Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze 55 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  The appearance of four “equally valid” English renderings in Comfort’s handbook reflects four ways a modern translator might paraphrase a single Greek clause, not four independent Greek archetypes that have equal textual standing. The concrete data from the documentary tradition are stubbornly simple: the entire extant Greek transmission of Acts 20:28 presents only two points of variation. One concerns a single consonant in the genitive qualifier of ἐκκλησία (“God” or “Lord”); the other concerns word-order within the double genitive. No manuscript, papyrus, version, patristic citation or indirect witness supplies the noun υἱοῦ, and no independent line of descent hints that it was ever present. Comfort is therefore describing exegetical possibilities that arise once the critic accepts the fixed wording διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου; he is not conferring equal textual votes upon four distinct readings. The conflation of exegetical paraphrase with textual attestation is the root of the misconception that the NWT merely chooses one among many equally grounded Greek alternatives. It does not. It supplements the text with a term found nowhere in the manuscript tradition.

  The attempt to justify that supplementation by appeal to “dynamic equivalence” confuses two distinct canons of translation. Dynamic equivalence merely releases the translator from mirroring Greek syntax where that syntax would mislead a modern reader; it does not license supplementation of the semantic content when the original is perfectly transparent. A first-century reader needed no added word to grasp Luke’s possessive genitive: τοῦ ἰδίου, in the marked post-posed position, qualifies the immediately preceding noun αἵματος and can only mean “his own blood.” If a modern reader requires help, the historically responsible method is to supply that help in a marginal gloss rather than to move the gloss into the running text and allow it to masquerade as the wording of Luke. The RSV, NRSV and NIV follow precisely that discipline by placing “Son” in an explanatory foot-note. The NWT, by contrast, printed the word in its main line from 1950 onward and only in 2013 removed the brackets that once at least acknowledged its conjectural status. That move does not emulate dynamic equivalence; it crosses the line between interpretation and substitution.

  The grammatical plea that τοῦ ἰδίου may function substantivally is equally fragile. The vocative papyrus formulae in which ὁ ἴδιος operates as a term for a dear relative are syntactically remote from Luke’s second-attributive construction. Not only does Luke never elsewhere coin a christological title from ἴδιος, but no Jewish or Christian author of the first three centuries employs ὁ ἴδιος as an independent designation for Jesus. When early readers misunderstood the phrase, they tended to invert the genitives (producing τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) or to swap θεοῦ for κυρίου; had they believed υἱοῦ belonged to the text they would have restored it, as Byzantine scribes habitually did with other perceived omissions. Their silence is negative testimony that the noun was never there.

  The charge that the appeal to Ignatius rests on corrupted fourth-century redactions has been overstated. The middle recension of the Ignatian letters is externally attested by Polycarp’s contemporary collection notice in the early 130s and by the embedding of lengthy verbatim quotations in Irenaeus, Origen and Eusebius—centuries before the alleged fourth-century mutilation. Those early writers already cite the phrase ἐν αἵματι θεοῦ. Even if one invoked maximal scepticism about Ignatian authenticity, the presence of the formula in Irenaeus (Against Heresies, V.1.2) pushes the usage back to the late second century and into a writer whose text is multiply witnessed in Greek and Latin. That early attestation demonstrates that Christians steeped in the sub-apostolic generation found no theological impropriety in coupling a divine title with the shedding of blood. The accusation of patripassianism is therefore misplaced. The fathers who most vigorously repudiated modalism—Athanasius, Hilary, the Cappadocians—happily cited Acts 20:28 in anti-Arian polemic, because they presupposed the Chalcedonian principle of communicatio idiomatum: whatever is said of either nature may be predicated of the one person. To speak of “God’s blood” no more implies that the Father suffered than Paul’s phrase “they crucified the Lord of glory” implies that the divine nature was extinguished on Calvary. It is the incarnate person who bleeds, and that person is truly God.

  Nor can one evade the force of Luke’s diction by pointing to the reading ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ κυρίου. Even were the committee’s more difficult reading criterion mistaken and κυρίου original, the result would still be the assertion that the Lord himself shed “his own blood,” not “the blood of his own Son.” The textual issue therefore leaves the genitive string untouched and does not aid the Watchtower’s interpolation.

  Behind the repeated claim that fourth-century corruption obliterated earlier testimony lies a methodological sleight of hand: accusations of later tampering are asserted where the evidence contradicts a theological preference, then withdrawn when the same evidence can be marshalled against Trinitarian readings. Consistency requires an even-handed treatment of the data. Extant manuscripts, versions and citations form a coherent stemma that leaves no room for an early loss of υἱοῦ across every branch of the tradition; the charge of global corruption collapses under its own weight.

