LINGEL_COURSEBOOK_V5

VI. The 6 Pillars of Islam
A. Shahada, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”
1. True faith of the heart is not the issue
2. Recitation of shahada makes one Muslim
B. Daily prayers (salat)
1. Upon rising in the morning, at noon, mid-afternoon and before retiring
Muslims recite prescribed prayers while facing in the direction of Mecca.
2. Prayer is not communication, but a routine and duty; looking for Baraka.
3. Shi’as pray 3 times a day whereas Sunnis pray 5 times a day. This requirement
comes from the hadith, not the Qur’an.
a. Muhammad flew from Mecca to Jerusalem on winged horse
b. Met many prophets on way to highest level of paradise
c. Gabriel tells him his people must pray fifty times, but Moses encourages
Muhammad to work the number down to five
d. This is why Muslims pray five times
e. How do Christians pray?
i. Without ceasing!
ii. We don’t have to be ritually clean; we approach the throne for cleansing
iii. For Muslims, prayer is public, but for us it is private (Mt 6:5-6)
C. Fast of Ramadan
1. A time of solidarity for the Muslim community
2. Ninth money of Islamic calendar

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3. Prayers, charity, accountability are part of this time
4. Fasting begins and ends with sighting of the new moon
5. During the fast, no eating, drinking, smoking and sexual intercourse
D. Almsgiving
1. Zakat; 2.5% of income; mostly given to poor
2. As Christians, are must give all
E. Pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj)
! Muslims from all over the world who can afford the pilgrimage make the trek

to Mecca. Whether one spends paradise in the hereafter could be determined
whether a Muslim makes this journey.
F. Jihad
1. Some say it is a part of the pillars, other say no
2. Many Muslims embrace peace
3. And many dress in camouflage draped with M-16s and bombs

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III. Conclusion

1. We too have a battle to fight however our power and weapons are much different.
Our power comes from the Holy Spirit, not bombs.

2. Our weapon is not a physical sword but the Sword of the Word of God

3. We fight for a kingdom, but it is not on the earth

4. We have a leader we follow, yet not one who kills, but one who died for us.

Application:
Please go to page 309 and fill out the Video Lesson 6 Application sheet.

! Small Group Discussion:
Discuss 2-3 points from video lesson 6 application sheet page 309

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Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly
Corrupted?

Daniel B. Wallace

Dr. Daniel Wallace is professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is
also the founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament
Manuscripts that is digitizing all known manuscripts of the bible. Wallace has been an outspoken
critic of the alleged "popular culture" quest to discredit orthodox, evangelical views of Jesus—
including the writings of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman.

Introduction
Throughout the English-speaking world, any group of Christians, from home

Bible studies to megachurches, can read the scriptures not only in their own language
but with the text of each person’s Bible identical to everyone else’s. Gutenberg’s
invention in the mid-fifteenth century has made this possible, yet this very innovation
has bred a false sense of certainty about the wording of the Bible.

Before the era of the movable-type printing press, all copies of scripture were
transcribed by hand, one letter at a time. The painstaking process of copying the whole
New Testament would require months of labor for a well-trained scribe. Yet of the
thousands of handwritten New Testament manuscripts that still exist, no two are
exactly alike. This is what the church for fifteen centuries had to contend with. And we
can no longer consult the original documents (or autographs) since they turned to dust
long ago, most likely before the end of the second century. Because of these two facts—
disagreements among the manuscripts and the disappearance of the autographs—the
need arises for examining the manuscripts and making decisions as to what the original
text most likely said.

In this respect, the New Testament faces the same challenges that the rest of
Greco-Roman literature faces. Textual criticism—the science of determining the wording
of a document whose original is lost—has to be applied to all of ancient literature, even
to much literature that was produced since the printing press was invented (such as
Shakespeare’s plays or Lincoln’s Gettysburg address). How difficult is the process of
ascertaining the wording of the autographs? The postures on this question widely vary,
from extreme uncertainty to dogmatic confidence, and everywhere in between.

