JESUS CHRIST: MICHAEL’S GOD PT. 2
Table of Contents
The following excerpt is taken from the monumental work titled The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense, authored by Robert M. Bowman Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski, published by Kregel Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2024, Chapter 19: Is Jesus Christ an Angel?, Part 3: The Name of Jesus: Jesus’ Divine Names, pp. 369-376.
In my estimation this is THE best and most comprehensive exposition and defense of the biblical basis for the Deity of Christ. Every serious Trinitarian Christian student of the Holy Bible, apologist, and/or theologian must have this book in the library. All emphasis will be mine.
DID PAUL IDENTIFY JESUS AS AN ARCHANGEL?
Paul told the Thessalonian Christians that when Christ returned, “The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thess. 4:16). According to the Watchtower, Paul’s statement identifies Jesus as the archangel because Jesus’ voice “is described as being that of an archangel.”27 After all, “It is reasonable to conclude that only an archangel would call ‘with an archangel’s voice.’”28 This plausible-sounding interpretation is mistaken for several reasons.
First of all, Paul’s statement would be a very strange way of speaking if Jesus was an archangel. Jehovah’s Witnesses simply assume that when Paul says that the Lord will descend “with the voice of an archangel” that he meant that the Lord’s voice would be that of an archangel. For example, Greg Stafford, a former Jehovah’s Witness advocating their view of Christ, asks, “What else is it supposed to mean if not that Jesus actually has, as a part of who he is, an archangel’s voice?”29 But this would be a very strange thing to say, at least in this way. It would be like someone saying that when Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg, he went with the voice of a man—meaning his own voice. What other kind of voice would Lincoln have? Would it not have been strange if Luke had stated that when Gabriel visited Mary, he spoke “with the voice of an archangel”?
Consider two scenarios, both of them assuming for the sake of argument that Paul’s statement meant that Jesus was an archangel. First, imagine that Paul’s readers already believed that Jesus is an archangel (and if that was Paul’s view, one would think he would have taught it to the Thessalonians when he was with them). If that were the case, when they read his statement in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, their reaction would have been, “Well, of course he had the voice of an archangel! What other voice would an archangel have?” Second, imagine that Paul’s readers were not familiar with the idea that Jesus was an archangel. If that had been the case, their reaction would have been, “Wait—are you saying that Jesus is an archangel? We never heard that before!” Either way, Paul’s statement would have struck them as exceedingly odd. If he wanted the Thessalonians to learn that Jesus was an archangel, he went about it in a very peculiar way; and if he had already taught them that Jesus was an archangel, saying that Jesus was coming “with an archangel’s voice” would also be odd.
The fact is that the text makes much better sense in context when we recognize that Paul is not speaking of Christ as an archangel. Rather, he is saying that the voice of an archangel would be heard speaking when Christ descends from heaven.
Rather than equating Christ with the archangel, Paul refers to Jesus Christ as “the Lord” who “will descend from heaven.” This language clearly echoes texts in the Old Testament in which “the Lord,” that is, Jehovah (YHWH), came down or descended to meet his people. Easily the best known of these is the account of the Lord descending to Mount Sinai to meet Moses. Here is a literal translation of the passage in the Greek Septuagint:
For on the third day the Lord will come down [katabēsetai kyrios] upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. . . . And it came to be the third day toward dawn; and sounds [phōnai] and lightnings and a dark cloud came to be on the mountain, and a loud sound of the trumpet [phōnē tēs salpingos mega] was blasting, and all the people in the camp were terrified. . . . Now the whole Mount Sinai was smoking because God had come down [katabebēkenai] upon it in fire. . . . Now the sounds of the trumpet [hai phōnai tēs salpingos] advancing became much louder. Moses was speaking and God answered him with a sound [phōnē]. Now the Lord came down [katabē de kyrios] upon Mount Sinai, upon the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses upon the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. (Exod. 19:11, 16, 18a, 19–20)
In this passage, as in 1 Thessalonians, the people are told that “the Lord will come down” heralded in advance by loud noises or “sounds” including that of the “trumpet.” The Greek words for “Lord” (kyrios), “come down” (katabēsetai and other forms), “sound” (phōnē), and “trumpet” (salpingos), which all appear repeatedly in the Septuagint in Exodus 19:11–20, are the same as the key Greek words in 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Of course, in Exodus 19 it is Yahweh (Jehovah), the Lord, who descends to meet his people (with Moses serving as their representative).
In the context of Paul’s scriptural sources of religious themes and imagery, his reference to Jesus as the “Lord” who “will come down” clearly reflects an important Old Testament motif of the Lord God coming down to his people as their divine king. Indeed, Paul speaks just a few sentences later about “the day of the Lord” (1 Thess. 5:2), an expression that refers in the Old Testament to the coming of YHWH in judgment but that in Paul’s writings always refers to the future coming of Jesus as “the Lord.”30 This means that the archangel is to be understood not as Jesus, but as a subordinate being heralding the coming of the Lord Jesus.
