Hi reniaa,
Thanks for your post. Some important verses for sure.
So can I ask who you believe Jesus is?
All the best,
Stephen
Is Jesus Jehovah?
by lostsheep82 144 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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reniaa
hi cameo-d it was hagar concubine of abraham and mother of ishmael here's the bit.
Genesis 16:7 Now ( H ) the angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to ( I ) Shur.
8 He said, "Hagar, Sarai's maid, ( J ) where have you come from and where are you going?" And she said, "I am fleeing from the presence of my mistress Sarai."
9 Then the angel of the LORD said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit yourself to her authority."
10 Moreover, the ( K ) angel of the LORD said to her, " ( L ) I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they will be too many to count."
11 The angel of the LORD said to her further,
"Behold, you are with child,
And you will bear a son;
And you shall call his name [ a ] Ishmael,
Because ( M ) the LORD has given heed to your affliction.
12 "He will be a ( N ) wild donkey of a man,
His hand will be against everyone,
And everyone's hand will be against him;
And he will live ( O ) to the east of all his brothers."13 Then she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, "You are a God who sees"; for she said, " ( P ) Have I even remained alive here after seeing Him?"
but this was said to angel of the Lord and it's a question not answered, so she must have been shocked at seeing an angel come and protect her prophecying her sons future :)
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quietlyleaving
reniaa
bear with me Reniaa, my question is -how can we say that humans and jesus are copies, reflections of the original (God) when he is invisible?
Erm how can I answer this question? It is one for God! he says in his word we are his image and Jesus is his image, not me :S you are looking at it on a literal he muxt be visiable for us to be a copy and so judging by human standards, what do I think if I was to speculate? I would say it had something to do with our conscousness awareness of right and wrong (is there a scripture on this somewhere?) that takes us beyond instinct-led animals and our ability to create but it is speculation :) Lol you'll have to ask Jesus this when next you meet but it is a good question, one I wouldn't mind the answer to either.
If someone has a scripture that may shed light on it I wouldn't mind a quote?
well I don't have a scripture and I don't think there is one because this is a subject I have had to grapple with. Btw I like your answer.
The problem is, if we are all like God and Jesus is like God too and we are all different it must mean that God has lots of differences in himself. If he has all these differences within himself do you think he would mind if different people decided to worship and live in different ways.
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Leolaia
but since we know Lord is used in reference to both YHVH and Jesus and also was used to replace YHVH couldn't another explanation be that paul is refering to two different 'Lord's'
Read the passage above for yourself. If Paul was talking about two seperate Lords in the same context, he failed to distinguish them. He didn't say anything like "formerly the Lord God did this, and similarly our Lord Jesus will do this and that". There is only one Lord mentioned....the Lord punished the Israelites in the past, and the Lord today will similarly punish those who disobey him. The OT allusions to the Lord God of Israel are applied specifically to Lord Jesus. This is a good example of what Larry Hurtado refers to as a conceptual overlap between God and Christ in Paul. He points out that of 200 uses of the term "Lord" in Paul, 180 refer to Jesus (Hurtado, p. 111). So when Paul uses the term, he is usually thinking of Jesus. It is false that it is just a word that can equally be used for both. The absolute form, where Paul simply uses the term "Lord" by itself, is what occurs most often in 1 Corinthians 10-11 and it is the form of the term that Paul uses most frequently (about 100 times) to refer to Jesus. This is especially the case in 1 Corinthians....just examine the chapters that precede this discusion of the Lord's supper (e.g. 6:13, 17, 7:10-12, 22, 32-35, 39, 9:14, etc.). When he uses "Lord" to refer to God, it usually is because he is citing a scripture from the LXX where "Lord" has replaced YHWH. And yet, most scriptures with YHWH in the original (and "Lord" in the LXX) are applied not to God but to Jesus -- even if the original passage was clearly talking about the Lord God. Most curious is Paul's use of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:5-6. Paul's confession of "one Lord Jesus Christ" appropriates the language of "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord" (Deuteronomy 6:4), and this is just one of several references to ch. 6 of Deuteronomy in which allusions to the Lord God are applied to Jesus.
