Hebrew Lexicon, p. 768] to "be in one's
consciousness, whether of knowledge, memory or purpose". Thus Job
speaks of how what God plans to do to him is "with God", i.e. in His
purpose (Job 23:14); David is spoken of as having the idea about
building a temple "with" him (1 Kings 8:17; 2 Chron. 6:7)- and there
are multiple other examples (Num. 14:24; 1 Kings 11:11; 1 Chron. 28:12;
Job 10:13; 15:9; 23:10; 27:11; Ps. 50:11; 73:23). It is this refusal to
read the Bible within its own Hebraic context which has led to so much
misunderstanding, and adopting of doctrines and positions which simply
don't stand up to closer Biblical scrutiny.
The whole idea of a human being
God Himself, or of personal pre-existence, are both Greek / Hellenistic
concepts, and not Hebrew ones. "When the Jew said something was
"predestined", he thought of it as already "existing" in a higher
sphere of life... this typically Jewish conception of predestination
may be distinguished from the Greek idea of preexistence by the
predominance of the thought of "preexistence" in the Divine purpose"
(24). The language of Jn. 1:1-3 is all about this- the logos
preexisting in God's purpose. Significantly, the idea of 'apocalypse'
alludes to this Jewish idea of predestined things 'existing' in Heaven
with God; for 'apocalypse' means literally an unveiling, a revealing of
what is [in Heaven]. In this sense the believer at the resurrection
will receive what was already laid up in store for him or her in Heaven
(2 Cor. 5:1; Col. 1:5; Mt. 25:34). Because of this, Hebrew can use past
tenses to speak of that which is future (e.g. Is. 5:13; 9:2,6,12;
10:28; 28:16; 34:2; Gen. 15:18 cp. Acts 7:5). Things can thus "be"
before they are created: "They were and were created" (Rev. 4:11). And
thus when the Lord Jesus speaks of the glory which He had with God from
the beginning (Jn. 17:5), there is no suggestion there that He
therefore existed in glory from the beginning. He didn't ask for that
glory to be restored to Him, as trinitarianism demands; instead He
asked that the glory which He already had in the Divine purpose, be
given to Him. Significantly, there is a Greek word which specifically
refers to personal, literal pre-existence: pro-uparchon- and it's never used about the Lord Jesus.
The Jewish View Of Adam
There
was a first century Jewish speculation that Adam would be re-incarnated
as Messiah. Paul's references to Adam and Christ in Rom. 5:12-21 and 1
Cor. 15:45-47 are very careful to debunk that idea. Paul emphasized
that no, Adam and Jesus are different, Jesus is superior to Adam,
achieved what Adam didn't, whilst all the same being "son of man". And
this emphasis was effectively a denial by Paul that Jesus pre-existed
as Adam, or as anyone. For Paul counters these Jewish speculations by
underlining that the Lord Jesus was human. The hymn of Phil.
2:6-11 is really a setting out of the similarities and differences
between Adam and Jesus- and unlike Adam, Jesus did not even consider
equality with God as something to be grasped for (Gen. 3:5). The record
of the wilderness temptations also appears designed to highlight the
similarities and differences between Adam and Jesus- both were tempted,
Adam eats, Jesus refuses to eat; both are surrounded by the animals and
Angels (Mk. 1:13).
A false understanding of the nature
of the Lord Jesus is related to a wrong understanding of sin and the
whole nature and need for atonement. There was a first century Jewish
speculation that Adam would be re-incarnated as Messiah, and this was
connected with the idea that Adam was somehow sinless. The Book of Enoch
blames the fall of man on the sin of the [supposed] Angels in Genesis
6, rather than Adam's sin in Eden; and some early Jewish Christians
likewise denied the fall of Adam, blaming humanity's problems rather on
the supposed visit of Angels to the earth [according to their
misinterpretation of Genesis 6] (25). In all this we see a refusal to
face sin for what it is, and to dilute human responsibility for sin,
blaming it rather on supposedly fallen Angels. It is this, on a
psychological level at least, which appears to be the root cause for
the misinterpretation on the Genesis 6 passage. I've written more about
this in chapter 5 of The Real Devil. This failure to perceive
the importance and nature of sin led to wrong thinking as to how
salvation could be achieved. According to the Gnostics, mankind was to
be saved simply by the act of "the Heavenly man" descending to earth
and ascending back to Heaven (see the Naasene Hymn and Hippolytus in Refutations
5.6-11). The Biblical picture is very different. The Lord Jesus was
born of an ordinary woman, human, with all our temptations (Heb.
2:14-18; 4:15,16), and only through His struggle against sin, unto
death, can we be saved. This is a far different picture from that of
popular Christianity, whereby [just as in the Gnostic theory], some
non-human redeemer saved us merely by making a trip down to earth and
back to Heaven again. Such a theory also says something about the
nature of God- would He really forgive us all the hurt we cause Him,
just because someone took a trip from Heaven to earth and back again?