Recently a provocative book appeared by the atheist apologist, C. J. Werleman,
called Jesus Lied. He wrote, “We do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible.
The originals are lost. We don’t know when and we don’t know by whom. What we

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have are copies of copies. In some instances, the copies we have are twentieth
generation copies.”57

It is not just atheists who have made such claims. Muslims, too, have joined the
chorus.58 On the website “Answering Christianity,” we are told that Christians “have to
rely on lies and deception, along with awkward logic to prove their corrupt script, to
answer away any contradiction or historical error that a Muslim might present to
them.”59
A very popular book among British Muslims makes this claim:

The Orthodox Church, being the sect which eventually established supremacy
over all the others, stood in fervent opposition to various ideas ([a.k.a.]
“heresies”) which were in circulation. These included Adoptionism (the notion
that Jesus was not God, but a man); Docetism (the opposite view, that he was
God and not man); and Separationism (that the divine and human elements of
Jesus Christ were two separate beings). In each case this sect, the one that would
rise to become the Orthodox Church, deliberately corrupted the Scriptures so as

57 C. J. Werleman, Jesus Lied—He Was only Human: Debunking the New Testament (Great
Yarmouth, Norfolk, England: Dangerous Little Books, 2010) 41.

58 Some Mormon scholars also despair of recovering the New Testament autographic
text. See Barry Robert Bickmore, Restoring the Ancient Church: Joseph Smith and Early Christianity
(Ben Lomond, CA: Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, 1999) 61–62; John Gee,
“The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity,” in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary
LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 2005) 163–88; Robert J. Matthews, “What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about
the Bible,” in Doctrines of the Book of Mormon: The 1991 Sperry Symposium, ed. Bruce A. Van Orden
and Brent L. Top (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992) 93–107.

Not all Mormon scholars share this skepticism, however. For example, Richard Lloyd
Anderson, “Manuscript Discoveries of the New Testament in Perspective,” in Papers of the
Fourteenth Annual Symposium on the Archeology of the Scriptures, ed. Forrest R. Hauch (Salt Lake
City: Brigham Young University Press, 1963) 58, 59 (whole article, 52–59) summarizes his
findings: “For a book [the New Testament] to undergo progressive uncovering of its manuscript
history and come out with so little debatable in its text is a great tribute to its essential
authenticity. … no new manuscript discovery has produced serious differences in the essential
story”; “The textual history of the New Testament gives every reason to assume a fairly stable
transmission of the documents we possess”).

59 www.answering-christianity.com.

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to reflect its own theological visions of Christ, while demolishing that of all rival
sects.60

Among those who display this sort of skepticism about the trustworthiness of the
New Testament text are a few biblical scholars. In The Five Gospels, Robert Funk, the
head of the Jesus Seminar, claimed:

Even careful copyists make mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will
never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any
biblical writing was.61
The temporal gap that separates Jesus from the first surviving copies of the
gospels—about one hundred and seventy-five years—corresponds to the lapse in
time from 1776—the writing of the Declaration of Independence—to 1950. What
if the oldest copies of the founding document dated only from 1950?62

The leading proponent of extreme skepticism over the wording of the original
text is unquestionably Dr. Bart Ehrman, a bona fide New Testament textual critic. In his
New York Times Bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, he made the following statements:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the
originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of
the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—
much later…. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of
places… these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t
even known how many differences there are.63

We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of
the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally.… the
examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands.64

60 M. M. Al-Azami, The History of the Qur’anic Text from Revelation to Compilation: a
Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments (Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada: Al-Qalam,
2003) 277.

61 Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for
the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 6 (italics added).

62 Ibid.

63 Misquoting Jesus, 10.

64 Ibid., 98.

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On the other side are those who claim that every jot and tittle of the autographs
is known today, since the Textus Receptus (the Greek New Testament, collated from
essentially seven late manuscripts whose credentials were less than stellar, that stands
behind the King James Bible) represents exactly what the apostles and their associates
wrote so long ago.65 For the King James Only crowd, having certainty about the text is a
sine qua non of the Christian faith. One influential writer from this camp, Jasper James
Ray, has been highly influential. He argued that no modern version may properly be
called the Bible,66 that salvation and spiritual growth can only come through versions
based on the Textus Receptus (TR),67 and that Satan is the prime mover behind all
modern translations based on the more ancient manuscripts.68 If this author’s views are
correct, then Christians who use modern translations based primarily on the few

65 For a critique of the King James Only view, see D. A. Carson, The King James Version
Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979);

