Was Jesus Created?

by 9thWonder 97 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  ithinkisee

  In the Bible there are verses that support the Trinity and verses that supoort the anti trinitarian view, and each side tries to bend the verses that don't agree with its views so as to make them fit in with it.

  I am not 100% sure yet, but I think that if you look at all the scriptures in context you will see that Jesus was not created and is God the Son.

  Of course this is if you believe the bible. If I were to believe the bible (which I am not 100% sure yet), I would have to take it at it's word, and that is that Jesus was God and was not created.

  Only when you take scriptures out of context does the possibility of Jesus being created and not God come into play.

  Only my opinion at the moment though.

  -ithinkisee
• 

  greendawn

  I think it's if you take verses out of context that you can arrive at the Trinitarian concept, my position is that the bible was not written for a tiny fraction of humans with deep philosophical training that would be able to discern deep and unusual meanings in basic words like firstborn son, father, creation etc.
• 

  Leolaia

  greendawn....It is not just trinitarianism...any systematic christology that tries to harmonize statements throughout all the NT to arrive at a single christology does pretty much the same thing. The Watchtower christology is also very eclectic. In reality, scripture presents a multiplicity of christologies and theologies about Jesus and his relation to God, each writer essentially expressed themselves a little differently on the subject -- and even Paul varied in the way he conceptualized the Son. What I wrote essentially referred only to Paul, and mainly only was representative of Colossians and exaltation christology of the other books. And it is only my semi-informed interpretation of what Paul wrote. If you read Matthew, John, Hebrews, etc. on their own terms, you'll find quite different approaches toward defining who Jesus is. The Society's Arian-esque christology, I believe, is inadequate because it glosses over and obscures the current of "high christology" in early Christianity (especially found in Paul, the Johannine corpus, Ignatius, etc.). On the other hand, trinitarian christology also glosses over the current of "low christology" in early Christianity (especially found in Matthew, the Kerygmata Petrou, etc.). No systematic christology is really fully adequate, as it is an ad hoc harmonization of data from originally independent texts, but I am far more sympathetic to trinitarianism because it seems to best respect (1) the deity of Christ, (2) the monotheistic impulse of there being "one God", (3) the personal distinction between the Son and the Father. I think of trinitarianism as an artificial construct, but as constructs go, it seems to be the best harmonization of these three conflicting beliefs (e.g. how can Christ be God and yet there be a distinction between the Son and the Father, and yet there be only one God?).
• 

  Justin

  leolaia . . . but you cannot have it both ways. You cannot perform an exegesis of Colossians 1:15 as if you were an apologist for orthodoxy (or trinitarianism) and at the same time claim to be treating it as a critical scholar would. Colossians 1:15 is an embarassment for trinitarians, and this is why they must go to great lengths to prove that prototokos ("firstborn") is there used metaphorically. The meaning is not a natural one in that context. One might compare this attempt to that of Roman Catholic apologists who, since the time of Jerome, have been saying that adelphoi ("brothers") actually means cousins when applied to Jesus' relatives because the word may have that meaning at times in the LXX. Certainly, in Colossians, "firstborn of all creation" is parallel with "firstborn of the dead." Jesus was the first to be born from among the dead (in an eschatological sense), and he was first to be born in creation.

  The argument that "firstborn" is here used something like an honorary title sounds like it may have first arisen in the fourth century in an anti-Arian context. That fourth century conflict, though, while it should not be read back into the NT documents, may shed some light on our problem. What was of paramount importance in the Arian controversy is that the orthodox - over against the Arian position - claimed that the pre-existent Logos (who become incarnate as Jesus) had been begotten of the Father rather than created out of nothing. This is an all-important distinction which is implicit in the JW vs. Trinity conflict now current, but it is not now made explicit as it was in the fourth century. A begotten Logos is one who is generated out of the essence of God, and so shares the divinity of the Father. It is "Light from Light." A created Logos would be one who has a purely creaturely status like the created world. In Colossians Paul does not make this distinction, but uses terminology which is mixed - "firstborn" for the Logos and "creation" for the world. Both have their origin in God, but Paul does not press that there may be a difference in the manner of their origin. Later trinitarian theology, in an attempt to avoid all subordination, would claim that the relationship between the Father and the Son is an eternal one - hence an eternal generation or begetting.