  In sum, the essence of the apologia for the NWT reduces to theological discomfort with attributing redemptive blood to a subject called “God.” That discomfort is understandable for a community that denies the full deity of Christ, but it cannot be converted into a textual argument. The Greek says what it says; the grammar yields one natural construction; the patristic record confirms that early Christians accepted the wording in that natural sense; and the charge of patripassianism dissolves once the incarnational framework of the NT is taken seriously. The purchase of the church by “the blood of his own” is, in Luke’s narrative logic, the purchase accomplished by the incarnate Son who is himself fully and eternally God. Every attempt to excise that confession from the verse has required inserting a word the evangelist did not write. Textual fidelity and historical theology therefore converge: the clause is best rendered, as virtually every critical edition and most standard versions still render it, “the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.”
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  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  The Watchtower’s appendix to the NWT accurately records three facts: the earliest witnesses divide only over θεοῦ versus κυρίου, every witness reads διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου without any trace of υἱοῦ, and the syntax admits two ways of construing τοῦ ἰδίου—either adjectivally (“his own blood”) or substantivally (“the blood of his own”). From those premises the appendix then extrapolates a conclusion that neither the manuscripts nor the grammar will bear, namely that Luke must have intended the second construction and that an understood noun, “Son,” may therefore be supplied in the translation. The difficulty is that the sole evidence advanced for this supplementation is a conjecture that failed to convince the very scholars upon whose work the appendix relies.

  J. H. Moulton’s note does indeed list four New Testament passages in which ὁ ἴδιος appears without an overt head-noun. In each instance, however, the adjective stands in the nominative as the subject or object of its clause or in a loosely appositional genitive; it never follows another genitive in the marked second-attributive position that Luke employs in Acts 20:28. The papyrus parallels to which Moulton alludes are likewise vocative or epistolary greetings where the adjective occupies the slot of a personal address. Those examples demonstrate that first-century Greek speakers could truncate a possessive phrase when the context supplied an obvious reference, but they do not justify extracting an autonomous christological title from a post-posed genitive that grammatically modifies αἵματος. The construction Luke actually writes—head-noun + article + adjective—recurs elsewhere in Scripture (for example Hebrews 13:12 and LXX Isaiah 63:3) and is uniformly rendered as a simple possessive. If Luke had wished to say “with the blood of his own Son” he had perfectly transparent means of doing so: διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου υἱοῦ, a wording he uses in Romans 8:32. No copyist, redactor or version translator ever reports such a form in Acts, and an argument that the noun nevertheless dropped out everywhere after the autograph must posit an unbroken chain of identical accidental omissions across all text-types—an hypothesis that textual criticism regards as methodologically inadmissible.

  Westcott and Hort recognised this. Hort’s private concession that υἱοῦ “might” have fallen out did not persuade him to print the conjecture; he retained the transmitted text because it is the harder reading and because no genealogy of witnesses can explain its unanimous survival if a longer reading once stood in the exemplar. Modern critical editors have been still more cautious. Nestle-Aland, UBS, SBLGNT and Tyndale House agree in rejecting the conjecture, and the two most recent comprehensive grammars of the language—Porter and Runge—classify τοῦ ἰδίου in Acts 20:28 as an adjectival genitive. Comfort’s four English “alternatives” therefore do not represent four Greek readings of equal standing; they illustrate four ways a modern interpreter might paraphrase one undisputed Greek clause. Distinguishing exegetical paraphrase from textual attestation is crucial: a translator may choose to footnote an interpretation, but may not relocate that interpretation into the main text without warning the reader that the supplied noun has no documentary support.

  Because the manuscripts are silent, the argument shifts to theology. The appendix calls the phrase “God’s blood” a difficulty and implies that the syntactical manoeuvre exists to evade patripassianism. Yet second-century Christians encountered that phrase in their liturgical reading of Acts and registered no alarm. Ignatius of Antioch writes to the Ephesian church—the very audience of Acts 20—urging them to “be renewed in the blood of God” (Eph. 1.1). The authenticity of the middle recension in which the clause occurs is verified by Polycarp’s collection notice, by multiple second- and third-century quotations, and by the discovery of an independent third-century Syriac translation whose wording coincides with the Greek. Whatever one makes of Ignatius’s broader theology, his comfort with the expression demonstrates that early orthodox circles did not identify it with patripassianism. The reason is the principle later enshrined at Chalcedon but already implicit in apostolic usage: because the one person of Christ unites two natures, what is predicated of either nature may be predicated of the person without implying confusion of natures. Paul can therefore say that the “Lord of glory” was crucified (1 Cor 2:8) and that God purchased the church with “his own blood” without suggesting that the Father as Father became incarnate or suffered. To treat the wording as theologically impossible is thus to project post-biblical scruples onto a first-century author who did not share them.

