John 8:58, Dale Tuggy takes on my questions on John 8 (iii)

Dale Tuggy has examined on his Trinities podcast the question of pre-existence, before looking at various scholars' responses to John 8:58, especially that of Thomas Belsham in episode 63. This prompted me to ask a question about when the current interpretation came about, and this "got me started on a quest", says Tuggy. He thus commits his 66th episode to probing the implied connections we often hear surrounding readings of John 8:58 from the pulpit and in popular Christian literature. This also follows on from two other posts on my blog, part 1 and part 2. Here is part 3, sorry it is a bit long and notey. There will also be a small extra post on the John 8:59, which was mentioned at the end of the podcast, and I feel less related to my original question, but still worth a separate mention.

What I found really insightful was the picture Tuggy sketched of the "Logos theologians" (2nd-3rd centuries, pre-Nicea) and the way he interacts with the next question of listener, "Sarah", when she quotes an interesting passage in Justin Martyr's writings (First Apology), recounting the Son of God speaking on God's behalf, as both "an angel and an apostle": an angel of God spake to Moses. the son of God, who is called both angel and apostle. After this, Irenaeus focuses in on the question of Jesus' pre-existence, and does use John 8:58 to emphasise this point.

Reminder: Dr Dustin Smith showed how it was ancient Jewish custom to talk about future events in the past tense that are determined in the mind and heart of God. We are also reminded that we all know this and apply this rule almost unconsciously to the Old Testament prophecies, e.g. He WAS PIERCED for our transgressions.

The logos theory came first. It was quite controversial. "Of course, this is not what the gospel of John is saying at all, there is no direct interaction between Jesus and Abraham recorded there", says Tuggy.
God now (in the 2nd and 3rd centuries) is seen to interact with creation through a go-between, none other than the Logos in John 1, a "pre-human" Jesus. Philo of Alexandria had a very transcendent view of God, and had clear platonic views. In the Scriptures that describe "god" being seen, these sightings had to be Jesus, as no-one can see God and live. So the Logos theologians were responsible for developing a theology first of indirect interaction of the transcendent God through his pre-existent son. (me: Remember how important Proverbs 8 was as a proof-text for the pro-Nicene movement, but which includes in v21: The LORD possessed/fathered/created me [wisdom] at the beginning of his work(s) - some of the Logos theologians seem to take this to mean Jesus was created first, but still a very long time ago).

So Irenaeus, Origen, and others begin to refer to this verse as support for the pre-existence of Christ. But the interesting point is what they are attempting to draw from this verse. Is it the twofold argument of both Jesus pre-existing and Jesus simply is Yahweh, doing "I AM" wordplay? (remember, we are not assuming that John himself intended any of this, although I suspect Bart Ehrman might disagree - since he claims very different christologies between the gospel writers)

1. I am God myself.
2. I have a timeless existence, a divine attribute, implying that I am god myself
3. I am implying that I have existed a long time, since before Abraham.

Novation is another early theologian, from the mid 200s, and he examined the idea of immortality for men, deification of man from Christ (not even "via"). When he refers to John 8:58 he is definitely affirming that Christ pre-existed, but he implies more than that, providing early arguments for Christ's two natures.
In fact, quite a lot of what he says sounds a bit like he is Trinitarian, but when you get to the end of Novatian's work, you realise that still, the one true God is the Father. For him, however, Jesus was
i) foreknown and
ii) divine and
iii) has two natures.

I gather from Dale that Novation was writing in Latin, and Latin apparently does not have or did not have the word "the", hence the ambiguity around "deus" (God/divine).

(Here I think Dale makes a bit of a mistake, though, or at least I am not at all sure he can so casually state comprehensible use of the definite article in Koine Greek. I hope one day to blog on this serious textual problem!)

Surprising omissions for such a "clear" text: The Arian controversy makes no reference to John 8:58, nor does Augustin On the Trinity, or the City of God, nor does Hansen's Search for the Christian doctrine of God, the best history resource of the Nicene controversy.

Finally finds a text from a 7th century forgery claiming to be written by Matthew, but that is a bit of a half-funny aside that Dale includes.

John Calvin's commentary, based on Chrisostoms Homily 55 (AD 355 - 4??). Like Novation, it attempts to prove that Jesus is divine and has eternal existence, two natures.

Augustin, bishop of Hippo: Before Abraham, I am - not "was". "Was" and "will be" he knows not. "From eternity begotten". "This his name he told to Moses, You shall say to them he that IS has sent me to you." Augustin is a clear Trinitarian, on the heels of Nicea.

