aqwsed12345

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Posts by aqwsed12345

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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: .

  take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

  - kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @Blotty

  The claim that Clement of Alexandria regarded the Son as “first-created” in the Arian sense of a temporal creature, and that the later Nicene contrast between “first-born” and “first-created” represents a post-apostolic invention, collapses once the philological evidence, Clement’s own theological vocabulary, and the wider second-century lexicon are placed in their proper literary and doctrinal settings.

  Clement employs the adjective πρωτόκτιστος only once, Stromateis 5.14. However the surrounding sentence, ignored by most Arian appropriations, situates the word inside an unmistakably anti-subordinationist context: the Logos is the Father’s “beloved and most ancient Word, always present with Him, whose energy shaped all things.” Clement’s point is not that the Logos is the first product of God’s will, but that He stands as the primal agent in whom the entire created order is articulated. In Alexandrian idiom πρωτό- compounds frequently mark logical or hierarchical precedence, not temporal origination. Philo, whom Clement knew intimately, calls the intelligible cosmos the “first-created” paradigm (πρωτόκτιστον) while simultaneously describing it as eternal in God’s mind; no Jew or Christian thought Philo thereby implied that the incorporeal archetype was a manufactured creature. Clement inherits the same rhetorical register: πρωτόκτιστος designates the Logos as archetypal relative to κτίσις, not as a member of it. The rest of Stromateis 5 underscores this logic by labeling the Son “eternal and uncreated” and “equal in substance with the Father.” A hermeneutic that seizes on a single adjective while silencing the author’s explicit confession of the Son’s uncreated deity violates every canon of historical exegesis.

  Nor is it true that the first-born / first-created distinction arose only after the apostles. The Septuagint itself differentiates πρωτότοκος, signaling primogeniture and rank (e.g., Ps 88[89]:28), from πρωτόκτιστος, a rarer adjective whose semantic field is less rigid and often metaphorical. The New Testament preserves that differentiation: πρωτότοκος describes Christ’s supremacy (Rom 8:29; Col 1:15; Heb 1:6), whereas no canonical or apostolic writing ever predicates πρωτόκτιστος of Him. The absence is striking if the allegedly “simple” partitive meaning were truly the Church’s earliest belief. Instead the apostolic authors consistently ascribe creative agency to the Son and reserve createdness for “all things” that come to be through Him (John 1:3; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16). That conceptual bifurcation is precisely what Nicaea later captured in the antonymy γεννητός versus κτιστός. Far from inventing a novelty, the council formalised in dogmatic grammar what the apostolic corpus already implies: the Son’s derivation from the Father is generation, not manufacture.

  Early patristic evidence before Clement confirms this inherited nuance. Ignatius of Antioch calls Christ “God’s unbegotten Logos who came forth from silence,” thereby distinguishing temporal procession into the economy from ontological beginning. The Epistle to Diognetus speaks of the Father sending the “eternal Word,” contrasting that Word with “the things which He ordered.” Justin Martyr, though still groping for adequate terminology, argues that the Logos was “begotten before all creatures,” thus already assuming that generation and creation are not interchangeable. The accusation that the Church produced a brand-new semantic distinction only after Constantine is therefore historically unfounded.

  The appeal to natural language change in English (“gay” and “happy”) is a category error. Shifts in popular English semantics have no probative value for the technical layers of second-century theological Greek, where authors carefully flagged their metaphysical intentions. When Clement says the Son is “true God … equal to the Lord of the universe,” the semantic range of πρωτόκτιστος must be read compatibly with that affirmation; otherwise one forces a contradiction into the text. Ancient readers were perfectly capable of recognizing polysemy and narrowing a term’s sense by context—far more so than modern critics who isolate a lexeme from its argumentative environment.

  Methodologically, restricting primary evidence to the New Testament and the creedal decisions that claimed to codify its meaning is not self-serving; it is historiographically responsible. Those corpora constitute the earliest and most authoritative witnesses to Christian self-identification. When later sources—Gnostic, Jewish-Christian, or otherwise—employ overlapping vocabulary, they must be weighed against that normative baseline, not treated as coordinate canons. Clement himself, immersed in eclectic learning, sometimes borrows phrases from Hellenistic Judaism or speculative Christian circles, but he repeatedly reins them back under the rule of faith. Photios’ medieval worry that πρωτόκτιστος entails creaturehood overlooks Clement’s own corrective clauses and the prevalent Middle-Platonist usage in which “first-created” can denote timeless archetype.

  Even were one to grant, for argument’s sake, that a single second-century teacher momentarily blurred the lines, historical theology proceeds by the consensus of worshipping communities, not by “one witness” precedents. The liturgical and baptismal formulas of the great sees—Rome, Alexandria, Antioch—confessed the Son as “God of God, Light of Light” long before the Arian controversy, and it was those same churches that adjudicated Nicea. Arius’ reduction of the Logos to a creature was therefore a rupture, not a retrieval.

  In sum, Clement’s lone use of πρωτόκτιστος cannot be pressed into Arian service without suppressing the stronger testimony of his own writings, the lexical versatility of Greek, and the apostolic pattern that already separates what is begotten from what is made. The Son is eternally generated, uncreated, and consubstantial with the Father; His designation as “firstborn of all creation” proclaims His sovereign primacy, not His membership in the class of things that began to be.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: .

  take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

  - kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @Blotty

  Your latest objections do not arise from new linguistic data or fresh patristic research but from reiterating the same mis-readings of Scripture and the Fathers that the Church has answered since the fourth century. They can be met only by returning, once more, to the primary texts—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—and to the consistent theological logic that binds them. This reply therefore traces, step by step, why the terms “firstborn,” “begotten,” and “created” remain irreducibly distinct in the biblical witness, why Justin and the other pre-Nicenes never taught a creature-Christ, and why the NT’s reticence to frame the Trinity in scholastic propositions is no evidence against the doctrine but precisely the soil in which it germinated.

  The semantic range of πρῶτότοκος is not intrinsically “partitive.” When Psalm 89 (88 LXX) calls David “firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth,” the intuition is not that he is merely the chronological eldest within a royal breeding-line but that he has been exalted to a rank none of his peers possesses. That David remains one king among kings is irrelevant to Colossians 1:15 because Paul’s context is categorically different. Immediately after naming Christ “firstborn of all creation” he explains why: “for in him were created all things … whether thrones or dominions or rulers.” An artisan cannot belong to the set of artefacts whose existence is owing to his own agency; the causal clause excludes partitivity. Grammarians catalogue this genitive not as partitive but as one of subordination or relation: creation is the sphere over which, not within which, the Son exercises primacy. If Paul had meant “first-created,” πρωτόκτιστος lay ready to hand (it appears in Philo and later Greek); he deliberately chose a word whose biblical freight is heirship and supremacy (Ex 4:22; Ps 89:27; Jer 31:9), a usage the Cappadocians would later exploit to dismantle Eunomius’ thesis.

  The Arian claim is that every “firstborn” (πρωτότοκος) is, by necessity, a member of the group from which they are “firstborn,” as in Psalm 89:27, where David, called the “firstborn,” is still a king among kings. This, however, rests on a conflation of the genitive construction’s contextual use and its inherent meaning. While in familial contexts, “firstborn of” can indicate group membership, in biblical idiom it is also a well-attested title of supremacy and unique status. In Psalm 89:27, David is designated “firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth”—not to stress that he is one king among others, but that he possesses preeminence and authority over all other kings. This metaphorical extension of “firstborn” is a familiar biblical trope, denoting status, privilege, and inheritance, not simply order of birth or inclusion in a class. In Exodus 4:22, Israel is called God’s “firstborn son,” a title of privilege among nations, not the first in temporal or natural order. The usage in Colossians 1:15 follows precisely this logic: Christ is “firstborn of all creation” not as one creature among many, but as the preeminent Lord and source of creation itself, as confirmed by the immediate context—“for by him all things were created... all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16-17). To make “firstborn” a marker of Christ’s createdness is to wrench the term from its context and to ignore the consistent NT witness that Christ is the Creator, not a creature.

