The Messiah: a human Davidic king or the divine God?

     In the past few posts, I have shown from the New Testament that the Messiah, Jesus, is the ultimate agent and Son of God who perfectly fulfills His will, and was exalted to become Lord over all upon His resurrection, although not being Yahweh Himself (contrary to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity). But another legitimate question related to this issue is, what was the Messiah prophesied to be in the Old Testament? Trinitarians allege that the Messiah was indeed prophesied to be a divine individual, and not “merely” a human, whereas unitarians believe that the Messiah was prophesied to be a human Davidic king who would reign in the place of Yahweh, second only to God Himself. In this post, I will examine the Messianic prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures to determine what exactly the ancient Israelites who wrote the Old Testament expected the Messiah to be and do.

    What is a “Messiah”?

Central to the question of what the Messiah was prophesied to be is what the word “messiah”, or “christ” in Greek (see John 1:41), actually meant to the ancient Jews. Technically, the word “messiah” simply refers to an “anointed one”, and was applied to a number of people in the Old Testament; what we would today call “the Messiah” refers to the ultimate “anointed one” who was prophesied in the Old Testament, a title which is applied to Jesus in the New Testament.

    So, what did being a messiah actually entail? As it turns out, there were three or four categories of people in ancient Israel who could be called the messiah, or anointed one, of God:

1. Priest: four times in the book of Leviticus, the priest is called “the messiah” (4:3, 5, 16; 6:22). This is the first time that the word “messiah” is used in the Hebrew scriptures. It can likely be traced back to Exodus 30:30, in which Moses is told to anoint Aaron and his sons to set them apart as priests, thus making them “anointed ones” or messiahs.

2. Prophet: in Psalm 105:15 (cf. 1 Chron. 16:22), the prophets are called “[God’s] messiahs”.

3. King: the vast majority of the time that the word “messiah” is used in the Old Testament, it refers to the king of Israel (1 Sam. 2:10). This is because the ancient kings of Israel were anointed (1 Sam. 10:1; 16:13), thus making them quite literally “anointed ones” or messiahs. Saul is repeatedly called a messiah (1 Sam. 12:3, 5; 24:6, 10; 26:9, 11, 16, 23; 2 Sam. 1:14, 16, 21), and David is called “the messiah of the God of Jacob” (2 Sam. 23:1 cf. 19:21; 22:51; 2 Chron. 6:42).

4. Savior: Cyrus, the king of Persia, is called “[Yahweh’s] messiah” in Isaiah 45:1, by virtue of being the instrument through whom God would achieve Israel’s salvation from Babylon.

With this multifaceted understanding of the word “messiah”, it makes a lot more sense that Jesus is repeatedly called “Christ” in the New Testament. Jesus fulfills all four of these categories, by simultaneously being a priest (Heb. 7:11-28), a prophet (Matt. 21:11; Lk. 7:16; 24:19; Acts 3:22), a king (Lk. 1:32-33; John 1:49; 12:13; 18:37), and a savior (Matt. 1:21; Lk. 1:68-79; Acts 4:12). This makes Him the ultimate and perfect Messiah of God.

    The Messiah in the psalms

There are three main kingly psalms that are quoted in the New Testament as referring to the Messiah, Jesus. Each of these will be examined in turn. The first is Psalm 2, which is applied to Jesus in Acts 4:25-26; 13:33; Heb. 1:5; 5:5; Rev. 2:27; 12:5; and 19:15:

Why do the nations rage, and the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against Yahweh and against His messiah, saying, “Let us break their bonds in pieces and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; Yahweh shall hold them in derision. Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, and distress them in His deep displeasure: “Yet I have set My king on My holy hill of Zion.”

I will declare the decree: Yahweh has said to me, “You are My son, today I have begotten you. Ask of Me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron; you shall dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

Now therefore, be wise, O kings; be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve Yahweh with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all those who put their trust in him. (NKJV)

The first key to understanding this passage is that it was originally not a prophecy about the Messiah, but was actually a coronation psalm written for an unnamed Davidic king of Israel. Because of this, everything in the psalm could be applied to any human Davidic king, not necessarily only Jesus, although it certainly finds its ideal fulfillment in Him.

    This seems odd to modern readers, because having the privilege of hindsight, we typically consider the title Son of God as unique to Jesus Himself. However, although there is certainly a special sense in which this title is applied to Jesus, to be called Yahweh’s “son” in the Old Testament simply meant to be His chosen king. The Messianic prophecy, “I will be to him a father, and he will be to Me a son”, actually found its original fulfillment in Solomon (1 Chron. 28:5-6 cf. 2 Sam. 7:12-16). Similarly, the council of kings in Psalm 82 is referred to as the “elohim [gods]” and “sons of the Most High”. Thus, based on these precedents, the ancient Jews would have understood the characterization of the Messiah as Yahweh’s son as referring to His chosen, human King from the Davidic royal lineage.

    Furthermore, because Yahweh is repeatedly referred to as a separate person from His messiah the king, there is no reason to believe that the ancient Jews would have seen a divine Messiah in this passage. Such statements as “The kings of the earth set themselves... against Yahweh and His messiah” and “Yahweh said to me [the messiah]” would make little sense if the messiah in this passage were to be considered identical to Yahweh. Therefore, this psalm is clear that the coming Messiah will be a human king and not the divine God.

    The second psalm which is applied to Jesus in the New Testament is Psalm 45, which is quoted in Hebrews 1:8-9:

To the chief musician. Set to ‘The Lilies’. A contemplation of the sons of Korah. A song of love. My heart is overflowing with a good theme; I recite my composition concerning the king; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

You are fairer than the sons of men; grace is poured upon your lips; therefore God has blessed you for the age. Gird your sword upon your thigh, O mighty one, with your glory and your majesty. And in your majesty ride prosperously because of truth, humility, and righteousness; and your right hand shall teach you awesome things. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies; the peoples fall under you. Your throne, O God, is for the age of the age; a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom. You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness more than your companions. All your garments are scented with myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, by which they have made you glad. Kings’ daughters are among your honorable women; at your right hand stands the queen in gold from Ophir.

Listen, O daughter, consider and incline your ear; forget your own people also, and your father’s house; so the king will greatly desire your beauty; because he is your Lord, worship him. And the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift; the rich among the people will seek your favor. The royal daughter is all glorious within the palace; her clothing is woven with gold. She shall be brought to the king in robes of many colors; the virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to you. With gladness and rejoicing they shall be brought; they shall enter the king’s palace.

Instead of your fathers shall be your sons, whom you shall make princes in all the earth. I will make your name to be remembered in all generations; therefore the people shall praise you for the age of the age. (NKJV)

This psalm was actually originally written for the wedding day of one of Israel’s kings; currently, the prevailing view is that this was either the wedding of Solomon and the daughter of the king of Tyre or (more likely) the wedding of Ahab and Jezebel. Therefore, this is another psalm that finds its original fulfillment in a human Davidic king, and not uniquely in Jesus Himself. (Otherwise, how would we explain that the king in this psalm is getting married, something that never happened to Jesus Himself?)

    This might confuse some people, because it refers to the king as “O God” (in fact, its quotation in Hebrews 1:8 is one of the passages used by trinitarians to establish the “deity of Christ”). How can Ahab, one of the most wicked kings of Israel, have been called God? But if we properly understand the ancient concept of agency, which I dealt with in my most recent post, then we can make sense of this passage. The king of Israel, as the agent of Yahweh and His messiah, can be called “God” in a representational sense.

    There is no reason to conclude that this passage, when applied to Jesus, should be understood any other way than it was originally understood when applied to Ahab. When Jesus is called “God” in Hebrews 1:8, the quotation of this passage, He was merely being called such in a representational sense (just as Ahab was), not in an ontological sense equating Him with Yahweh. Therefore, this is another prophecy that finds its ideal fulfillment in a Messiah who is a human Davidic king, not the divine God, Yahweh.

    The third Messianic psalm is Psalm 110, which is quoted in the New Testament too many times to count as proof of Jesus’ kingship:

A Psalm of David.

Yahweh said to my Lord [adoni], “Sit at My right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool.” Yahweh shall send the rod of your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of your enemies! Your people shall be volunteers in the day of your power; In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, you have the dew of your youth. Yahweh has sworn and will not relent, “You are a priest for the age according to the order of Melchizedek.”

The Lord [Adonai] is at your right hand; He shall execute kings in the day of His wrath. He shall judge among the nations, He shall fill the places with dead bodies, He shall execute the heads of many countries. He shall drink of the brook by the wayside; therefore He shall lift up the head.

The very first verse in this psalm, which is quoted or referenced seventeen times throughout the New Testament, refers to the coming Messiah as an adoni. In contrast to the title Adonai, which was reserved for Yahweh God only, the title adoni was applied to human leaders and rulers (and never to God). Jesus quotes this verse in Matt. 22:44 to show that He was far greater than David, which is indeed true, but neither He nor His Jewish audience would have understood this as a divine claim; instead, they would have recognized that this is the title of an exalted human, never used of God Himself.

    The second section of this psalm continues the idea of agency, understanding the prophesied Messiah to be an agent of the Lord God. Just as it is said that God was with the judges of Israel, delivering the nation through their agency (Judg. 2:16-18), the Lord God will be alongside the Messiah (at His right hand) executing the kings of the nations through His agency. This is consistent with the Messiah as a human agent of Yahweh, but not with the Messiah being Yahweh Himself.

    In summary, the picture of the Messiah which we get from the Messianic psalms is that He would be a human king of the Davidic line, and an anointed agent of Yahweh Himself. However, contrary to the trinitarian position, there is no expectation of “the deity of Christ” (that the Messiah would be Yahweh Himself). In fact, for the Messiah to be God Himself would be entirely inconsistent with the prophetic picture that is painted by Psalms 2, 45, and 110.

    The Messiah in the prophets

The very first explicit prophecy of the Messiah (following the promises to Abraham) can be found in Moses’ final words to the fledgling nation of Israel, in the book of Deuteronomy. According to Moses,

“Yahweh your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [Moses] from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear... I [Yahweh] will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him.” (Deut. 18:15, 18)

According to Moses, the coming prophet - the Messiah - would be raised up from among the humans in the nation of Israel. There is no indication that the Messiah will be divine (although, to be fair, there is no indication that the Messiah will not be divine either).

    The most detailed non-psalmic prophecies of the Messiah come from the book of Isaiah. The first prophecy comes from Isaiah 7, in which Isaiah gives a sign to Ahaz (the king of Judah) to mark the end of his war with Israel and Damascus:

“Therefore the Lord [Adonai] Himself will give you [Ahaz] a sign: behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Curds and honey he shall eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.” (Isa. 7:14-16)

Although verse 14 is applied to Jesus in Matthew 1:23 as a prophecy regarding His birth of a virgin, the context makes clear that the original fulfillment of this prophecy was not Messianic in nature. Instead, the original fulfillment was when a young woman [1] conceived and bore a son to Ahaz, as a sign that the war with the nations of Israel and Damascus was nearing its end.