In the cultural setting of Paul’s epistles, his imagery pictures an archangel as an authoritative representative of the divine king coming down ahead of the Lord, heralding his imminent arrival. As New Testament scholar Ben Witherington points out, “A royal visit to a city would be announced by a herald (see Ps. 24.7–10) and might well also be announced by a trumpet blast to alert those in the city that the king was coming.”31 Thus, the archangel’s voice functions as that of the herald coming in advance of the king and should not be confused with the voice of the king himself.
In short, a close reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 in its historical and cultural context shows that Paul distinguishes between Jesus, who is the divine, royal Lord, and the archangel who will come ahead of the Lord Jesus to herald his coming. The way that Paul does so, making rich allusions to the Lord’s coming to Sinai, actually provides yet another line of evidence for identifying Jesus Christ as the Lord Jehovah.
There are, of course, similarities between Michael and Christ in the Bible. Both are supernatural beings, both lead angelic armies, both fight on behalf of God’s people, and both may be described as having close access to the presence of God the Father. On the other hand, the New Testament never identifies Jesus Christ as Michael or as an archangel, and a careful reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and Jude 9 in context shows that both Paul and Jude differentiated between the Lord Jesus and archangels such as Michael.
DOES PAUL CALL JESUS CHRIST “THE ANGEL OF GOD”?
If Christ was not Michael the archangel, then what angel, if any, might Christ have been? He clearly was not any of the other archangels (such as Gabriel or Raphael), and the archangels were the highest-ranking members of the class of created angelic beings (as the name archangels indicates).
The only possible candidate for an “angel” that one might plausibly identify as the preincarnate Christ is the mysterious “angel of the Lord” (literally, “messenger of Yahweh”) or “angel of God” mentioned many times in the Old Testament. As we saw in chapter 10 (pp. 203–6), there is a rather strong argument for interpreting these references to the angel of the Lord as speaking of a divine figure who came from Yahweh and yet was himself an appearance or manifestation of Yahweh. If Christ is this “angel,” it would seem to support the conclusion that he is uncreated deity, not a created angelic being.
The main difficulty with identifying Jesus Christ as the angel of the Lord, as with the theory that Michael the archangel was the preincarnate Christ, is that the New Testament never clearly makes this identification. The one text sometimes thought to make this identification is Galatians 4:14, where Paul reminds his readers, “though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus” (Gal. 4:14). Those who think Paul here uses the expression “angel of God” for Jesus argue for two very different views of what this means. On the one hand, Bart Ehrman argues that Galatians 4:14 reflects an early (even pre-Pauline) Christology in which Jesus was viewed as the chief angel—a created being, though the greatest such being. His view of Paul’s Christology in this respect is similar to the Christology of Jehovah’s Witnesses (though he finds other Christologies elsewhere in the New Testament).32 On the other hand, some Christians argue that Paul here was referring to Christ as the angel of God, more commonly known as “the angel of the Lord,” and therefore an uncreated, divine person.33
Two exegetical questions are crucial to assessing whether Galatians 4:14 refers to Christ by the term “angel of God.” The first is whether we should construe angelon as indefinite, “an angel,” as in all standard English versions, or as definite, “the angel,” as those who see this text as calling Christ “the angel of God” argue. The fact that angelon is anarthrous (lacking the article) might suggest that the word is being used indefinitely to mean “an angel.” On the other hand, Daniel B. Wallace states in his Greek grammar that in both the Hebrew Old Testament text and the Septuagint translation, the expression “angel of YHWH” (“Lord”) or “angel of God” is always anarthrous “except when the reference is anaphoric,” that is, except when it refers back to the angel as previously mentioned. On this basis, he concludes that we should take the expression to mean the angel of the Lord not just here in Galatians 4:14 but (evidently) everywhere else in the New Testament (“angel of the Lord,” Matt. 1:20, 24; 2:13, 19; 28:2; Luke 1:11; 2:9; Acts 5:19; 8:26; 12:7, 23; “angel of God,” Acts 10:3; Gal. 4:14).34 Since Wallace understands the Old Testament to identify “the angel of the Lord with YHWH himself,”35 the implication is that Christ is the angel of the Lord in these New Testament texts.
