1. About John 1:3.
You like AT Robertson, so do I. In this place he takes the negative half of the exclusion and obliterates any hope of squeezing in an exception, because the phrase actually reads as follows:
Panta di autou egeneto kai xoris autou egeneto oude ev ho gegonen
Literally
All things by means of him were created and without him was created not even one created thing.
Did you catch that? An emphatic denial that even one created thing was made apart from Christ. There is clarity in John here. He means to deny the Gnostics their perverse misuse of angels, and your own choice of Greek grammarian agrees, it’s a lockout. No angels treading there.
2. On Hebrews 1:8
“Your throne O God” would be the vocative rendering, and nominative would change it to “God is your throne.” No contest. It’s vocative. Of course Robertson’s more tenuous evaluation is necessarily limited to the linguistic artifacts of the one verse, but the problem is not unsolvable, because we also have the Hebrew psalm upon which this quote is based, and that is clearly in the vocative:
Psa 45:6 Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre.
Which only makes sense, as there never has been any such expression as God being a throne for some high king. It really is ludicrous on its face.
Therefore, as the writer of Hebrews applies this Messianic psalm to the Son, and as we know there is no God but Jehovah, the only reasonable conclusion is that he means, like John, to set Christ above the angels, in a unique category of sonship, which of course has implications for the use of legal terms like “firstborn,” which imply in this case a logical order, not a chronological order.
For a true chronology of the Word, we must again look to John 1:1, in which we find:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”
Note the first clause. In the beginning, the Word simply was, in a verb of being that represents a continuous state. Eternal. At the beginning he had no beginning, because he already was. Again, keep in mind the John is laying out a case for who Jesus is that will defeat the Gnostic distortions trying to reduce him to a mere angel.
The rest of the passage is translated correctly as given above, and even AT Roberson approves. Do you still wish to keep using him as your Greek expert?
3. About theophanies of Christ before his incarnation.
There is no doubt that Christ appeared to various people before his incarnation. As the Word, we know he was already existing when everything began, so appearances before his incarnation are reasonable and even to be expected. Theses theophanies actually have no bearing whatsoever on your theory of limited agency. Trinitarian theory allows God to be presented in human form through the Son. Each time he is, we understand that to be the Son, and the natural role of the Son, to be the perfect expression of the Father. Hence no problem with the exchange between Jesus and Philip.
So, as far as you have taken it, each action you take to be agency could just as well be a deeper form of instrumentality based on a unity of being. Your burden, and you cannot meet it, is to show that even one of these theophanies was carried out by a created being. The text provides no such evidence, but does describe Messiah in terms that would allow for an eternal being:
Micah 5:2 “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”
4. On dia.
The fact is, with respect to John 1:3, you are attempting to use dia to restrict the possible meaning of instrumentality to a particular form of limited agency, in particular, an agency between an uncreated principal and a created agent. Yet the word in itself does not inherently have that limitation, and that is why I’m not letting you off the hook regarding its broader range of meaning. You simply cannot build a case for created angelic nature as opposed to eternal divine nature on a single preposition that has such enormous versatility. Well, of course you can build whatever case you like, but do not expect it to be convincing to anyone who actually knows the language.
5. On Psalm 102
Yes, God has spoken to us by his Son, whom I note is the Son of the Father, who would not be the Father but for the Son. Again, your theory presents a very restricted kind of creature-Creator agency, and makes no allowance for this unique Father and Son relationship, where we already have evidence that both parties to the arrangement are eternal and uncreated. Your inferences from agency are divorced from this reality, and therefore cannot be expected to explain the totality of the Biblical record.
In particular, Psalm 102’s application is not left to chance or speculation, whether the referent is the Father or the Son, because the conjunction kai at Hebrews 1:10 links both Messianic prophesies together as being applicable to the Son mentioned in 1:8:
Heb 1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
But this does not address the problem raised in Job, where Jehovah does this same work of creating the universe, not through an agent, but alone:
Job 9:8-9 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea. [9] Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south.
Which makes sense if “alone” here means unaided by lesser beings, but through the instrumentality of the Son. And that you may recall is the whole point of Job, to show that no man nor anyone but God can enter into the mind of God and know what he is doing and why he is doing it. That is the very cornerstone of his argument that Job should humble himself and accept that Gods ways are past finding out, and we must trust him no matter what.
And again the same rule of context applies to Hebrews chapter 1, The writer is going to great pains to show, not that Christ is some high angel, but that he is above the angels, in a class by himself, shared only with the Father, for only God is to receive worship, and Jesus said so during his temptation, and yet:
Heb 1:6 “And again, when he bringeth in the firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him.”
But:
Matthew 4:10 “Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”
So are the angels of Hebrews wrong to worship the Son? Not if he’s God.
Peace,
SR
The NAB translates Psalm 45:6 a “a god” and in a footnote explains that the king was called a god since he was a representative of God and that Paul applied the Psalm to Christ.
On John 1:1-3.
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God”.
First the use of caps is the translators choice and all sorts of arguments made for treating what should be an indefinite “a god” as the definite “God”.
“Trinitarian theory allows God to be presented in human form through the Son. Each time he is, we understand that to be the Son, and the natural role of the Son, to be the perfect expression of the Father. Hence no problem with the exchange between Jesus and Philip.”
Does “Trinitarian theory” allow the Father to be the Son?
Colwell’s Rule, quantitative vs. qualitative, Etc. but most translations follow the AV and the translators own bias.
Excellent rebuttal, counselor! Good job. Thank you.