As I have done in the past, I want to commend to my readers the many uniquely valuable posts of “Scribes of the Kingdom” blogger Alex Finkelson. He never disappoints. This latest one truly hits the mark and expels a huge cloud of confusion among those who dabble in New Testament Christological texts without understanding their Greco-Roman cultural and religious contexts. Don’t miss this one, as well as the various links in the footnotes:
“Θεοί [Gods] At War: The Deity of Christ and the Fate of the Empire”
Evangelicals often quote texts of the New Testament such as Titus 2:11-14, Peter 1:1-2 and others, that some read as affirming Jesus as the “Great God and Savior,” assuming some equivalence to YHVH. The Church Fathers were quite fond of this identification, and it eventually became part of the entire Trinitarian package. Alex really lays things out clearly in this post and also gives the link to an open access article titled “Another God in the Gospel of John? A Linguistic Analysis of John 1:1 and 1:18,” published by Alexander Smarius in the journal Horizons in Biblical Theology.
I want to work through both of these on a future YouTube series I will begin in late August called ‘Did Early Followers of Jesus Believe He Was God?”
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