  Appeals to “firstborn of death” (Job 18:13) or “firstborn of the poor” (Is 14:30) do not help the Arian case. Both phrases are prophetic hyperboles. “Firstborn of death” personifies the most virulent disease; “firstborn of the poor” denotes the extremity of destitution. The expression signals intensity, not membership: Job’s disease is not itself one dying son among many; it is death’s most potent offspring. Likewise, Christ’s title in Colossians marks him as creation’s principle and lord, not its most senior denizen.

  Your insistence that all “firstborn” language entails partitivity ignores the difference between a partitive genitive (membership) and a genitive of subordination or superiority (rulership). The grammatical point, well attested in advanced Greek grammars (cf. D.B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics), is that the construction πρῶτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως does not, in this context, function as a partitive but rather as a genitive of subordination: Christ stands over creation as its Lord. The same logic applies to the use of “firstborn” in LXX idioms such as “firstborn of death” or “firstborn of the poor”: these are poetic metaphors for that which is most prominent or supreme among its category (the “firstborn of death” is the most deadly, not simply the first to die). The analogy actually supports the Trinitarian reading, not the Arian one, by emphasizing the concept of preeminence rather than mere inclusion.

  Modern lexical semantics rejects the idea that any single word, isolated from its syntactic and pragmatic environment, “carries” a permanently fixed relation such as partitivity. Meanings are not static parcels lodged inside lexemes; they are networks of potential which a speaker activates in context. Consequently, the claim that πρωτότοκος is an “inherently partitive word” whose semantics compel inclusion in whatever genitive follows is methodologically indefensible and exegetically hazardous.

  The semantic core of πρωτότοκος is straightforward: it denotes the child who holds “firstborn” status. That notion of priority can be deployed in multiple conceptual frames—temporal sequence (“first to be born”), legal privilege (“heir”), or symbolic supremacy (“highest”). Nothing in the lexeme itself encodes the further proposition “and therefore belongs to the class expressed by the genitive.” Whether such a relation is inferred in any given clause depends on how speaker and audience construe the wider situation. Linguistically, “firstborn of X” is a composite construction: the noun signals status; the genitive specifies the domain over which that status is exercised. To treat the domain as an obligatory set-membership marker ignores the polyfunctionality of Greek genitives (possessive, subjective, objective, relational, subordination, comparison, et cetera) and collapses syntax, semantics, and pragmatics into a single mechanical rule.

  The LXX data routinely cited to prove intrinsic partitivity are in fact heterogeneous. In narratives that list literal siblings (e.g., Genesis 25:13), the genitive is certainly partitive because the discourse itself evokes a family set and places the firstborn within it. Yet the very same lexeme appears in non-partitive settings. Psalm 88(89):27, “I will make him firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth,” employs a comparative (heightened) genitive: David is “of” the kings only in the sense that his royalty is exercised over them. No Israelite reader would infer that David must share generic ontological identity with every pagan monarch in order to bear that title; the turn of phrase marks elevation, not inclusion. The same non-partitive force dominates Jeremiah 38(31):9, Micah 6:7, and especially Exodus 4:22, “Israel is my firstborn son,” where the nation is singled out from, not merged into, the total set of peoples.

  NT writers exploit precisely this superlative nuance. Colossians 1:16-17 unfolds the meaning of πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως by glossing it with three causal clauses: “because in him all things were created,” “because he is before all things,” and “because all things subsist in him.” Every clause structurally excludes the Son from the category of created entities: he is the agent, the antecedent, and the sustainer of τὰ πάντα. If πρωτότοκος were partitive by lexical necessity, the author’s elaboration would be incoherent, for it would force Christ simultaneously to belong to and to precede the same ontological set. The epistle avoids that contradiction precisely by using the genitive in a subordination (or relational) sense: he is the pre-eminent heir who stands over creation.

  Early Christian exegesis recognizes this polyvalence. Athanasius argues that the Father could have called the Son πρωτόκτιστος had Paul wished to mark creaturehood, but instead chose πρωτότοκος to proclaim dignity and heirship. Basil of Caesarea, in Contra Eunomium II, explicitly distinguishes between partitive and comparative genitives, locating Colossians 1:15 in the latter category. Their argument does not impose alien philosophy upon the text; it formalizes the pragmatic inference that the syntax and context already suggest.

  The burden of proof lies with those who posit an intrinsic partitive feature. Demonstrating recurring set-membership readings in narrative contexts does not establish that the lexeme itself encodes that relation; it merely shows how often authors happened to use the construction in a literal family frame. A genuine intrinsic feature would manifest across all contexts, including metaphorical, regal, and cosmological ones—yet the non-partitive examples cited above show otherwise. Without independent diagnostic tests—minimal-pair contrasts or native speaker judgements—no purely lexical, invariant “partitive value” can be verified.

  In sum, πρῶτότοκος does not contain a built-in grammatical switch that forces every following genitive into a partitive mold. Greek genitive relations are determined by the conceptual structure of the clause, not by secret semantic properties of individual nouns. Colossians 1:15 therefore remains free to articulate, as its context in vv. 16-17 declares, the supremacy of the eternally begotten Son over the whole created order—a reading fully consistent with Trinitarian confession and with sound linguistic method alike.

  The next argument, concerning Justin Martyr’s use of “begotten” (γεννητός), is equally misconstrued. While it is true that early Christian writers sometimes used “begotten” language in ways that reflect the flexible metaphysics of their day, it is anachronistic to read this as an assertion that Christ was brought into existence in time. In Dialogue with Trypho 61, Justin explicitly affirms that the Logos is “begotten of the Father before all created things” and “prior to all ages.” The phrase “before every aeon” (πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων) is a technical term in early Christian literature for eternal pre-existence, not simply priority within a sequence of temporal epochs. The overwhelming patristic consensus, from Justin through Athanasius to the Cappadocians, is that the Son’s generation is supra-temporal, transcending all created time, and that the Father has never existed without the Son.

  Justin Martyr’s vocabulary is pressed into Arian service only by wrenching it from Justin’s own argument. When he calls the Logos “a second God” and “begotten before all creatures,” he is not ascribing a temporal birthday to the Son but contrasting eternal generation with the finite coming-to-be of the cosmos. Trypho demands how Christians worship one born in recent times; Justin replies that the Logos existed “πρὸ γενέσεως τῶν ὅλων” (“before the genesis of all things,” Dial. 61). The verb γεννάω certainly can denote a creature’s entry into time, but Justin precisely distinguishes the Son’s begetting precisely by locating it outside all temporal measure; he even invokes Proverbs 8:25 to show that “He brought me forth before the mountains were established,” a line whose force depends on Wisdom’s priority to any physical event. Origen goes further: the Father “is always Father, the Son always Son” (§ Princ. I.2.13), for the act of generation is eternal, proceeding from the divine will that itself is timeless. Talk of “before every aeon” is therefore unidirectional—backward, not forward—because the aeons themselves mark the boundaries of creaturely history. Nothing in Origen suggests the Son ever did not exist.

  The attempt to relativize this by asking “which direction did he mean?” with reference to “eternity working two ways” is simply a rhetorical evasion. The context in Justin and the Fathers makes it clear: “before all ages” means before time itself, which is the very definition of eternity in the Christian theological tradition. As the Fourth Lateran Council would later summarize: “the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Holy Spirit proceeds—none is before or after, greater or less than the other, but all three are coeternal and coequal.”

  The claim that if Scripture wanted to call the Son “first-created” (πρωτόκτιστος), it could have done so, but instead chooses “firstborn” (πρωτότοκος), is dismissed by the Arian argument as special pleading, suggesting that if the biblical writers intended the Trinitarian doctrine they would have used unambiguous language for “God” and the “Trinity.” This line of argument betrays a misunderstanding of the development of biblical theology and the nature of divine revelation. The term “firstborn” was chosen precisely for its rich theological resonance: it denotes not only priority but also heirship, supremacy, and unique relationship to the Father (cf. Hebrews 1:2–3). The NT does, in fact, call Christ God explicitly in multiple places (John 1:1; John 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8–10), and as the only-begotten God (μονογενὴς θεός, John 1:18). The doctrine of the Trinity emerges not from a single proof text but from the total scriptural witness, read in light of the rule of faith and the Church’s liturgical and confessional life (cf. Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14).