  Finally, the appeal to dynamic equivalence does not rescue the interpolation. Dynamic equivalence justifies idiomatic reshaping when literal form would obscure meaning for a contemporary audience; it does not license the insertion of a lexical item absent from the source. The NIV, NRSV and NET demonstrate proper practice: they retain the literal phrasing in the text and relegate “his own Son” to a footnote that explicitly warns readers the word is not in the Greek. The New World Translation is unique in having placed “Son” in its main line from its first edition and in the 2013 revision removing the brackets that once conceded its conjectural status. That change transforms an acknowledged gloss into a replacement for Luke’s wording and thereby crosses the boundary between translation and dogmatic revision.

  For these reasons the case for inserting “Son” remains untenable on textual, grammatical and historical grounds. The manuscripts attest only “his own blood”; the syntax most naturally construes τοῦ ἰδίου as an adjective qualifying αἵματος; the early church read the verse without embarrassment and used it to proclaim the infinite value of the redemption accomplished by the incarnate Son who is truly God. The Watchtower’s alteration, however pastorally motivated, dissolves under rigorous scrutiny as an interpretive overlay imposed upon a text whose original form is both secure and theologically coherent.
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  Earnest

  aqwsed12345 : The RSV, NRSV and NIV follow precisely that discipline [of using a marginal gloss] by placing “Son” in an explanatory foot-note.

  aqwsed12345 : The NIV, NRSV and NET demonstrate proper practice: they retain the literal phrasing in the text and relegate “his own Son” to a footnote that explicitly warns readers the word is not in the Greek.
  

  The RSV reads "... to care for the church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son" with a footnote "Greek with the blood of his Own or with his own blood".

  The NRSV/NRSVUE reads "... to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son" with a footnote "Or with his own blood; Gk with the blood of his Own".

  The NET reads "... to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son" with a footnote "Or “with his own blood”; Grk “with the blood of his own.”

  NET adds to the footnote : The genitive construction could be taken in two ways: (1) as an attributive genitive (second attributive position) meaning “his own blood”; or (2) as a possessive genitive, “with the blood of his own.” In this case the referent is the Son, and the referent has been specified in the translation for clarity.

  The NIV reads "... Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood" with a footnote "Or with the blood of his own Son".

  Let the translations speak for themselves.
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  slimboyfat

  Looking at NA28 am I reading it correcting that Irenaeus has a variant here too? Which would mean that not only was aquabot wrong about the verse having no variation (in fact it’s a famously difficult text from a textual criticism perspective) but also wrong about there being no witnesses to a different ending to the verse in particular because there are Greek MSS with different wording and apparently other early witnesses such as Irenaeus too. The trouble with AI generated answers is that they look very knowledgable and competent but they just get really basic stuff wrong and unless you know the topic really well you can’t spot it. I refuse to read it at this point because although it looks convincing it’s as reliable as jelly and you’ll end up accepting stuff that is just factually wrong. Plus he has the AI tone set to condescending mode or something.
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  aqwsed12345

  Those modern versions that replace Luke’s phrase “διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου” with “the blood of his own Son” illustrate the distinction scholars draw between translating a text and interpreting it for readers. The RSV appeared in 1952 with the literal wording “with his own blood”; the wording you quote is the 1971 “Common Bible” revision produced for ecumenical use and reprinted in the NRSV family. Exactly because that phrase departs from the Greek, every committee that placed it in the running text surrounded it with an explicit note: the RSV margin reads “Greek: with the blood of his own”; the NRSV and NRSVue add the alternative “with his own blood”; the NET explains that the translators have chosen to resolve the ambiguity for the reader and admits that no manuscript supplies υἱοῦ. The NIV panel, whose brief is a mediating style rather than formal equivalence, kept the literal wording in the text and relegated “his own Son” to a footnote. Whatever choice a committee makes, the cautionary apparatus remains so that users can see at a glance that the noun “Son” is an explanatory addition, not a second Greek reading. That editorial transparency is precisely what was removed when the 2013 revision of the NWT printed “his own Son” without brackets or note.