    Some trinitarian interpreters believe that, because the child is named Immanuel (“God with us”), this is a prophecy that the Messiah would literally be God Himself. However, this is simply eisegesis; in the original fulfillment of this prophecy, God certainly did not literally come down to earth, and so there is no reason to believe that it would be different in its ultimate fulfillment. To say that “God is with you” could indeed mean that God is physically present, but it can also mean that God is helping His people; for example, in Joshua 1:9, it is said that “Yahweh is with you [Joshua] wherever you go”, but God did not literally incarnate Himself in order to be physically present with Joshua.

    Another Messianic prophecy of Isaiah, this time finding its direct fulfillment in Jesus Himself, can be found in Isa. 9:6-7:

“For unto us a child will be born, unto us a son will be given; and the government will be upon his shoulder. And his name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even for the age. The zeal of Yahweh of hosts will perform this.” (NKJV)

This prophecy is often understood as referring to Jesus as “mighty God”, thus making Him equivalent with Yahweh, and “everlasting Father”, thus making Him the same as the Father (making this a favorite verse of modalists). Because of this, trinitarians often point to this passage as further proof for the “deity of Christ”.

    However, although the title “mighty God” (el gibbor) is often confused by uninformed readers, and even sometimes accomplished exegetes, with the title “Almighty God” of the New Testament, these are different titles. El gibbor is used only twice elsewhere, once referring to God Himself (Isa. 10:21) and the other time (in the plural) referring to mighty human rulers (Ezek. 32:21). This title, in Isa. 9:6, could just as easily be translated as “mighty chief” [2].

    The title abi-ad, which is usually translated as “everlasting Father”, has also been mistranslated. This title would be better translated as “father [originator] of the age” [3]. This is not a title unique to God, nor does it support modalism; rather, it is uniquely a title belonging to the Messiah, since He will be the originator (or the “father”) of the coming Messianic age.

    It is important to remember that, to properly exegete a passage, we have to put ourselves in the place of the original readers. To the ancient Israelites, the idea that Yahweh Himself would come down and be born as a human would be counterintuitive and even blasphemous. If this was the point that Isaiah wanted to get across, he would have needed to use blatantly divine language to describe the coming Messiah, such as saying that His name would be Yahweh. Instead, he used titles that are not unique to God, like el gibbor and abi-ad. Although this is an argument from silence, this seems sufficient evidence that Isaiah did not believe the coming Messiah would be the divine God.

“There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of Yahweh shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Yahweh. His delight is in the fear of Yahweh, and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of His lips he shall slay the wicked...

“And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, who shall stand as a banner to the people; for the Gentiles shall seek him, and his resting place shall be glorious.” (Isa. 11:1-4, 10 NKJV)

There is no indication in this passage that the Messiah will be the divine God (although again, to be fair, there is no indication that He will not). Instead, we are told simply that the Messiah will be from the Davidic line of kings (the root of Jesse).

Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of Yahweh been revealed? For he shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and we did not esteem him.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare his generation? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people he was stricken. And they made his grave with the wicked — but with the rich at his death, because he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it pleased Yahweh to bruise him; He has put him to grief. When You make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Yahweh shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the labor of his soul, and be satisfied. By his knowledge My righteous servant shall justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa. 53 NKJV)

This is perhaps the most famous prophecy about the Messiah, at least among Christians, as it is a perfect depiction of Jesus’ suffering. And yet the doctrine of the “deity of Christ” is nowhere to be found here. Instead, the suffering Servant is repeatedly considered to be a separate individual from Yahweh, not the same being. Statements like “Yahweh has laid on him iniquity”, “Yahweh bruise[d] him”, “[Yahweh’s] righteous servant” would be meaningless if the servant were actually the same as Yahweh.

    Similarly, in the very first verse, this Servant is said to be “the arm of Yahweh”. This is the way that agents of Yahweh were described in the Old Testament (for example, Isa. 63:11-12), as the agents through whom God acted out His will could be figuratively considered His arm. But again, if the Servant is equivalent to Yahweh, then He could not be Yahweh’s agent.

    Although there are further Messianic prophecies in the rest of the prophets, none of them are pertinent to the question being considered here, and so they will not be covered in this post. However, from the prophecies that have already been considered, it is clear that the ancient Jews would not have expected the Messiah to be the divine God. Rather, as in the Messianic psalms, they would have expected the Messiah to be a human Davidic king and the ultimate agent of Yahweh.

    But isn’t Jesus, the Christ, called God?

As we have seen, the Old Testament Messianic prophecies show that the Messiah was expected to be a human king from the Davidic lineage, someone who would be an agent of Yahweh yet even greater than Moses, but the idea that the Messiah would be God Himself is foreign to these prophecies. In fact, the nature of these prophecies is such that if the Messiah were Yahweh, there would be major inconsistencies, as the Messiah is repeatedly treated as a separate person from God.

    But at this point, trinitarians will object: “isn’t Jesus called God in the New Testament, in which case the Messiah is God?” Well, as covered in a previous post of mine, Jesus never claimed Himself to be God, which in itself shows that the case for Jesus being considered God is on rather shaky ground. But apart from Jesus’ own words, is there any place in the New Testament that calls Jesus God?

    For an examination of whether Jesus is ever called God (ο θεος), we must turn to two of the foremost publications on this subject: Murray J. Harris’ tome Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus (1992) and Brian Wright’s publication Jesus as Theos: Scriptural Fact or Scribal Fantasy? (2007). Harris concluded that

Of the nine passages he concludes that four are certainly applying theos to Jesus: John 1:1; 1:18; 20:28; 2 Pet. 1:1. Of the remaining five he concludes three are likely or probably, but not beyond doubt, applying theos to Jesus: Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8-9. The last two, Acts 20:28 and 1 Jn. 5:20, he concludes are unlikely to be referring to Jesus as theos... Harris also examined 7 ‘secondary passages’ – Matt. 1:23; Jn. 17:3; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5:5; Col. 2:2; 2 Thess. 1:12; 1 Tim. 3:16. He concluded that each of these secondary passages did not apply theos to Jesus.

And here are Wright’s conclusions:

2 Thess. 1:12; 1 Tim. 3:16; Jude 4 – Do not apply theos to Jesus
Matt. 1:23; Jn. 17:3; Acts 20:28; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5:5; Col. 2:2; 1 Jn. 5:20 – Dubious
Jn. 1:18; Rom. 9:5; Heb. 1:8; 2 Pet. 1:1 – Highly probable
Jn. 1:1; Jn. 20:28; Titus 2:13 – Certain

It is instructive to note which verses they agreed upon, and which they did not. Here are the seven verses that they agreed were either certainly or probably applying the title theos to Jesus: John 1:1; 1:18; 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; and 2 Peter 1:1. (All of the others can be ruled out on the basis of textual problems, or else they are ambiguous about calling Jesus theos.)

    Two of these verses, Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1, are considered to be affirming the “deity of Christ” based on a rule of Greek grammar known as the Granville Sharp rule. According to this rule, whenever two nouns are connected by the conjuction και without a definite article separating them, they both apply to the same individual. Therefore, these two verses which refer to “the God of us and Savior of us Jesus Christ” are taken to mean “our God and Savior Jesus Christ”, rather than referring to two separate individuals, God and Jesus Christ.

    However, the problem here is that the Granville Sharp rule has many (seemingly arbitrary) exceptions throughout the New Testament, and cannot be applied when two different people are in view (for example, if the Greek text states “the Paul and Apollos”, these names refer to separate individuals). For this reason, to suggest that the Granville Sharp rule applies to Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 is actually begging the question of whether God is a separate individual from Jesus, and those who use these verses to support the Trinity must presuppose the Trinity in order to do so. It is entirely circular reasoning to say that these passages equate Jesus with God (and for this reason, a separate category of exceptions to the Granville Sharp rule has been proposed which would exclude these verses).

    This leaves us with only five passages that either certainly or probably use the title theos for Jesus: John 1:1; 1:18; 20:28; Romans 9:5; and Hebrews 1:8. Of these five, as discussed earlier in this post, Hebrews 1:8 must be only referring to Jesus as theos in a representational sense, as the quoted passage (from Psalm 45) was originally written to describe Ahab, the king of Israel; this leaves only four passages to potentially describe Jesus as theos in an ontological sense. Let us examine each in turn:

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God (John 1:1)

In my previous post on trinitarian prooftexts, I already discussed this verse; for a more detailed explanation of what I’m about to say, check out that post. Essentially, by suggesting that the word (λογος) was a conscious being prior to the conception of Jesus Christ, trinitarians are reading their own preconceptions about the “pre-existence of Christ” into the prologue of John.

    The λογος, in Jewish thought, more accurately describes the impersonal divine word and wisdom, which became manifested in Jesus. The personification of God’s impersonal word and wisdom was a common theme throughout both biblical and extra-biblical Wisdom literature, and John’s prologue would have been understood as such by its original readers. The idea of the divine wisdom becoming embodied in a human being was also a common one in Jewish literature (see here for more information). Thus, the “word” was not actually a conscious being prior to Jesus’ conception and birth, but was the literal wise utterance of God which became embodied in Jesus.

    Furthermore, as both Harris and Wright agree, the θεος in John 1:1c (being anarthrous and a predicate nominative) is better understood as qualitative, that is, “divine” rather than referring to God as a being. Therefore, John 1:1 might be paraphrased, “In the beginning was the divine word and wisdom, and the divine word and wisdom was with God, and the divine word and wisdom was what God was”. This divine, yet impersonal, word of God then “became flesh” when it was manifested in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth. This understanding of John 1:1, which is more in line with ancient Jewish thought, does not apply the title theos to Jesus.

No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten God, who is on the bosom of the Father, he has declared Him (John 1:18)

The textual evidence for this reading is dubious. Although two of the earliest manuscripts read “only-begotten God”, the majority of patristic writers cite this as “only-begotten Son”, which appears several other places in the Johannine literature (John 1:14, 3:16, 1 John 4:9), whereas this would be the sole example of “only-begotten God” if that were the original reading. For this reason, Wright categorized it as merely a probable example of Christ as theos. This is certainly insufficient grounds on which to base an entire doctrine of the “deity of Messiah” which is foreign to the rest of scripture.

And Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28)

This is the second text that both Harris and Wright agree is certainly referring to Jesus as God, and based on the overwhelming textual evidence for this reading and lack of ambiguity in the original Greek, I am inclined to agree that Thomas indeed said to Jesus, “my Lord and my God”.

    But is this evidence that the writers of the Bible regarded Jesus as ontologically equal to His God and Father? I highly doubt this, because if Thomas were truly describing Jesus as Yahweh by this statement, this would be the perfect time for John to once and for all establish Christ’s absolute deity, and yet John immediately goes on to say that “these have been written that ye may believe that Jesus is [God? No, but] the Christ, the Son of God” (v. 31).