  Your rhetorical question—“If the apostles wished to say the Son is God, why not say so plainly?”—ignores that they do so repeatedly. John opens his Gospel with “the Word was God”; Thomas confesses “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28); Paul acclaims Christ as “the God who is over all” (Rom 9:5) and looks for “the appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ” (Tit 2:13); Peter greets the faithful from “our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Pet 1:1). What Scripture does not supply is a metaphysical treatise—nor could it, for the canon arose in the milieu of Second Temple monotheism where theological compression, not systematic exposition, was the idiom. The Church’s conciliar language is the fruit of contemplating that compressed witness, not a betrayal of it.

  The objection that if the NT authors had wished to define three persons in one God they would have done so as explicitly as Paul describes the “members” of the body is a category error. Trinitarian dogma is the product of scriptural synthesis and theological reflection, not the mere collation of isolated proof-texts. The NT abounds in “triadic” formulas that link the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in shared divine prerogatives (see Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Ephesians 4:4-6). The gradual unfolding of doctrinal clarity in the post-apostolic period is the normal pattern of Christian revelation and theological maturation.

  Your jibe that “original scrolls still exist” cuts the other way. No extant Hebrew manuscript of Proverbs 8 renders קָנָה as “he created me”; every one supports “acquired/possessed.” It was the Alexandrian translators who ventured ἔκτισεν, and it was precisely that lone rendering—already suspect to the Jewish revisers Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion—that the Fathers re-interpreted in light of the whole canon: κτίζει can mean to ordain or establish (Ps 50:12 LXX), so the verse announces Wisdom’s installation as archetype of the cosmos, whereas verse 25 (“he begets me”) unveils her eternal derivation. Two verbs, two dimensions: economic mission and ontological origin.

  The appeal to Psalm 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Hebrew בְּרָא־לִי לֵב טָהוֹר)—to bolster the claim that κτίζω in Proverbs 8:22 “must” denote the production of a being who previously did not exist is philologically and theologically misplaced. In the Psalter verse the verb bārāʾ does not speak of ontological origination out of nothing, still less of the manufacture of a new “substance.” David already possesses a heart; his petition is for its moral renewal. Throughout the Hebrew Bible bārāʾ can signify transformative re-creation within an existing entity (cf. Isaiah 57:19; 65:18). When the Septuagint renders Psalm 51:10 with κτίσον, it therefore mirrors that idiom of renewal, not the absolute beginning posited in Genesis 1:1. Consequently one cannot extrapolate from Psalm 51 to Proverbs 8 a semantic rule that κτίζω invariably means bringing a concrete object into first existence.

  Patristic exegesis underscores the same point. Athanasius, commenting on Psalm 51, reads the verse as an invocation of sanctifying grace rather than material origination; his focus is the Holy Spirit’s cleansing action in the believer’s interior life. Augustine concurs in Enarrationes in Psalmos 50, explaining that the psalmist seeks “a heart refashioned by charity,” a moral re-creation continuous with, yet elevated above, the heart he already has. Neither Father treats the verb as proof that God must at that moment be producing a novel, hitherto non-existent substance. In short, Psalm 51:10 witnesses to divine renovation, not to creaturely genesis.

  The relevance for Christology is decisive. The semantic elasticity of bārāʾ/κτίζω demonstrates that creation language cannot, by itself, settle ontological status. To infer from Proverbs 8:22—where ἔκτισεν translates קָנָה (“acquired/appointed”)—that Wisdom is a creature because Psalm 51:10 uses a cognate verb for moral renewal is a non sequitur. The writer of Proverbs selected a verb capable of multiple nuances, and the Fathers consistently interpreted it as an economic designation: the Son is “established” or “appointed” as the archetypal Wisdom through whom the cosmos is ordered, not manufactured as a member of the cosmos. The immediate sequel, “before the mountains He γεννᾷ me” (v. 25 LXX), already distinguishes generation from creation; patristic theology merely makes that distinction explicit.

  Barnes’ nineteenth-century comment that only God can bring about such an interior cleansing is perfectly congenial to Trinitarian doctrine: the Son and the Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father, share the singular divine power to re-create. Nothing in his gloss authorizes the leap from moral renewal in the redeemed to ontological origin of the Redeemer. Psalm 51 affirms divine agency in sanctification; it says nothing about the temporal genesis or creaturehood of the Logos.

  Therefore, the invocation of Psalm 51:10 neither proves that κτίζω is semantically restricted to the creation of previously non-existent beings nor supports the Arian contention that the Son belongs to the order of creatures. Proper lexical analysis, the broader canonical context, and the unanimous witness of the early Church converge to show that “create” in that psalm describes God’s transformative grace, while the Son, eternally begotten and consubstantial with the Father, stands on the Creator’s side of the Creator–creature divide.

  The Arian polemic depends throughout on the notion that the lack of explicit, technical, philosophical terminology in the NT somehow constitutes evidence against the Trinitarian reading. This is historically and methodologically baseless. All classical Christian doctrine arises from the Church’s careful contemplation of the entirety of revelation: the unity of God, the divinity of Christ, the personal distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the narrative of salvation history. The “homoousios” of Nicaea and the “begotten, not made” formula were not novelties but clarifications—terms coined to rule out heretical interpretations like Arianism and to safeguard the mystery revealed in Scripture.

  The distinction between “begotten” and “made” therefore stands on texts older than Nicea and logic deeper than conciliar decree. Every creature is made ex nihilo; only the Son is begotten ex Deo. To merge the verbs is to collapse Creator and creation, to unwrite John 1:3, and to leave the Church without a Redeemer who is truly God yet truly from God. That is why the bishops of 325, guarding “the faith once delivered,” confessed nothing novel when they cried “γεννηθέντα, οὐ ποιηθέντα.” They simply gave dogmatic voice to what Scripture already requires and what Justin, Origen, Athanasius, and the whole catholic tradition had always—however variously phrased—believed: the Father is never without his Word, nor was there ever a time when the Son was not.

  In conclusion, every aspect of the Arian critique—regarding “firstborn,” the meaning of “begotten,” the biblical witness to Christ’s divinity, and the development of Trinitarian doctrine—fails under the weight of scriptural exegesis, linguistic evidence, and historical theology. The context of Colossians 1, the meaning of πρωτότοκος, and the witness of Justin and the early Fathers all converge on the reality that the Son is not part of creation but stands eternally as its source, Lord, and inheritor. The “firstborn of all creation” is the one through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made that has been made (John 1:3). He is eternally begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father—the confession of the universal Church from the beginning. Any other reading fragments the scriptural logic and empties the apostolic gospel of its heart: that in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col 2:9), and that our redemption rests on the uncreated, eternal Son’s work and person.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: .

  take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

  - kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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  aqwsed12345

  The Arian argument rests on three main claims: (1) that the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is irrelevant or can only support an Arian reading; (2) that the terms “created” (ktizō) and “begotten” (gennaō) are interchangeable in both biblical and early patristic sources, rendering the Nicene distinction artificial; (3) that the patristic and New Testament use of titles such as “firstborn” support a partitive and not a relational reading, placing Christ within the order of creation. Each of these points is based on selective evidence and a misapprehension of both the original languages and the theological context in which these terms developed.

  The attempt to read Proverbs 8:22–25 as a straightforward proof that the Son is a created being rests on a series of linguistic confusions and historical misrepresentations that collapse once the text is examined in its original languages, in its literary genre, and within the exegetical tradition that culminated in the Nicene settlement. Proverbs 8 is a poem that personifies Wisdom so as to celebrate the rational order embedded in creation; the device is pedagogical, not ontological. Second-Temple Jewish texts such as Sirach 24, Wisdom of Solomon 7–9 and Philo’s discussions of the Logos already deploy this personification to speak of an eternal attribute or hypostasis of God that stands over against the finite world. When early Christian writers identified Christ with this Wisdom, they did so to underscore his pre-existent activity as mediator of creation—not to insinuate that he belongs among created beings.

