Robert A. Morey & Christ’s Deity

I will be quoting from the late Dr. Robert A. Morey’s The Trinity: Evidence and Issues, published by World Bible Publishers, Inc., Iowa Falls, IA, in 1996, Part IV: The New Testament Evidence, Chapter 17. God The Son. All emphasis will be mine.

The Theophanies

We have already seen that in Old Testament times Yahweh came to earth in human form and communed with the Patriarchs and prophets of old. The link between this God-man and the Messiah was given in the name “Wonderful” (Pele) which is found in Judges 13:17-18 and Isaiah 9:6. The New Testament then links together Jesus and the God-man seen by Isaiah in John 12:

John 12:36 “While you have the light, believe in the light, in order that you may become sons of light.” These things Jesus spoke, and He departed and hid Himself from them.

37 But though He had performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing in Him;

38 that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spoke, “LORD, WHO HAS BELIEVED OUR REPORT? AND TO WHOM HAS THE ARM OF THE LORD BEEN REVEALED?”

39 For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again,

40 “HE HAS BLINDED THEIR EYES, AND HE HARDED THEIR HEART; LEST THEY SEE WITH THEIR EYES, AND PERCEIVE WITH THEIR HEART, AND BE CONVERTED, AND I HEAL THEM.”

41 These things Isaiah said, because he saw His glory, and he spoke of Him.

42 Nevertheless many even of the rulers believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue;

The passage is quite straight forward:

1. The person in view is Jesus. The passage begins and ends with Him.

2. The fact that Jesus was rejected by the Pharisees is viewed by John as a fulfillment of Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10.

3. Since he had just quoted Isaiah John looked at the context and saw that Isaiah had seen “the Lord” (Adonay), in verse 1 whom he later identified as YHWH “Yahweh” in 6:5. Adonai Yahweh appeared to him in human form sitting on a throne in the temple. John explains that this God-man was none other than Jesus in His pre-existent glory.

The grammar of the Greek text of John 12:41 is clear:

tauta eipen Isaias hoti eiden ten doxan autou, kai elalesen peri autou

According to the apostle John, when Isaiah said that he had seen YHWH, he was speaking peri autou “about Him,” i.e., Jesus. As Hengstenberg points out, “autou refers back to verse 37.”⁵⁰

Of this there can be “no doubt,” according to the famous Greek scholar J.B. Lightfoot in his Commentary On The New Testament From the Talmud and Hebraica.⁵¹ The classic French commentator Godet explains:

John justifies in this verse the application which he has just made to Jesus Christ of the vision of Isa. vi. The Adonai whom Isaiah beheld at that moment was the divine being who is incarnated in Jesus. Here also John and Paul meet together; comp. I Cor. X.4, where Paul calls the one who guided Israel from the midst of the Cloud Christ.⁵²

The ancient Latin and Syriac versions of John’s gospel agree with this understanding. The Syriac text says:

It was of Christ, who manifested Himself to him as Adonai, that Isaiah spoke when he uttered such words.⁵³

4. There is no honest way to avoid the grammar of the text. All the pronouns “Him” refers to the proper name “Jesus” from verse 36.  Even verse 42 clearly refers back to Jesus and continues to use the same pronoun “Him.” We have placed the pronouns in bold text so that the reader can see that they all refer back to Jesus.

5. John 12:36-42 establishes the link between the theophanies of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New Testament. Whenever Yahweh in the Old Testament came to the earth as a man, this was probably the pre-existent Jesus. (Pp. 307-308)

New Testament Christology

If the authors of the New Testament believed that Jesus was God as well as man, how would they express that idea? What words would they use to indicate that He is God as well as man? Trinitarians assume that the authors would use the same words which they used to indicate the deity of the Father.

Trinitarians begin with the assumption that once we accept the validity of the arguments used to prove the deity of the Father, we must accept the validity of these same arguments when applied to the Son. No amount of special pleading can overcome the simple observation that once an argument is deemed biblically and logically valid, it cannot be dismissed later on because it takes us where we do not want to go. No one should start out on the path of truth unless he is willing to accept its ultimate destination.

What We Expect to Find

1. The names of God will be applied to the Son.

2. The attributes of God will be applied to the Son.

3. The works of God will be applied to the Son.

4. The words of God will be applied to the Son.

5. The worship of God will be applied to the Son.

The Names of God

Did the authors of the New Testament ever use the Greek terms for God (theos, kyrios etc.) in reference to Jesus? If they believed that He was divine, then we would expect them to do so. They would also use Hebraic terms such as “I Am.” But if they did not believe that He was God, then we would not expect them to apply such terms to Jesus.