66 Jasper James Ray, God Wrote Only One Bible (Junction City, OR: Eye Opener Publishers,
1955) 1.

67 Consider the following statements: “The TEXTUS RECEPTUS… is God’s sure
foundation on which to rest our eternal salvation” (ibid., 32); “It is impossible to be saved
without ‘FAITH,’ and perfect-saving-faith can only be produced by the ‘ONE’ Bible God wrote,
and that we find only in translations which agree with the Greek Textus Receptus…” (122); “Put
poison anywhere in the blood stream and the whole becomes poisoned. Just so with the Word of
God. When words are added or subtracted, Bible inspiration is destroyed, and the spiritual
blood stream is poisoned. In this respect the revised Bibles in our day seem to have become
spiritual guinea pigs, with multiple hypodermic shots-in-the-arm by so called Doctors of
Divinity, who have used the serum of scholasticism well mixed with modern free-thinking
textual criticism. When the Bible words are tampered with, and substitution is made, the Bible
becomes a dead thing with neither power to give or sustain life. Of course, even under these
conditions, it is possible to build up church membership, and report many professions. But
what about regeneration? Are they born again? No person can be born again without the Holy
Spirit, and it is evident the Holy Spirit is not going to use a poisoned blood stream to produce
healthy Christians. Therefore, beware, beware, lest your faith become marred through the
reading of corrupted Revised Versions of the Bible” (ibid., 9). Apparently Ray was not aware
that virtually every manuscript adds and omits words.

68 Ibid., ii, 101.

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ancient manuscripts are, at best, dupes of the devil and, at worst, in danger of forfeiting
their immortal souls.69

Both attitudes—radical skepticism and absolute certainty—are unworthy of the
historical evidence. They are the offspring of postmodernism and modernism
respectively. Both betray an arrogance about what one certainly knows, but in the case
of radical skepticism the only certainty is uncertainty itself. These two attitudes are like
driving on the mountain roads in Greece. Drive too far to the left and you will have a
head-on collision with a tourist bus. Drive too far to the right and you will end up flying
over the cliff where the guardrail should have been.

In the middle are moderating views, embraced by the great majority of biblical
scholars. The din of alarmists notwithstanding, most biblical scholars—whether they
are evangelical or liberal, Protestant or Catholic—believe that what we have today in all
essential respects (though not necessarily in all particulars) is what the New Testament
authors penned nearly two millennia ago.

What are the evidence and arguments that have convinced so many scholars?
And what is really at stake? It is our objective in this chapter to focus on three things: (1)

69 Even in later works that are dressed in more scholarly garb, the witch-hunting
invectives are still present. David Otis Fuller, for example, in Counterfeit or Genuine[:] Mark 16?
John 8? (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1978), speaks of
“bastard Bibles” (10). He adds further, as did Ray, that Satan is the mastermind behind this
defection from the King James and TR: “born-again Christians in this twentieth century are
facing the most malicious and vicious attack upon God’s inspired Holy Word since the Garden
of Eden. And this attack began in its modern form in the publication of the Revised Version of
the Scriptures in 1881 in England” (9). Donald A. Waite, a Dallas Seminary graduate with both a
ThM and ThD from that institute, argued in his The Theological Heresies of Westcott and Hort
(Collingswood, NJ: Bible for Today, 1979), that the two Cambridge scholars were unregenerate,
unsaved, apostate, and heretical (39–42). David D. Shields in his dissertation on “Recent
Attempts to Defend the Byzantine Text of the Greek New Testament” (Ph.D. dissertation,
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas; December, 1985) points out that
“the evidence on which [Waite] bases these conclusions often would indict most evangelical
Christians. Even in the author’s perspective, Westcott and Hort have theological problems, but
the extreme severity of Waite’s approach would declare anyone apostate and heretical who does
not hold to his line” (55). Theodore P. Letis, editor of The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the
Continuing Debate (Fort Wayne, IN: Institute for Biblical Textual Studies, 1987), used vitriolic
language seemingly against everybody, for he was in something of a theological no man’s land:
his arrows were aimed not only at modern textual criticism, but even against inerrantists. He
spoke, for example, of “the idolatrous affair that evangelicals are having with the red herring of
inerrancy” (22); those who advocate using modern-language Bibles (including the translators of
the New King James Version) are “in pragmatic league with the goddess of modernity—Her
Majesty, Vicissitude” (81); virtually all modern translations imbibe in Arianism (203). Ad
hominem arguments are found everywhere in his book.

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the number of textual variants, (2) the nature of textual variants, and (3) theological
issues raised by textual variants. This third issue must be addressed last because the
evidence concerning it needs first to be discussed. For the believer, this final issue is the
most important. It is also that which has been most distorted by the apologists of
skepticism.