  The suggestion that the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is irrelevant to Christology is both historically and theologically naïve. The use of poetic personification in Proverbs 8—where Wisdom is depicted as an agent alongside God in creation—is not intended as a literal ontological statement about a created being. Rather, as both Jewish and Christian exegetes have long recognized, this figure serves a dual purpose: first, to extol the order, beauty, and intelligibility of creation as founded in God’s own Wisdom; and second, to foreshadow, in typological and analogical terms, the divine Logos through whom all things were made (John 1:3; Col 1:16-17). In Second Temple Judaism and the intertestamental Wisdom literature (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon 7:25-26; Sirach 24), Wisdom is described as an emanation of God’s glory and an agent in creation, but never as a mere creature. Early Christians, such as Paul (1 Cor 1:24) and John, appropriated this language to articulate the unique pre-existence and creative agency of the Son, distinguishing him from all created things. The Fathers, especially Athanasius and the Cappadocians, were explicit that any identification of Christ with Wisdom in Proverbs is to be understood in a typological or economic sense, not as a statement of created origin. This is why Athanasius, in his Orations Against the Arians, repeatedly affirms that the Son’s “generation” is eternal, immaterial, and of the same essence as the Father, and not to be confused with the creation of temporal beings.

  The core of the Arian argument is the claim that the Septuagint’s use of “created” (ktizō, ἔκτισεν) in Proverbs 8:22 and “begets” (gennaō, γεννᾷ) in v.25 indicates their equivalence, which undermines the Nicene distinction. This is based on a misunderstanding of both the translation history and the original languages.

  The Hebrew of Proverbs 8:22 employs קָנָה, whose primary sense is “to acquire” or “to possess,” and only in exceptional contexts “to create.” Ancient Jewish translators aware of that range rendered it by ἐκτήσατο (“acquired”) rather than ἔκτισεν (“created”). The Septuagint’s singular choice of ἔκτισεν broadens the semantic field to include “appointed” or “established,” yet never obliges a reading in which Wisdom is made ex nihilo. Verse 25 then shifts in Hebrew to חוֹלָלְתִּי, a childbirth verb that the LXX correspondingly translates with the masculine active “he begot me” (γέννα με). Far from conflating the two verbs, the Greek text itself keeps their semantic difference intact: κτίζω may denote producing something that did not exist; γεννάω describes derivation, generation, or birth. The poem places both verbs side-by-side precisely to evoke Wisdom’s primordial dignity without equating her with the products of the six-day creation.

  The Hebrew verb in v.22 is qanah (קָנָה), with a semantic range that includes “to acquire,” “to possess,” “to beget,” but rarely “to create.” Most authoritative Jewish sources, as well as major Greek translators like Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, rendered it as “possess” or “acquire” (ektēsato), not “create.” The LXX’s use of ktizō is an outlier and was heavily criticized by orthodox Fathers because it gave Arians linguistic ammunition to claim that the Son was a creature. Athanasius, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa, among others, responded by noting that even in the LXX, ktizō is not always equivalent to “create ex nihilo” but can mean “establish” or “appoint” (cf. LXX Psalm 50:12, “create in me a clean heart,” meaning to renew or reconstitute, not create from nothing). More importantly, the language of v.25 in both the Hebrew (cholalti, “I was brought forth,” with birth/labor connotations) and the Greek (gennaō, “he begets me”) is qualitatively different from creation. In Hebrew anthropological and familial contexts, begetting denotes derivation of essence, a sharing of substance (as in human parenthood); in theological usage, it points to the mysterious and eternal generation of the Son by the Father (see John 1:18, monogenēs; Heb 1:3, the “radiance of [God’s] glory and exact imprint of his nature”). The claim that Proverbs 8:22-25 uses “created” and “beget” interchangeably ignores this semantic and contextual difference, as well as the clear distinction drawn in later Christian dogmatic reflection.

  The Arian polemic appeals to early Fathers such as Origen, Tatian, and Justin Martyr, suggesting that they treated “begotten” as functionally equivalent to “created.” This is a misrepresentation both of their intent and of the development of doctrine. Origen, writing before the technical terminology of Nicaea was settled, sometimes employed “subordinationist” language, yet he also affirms in On First Principles that the Son is “generated from the Father’s own substance,” and therefore not a creature among creatures. Tatian and Justin occasionally use “beget” with reference to the world or souls, reflecting the fluidity of pre-Nicene vocabulary. However, both are careful, in their best moments, to maintain the unique status of the Son as the eternal Logos. The distinction between “begotten” and “made” did not arise ex nihilo at Nicaea but was the result of careful exegetical and theological clarification in response to Arian equivocation.

  Athanasius, in Contra Arianos II.20–22, argues that κτίζει in v. 22 must refer either to the Son’s incarnate mission or, more plausibly, to a divine “establishing” of his mediatorial office, for otherwise verse 25 would contradict itself by first calling Wisdom created and then begotten. Basil of Caesarea (Contra Eunomium II.20) and Gregory of Nyssa (Ad Ablabium) press the same point: if Scripture had wished to call the Son “first-created,” it possessed the unambiguous adjective πρωτόκτιστος but instead chooses πρωτότοκος, a title of primacy and inheritance. They therefore reject the Arian syllogism that equates generation with manufacture.

  Appeals to Origen, Justin Martyr, or Tatian prove equally inadequate once context is restored. Origen indeed speaks of the Son as δεύτερος θεός and subordinate in role, yet he is equally clear that the Son is begotten “before every aeon” and is therefore eternal (Princ. I.2.2–4). Whatever terminological fluidity marks pre-Nicene writers, none envisages the Son as a creature in the Arian sense; rather they grope for ways to articulate an eternal relation within the Godhead. Justin’s description of souls or the cosmos as “begotten” borrows the Platonic idiom of generated realities but carefully distinguishes the Logos as the one through whom those generated realities come to be.

  The Nicene Creed’s “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” (gennēthenta ou poiēthenta, homoousion tō patri) is thus not a theological contrivance, but the crystallization of a distinction already present in the apostolic witness (cf. John 1:3; Col 1:15-17; Heb 1:2-3) and made explicit by the theological controversies of the fourth century. The Creed does not invent a distinction; it articulates, in the face of confusion, what was always implicit: that the Son is of the same essence as the Father, and therefore eternally God, not a creature.

  The rhetorical move that treats πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως in Colossians 1:15 as though it meant “first created among creatures” ignores the immediately following causal clause: “for in him all things were created.” The Son is prior to and the source of the totality of created reality; grammar and syntax allow no partitive reading that smuggles him back inside the class of things his own agency calls forth. The Septuagint’s idioms—“firstborn of the poor,” “firstborn of death”—are admittedly genitives of relation, but they strengthen rather than weaken the Nicene reading: “firstborn” names status and supremacy, not temporal origination.

  The Arian reading of Colossians 1:15 as “firstborn of creation” (partitive genitive: included within creation) is grammatically and contextually unsound. The Greek prōtotokos pasēs ktiseōs is best understood as a genitive of subordination or supremacy, not membership. This is confirmed by the immediate context: “For in him all things were created… all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things…” (Col 1:16-17). The “firstborn” is not part of the set of created things, but rather stands over it, as its source and ruler. Patristic interpretation, as in Hilary and Athanasius, always understood “firstborn” as an assertion of Christ’s sovereignty and preeminence, not of his ontological inclusion in the created order. The appeal to “firstborn of death” or “firstborn of the poor” in the LXX is contextually irrelevant, as these are idioms and poetic expressions, not technical terms for ontology. In biblical usage, “firstborn” often denotes preeminence or heirship (cf. Psalm 89:27: “I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth”), and in the case of Christ, indicates his unique role as the source, ruler, and redeemer of creation—not as the first among equals.

  The Nicene confession “begotten, not made” is therefore not a late theological artifice but the crystallization of a distinction already embedded in Scripture. Generation designates an eternal intra-divine relation in which the Father communicates the whole divine essence to the Son; creation designates the divine act that brings the universe into being out of nothing. By confusing these two registers, the Arian interpretation erases the very logic that the biblical canon uses to safeguard both the Son’s full deity and the monotheistic integrity of Christian worship. When the Creed insists on homoousios, it simply renders explicit what John had said at the outset: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and what John reiterated in the strictest possible terms, “without him was not anything made that was made.” To assign the Word himself to the category of made things is to invert the sentence, emptying the gospel of its own confession.