    So what should we understand by Thomas’ exclamation of “my Lord and my God”? Was he affirming to Jesus, “[You are] my Lord and [You are] my God”, or was he saying something else? I believe the latter is more likely, based on what we know of the concept of agency in the Old Testament. Throughout the Old Testament, the people of Israel worshipped both God and His king, often in the very same breath. For example, see the following passages:

Thus Israel saw the great work which Yahweh had done in Egypt; so the people feared Yahweh, and believed Yahweh and His servant Moses. (Exod. 14:31)

Then David said to all the assembly, “Now bless Yahweh your God.” So all the assembly blessed Yahweh God of their fathers, and bowed their heads and worshipped Yahweh and the king. (1 Chron. 29:20)

“For it shall come to pass in that day,” Says Yahweh of hosts, “That I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds; foreigners shall no more enslave them. But they shall serve Yahweh their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them.” (Jer. 30:8-9)

Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek Yahweh their God and David their king. They shall fear Yahweh and His goodness in the latter days. (Hos. 3:5)

Furthermore, Jesus applied this same “dual praise” to Himself and God in the New Testament, showing that He should be worshipped in the same way:

“Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.” (John 14:1)

“this is the life age-during, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and him whom Thou didst send — Jesus Christ” (John 17:3)

Twice in the gospel of John, then, we see that Jesus indicated to His disciples to provide Him with the same dual praise that kings received together with Yahweh in the Old Testament. So, when Thomas praised “my Lord [Jesus] and my God [Yahweh]”, he wasn’t necessarily equating Jesus with Yahweh; rather, he was simply praising Christ together with God, an emphatic expression of this type of dual praise. This, also, is not a certain example of the Messiah being referred to as ontologically equal with God [4].

    Finally, the fourth and last remaining verse that is used to prove Christ’s deity is Romans 9:5:

[the Israelites] of whom are the fathers, and from whom came Christ according to the flesh, who is over all God, blessed to the ages. Amen.

This verse is, in the original Greek,

χριστος... ο ων επι παντων θεος ευλογητος εις τους αιωνας

However, the above translation is not the only possible way to translate the Greek. In fact, there are three separate, and equally legitimate, ways to translate it. The first is the above translation, which makes it appear that Christ is being referred to as “over all God”. The other two potential translations are “Christ according to the flesh, who is over all. God be blessed to the ages” and “Christ according to the flesh. God who is over all be blessed to the ages”.

    Since there are three equally legitimate ways to translate this verse, and only one of the possible translations refers to Christ as God, this verse is also not certainly referring to Christ as God. Furthermore, we know that Jesus is not actually “over all”, because the Father is over Him (John 14:28, 20:17, Rom. 15:6, etc.), which casts further doubt on the trinitarian translation. This favors the translation, “Christ according to the flesh. God who is over all be blessed to the ages”.

    In summary, though there are seven verses that Harris and Wright both agree are either certainly or probably describing Jesus as ontologically equivalent with God, none of these verses actually say this for certain. For Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1, circular reasoning must be applied to make these verses describe Jesus as God. The original Greek of Romans 9:5 is ambiguous about calling Jesus God, and could just as easily be translated a different way. Hebrews 1:8 is referring to Jesus as God in a representational, not an ontological, sense. The textual evidence for John 1:18 is unclear about whether it calls Jesus “God” or merely “Son”.

    Finally, even the two passages that Harris and Wright both agreed were certainly calling Jesus “God” - John 1:1 and 20:28 - don’t necessarily describe Jesus as ontologically equal to God when understood in their cultural and literary context. John 1:1 does not need to be describing any pre-existent state of Christ unless that idea is forced upon the text; the literary context indicates that this is referring to God’s literal (and impersonal) spoken word which was divine. John 20:28 is merely expressing the Hebraic concept of “dual praise”, in which both God and His king are praised together. Thus, all of the texts that supposedly identify Jesus as God are far from conclusive in this regard.

    Conclusion

Throughout Messianic prophecy, the Messiah is not depicted as being someone who would be ontologically equivalent with God, but rather a human being who would be a king of the line of David and a representative agent of Yahweh. In the Old Testament, the human Davidic king was said to sit on the throne of God (1 Chron. 29:23; 2 Chron. 9:8), rule over the kingdom of God (1 Chron. 28:5; 2 Chron. 13:8), be called the “son of God” (1 Chron. 28:6; Ps. 2:6-7), and be worshipped alongside God (1 Chron. 29:20), all of which are things said of Jesus in the New Testament.

    Although there are a few texts that are often used by trinitarians to prove that the Messiah, Jesus, is indeed ontologically equivalent to God, these texts do not certainly describe Jesus as God. The only two verses which certainly apply the title of “God” to Jesus, John 20:28 and Hebrews 1:8, can be shown from the Old Testament to be referring to Him as God in a representational sense, not an ontological sense. Thus, there is zero reason from scripture alone to believe that Jesus, the Messiah, is Yahweh God, unless we artificially import our own modern preconceptions into the text based on the fourth-century doctrine of the Trinity.

______________________________

[1] The word used here in Hebrew is almah, which refers to simply a young woman, not a virgin. Almah was, however, translated into Greek in the LXX as παρθενος (“virgin”), which led to Matthew’s application of this verse to Jesus’ virgin birth. Contrary to some conservative commentators, understanding Isaiah 7:14 in this way does not threaten the infallibility of scripture; rather, it is simply a re-application of this passage that did not originally apply to Jesus, which is common elsewhere in scripture (for example, Hosea 11:1 which originally referred to Israel is applied to Jesus in Matt. 2:15).

[2] In fact, in Martin Luther’s German translation, el gibbor is translated as Held (“hero”).

[3] Hence its translation in the Latin Vulgate as pater futuri saeculi, or “father of the coming age”.

[4] Another biblical unitarian interpretation of John 20:28 can be found at the end of this article. According to this interpretation, Thomas was not saying “[You are] my Lord and [You are] my God”, but instead “[By] my Lord and my God [I do believe]”. This is similar to how Jonathan simply said to David, “Yahweh God of Israel”, meaning “[By] Yahweh God of Israel [I do swear]”, when swearing allegiance to him (1 Sam. 20:12), although obviously not identifying David as Yahweh.

Understanding the concept of agency

     In my most recent three posts, I have presented a thorough refutation of the trinitarian “prooftexts” for the position that the human Jesus Christ is also the supreme God, Yahweh, and an exposition of the evidence for unitarianism (admittedly, not comprehensive). However, I have recently been made aware of another category of “prooftexts” that trinitarians use to support the belief that Jesus is Yahweh; these are prophecies, pertaining to Yahweh, that are re-applied in the New Testament to Christ. For example, Joel 2:32 states that “everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh shall be saved”, whereas Romans 10:13 quotes this as “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord [in context, meaning Jesus] will be saved”.

    When I first encountered this idea, I was blown away by how blatantly this ignores the ancient concept of agency! In the ancient world, whenever a king or person of authority sent an envoy (or “agent”) to another party, the envoy was to be treated as the person who sent him, and he could speak with the authority of that person [1]. This idea of agency appears throughout the Bible, in both the Old Testament and New Testament. In this article, I will demonstrate that this is how we are to understand Jesus’ relationship to Yahweh - not as Yahweh Himself, but as an envoy, or agent, sent to carry out His will.

    The “Angel(s) of Yahweh”

Throughout the Old Testament, a mysterious figure called the “angel of Yahweh” repeatedly appears to Israelite individuals to relay messages from Yahweh; oftentimes, this angel actually speaks as though he was Yahweh. Many modern Christians interpret the appearances of Yahweh’s angel as Christophanies (appearances of the so-called “pre-existent Christ”), and so take the fact that this angel speaks as though he was Yahweh as further evidence for the deity of Christ. However, as I shall demonstrate in this section, the “angel of Yahweh” is actually a title used for any envoy sent by Yahweh, and is in fact a perfect example of the concept of agency in the Old Testament.

    First of all, it is necessary to dispense with any preconception about there being only one unique “angel of Yahweh”. The word “angel” in Hebrew, malak, simply referred to a messenger, envoy, or agent, and so in this sense anyone who was sent by Yahweh for some purpose could be called “the malak of Yahweh”. In a similar way, the title “the servant of Yahweh” appears to be in the definite form, and so only refers to one person, and yet it is applied to many different people (Gen. 26:24; Num. 14:24; Deut. 34:5; Josh. 24:29; Isa. 42:1; Hag. 2:23); this is simply a necessity of Hebrew grammar, so the title “the angel of Yahweh” could equally be translated “an angel of Yahweh”. In fact, when translated into Greek in the LXX, many instances of “the angel of Yahweh” were rendered as merely “an angel of the Lord” (e.g. Gen. 16:6; 22:11; Exod. 3:2; Judg. 2:1; 6:11).

    In this way, even regular humans were called “the angel of Yahweh”; for example, in Hag. 1:13, Haggai is said to be “the angel of Yahweh”, and in Mal. 2:7 it is said that the priest is “the angel of Yahweh of hosts”. It is very likely that in Exodus 23:20-23 and Numbers 20:14-16, Moses was being referred to as “the angel of Yahweh”, as also in Isaiah 63:9-12 Moses was called “the angel of His presence” and “the arm of His glory”. Moses, along with the prophets and priests, was called Yahweh’s angel precisely because he was personally commissioned by Yahweh (Exod. 3:10), thus becoming Yahweh’s representative agent.

    But if “the angel of Yahweh” simply refers to any agent commissioned by Yahweh, then why do these agents often speak in the first person as though they were Yahweh? For example, see Genesis 16:7-10, 22:11-18; Judges 2:1-4; 6:11-22; and Zechariah 3:2-10. In some of these instances, the angel is even called Yahweh, and the people fear because they have “seen Yahweh”! But, as I will show, these angels were certainly not Yahweh Himself, but merely representatives of Him. For a pertinent example, see Exodus 3:

And the angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” So when Yahweh saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses... I am the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exod. 3:2-4, 6 NKJV)

The angel goes on to even identify himself as “I am who I am”, and entrusts Moses with the personal name of Yahweh for the first time in history (vv. 14-15). Moses is told that “Yahweh God of [your] fathers... has appeared to you” (4:5). And yet, later on in the Bible, we are actually told that this was not Yahweh, but a mere angel, and that God commissioned Moses by the hand of this angel, therefore proving that this angel cannot have been God Himself (Acts 7:30, 35).

    So how are we to understand this encounter? Either it is an irreconcilable contradiction, or else this is a perfect example of the concept of agency in the Hebrew Bible: the angel that was personally sent by Yahweh is able to claim the authority of Yahweh and even use His name, and can be considered representationally and functionally equivalent to Yahweh, and yet the angel is not ontologically equal to Yahweh in any sense.