It should also be added that the arbitrary insertion of "Jehovah" in the NWT of 1 Corinthians 10-11 completely obscures Paul's argument, unless you were to assume that Jesus was Jehovah and I doubt any witness would read the text in that way. So the insertion of "Jehovah" introduces two figures in the references to the "Lord" whereas originally there was only one. The absurdity of interpolating the name can best be seen in the fact that the expression "cup of the Lord" is rendered "cup of Jehovah" in 10:21, even though it follows a reference to the "cup of blessing ... sharing in the blood of Christ" in v. 16 and it precedes another use of the expression "cup of the Lord" in ch. 11 which this time is NOT rendered "cup of Jehovah" but is left as "cup of Jesus". Why are they inconsistent in rendering the "cup of the Lord" as "cup of Jehovah" in 10:21 and "cup of the Lord" in 11:27 since it refers to the same thing (the cup of wine at the Lord's supper)? Because the very same sentence refers to those unworthily eating the bread and drinking from the cup as "disrespecting the body and the blood of the Lord". The "blood of the Lord" can only refer to Christ and is clearly parallel to the "blood of Christ" in 10:16. So the "Lord" is assumed to be Christ throughout, and the arbitrary insertion of "Jehovah" in one instance and not the other imposes a division between the passage's references to the "Lord" that does not exist in the text.
In short, again, the Lord God of the OT and the Lord Jesus are not clearly distinguished from each other, whereas the Son is always clearly distinguished from the Father.
Your own words admit that trinity is a later development but for me personally that invalidates the trinity because it is like saying bible writers who who had holy spirit and spirit inspired, taught by Jesus weren't given the truth to write only later scholars influenced by rome and plato were given greater understanding by holy spirit/God etc. but the bible says the opposite is true that a lie is planted till the end times with weeds and wheat growing together, and the bible is the measure to judge by.
Why does discussion of biblical passages always have to invoke theologies that were developed generations if not centuries later (whether we are talking about Arianism or orthodox trinitarianism)? I'm not really that interested in the trinity per se -- I'm not talking about it. I'm trying to take NT writers at their own words and not press the various theological perspectives into a single systematic doctrine, which is what both Arianism and trinitarianism do.
BTW, it is false that Christianity was influenced by Greek philosophy only after the death of the apostles. The influence is there in the NT itself. Heck it is even there in the Judaism that came before Christianity.
I'm not religious nor do I have preference either way but based on simple personality test I'd say biblical text is describing two different entities, god of old testament is vengeful and easily offended personality, Jesus of new testament is more forgiving and understanding, and in fact takes values to a higher level of prinicples rather than black and white, right and wrong type of thing.
zagor....There is no one single "Jesus of the New Testament". Look at the passage I quoted above. Paul refers to him precisely in the same way as the God of the Old Testament (at least the YHWH of the Pentateuchal narratives), who can be provoked to jealousy and put to the test. Christians have become sick and died because they disrespected his sacraments, just as he killed Israelites in the wilderness who put him to the test and disobeyed him.
Although I admire your knowledge, you say it "AFAIK" because your knowledge is limited.
posible-san....I used AFAIK to be polite. It is a very simple matter to do a search in the Pauline epistles for the verb eimi. I was just politely giving you the opportunity to provide me the passage, if one exists.
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Leolaia
the bible explains the way Jesus is from his father and so can be fulfillment of what Jehovah does since he has his 'Authority'
1 Corinthians 8:6
yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
Jesus is the 'through' the link between us and God.
this is a lovely scripture that explains completely how Jesus and Jehovah interact in a way all the pages of rhetoric of 3 = 1 cannot. arguably this is one of my favourite scriptures.But notice this....the name "Jehovah" does not occur here at all! Paul doesn't distinguish between Jesus and Jehovah, there is no "Jehovah" here. You are assuming that Jehovah = the Father, an assumption that doesn't correspond to Paul's thought since he doesn't use YHWH at all -- he uses "Lord" which has replaced YHWH in the Greek Bible he quoted from, and more often than not, he applies those YHWH scriptures to Jesus. In fact, he does so in this very verse. "For us there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ" alludes to Deuteronomy 6:4 LXX: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord". The "one Lord" of Deuteronomy is associated allusively with the "one Lord" who is Jesus Christ. But in the Hebrew, YHWH occurred in place of "Lord". This is a scripture that referred to YHWH and Paul has appropriated it in order to refer to Jesus. So if there is a "Jehovah" lurking somewhere behind this statement by Paul, it is in the clause that talks about the "one Lord Jesus Christ".
