[A_Thinker]

And what do you make of Yeshua's prayer (verse 5) here ...

John 17:1 These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

17:2 As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.

17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

17:4 I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

17:5 And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

[Invincibly Ignorant]

When Jesus says that he "had" the glory for which he no prays, he is merely asking for the glory which he knew was prepared for him by God from the beginning. that glory existed in God's plan, and in that sense Yeshua already "had" it. Note that Yeshua did not say, "Give me back" or "restore" to me the glory which I had when I was alive with you before my birth." This notion would have been completly foreign to Judaism. It is quite unecessary
and wrong to read Gentile ideas into the texts of Scripture
when we can make good sense of them as they stand in their Jewish environment. The onus is on those who believe in literal preexistence to demonstrate that the texts cannot be explained within their own Jewish context. And it should be remembered that the Hebrew Boible, which has much to say in anticipation of the coming Son of God, makes no statement to imply that the Messiah was God destined to arrive froma personal pre-birth existence in heaven. The idea that God can be born as a man is alien to the Jewish environment in which Jesus taught. A revolution would have been required for the introduction of such a novel concept.