Jesus as theos

The liberal attempt in the nineteenth century to deny that Jesus was referred to as theos “God” in the New Testament was refuted by their own scholars such as the Unitarian Greek scholar Joseph Thayer. No one today bothers to deny that the word theos is applied to Jesus in the New Testament. Such passages as John 1:1 preclude any attempt to deny this grammatical reality.

Where the disagreement comes in is the issue of the meaning and significance of the word theos when it is applied to Jesus. Is He really called “God” as in the full sense of Deity or only a “god” in a metaphorical sense like the devil or some pagan deity? This means that we must understand how the word theos was used in the Greek New Testament.

Dr. Murray Harris has done the most extensive and exhaustive analysis of the usage of the Greek word theos in ancient extra-biblical and biblical literature.⁶⁸ It would helpful to summarize his work at this point. (Pp. 317-318)

The New Testament’s Usage of theos

The Septuagint’s usage of the word theos formed the basis of its usage in the New Testament as a generic term indicating any and all deities in general, including the true God. It was a title of deity and not a personal name of God. Thus, it is used of Satan (II Cor. 4:4), men (Acts 14:11), pagan deities (I Cor. 8:4), and even the belly, i.e., fleshly appetites (Phil. 3:19).

One question frequently asked is “If the word theos does not have a definite article, does this mean that something less than true deity is in view? Could Jesus be theos but not ho theos?”

The word theos appears 1,315 times in the New Testament. Seventy-eight percent of the time it appears with a definite article and 21.6% times without an article. Those unfamiliar with the Greek language often assume that when the true God is in view, the word theos will have the article. When theos appears without the article, the word theos does not refer to the true God. Thus, the typical Jehovah’s Witness defends his organization’s translation of John 1:1c, “the Word was a god,” on the basis that the word theos does not have the article.

After his detailed analysis of the presence or absence Murray Harris concludes that generally speaking:

Ho theos and theos are often used interchangably.⁶⁹ It is therefore not possible to maintain that whenever theos is anarthrous [without the article], it differs from emphasis.⁷⁰

The statistical evidence bears this out. For example, the Father is referred to as theos without the article in such places as John 1:6, while Jesus is referred to as theos with the article in such places as John 20:28. If the presence or absence of the article indicates whether true deity is in view, then the Father is only “a god” and Jesus is the true “God”!

But this does not mean that the presence or absence of the article never has any meaning. There are times when it has a grammatical significance. For example, in those cases where both ho theos and theos appear with the connecting word kai in the same verse, the Granville Sharp rule may apply. We will develop this thought later on in the chapter.

There are a few other times when the absence or presence of the article before the word theos does have a grammatical significance. But these are rare exceptions to the general rule that in the vast majority of cases, the absence or presence of the article before theos has no significance whatsoever. (P. 319)

When we turn to the New Testament, we are told the same exact thing. The Apostle John says:

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

En arche een ho logos, kai ho logos een pros ton theon, kai theos een ho logos.

The Greek verb en “was” is the imperfect tense of eimi and indicates the Word already existed when the Beginning began. Rienecker and Rogers point out:

The imperf. expresses continuous timeless existence (Bernard), and is contrasted with egeneto of v.3 (Barrett).⁶²

Murray Harris, points out that:

Since the Greek Bible begins with the expression en arche (“in the beginning”), rendering bereshith, it seems likely that John is alluding to Gen. 1:1. But whereas the first verse of the Torah continues “God created,” John follows with “the Word [already] existed.” In Genesis the creation of the world is contemporaneous with or marks “the beginning”; in John the existence of the Word is anterior to the “the beginning” . . . John implies the eternal preexistence of the Word.⁶³

John is clearly emphasizing that when the Beginning began, the Word was already in existence.

In John 17, we read:

And now, glorify Thou Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world.

(John 17:5)

There are three things this text clearly teaches:

1. Christ pre-existed His birth on earth.

2. Christ’s pre-existence goes all the way back to “before the world was” created, i.e., eternity.

3. The Son shared eternal glory with the Father.

Once again, in the book of Colossians Paul states:

For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities— all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. (Col. 1:16 -17)

Christ’s Relationship to All Things

1. “by Him all things were created”; i.e., He is the Creator

2. “in Him all things hold together”; i.e., He is the Sustainer

3. “He is before all things”; i.e., He is eternally pre-existent

4. “All things have been created . . . for Him”; i.e., all things exist for His glory.