  A third text which may be used by Arians, if it is accepted that "Wisdom" in the Proverbs is a designation for the pre-incarnate Christ (and both parties in the fourth century accepted this), is Proverbs 8:22ff: "The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works." (LXX) This text uses both ektise ("made" or "created") and genna ("begets" - verse 23). When commenting on this text, Justin Martyr chose to emphasize the latter rather than the former. We could consider this parallel to the situation in Colossians, where the original author has chosen not to emphasize the difference in terms, but the emerging Church found it necessary to make such a distinction.
• 

  zagor

  It’s a simple question which requires a simple answer. As we are told that God chose the foolish ones over the wise even I would understand a simple yes or no from the mouth of the only one who can tell us.

  Reoccurring question of trinity eh? This above is really the essence of it. Did simple minded first christians believe in trinity? Or did trinity idea have its development period? And of course there is always question of how Jesus revealed himself to his disciples . So if he told those simple-minded people he was a son of god what do you think they would understand it as? Would they try to make complicated constructs or would they just take his word for it? It is not anymore about what his real nature is but how he wanted to be revealed.

  Perhaps he was an alien from another dimension, and wanted to relate his nature in a way simple-minded fishermen could understand

  Anyway, here is a thread I started not long ago about similar topic. Have a read.

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/92969/1.ashx
• 

  tetrapod.sapien

  Was Jesus Created?

  yes, by the first century writers who wanted to wrestle power from the religious establishment.
• 

  Leolaia

  Justin....First, I wanted to say that that was a really nice post and you raised some good points. But I want to clarify that (perhaps contrary to what you would call "orthodox" trinitarian approaches), I was not construing "firstborn" in a strictly metaphorical way. Jesus is "firstborn" because he is the first to be raised from the dead and made a "son" of God, and as the firstborn he has inherited all things as his birthright. If he was "appointed" to be firstborn (cf. Psalm 89:27, "I will also appoint him my firstborn, most exalted of the kings of the earth"), and even if his inheritance due to his being appointed (cf. Hebrews 1:2 "the Son that he has appointed to inherit all things"), he is still the firstborn he was appointed to be. Moreover, I think Paul may have indeed construed the resurrection as a begetting: he describes Jesus' resurrection in terms of God giving his Spirit and power to bring life to the lifeless Jesus, so that Jesus was "declared to be Son of God ... through his resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:4), just as anyone who is born receives life from God; in the case of Christians who are adopted as sons, who receive everlasting life through the Son, Paul refers to them as "born by the power of the Spirit" (Galatians 4:29).

  So, at least in my speculative exegesis, Paul was using "firstborn" in its usual sense of the term....Jesus was the first member of a much larger group to be born through the resurrection, and he has birthright rights by virtue of being firstborn (which he shares with his brothers, cf. Romans 8:20-30).

  Certainly, in Colossians, "firstborn of all creation" is parallel with "firstborn of the dead." Jesus was the first to be born from among the dead (in an eschatological sense), and he was first to be born in creation.