    Furthermore, none of the other examples of the angel of Yahweh can be understood as referring to Yahweh Himself either, and this was understood by the Hebrews to whom this was written. We know this because the first century Jews who wrote the New Testament believed that Yahweh God had never been, nor could ever be, seen by a mere human being:

No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared [Him]. (John 1:18 NKJV)

“And the Father who sent me Himself hath testified concerning me; ye have neither heard His voice at any time, nor His appearance have ye seen” (John 5:37)

“not that any one hath seen the Father, except he who is from God, he hath seen the Father.” (John 6:46)

[God] only is having immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no one of men did see, nor is able to see (1 Tim. 6:16)

No one has ever seen God (1 John 4:12)

These passages demonstrate beyond a doubt that no person has ever truly seen God, showing that there could not have been an actual theophany in the Old Testament. Rather, whenever someone in the Old Testament claims to have “seen Yahweh”, or seen the shekinah glory of God, they actually either saw only an agent sent by God (in the cases of the “angel of Yahweh”) or a representation of His being (such as in Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1).

    Sidebar: Is Moses Yahweh?

Another perfect example of agency in the Old Testament can be found in the words of Moses himself, twice in the book of Deuteronomy.

And Moses called all Israel, and said to them... “And it shall be that if you earnestly obey My commandments which I command you today, to love Yahweh your God and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, then I will give you the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine, and your oil.” (Deut. 5:1, 11:13-14)

Now Moses called all Israel and said to them... “You have not eaten bread, nor have you drunk wine or similar drink, that you may know that I am Yahweh your God.” (Deut. 29:1, 6)

Twice in his lengthy speeches to Israel throughout this book, Moses slips into talking in the first person as Yahweh without first using the traditional “Thus says Yahweh” introduction. (Go ahead, you can check for yourself.) If we didn’t understand the concept of agency, we would have to conclude that Moses was claiming himself to be Yahweh God. Especially for trinitarians, who seem bent on twisting Jesus’ words into a claim of divinity (including simple statements like “I am He”), this should be a field day; we finally have absolute proof that a man can be God, because Moses quite literally said “I am Yahweh your God”!

    However, if we understand that Moses was merely a commissioned agent (or “angel”) of Yahweh, then these passages make more sense. By being an angel of God, Moses has the authority to speak in Yahweh’s name, even while presenting God’s words as his own.

    This also happens several times throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament, where the prophets slip into the first person without first using the proper introduction “Thus says Yahweh” (or vice versa); see Isaiah 3:1-4; 34:2-8; 53:10-12; Hosea 14:1-4; Micah 1:6-16; and Zechariah 14:1-3. Are these prophets all claiming to be Yahweh? Obviously not, but they are claiming to be agents of Yahweh (prophets can be called “angel of Yahweh”; Hag. 1:13), thereby being allowed to speak for Him.

    Other examples of agency in the Bible

The specific case of the “angel(s) of Yahweh” is perhaps the best example of agency in the Bible. However, there are other cases where a person who has been sent by God can be considered on the same level (representationally) as Him. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in the book of Judges, where it is said that

Nevertheless, Yahweh raised up judges who delivered them out of the hand of those who plundered them... And when Yahweh raised up judges for them, Yahweh was with the judge and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for Yahweh was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed them and harassed them. (Judg. 2:16, 18)

We are told, almost in the same breath, that it was the judges who delivered Israel, and yet also it was Yahweh who delivered Israel. Does this prove that the judges were actually God incarnate? No, no more than Moses saying “I am Yahweh your God” proves that Moses was God incarnate. The judges, by carrying out God’s purpose, were in some way acting as Yahweh, but they were not literally Yahweh.

    Another good example of agency in the Old Testament is in Exodus 3. Here, the angel of Yahweh in the burning bush (speaking as Yahweh) says that He will personally go down to Egypt and free His people:

“I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land” (3:7-8 NKJV)

And yet, it is not God Himself who goes down to Egypt to save His people, but instead it is His commissioned agent, Moses, as the angel goes on to say in verse 10. So then, it is Moses who fulfilled Yahweh’s own words that He would Himself go down to Egypt to free the Israelites. But this does not mean that Moses is himself Yahweh; rather, it simply means that Moses is God’s chosen agent.

    A third example of agency (which, in the interest of keeping this article short, will be the last discussed here) can be found in Exodus 7:

Thus says Yahweh: “By this you shall know that I am Yahweh. Behold, I will strike the waters which are in the river with the rod that is in my hand, and they shall be turned to blood”... And Moses and Aaron did so, just as Yahweh commanded. So he lifted up the rod and struck the waters that were in the river (Exod. 7:17, 20)

Here, God tells the Egyptians that they will know that He is Yahweh when He strikes the river with the rod in His hand. And yet, just a few verses later, it is Aaron who strikes the river with the rod in his own hand! If Aaron fulfilled a prophecy that was personally about Yahweh, does that mean that Aaron is God? Certainly not; but he is the agent of God, for just a few verses earlier, God tells Moses and Aaron that they will be “[as] God to the pharaoh” (v. 1).

    The Messiah: the ultimate agent of God

Throughout the Old Testament, and in the New Testament as well, the Messiah is presented as someone who would be the ultimate and greatest agent of Yahweh - someone who, though being a human, would be the perfect fulfillment of God’s will, thereby being the greatest representative agent possible. In one of my previous posts, I touched upon this idea when expounding the meaning of Jesus Christ’s title, “the image of God”; for a briefer summary of what I’m about to say, check out that post.

    The idea of Jesus, the Messiah, as the greatest agent is best explained in the first chapter of Hebrews:

In many parts, and many ways, God of old having spoken to the fathers in the prophets, in these last days did speak to us in a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He did make the ages; who being the brightness of the glory, and the impress of His subsistence, bearing up also the all things by the saying of his might — through himself having made a cleansing of our sins, sat down at the right hand of the greatness in the highest, having become so much better than the angels, as he did inherit a more excellent name than they. (Heb. 1:1-4)

Although this passage has been twisted by trinitarian interpreters in the past to prove the “deity of Christ”, the central meaning should be obvious: though Yahweh in the past spoke through imperfect agents, the prophets, He now speaks through His most perfect agent and Son, Jesus Christ.

    The meaning of the phrase “impress of His subsistence” can be confusing to modern readers, because we aren’t familiar with the idiomatic usage of these words. The first word, χαρακτηρ, literally means an “impress” or “stamp”, but was often used to describe the royal seal stamped upon coins and official documents. The second word, υποστασις, literally means “substance”, but was figuratively used to describe support, confidence, or assurance of a thing; see its usage elsewhere in Hebrews (3:14; 11:1). Therefore, the phrase “impress of His subsistence” might be better translated idiomatically as “seal of His assurance”, like the modern idiom, “seal of approval”.

    So what does it mean for Christ to be God’s “seal of assurance”? This simply means that Christ is now the guarantee of God’s covenant with Israel, as the promised Messiah and King descended from David. This same idea is reflected in Malachi 3:1, which describes the coming Messiah as the “the angel [malak] of the covenant”. So, this is yet another way to say that Christ is God’s ultimate agent through which the covenant is carried out.

    At this point, the author of Hebrews goes on to write about how Christ is “so much better than the angels”, and he continues to talk about this point through chapter 2. Trinitarians like to point to this and say, “See! Christ is better than the angels, and only God is higher than the angels, so Christ is God!” It is most likely that “angels” here is referring to spirit beings, because the Hebraist later contrasts the angels with humans and descendants of Abraham (Heb. 2:5-9, 16). However, the Hebraist’s entire argument is that Jesus is better than the angels because He is an exalted human who has been “crowned with glory and honor” and “made perfect” (Heb. 2:9-10). Rather than showing that Jesus is God Himself, this shows quite the opposite — God has always been perfect, so He could not be “made perfect”!

    Now, let’s take a look at what Jesus said about Himself. Throughout the gospel accounts, Jesus repeatedly claims to have been sent by His Father, God (Matt. 10:40; John 4:34; 5:30; 6:40; etc.) This doesn’t mean that He had any heavenly “pre-existence” in mind when He said this, but rather that He is the commissioned agent of God, the Messiah. See how He describes His relationship with the Father throughout the gospel of John:

[Jesus] also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God. Jesus therefore responded and said to them, “Verily, verily, I say to you, the Son is not able to do anything of himself, if he may not see the Father doing anything; for whatever things He may do, these also the Son in like manner doth. For, as the Father doth raise the dead, and doth make alive, so also the Son doth make alive whom He willeth; for neither doth the Father judge any one, but all the judgment He hath given to the Son, that all may honour the Son according as they honour the Father; he who is not honouring the Son, doth not honour the Father who sent him.” (John 5:19-23)

Trinitarians point to this passage as proof that anyone who does not worship Jesus on the same level as the Father is not honoring God, and therefore, Jesus is God. Likewise, they say, if Jesus was making Himself equal to God, He must be God. But this is not how the first-century Jews would have understood this statement. The context shows that Jesus was talking about how the Father has granted authority to the Son both to resurrect and to judge; that is, He has been given authority as the agent of God. If Jesus were God Himself, obviously it wouldn’t be true that “the Son is not able to do anything of Himself” (since God is self-existent), but this is true of the representative agents of God.

    Understanding that this passage is about agency, and not deity, completely changes the interpretation of vv. 18 and 23. In the ancient world, a king’s envoy was expected to be received with the same honor as the king himself, and anything else would be greatly dishonorable to both the king and his envoy. So, when the Jews heard Jesus say this, they would have understood him as saying something like this: “The Father has given me authority as His agent, the Messiah; acknowledge me as you would the Father, or else you dishonor us both”. This is not a statement that Jesus is God, but rather a statement that Jesus, as the Messiah, is the ultimate agent/envoy of God the Father.

“Whoever may receive one of such children in my name, doth receive me, and whoever may receive me, doth not receive me, but Him who sent me.” (Mk. 9:37 cf. Matt. 10:40; Lk. 9:48; John 13:20)

And Jesus cried out and said, “He who is believing in me, doth not believe in me, but in Him who sent me; and he who is beholding me, doth behold Him who sent me” (John 12:44-45)

These two passages are about as blatant a statement of agency as possible. Those who believe in and receive Jesus as the perfect agent commissioned by God - the Messiah - also receive and believe in the Father who sent Him, in accordance with the concept of agency.

    All of these passages show that the Messiah, Jesus, was considered the ultimate agent of God as the perfect “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Now, keeping this concept of agency in mind, let’s take a look at the passages considered by trinitarians to prove that Jesus is one and the same as Yahweh.

    Is Jesus Yahweh?

The following pairs of verses will be taken mostly from Matt Slick’s article “Jehovah is Jesus“, from his “Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry” website, although a few are taken from other trinitarian apologetics resources.

“Turn to Me, and be saved, all ends of the earth, For I [am] God, and there is none else. By Myself I have sworn, Gone out from my mouth in righteousness hath a word, And it turneth not back, That to Me, bow doth every knee, every tongue swear.” (Isa. 45:22-23)

that in the name of Jesus every knee may bow — of heavenlies, and earthlies, and what are under the earth — and every tongue may confess that Jesus Christ [is] Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Php. 2:10-11)

In the first passage, we are told that every knee will bow and every tongue swear allegiance to Yahweh, and yet in the second passage Paul says that every knee will bow and every tongue swear allegiance to Jesus Christ. Does this mean that Jesus is one and the same as Yahweh? Absolutely not - this is merely the concept of agency being emphatically expressed.