Christ’s eternal pre-existence forms the context of the Trinitarian doctrine of the deity of Christ. The anti-Trinitarians have always had a rough time dealing with such passages and usually avoid any serious exegesis when confronted with such texts as examined above. (Pp. 313-314)

In the Beginning Was the Word

En arche een ho logos

We have already demonstrated that the first phrase, refers to the eternal pre-existence of the Word. Godet explains:

The imperfect en, was, must designate, according to the ordinary meaning of the tense, the simultaneousness of the act indicated by the verb with some other act. This simultaneousness is here that of the existence of the Word with the fact designated by the word beginning. “When everything which has begun began, the Word was.” Alone then, it did not begin; the Word was already. Now that which did not begin with things, that is to say, with time, the form of the development of things, belongs to the eternal order ... The idea of this first proposition is, therefore, that of the eternity of the Logos.⁷³

The modern Greek scholar Randy Yeager concludes:

Thus the Word existed before the beginning, since He has always existed. With Him there is no beginning. He is eternal and everlasting... It is impossible to avoid the force of John’s grammar.⁷⁴ (Ibid., pp. 320-321)

Given the grammar of the Greek text and the verses which follow, we have to place the pre-incarnate Logos “with” the Father under the column marked “the Creator.” That this is true is seen from verse 3.

All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come-into being. (John 1:3)

Panta di’ autou egeneto, kai choris autou egeneto oude en. ho gegonen

With this said, let us now examine John 1:1c.

... and the Word was God.

... kai theos een ho logos

Since the deity of the Logos was already set forth in the first two phrases of the hymn, the third phrase should not be that difficult to accept. Indeed, the hymn has been building to the climax “the Word was GOD.”

In Greek syntax, when you want to emphasize a word, you take it out of its normal word order and put it as the first word of the sentence. This is particularly true with the New Testament because it was intended to be read outloud.

This is the exact situation with John 1:1c.⁷⁶ When you read John 1:1 outloud, you should emphasize the word “GOD” by raising your voice. Instead of “the Word was God,” the word order of the Greek text is “God was the Word.”

John assumed that the reader would put the emphasis on the word “GOD” as the climax of the hymn: “the Word was God.” Any attempt to water down the word theos “God” into something less than true deity is due to a failure to observe the syntax. It would be anti-climactic to say that the Logos was “a god.”

Why No Article Before theos

The word theos in John 1:1c does not have a definite article in front of it. This does not mean that we should follow the Jehovah’s Witnesses and downsize it to “a god.” We have already pointed out that the word “Father” is modified by theos without the article. Do the Arians downsize Him into “a god” because of this? No. Then on what grounds do they do this to Christ?

The article was not placed in front of theos for two very good reasons. First, in terms of Greek grammar and syntax, Colwell’s Rule 20 states that when a noun is taken out its normal word order and placed before its verb, 97% of the time it does not have an article.⁷⁷ This is what we find in John 1:1c.

What this means is that instead of beginning with the a priori assumption that theos should have the article and then seeking to explain why it does not have one, we should begin the other way around and assume that it should not normally have the article. Thus, anyone who thinks that it should have the article will have to justify that assumption.

The second reason theos does not have the article is that it would lead the reader to the mistaken idea that the Word was the Father. Murray Harris explains:

Having just distinguished the Logos (the Son) from ho theos in verse lb, would he be likely immediately afterward to dissolve that personal distinction? For him to have used ho theos in the predicate of verse lc would have implied either that subject and predicate were identical or coextensive or that this predicate referred to none other than the ho theos of the preceding clause. As it is, in verse lc John maintains the distinction between the Logos and the Father that he has drawn in verse lb, while at the same time affirming the participation of the Logos in the divine essence (ho theos).⁷⁸

John did not place the article ho in front theos in order to maintain the distinction between the Father and the Son. This is why he made the distinction once again in John 1:2.

He Was in the Beginning with God

Houtos een en arche pros ton theon

The futile attempts of nineteenth century liberals to dilute the meaning of theos in John 1:1c down to something less than true deity or to reduce it to the mild adjective “divine” were successfully refuted by the best Greek scholars of that day. Arian cults, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Way International, The Assemblies of Yahweh, etc., are the only ones who still use old nineteenth century arguments as if they were still valid.

John 1:18

No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

ho theon oudeis heoraken popote monogenes theos ho on eis ton kolpon tou patros ekeinos exegesato.

