2 Corinthians 3:16 and Luke 1:16 --> the LORD in the New Testament continued...

I have already mentioned the distinct possibility that the passage written by Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:16-18 is distinctly Yahweh-esque (please refer to that post here).

Noting how the context of this explanation of Paul is firmly and immediately rooted in the story of the Israelites and that Kyrios (LORD) lacks the article in 4 out of 5 occurrences, I proposed the following translation:

But whenever anyone turns to LORD, the veil is taken away. 17 Now LORD is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of LORD is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate LORD's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from LORD's Spirit.

I showed through comparison with some other passages that the lack of the article before the first LORD is very suggestive, as we have elsewhere in the undisputed Pauline corpus (e.g. 1 Thes 1:9) the same verb and same suffix with the article for Theos.

This is pretty standard practice for stacks of Old Testament declarations about Israel's God. "Yahweh, the God of Israel". Or "Yahweh, the God of us", and so on.

In Greek, of course, this goes: Kyrios (LORD), the God of Israel".

Today I stumbled over even more evidence in favour of my hypothesis that Kyrios is deliberately anarthrous, and therefore referring back to the God of Israel and not specifically to Jesus.

I tried running this search: πρὸς κύριον (to LORD). In the New Testament, this occurs once. However you will see below the exact hit there are also the indirect hits, for πρὸς τὸν κύριον (to the Lord).

A second piece of evidence in favour of capitalisation of LORD in this passage (or even applying Yahweh), is that a similar Greek word behaves the same way and with the same case (accusative): ἐπὶ κύριον. This also means "to LORD" or, at the very least "to the LORD". The context of the only hit (Luke 1:16) here makes it staggeringly plane that capitalisation would be a clearer rendering if the article is kept (which it isn't in the Greek):

He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God.
NIV

In my view, this should probably read at the very least:
He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the LORD their God.

The challenge of course is being consistent in the more ambiguous instances.

Please note that in line with Larry Hurtado, I am not suggesting that there is an ultra-neat match of
ARTICLE + KYRIOS = Lord Jesus
KYRIOS (NO ARTICLE) = Yahweh

However, as Hurtado recognises in God or Jesus? Textual Ambiguity and Textual Variants in Acts of the Apostles, there is correlation ("In the majority of their 70 (or so) uses in Acts, the arthrous-singular forms of κύριος are applied unambiguously to Jesus", p. 2, you can read it for yourself here). This ambiguity he traces in Acts is fascinating and I will at some point review it on this blog when I have finished processing it all.

John's gospel: "the Lord"

A crazy-short post today as I'm mega busy. I did procrastinate just long enough to check all the mentions I could find of the English rendering "the Lord" in John's gospel.

Every single one that was specifically referring to Jesus was arthrous. This means that Kyrios, the Greek translation for our word "Lord", is systematically translated with the definite article in John's gospel when referring to Jesus.

This cursory glance is suggestive of different usages of "Kyrios" in the Bible, where Yahweh is often translated "Kyrios", but without the article.

Since these gospel citations are likely emmanating from a later stage of 1st century understanding, given common dating of John's gospel, it seems that this usage is Jesus' earth-ministry title accorded and remembered by his disciples. The name that he inherited as the Son of God (see Hebrews 1:4) is probably a quite different kettle of fish.

A new (very small additional) argument for a Triune Divinity from canonicity

...The second part that is overlooked is early Christianity. Did the early christians think that Jesus was Fully Divine, where that means that Jesus has all the Divine attributes? No they didn't. It's a matter of record that leading mainstream theologians taught that Jesus was not eternal, Jesus does not know as much as the Father, Jesus doesn't have the same kind of power, Jesus isn't good in the same way - his goodness depends on the goodness of God, whereas God has his goodness independently. Who am I talking about? Mainstream theologians in the 100s, and in the 200s and even into the 300s. When they came to a text like: "The Father is greater than I", they just said: yes, see: "greater". They didn't say greater with respect to his human nature but equally great with respect to his divine nature". And when he said he didn't know the day or the hour, they said "yes, only God is omniscient". Jesus isn't omniscient, he says he doesn't know something, you don't want to say he's a liar, right? You just don't find most early Christians saying that Jesus is fully divine. You see them saying things that go very clearly against that. Even after they're speculating about the pre-existent logos, the logos is divine, even after they're calling Jesus "our God", they'll turn right around and say the one True God is the Father, and only he is eternal, only he is perfect in knowledge and so on. And as we have just looked at, this claim that Jesus is fully divine is fully loaded with problematic speculations; it always was.