    As Jesus said, “he who is believing in me, doth not believe in me, but in Him that sent me” (John 12:44). Because Jesus is the ultimate agent of Yahweh, to swear allegiance to Jesus is to swear allegiance to God. To this effect, Paul adds that every tongue confessing that Jesus is Lord is “to the glory of God, the Father”, precisely because those who accept Jesus are accepting the one who sent Him: Yahweh God.

“Every one who calleth in the name of Yahweh is delivered” (Joel 2:32)

whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord [Jesus], he shall be saved. (Rom. 10:13)

Does this mean that Jesus is Yahweh? Well, first of all, there is no indication that Paul is actually trying to quote Joel 2:32 in this passage; it is not preceded by “thus says the scripture”, which is how Paul usually cites the Old Testament.

    But even if Paul were trying to quote Joel 2:32 here, this is still merely using the concept of agency. Those who call upon Jesus are, in effect, calling upon the one who sent Him, as Jesus Himself explained several times (Matt. 10:40; John 12:44; 13:20), just as the angels of Yahweh in the Old Testament (including Moses and the prophets) often used His name. Therefore, this comparison is certainly not enough to prove that Jesus is Yahweh; again, it is merely an emphatic expression of the concept of agency, by which those who call upon Jesus are in effect calling upon God who sent Him.

“And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for him as one grieves for a firstborn.” (Zech. 12:10)

Lo, he doth come with the clouds, and see him shall every eye, even those who did pierce him, and wail because of him shall all the tribes of the land. Yes! Amen! (Rev. 1:7)

In the first passage, Yahweh prophesies that Israel will look upon “Me whom they have pierced”, whereas in the second passage, John writes that every eye will see Jesus, even “those who did pierce Him”. Does this not prove that Jesus is Yahweh? First of all, the grammar of this passage is not clear in the Hebrew, and there are certain textual variants which indicate that the original reading may have been “look on him whom they pierced”. In fact, this very verse is quoted in the gospel of John as, “They will look on the one they have pierced” (19:37).

    However, even if this verse did originally read “look on Me whom they pierced”, this is no problem for unitarianism when the concept of agency is properly understood. Jesus said in John 5:23 that those who dishonor Him also dishonor the One who sent Him, the Father, via the ancient concept of agency; so it could indeed be said that, when Jesus was pierced, Yahweh who sent Him was likewise figuratively pierced. Those who see Jesus can have said to have seen Yahweh as well (John 12:45; 14:9), just as Moses and several others in the Old Testament saw an “angel of Yahweh” and claimed to have seen Yahweh Himself.

    Furthermore, Yahweh goes on to speak of this same one “whom they have pierced” in the third person, demonstrating that He cannot be one and the same as Yahweh. Instead, He must be an agent of Yahweh, as the original readers of the passage would have understood it.

A voice is crying — in a wilderness — “Prepare ye the way of Yahweh, Make straight in a desert a highway to our God.” (Isa. 40:3)

“Lo, I am sending My angel, And he hath prepared a way before Me, And suddenly come in unto his temple Doth the Lord whom ye are seeking, Even the angel of the covenant, Whom ye are desiring, Lo, he is coming,” said Yahweh of hosts. (Mal. 3:1)

As it hath been written in the prophets, “Lo, I send My angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee — A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, straight make ye his paths” (Mk. 1:2-3 cf. Lk. 1:76)

The trinitarian claim is that, because Isaiah and Malachi prophesied an angel who would prepare the way for Yahweh, whereas John the Baptist only prepared the way for Jesus Christ, Jesus must be Yahweh. However, this ignores the immediate context of Malachi 3:1, which in the same breath says that the prophesied angel (John the Baptist) would prepare the way for “Me” and “the angel [agent] of the covenant”. As I hope I made obvious in the first section of this post, this would have been understood as referring to an agent of Yahweh, who could simultaneously be considered representationally equivalent to Yahweh and yet ontologically distinct and inferior.

    Furthermore, when Jesus actually did come after His way was prepared by John, the Israelites understood Him not as God Himself but as the agent of Yahweh through which God would accomplish His purpose. The Jews, upon seeing Jesus performing a miracle, said that “a great prophet has risen up among us, and God has visited His people” (Lk. 7:16). Certainly, the Jews never would have thought that a human prophet could have been the same as Yahweh Himself, but they would have understood a prophet to be the agent of Yahweh, and so the coming of a prophet could, in a sense, be considered God visiting His people.

Israel doth wait on Yahweh, For with Yahweh [is] kindness, And abundant with Him [is] redemption. And He doth redeem Israel from all his iniquities! (Ps. 130:7-8)

[Christ] did give himself for us, that he might ransom us from all lawlessness, and might purify to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works (Titus 2:14)

I fail to understand the logic in grouping these two verses together. It seems to be similar to how some trinitarians argue that because God is the only savior (Isa. 43:11), and Jesus is a savior (Lk. 2:11), Jesus must be God. However, there are many other verses in scripture that say that certain humans are saviors, raised up (i.e., commissioned as agents) by Yahweh: Othniel ben-Kenaz (Judg. 3:9), Ehud ben-Gera (v. 15), David (2 Sam. 3:18), Jeroboam ben-Jehoash (2 Kings 14:27), and many unnamed human saviors (Neh. 9:27, Obad. 1:21).

    Does this mean that all of those humans were actually God in the flesh? No! As described already, Judges 2:16-18 says that Yahweh was with the judges when they saved Israel, and so it can be said that both God and the judges were saviors, even though God is ultimately the only source of salvation. In the exact same way, Paul writes that God was through Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:18-19). Therefore, these two passages combined do not prove that Jesus is God; again, all that they prove is that God was acting through Jesus as His ultimate agent, the Messiah.

     Conclusion

In the New Testament, there are several passages which apply prophecies about Yahweh to the Messiah, Jesus. Trinitarians use these passages to try to prove that Jesus is one and the same as Yahweh. However, this is entirely ignoring the cultural context of these passages, in which an agent of a deity or king could be considered functionally and representationally equivalent to that deity or king, while being ontologically distinct.

    If, as the trinitarians suggest, we should interpret all passages that apply a prophecy or statement about Yahweh to a human being as saying that that human being is Yahweh, then we would have to conclude that not only is Jesus Yahweh, but also Moses, Aaron, all the judges of Israel, and all the prophets are Yahweh Himself as well. Instead, we must recognize that God often accomplishes His purpose through intermediaries, agents, or “angels” who, by virtue of being commissioned by Yahweh, can be considered as representationally equivalent with Yahweh.

    Jesus is no exception to this rule, because as the Messiah, He is the ultimate and greatest agent of God. Therefore, we should understand the passages that apply prophecies about Yahweh to Jesus as describing Jesus as an agent of God, not as God Himself. This is the only way to properly interpret these passages, in light of the concept of agency as it appears throughout scripture. Trinitarians, by saying that these passages prove Jesus is God, are reading their own preconceptions into the text based on a fourth-century doctrine that has no basis in the Bible. This is shallow exegesis, and I urge these trinitarian apologists to stop using such bad arguments, in the interest of furthering more genuine debate between the two camps.

______________________________

[1] Aubrey R. Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God pp. 4-7: “In Hebrew thought a patriarch’s personality extended through his entire household … in a specialized sense, when the patriarch, as lord of his household, deputized his trusted servant as his malak (his messenger or angel), the man was endowed with the authority and resources of his lord, to represent him fully and transact business in his name. In Semitic thought this messenger-representative was conceived of as being personally — and in his very words — the presence of the sender.”

[2] To say that Moses was the “greatest angel of all” seems odd to our modern ears, since the modern view of angels is that they are ethereal beings from ‘heaven’. But really, although most of the angels were indeed non-human beings sent from God, there were many human angels as well. The word malak in Hebrew simply means a commissioned agent, and was applied to many humans in the Old Testament.

Some further notes on the unitarian debate

Is the God of Christianity the God of the Bible?

Specific objections to “Is the God of Christianity the God of the Bible?”

     Although I got through a lot of information about the unitarian/trinitarian debate in my last two posts (and I strongly suggest reading those before reading through this one), most of it was about making the negative case against trinitarianism rather than the positive case for unitarianism. Therefore, in this post I would like to explain why I do believe in unitarianism rather than trinitarianism (although I partially explained that in the first post in this series, “Is the God of Christianity the God of the Bible?”). First, though, we must define what is meant by trinitarianism and unitarianism.

    Defining the doctrine of the Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity can be best explained as follows: God is simultaneously one being and three persons, the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit, all of whom are co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial (meaning “one in substance”).  The three persons of the “triune” God are all separate conscious wills, not merely separate manifestations of God’s being, which is the heresy of modalism. All three together make up God, and yet each one is individually fully God.

    In contrast, unitarianism affirms that God is one being and one person, the Father, who is uniquely God and Yahweh (and shares these names with no other person). He is above the Son, Jesus Christ, who is a human. Unitarians are divided on whether the Son pre-existed His birth as Jesus, in which case He might be better described as an angelic being, and are also divided on the issue of the personality of the Holy Spirit. However, at its heart, unitarianism is simply the belief that the Father alone is God and Yahweh, one being and one person.

    With these definitions in mind [1], the positive case from the Bible for unitarianism will now be considered.

    1. God repeatedly presents Himself as only “one”

Throughout the Bible, Yahweh (the supreme God) repeatedly presents Himself as being only “one”. The words meaning “one” in Hebrew and Greek (echad and εις, μια, and εν respectively) never mean anything different than numerically one; any time that two or more parts come together to form one whole, this is very clearly represented in the context (for example, Genesis 2:24).

    However, we are never told in scripture that, for example, “God is three in one”, “God is three parts in one”, or “God is three persons in one being”. There is never any indication that there are multiple parts, or persons, within God. Instead, we are repeatedly and emphatically told that God is one, with no caveat. For example, see the following passages.

Hear, O Israel, Yahweh [is] our God, Yahweh [is] one (Deut. 6:4)

And one of the scribes having come near, having heard them disputing, knowing that he answered them well, questioned him, “Which is the first command of all?” and Jesus answered him — “The first of all the commands [is], Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one“... And the scribe said to him, “Well, Teacher, in truth thou hast spoken that there is one God, and there is none other but He“ (Mk. 12:28-29, 32)

The God of Jews only [is He], and not also of nations? Yes, also of nations; since God [is] one (Rom. 3:29-30)

there is no other God except one... yet to us [is] one God, the Father, of whom [are] the all things, and we to Him (1 Cor. 8:4, 6)

and the mediator is not of one, and God is one (Gal. 3:20)

[There is] one God and Father of all, who [is] over all, and through all, and in you all (Eph. 4:5)

for God [is] one, one also [is] mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5)

thou dost believe that God is one; thou dost well (Jas. 2:19)

Now, if God were actually a “three-in-one” being as trinitarians assert, He could have easily presented Himself as such in these passages (for example, by saying that “God, although being three, is yet one”). But instead He repeatedly and emphatically refers to Himself as simply “one”. In fact, the statement that “Yahweh our God is one” is considered to be part of the greatest commandment, according to Jesus Himself. 