  Thus every strand of evidence—philological, literary, inter-testamental, patristic, and canonical—converges on a single conclusion. The verbs of Proverbs 8 point toward, rather than away from, the eternal generation of the Son. The early Fathers’ occasional ambiguities find their resolution, not their contradiction, in the Nicene articulation. And Colossians 1 joins Proverbs 8 in exalting the Wisdom of God precisely because he stands on the Creator’s side of the ontological divide, the eternally begotten Word through whom all that is not God has come to be. The Arian construction collapses under the weight of these texts; the Trinitarian reading alone does justice to their grammar, their theology, and the church’s unbroken confession of the Son’s full and uncreated divinity.

  In sum, the Arian conflation of “begotten” and “created” is based on (a) a tendentious reading of Proverbs 8 that ignores the poetic and typological function of Wisdom; (b) a misunderstanding of both Hebrew and Greek linguistic nuance; (c) a selective and often anachronistic use of patristic sources; and (d) a grammatical misreading of key New Testament texts. The development of Trinitarian doctrine, and the clarification made at Nicaea, was not a break with Scripture but a defense of its deepest logic: the Son is not a creature, however exalted, but “Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” This is the consistent teaching of the apostolic and patristic witness, from the earliest hymns to the mature theology of the fourth century.

  To conclude: the distinction between “begotten” and “created” is neither arbitrary nor the product of post-biblical speculation. It arises from the very structure of biblical revelation, is supported by careful linguistic and contextual analysis, and was defended by the entire mainstream of Christian tradition against Arian reductionism. The Son, as the Wisdom and Logos of God, is eternally generated and fully divine, and this is the only reading that does justice to the biblical, theological, and historical data.
• 
  13

  Daniel 2:42 , is it really unstable democratic governments?

  by raymond frantz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  in its latest front page article titled “political turmoil that fulfills bible prophecy”, jw.org once again attempts to connect current world events with the vision found in daniel chapter 2, particularly the image composed of various metals.

  their interpretation of daniel 2:42 is laid out in the following paragraph: "the feet of the image are made ‘partly of iron and partly of clay,’ a combination that is inherently weak.

  (daniel 2:42) today, the power of both the united states and britain is weakened by elements within their own societies.

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• 

  aqwsed12345

  @peacefulpete

  Your reconstruction of the book of Daniel—as a patch-work of disappointed nationalistic pamphlets repeatedly recycled to keep pace with fresh political humiliations—is ingenious but finally unpersuasive once one moves beyond the narrow field of form-critical speculation and listens to the wider choir of evidence that has impressed both Jewish and Christian tradition for two millennia. A Catholic reading does not claim that the book dropped from heaven in its final shape without any redactional history; the Church has always admitted that the sacred authors employ sources, languages and even later hands who collate or gloss. What she denies is that such literary history empties the work of genuine prophecy—real foreknowledge given by God—or that it reduces Daniel to a cynical exercise in post-eventu guesswork.

  The bilingual structure is not proof of a century-and-a-half compositional gulf. Ezra, written in the Persian period, shifts between Hebrew and Aramaic within a single paragraph—hardly evidence of a later author forging continuity. In Mesopotamia the court language was Aramaic while sacred reflection remained at home in Hebrew; a sixth-century Jew trained for government service would naturally write court memoirs in Aramaic and private visions in Hebrew. Dead Sea Scroll copies of Daniel, dated a mere generation after Antiochus, already treat the work as Scripture; there is no sign of a freshly minted Maccabean tract awkwardly seeking canonical status. Qumran’s esteem disposes of the theory that the Hebrew chapters were late Hasmonean propaganda waiting for Pompey to become “relevant.”

  The identification of the fourth kingdom with Rome is not a Christian novelty foisted on an unsuspecting Daniel. The Greek translation of Theodotion—pre-Christian and used by both synagogue and Church—already renders the metals in a way that fits Alexander’s break-up and Rome’s iron grip. The “eagle” midrash in 4 Ezra, far from confessing novelty, simply clothes the common Jewish reading of Daniel in the imperial iconography of its day. Nor must one ignore Josephus, who tells us that Daniel’s vision of the fourth empire was interpreted as Rome when Pompey was scarcely cold in his grave. To dismiss this as opportunistic is to ignore the stubborn fact that Rome is the only historical super‐power that fulfills Daniel’s explicit criteria: it crushes all predecessors, lasts deep into messianic time, and is still standing when the divine stone strikes.

  Your proposal that chapter 7 originally aimed at Ptolemy I Soter dissolves when weighed against the text. The little horn subdues three of the ten; Ptolemy displaced none of Alexander’s core successors. He never “changed the times and the law,” a phrase far more naturally suited to Antiochus’ abolition of Sabbath and sacrifice. Nor did Ptolemy meet his demise “without human hand” in a sudden, non-military fashion. The Antiochene crisis, on the other hand, fits every detail. The more economical reading is precisely the one the Church Fathers inherited from pre-Christian Judaism: chapter 7 sketches the entire series of empires from Babylon to Rome, then focuses the camera on the archetypal persecutor who foreshadows later antichrists.

  That brings us to a specifically Catholic nuance often missed in reductionist schemes. Prophecy is not exhausted by its first historical horizon. The Church Fathers call this the “sensus plenior”—a fuller sense intended by the Holy Spirit that unfolds across history. Antiochus is a near fulfillment, a dress rehearsal; the final fulfillment surges forward into the Roman period and beyond, lying open until the stone “cut without hands” pulverizes the image at Christ’s return. This layered depth explains why a single vision can speak coherently to Maccabean martyrs, to first-century Christians groaning under Nero, and to believers still awaiting the last act of history. Far from being embarrassed by successive applications, Catholic theology expects them.

  Even modern critical scholarship has begun to retreat from the sweeping skepticism of the nineteenth century. The linguistic profile of Daniel’s Aramaic is older than Qumran, and the Persian loan-words reflect an Achaemenid rather than a Seleucid administrative milieu. Greek words are conspicuously absent where we should expect them if a Jerusalem scribe were writing under Antiochus. The book’s knowledge of sixth-century Babylonian titles and architecture proved embarrassingly accurate once cuneiform was deciphered. These are awkward facts for the ex-eventu hypothesis but congenial to a date near the lifetime of the historical Daniel.

  Catholic faith therefore continues to read Daniel as the Church always has: an inspired mosaic, certainly edited and transmitted, but substantially the work of a sixth-century seer whose visions God enlarged to embrace later crises and, finally, the definitive victory of Christ’s kingdom. Skeptical reconstructions will no doubt continue to circulate, yet the burden of proof remains on those who would overturn the remarkable unity of tradition, internal coherence, and mounting archaeological confirmation that surround this prophetic book.
• 
  30

  2 Peter 1: 1 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: simeon peter, a servant and apostle of jesus christ, to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our god and savior jesus christ: - 2 peter 1: 1. here's how watchtower prints this verse:.

  simon peter, a slave and an apostle of jesus christ, to those who have acquired a faith as precious as ours through the righteousness of our god and the savior jesus christ: - nwt.

  why did watchtower change this verse by adding the word "the" ?.

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• 

  aqwsed12345

  The opening greeting of 2 Peter identifies its author as “Συμεὼν Πέτρος, δοῦλος καὶ ἀπόστολος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τοῖς … ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ”—“Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those … in the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.” The New World Translation, however, divides the construction and renders: “by the righteousness of our God and the Savior Jesus Christ,” thus avoiding the identification of Jesus as both “God” and “Savior.” The defense of this reading rests on two claims: that the Greek permits or even favors a two-person interpretation, and that contextual or theological factors in 2 Peter require it. A careful examination of the language, the syntax known as the Granville Sharp rule, and the immediate literary setting shows that both claims fail.

  1. The form of the construction

  The relevant words form an article–noun–καί–noun (TSKS) sequence: τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Granville Sharp demonstrated that when (i) two singular, personal, non-proper substantives share one article and (ii) no contextual disqualifier is present, both substantives invariably have the same referent. Sharp excluded plurals and proper names, and those exclusions have been confirmed in subsequent quantitative surveys of Hellenistic and patristic corpora. Daniel Wallace’s computer-assisted collation of every NT instance shows eighty-plus examples that meet Sharp’s criteria and not one clear counter-instance; where the construction occurs with proper names or other disqualifying features the rule is not expected to apply.

