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John 10
33 “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”
34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods” ’? 35 If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? 37 Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. 38 But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” 39 Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.
I have to admit that I don't quite get John 10:34-36.
He does appear to be backpedaling on the whole 'I am God' claim ... but John 1 (JW translations notwithstanding) seems pretty unambiguous on that particular claim.
And then John 10:37-38 seems to rally back to the message of John 1.
... so yeah, I have some personal questions on that part, too.
Yes, that's the one. I was thinking about it recently, so it was on my mind before I drifted into this discussion. Jesus is alluding to Psalm 82, in which Yahweh is addressing a council of
elohim, which either means "gods" or the assembled kings and judges of the world. The word is very ambiguous in Hebrew, as it seems to come from an abbreviated genitive construction. It makes more sense in Greek because θεός is similarly ambiguous in meaning. But yes, the point of Jesus's response is that the Pharisees have gotten him wrong and he is not claiming equivalency with the Judaic god.
However, he does suggest a kind of "mutual indwelling" between himself and God (that's the term people use, to distinguish it from a direct identification or equivalency), although at no point does he suggest that is unique to him. On the contrary, he and Paul always seem to be suggesting that God is in everyone, and Jesus here seems to suggest that the reverse is also true. This makes good sense in light of Paul Tillich's theology, which understands God to be the very basis of Being itself, so that nothing is truly apart from God, and God manifests personally in each of us, though most iconically in the form of the Christ.
As for
John 1, although I'm the last person to advocate for a JW translation, it's true that the Greek doesn't support an equivalency there either. Like the Hebrew
elohim, the Greek θεός is much more semantically versatile than the English word
god. You really have to rely on the syntax to make sense of it, and in
John 1, as in various other places in the NT, the omission of the definite article is significant. English wouldn't translate the article, since that's not how we use it, but it would be the normal signal to understand θεός as
God instead of as something related to divinity in some nonspecific way. The same applies when Paul says that Jesus the Christ will be recognized as θεός by all people. Modern folk tend to want to see any attribution of divinity in a monotheistic context as denoting personal equivalency to God, but even in the Hebrew Bible that's not the case. There are people and things and concepts that are
of God and are described with these words and constructions.
As I think I mentioned earlier,
John 1 is probably expressing the belief that the Messiah had been prepared from the very beginning to perfect creation at the appointed time, as well as drawing in the concept of
logos from Greek philosophy as a way of understanding the Christ's intermediary function between God and Man. There's a lot of fascinating stuff going on there. However, it would be a mistake to read orthodox Trinitarian doctrine into it as many people do, since that was still a couple of centuries away and almost certainly not what the Johannine author had in mind (much less his original audience, who would never have heard of such a thing).