However, interpreting the expression “angel of the Lord” to refer to Christ is implausible in most if not all other New Testament references. For example, it does not make sense to understand the angel who appeared to Joseph (Matt. 1:20, 24; 2:13, 19) to be Christ—especially since in the second pair of these references Christ has already been born as a human child! The same problem applies to the angel who appeared to the shepherds to announce Christ’s birth (Luke 2:9). After stating that “an angel of the Lord” rolled away the stone from Jesus’ tomb, Matthew quotes the angel as speaking about Jesus in the third person: “He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay” (Matt. 28:2, 6). Obviously, this “angel of the Lord” is not Jesus. If we take all New Testament occurrences of “angel of the Lord/God” to refer to the Old Testament figure called the angel of the Lord, then, we will have to conclude that the New Testament writers deny that Christ is that figure (or that Paul disagreed with the other writers).
What about Wallace’s grammatical point that the expression “angel of the Lord/God” lacks the article except when it is anaphoric? This generalization works for the New Testament, since out of thirteen occurrences of the expression only one has the article (Matt. 1:24). However, the small number of occurrences in the New Testament, and the fact that Galatians 4:14 is the only text by Paul using “angel of God” or “angel of the Lord,” suggests caution in drawing inferences from the data is in order. The Old Testament evidence is far more complicated. In Hebrew, malʾak (“angel”) must always be anarthrous in these expressions (because it is in the construct state). Only context can help us determine if we should understand the Hebrew text to mean “an angel” or “the angel.” In Greek, however, grammatically angelos could appear with or without the article. Looking just at the relevant occurrences in the Greek text of the Septuagint, angelos with either theou (“of God”) or kyriou (“of the Lord”) has the article about forty-six times and lacks the article about thirty-five times.36 The occurrences with the article are clearly definite (“the angel”); those without the article might be definite or not (“an angel”) depending on context. In at least some of the forty-six articular occurrences, the article does not seem to be anaphoric (e.g., Gen. 31:11; Exod. 14:19; Num. 22:22; 2 Sam. 24:16a). We must also consider the possibility that the expression “angel of the Lord/God” came to be used somewhat differently by the New Testament period. For example, already in the book of Tobit, Raphael is called “the angel of the Lord” (angelos theou, 12:22), in a context where this clearly does not mean that Raphael was the (preeminent) angel of the Lord.
If we cannot assume that the anarthrous expression “angel of God” has the same meaning in Galatians 4:14 as “angel of God/the Lord” does in the Old Testament, the indefinite rendering “an angel of God” may well be correct. Paul makes a thematically related statement earlier in the same epistle when he warns the Galatians not to accept another gospel “even if we or an angel from heaven” preaches it to them (Gal. 1:8). Both texts speak about how the Galatians received or should receive someone preaching a gospel to them (cf. Gal. 4:13–14).
The second exegetical question is whether Galatians 4:14 refers to Christ as “angel of God.” Those who answer in the affirmative argue that the two clauses, “but as [all’ hōs] an angel of God, as [hōs] Christ Jesus,” are appositive in a way that equates the “angel of God” with “Christ Jesus.” Those who disagree view the two clauses as progressive or ascending: the Galatians treated Paul as if he were an angel of God, and even as if he were Christ Jesus himself. Which exegesis is correct?
The standard argument for equating “angel of God” with “Christ Jesus” in Galatians 4:14 appeals to two other Pauline texts using the same construction (1 Cor. 3:1; 2 Cor. 2:17).37 In the first text, Paul says that he could not speak to the Corinthians as spiritual people “but as [all’ hōs] fleshly ones, as [hōs] infants in Christ” (1 Cor. 3:1 lit. trans.). The appeal to this text takes it for granted that “fleshly” people and “infants in Christ” have the same meaning. Actually, this is probably not quite correct. “Fleshly” (or “carnal”) people are simply those living according to fallen human values and motives, which would be mostly non-Christians. “Infants in Christ” are Christians who are just beginning their new life and are still so immature that their thinking and conduct are still in some ways carnal. The second description qualifies the first. Years ago, New Testament scholar C. K. Barrett helpfully explained the distinction:
The next words [“as to babes in Christ”] introduce a qualification. To call his readers fleshly is to imply that they are completely outside the Christian way, and this would go too far. Mature provides a better basis of comparison than spiritual. Mature the Corinthians certainly are not, but they may be described as babes in Christ; that is, they are not heathen, but Christian; but they have only just made a beginning in the Christian life.38
In the second text, Paul writes: “For we are not, as [hōs] the many, peddlers of the word of God, but as [all’ hōs] from sincerity, but as [all’ hōs] from God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ” (2 Cor. 2:17 lit. trans.). Here Paul’s description of himself and his associates in ministry as speaking “from sincerity” and “from God” both apply to the same group, but they are not equivalent expressions. The first phrase, “from sincerity,” describes their motive as sincere; the second phrase, “from God,” identifies the origin of their message as having come from God.39
In Galatians 4:14, the two clauses “as an angel of God” and “as Christ Jesus” are in apposition because they both describe how the Galatians received Paul, not because the two expressions are equivalent in meaning. The “ascensive” reading, in which the second expression goes above or beyond the first, actually fits the text much better: “as an angel of God, as even Christ Jesus.” A good example of an ascensive use of this double hōs-clause construction is the psalmist’s statement that he felt about others “as [hōs] a friend, as [hōs] our brother” (Ps. 35:14 [34:14 LXX]).