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Leolaia
So who did Moses see in these verses?
Exodus 33:19-23 (New International Version)
19 And the LORD said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."
21 Then the LORD said, "There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen."Good question, since Paul also refers to this incident, particularly the glory in Exodus 33-34 that Moses had received from seeing the Lord (MT: YHWH). Paul compares the glory that Moses shone with the glory that Christians receive from Christ. Paul takes the "Lord" of Exodus 33-34, who has the absolute "Lord" as his name, as the Lord whose glory those in Christ reflect; there is no distinction, the two overlap, the Lord of the OT is not distinguished from the Lord Jesus. The many references to the Lord in Paul's discussion have Christ as their object..."Christ" and "the Lord" are in parallelism in adjecent references the veil being taken away, the "Spirit of the Lord" is parallel to Paul's references to the "Spirit of Christ" and the "Spirit of his Son", the reference to the "Lord's glory" is parallel to the reference to the "glory of Christ", and finally the "Lord" is identified with "Jesus Christ":
Exodus 33:17-19, 34:33-35 LXX: "Then the Lord said to Moses, 'Even this word that you have spoken I will do for you. For you have found favor before me, and I know you above all others.' And he says, 'Show me your own glory!' And he says, 'I will pass by before you in my glory and I will call by my name "Lord" before you'.....And when he stopped speaking to them, he placed a veil over his face. But whenever Moses would enter in before the Lord to speak with him, he would remove the veil until coming out. And when he came out, he would tell all the sons of Israel what the Lord commanded him. And the sons of Israel saw the face of Moses that it was charged with glory, and Moses put a veil over his face until he went in to converse with him".
2 Corinthians 3:7-8, 13-18, 4:4-6: "Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? ... We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord (= Christ in the previous verse), the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit (= the "Spirit of Christ" in Romans 8:9, and the "Spirit of his Son" in Galatians 4:6), and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit...The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord".
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possible-san
Hi, leolaia.
posible-san....I used AFAIK to be polite. It is a very simple matter to do a search in the Pauline epistles for the verb eimi. I was just politely giving you the opportunity to provide me the passage, if one exists.
For me, all the words of the Scriptures are symbolic.
Probably, my view is not so simple as you think.If we would like to only search "surface meaning of the words", isn't it enough that we just start "Bible software"?
Well, I did not feel that the word "AFAIK" is polite.
In the context which you used, it means "Paul is not giving such any explanation."Although you probably have much knowledge, I feel some that you are arrogant.
http://www.watchtower.org/e/bible/1co/chapter_008.htm#bk1
http://www.watchtower.org/e/bible/1co/chapter_008.htm#bk2Probably, I think that Jehovah's Witnesses do not like a such type.
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Leolaia
possible-san....I think we are probably not understanding each other well because of language differences. When you said that "Apostle Paul had mentioned Jesus as 'I AM' ", I misunderstood that you meant that Paul used the specific words "I am" when you seem to really be saying that Paul wrote about Jesus along the lines of a symbolic concept of "I AM" (however you define that concept). And when I used the hedge term "AFAIK", you misunderstood me as being impolite and arrogant when in fact the opposite was intended. Hedges like "AFAIK" and "IMO" are used to take a decidedly non-dogmatic stance, quite apart from the impression I think you have gained. Again, I may not have understood you correctly, but I think we have both not understood each other correctly
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reniaa
lol leolaia I'm trying to get my head around your definition of different references to Jehovah Jesus, God, Lord, lord god and Lord Jesus.