  The Nestle–Aland apparatus confirms why the note is necessary. Under the lemma ἐκκλησίαν, witnesses divide between τοῦ θεοῦ, τοῦ κυρίου and the later expansion τοῦ κυρίου καὶ θεοῦ; under the lemma αἵματος the only variants are the stylistic transposition to τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος in a handful of Byzantine manuscripts and the Western tendency to paraphrase by condensation. No Greek or versional witness, patristic or documentary, is cited for a text that includes υἱοῦ. Irenaeus appears in the apparatus, but only in the first line, where he joins P74‎ א B cop sa et al. in supporting τοῦ θεοῦ against τοῦ κυρίου; he is not cited under the second line because, like every other father, he quotes the clause exactly as the manuscripts transmit it. His extant Latin translation reads sanguine suo, a rendering that corresponds to the Greek genitive and that generations of editors have used to show that the literal form was in circulation long before the fourth century. Appeals to undetected corruption are therefore speculative and methodologically circular: the only way to argue that every extant witness is corrupt is to decide in advance that the autograph must have said something else.

  Textual criticism judges a variant by two criteria, attestation and transcriptional probability. The variant τοῦ κυρίου has early and diverse support and explains the rise of τοῦ θεοῦ less plausibly than the reverse, so editors assess it carefully and still place it in the margin. The conjecture τοῦ υἱοῦ, by contrast, has no attestation whatever and presupposes a universal early accident that left no trace in any text family. Westcott and Hort entertained the conjecture precisely because it would eliminate a theological tension; they nonetheless refused to print it, for the same reason they rejected every conjecture that lacked documentary evidence. Modern editors have followed their judgement. Comfort’s four English renderings are therefore not “four textually valid readings”; they are four ways to construe one Greek reading. They describe hermeneutical possibilities, not alternative autographs.

  Luke’s syntax gives no reason to prefer the conjecture. The sequence τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου stands in the second-attributive position, a slot that in both the New Testament and the papyri marks a simple possessive relationship. Hebrews 13:12 provides an isomorphous construction and is universally translated “through his own blood.” The papyrus letters that use ὁ ἴδιος as a standalone term of endearment appear in vocatives or in epistolary openings and never in Luke’s attributive pattern. If Luke had intended a possessive genitive meaning “the blood of his own Son,” he had both lexical and syntactical resources for writing it unambiguously, as Paul does in Romans 8:32; instead he chose a form whose unmarked sense is adjectival. Patristic exegesis confirms that contemporaries understood him that way. Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Chrysostom and Theodoret all cite Acts 20:28 to prove that the incarnate Christ is truly divine, each time preserving the literal genitive and none supplying “Son.” Their polemical opponents would have seized on any manuscript evidence that weakened the argument; that they do not suggests the evidence was not there to be found.

  Nor does the phrase “the blood of God” entail patripassianism. The communicatio idiomatum, already implicit in apostolic language such as 1 Cor 2:8 (“they crucified the Lord of glory”), predicates of the one person of Christ what belongs to either nature. Ignatius of Antioch’s exhortation to the Ephesians to “be refreshed in the blood of God” depends on that logic and was cited by later orthodox theologians precisely because it confesses the full deity of Christ while leaving the impassibility of the Father intact. The patristic fear of patripassianism arises only when divine and human natures are collapsed into one; Luke’s wording, Ignatius’ echo and the Chalcedonian definition alike avoid that collapse by maintaining the unity of person and the distinction of natures.

  Translations that retain the literal genitive in the text and move the conjecture to the margin honor both the manuscript tradition and the obligation to alert readers to interpretive options. The NWT’s decision first to insert “Son” in brackets and then to remove those brackets erases the distinction between evidence and exegesis and presents as text what is, at best, one possible paraphrase. A century of critical study has not produced a single Greek witness that supports that paraphrase, and modern grammars and critical editions continue to print the wording that Luke’s earliest readers knew: God purchased the church “with his own blood.”
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  slimboyfat

  The biggest problem with the Trinitarian rendering is the one that Trinitarians are least able to face and that is that it is simply overwhelmingly unlikely on an unbiased reading of the book of Acts that its author would ever have written anything remotely like a statement about God giving “his own blood”. Because the author of the book of Acts clearly viewed Jesus and God as separate and Jesus is definitely subordinate to God throughout. In fact it has perhaps one of the lowest Christologies of any book in the NT. At one point the author asserts that the reason Jesus was able to perform miracles is because God empowered him to do so. This is as far from a Trinitarian understanding of Jesus as coequal and consubstantial with God you can get. The idea that the author who otherwise consistently differentiated and subordinated Jesus to God, nevertheless slipped in a comment in 20:28 about God himself, or God the Son in Trinitarian terms I suppose, giving his blood for humans is so farfetched and removed from the spirit of the text as it is possible to get. The variations in the text and the ambiguity of the grammar in the text are just additional reasons for discounting the Trinitarian reading. The primary reason it’s wrong is that it clearly makes no sense in a first century Christian text such as this. It’s as out of place and out of time as if it were to slip in a mention the pope or the Vikings or something else that only came around in later centuries.
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  Wonderment

