Response to the Watchtower's Coptic John 1:1 claim in academic journal

by slimboyfat 25 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • jonathan dough
    jonathan dough

    To share divine nature does not make the Logos God any more than it makes Christians who partake of the divine nature, God. -- 2 Peter 1:4


    This is also a false teaching. Let me repost part of what I wrote regarding the sharing of divine nature and the JWs' false analogy.

    The Jehovah's Witnesses argue that “[b]eing truly “divinity,” or of “divine nature,” does not make Jesus as the Son of God coequal and coeternal with the Father, any more than humans are coequal or all the same age just because they share humanity or human nature” (Reasoning, 421). But that is not necessarily true. If all persons share humanity it does make them all human, and they are all equally “human.” One person is not more or less human than another. So, if the inevitability of death is one aspect of humanity, then all humans die, all are mortal; they are equal in that regard. Similarly, if divinity inherently includes an eternal nature, and Jesus and God are divine, of the same essence (consubstantial), then both are eternal.

    Actually, the Jehovah's Witnesses’ comparison of Jesus with all humans who share humanity is another flawed analogy because Jesus doesn’t share God at all like humans have a share in humanity. Jesus is fully God, and not somehow made God by virtue of the hypostatic union.

    At Hebrews 1:3 Christ is said to be “the very imprint of His (God’s) being” (NAB) (“the very stamp of his nature” (RS) (“the express image of His substance” (Strong and Vine’s, 269). The Greek word used here for image, stamp or imprint is charaktar and means an exact copy or representation, and stresses complete, not partial, similarity of essence.

    (2) In the NT it is used metaphorically in Heb 1:3, of the Son of God as “the express image of His substance.” The phrase expresses the fact that the Son “is both personally distinct from, and yet literally equal to, Him of whose essence He is the imprint. The Son of God is not merely his “image” (His character), He is the “image” or impress of His substance, or essence. It is the fact of complete similarity which this word stresses. (Strong and Vine’s, 269)

    Accordingly, such equality applies to His eternal existence, omnipotence and omniscient nature, as God and the Word are literally equal to each other with respect to their essential being.

    http://144000.110mb.com/trinity/index-6.html

  • Band on the Run
    Band on the Run

    Does anyone know what the reputation of the Dallas Theological Seminary is and that of the academic journal? If an author writes a string of articles focusing on how bad the Witness translation is I wonder.

    It sounds very complicated. Why would the Coptic translation be definitive? Is it the earliest?

    I recall when the Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. Their beliefs and cultural practices were so contrary to the way the main body of Judaism evolved. There was even debate in Israel whether they were truly Jews. It makes good National Geographic articles.

    One thing I find lacking here is an Eastern Church perspective. I used to attend Eastern rite and orthodox churches just to get a flavor. Middle Eastern Christianity is amazing, too. We tend to think of Christian as Latin. It would be nice to have some Eastern summaries.

  • jonathan dough
    jonathan dough

    Ontological identity of the Logos with God would mean that Jesus is also the Father, which Trinitarianism claims to reject.

    Again, you don't understand the Trinity doctrine. In particular, you are confused about the difference between immanent trinity (the triune God before creation) and economic trinity (post creation). When John 1:1 refers to the relationship of God and the Word in the beginning, it speaks of immanent trinity. It has nothing to do with Jesus born to Mary (economic trinity). You're right, the church rejects the heresy that the Father became the bleeding Son on the cross, that the father became the son; this is the lie that the Jehovah's Witnesses continue to spread, that this is what real Christians believe, but that is not mainstream teaching. That is the heresy of patripassianism. John 1:1c isn't claiming to say that the Word was Jesus. That is simply not true and mischaracterizes the issue.

    But in fact, if the Logos is the same in every way with the Being described as God in the Bible, then "the Word is God" can only mean that the Word is the Father.

    More confusion. You have to ask in what sense they are equal. God the Son and God the Father are equal with respect to divinity, power and nature.

    There is subordination of relation and order among the three Persons, but not in nature:

    Moreover, the subsistence and operations of the three Persons are marked by a certain order involving a certain subordination in relation, though not in nature. The Father as the fount of deity is First: He is said to originate. The Son, eternally begotten of the Father, is Second: he is said to reveal. The Spirit, eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son, is Third: He is said to execute.