The Number of Variants
We should begin with the definition of “textual variant”: A textual variant is any

place among the manuscripts in which there is variation in the wording, including word order,
omission or addition of words, even spelling differences. The most trivial differences count, as
well as, of course, the most serious. In the past century, the estimated number of textual
differences has risen steadily, largely for two reasons: the number of manuscripts
known to exist has significantly increased, and the painstaking analysis of individual
New Testament books has been published, displaying more variants than were
previously known.70 The best estimate today is that there are as many as 400,000 textual
variants among the manuscripts. Yet the New Testament has less than 140,000 words in
it. This means that for every word in the New Testament there are, on average, almost
three variations.

Some evangelicals have argued that variants should be counted in terms of
manuscripts that have these readings. Thus, if five hundred manuscripts have “Jesus”
in one place and another five hundred have “Christ,” there must be five hundred

70 In 1883, Philip Schaff spoke of 150,000 textual variants as the estimate (Philip Schaff,
Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version [New York: Harper, 1883] 177). With the
publication of Herman C. Hoskier’s Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse, 2 vols. (London:
Quaritch, 1929), in which every variant of every known manuscript of Revelation was
tabulated, the estimates were revised upwards. And with other publications such as the two-
volume text of Luke by the International Greek New Testament Committee, the Editio Critica
Maior series by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung, and Tommy Wasserman’s The
Epistle of Jude (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006)—a work, like Hoskier’s, that documented
every variant among the continuous text manuscripts of Jude—the estimates have risen to as
high as 400,000.

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variants. This view goes back to a book published in 1963, and it has made its way, in a
steady stream of misinformation, into more than one apologist’s writings.71

But it is completely false. Textual critics do not count variants by the number of
manuscripts supporting them, but by the differences in wording regardless of how
many manuscripts support these differences.72 Thus, if a single manuscript deviates
from all other manuscripts in a given place, its reading counts as a single textual
variant, and if a thousand manuscripts agree with each other but deviate from all others
in one place, this wording too counts as a single textual variant. If variants were
counted in terms of the witnesses behind them, the number would be in the tens of
millions.

Nevertheless, 400,000 is still a high figure. Why is it that there are so many
textual differences for the New Testament? The reason is quite simple: There are
thousands of variants because there are thousands of manuscripts. No classical Greek or
Latin text has nearly as many textual deviations because no classical text has nearly as
many manuscripts. If there were only one copy of the New Testament in existence, it
would have zero variants. Yet for several ancient authors there is only one copy extant
today, and sometimes that lone copy comes more than a millennium after the original
composition. But a lone, late manuscript would hardly build confidence that that single
manuscript duplicated the wording of the original in every respect. In reality, the more
manuscripts we have, the better able we are to recover the wording of the autographs.

In 1707, a lifelong project saw the light of day when John Mill published his two-
volume New Testament just a fortnight before his death. Mill had collated one hundred
Greek manuscripts as well as several versions and patristic writers’ comments on the
text. His Novum Testamentum listed 30,000 textual differences. This was the first Greek
New Testament with any significant amount of variants listed. And it triggered quite a
storm. Conservative Protestants condemned Mill’s work as creating doubts about the
text of Holy Writ. Remarkably, some even railed against Mill as though he had invented
the variants instead of merely discovering them. And Roman Catholics pointed to Mill’s

71 See Neil R. Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963) 53–54; Lee
Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1998) 64–65; Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to
the Bible, rev. ed. (Chicago: Moody, 1986) 468: “If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different
manuscripts, it is counted as 3,000 variants or readings. Once this counting procedure is
understood, and the mechanical (orthographic) variants have been eliminated, the remaining
significant variants are surprisingly few in number.” This statement duplicates verbatim the
wording found on p. 361 in the first edition of this book, published in 1968. See also Norman L.
Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998) 532.

72 At minimum, there must be one manuscript in support of a reading; otherwise it is
only conjecture.

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work as evidence that the sola scriptura of the Reformation was seriously flawed, that
Protestants had a ‘paper pope’ which had dissenting opinions on every page.