We conclude, then, that while it is possible to interpret Galatians 4:14 to refer to Jesus as “the angel of God,” this does not seem to be the best understanding of the text. After acknowledging that others have argued for such an identification in Galatians 4:14, Craig Keener rightly concludes, “But the passage probably offers no such Christological point; it simply offers two comparisons with Paul.”40
There is, then, no clear reference to Christ in the New Testament as “the angel of God” or “the angel of the Lord.” In fact, the New Testament never uses the term “angel” for Jesus Christ in any context. This does not necessarily mean that the “angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament was not the preincarnate Christ. As we discussed earlier in this book (pp. 203–6), there are places in the Old Testament (especially in Genesis through Judges) where the “angel of Yahweh” seems to be both distinguished from Yahweh and identified as Yahweh. For this reason, many Christians throughout church history have thought that the angel of the Lord was the preincarnate Christ. If this view is correct, it may well be that the New Testament writers simply did not use the expression in its customary Old Testament sense. Foreman and Van Dorn put the point this way:
The connotations of the term “angel” changed over biblical history. The term began to take on a more ontological meaning. In other words, it came to signify more about the kind of being than about a function the being was carrying out (i.e., a messenger). . . . For these reasons, in order to avoid confusion, the New Testament seems to have avoided the term “angel” for Jesus.41
JESUS CHRIST IS NOT AN ANGEL
Whether one identifies Jesus Christ as the Old Testament’s “angel of the Lord” or not, there is simply no basis in the New Testament for viewing Christ as a created angelic being. As we have seen, there are solid reasons for rejecting the identification of Jesus as Michael the archangel. But if Jesus is not Michael, there seems to be no viable candidate among the created angels mentioned in the Bible that might be identified as Christ. If we interpret the “angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament as the preincarnate Son, this identification does not offer any support for viewing him as a created being.
The theory that Jesus Christ is the first, greatest, or chief angel simply does not square with the New Testament writings. In various ways, the New Testament exalts Christ above the angels not as the chief angel but as the divine Lord. Paul taught that all created heavenly beings were created in, through, and for the Son (Col. 1:12–17). This point is developed in great detail in Hebrews 1–2, in which the divine Son is contrasted with the angels in terms of his titles and roles. The question, “To which of the angels did God ever say . . . ?” (Heb. 1:5, 13) is a rhetorical question to which the understood answer is “none.” The Son is not one of the angels but is instead worshiped by them (Heb. 1:6) and identified as “God” and “Lord” (1:8, 10). The Son had humbled himself by becoming a man and dying for our salvation, but at his resurrection and ascension the now incarnate Son was exalted above all creation including all angels (Phil. 2:5–11; cf. Eph. 1:20–22; Heb. 2:5–9; 1 Peter 3:22; Rev. 5:8–13).42
If Jesus Christ is not an angel—not even Michael the archangel, apparently among the highest-ranking angels mentioned in early Jewish and Christian texts—but is superior to the angels, then who is he? As we will see in the rest of Part 3, while the New Testament never calls Jesus “Michael” or refers to him as an angel or archangel, it does apply to Jesus titles belonging only to God, while consistently distinguishing Jesus from God the Father. The distinction between Jesus and God the Father is so important to New Testament Christology that we will devote the next chapter to that issue.
27. “Michael,” in Insight on the Scriptures, 2:393–94.
28. “Who Is Michael the Archangel?,” 17.
29. Stafford, Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended, 3rd ed., 171 n. 68.
30. We will substantiate this point in chapter 26 (p. 494; cf. pp. 657–58).
31. Ben Witherington III, 1 and 2 Thessalonians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 138.
32. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 252–53.
33. E.g., Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 252; Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, AGJU 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 315–25.
34. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 252 and n. 94. Wallace cites just five of these occurrences of the expression, but his conclusion clearly is meant to apply to all of them.
35. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 252 n. 97.
36. In the LXX, the articular ho angelos tou theou occurs thirteen times while the anarthrous angelos (tou) theou occurs eight times. Similarly, the articular ho angelos kyrios occurs thirty-three times and the anarthrous angelos kyrios twenty-seven times.
37. E.g., Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 325; Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 253.
38. C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, BNTC (London: Continuum, 1968), 80 (emphasis in original).
39. Harris, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 255.
40. Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012– 2015), 2:2143 n. 1528.
41. Foreman and Van Dorn, Angel of the Lord, 194.
42. Cf. Hannah, Michael and Christ, 158–61.
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