  In 2 Pet 1:1 both nouns (θεός, σωτήρ) are singular, personal, and common, and the second is immediately followed by the proper name Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ in apposition. Nothing in the syntax overrides their natural co-reference. Indeed, the three other occurrences of the very pair κύριος καὶ σωτήρ inside the letter (1:11; 2:20; 3:18) all apply both titles unambiguously to the one person Jesus Christ. That internal usage weighs heavily against breaking the cohesion of 1:1 only eleven words into the epistle.

  2. “God” as a supposed proper name

  Because Sharp’s rule applies only when neither substantive is a proper name, NWT apologists argue that θεός functions as a proper name for the Father and therefore creates an exception. The fallacy is two-fold. First, θεός in the NT is not treated as a rigid designator but as a titular noun that can take modifiers (“the living God,” “the God of Abraham,” “our God and Father”) and can even be applied to others metaphorically (2 Cor 4:4). As Wallace observes, a word that admits such qualifiers cannot be semantically equivalent to a personal name. Second, when θεός is used as a putative name in the NT it is characteristically anarthrous (John 1:1c; Heb 1:8); here, by contrast, it bears the article shared with σωτήρ, signaling a descriptive rather than a naming function.

  3. The objection from “paired” nouns

  NWT defenders propose that θεός and σωτήρ constitute a semantically “paired” set (like “king and queen”), so that the single article does not require identity of referent. Yet the evidence of Hellenistic and LXX Greek contradicts this. The combination rarely occurs; where it does, it either employs two articles when two persons are in view (e.g., 2 Macc 1:24) or one article when one person is intended (Wis 16:7; 3 Macc 6:32). Context, not some putative collocational rule, governs the usage. Ezra Abbot’s nineteenth-century appeal to Prov 24:21 LXX fails because βασιλεύς is plural in sense (the human monarchy) and θεός there substitutes for the tetragrammaton, functioning as a proper name; thus the text is outside Sharp’s parameters.

  4. Literary cohesion in 2 Peter

  Verse 2 immediately follows with the prayer, “May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” NWT defenders treat this as proof that Peter “consistently” distinguishes θεός from Jesus. The shift, however, is stylistically expected: v.1 contains the weighty titular formula of salutation, whereas v.2 resumes the traditional epistolary wish found in 1 Pet 1:2 and in Paul. Crucially, 2 Peter never uses the simplex expression “our God” of the Father alone; when “our God” reappears at 3:12 it is embedded in the eschatological hope centred on τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν, a hope fulfilled at “the appearing of τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ” (1:11). The narrative arc thus converges on a single figure whose identity seamlessly unites the titles “Lord,” “Savior,” and here “God.”

  5. Patristic reception

  Although modern Watch Tower literature claims that no early writer understood 2 Pet 1:1 as calling Christ “God,” patristic citations tell a different story. Athanasius (c. 296–373) repeatedly quotes the verse in that sense (e.g., Oratio Contra Arianos 1.3), and the reading underlies the Nicene Creed’s application of θεός ἀληθινός to the Son. The fact that all extant Greek manuscripts unite on the text of 1:1 further vitiates the conjecture, advanced in some older critical notes, that θεός is a scribal alteration of an original κύριος.

  6. Translational consequences

  The NWT’s “our God and the Savior Jesus Christ” inserts a second article without Greek warrant, thereby producing a construction that does not exist in the source text. Every major critical edition, from Westcott-Hort through NA28, prints the single article, and mainstream versions (e.g., NRSV, ESV, NASB, NIV) reflect it. By mechanically repeating the English article the NWT forecloses the Greek author’s intended identification and imposes a theological distinction alien to the syntax.

  Conclusion

  Grammatical analysis rooted in the Granville Sharp principle, corroborated by usage within 2 Peter and by the earliest reception history, shows that the epistle’s very first sentence acclaims Jesus as “our God and Savior.” The New World Translation’s evasion of that claim hangs on ad hoc exceptions to a rule that otherwise enjoys unbroken attestation and fails to respect the letter’s own patterns of titulary usage. Far from being ambiguous, 2 Peter 1:1 furnishes one of the clearest New Testament affirmations of the full deity of Christ, a confession that stands at the heart of Petrine—and apostolic—Christology.
• 
  30

  2 Peter 1: 1 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  here's how this verse should read: simeon peter, a servant and apostle of jesus christ, to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our god and savior jesus christ: - 2 peter 1: 1. here's how watchtower prints this verse:.

  simon peter, a slave and an apostle of jesus christ, to those who have acquired a faith as precious as ours through the righteousness of our god and the savior jesus christ: - nwt.

  why did watchtower change this verse by adding the word "the" ?.

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• 

  aqwsed12345

  “Our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Pet 1:1):

  A Critical Re-assessment of the New World Translation

  1. Text and Translational History

  The unanimously attested Greek wording is en dikaiosynē tou Theou hēmōn kai Sōtēros Iēsou Christou. In its 1950 edition the New World Translation (NWT) rendered this clause “by the righteousness of our God and the Saviour Jesus Christ,” a wording preserved (with minor cosmetic changes) in 1984 and 2013. The insertion of a second article—“the Saviour”—is not present in the Greek text and was introduced solely to distinguish two persons.

  2. The Granville Sharp Construction

  2 Pet 1:1 exhibits the article–noun–kai–noun (TSKS) construction analysed by Granville Sharp. When two singular, personal, non-proper substantives are joined by kai and only the first bears the article, both nouns designate the same person. This principle has been rigorously tested in ca. 80 New-Testament examples with no exceptions where the semantic conditions are met . Contemporary grammarians (e.g. C. F. D. Moule, D. B. Wallace) accept the rule in precisely these circumstances .

  In 2 Pet 1:1 both Theos and Sōtēr are

  • personal (titles for a person)
  • singular
  • common (neither is a proper name)

  Hence grammatically “our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” denotes one referent.

  3. Answering NWT Defences

  (a) Appeal to verse 2.
  NWT footnotes claim verse 2 “distinguishes” God and Jesus, compelling the same division in verse 1. Yet verse 2 uses the form tou Theou kai Iēsou tou Kyriou hēmōn; because Iēsou is a proper name Sharp’s rule does not apply . A different syntactic pattern in v. 2 cannot override the grammar of v. 1.

  (b) “God and Saviour” as a two-person formula.
  The Watchtower argument ignores the fact that 2 Peter later four times speaks of Jesus as “ho Kyrios kai Sōtēr” (“the Lord and Saviour”)—undisputedly one person (1:11; 2:20; 3:2, 18). Verse 1 repeats the very same construction, simply replacing “Lord” with “God”; literary logic therefore expects “God and Saviour” to be read of the same Jesus .

  (c) “Saviour Jesus Christ” as a proper name.
  Sharp’s rule would fail if Sōtēr Iēsous Christos functioned as a single proper name. But every NT occurrence of “Saviour” combined with Jesus’ name is qualified by a pronoun (“our/my”—e.g., Tit 2:13; 3:6) or by Kyrios “Lord” (2 Pet 2:20; 3:2) . The simple string “Saviour Jesus Christ” never functions as a proper name, and thus cannot exempt the verse from Sharp’s rule .

  (d) Rarity of calling Jesus “God”.
  Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that because Peter otherwise reserves Theos for the Father (≈ 45×), readers would assume “God” here also means the Father. This statistical appeal begs the question; grammatical evidence outweighs frequency statistics. Moreover, when Peter does doxology in 3:18 (“To him be glory…,” referring to Jesus), he ascribes divine honour unique to Yahweh, forming an inclusio with 1:1 that frames the epistle with Christ’s deity .

  4. Contextual and Intertextual Evidence

  • Inclusio: 1:1 “our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” ↔ 3:18 “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” .
  • OT background: “a righteous God and Saviour” (Isa 45:21 LXX) is Yahweh’s self-designation; Peter echoes the collocation “righteousness of our God and Saviour”, now applied to Christ .
  • Patristic reception: Greek fathers uniformly cite 2 Pet 1:1 as a proof-text for Christ’s deity, confirming that native readers of koine Greek perceived one referent .

  5. Theological Coherence

  Peter’s christology elsewhere—Christ’s sovereign Lordship (3:2), participation in divine glory (1:16-17), and prerogatives of final judgement (3:10-12)—is fully consonant with the confession that Jesus is ho Theos kai Sōtēr.