  J.N. Darby: “Nothing could be more mischievous than the resting the divinity of the Lord Christ on this passage [Acts 20.28] - a passage tortured by critics, no two of whom hardly can agree upon it. […] For my own part I am perfectly satisfied that ‘by the blood of His own’ - that is, what was more than our words of ‘near’ and ‘dear’ can possibly convey, it was God's own dear and beloved Son - is the true translation.” (STEM Publishing: Acts 20:28 4004E> 105)

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  The Bible simply says that God provided Jesus' blood in sacrifice to save the world. (John 3.16; 1 John 1.7)

  Those who seek to impose the Trinity dogma through this verse have no choice but to use convoluted exterior sources in length to argue against the plain biblical statement.
  
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The objection rests on a clear but unnecessary dichotomy: either Luke everywhere subordinates Jesus to the Father or he could not possibly ascribe redemptive “blood” to God in Acts 20:28. That dichotomy vanishes once one reads Acts in the same way one reads the rest of the NT—as a book that speaks of Christ from within the incarnation, alternating freely between language that highlights his functional subordination and language that assigns him uniquely divine dignity. Luke can affirm, without contradiction, that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power” (10:38) and yet call him “the Author of life” who was killed by men (3:15) or place “the Lord of glory” on a cross (echoing 1 Cor 2:8). In Acts 2:36 God’s exaltation of Jesus culminates in his being declared “both Lord and Christ”; the title κύριος carries precisely the Septuagintal resonance that the objection says Luke never entertains. A Christology that ranges from economic subordination to shared divine titles is not anachronistic: it is the texture of every major Pauline letter, of Hebrews, of John, and of the pre-Pauline hymn embedded in Phil 2. Luke is no exception.

  Hence, the assertion that the so-called Trinitarian rendering of Acts 20:28—namely, the reference to God purchasing theCchurch “with his own blood”—is “overwhelmingly unlikely” in the context of Acts, and constitutes a theological anachronism, does not withstand serious scrutiny either on literary, historical, or theological grounds. The argument is that Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, portrays a thoroughly “low Christology,” where Jesus is presented as consistently subordinate to God, and that, as such, any suggestion of divine bloodshed, or of Christ as “God the Son,” must be an intrusive later doctrinal development rather than an authentic Lukan expression. This reading, however, reflects a selective and reductionist engagement with both the text of Acts and its literary and conceptual background.

  Textual facts are equally resistant to the charge of anachronism. Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, the Peshitta and the Old Latin all transmit ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ … διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. The lone Greek word that ever varies is θεοῦ, replaced in parts of the Western tradition by κυρίου, exactly the shift one expects when scribes recoil from speaking of God’s blood. No Greek witness, and no versional witness before the seventeenth century, inserts υἱοῦ. The grammatical form Luke actually wrote puts τοῦ ἰδίου in the second-attributive position after αἵματος, the New-Testament idiom for a simple possessive relationship; Hebrews 13:12 repeats the construction and is never paraphrased “blood of his Son”. The papyrus letters adduced in defense of a substantival sense do not parallel Luke’s syntax: their ὁ ἴδιος appears in vocative or nominative address, not as an attributive genitive. A conjecture is free to imagine that a lone word dropped out “at an early date”, but textual criticism does not emend unanimous evidence on the ground that it produces a difficult theology.

  That theology, moreover, is not post-Nicene. Ignatius of Antioch—writing to the very community whose elders Paul addresses—exhorts them to be “refreshed in the blood of God” (Eph. 1:1). Tertullian argues against Praxeas that Acts 20:28 teaches the Son’s full deity because God purchased the church “with his own blood”. Neither writer is a wildcard interpolator; both are second-century bishops who read Luke’s Greek without scruple and found its wording perfectly apt. They do so because they already accept what Chalcedon would later formalize as communicatio idiomatum: the one person of the incarnate Word may be described by predicates belonging to either nature. To say that “God purchased the church with his own blood” no more collapses Father and Son than Paul’s assertion that “they crucified the Lord of glory” collapses heaven and earth. It simply recognizes that the person who bleeds on Golgotha is the same person who bears the divine name.