- Dale Tuggy, 2016, http://trinities.org/blog/podcast-145-tis-mystery-immortal-dies/ at ‘Tis Mystery all - 21st Century Reformation Theological Conference 30/04/2016

For me, originally a die-hard exegesis fan (and the die-hard is not dead yet), this argument is very significant. In my paper Trinitarian Interpretations, I argued that if we are right about the early church Fathers not believing that God was Triune, then we have a problem. One of the solutions I considered, which I have never heard argued, is that the inspired 1st century authors were so inspired that they were literally centuries ahead of their subsequent interpreters. Most people prefer to argue that the earlier (Ehrman would call them "proto-orthodox") theologians, were roughly right, but they were less refined or something like that.

I think there are quite a few theologians who believe the conciliar Christologies are basically on track and that this perspective simply takes a very long time to work out (and it is not finished yet, and its various interpretations today are multiple and mutually-incompatible). That might mean that non-triune things are said in the Scriptures, which, if all are to be considered true on a deep level, that you end up with something looking like a form of Trinitarianism. But God set the whole thing up for a huge debate from an obscure beginning in order for it to stand somehow (because it didn't come easily; paradoxically because it was not as blazingly obvious as evangelical apologists like to assume and argue today). That's an argument I'd be more open to: but I think I have another option still. These beliefs about the Triune God began around about the same time the canon was sealed, so to speak. It could be argued that the wrestling and debating going on with regard to canonicity are not independent of the christological wrestling. Had the canon been clearer earlier, then maybe the Triune God perspective would have emerged earlier too. The same church that decided these are the books, is the church that said, this is our Christ.

My position might be considered to drift. It isn't, or hasn't much. I still firmly believe given the lack of clarity and the supreme position of the Scriptures, the close proximity of the church Fathers in terms of chronological interpretive distance, that we have to allow for greater breadth and tolerance and welcome differing views of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. For me, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit remain central to church life, individual faith and the advancing Kingdom of God. And that has always been the case for me.

This is where the Biblical Unitarian communities, I think, also need to be careful. They can be so sceptical of a whiff of a "divine" Christ, that it could be harder for them (I speculate) to worship Jesus, even if they knew it was to the glory of God the Father, as explicitly stated in Philippians 2.

Let the debate roll on!

NIV evolutions

A couple of times on the blog I have zoomed in on what appears to be an important shift in the NIV in its more recent edition (2011). There have actually be three main "incarnations" to this translation:
1. 1984
2. 2005 (TNIV)
3. 2011

In the process of compiling my Psalms reading plan (Psalms: God's keys to our presence), I have discovered many of these discrepancies that, for me, lean in favour of the older translation. Before I mention my difficulties there, let's look at how wide-reaching those changes have been:

(taken from http://www.biblewebapp.com/niv2011-changes/)

So far I have discovered two main (great) sources for tracking the changes:

• http://www.biblewebapp.com/niv2011-changes/#001-001
• http://www.slowley.com/niv2011_comparison/

You won't believe how in-depth they are! One important thing to note is that it is actually no longer so easy to find electronic versions of the 1984 NIV now. The reason for this is that most sites just updated their version with the 2011 version. It is not called "NIV 2011". It is simply called "NIV", so it is not always straight forward to know unless you are aware of a key change. But for the most-part, 1984 has gone.

One place I still go, especially for the Psalms study, is http://classic.studylight.org/. Just select NIV on the drop-down menu, and (although you would have no way of knowing this), you are provided the 1984 version. However, if you go to the main studylight.org site, and make the same selection, then you are provided the 2011 version! Crazy, huh? I think it's useful to know.

A while back while looking into Christ's role in creation, I noted a rather subtle but essential recognition of an inaccuracy in Colossians 1:16. Perhaps under the influence of a renewed Jesus movement in the evangelical churches (I speculate), the Father was even eclipsed here:

For by in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were have been created bythrough him and for him.