    If God is truly a Trinity, we would have to assume that He is being misleading by simply calling Himself “one”, or at the very least not telling the full truth. In contrast, the statement that “God is one” is fully compatible with, and supportive of, the doctrine of unitarianism. The question must be asked, which of these options is more compatible with the God who truly desires all people to know the truth (1 Tim. 2:4)? Would He willingly mislead us in this way?

    2. The singular pronouns used by God

Quite literally thousands of times throughout the Bible, singular masculine pronouns are used to refer to God, both by Himself and others: “I”, “me”, “my”, “He”, “Himself”, “His”, etc. If God were a plurality of persons, as trinitarians allege, we would expect Him to consistently use plural pronouns like “we”, “us”, “our”, “They”, “Themselves”, and “Their”. Although this seems normal to many Christians who have never stopped to think about the consequences of this obvious fact of scripture, it is actually definite proof for the idea that God is one being and one person, the central tenet of unitarianism.

    There are a comparatively negligible amount of passages in which God does appear to use plural pronouns in reference to Himself. These verses can be counted on one hand: Genesis 1:26; 3:22; 11:7; and Isaiah 6:8. One would think that, if God truly is three persons (meaning three conscious beings, each of which use separate personal pronouns), He would use plural pronouns the vast majority of the time, rather than simply four out of thousands of instances of the singular pronoun [2].

    Trinitarians object by saying that, although God is a plurality of persons, He has chosen to use the singular pronouns to relate Himself to us (for whatever mysterious reasons He may have). However, whenever more than one of the so-called “Persons” of the Trinity are mentioned together in the New Testament, they are described using plural pronouns. See especially John 14:23:

Jesus answered and said to him, “If any one may love me, my word he will keep, and my Father will love him, and unto him we will come, and abode with him we will make”

Therefore, if God is truly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (three separate persons who each use separate personal pronouns) all together in one being, the fact that God reveals Himself using singular pronouns would not only contradict the rules of grammar, but also the few instances in which Jesus and the Father are mentioned together using plural pronouns. This is far more consistent with unitarianism than trinitarianism.

    3. Jesus was a unitarian

Another reason that I believe unitarianism is because Jesus Himself was a unitarian. This is certainly a controversial claim, but it can be easily proved from scripture that Jesus believed that God was one being and one person, the Father, and that there was no other supreme God beside the Father. Probably the most clear passage that demonstrates this is Mark 12:28-34:

And one of the scribes having come near, having heard them disputing, knowing that he answered them well, questioned him, “Which is the first command of all?” and Jesus answered him — “The first of all the commands [is], Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God out of all thy heart, and out of thy soul, and out of all thine understanding, and out of all thy strength — this [is] the first command”... And the scribe said to him, “Well, Teacher, in truth thou hast spoken that there is one God, and there is none other but He; and to love Him out of all the heart, and out of all the understanding, and out of all the soul, and out of all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, is more than all the whole burnt-offerings and the sacrifices.” And Jesus, having seen him that he answered with understanding, said to him, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God;” and no one any more durst question him.

First of all, Jesus says that the greatest commandment of all includes the statement “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). But what is important to note is that Jesus does not merely say “the Lord is your God”, but “the Lord is our God” - that is, the “Lord” in question here, of whom there is no other God but He, is also the God of Jesus Christ.

    But who is the God of Jesus Christ? Answer: the same Being whom Jesus called “my God” (Matt. 27:46; Mk. 15:34; John 20:17; Rev. 3:2, 12) and whom Paul referred to as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:3; Eph. 1:3, 17; Col. 1:3 cf. Rev. 1:6), namely, the Father. This means that, when Jesus said “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one... and there is none other but He”, what He meant is that “the Father is our God, the Father is one... and there is none other but He”. Consider the following logical argument:

Premise 1. According to Jesus, the Lord God (whom He referred to as “our God” and “my God”) is the one true God, Yahweh, and there is none other but He.

Premise 2. The Being whom Jesus referred to as “our God” and “my God” is the Father.

Conclusion. According to Jesus, the Father is the one true God, Yahweh, and there is none other but He.

Furthermore, when the scribe provided his own interpretation of the passage in question, Jesus affirmed that his interpretation was correct and said, “You are not far from the kingdom of God”. It is inconceivable to think that the Jewish scribe believed any other interpretation than the interpretation which has unanimously dominated Jewish thought since Abraham, which is that God is one being and one person. So the fact that Jesus actually affirmed this interpretation is highly problematic for trinitarianism; if God were truly three-in-one, He could have easily corrected the scribe by saying, “Well, that is close, but God is actually three persons within His one being”, but instead Jesus affirmed that the traditional Jewish understanding of the Shema is correct.

    Jesus’ belief that the Father is the only true God, and there is no other God beside the Father, was also stated explicitly elsewhere, in the gospel of John. Traditionally, the gospel of John is understood as being the most favorable toward the doctrine of the “deity of Christ”. However, even (especially) in this gospel account, Jesus repeatedly affirmed that the Father alone is the one true God:

“I have come in the name of my Father... the only God” (John 5:43-44)

Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is my Father who is glorifying me, of whom ye say that He is your God” (John 8:54)

“I go on to the Father, because my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28)

These things spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to the heaven, and said — “Father... this is the life age-during, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and him whom Thou didst send — Jesus Christ” (John 17:1, 3)

Jesus saith to her... “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, and my God, and your God” (John 20:17)

Trinitarians allege that although the Father is indeed the “only true God”, Jesus is also the “only true God”, because they are both one in substance and being. However, this is nowhere stated explicitly [2], and is in fact refuted by Mark 12:28-34 which (as I have shown) demonstrates that Jesus believed that the Father alone is the true God. There can be little doubt from these passages that Jesus believed in the central tenet of unitarianism, that God (Yahweh) is one being and unipersonal, the Father alone.

    If we truly want to be like Christ, we should worship the same God that He worshipped (Matt. 4:10; 22:37; Mk. 12:29-30), pray to the same God whom He prayed to (Matt. 26:39, 42; Mk. 14:36; Lk. 22:42; John 17), and serve the same God that He served (John 4:34; 5:30; 6:38; 7:16; 13:16; Acts 3:13, 26; Heb. 10:5-9): the Father alone.

    4. Paul was a unitarian

A third reason why I am a unitarian is because Paul, who wrote half of the New Testament, was also a unitarian. Again, this is a controversial claim, but it is clearly demonstrated multiple times in his epistles. For example, see the following passages:

“God, who did make the world, and all things in it, this One, of heaven and of earth being [υπαρχων] Lord, in temples made with hands doth not dwell, neither by the hands of men is He served — needing anything, He giving to all life, and breath, and all things... indeed, He is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and are; as also certain of your poets have said: For of Him also we are offspring... [God] doth now command all men everywhere to repent, because He did set a day in which He is about to judge the world in righteousness, by a man whom He did ordain, having given assurance to all, having raised him out of the dead.” (Acts 17:24-31)

This is perhaps the clearest passage of all as to Paul’s unitarianism. Here he distinguishes between God, the Creator of the world and all things in it, and Jesus Christ, a man whom God ordained. Whereas Paul says that God inherently possesses (υπαρχων) Lordship over heaven and earth, Jesus had to be made Lord of heaven and earth (Matt. 28:18; Acts 2:36) when He was exalted to the right hand of God in heaven (Lk. 22:69; Acts 2:33-35; Eph. 1:20-23; Heb. 1:3, 13).

Concerning the eating then of the things sacrificed to idols, we have known that an idol [is] nothing in the world, and that there is no other God except one; for even if there are those called gods, whether in heaven, whether upon earth — as there are gods many and lords many — yet to us [is] one God, the Father, of whom [are] the all things, and we to Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom [are] the all things, and we through Him (1 Cor. 8:4-6)

Notice here what Paul’s line of argumentation logically leads to. According to Paul, there is “no other God except one”, and “to us is one God, the Father”. If there is no other God except the one God, and the one God is the Father, the only logical conclusion is that Paul believed there is no other God except the Father.

    Some trinitarians will argue that because Paul says that Jesus Christ is our “one Lord”, and yet the Father is also Lord, it is possible that both the Father and Jesus are the same “one Lord” and the same “one God”. However, this objection completely ignores the context of the verse. Paul is contrasting the one God and the one Lord with the “many gods [divine rulers] and many lords [human rulers]” of the pagans. The Father is the perfect contrast with the “many gods”, because He is the one divine ruler, whereas Jesus Christ is the perfect contrast with the “many lords”, because He is the one human ruler. In fact, if Jesus were inherently divine, Paul would be unable to contrast Him with the many human rulers of the pagans. Therefore, it is clear that Paul was expressing a belief in unitarianism in this passage.

[There is] one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who [is] over all, and through all, and in you all (Eph. 4:5-6)

Again, in this passage, like in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul presents the “one God” as the Father alone, and distinguishes Him from the one Lord, Jesus Christ. This logically leads to the central tenet of unitarianism, which is that God is one being and one person, the Father.

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, first-born of all creation... for it pleased the Father that in him all the fullness should tabernacle... because in him doth tabernacle all the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 1:15, 19, 2:9)

Although these passages from the epistle to the Colossians are often (unintentionally) twisted by trinitarians to support the belief that Christ is God, they actually provide much evidence that Paul was a unitarian. For Christ to be the image of God, He cannot be numerically identical with God, just as a picture of a person is not numerically identical to that person. For Christ to be the first-born (that is, the inheritor) of all creation, it is necessary that He actually inherited it from His Father; but if Christ is God, then He is already inherently the ruler of all creation, and so He cannot be the first-born.

    Likewise, if the Father was pleased to cause the fullness of God to tabernacle within Christ, Christ cannot be numerically identical with God Himself. It would be meaningless to say that “it pleased God that in Himself all the fullness of Himself should dwell”, because if Christ is numerically identical with God, then He is already the fullness of God. However, if Christ is not God, then this passage suddenly makes sense; the fullness of God can tabernacle in Christ in the same way that it tabernacles in believers (Eph. 3:21), as God gives us His Spirit without measure just as He did in Christ (Gal 4:6 cf. John 3:34).

    Finally, the fact that Paul repeatedly referred to God as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:3; Eph. 1:3, 17; Col. 1:3) demonstrates that he must have been a unitarian. Consider the following argument:

Premise 1. According to Paul, God is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Premise 2. Also according to Paul, God is “above all” (Eph. 4:6), and so no person or thing can be above God.

Conclusion. Jesus Christ is not God, because according to Paul, He has a God above Him, who is the Father.