  While it is certainly the case that Luke (like the entire NT) affirms the historical humanity of Jesus and describes his earthly ministry as performed “through the power of God” (e.g., Acts 2:22, 10:38), it is facile to extrapolate from this the idea that Acts is therefore “as far from a Trinitarian understanding of Jesus as you can get.” On the contrary, the Lukan corpus repeatedly deploys language and categories that ascribe to Jesus prerogatives, titles, and functions reserved for God alone in Jewish monotheism. For example, in Acts 2:21 and 2:36, the title “Lord” (κύριος) is applied to Jesus in ways directly drawing upon the Septuagintal rendering of YHWH. In Acts 3:15 Jesus is called the “Author of life” (ἀρχηγὸς τῆς ζωῆς), an expression which, within the theological world of Second Temple Judaism, cannot be intelligibly predicated of any mere creature. In 4:12, salvation is said to be found “in no one else,” again echoing the exclusivist language of the Hebrew Bible regarding YHWH. The narrative of Stephen’s martyrdom (Acts 7:59) even features prayer addressed to Jesus as the heavenly Lord, in a context of cultic worship. To suggest that the Christology of Acts is “as low as possible” is to abstract from the text its constant dialectic of exaltation and mission, in which the risen Christ is enthroned as the eschatological Lord—an honorific freighted with divinity.

  The objection that the phrase is “out of place” in a first-century context is rendered hollow by the explicit testimony of the earliest post-apostolic sources. Ignatius of Antioch, writing ca. 110 CE to the Ephesians (1:1), speaks without embarrassment of Christians being “sprinkled with the blood of God.” Tertullian, Chrysostom, Jerome, and other Fathers cite Acts 20:28 as evidence for the full divinity of Christ, with no suggestion that the attribution of “God’s blood” is anachronistic or scandalous. That these writers, who are often acutely sensitive to questions of doctrinal innovation and fidelity to apostolic teaching, deploy the phrase as a commonplace is a powerful argument for its authenticity and intelligibility within early Christian theology.

  The charge that this “makes no sense in a first-century Christian text” is not only anachronistic but presumes that the robust Christology evident in the NT must be read through the grid of modern critical minimalism rather than in light of the dynamic theological development that is itself already visible within the first century. The Christology of the NT is not static but a spectrum in which the affirmation of Jesus’ messianic mission, his role as agent of God’s redemptive work, and his participation in the unique identity of God are not mutually exclusive but organically interrelated. The charge of “anachronism” fails to appreciate that the very doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, formalized in later conciliar theology, is grounded in the logic already at work in the apostolic writings: what can be said of Christ’s humanity can, because of the hypostatic union, be said of the person who is also fully divine. Hence the person who “purchases the church with his own blood” is “God,” but specifically as incarnate and redeeming in Christ.

  As for the rhetorical comparison to “mentioning the pope or Vikings,” this is a category error. The language of divine redemption through Christ’s blood is already explicit in Paul (cf. Romans 3:25; Ephesians 1:7; Colossians 1:20) and the Johannine literature (cf. 1 John 1:7; Revelation 1:5). The attribution of this act to “God” is a natural extension of the conviction, expressed in John 1:1, 1:14, Philippians 2:6–11, and elsewhere, that Jesus is fully divine and that the act of redemption is God’s own act in Christ. What is foreign to the NT is not the identification of Jesus as the one in whom God himself redeems the world at cost of his own blood, but rather the post-biblical anxiety that seeks to minimize the radicalism of this claim.

  The appeal to “low Christology” therefore proves too much. If a theology that distinguishes Father and Son precluded divine predicates for Christ, the entire corpus of pre-Nicene exegesis would be incoherent—and yet it is precisely that corpus which treats Acts 20:28 as an index of Christ’s deity. Conversely, if Luke intended a more modest claim he had every linguistic resource to write διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ, as Paul does in Rom 8:32; he did not. The NWT’s interpolation corrects the apostle by supplying the absent word and then, in its 2013 revision, suppresses the fact that the word was ever supplied. No manuscript demands the correction; the grammar resists it; the earliest readers contradict it. One may reject the incarnation, but one cannot enlist Luke to do so without rewriting the text he gave us.

  In summary, the so-called “Trinitarian reading” of Acts 20:28 is not a “later imposition,” nor does it do violence to the literary, theological, or historical context of Acts. Rather, it is the natural consequence of the text as transmitted, the grammar as written, and the early Church’s interpretation. The avoidance strategies—invoking “low Christology,” alleging anachronism, or magnifying variant readings—do not overturn the weight of the textual, grammatical, and patristic evidence. The blood that redeems is the blood of Christ, and because Christ is confessed as Lord and God, it is truly “God’s own blood”—a statement that, far from being out of place, is the climax of apostolic proclamation.