Dale's conclusion: So clearly by the early 400s, when Augustin is making his comments about John and 1st John, from that time on it's part of catholic tradition to see Jesus not merely alluding to the statement of God to Moses, but really asserting that he has eternal existence and thereby asserting that he is fully divine. Is this a discovery?

For Dale this is a classic case of Eisegesis, reading into it what you want to find there rather than drawing out what is actually there, expounding what the author actually meant.

The last part of this podcast I felt strayed back to more contemporary analysis that would with retrospect be better placed, perhaps, in the Belcham episode 63, but it is relevant to our interpretations of John 8:59. Let's look at that quickly in the next post.

Quick Christianity jabs

I am so grateful and glad that Daniel Wallace is alive, kicking and writing.

In his latest post on his blog, published yesterday here, Wallace easily deals with the hasty attack on Christianity by Kurt Eichenwald, who, writing for Newsweek, exaggerates the so-called unreliability of the New Testament transmission methods, even overstating Bart Ehrman's case. Just to give you an example of some of the unsubstantiated things Eichenwald says, and Wallace should have mentioned this I think, and this of the 381 Council of Constantinople: "a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost." Oh really?!

One of Wallace's key points, however, is to state that we are not talking of a near-perpetual linear series of translations of translations, one of Eichenwald's points. All serious translations of today are working off manuscripts, some of which "go as far back as" the 2nd century.

I am currently reading through Wallace's book at the moment on Revisiting the Corruption of the New Tesetament: Manuscript, Patristic and Apocryphal Evidence. 

My intention, by the way, for anyone who is interested and for my own reference, is to publish chapter summaries. Each subject is distinct and actually written by a different scholar, with the whole lot edited by (and the first chapter written by) Daniel B. Wallace. In this book, one of the key challenges of Ehrman's interpretations is that he does not acknowledge his own biases, in particular the criteria of orthodox corruption. While that is not entirely true, from what I can see, we have another clear case here that works in the opposite direction. So when we see "as far back as the second century" from Wallace, Ehrman would maintain that the second century is still a fair old way off from the first and very fragmentary in what we do have, and even these are probably at least copies of copies of a copy (or of copies). He also would remind us that from the evidence we hold, in manuscript copying errors intensify the further you go back and that we simply "cannot know" what the originals said. 

While I agree with Wallace that Ehrman overstates his case, it is easier for me to see now when presumptions are "smuggled onto the table" (Stephen Holmes' expression), and here "as far back as" implies that this is an incredibly long way back. Challenged, the Wallace crew would be quick to compare to other ancient Greek texts that are much less well attested in terms of manuscript evidence. Ehrman is not in the business of comparing, however, and has no more faith in the copies of manuscripts that we have of Homer, for example, as representative of what was originally penned to parchment. 

But the key issue I think here in Wallace's otherwise solid defence against this weak attack by Eichenwald, is an often-forgotten translation stage. It seems to have been too obvious to mention by everyone, but it is not insignificant: the quotations in the gospels are already translations. We should be aware of that and reminded of that in these sorts of conversations. So in that sense, perhaps unwittingly, Eichenwald had a point he did not realise he was scoring!

I and the Father are ONE and a bit more on the unitarian vs trinitarian debate

"I and the Father are One": John Chapters 10 and 17

This has been a difficult choice for me - to exclude or not to exclude the John 10 instance of I and the father are one, cited by trinitarians as excellent textual support for Christ's full divinity [blue category]. To exclude it, that is, from my New Testament study seeking to statistically review evidence cited in favour of Christ's Nicene status or that discounts the strength of the Nicene claim: Jesus is "Very God" [this category I call the green category]. In this study, I hope it is clear from the many other references that I have included in the blue category that I am consciously being as neutral as I can be. I am not attempting to demonstrate textual credibility for the doctrinal conclusions any more than I am attempting to discredit these conclusions, simply to examine the ways in which the various texts seem to lean and how they collectively add up - if indeed they do or must do. For me, the lack of clarity so far and the ongoing debate, with evidence pointing in different directions, could open the way to either or both of the following projects:

1. Legitimising a change in where we lay down our limits of divine and christological comprehensibility.
2. Proceed in a more cautious way in response to what I am defining as “canonical pressure”, in opposition to Stephen Holmes’ and others' “exegetical pressure”.

So why exclude “I and the Father are one”, if I am as open-minded as I claim and strive to be? Why exclude any passages from the study? Because some passages can be described as compatible with both positions, or even in some instances are considered actively supporting both positions, as one day we shall see in the historical battles over John 5:19 and other instances also.