Note how essential "Father-space" (see 1 Cor 8:6) had been filled by a Trinity-subsuming Christ who was simply understood to be Creator. So these little tweaks are, in my view, very significant. So why am I unhappy about the Psalms direction? Rather than bore any readers here with more examples, let me just grant that the word "soul" is grossly misunderstood. I acknowledge that this word in a worn-out evangelism of soul-saving has become unhelpfully unclear. The 2011 NIV has opted for a rather novel way out. Where it feels like it can get away with it, it scraps the "soul" and replaces it with the person as a whole (or a pronoun). 

I'm not satisfied with that solution, because it is precisely the wholeness of a person that is at stake and that is lacking when the person is not entirely present. To be present requires strong intra-connecting aspects of hands, face, eyes, bones, thoughts, emotions, words, tongues, heart and soul. There is a spectrum of parts comprising the whole that goes from visible to invisible, tangible to intangible, emitter to receptor, and even teacher to student. This is why I recommend reading the Psalms in the 1984 version: in my view, you will be less confused by the pronoun play.

Confusion over a *case* in the NT: anarthrous Moses vs arthrous Peter

I am a bit confused, I must admit, to discover some quite curious statistics around the Greek in the New Testament. Some will know I am quite interested in the case of the presence or absence of articles in this fascinating language. It occurred to me that in order to better understand the practice of including articles with proper names, e.g. the John writing this blog post, it would make sense to look at other examples in the New Testament, and see how case  comes into it. If we include the vocative, there are actually five Greek cases: vocative, nominative, genitive, accusative and dative.

It had already become clear to me when I did the series of posts on arche that Greek case had a role to play, and other readings have confirmed that (BTW I remain a total novice to Koine Greek, but that does not prevent me from asking what I think should be a legitimate question, which I will get to in a second).

So I decided to take Moses, Peter and Jesus as three prominent proper names to look at. I haven't done Jesus yet - and I wish to re-count Moses and Peter before proceeding. What did I find?

I'll publish some stats when I have gone through it more thoroughly, but there was a surprising difference between Moses and Peter in the Nominative case. Moses occurs in the New Testament 80 times. Of those 80, slightly over half are in the nominative case. For example:

“Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children...” (Matt 22:24). This Moses is in the nominative: Μωϋσῆς. And there is hardly ever an article with the nominative in the instance of Moses (my first count was 3 out of 43). However, in the case of Peter, it is quite different. Peter is mentioned 156 times in the New Testament, of which 100 are in the nominative case, Πέτρος. So my question is: why do we get so many articles with Πέτρος? Approximately half of these have the article appended. OR, why do we get so few articles with Μωϋσῆς? I hope the same enquiry into Jesus will highlight which of these two questions is the most pertinent.

UPDATE: While this discrepancy remains a little unclear to me, John (Ἰωάννης  OR Ἰωάννου) is more in line with what we might expect: anarthrous in the genitive and nominative cases to the tune of 18%, and especially in the genitive (only 8%).

The Son of God: Three Views of the Identity of Jesus (5)

Enjoy!

Inherited Name

The more I think about Christology - which has been quite a bit in the last couple of years - and the divine name, translated by LORD (Kyrios) in Greek, the more I am convinced that Hebrews 1:4 has a vital role to play. Here it is again in the NIV:

So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.

And check out the Aramaic Bible in Plain English version:

And This One is altogether greater than the Angels, according to how much more excellent than theirs is The Name which he possesses.

Weymouth also capitalizes Name.

One thing that had escaped my notice until recently is the angels' name. We know that the angels were at times identified by various names. But here we are talking about some sort of collective "name". The name constitutes some sort of comparable "excellence" or rank. Here is another insightful translation, Holman Christian Standard Bible:

So He became higher in rank than the angels, just as the name He inherited is superior to theirs. 

And then in verse 5 we flow straight into Christ's begetting, or at least the most apt OT picture of such a begetting, and reason for such superior greatness.

But the point is the angels haven't had that experience. They have not inherited a name like that. But if any had done so, then the angel Gabriel, for instance, would hardly have stopped being called "Gabriel", etc. In Jesus' affiliated name is a rank of excellence and required reverence, inherited from his Father.

He is the Son of Yahweh himself, and he rightly bears the Greek translated name of His Father, Kyrios.

THIS is the name (and rank) that is referred to when it says "at THE NAME of Jesus every knee shall bow".