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  @Wonderment

  Darby’s judgement that Acts 20:28 “cannot bear the weight of Christ’s divinity” rests on a series of assumptions that collapse once the primary evidence is allowed to speak for itself. His first premise is that the text is so hopelessly disputed that no theological inference may legitimately be drawn from it. Yet the documentary situation is not one of chaotic disagreement. Among the uncial witnesses the reading ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ … διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου is carried by 𝔓74 (III), 𝔐, B, 33 and the Coptic versions; “τοῦ κυρίου” is confined to the Western axis headed by D and, significantly, displays the very profile—secondary, geographically limited, geared to doctrinal softening—that textual critics have long recognised as symptomatic of assimilation. No Greek manuscript, early or late, inserts υἱοῦ; the conjecture is a nineteenth-century expedient, not part of the transmissional history.

  Darby’s second premise is grammatical: he insists that the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου must be read substantivally, “of His own [Son].” This is linguistically strained. In Luke-Acts every unambiguously substantival use of ὁ ἴδιος is marked either by the article in the first attributive position or by syntactic independence (Jn 1:11; 13:1; Ac 4:23; 24:23). Acts 20:28, by contrast, places the adjective in the second attributive position after αἵματος, a slot that throughout Hellenistic prose signals adjectival force. Hebrews 13:12 (διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) supplies a perfect parallel and has never prompted the addition of “Son.” The papyrological parallels often invoked—terms of affection such as ὁ ἴδιος used vocatively—occur in salutations, not in genitive attributive chains. Darby’s grammatical route therefore asks Luke to adopt a construction for which no secure analogue exists in his diction.

  The appeal to “plain biblical statement” in John 3:16 and 1 John 1:7 unintentionally undercuts the objection. In Johannine theology the Father gives the Son precisely so that the life of God is mediated in the flesh and blood of Jesus; Johannine Christology habitually predicates of the one incarnate subject what belongs eternally to the Word (Jn 1:14; 20:28). Luke follows the same logic when he juxtaposes a divine title with a human act (“you killed the Author of life,” 3:15; “they crucified the Lord of glory,” echoed in 1 Cor 2:8). The statement that God purchases the church with “his own blood” is therefore not alien to early Christian proclamation; it is the narrative shorthand for the communicatio idiomatum already presupposed in apostolic preaching.

  That early readers recognized no incongruity is shown by Ignatius of Antioch, writing scarcely a decade after Acts attained circulation in Asia Minor, who exhorts the Ephesians to “be refreshed in the blood of God” (Eph 1:1). Ignatius’ phrase is not a rhetorical flourish imported from later conciliar theology; it is the way a second-century bishop heard the apostolic kerygma. Likewise Tertullian can cite the verse verbatim—ecclesiam Dei quam sanguine suo comparavit—and turn it against Modalist opponents, confident that the wording proves rather than undermines the personal distinction within the Godhead.

  Darby’s final suggestion is theological: because Acts “has one of the lowest Christologies in the New Testament,” the verse cannot ascribe divine blood to Christ. But the premise is false. Acts grounds Jesus’ saving significance in his exaltation to the right hand of God (2:33-36; 5:31), depicts him as the object of cultic invocation (7:59), and assigns to him prerogatives such as granting repentance and forgiveness (5:31)—roles Second-Temple monotheism reserves for YHWH. A narrative that can present the risen Christ as sharing the divine name and authority can equally speak of the church as acquired by “God’s own blood,” for the blood belongs to the one person who is simultaneously the human Messiah and the Lord of glory.

  No responsible Trinitarian argument rests on a single text. What Acts 20:28 does supply—when read according to its best attested form and ordinary Greek syntax—is a striking instance of the New Testament’s integrated Christology: the saving act realized in the historical passion is attributed without hesitation to τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ. The verse is therefore neither a tortured crux upon which the doctrine precariously depends nor a late doctrinal interpolation; it is one thread in the coherent fabric of apostolic testimony to the incarnate Son’s full participation in the divine identity.
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  slimboyfat

  In Acts 2:36 God’s exaltation of Jesus culminates in his being declared “both Lord and Christ”; the title κύριος carries precisely the Septuagintal resonance that the objection says Luke never entertains.