    While this does not suggest priority in time or in dignity, since all three Persons are divine and eternal, it does suggest an order of precedence in operation and revelation. Thus we can say that creation is from the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. (New Bible Dictionary, 1299, 1300)

    Each Person has the divine nature, but each has it differently:

    Whatever is other, distinct, plural, personal, and proper in the Godhead is exclusively a matter of relationship. Father, Son and Spirit do not differ as God, but in the way each is God with respect to the others. Each has and is the divine nature, but each has it differently: the Father from Himself, the Son from the Father, the Spirit from both the Father and the Son. God, then, is one in substance, three in Person, and what is significant about this distinction, what makes it non-contradictory, is that what is personal in the Godhead is not something absolute, but something purely relative, (Council of Florence, 1442). (Catholic Encyclopedia, 303)

    The doctrine also holds that the divine Persons exist in their relationships to one another:

    The three divine Persons exist in their particular, unique natures as Father, Son and Spirit in their relationships to one another, and are determined through these relationships. It is in these relationships that they are Persons. Being a person in this respect means existing-in-relationship. (Trinity and the Kingdom, 172)

    [T]he three divine Persons possess the same individual, indivisible and one divine nature, but they possess it in varying ways. The Father possesses it of himself; the Son and the Spirit have it from the Father (ibid., 172). The Trinitarian Persons subsist in the common divine nature; they exist in their relations to one another. (ibid., 173)

    “A divine Person is a non-interchangeable existence of the divine nature.” By the word ‘existence’ - existential - [he] meant: existence, in the light of another” (ibid., 173).

    http://144000.110mb.com/trinity/index.html

    As a matter of fact, the view which the Jehovah's Witnesses ascribe to Trinitarians - the exaggerated view of Noetus which identified “Christ with the Father,” was rejected by the church many centuries ago along with similar heretical distortions (Catholic Encyclopedia, 296).

    In its extreme form it may suggest that the whole of God was, for example, present in Jesus - that heaven was empty when Jesus walked on earth. In relation to the cross, it may imply that, because there is no distinction between Father and Son, the whole of God suffers equally as Jesus dies, and indeed God dies entirely on the cross …. (Oxford, 1211)

    This and similar notions are precisely some of the “pitfalls” the “doctrine of the Trinity sets out to avoid …” (Oxford, 1211). Any implications or explicit assertions by the Jehovah's Witnesses to the contrary are untrue - they are false accusations.

  • jonathan dough
    jonathan dough

    Anyone who argues that the Word was, or was not, God based solely on John 1:1c is simply wagging the dog by the tail. Overall context of the Bible is the determining factor, all of the proof texts that establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus was, and is, God, as that concept is understood in the trinitarian world.

    And here is the proof. http://144000.110mb.com/trinity/index-5.html#20

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento

    One of the wrose things that ANY scholar can do is to try to put 21st century thinking that has been infuenced by almost 2000 years od debate, into the mind of the Writer of the GOJ.

    The writer quite simply said that The word was WITH God and that the word WAS God.

    Taken in that way we have a statment of the nature of the word, since his "identity" has already been given ( He is the word of God).

    To make the word "a god" is to go against what the writer is stating here and through out the Gospel, which cumulates in Thomas declaration:

    "The lord of me and the God of Me".

    The word who is Christ, is WITH God and IS God.

  • jonathan dough
    jonathan dough

    "The lord of me and the God of Me".

    The word who is Christ, is WITH God and IS God.

    Yes.

    The Word’s relation to the Godhead, in the sense of being “with” God does not mean “mere company, but the most intimate communion” (Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words Compilated and Expanded upon in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible [Nashville, Tennessee, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001], 152) (Strong and Vine’s). This intimacy of the Word with God is a product of their mutual indwelling, among other things, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father (John 17:21 NAB). Furthermore, the Word (Logos) is the personal manifestation, “not of a part of the divine nature, but of the whole deity” (Strong and Vine’s, 152).

    His answer to Christ, "My Lord and my God, “forms a literary inclusion with the first verse of the gospel: “and the Word was God” (NAB notes John 20, 28).

    http://144000.110mb.com/trinity/index-7.html#35

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