If we had John 10 alone, then it would have to be blue, for sure. Not because it provides overwhelming evidence for Jesus' deity - Jesus neither accepts nor denies the allegations that he is calling himself God (unitarians will take the OT quote further in their own defence) - but because the statement could be and consistently has been labelled as solid support for the claim. The point of this post is to say that this seems to me a clear case of REVERSE ENGINEERING (a wonderful expression a theologising friend and companion taught me today - a pretty solid trinitarian as it happens).

However, we do not have just John 10 - we also have John 17, which provides us with greater context for this expression and what John understands Jesus meant in this statement.

Before I proceed, we should be clear that we are working on the assumption that between John 10 and John 17 we have the same author whose views and language are consistent, who views that Jesus' views are consistent, and who when he uses the same words in a different context does not mean something radically different than what he understood Jesus to mean in the first context. That sounds like a big assumption, but I do not think it actually is (although I should probably find a good example to back this up). I also note that the contexts are actually not so different: Jesus is referring to his beloved believers in both cases.

My point is this: John 17 gives us good reason to reject intended reference here to common divine identity of Jesus' saying "I and the Father one", i.e. one divine personality or one divine essence, because of how this same wording, used twice more in John 17, is applicable in the same way to humans. Perhaps I am being too subjective here (I do not think I am), but a natural reading of this phrase is that of a unity of purpose, a total lack of disagreement, total agreement, common vision, alignment of wills, etc. Here again are those verses, with my emphases (v11 and v20-23) :

"I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one...

"I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one - I in them and you in me - so that they may be brought to complete unity."

The oneness between Jesus and the Father is the same as that which can be shared by humans, or hoped and prayed to be shared. The hope here is never that the believers become one self - indeed the beauty of the oneness is that it is achieved by distinct persons, in a way that can remind us of a how a husband and wife become "one". I need to be careful here not to appear to argue this text from a unitarian position (this is why I deliberately write "persons" and not "beings"). That is not at all the purpose of this post! The point therefore is to stress inter-person oneness for a purpose: unity. Both unitarians and Trinitarians should be happy with that conclusion, as this text should be compatible with both positions:

Unitarian: the oneness is compatible with our view that as invested with authority as Jesus is by God (Matt 11:27, all things have been given to me by the Father), he is not God himself because the same oneness is plainly requested by the Messiah for humans, so there is nothing here that demonstrates that Jesus is God any more than I am my wife or even I am my couple. Taken out of context like in John 10, then we might think that. We can also ask, as does Apolytus, what does “is” mean? the Father and I are (plural) one, rather than the Father and I am one. 

Trinitarian: although this kind of unity-bond is of the same kind that two or more like-minded humans can share, we would expect nothing less from a triune God so it is compatible for us trinitarians too. We should also remember: Tertullian and Hypolytus' understanding of the “Divine Economy” as a way of organising relationships. Three distinct beings but perfectly unified in will and purpose.

So we have compatibility in both directions, but no specific support from these passages for either position (even though I sense that there is more natural flow on the unitarian side on this one). Since we are looking for verses that support one position rather than are simply "compatible", then these passages become less useful to this task.

Thus, my reasoning provides a rather surprising exhortation: unitarians and trinitarians - you can be relatively united over this text! Pick your fights elsewhere please.

NB: I also wonder if the "being one...so that they may be brought to complete unity", could be an indication of how Jesus seeks that those who believe in him take their momentary or partial oneness to a total and permanent state of unity. Note that the pressure of this conclusion is toward beautiful harmony of persons who do not lose their separate states of consciousness, being, etc. To resume the marriage example, therefore, we could see the oneness cemented in "wedlock", a state of permanent and desired unity.

UPDATE (MARCH 2015)
- I see I mentioned Tertullian there, and another quote I have found of his demonstrates his interpretation of this passage, which I sense is already in discord with John's meanings, or at least seems to require John to apply his language of unity inconsistently. Here's the interpretation he gives:

... Qui tres unum sunt, non unus, quomodo dictum est, Ego et Pater unum sumus, .... ("Thus the connection of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Paraclete, produces three coherent Persons, who are yet distinct One from Another. These three are one [thing], not one [Person], as it is said, 'I and my Father are One,' in respect of unity of substance not singularity of number.")

Tertullian seems so caught up in a debate over "unity of substance" and "singularity of number", and there is true occasion to his writings, notably the patristic passion heresy. This means that he might not see other options. For instance, as described above, a unity of purpose and vision. There is no need for "substance" here, at least in my view, and this seems to be backed by a lot of modern social Trinitarian writers.