Would you care to "disprove" any of the info on the web pages I posted? Please I am dying to know where the horrible scholarship and exegesis is. I challenge you to disprove something on any of those web pages. That shouldn't be too hard for you, should it, seeing that you must be a master of scholarship and an expert at exegesis?
I did not make a personal attack, I made a statement of fact. Scholarship and exegesis are lacking. For an example, from the following link we find this: http://www.macgregorministries.org/jehovahs_witnesses/jesus_god/jesus_is_god.html
Again in Mark 15:39 The centurion said of Jesus. while He was on the cross. "TRULY THIS MAN WAS THE SON OF GOD.' A look at the Greek shows that there is no article before the word "God." But Jesus was not the son of someone who was "god-like." Rather. He is the son of "God.' In this case the rule that applies is the rule that predicate nouns take the article if they follow the verb. And since "God' or 'Theos' precedes the verb, it has no article, just as in John 1:1 above.
Talk about entirely importing something unrelated. God would be the genitive QEOU, it would not be a preverbal anarthrous predicate nominative ala John 1:1c. And yet they use this to "disprove" the translation of "a god" in John 1:1? This is poor scholarship. It is unresearched and it is the use of a wanna-be argument when there is no argument to be made.
Where does the Bible ever say that Christians are not under God's Command to worship Him ALONE? What do you base that claim on? Jesus repeated this Commandment (Matthew 4:10, Luke 4:8). Do you also claim that Christians are not under God's Moral Laws, such as "You shall not murder," "You shall not covet," and "You shall not commit adultery"? Are Christians still under those commands or not? If they are, then why are they under those laws, but not under God's Command to worship only Him?
Yes we are under the moral law, but this is not a matter of morality. Do we observe the Sabbath? No! We are not to worship idols, as the NT makes very clear (1Joh. 5:21), but Jesus is not an idol, he is the Son of God. Hebrews 1 presents a command from God to the angels to worship Jesus. God is making the command, so it is to be obeyed.
If Jesus was created by God, then how did Jesus exist before ALL things were created? (Colossians 1:16-18) If Jesus was created by God, then how did God created all things through Jesus? (John 1:3)
Because the adjective PAS is contextually relative. For example, in Hebrews 2:10 if "all things" are subject to Jesus, how come the Father is not? Indeed, in John 1:3, if "all things" are created through Christ, is not the Father created through Jesus too, because it says "all"? No. The exception of the Father is implied, because the Father is not created, and so the exception of the Son is seen because the Son cannot be created through himself. John 1:4, when translated literally from the Greek while properly attaching to the sentence the words hO GEGONEN as the early church did, reads: "What has come to be in him was life and the life was the light of men." Who is "the light of men"? The Messiah! And what? "The life." And what happened to the life? It "came to be." If Jesus is the light of men and the light of men is the life, Jesus came to be! John 1:4 says he was created.
Also, if God created all things through Jesus (as stated in John 1:3), then how did God also create all things ALONE, BY HIMSELF? (Isaiah 44:24)
Which in context is dealing with God vs. idols. Of course all things originate with God and so he does it "by himself," but doing it by himself does not stop him from making use of his own creation. God made use of his own creation to create many things, including gravity, various gasses, etc. Even with the creation of man he used dirt and water. To say God made use of his own creation does not contradict the verse, but if somebody or thing that wasn't his creation was involved, that indeed would contradict it.
If a person in the first century had wanted to write God's Name/Title "I AM" from Exodus 3:14 in Greek, how would it have been written?
Some form of esomai or egw eimi ho wn. Take a look at Acts 3:13, you'll find it alludes back to Exodus 3:15, and we see that the speaker there (and thus also in 14) was not Jesus at all, but it was the Father.
If Jesus simply meant that He existed before Abraham in John 8:58, then why did the Jews try to stone Him for blasphemy? It was not against Jewish law to claim to be an angel was it? It was only against Jewish law to claim to be God or equal to God. So, no matter what you claim Jesus was saying in John 8:58, the Jews clearly understood that He was using the Divine Name "I AM" found in Exodus 3:14.
It was blasphemy to claim to take authority from God for yourself when God did not grant it to you, which is what Jesus was doing. He was claiming, in their eyes, to have stolen an existence that lasted for roughly 2000 years, something that no man is capable of without the authority from God to do so. As he didn't have it, in their eyes, and he was claiming it, he was deserving of stoning. The grammar in John 8:58 simply does not allow for a connection to Exodus 3:14. To make such a leap is entirely unwarranted and cannot stand up under examination.
Also, let's say, for the sake of argument, you are right about John 8:24, and Jesus was actually saying "I Am He." (Compare with Isaiah 43:10) What is your interpretation of that? What did Jesus mean? It was obviously a very serious matter. Jesus said that they were all going to "die in their sins" if they did "not believe that I AM [He]."
Isaiah 43:10 does not use the words in any special sense. God uses ANI HU in a rather normal way, where the pronoun HU refers back to an antecedent. Similarly, John 8:24 takes us back several verses to where Jesus claimed to be "the light of the world."
Also, "I AM HE" was a title/name of YHWH in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 32:39, Isaiah 41:4, 43:10, 43:13, 46:4, 48:12, 51:12, 52:6)
No, it is not. It is a regular use of language that is not at all unique. Keeping them in context there is nothing special or unusual about any one of these texts. You may want to consider this article to see how none of those texts contain any idea of a "name."
Mondo