Not all condemned Mill’s work, however. Six years after his Novum Testamentum
appeared, a brilliant textual scholar, Richard Bentley, commended Mill’s magnum opus as
that which would better enable scholars to recover the autographic wording:

If there had been but one manuscript of the Greek Testament at the restoration of
learning about two centuries ago, then we [would have] had no various readings
at all. … And would the text be in a better condition then, than now [that] we
have 30,000 [variant readings]?

It is good, therefore… to have more anchors than one; and another MS. to join the
first would give more authority, as well as security.73

Bentley’s essential point was that the more manuscripts we have the more we can
compare their readings and trace their relationships, ultimately enabling us to have
greater confidence about the wording of the original. If one hundred manuscripts are
significantly better than a single manuscript in this regard, then having many times that
amount should multiply that confidence.

Today, in Greek alone, more than 5,600 handwritten New Testament documents
are known to exist. Many of these are fragmentary of course, especially the older ones,
but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is over 450 pages long. Altogether,
there are more than 2.6 million pages of text, leaving hundreds of witnesses for every
book of the New Testament. As more and more manuscripts come to light, we are
getting closer and closer to the wording of the autographs.

It is not just Greek manuscripts that help in this endeavor. Beginning in the
second century, the New Testament was translated into a variety of languages—Latin,
Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and a host of others. There are
about 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament alone. No one really knows the
total number of all these ancient versions, but the best estimates are between 5000 and
10,000—besides the 10,000 in Latin. Altogether we have at least 20,000 handwritten
manuscripts of the New Testament in various languages.

Even if none of these documents existed, we would not be left without a witness.
(Collectively, manuscripts, versions [or translations], and quotations of the New
Testament by the church fathers are known as witnesses or external evidence.) That is
because church fathers wrote homilies and commentaries on the New Testament. To

73 Richard Bentley, Remarks upon a Discourse of Free Thinking (London: J. Morphew and E.
Curll, 1713; 8th edition, which is quoted here, published a year after Bentley’s death with
additions from his manuscript; London: Knaptons, Manby, and Beecroft, 1743) 349.

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date, more than one million quotations of the New Testament by the fathers have been
recorded. “[I]f all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament
were destroyed, [the patristic quotations] would be sufficient alone for the
reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.”74

How do skeptics respond to such data? They argue that the number of
manuscripts is irrelevant, especially since the vast majority of them are more than a
millennium removed from the originals.

[T]he fact that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts does not in
itself mean that we can rest assured that we know what the original text said. If
we have very few early copies—in fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the
text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be
reproduced in such large quantities?75

The spearhead of the argument tacitly switches from actual numbers to relative
amounts, often stated in terms of percentages. It is certainly true that the vast bulk of
Greek New Testament manuscripts come from after AD 1000. In fact, more than 85% do.
From the first millennium, however, the numbers are still impressive: at least 838

74 Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission,
Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 126. It should be
noted that in the fourth edition of Metzger’s introductory textbook on New Testament textual
criticism, Ehrman joined his mentor in the revision. As skeptical as Ehrman has been in his own
writings, what he co-authored with his Doktorvater has been a far more moderating and
mainstream viewpoint.

75 Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 219. Cf. also Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: An
Historical Introduction To The Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 449; Eldon J. Epp, “Are Early New Testament Manuscripts Truly Abundant?” in
Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity.
Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, ed. by David B. Capes, April D. DeConick,
Helen K. Bond, and Troy A. Miller (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007) 77–107. It is
remarkable that in an article intended to show how sparse are the early data for the New
Testament (e.g., “If the early manuscripts are most valuable, what value and how much
abundance do we have in the mere eleven manuscripts that have survived from the period up
to and around 200 C.E.? At that point, Christianity had been in existence for two hundred
years!” [88]), Epp makes no comparison with other ancient Greco-Roman literature. Without
such a comparison, there is no way to tell how relatively abundant the early New Testament
manuscripts are. Further, nowhere does he discuss how much text of the New Testament was
found in these early manuscripts.

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manuscripts.76 To argue that New Testament manuscripts from the early centuries are
not very plentiful is only true in relation to later New Testament manuscripts—not to
anything else in the ancient world.