  6. Conclusion

  The NWT’s two-person rendering of 2 Peter 1:1 is grammatically indefensible. The TSKS construction, reinforced by immediate context, Septuagintal precedent, and early patristic exegesis, demands the translation:

  “to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours in the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

  Far from distinguishing the Father from the Son, Peter’s opening greeting acclaims the exalted Christ as true God, sharing the unique title and saving prerogatives of Yahweh himself.
• 
  13

  Daniel 2:42 , is it really unstable democratic governments?

  by raymond frantz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  in its latest front page article titled “political turmoil that fulfills bible prophecy”, jw.org once again attempts to connect current world events with the vision found in daniel chapter 2, particularly the image composed of various metals.

  their interpretation of daniel 2:42 is laid out in the following paragraph: "the feet of the image are made ‘partly of iron and partly of clay,’ a combination that is inherently weak.

  (daniel 2:42) today, the power of both the united states and britain is weakened by elements within their own societies.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  From the moment the Watchtower began marketing its “modern‐day fulfillment” of Daniel chapter 2 the interpretation has behaved like wet cement—poured, reshaped and repoured every few decades—yet somehow the Organization insists that the hardened image is already visible for anyone with “spiritual eyes.” In the 1950s the iron and clay were touted as the United States and the Soviet Union, the ideological superpowers that would forever remain ideologically incompatible. In the 1990s, when the Soviet bloc disintegrated in real time, the explanation evaporated without apology and re-formed around the Anglo-American world power and “its democratic populace.” Today jw.org stretches the metaphor yet again: iron is said to be the two-headed Anglo-American political class, while the clay now morphs into protesting citizens who keep voting but cannot agree on anything. If history forces a change tomorrow the Governing Body will simply mix a fresh batch and tell the rank and file that this was Jehovah’s insight all along.

  The problem is not merely interpretive gymnastics; it is that Daniel never grants the interpreter permission to equate clay with voters or iron with congressional majorities. Clay in Scripture is unambiguously Adamic humanity—frail, transient and dependent on its Maker. Isaiah and Jeremiah trumpet the theme that people are clay in the divine Potter’s hand, a theme so obvious that Paul picks it up in Romans 9 without any need for decoding. Iron, by contrast, is repeatedly linked with supernatural strength and the exercise of dominion—sometimes righteous, sometimes sinister. Psalm 2, for instance, speaks of an iron scepter smashing rebels like pottery. Daniel himself later unveils unseen military commanders—“princes” of Persia and Greece—who are unquestionably spiritual beings, and the language is identical: metals denoting an order of power that transcends normal flesh and blood.

  Daniel 2:43 presses the point even further. “They will mix with the offspring of mankind, but they will not stick together.” The text contrasts two parties: the offspring of humans, and a separate “they.” If both parties were human rulers the wording would be nonsensical. Daniel is echoing the Genesis 6 catastrophe in which rebellious “sons of God” attempted to hybridize heaven and earth, corrosion so severe that God purged the planet in a flood. Jesus Himself predicts a reprise of “the days of Noah” before His return, and Daniel places that reprise squarely at the toes of the image. The frailty of the last kingdom is not the voting gridlock on Capitol Hill; it is the ontological impossibility of welding corrupted spirit powers to mortal creatures. Iron never becomes clay. Clay never becomes iron. Any empire built on that fusion is doomed by design.

  The Watchtower’s political reading deletes the spiritual dimension and replaces it with newspaper headlines about parliamentary stalemates and viral protests. It is theological reductionism, a demotion of cosmic rebellion to partisan bickering. Worse, it diverts attention from the genuine warning of spiritual infiltration—a warning that the apostle Paul, Jude and John all echo when they speak of “deceiving spirits,” “angels who abandoned their proper dwelling” and “the spirit of antichrist already in the world.” To readers of Scripture those themes matter far more than whether Westminster or Washington can pass a budget.

  The Organization’s predictive track record underscores the bankruptcy of its method. If the iron and clay were once the United States and the U.S.S.R., the prophecy expired with the Berlin Wall. If the iron and clay are now elected officials and their discontented electorates, the prophecy must be recalibrated every time a poll shifts. In reality Daniel offers a single, consistent forecast: a final kingdom cobbled together by powers that do not belong together—spirit and flesh—collapses under the impact of a stone “cut without human hands.” That stone is not a Governing Body legal corporation founded in Pennsylvania; it is the messianic reign of the risen Christ, a kingdom that shatters every hybrid empire whether political, ideological or supernatural.

  The image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is nearly complete, but its weakness is not democratic turmoil—it is the same fatal fracture that provoked the Flood. The stone has never changed trajectory. One does well to heed Daniel’s original message rather than the Watchtower’s endlessly remixing commentary, because when iron meets clay the failure is inevitable, and when the stone strikes it will pulverize every man-made explanation along with the image itself.
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  41

  John 20: 28 in the NWT Calls Jesus God

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  in answer thomas said to him: “my lord and my god!

  - john 20: 28 nwt.

  why don't jehovah's witnesses believe jesus is god when he is called that in their own bible?.

  1. 
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• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Halcon

  Thank you for your thoughtful and gracious response. I deeply appreciate your willingness to engage not only the “technicalities” of theology, but the heart of Christian faith—the lived, loving encounter with the God who reveals Himself. Your point about the diversity of attempts to describe the Trinity among believers is both honest and, I think, instructive. Indeed, human language, even at its best, can never exhaust the mystery of God; the most profound truths of faith inevitably draw us beyond our concepts and images, inviting us into a humility that is itself an act of worship.

  Yet, within this humility, we hold that God’s revelation is not self-contradictory or left so utterly open that “all explanations are equally correct.” The very reason the Church has, across the centuries, carefully defined the doctrine of the Trinity is precisely because some explanations, though well-intentioned, subtly undermine the reality of God’s self-gift in Christ. This is not about “solving” a metaphysical puzzle, but about remaining faithful to what God has done and said in Christ and the Spirit.

  You are quite right: love, as a spiritual reality, eludes strict definition. And yet, in revelation, love is not left for us to invent or define by our own standards; God has shown us what love is by giving Himself in the Son and the Spirit. To encounter the Son is to encounter the very heart of the Father, not a lesser emissary or exalted creature, but the one who is “of one being with the Father” (as the Nicene Creed confesses). Here the Church’s confession is not meant to restrict the soul’s encounter with God, but to safeguard the fullness of what God has freely revealed: that the love poured out in Jesus is nothing less than the love of God Himself, not an intermediate being. To say otherwise, as the early Church realized, is not only to risk misunderstanding Christ, but to risk losing the full consolation and power of God’s self-giving love.

  On John 17:3 and the divinity of Christ: you ask, with great sincerity, why calling Jesus “only the Son” (in a non-divine sense) should “negate everything he did for mankind.” From the human perspective, as you note, even the title “Son of God” sounds exalted; but the Church’s concern, rooted in the New Testament and the earliest Christian experience, is that only God Himself could redeem humanity, overcome sin and death, and restore us to communion with Himself. No matter how exalted, a creature—no matter how unique—cannot bridge the infinite gap between Creator and creation. The incarnation is not just God sending a special messenger, but God Himself entering our history to heal us from within. To say that Christ is truly God is to affirm that salvation is not a work from afar, but the intimate self-giving of the divine life to humanity—a union which alone can deify us, as the Fathers loved to say (“God became man so that man might become God,” as Athanasius taught).

  This is why the question is not about abstract metaphysics, but about the very substance of hope: are we united to God Himself, or only to an exalted creature? Is the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit the love of the Creator, or merely of a mediator? The early Church insisted on Christ’s deity not out of philosophical rigidity, but out of fidelity to the living experience of redemption and communion. Anything less was found, in the end, to be an impoverished gospel—a “different Jesus,” not by human judgment, but by the logic of revelation itself.

  Of course, as you wisely observe, no human being can fully understand or define God. The Trinity remains, as Augustine said, “the supreme mystery of the Christian religion,” and Paul himself reminds us that “now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor 13:12). The Church does not demand perfect comprehension, nor does it claim to possess it; rather, it calls us to accept, in humble faith, the truth God has shown us—even as we know that our grasp is partial and our words always inadequate. The unity of faith is not uniformity of human explanation, but a shared assent to the revealed mystery, protected against those distortions which would finally cut us off from the fullness of God’s love.