John 1:18 may be part of the same ancient hymn which John started quoting in verse 1. As such, it is very important to our understanding of the early Church’s doctrine of the deity of Christ. Murray Harris comments:

Probably no verse has a more strategic position in the Fourth Gospel than 1:18, looking back as it does over the Prologue from its peak and also forward to the expansive plain of the Gospel narrative. Of crucial import, therefore is the interpretation of this verse and, in particular, the determination of its original text.⁷⁹

In the nineteenth century, before the discovery of the multitude of manuscripts we have available today, liberal scholars fought long and hard to avoid the reading “unique God” (monogenes theos). They did not want or need another New Testament text which called Jesus theos. But as the manuscript evidence began to mount in its favor, even Marcus Dods reluctantly admitted, “The MS authority favours the reading theos.”⁸⁰

Today, after the manuscript evidence has overwhelmed any lingering doubts, Lenski could state:

The question of the true reading is no longer in doubt. It is monogenes theos and not ho monogenes hyios nor monogenes without a substantive.⁸¹

Modern commentators agree with Lenski. Hendriksen comments:

The reading the only begotten God (monogenes theos) instead of the only begotten Son is supported by the best and oldest manuscripts.⁸²

With the discovery of the Bodmer papyri which must be dated no later than 200 A.D., it can no longer be doubted that monogenes theos was the true reading of the original text. The greatest Greek scholar of the twentieth century was without a doubt A.T. Robertson. After investigating all the manuscript evidence, he concludes:

The best old Greek manuscripts (Aleph B C L) read monogenes theos (God only begotten) which is undoubtedly the true text. Probably some scribe changed it to ho monogenes hyios to obviate the blunt statement of the deity of Christ and to make it like 3:16. But there is an inner harmony in the reading of the old uncials. The Logos is plainly called theos in verse 1. The Incarnation is stated in verse 14, where he is also termed monogenes. He was that before the Incarnation. So he is “God only begotten.⁸³

The only ones who do not admit that monogenes theos is the true reading of the Greek text are Arian cults who still depend almost exclusively on nineteenth century anti-Trinitarian writers.

It is thought by many modern scholars that John 1:18 is a part of the ancient hymn John is quoting. Having proclaimed the Logos “God” in verse 1 and incarnate in verse 14, the hymn now proclaims Him the “unique God” in verse 18:⁸⁴

John 1:18 No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

ho theon oudeis heoraken popote monogenes theos ho on eis ton kolpon tou patros ekeinos exegesato.

John now states that the Logos ho on eis ton kolpon tou patros “is in the bosom of the Father.” The tense of the verb and the preposition he uses to describe the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son should be noted. The verb on is the present participle of eimi and clearly indicates a timeless, i.e., eternal quality to the Logos’ relationship to the Father. As Lenski points out:

These are the assured grammatical facts regarding ho on, which we should not yield when they are modified in the interest of a wrong view of the person who is truly “God Only-begotten.”⁸⁵

The use of the present participle to indicate a timeless relationship between the Father and the Son has been noted by many other commentators.⁸⁶ John’s choice of eis instead of en is also to be noted.

The Charge of Blasphemy

“For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make yourself out to be God.” (John 10:33)

apekrithesan auto hoi Ioudaioi peri kalou ergou ou lithazomen se alla peri Blasphemias kai hoti su anthropos on seauton theon

Often overlooked when discussing passages where the word theos is applied to Jesus, the accusation of blasphemy is quite significant.

When Jesus said in verse 30, “I and the Father, we are One,” the Jews rightly understood that He was saying that that He and the Father were one in nature and essence. The Jews logically deduced from this that Jesus was claiming to be God. Lenski comments:

This, however, the sharp ears of these Jews at once caught, that by saying, “I and the Father, we are one,” Jesus was making himself God. They caught this because it was exactly what they wanted, a word on which to base the charge of blasphemy and thus full justification for the summary inflection of the death penalty. .. . This Jewish charge of blasphemy must stand against Jesus to this day if he, being nothing but a man, either by implication or by some direct statement (here or elsewhere) made himself God.⁸⁷

The words in the original are quite striking. The charge was blasphemy (Blasphemia). This is the only time John used the word in his Gospel. The charge of blasphemy could be leveled only if Jesus was claiming to be the one true God of Israel. The contrast is, thus, not between paganism (a false god) and Judaism (the true God) but between man and God.

The crime of blasphemy was punishable by death according to Leviticus 24:16. In that passage the crime has to do with the misuse of the name Yahweh. Thus, it is the one true God which is in view and not pagan gods.⁸⁸ Marcus Dods concludes:

It was blasphemy for a man to claim to be God. And it is noteworthy that Jesus never manifests indignation when charged with making Himself God; yet were He a mere man no one could view this sin with stronger abhorrence.⁸⁹

This passage is exactly what Trinitarians expect to find in the New Testament. If Jesus claimed to be God, then the unbelieving Jews would have picked up on this. They would object and charge Him with blasphemy.

On the other hand, if Jesus never claimed to be God, then we would not expect to find the charge of blasphemy leveled against Jesus. The expectations of Trinitarians are fully satisfied while the anti-Trinitarians have to scramble to find ways to wiggle out of such passages. (Pp. 323-328)