Your basically saying Paul didn't differentiate between Lord Jesus and Lord God but he did differentiate between Jesus and God.
but first
let me get out of the way first that Jws believe YHVH or some indication of it has been removed from Nt in their favour is 2 things, one mathew was originally written in hebrew and there would be no reason for YHVH not to be used in it especially when quoting OT, jerome said that they had a copy of a hebrew mathew. secondly due to fragments of the greek septuagint with YHVH in it has been proved that both Jesus and the appostles inc Paul, read both hebrew scriptures and greek scripture of OT with YHVH so when they quote OT they quote a source they know is refering to YHVH not 'Lord' a later addition. SO when quoting Deut 6:4 they are definitely refering to YHVH as they read and knew it certainly there is no reasons given by them themselves why they use Lord instead of YHVH. JWs use this as back-up to thinking New testament has had YHVH removed like OT but there is no fragmantary proof as yet although the nearest copy we have is still 100 years away from writers (lol before you say it there is absolutely no indication of contraversy over a change in early christians commenting on NT) lol I know quite fully the debate over YHVH in NT but since it was argued equally as absolutely until the fragment of greek septuagint found with YHVH in that they read a greek OT without YHVH in, I appreciate scholars such as yourself need proof before making conclusion other than one on current evidence.
now back to romans chapter 1 written by Paul
1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit [a] of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God [b] by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5 Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. 6 And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
7 To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.Paul's Longing to Visit Rome
8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. 9 God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you
so here Paul is clearly separating Lord Jesus from God the father look at verse 7. and here again in romans 4:24
24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.
I'm not sure I follow your only using Lord God against Lord Jesus in reference to making assumptions on his viewpoint of Jesus and God because here again he clearly makes a distinction between the Lord Jesus and God who ressurrected him.
you also separate father and son in nt from God and jesus and yet the biggest scriptorial back up for believing Jesus is not god and absolutly defined is John 17:3
John 17:3 (New International Version)
3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
Clearly Jesus is sent here by the one true god, so again I would say not only is there a distinction between God the father but also as shown here between the only true god and Jesus with the Nt writers.
here is another distinction made by Paul in romans 8:17
17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
the human heirs are aligned with Jesus both classed as co-heirs to god. sharing in the Glory making glory something that can be shared by all including humans.
now look at 1 cor
1 Corinthians 11:3
Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is Godthis is clearly stating the head of christ is god.
So are we by narrowing the parametres to Lord giving a false impression of what Paul thought in relation between God and jesus? if you look at only Jesus and God or even Lord Jesus and God the distinction between them in these scriptures is clearly shown, it is only when both are refered to as Lord that the clearness is Lost. There is also the issue that as I've mentioned before Jesus is God's representative so when he does things on God's behalf they can be assigned to be him as doer and to as the one who has given us the doer, as in a builder and his boss both can be said to have built the house.
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Leolaia
reniaa....We have tread similar ground before. On the presence of YHWH in the LXX, I refer you to the earlier threads of yours I posted on last year where I posted at length the evidence bearing on the originality of kurios "Lord" in the LXX and the appearance of YHWH in some Palestinian MSS as a secondary development. In those same threads, I also showed that Paul's citations of the LXX in Romans reflect the presence of kurios in the LXX he used, and not YHWH. Since our discussion is about Paul, the secondary presence of YHWH in some Palestinian copies of the LXX is not relevant to Paul per se. In fact, Paul's willingness to apply scriptures originally referring to YHWH to Jesus is partly explained by the systematic replacement of the name with kurios (the very title that Paul was most fond of using for Jesus) in Greek translation.
As I said quite a few times above, the distinction between God the Father and Jesus is not at issue here. All those scriptures you cited bear on that question. Only modalists would deny such a distinction. Both Arianists and trinitarians distinguish the two; to say that this is an issue for trinitarianism is to confuse it with modalism. What I am trying to discuss is not trinitarianism but the undeveloped christology of Paul. Paul clearly distinguished the Son from the Father, all agree on that. Paul presented the Son as subject to the Father, all agree on that too. I am trying to say that this is not the whole story. When Paul used the absolute "God" (ho theos by itself), he generally meant the Father, and when he used the absolute "Lord" (ho kurios by itself), he generally meant the Son. But when it comes to the "Lord" of the LXX Bible that Paul used (where YHWH occurs in the Hebrew original), Paul associated this figure with both the Son and the Father but more often than not the Son. Paul talks about the Son as the "Lord" of the OT, and much less frequently he talks about the Father as the "Lord" of the OT. That is my only point in this thread.