  In the end, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a barrier to God, but His gracious invitation to share in the life and love that He is. Even as we stumble for words, even as Christians sometimes differ in their ability to articulate the mystery, what matters is our openness to receive what God gives: the very life of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Church’s teaching aims not to limit our approach to God, but to ensure that, in seeking Him, we do not settle for anything less than the fullness of the divine self-gift offered in Christ.

  I am grateful for your openness, your humility, and your evident desire for truth and love. May that desire always draw us deeper into the mystery, not only in thought, but in the lived reality of faith, hope, and love, until at last we know even as we are known.
• 
  41

  John 20: 28 in the NWT Calls Jesus God

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  in answer thomas said to him: “my lord and my god!

  - john 20: 28 nwt.

  why don't jehovah's witnesses believe jesus is god when he is called that in their own bible?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Halcon

  Thank you for your thoughtful and sincere reply. I greatly appreciate the spirit of humility and reasonableness with which you approach these questions. Let me offer a few clarifications—not to contradict the charity or common sense you express, but to illuminate why the doctrine of the Trinity, even in its mystery, is both more and less demanding than many suppose.

  First, you are quite right: “simply knowing that there is a doctrine called the Trinity” is not the same as receiving the revelation of the Triune God. The essence of Christian faith is not assent to a set of abstract formulas, but a living relationship with God as He has actually revealed Himself—most fully in Jesus Christ. Doctrine only has value insofar as it safeguards and articulates this living faith, keeping us from misunderstanding the mystery into which we are called. The Trinity is not a test of intellectual acumen, but the content of the self-gift God makes to the world in Christ and the Holy Spirit. It is true that one can have faith in the Resurrection, for example, without ever having seen the event itself—because the basic concepts involved are part of universal human experience. But in a deeper sense, faith itself is always a gift, a response to grace, and our relationship with God is not reducible to the categories of logic alone.

  You are also right to emphasize that God knows the limitations of each human heart. No one is condemned for ignorance of the Gospel or its mysteries if that ignorance is involuntary and their conscience is sincerely seeking the truth. God’s justice is always, as you note, perfectly balanced with His mercy. Indeed, as St. Paul writes, “God desires all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).

  The heart of your concern is about what it means to “know the right Jesus.” Here, our perspective does not treat the doctrine of the Trinity as a mere theological hurdle, but as the very reality of who Jesus is. To know the “right Jesus” is to know, even if only implicitly, the Jesus who is the only-begotten Son of the Father, who is true God and true man, who sends the Holy Spirit and is Himself sent by the Father. To encounter this Jesus is to be drawn, even if imperfectly, into the mystery of God as He truly is: not a solitary being, but the eternal communion of love, which the names “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” try to express. When the Gospel is announced, this is the Jesus proclaimed—not just a moral teacher, not a mere prophet, but the living Son of God in whom the fullness of divinity dwells.

  You are correct: no human mind can exhaust or fully comprehend the essence of God. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a “password” to salvation, nor is its full intellectual grasp required for acceptance by God. What is required is a humble openness to receive the truth as God reveals it, and a willingness not to deny what God has shown, even when it surpasses our comprehension. The insistence on the Trinity is not an arbitrary demand for metaphysical precision, but a defense of the mystery of who Christ actually is. As St. John says, “this is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). If Christ is not truly God, then the Christian hope would be in vain.

  That said, our role is to proclaim this mystery faithfully, to explain as best we can what God has revealed, and to invite all people into the fullness of communion with Him. The salvation is ultimately God’s work, and that the light given to each soul is different. Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ or the Trinity explicitly, but seek God with a sincere heart and strive to do His will as they understand it, are not condemned. Yet when the mystery is revealed, there is a responsibility to receive it, not as a burden but as an invitation to deeper intimacy with the God who is Love.

  Finally, you are right that the use of human terms—Father, Son, Spirit—can never fully express the reality of God. Yet they are the words God Himself has chosen to draw us into His life. The call is not to “figure out” the Trinity as a philosophical puzzle, but to say “yes” to the mystery of God’s self-giving, to let ourselves be loved and transformed by that mystery, and to share that love with others.

  To summarize: We do not teach that anyone is condemned merely for failing to grasp the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine. What it teaches is that God, in Christ and through the Spirit, reveals Himself as Triune, and invites us to accept His self-revelation with humble faith, trusting that He knows the weakness and limitation of every heart. The measure is not perfect comprehension, but loving trust and the willingness to receive the God who comes to meet us—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who desires to share His own life with us forever.
• 
  41

  John 20: 28 in the NWT Calls Jesus God

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  in answer thomas said to him: “my lord and my god!

  - john 20: 28 nwt.

  why don't jehovah's witnesses believe jesus is god when he is called that in their own bible?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Halcon

  Thank you for your thoughtful and charitable response, and for your openness to seeking a deeper understanding of this profound Christian mystery. I truly appreciate your spirit of inquiry and your recognition that wrestling with the mystery of the Trinity can deepen our reverence and love for God. Allow me to respond to the points you have raised and to clarify why, the doctrine of the Trinity is not merely an abstract speculation or a secondary matter, but central both to the fullness of revealed truth and to our salvation—though always approached with humility and a recognition of its mystery.

  First, I wholeheartedly agree that the use of relational terms like “Father” and “Son” in divine revelation is a mark of God’s condescension and pedagogical care for us. God reveals Himself using human language and concepts, so that we, as limited creatures, might have some share in His infinite life. The words “Father” and “Son” are not arbitrary, nor are they mere metaphors; they express, as analogically as possible, something true about the eternal life of God. the Father truly is Father by begetting the Son, and the Son truly is Son by being begotten of the Father—not in time, not by any physical process, but eternally and spiritually within the one divine essence. These terms both reveal and conceal: they open up for us the relational richness of God’s own inner life, while still respecting the infinite difference between creature and Creator.

  Regarding the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and salvation, you are right to sense that there is a tension between God’s merciful accommodation to our weakness and the grandeur of this revealed mystery. Many who lack explicit knowledge or acceptance of the Trinity, but seek God with a sincere heart and strive to do His will as they understand it, are not automatically condemned; God’s grace is not bound by our intellectual limits, and His mercy always exceeds our comprehension. Yet, in Christ and through the Gospel, God has definitively revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that to receive this revelation is to be drawn more deeply into the very life of God. This is why Christian baptism, according to Christ’s command, is “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—a sacramental participation in the life of the Trinity, not a mere symbolic gesture.

  In other words, while explicit, precise knowledge of Trinitarian doctrine is not required for the possibility of salvation (for God judges hearts and knows the limitations of each soul), nevertheless, full communion with God—both in this life and in eternity—is a participation in His trinitarian life. The Church’s mission is to bring all people to that fullness of faith and life, which Christ came to reveal. The Church does not claim that anyone is damned simply for misunderstanding or not knowing the doctrine, but she does affirm that what is revealed about God in Christ is not optional or peripheral. It is the very substance of our hope and the shape of our eternal destiny: “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Jesus’ prayer was not simply that we believe in God as an abstract principle, but that we enter into the communion of love that unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

  Thus, the mystery of the Trinity is not a barrier to God or a test of philosophical skill, but the gracious unveiling of the God who is love, who calls us into His own communion. To embrace the Trinity is to recognize that God is, in His very being, a relationship of love—a love into which we are invited. Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know this, are not thereby condemned; but those who receive the revelation are called to accept it in faith, not because it can be exhaustively explained, but because it is the self-gift of God Himself.

  Finally, the language of “Father” and “Son” is, as you say, simple, and it meets us in our simplicity; but within this language is contained an inexhaustible depth, a mystery that calls forth not only awe and study, but worship. As St. Augustine so beautifully said, “If you understood Him, it would not be God.” The doctrine of the Trinity is not a human invention, nor an academic curiosity, but the heart of the Christian proclamation: that the God who made us and saves us is eternally a communion of life and love, and that, through Christ, we are drawn into that communion.

  Thank you for engaging so deeply and respectfully with these mysteries. May our search always lead us not only to greater understanding, but to deeper love of the God who has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.