Your arguments are thought provoking, Theocrat, and deserve some careful attention. My initial response, however, is that I don’t think you have proved the point you are trying to make, and you miss the thrust of the passage and the incident it is describing.

The context of the passage is, of course, parentage (of Jesus and the Pharisees), and the Pharisees have in mind the rumour that Jesus was an illegitimate half-breed (which they bring into the open in verse 48), and demon-possessed (in which sense, his ‘father’ is the devil). So the discussion revolves around this and their claim to parentage from Abraham (and Jesus’s accusation of their true ‘father’ being the devil, because of his knowledge of their disguised murderous intents). The focus on Abraham as the passage moves towards its climax arises out of these arguments. It is in this context that Jesus’s claims to relate to God as ‘Father’ acquire significance, as well as his own implied status and role as ‘son’ (verse 36). If the Pharisees rest their claim to status on an ancestry in Abraham, Jesus rests his on an ancestry in God.

Inexorably, the exchange with the Pharisees draws out the significance of Jesus’s identity. Instead of saying that God gives life to those who keep his (God’s) word, he makes himself the source of life and freedom from death, for those who keep his own (Jesus’s, not the Torah) word (v.51). In verse 52, the Pharisees draw the following conclusion: if Jesus is asserting that he can give life, then he (unlike Abraham and the prophets) will never die. Jesus then places Abraham in context, as one who ‘rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day’. The Pharisees assume that Jesus is claiming contemporaneity with Abraham, who had lived some 2000 years before, and that these are indeed the ramblings of a demon-possessed man. But Jesus does not allow them to remain in this delusion, and makes himself clear with the self-identification of verse 58.

The impact of his statement goes beyond saying that he was merely in existence before Abraham (before Abraham was, I was). It’s here that your attempted explanation falls considerably short. I will quote the whole statement:

“It only makes sense if Jesus is referring back to some statement he has made previously about his present status with respect to the patriarch. I would suggest that Jesus is expanding on his statement in verse 56 by explaining how, in spite of his not being 50 years old, Abraham could still have rejoiced to see his day.

Bringing the two together what we get is: “Before Abraham was, I am he… whose day Abraham rejoiced to see”.
This is a clear identification by Jesus of himself as the seed promised to Abraham by Yahweh and through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed.”

The explanation you provide is not clear at all, and does not make sense of the grammatical ‘confusion’ within Jesus’s language. If he only wanted to say that he was the promised seed whose day Abraham (would have) rejoiced to see (or rejoiced to see in a prophetic sense, or in a vision), he would not have said ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Jesus implies by saying ‘I am’ that he is the ‘always’ of YHWH. He doesn’t need to add anything - the Pharisees have understood and pick up the stones. He is saying something quite different from the ‘I am’ of the man healed of blindness in John 9:9. The context provides the difference. There is also a wider context - the six other ‘I am’ statements in John’s gospel, although this is the most explicit in terms of Jesus making a statement of relationship to God. (I would also add a context of the ‘I am’ statements in Isaiah 45, 46, 47 and 49, as well as the context of the statement in Exodus 3:14).

You draw attention to the use of the phrase ‘Son of God’, and of course there is a traditional level of meaning which does not imply a relationship of ‘Son’ to ‘God’ in a divine framework, still less a trinitarian framework. But the point is that John, like Paul, fills the phrase with added content - especially in his developed use of the Father/Son relationship, which is seen in John 8, as elsewhere in John. In the light of John’s gospel, the phrase has acquired far greater content than its previous usage. It is not a category mistake to see that it now has a significance filled out by Jesus’ use of the Father/Son relationship in which the term ‘Son’ has begun to acquire the significance of divine being within a divine relationship. It is in this light that we begin to see the use of the phrase in John’s gospel. (John even has Jesus’s accusers using the phrase this way in 19:7).

It’s not as if I am defending a case which has never been made before. This, and your own unitarian assertions, is a well-worn path, though I’m happy to tread it over again if you want to.

Theocrat: I think that you make some great points and that you are probably partly correct. However, I have several problems with your argument that I’d like to point out.

1) At the level of detail with which you engage the Greek text of the Gospel you implicitly assume the accuracy of the Greek. But did Christ preach in Greek? It seems to me that we must engage with the text of the Gospel in more broad strokes than you do.

2) At the same time, your close reading of the New Testament does not appear to extend to the Hebrew Bible. I presume that in referencing God’s promise to Abraham you refer to Genesis 12:2-3. Literally, God promises to make Abraham into a great nation, to bless him, and to be a blessing to him, to bless those that bless him and to curse those that curse him, and to bless through Abraham all the nations of the Earth.

While you don’t investigate the passage beyond a brief reference, you claim that Jesus is the blessing upon all the nations of the earth promised by God to Abraham. This is a strange if compelling assertion.

The first problem with this assertion is that God sets up his blessing of Abraham in a communal way. God tells Abraham “I will make a great nation of you.” From the Hebrew it seems that all the following blessings are to be realized by that great nation, not by an individual.

The second problem with your assertion of the “straightforward” reference to the Hebrew bible is the context of Jesus’ comments. If Christ is the blessing upon all the nations of the Earth, why then is his argument in John addressed solely to the “Jews” (who you call Pharisees though John is not so specific). If that were Jesus’ counterargument to the Jews, you’d think that the Jew’s argument would be something having to do with Jewish chosenness. But it is not. Rather, they ask about the doctrine of eternal life in Christ. Those Jews likely read the Abrahamic promise in the same communal way that I have outlined above. Why, in addressing Jews’ criticism about his eschatology, would Jesus claim to be the sole seed of Abraham in the way you outline? What is the purpose of that assertion?

3) There is something troubling about saying that Jesus in no way makes a claim to divinity in John 8:58. Even if it is not a reference to Exodus (which it may well be), Jesus claims to have been in existence prior to Abraham’s birth. The way in which the verse is phrased seems to evoke a sense of eternity. Can you point to a theology of eternity in first century Judaism that would allow for an eternal being not to be divine? Seems like a hard sell to me.

4) What is problematic about saying the Jews of John’s Gospel stoned Jesus both for his claim to Abrahamic legitimacy and for his claim to divinity? Why are you bent on proving John’s Jesus did not accept a God-head? I’d believe you if we were talking about Mark’s Jesus, but John’s?

It seems to me that you are trying rather hard to absolve the Jews of John of the act of denying Jesus divinity so that you can bring the Gospel of John into the modern era where we want Jews and Christians to get along. But Jews and Christians did not get along in the first century. Nor did they get along in the second century, when the Gospel of John was likely written. What is wrong with saying that John represents his times well and doesn’t represent ours quite as nicely?