Is the God of the Bible really so tokenistic and so easily satisfied by
ritual for the sake of it? The huge place accorded to the death and
resurrection of Jesus by the New Testament writers is clearly enough a
denial of the Gnostic idea of the Heavenly redeemer coming down to
earth and ascending again for our redemption. And yet this mistaken
idea is clearly behind the theology of mainstream Christianity- even
though it utterly devalues the cross and resurrection. John's idea is
that the Lord Jesus was 'lifted up' on the cross, and yet 'lifted up'
is the term used for exaltation to and by God (Jn. 3:14 etc. all play
on this idea). The Lord's ascension to Heaven wasn't therefore a 'going
home', as required by the Gnostic pre-existence theory; it was a
wonderful exaltation of "the man Christ Jesus" from earth to Heaven, in
recognition of His supreme achievment. Truly has it been commented:
"The dogma of Christ's deity turned Jesus into a Hellenistic
redeemer-god, and thus was a myth propagated behind which the
historical Jesus completely disappeared" (26).
Further,
the Lord Jesus is set up in so many ways as the example for us to
follow- in a way that some cosmic being descending from outer space
never could have been. In the same way as Jesus was the image of the
invisible God in His character (Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4), so we are
bidden put on the image of God (Col. 3:10), being transformed into His
image progressively over time (2 Cor. 3:18), through "the renewing of
your mind" (Rom. 12:2), being conformed to the image of Jesus our
Saviour (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49). Thus the process of our redemption, through the perfect character of Jesus, becomes in turn a personal pattern
for each of us who have been saved by that process. And it was only
through the successful completion of that work of redemption that Jesus
was "made" Lord of all (Rom. 1:4; Acts 2:36). This is a different
picture to the Gnostic-Trinitarian idea of a pre-existent Lord of all
descending to earth. Further, their theory gets somewhat confused when
they claim that the Angelic appearances on earth in Old Testament times
[e.g. the Angel with Israel in the wilderness] were actually
appearances of Jesus on earth. If this is so, then when did
Jesus come to earth to save men? Did He make several visits...? Why
couldn't each of these visits have been enough for human salvation? The
idea that the Lord Jesus was an Old Testament Angel is simply
unsustainable in Scripture and needs to be rejected, along with all
Gnostic-influenced views of Him. We know from Acts 14:11 that there was
a strong tendency in the first century to believe that the gods could
come to earth in the likeness of men; and trinitarianism simply
reflects the fact that weak Christians in the early centuries sought to
accomodate Christianity to their existing beliefs.
The Language Of Exaltation
As
scholarship uncovers and analyzes more and more Jewish literature
contemporary with and predating the New Testament, it becomes apparent
that many of the terms of devotion used about Jesus are in fact
borrowed from Judaism. This we would expect, seeing that the New
Testament writers and the early Christians were largely Jewish. Judaism
gave Divine titles to Messiah, speaking of Him in Divine terms (27)-
and yet clearly enough, this didn't mean that the Jews understood
Messiah as equal to God, for they were the world's fiercest
monotheists. If the Jews of the first century were being asked to quit
monotheism and accept trinitarianism, why is there no New Testament
hint of the struggle this would have resulted in? Why doesn't Paul
speak of how he struggled with it? For even today, Trinitarian
preachers find their view of the Trinity to be the greatest
stumblingblock for their Jewish audiences. Larry Hurtado sums it up
like this: "Virtually all the Christological rhetoric of early
Christians was appropriated from their environment" (28). We of course
do the same- we describe a promising young footballer as "the next
[Beckham]", or whoever is the football star of the moment. Likewise the
word "awesome" came into strong vogue in the late 1990s as a
superlative. We use the terms of exaltation which are current at our
time. Thus reading the New Testament against its context, the highly
exalted language used about the Lord Jesus was not in fact making any
claim at all that 'Jesus = God' in a trinitarian sense. It was only
because Judaism and Christianity parted company with each other that
later generations of Gentile Christians came to forget the immediate
Jewish context against which those terms were initially used- and
conveniently mixed them with their own pagan ideas about gods coming to
earth etc.
The Extent Of Jewish Influence
It
may be wondered whether I'm not over emphasizing the influence of
apostate Jewish thinking upon apostate Christian thinking in the first
century. However there's ample evidence that such influence occured in
other doctrinal and behavioural areas even amongst the early Gentile
churches. The Songs Of The Sabbath Sacrifice was a document
used in the Qumran community, claiming that the Angelic choirs of
praise to God were reflected in the praises of the Qumran community.
