Peter, 

There are points that you pick up, but also points that you ignore from previous posts - and to my mind some of the more damaging ones to your case are the ones ignored!

I’m sure you will appreciate that if keeping track of my many scattered postings is a bit of a task, so was writing them! I’ve had a lot to respond to and done my best to address all the points raised. If, after you’ve read through them all you still feel that there is anything that I have neglected, please feel free to point it out and I’ll do my best to deal with it.

Also, if you’re referring to the most recent posts by smcloud, rickRitchie and others I plan to write replies to them ASAP.

And you yourself are actually importing post-biblical concepts in your insistence that the ‘oneness’ of God was held as something like a mathematical formula.

‘One’ is a number. Surely it doesn’t take an army of rabbis several hundred years to reach the conclusion that numbers pertain to the real of mathematics. Also, it’s stretching things a bit referring to the number one as a ‘formula’. It’s not rocket science, it’s the first number we learn to count to.

Duality in the godhead appears in Jewish literature of the post-exilic period and was not denounced as heresy

I would be interested in seeing the sources you refer to here. I also wonder if heresy-hunting was as much a feature of post-exilic Judaism as church history.

James Dunn has done considerable research in this area in his ‘Christology in the making’. The closest thing to it that he can identify is Philo’s attempted shotgun marriage of Judaism with Greek philosophy which relied very heavily on allegory. Even then, his language, for the most part, seems to have involved the personification of God’s attributes. Justin Martyr seems to have read Philo without understanding this and developed his Logos Christology as a result. This was the first step towards the kind of explicit articulation of Jesus as God Almighty that we find in the later creeds.

To echo Wright, the ‘oneness’ of God was not an interior analysis of his being.

Yes, but I see this quote as supporting the last statement I made in the post above. Because it was the process of making Jesus into God that was the cause of all this discussion in the first place. It was the ‘fathers’ with their schooling in Greek philosophy that first began gazing into the navel of God. It was they that imported terms such as ‘essence’ and ‘substance’ into discussions about God and brought ontology to the table. Extrabiblical words and models had to be introduced in order to articulate an extrabibilical doctrine of God and of the Messiah.

Why is there no discussion of this momentous development in the New Testament period, if it was during this time that the church developed these ideas? God becomes a man yet this raises not so much as a murmur until about 100 years later!

My argument is, against yours, that in just about every way possible Jesus is represented not just as a human messiah (which he was), but as God, in the terms of reference which were held by Jews: which were not abstract/philosophical, but in terms of symbol, and polemic.

Jesus is presented as being the prophet like Moses. Yet the prophecy was made in connection with Israel’s request that someone other than God speak to them (Deuteronomy 18:16-17). Therefore to be the prophet like Moses Jesus had to be someone other than God.

Jesus is the temple. But the temple isn’t God, it’s the place where God dwells. In Ezekiel’s vision he abandoned the temple, just as he abandoned his Son on the cross. So God and his temple are not the same thing, any more than God and his Son are. Worship of the temple as divine in and of itself would have been considered idolatrous. If Jesus associated himself with this symbol, should we not draw the same conclusions about worshipping him?

Jesus is our great high priest. The qualification for priesthood was humanity. Someone who could relate to human weaknesses and limitations. Yet, since God cannot be tempted with sin he wouldn’t make a very good priest. Even the angels are disqualified on these grounds (Hebrews 2:16-18).

As the sacrificial lamb, Jesus had to give his life. Again, God who cannot die could not do this.

Jesus is another Isaac, another David, another Adam etc. etc. Obviously, none of these men where God.

I don’t believe he could have been the sin-bearer if he was only of Adam’s line.

I accept that this is your view. It’s just that I’m yet to see where scripture demands this.

One important issue for me that comes up again and again as I consider this subject is the cry from the cross and the death of the Son of God. This is something I would love to discuss with you (And, of course anyone else who wants to participate), when you have the time to post something on it. The conversations so far seem to have revolved around objections to what I have set out. Though I welcome all these thoughtful comments, it would be good if we could also spend some time exploring a few of my objections.