Boatbums said:
“When Jesus said to the Jewish religious leaders of His day that he is the I AM, that God is His Father, they knew very well what He was saying and they took up stones to stone Him because, “that thou, being a man, makest thyself God” (John 10:33)”
You said:
“But Jesus showed their accusation was false as he said the term “god” could be said of humans, he has said the was “the Son of God”. “Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world , Thou blasphemest because I said I am the Son of God ?” (John 10:35) “
Technically, you are incorrect to say Jesus proved their accusation false. He did no such thing. Read again. He simply outlawyers them, which, as a lawyer myself, I can really appreciate.
First, note that there are two similar but separate events here. The John 10 episode was not in response to the I AM statement, but to this statement:
John 10:30 I and my Father are one.
The other event occurs in John 8:58, and brings another accusation he is claiming to be God, but in that situation he simply escapes. See John 8:59.
But if you read both of these carefully, he never denied the charge that he was claiming to be God. He simply evaded their desire to kill him. In John 8, he escaped physically, but in John 10 he escaped legally.
Indeed, search the Scriptures, and you will find he never once said, “I am not God,” or “I am a fellow creature, just like you,” or “I am an angel,” etc. Not one denial of the charge.
What then is he up to in John 10 when he refers to the “gods” of Psalm 82:6?
Consider what has happened. They have accused him of what, under their law, they regarded as a capitol offence, carrying a penalty of death by stoning, for making himself out to be God.
He elects not to escape physically this time, so what are his possible defenses to this accusation? Under the law, you can defend by denying the facts, or you can admit the facts and defend using just the letter of the law, which would be a perfectly ironic way for Jesus to defeat his legalistic opponents. Here, Jesus does not deny the charge. Instead, he denies that their law makes such a claim punishable if the claim is proven true.
Then he sets up this wonderful contrast between derived and innate deity. On the one hand, the Jews are precluded from condemning him because, as he points out, if even the wicked judges of Israel in Psalm 82 were immune to a charge of blasphemy when called gods, because they actually had derivative authority from God, how much more immune would a true Son of God be, whose authority was not derived, but innate as the unique Son of God, as demonstrated by both his good works and his miraculous power?
So when he tells them this, then reminds them that “the Scripture cannot be broken,” he is shoving it their face that they have no way to win a blasphemy case against him unless they can prove his claim to deity is false, which he and they both know can’t be done, given who he really is.
2. On Ego Eimi
You also said:
“Translating “ego eimi” as “I Am” at John 8:58 makes a mess of the simple statement Jesus made. Good English must pay attention to the tenses and “I Am” doesn't do that. Jesus said he existed before Abraham existed or came to be so “I am” is simply the wrong tense, it could better be translated as “I was” or “I have been” . And a number of translations do just that.”
Well, the problem you have there is that the tense conflict really is present in the Greek, and that is the single most striking thing about this passage, and it is central to understanding why it caused his Jewish listeners to again think he was claiming to be God.
In translation, when you encounter something unusual in the original, you have two choices. You can hide it behind an unfaithful translation, or you can be faithful to what was actually said. If we assume, and I do, that these words are God-breathed, I can think of absolutely nothing that would justify trying to hide what the writer obviously wrote. To do so would be to fight God Himself.
Therefore, I believe it is wrong to try to recast “ego eimi” as anything other than the indisputable present active indicative verb that it is in this passage. The proper translation really is, “before Abraham came to be, I am.” If Jesus had wished to say “I was,” there were much better options in the Greek for saying exactly that.
Consult any standard conjugation chart for eimi, and you will find the first person singular present indicative, “I am,” is eimi, exactly the word found in the “ego eimi” of John 8:58:
πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι, ἐγὼ εἰμι.
Before Abraham came to be I am
Note: Some have speculated that eimi should be understood as past tense even though it is present tense because a perfect (past tense of completed action) is not available for this verb, eimi being defective. However, the normal contextual cues required for such a usage are not present in this text, and the bulk of modern translations honestly reflect the two contrasting tenses as found in the text:
King James,
New King James,
New American Standard Bible,
New International Version,
Philips Modern English,
Revised Standard Version,
Today's English Version,
Jerusalem Bible,
New English Bible,
American Standard Version,
New American Bible,
Douay,
Young's Literal Translation,
Berkeley Version,
Norlie's Simplified New Testament,
New Testament in Modern English (Montgomery),
New Testament in Modern Speech (Weymouth),
Wuest's Expanded Translation,
Amplified New Testament,
New Testament (Swann),
Aldine Bible,
Four Gospels (C. C. Torrey),
Confraternity Version,
Four Gospels (Rieu),
New Testament (Knox),
Concordant Literal New Testament,
Anchor Bible,
Rotherham,
Holy Bible in Modern English (Fenton),
Bible in BASIC English,
Better Version (Estes),
Sacred Writings (A. Campbell),
New Easy-to-Read Version,
New Testament for the New World.
Furthermore, there was an even better solution available that was not used. Why not use the same verb as used for Abraham? After all, genesthai (“came to be”) is from the root ginomai (“come to be”) and Jesus could have easily matched “Abraham came to be” by continuing to use ginomai, conjugating it as “gegona,” “I came to be,” which would be the truth if he were indeed a created being.
For an Arian this would seem to be the perfect and expected solution, because it still gives Jesus first-in-time priority over Abraham, but avoids “confusing” the listeners into thinking he is claiming to be eternal in the same sense as God is, which shocking impression was certainly created when he used “eimi” instead.