Trinitarians will argue that the Father might be the God of Jesus’ human nature, but Jesus’ divine nature is still “above all” and is unified with the Father within the triune God. However, one would be hard-pressed to find any kind of doctrine like this in the Bible; nowhere is it stated that Jesus has two distinct natures that can be considered separately from one another. If Jesus did have two distinct natures (such that one could be subject to God and the other actually be God), He would no longer be a single conscious being, which is very clearly unscriptural.

    Therefore, the fact that Paul referred to the Father as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”, along with the several times that he distinguishes the “one God, the Father” from Jesus, demonstrates that he did not believe Jesus Christ to be the supreme God, Yahweh, and instead believed in a unipersonal God: the Father alone.

    5. The many passages that distinguish God from Christ

In the New Testament, there are approximately ten “prooftexts” that are often used to prove the idea that Jesus is the supreme God, Yahweh: John 1:1; 8:58; 10:30; 17:5; 20:28; Philippians 2:6-9; Colossians 1:16-20; 2:9; Hebrews 1:8; and Hebrews 1:10. These are the only texts for which the Greek text is unambiguous in supporting the trinitarian reading; all of the other trinitarian “prooftexts” either have an alternate unitarian reading that is better supported by the manuscript evidence, or the original Greek is ambiguous as to whether the trinitarian reading is correct. These ten texts, when examined more closely in their contexts, do not support the Trinity, as I showed in my last post.

    In contrast, there are over five dozen verses in the New Testament that distinguish between God and Jesus Christ. These verses do not merely distinguish between Jesus and “the Father”, but between Jesus and “God” Himself. See the following list of passages: Matt. 4:9-10; 9:8; 19:17; Mk. 9:18; 16:19; Lk. 1:68-69; 3:7-8; 18:19; 22:69; Jn. 1:18; 3:16-17; 34; 6:29; 7:16-18; 13:3; 16:27-28; 17:3; Acts 2:22; 24; 33-36; 3:13-15; 26; 4:10; 5:30-32; 7:55; 10:38-42; 13:30; 37; 17:31; Rom. 3:24-25; 8:3; 34; 15:6; 1 Cor. 3:23; 8:6; 11:3; 15:15; 24; 2 Cor. 1:2-3; Gal. 4:4; Eph. 1:3; 17; 20; 4:4-6; Col. 1:3; 2:12; 3:1; 1 Thess. 3:11; 2 Thess. 2:16; 1 Tim. 2:5; 6:13; 2 Tim. 4:1; Heb. 2:8-10; 9:14; 12:2; 23-24; 1 Pet. 1:3; 2:4; 3:21-22; 1 Jn. 3:9; Rev. 1:6; 3:2; 3:12; 7:10; 12:10; 14:4.

    These sixty-seven verses clearly distinguish between the human known as Jesus Christ and God. Trinitarians may argue that this is simply a distinction between Jesus’ “human nature” and God, but is there any reason to believe this from the Bible itself? Since there are only two verses that unambiguously call Jesus “God” (John 20:28; Heb. 1:8) and each of these can be understood as using “God” in the representational sense by which other human beings are called God or gods (Exod. 4:16; 7:1; Ps. 45:6; 82:6), it would be wise to believe the vast majority of places in the New Testament where God and Christ are shown to be separate entities rather than the comparatively negligible amount of trinitarian “prooftexts” which all have legitimate, alternate interpretations.

    Even one passage that distinguished between God and Jesus would be enough to show that they are separate beings, so the fact that there are no less than sixty-seven passages where they are considered to be distinct entities is essentially irrefutable proof that Jesus is not the supreme God, Yahweh. Because Jesus and God are referred to as separate entities throughout nearly all the books of the New Testament, the writers of the New Testament should be recognized as unitarians, not trinitarians as is usually assumed.

    6. Jesus never claimed to be God

One further reason why I am a unitarian is because Jesus never actually claimed to be God. If you’re a trinitarian reading this, you’re probably thinking of a few verses right now (likely from the gospel of John) in which you think Jesus did claim to be Yahweh God. However, there are actually no instances where He certainly claimed to be God.

    The three main verses in which trinitarians believe that Jesus claimed to be God, found in the gospel of John, are John 8:24; 8:58; and 10:30. In the first two of these verses, Jesus identified Himself with the phrase “I am” (εγω ειμι), which, based on the similarity of the two phrases in modern English translations, is often considered to be equivalent to Yahweh’s title “I am what I am” in Exodus 3:14.

    However, the LXX translation of Exodus 3:14 into Greek (which is what the Jews of Jesus’ day would have been familiar with) translates God’s title as Ο ΩΝ, essentially meaning “the self-existent One”, which bears no similarity to εγω ειμι. In fact, throughout the Bible, an unpredicated εγω ειμι never represents a claim to deity; we are told that the blind beggar who had been healed by Jesus went around the town saying, “εγω ειμι”, not meaning “I am [Yahweh]” but meaning “I am [the one who had been blind]” (John 9:8-9). Likewise, almost every time Jesus says εγω ειμι, one of His titles like “Messiah” or “Son of Man” is the implied predicate (Mk. 13:6 cf. Matt. 24:5; Mk. 14:61-62; John 4:25-26; 8:28; 13:18-19; 18:4-5).

    Essentially, the only reason to believe that Jesus was claiming to be Yahweh when saying εγω ειμι is if one already believes that Jesus is Yahweh, in which case the implied predicate would be Yahweh (“I am [Yahweh]”). But was this the implied predicate in John 8:24, one of the passages commonly pointed to by trinitarians to prove that Jesus was claiming to be God? Let’s see:

“Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” Then they said to Him, “Who are You?” And Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning.” (John 8:24-25 NKJV)

According to this passage, if the Jews did not believe that “I am He”, they would die in their sins. So what was the message that, if they believed, they would be saved by? According to John, what his audience needed to believe to be saved is this: “that Jesus is the Messiah“ (John 20:31). Therefore, when Jesus said “I am He”, the implied message was “I am [the Messiah]” - not “I am [Yahweh]”. Furthermore, in v. 25, Jesus says that He has been telling them that “I am He” from the beginning. So what is the message that He has been telling them from the beginning? Again, according to John 10:24-25, this message is that Jesus is the Christ, not that He is Yahweh. Consider the following arguments:

Premise 1. If the Jews did not believe that “εγω ειμι”, they would die in their sins.

Premise 2. The message which, if the Jews believed, they would not die in their sins, is that “Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31).

Conclusion. When Jesus said “εγω ειμι”, the implied message was “I am the Christ”.

Premise 1. Jesus had been telling the Jews that “εγω ειμι” from the beginning.

Premise 2. The message that Jesus had been telling the Jews is that He was the Christ (John 10:24-25).

Conclusion. When Jesus said “εγω ειμι”, the implied message was “I am the Christ”.

These deductive arguments show that Jesus’ statements of “εγω ειμι” in the gospel of John were not divine claims equating Him with Yahweh, but were Messianic claims.

    But what about John 10:30? Didn’t Jesus claim to be God when He said, “I and the Father are one”? Well, Jesus could have meant one of three things here:

1. That He and the Father were one person (modalism).

2. That He and the Father were one being (trinitarianism).

3. That He and the Father agree as one (unitarianism).

Although the second option is possible, the third option is more in line with how this Greek idiom is used elsewhere (for example, see 1 Cor. 3:6, 8 and 1 John 5:8). In Greek idiom, to say that multiple people “are one” was similar to the modern idiom, “of one mind”; that is, that Jesus and the Father were of one mind on the issue of giving age-during life to those who follow Him (John 10:25-30).

    The unitarian interpretation (option 3) is also more compatible with the following context:

“I and the Father are one.” Therefore, again, did the Jews take up stones that they may stone him. Jesus answered them, “Many good works did I shew you from my Father; because of which work of them do ye stone me?” The Jews answered him, saying, “For a good work we do not stone thee, but for evil speaking, and because thou, being a man, dost make thyself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not having been written in your law: I said, ye are gods? If them he did call gods unto whom the word of God came (and the Scripture is not able to be broken), of him whom the Father did sanctify, and send to the world, do ye say — Thou speakest evil, because I said, Son of God I am?” (John 10:30-36)

According to this passage, the Jews tried to stone Him for this statement, because they believed that He, “being a man, made [Himself] God”. However, Jesus corrected them by saying that He was not claiming to be God in the same sense that Yahweh is God, but in the sense that humans can be called God/gods, by quoting Psalm 82:6. For more on this secondary, representational use of the title “God”, see my previous article that touches upon this subject.

    So, then, there are actually no places in the New Testament where Jesus claims to be God in the absolute sense that Yahweh is God. In fact, as He explicitly clarified in John 10:34, He can only be called God in the representational sense that humans (when appointed to positions of authority by Yahweh) can be called God/gods.

    This is strong proof (albeit an argument from silence) for unitarianism, because if Jesus were truly God and this were an issue of salvation, He would presumably have made this very clear in His teachings, at the very least privately with His disciples. Instead, the disciples of Jesus understood that He was “the Christ, the Son of God” (Matt. 16:15-17; Mk. 8:29-30; Lk. 9:20-21), and this was the only charge brought against Him by the Jewish authorities (Matt. 26:62-66; 27:11; Mk. 14:60-64; 15:2; Lk. 22:66-71; 23:2-3; John 18:33-37). Should we not trust that Jesus provided us with an accurate picture of Himself, as the human Messiah and Son of God?

    7. Trinitarianism is just one doctrinal faction that happened to “win out” in the 4th century

Although it is difficult to imagine today that anything other than the Trinity could have ever been the prevailing belief about God’s nature, the fact is that prior to the late fourth century, there were actually many different doctrinal factions, including modalism, binitarianism, what would today be called Arianism, and trinitarianism. It just so happened that in the fourth century, the “trinitarian” faction gained enough political power to declare the other doctrines “heresies”; but this was not an issue settled by biblical exegesis, instead, it was marked by internecine fighting and political manipulation.

    In the late first century, immediately after the time of the apostles, we unfortunately do not have enough information about their beliefs to determine which faction they belonged to. However, the statements they made seem to be more in line with unitarianism than trinitarianism. If the Martyrdom of Ignatius is regarded as genuine, Ignatius believed in “one God, who made heaven and earth... and one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God” (Martyrdom 2). Likewise, his contemporary Polycarp seems to have regarded God as separate from Christ, as he repeatedly refers to “God and Christ” throughout his Epistle to the Philippians. Furthermore, just before his martyrdom, he is recorded as having said:

O Lord God Almighty, the Father of your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ... I praise You for all things, I bless You, I glorify You, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, with whom, to You, and the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and to all coming ages. (Martyrdom of Polycarp 14)

Polycarp, therefore, saw the title of “Lord God Almighty” as belonging to the Father alone as distinguished from Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If these accounts are all regarded as genuine, then the beliefs of the “apostolic fathers” seem much more in line with unitarianism than trinitarianism.