  Again another subtle but important misquotation. Acts 2:36 doesn’t say Jesus was “declared” Lord and Christ at his exaltation. It says that God “has made” Jesus Lord and Christ. Firstly, nobody ever “made” God Lord, he is Lord by right. If Jesus was “made” Lord, as Acts says, then he is clearly not God, of whom this could never be said. Secondly, the author of Acts makes it extremely clear that Jesus, as Lord, is distinct from YHWH in his quotation of Psalm 110:1 where Jesus as messianic Lord (adonai) is distinct and subordinate to YHWH.
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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The verb ἐποίησεν in Acts 2:36 neither implies that Jesus was ontologically fashioned into something he previously was not nor does it underwrite a “low” Christology that excludes his participation in the divine identity. In Luke-Acts ποιεῖν frequently denotes appointment to a role or the public establishment of a status rather than metaphysical manufacture: Peter tells Cornelius that God “made” (ἔθηκεν) Jesus ὁρισθέντα κριτὴν ζώντων καὶ νεκρῶν, “appointed judge of the living and the dead” (10:42), language no one takes to mean that Jesus first came into existence at the appointment. In the LXX the same semantic range appears when YHWH “makes” David king (2 Sam 5:12), a recognition ceremony, not an act of creation. Luke therefore uses ἐποίησεν in 2:36 to describe the eschatological enthronement whereby the risen Messiah is invested, in his humanity, with universal sovereignty.

  Hence the Greek word ποιέω (poieō) in Acts 2:36, translated as "made," does not imply creation or origination. Instead, it conveys the idea of appointing or declaring in context. This is consistent with the Septuagint's use of the term in Isaiah 63:14 to describe YHWH’s actions, which do not suggest creation but affirmation or designation. In the context of Acts 2:36, "made" refers to the Father’s public declaration of Jesus as "Lord and Christ" through the Resurrection and Ascension. Jesus’ Lordship and Messiahship were always intrinsic to His divine identity, but they were definitively revealed to humanity through these salvific events. This aligns with Romans 1:4, where Paul states that Jesus was "declared (horízō) to be the Son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the dead." Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 emphasizes the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah’s death, resurrection, and exaltation. By declaring Jesus as "Lord and Christ," Peter challenges his audience to recognize the crucified and risen Jesus as the divine Messiah foretold by David. The sermon’s climax, Acts 2:36, does not undermine Jesus’ deity but rather invites the Jewish audience to acknowledge Him as the divine Lord and promised Christ. The subsequent call to repentance (Acts 2:38) underscores the necessity of faith in Jesus for salvation.

  That meaning coheres perfectly with Psalm 110:1, which Peter has just cited. The psalm distinguishes κύριος (YHWH) from David’s κύριος (the Messiah) yet unites them in shared throne-space: to sit at the right hand of YHWH is to share divine prerogatives over the cosmos. Jewish Second-Temple writings reserve that seat for no mere creature (cf. 1 En. 61:8; 4 Ezra 13:26-37). Luke’s audience therefore hears the exaltation as the Father’s public ratification of the Son’s sovereign status, not a promotion of a previously non-divine agent.

  The charge that no one “makes” God Lord confuses functional investiture with essential being. Phil 2:6-11 supplies the apostolic interpretation: the One who was already ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ—sharing the divine condition—embraced servanthood; consequently “God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every name.” The “Name” is not a novel identity but the manifest disclosure, in the arena of history, of the divine dignity he possessed from eternity (Jn 17:5). Acts 2 depicts the same movement from humiliation to vindication: the resurrection-ascension does not deify Jesus; it enthrones the incarnate Word as the eschatological Lord proclaimed by Joel and David.

  The assertion that κύριος in Acts must carry only an “adonai not YHWH” sense overlooks Luke’s exploitation of Septuagintal usage. Throughout the speech Peter alternates κύριος for both divine Persons without explanatory caveats. In 2:21 he cites Joel 3:5, “everyone who calls on the name of the LORD (κύριος) shall be saved,” then in 2:38 applies the same saving invocation to Jesus. The early Christian hermeneutic intentionally transfers texts about YHWH to the risen Christ (Rom 10:13; 1 Cor 1:2; Phil 2:10-11). Far from “avoiding confusion,” Luke expects his hearers to grasp that the identity of God embraces the exalted Jesus while still distinguishing Father and Son. That is precisely why “God made him both Lord and Christ”: the messianic office and the divine name converge in the one crucified-and-raised person.

  Finally, the suggestion that deploying Acts 2:36 Christologically amounts to reading fourth-century dogma back into a first-century text disregards second-century reception. Ignatius can speak of “Jesus Christ our God” (Eph. 18:2) while quoting Psalm 110:1; Justin and Irenaeus identify the enthroned κύριος with the divine Logos; none perceive any dissonance. The later conciliar formulas distilled, they did not invent, the logic already present in Luke’s narrative: God’s saving action is mediated through, and fully revealed in, the Son who now shares the Father’s sovereign name.

  Acts 2:36 therefore neither denies Christ’s deity nor supports an Arian reading. It proclaims, in idiom native to Second-Temple Judaism, that the man Jesus, risen from the dead, now exercises the authority—and bears the name—proper to YHWH, because the one God has acted in him and through him as the climax of redemptive history.