However, unfortunately for the Arian theory, the mismatch of the two verbs is present right there in the text for all the world to see. John, and really Jesus, intended it to be the attention-getting contrast that it plainly is.
But why? Clearly, at a minimum, Jesus is calling attention to the fact that Abraham did come into being at a point in the past, and if he had wished to say of Himself that he came into being before Abraham, there was, as we have pointed out, no shortage of ways to say exactly that.
But he didn’t do that. By positioning his present tense against Abraham’s past tense, He intentionally presented the idea that he stands above and outside the human experience of time. In short, he is declaring his eternal nature. As the Jews who heard this knew, no one but The Eternal God could ever be worthy of such a title, and so they sought to kill him. In this sense he appears to be associating himself with El-Olam, the Everlasting God, as used in several places:
Gen 21:33 And Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God.
See also Ps. 90:1-3, 93:2; Isa. 26:4
3. On Eyeh Asher Eyeh
Now there is a rather technical argument that his proclamation here also resonated with his Jewish listeners as literally paralleling the I AM declaration used in Exodus 3:14. While I believe that to be true, a full discussion of that is probably not beneficial if we cannot get past basic issues like the normal usage of eimi.
In short form, as you pointed out, the Hebrew of Exodus transliterates to “Eyeh Asher Eyeh.” The exact meaning of this has been the subject of much debate, which I will not reproduce here, except to say that the translators of the Septuagint apparently did not buy the future tense argument, because they translated it into the Greek as
ego eimi ho on
I am the being
Which apparently appears in contracted form in Isaiah in several places. For one example:
Isaiah 41:4 Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.
…where the Septuagint uses the “ego eimi” for the expression, “I am,” as also in Isaiah 43:10 and 46:4.
Now at first one could think this was nothing special. After all, the man born blind whom Jesus healed had used “ego eimi” without a predicate, i.e., without a noun or pronoun spelled out after the “am.” However, in such cases where a predicate is implied by context, one may be supplied, hence “I am he,” because the predicate is implied by him answering the question “are you him?”
But where no predicate is supplied, it was the rule from the classical period forward that “eimi” without a predicate, either actual or implied, was an assertion of existence. Such was the case, for example, when Jesus responded to the angry crowd by contrasting his own timeless existence relative to Abraham’s emergent existence.
This sense of ego eimi corresponds perfectly to other passages which convey Christ as a timeless being, without beginning or end, such as
John 1:1 “In the beginning was the word,”
i.e., the word was already in existence when everything began.
Heb 13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.
Which statement could never be made of a created being, for whom there would be some “yesterday” when he didn’t exist, and so NOT the same as today or tomorrow, and who could not be the same for all eternity future, as all God’s created beings, being finite, must necessarily learn and grow and change, all the more so at the high end than the low end.
The sobering conclusion of all this is that Thomas was absolutely right to respond as he did to the risen Jesus:
John 20:28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.
Peace,
SR
GREAT post. Thank you.
Can “eimi” be translated as “have been”? Certainly if the context and sense allows for it as it does at John 14:9 when Jesus says to Phillip:
“Have I been (eimi) with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me?”
Both at John 8:58 and 14:9 Jesus is referring to a period of time past and continued into the present so “eimi” must be translated as either “be” in the past tense or an action from the past continuing into the present. “I am” doesn't work as an existence in the past.
Where “I am” does work is in the eyes of those who see a connection with Exodus 3:14 where so many translations render the Hebrew
“ayeh asher ayer” as “I am that I am”. Neat! Jesus says he is the “I am” of Exodus 3:14! Or does he? Does Exodus 3:14 even translate as “I am”?
“I shall be the one who will be” and then instead of “I am” as The Name, “He who will be” is the way the Brown-Driver- Briggs Hebrew/English Lexicon explains the Hebrew verb “ayer”.
“I will be that I will be” is an alternate reading in a footnote in the ASV on Ex. 3:14.
Verse 15 reveals that the foregoing has been a explanation of The Name since Moses is to tell the children of Israel, “Jehovah” has sent him.
Jesus isn't quoting Exodus 3:14 at John 8:58 any more than the blind man who said “I am” (ego eimi) at John 9:9 but Jesus is saying he was in existence at a indefinite point in past time, “before Abraham was”.
(tea time..back later)
No, what Thomas asked for was visible, tangible proof of the resurrection, that what the disciple saw was indeed the resurrected Christ.
When Thomas gets that proof he exclaims, “My Lord and My God”. Does this mean he believes he is seeing God? No, since as John has written at 1 John 4:12, “No man has ever seen God”.
What then did Thomas mean? Possibly that he was seeing the Father and His power through the Christ as Jesus was said to be the “image” of his Father.
Thomas’ exclamation is not evidence of a Father, Son, Holy Spirit in one God.
“First, note that there are two similar but separate events here. The John 10 episode was not in response to the I AM statement, but to this statement:
John 10:30 I and my Father are one.”
In so saying Jesus was not saying he was God, that was the false accusation of his opposers. In vs. 36 Jesus says he is “The son of God” not God.
“Consult any standard conjugation chart for eimi, and you will find the first person singular present indicative, “I am,” is eimi, exactly the word found in the “ego eimi” of John 8:58: “
But a translator must also transmit meaning depending upon how the word is used and “eimi” can be translated “been” if the context calls for it, example already given.