    In the second century, we see the beliefs of the so-called “early Church Fathers” much more clearly expressed. But these were not modern, orthodox trinitarians; rather, they ascribed to the theology known as “two-stage Logos theory”. These writers, including the major apologists like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Theophilus, saw the Logos (Son) and Sophia (Holy Spirit) as originally being a part of the consciousness of the Father (being His “reason/logic” and “wisdom” respectively), until at the moment of creation the Father caused them to become separate agents through which He acted out the creation of the world [4].

    Although these writers saw the Logos as “God”, they believed that He is a divine being subordinate to (and created by) the Father. As Justin Martyr wrote,

[The Logos is] another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an angel, because he announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things — above whom there is no other God — wishes to announce to them. (Dialogue with Trypho 56)

Justin Martyr was the first one to coin the word “trinity” (to explain the relations between God and the two subordinate “gods”, not to represent a “triune” God), but it is clear from the above that he would not have been considered a trinitarian even two centuries later. Instead, all of these second century theologians - including Tertullian as well, who coined the Latin word “trinitas” [5] - were what we would call today Arians. With this in mind, it is no wonder that in the early fourth century Arius claimed that his theology was “received from our forefathers and learned from you [Alexander] as well” (Letter to Alexander).

    Around the same time, a separate doctrinal faction arose in opposition to the two-stage Logos theologians. These were the “modalistic monarchians”, who believed that the Logos theologians’ belief in two or three “Gods” went against the monotheism of the Bible. In response, they argued, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit must simply be manifestations of one and the same person - the one true God, Yahweh. The debate between these two factions raged on throughout the second and third centuries, as the Logos theologians believed that the monarchians were too “Jewish” in their theology, and the monarchians charged the Logos theologians with polytheism.

    In the mid-third century, Origen of Alexandria ended up combining these two theories to propose a compromise: the “one-stage Logos theory”. He believed that the Logos must have been eternally pre-existent and conscious with the Father, so as to remove all appearance of polytheism. This is the origin of the trinitarian theory of “eternal generation”. However, even Origen did not take it so far as the orthodox trinitarians of the following centuries did; in fact, at one point he calls the belief that Jesus is the supreme God a “most obscure sect of heretics”, and argues that Jesus cannot be on the same level as the Father, but must be distinct from and “inferior to... the God and Father who is Ruler over all” (Contra Celsus 8.15).

    By the late third and early fourth centuries, two new sects arose as a final compromise between the modalistic monarchians and the Logos theologians. These were what we would today call “binitarians” (who believed that Jesus was consubstantial with the Father, but did not believe in the personality of the Holy Spirit) and orthodox “trinitarians”. Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, a trinitarian, convened a local synod in 318 and again in 320 of these binitarians and trinitarians to condemn Arius and his two-stage Logos theology (which was now slandered as “Arianism”).

    Finally, in 325, the Council of Nicaea was convened, and all of the bishops from non-Arian doctrinal backgrounds (modalists, binitarians, and trinitarians alike) were able to agree upon a creed which used language specific enough to ‘refute’ Arius, but vague enough that all of the other doctrinal factions could agree on it. This led to half a century of internecine fighting between these groups, most notably between the Church historian Eusebius (at first a binitarian), Marcellus (a modalist), and the growing trinitarian faction including Alexander, Athanasius, and the three ‘Cappadocian Fathers’. The fighting finally ended in 381, when the ecumenical Council of Constantinople was convened, and a creed which decidedly favored full trinitarianism was formulated [6].

    Although this is obviously not a comprehensive analysis of the development of trinitarian orthodoxy in the first four centuries of the church, it should be clear that the idea of the Trinity was not always regarded as biblical or orthodox. Instead, it developed slowly as the result of internecine fighting, and political and theological compromise, between the Logos theologians and the modalists (both of which are now considered to be damnable heresies). So it is extremely unwise to accept the doctrine of trinitarianism simply because it has “always been accepted”; the history of doctrinal “orthodoxy” is riddled with political maneuvering, and has very little to do with actual biblical exegesis.

    8. The Trinity is logically contradictory

Another reason why I am a unitarian rather than a trinitarian is because the traditional view of the Trinity is actually logically impossible. Consider the following diagram, which has been used since the Middle Ages to visually demonstrate the doctrine of the Trinity:

Trinity - Wikipedia

This picture can be summed up in six statements:

1. The Father is numerically identical to God.

2. The Son is numerically identical to God.

3. The Holy Spirit is numerically identical to God.

4. The Father is not numerically identical to the Son.

5. The Son is not numerically identical to the Holy Spirit.

6. The Holy Spirit is not numerically identical to the Father.

These statements are entirely consistent with the orthodox definition of the Trinity that was stated in the first section of this article. However, the first set of statements - that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each numerically identical with the single Being known as God - are logically contradictory to the second set of statements - that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not numerically identical with one another.

    There are four separate ways to reconcile this logical contradiction: first, if each of the three persons are only one-third of the whole God, then the six statements are no longer contradictory. However, this commits the heresy of partialism, and denies the principle that God is indivisible. Second, if each of the three persons are separate Gods, and all share the title God, then the six statements are no longer contradictory. However, this commits the heresy of tritheism, and denies the strict monotheism of the Old Testament. Third, if the final set of statements is false, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are numerically identical, then there is no logical contradiction. However, this commits the heresy of modalism, and denies the obvious fact that the Father is separate from Jesus throughout scripture. Finally, if the first set of statements is false, and only one of the persons is actually God (the Father), then there is no logical contradiction. This is unitarianism.

    Trinitarians like to argue that it is impossible to fit God inside a box of “logic”, and our human sense of reason is too unreliable to discern what is true. To such trinitarians, I ask the following question: can God create a rock that is too heavy for Himself to lift (or any variation on such a question)? If so, then God is no longer omnipotent; if not, then you must admit that God’s omnipotence (and therefore His nature) is limited by the rules of logic.

    From this exercise, we can see that there are five different ways to interpret and/or alter the above diagram which describes the ‘Trinity’: (1) with orthodox trinitarianism, (2) with partialism, (3) with tritheism, (4) with modalism, and (5) with unitarianism. Of these five options, the only one which is both logically possible and consistent with scripture is unitarianism.

    9. The hypostatic union is logically contradictory

Another aspect of trinitarianism that is logically contradictory is the idea of the hypostatic union: that Jesus, from the “incarnation” onward, has simultaneously possessed the nature of God and the nature of humanity (that He is “fully God and fully man”). The definition of a “nature” according to trinitarians is elusive and slippery; according to them, Jesus’ two “natures” are not separate consciousnesses, and yet one can be subject to God while the other is God. But at its heart, to possess the nature of something means to have the properties or characteristics of that thing. A rock possesses the nature of a rock by virtue of its properties as a rock; a man possesses the nature of a man by virtue of his properties as a man; and God possesses the nature of God by virtue of His properties as God.

    So, for Jesus to fully contain within Himself the nature of God and the nature of humanity simultaneously, we would have to conclude that He possesses all of the characteristics of both God and humanity. But what exactly does this mean? Let’s compare the characteristics of God with the characteristics that Jesus possessed as a human:

1. God is omniscient (Isa. 46:9-10), yet Jesus did not know everything (Mk. 13:32)

2. God is immortal (1 Tim. 6:16), yet Jesus died (1 Cor. 15:3)

3. God is not temptable (Jas. 1:13), yet Jesus was tempted (Heb. 4:15)

4. God is above all (Eph. 4:6), yet Jesus is inferior to the Father (John 14:28) 

5. By definition, God is not a human (Hos. 11:9), yet Jesus was a human (John 8:40)

As you can see, from just these five examples (although one would be sufficient to prove the logical absurdity of this view), it is impossible that any being could simultaneously hold all the properties of God and all the properties of humanity. And yet, we repeatedly see Jesus exhibit the properties of humanity, whereas He never exhibits divine properties apart from the authority given to Him by God the Father (Matt. 9:8, John 5:19).

    This alone is enough to prove the illogicality of the hypostatic union, which demonstrates that Jesus cannot have the full nature of God at the same time as being a man, therefore refuting trinitarianism (and any other belief system that places Jesus on the level of the supreme God) in favor of unitarianism.

    Conclusion

In this article, I have provided nine different reasons for believing in unitarianism - that God is a single divine being Who is unipersonal, the Father alone - rather than the Trinity, based on scripture and logic:

1. God repeatedly presents Himself as only “one”

2. The singular pronouns used by God

3. Jesus was a unitarian

4. Paul was a unitarian

5. The many passages that distinguish God from Christ

6. Jesus never claimed to be God

7. Trinitarianism is just one doctrinal faction that happened to “win out” in the 4th century

8. The Trinity is logically inconsistent

9. The hypostatic union is logically inconsistent

Any one of these nine points would be enough to refute, or at the very last cast significant doubt on, the idea that God is a Trinity of three persons in one divine being. These points, along with the fact that all of the major trinitarian “prooftexts” have more likely unitarian interpretations (as I showed in my previous post on this blog), should be more than enough to show virtually beyond a doubt that the Father alone is Yahweh, the one true God, and that Jesus Christ is His human Son who has been exalted to a position second only to the Father Himself, as the Lord of heaven and earth.

______________________________

[1] Apart from both trinitarianism and unitarianism is modalism, which is the belief that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all one person and are merely separate manifestations of the same being and person, God. This view, however, which is held by a few denominations such as the Oneness Pentecostals, is so far off-base from what scripture teaches that it will not even be covered here.

[2] These four instances can be explained by the Hebrew use of the “plural of majesty” (sometimes called the “royal we“), in which a singular person of great authority uses a plural pronoun or verb to express their intentions. For example, King Artaxerxes uses the plural of majesty in Ezra 4:18: “The king [singular] sends this reply: ‘The letter you sent us has been read...’”

[3] 1 John 5:20 is sometimes quoted by trinitarians to show that Jesus is the true God as well, but this is easily shown to be false. According to this verse, “we are in Him who is true, in His son Jesus Christ; this one is the true God”. Trinitarians see this as saying that Jesus Christ is the true God, but the context shows that Jesus Christ is the son of “Him who is true”, and so “this one is the true God” must be referring back to the Father, not Jesus Christ.

[4] For a detailed explanation of this position, and a study of the beliefs of the second-century apologists about God’s nature, see Jackson Lashier’s PhD dissertation titled “The Trinitarian Theology of Irenaeus of Lyons“.

[5] See the paper “Tertullian the Unitarian“ by Dale Tuggy. Tertullian once wrote, “[God] has not always been Father and Judge, merely on the ground of His having always been God. For He could not have been the Father previous to the Son... There was, however, a time when neither sin existed with Him, nor the Son“ (Against Hermogenes 3). Since Tertullian believed that the Son did not always exist, he was clearly a unitarian (specifically, a two-stage Logos theologian).

[6] And violently enforced by the emperor at the time, Theodosius I, which stamped out any final resistance to the “orthodox” theology of trinitarianism.

Taking a break from blogging

This decision to stop blogging (temporarily) is unrelated to my recent ‘conversion’ to partial-preterist eschatology (the belief that most o...