They saw themselves as praising God with the "tongues of Angels". A
similar idea can be found in the Testament Of Job, which also
uses the term "tongues of Angels" to describe how the praises of Job's
daughters matched those of the Angels in Heaven. These two apocryphal
writings include many phrases which are used by Paul in his argument
against how the Corinthians were abusing the idea of 'speaking in
tongues': "understand all mysteries (1 Cor. 13:2)... in a spirit speaks
mysteries (1 Cor. 14:2)... speaking unto God (1 Cor. 14:2)... sing with
the Spirit (1 Cor. 14:15)... bless with the spirit (1 Cor. 14:16)...
hath a psalm (1 Cor. 14:26)" (29). It would seem therefore that the
Gentile Corinthians were influenced by apostate Jewish false teachers,
who were encouraging them to use ecstatic utterance with the claim that
they were speaking with "tongues of Angels". And Paul's response is to
guide them back to the purpose of the gift of tongues- which was to
preach in foreign languages. My point in this context is that even in
the Gentile church at Corinth, there was significant influence from
Jewish false teachers. So it's no surprise to find that in the area of
the nature and person of the Lord Jesus, which was the crucial issue in
the new religion of Christianity, there would also be such influence by
Jewish thinking.
Notes
(1) See Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion And Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003) pp. 71-92.
(2) N.A. Dahl, "Christ, Creation And The Church" in The Background Of The New Testament , ed. W.D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1964) pp. 422-443.
(3) Vincent Taylor, The Person Of Christ In New Testament Teaching (London: Macmillan, 1959) p. 62.
(4) Evidence provided in Rudolf Bultmann, Theology Of The New Testament (New York: Scribner's, 1965) Vol. 1 pp. 132, 176, 178.
(5) See J. Moffatt, The Epistle To The Hebrews (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1924) pp. 11,38; C.K. Barrett, The New Testament Background (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1989 ed.) pp. 174-184.
(6) Arthur Gibson, Biblical Semantic Logic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981) p. 26. The same point is often exemplified in Jmaes Barr, The Semantics Of Biblical Language (Oxford: O.U.P., 1961).
(7) See my The Real Devil chapter 1.
(8) John Macdonald, The Theology Of The Samaritans (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964) p. 162.
(9) References in James Dunn, Christology In The Making (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980) p. 100.
(10) Martin Hengel, Acts And The History Of Earliest Christianity (London: S.C.M., 1979) p. 106.
(11) See John Hick, ed., The Myth Of God Incarnate (London: S.C.M., 1977) p. 67.
(12) John Macdonald, op cit., pp. 135, 221, 306.
(13) W. Bauer, Orthodoxy And Heresy In Earliest Christianity (London: S.C.M., 1972) pp. 44-60; H.G. Kippenburg, Gerazim And Synagogue (Berlin & New York: Gruyter, 1971) pp. 205, 316, 367.
(14) Mentioned in Bauer, op cit., p. 44.
(15) Harry Whittaker, 'The Jewish Plot', in Studies In The Acts Of The Apostles (Wigan: Biblia, 1991); and my 'The Jewish Satan' in The Real Devil (Sydney: Aletheia, 2007).
(16) Michael Goulder, in John Hick, ed., The Myth Of God Incarnate (London: S.C.M., 1977) p. 84.
(17) J. Danielou, The Theology Of Jewish Christianity: A History Of Early Christian Doctrine (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964) chapter 4, 'The Trinity and Angelology'.
(18) James Dunn, Christology In The Making (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980) pp. 132, 150.
(19) H. Ringgren, Word And Wisdom (Lund: Ohlsson, 1947) pp. 165-171. See too his The Faith Of Qumran (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963).
(20) See documentation in Oscar Cullmann, The Christology Of The New Testament (London: S.C.M., 1971) pp. 15,16.
(21) Kenneth Wuest, Great Truths To Live By (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952) p. 30.
(22) E.G. Selwyn, First Epistle Of St. Peter
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983) p. 124. Likewise Emil Schurer: "In Jewish
thinking, everything truly valuable preexisted in heaven", The History of The Jewish People In The Age Of Jesus Christ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1979) Vol. 2 p. 522.
(23) H. Mowinckel, He That Cometh (Nashville: Abingdon, 1954) p. 334.
(24) E.C. Dewick, Primitive Christian Eschatology (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1912) pp. 253,254.
(25) For documentation, see Oscar Cullmann, The Christology Of The New Testament (London: S.C.M., 1971) p. 170.
(26) Martin Werner, The Formation Of Christian Doctrine: An Historical Study Of Its Problems (London: A. & C. Black, 1957) p. 298.
(27) See William Horbury, Jewish Messianism And The Cult Of Christ (London: S.C.M., 1998); Nils Dahl, "Sources of Christological language" in his Jesus The Christ: The Historical Origins Of Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) pp. 113-136.
(28) Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion To Jesus In Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) p. 75.
(29) References for all this can be found in Andrew Perry,'The Songs Of The Sabbath Sacrifice And Tongues', Christadelphian Journal Of Biblical Interpretation, Vol. 2 No. 2 April 2008 p. 13.