  This is where I disagree....the two expressions are NOT in fact equivalent: prótotokos pasés ktiseós "firstborn of/over all creation" in v. 15, and prótotokos ek tón nekrón "firstborn out of the dead" in v. 18. The first expression has a genitive relation, which could either be a partitive or a genitive of subordination, whereas the second has the preposition ek "from" which indicates that the "firstborn" was once a member of the group of "dead (ones)". If we assume that the genitive is partitive in v. 15, then we would have to assume that prótotokos means two different things: (1) "firstborn" as the first created being, and (2) "firstborn" as the first resurrected being. My interpretation is that prótotokos means the same thing in both contexts (#2), and thus it has this sense in v. 15 (i.e. "the firstborn [from the dead] over all creation"). In my first post in this thread, I also gave two exegetical reasons from the text itself that invalidates a partitive understanding of the genitive case: (1) the word for "all" would shift its meaning at least three times in the text, variously including or excluding Jesus, and (2) the logical relation expressed by hoti "because" in v. 16 makes sense if the genitive conveys the concept of Christ as supreme over "all creation". In support of the genitive of subordination interpretation also is the whole point of v. 16-18 which states over and again all the different ways in which Christ is supreme over all things. So I do not view the interpretation of prótotokos pasés ktiseós as "the first to be born in creation" as best befitting the context, imho.

  I also recognize that there were other early concepts of Jesus' begetting, including the quasi-Platonic concept of the begetting of Jesus as God's first thought or logos, the adoptionist concept of begetting at Jesus' baptism (cf. in Ebionism), the creation/begetting of Wisdom in Proverbs, etc., but I did not discuss these (as well as the valuable apologist distinction between begetting and creating) because I do not believe that these are representive of Paul's views; Paul's gospel is almost entirely focused on Jesus' death and resurrection and discusses Jesus' Sonship in those terms (Romans 1:4).
• 

  hmike

  9th Wonder,

  The pastor you had the discussion with brought that up about Jesus because that is invariably the crucial issue for religions and individuals alike. Many will hold a belief in God (possibly known by different names), but it always seems to come down to "What do you do with Jesus?" No wonder he is called "A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall" (I Peter 2:8).

  There are issues in Christianity that are important to us that the writers of the Bible texts did not address directly or specifically because those issues were not important to them. After the sayings of Jesus on how to live, the most important issue for them was, "Did Jesus have the authority and approval of God do and say what he did?" They all agreed in the affirmative, with evidence cited including (1) the miracles Jesus performed, (2) his resurrection from the dead, (3) the voice of God (at the baptism and on the mountain), and (4) how various details of the life of Jesus conformed to OT prophecies. The writers of the synoptic gospels did not concern themselves with the pre-existence of Jesus, choosing to focus on his earthly life and the evidence just cited. The book of Acts picks this up by citing miracles performed through the apostles in the name of Jesus. From the gospels, it is only in the book of John that the writer uses the pre-incarnate state of Jesus--the Logos--as an argument for the authority of Jesus: Jesus had the authority of God because he was one with God from the beginning and came from Him. This completely differentiated Jesus from any other prophet or teacher in the past, present, or future, and was meant to be a definitive response to any dispute about his right to act as God Almighty.

  So, from the standpoint of the writers, this was all they wanted to establish. They were not interested in discussing the nature of Jesus from a philosophical perspective, or just for the sake of discussion. They went only as far as was necessary to support their assertion (initially to the Jews) that Jesus was God’s promised Messiah and Lord. The Trinity Doctrine was not the issue for them the way it is for us today, so it was not specifically addressed--it must be inferred from what was written.

  By referring to the pre-incarnate Jesus as the Word (Logos), the answer to your question I see is that the Word could not have been created because the Genesis account has God speaking everything into existence. Now, you can speculate about the meaning of this representation, but what it appears to come down to is that God couldn’t (or chose not to) create the means by which He created.
• 

  funkyderek

  Was Jesus created?

  No, he evolved.
• 

  LittleToe

  I'm not going to enter the Trinitarian debate, but I will answer the original question:

  Scripture does not indicate that Jesus was created.

  Whether you want to take that information and run with it into the Trinitarian / Binitarian / Unitarian court is up to you. Whether you want to just declare "God" to be a family of persons, with the Son having been "born" of spirit parents, might be another. Whether you want to dismiss the whole issue as moot (as, for example, Tetra), might be yet another. But the bottom line is that this is another area where the WTS has made stuff up and bent scripture out of shape, to support their theology.