Even from the earliest centuries, the numbers are impressive. How many
manuscripts from the first century after the completion of the New Testament still exist?
How many from the second? The third? We have today as many as a dozen manuscripts
from the second century, sixty-four from the third, and forty-eight from the fourth.
That’s a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New
Testament. Most of these manuscripts are fragmentary, but, collectively, the whole New
Testament text is found in them multiple times. And even with 125 years of the
completion of the New Testament, the extant manuscripts include 49% of all verses.77

It may be helpful to put these numbers into perspective. If we are comparing the
same time period—300 years after composition—the average classical author has no
literary remains at all. But if we compare all the manuscripts of a particular classical
author, regardless of when they were written, the total would still average less than
twenty, and usually less than a dozen—and they would all be coming much more than
three centuries later. There are in fact three times as many manuscripts of the New
Testament within two hundred years of its composition as there are of the average
classical author within two thousand years of its composition. Thus, to claim that we
have ‘scarcely any’ early copies of the New Testament is hardly an accurate
representation of the facts.

Another standard argument of the radical skeptics is that regardless of the
number of New Testament manuscripts, the vast majority are worthless for
reconstructing the text of the New Testament because they are so late. The implication
they draw from the late date of most New Testament manuscripts is that none of them
are trustworthy, that the New Testament is in no better shape than other ancient
literature.

76 A few manuscripts are dated on the cusp of the millennial change (i.e., AD 1000) or
cannot be pinpointed more accurately than tenth to eleventh century; these bring the numbers
to 860. See codex 2882, posted at www.csntm.org/Manuscript/View/GA_2882, as an
illustration of a recently-discovered manuscript that has been dated to the tenth/eleventh
century.

77 Thanks are due to Brett Williams who catalogued all the verses found in the papyri
through the early third century. 3880 verses out of 7917 (the total found in the Nestle-Aland27
Novum Testamentum Graece, sans Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11) is 49.01%. Quite a few of the
verses are found in more than one papyrus.

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What the skeptics do not mention is that these later manuscripts add less than
two percent of material to the text.78 If we can envision the New Testament as a
snowball rolling down a hill, picking up alien elements through the centuries, it is
remarkable that it only picks up two percent more material over fourteen hundred
years. That is an extraordinarily stable transmissional history. Although the New
Testament text has grown over time, it has grown very little. Since the earliest texts that
we have agree substantially with the later ones, if we were to project backward to the
original, the changes from the autographs to the earliest copies would be miniscule.79

How does the New Testament compare to specific ancient writers, especially
historians and biographers—the group that comes closest to the genres we find in the
New Testament? For many important authors we only have partial works. Livy and
Tacitus were two of the most important Roman historians of the first century AD. We
base a lot of our understanding of ancient Rome on these two writers. Livy wrote 142

78 The total number of differences between the earliest form of the text and the latest is
closer to four percent. The additions alone are about 1.5%, but the latest form of the text does
not merely add material; it also omits, transposes, and substitutes words. The majority of these
changes are so trivial as to be untranslatable.

79 Although skeptics such as Bart Ehrman have suggested that the earliest manuscripts
we have today display significant differences and betray a wild copying tendency, largely
because the scribes who produced them were not professionally trained, the evidence speaks
otherwise. I offer three pieces of data. (1) Barbara Aland, “Der textkritische und
textgeschichtliche Nutzen früher Papyri, demonstriert am Johannesevangelium,” in Recent
Developments in Textual Criticism: New Testament, Other Early Christian and Jewish Literature, ed.
Wim Weren and Dietrich Alex-Koch (Assen, The Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2003) 19–38,
argues that the early papyri of John’s Gospel only display a few notable variants and present,
apart from sloppiness in copying, a reasonably reliable text.

(2) Zachary Cole, “Scribal Hands of Early New Testament Manuscripts” (ThM thesis, Dallas
Theological Seminary, 2012), takes head-on the skeptics’ assertion that non-professional scribes
were necessarily careless. By comparing the handwriting of early manuscripts, Cole
demonstrates that there is no correlation between a professionally-trained scribe and careful
copying or between an untrained scribe and careless copying.

(3) Below is a chart of early papyri that have a ‘strict text’ or ‘normal text’ according to Kurt and
Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). By ‘strict
text’ the Alands mean manuscripts that “transmit the text of an exemplar with meticulous
care” (64); by ‘normal text’ they mean “a relatively faithful tradition which departs from its
exemplar only occasionally” (ibid.). The Alands also speak of five categories of manuscripts in
terms of textual character, with Category I being the closest to the autographs (ibid., 335). The
chart is my own, culled from the descriptions in this volume.

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volumes on the history of Rome. Only twenty-five percent of them survive today. Only
one third of Tacitus’s writings are still with us. Two hundred copies of Pliny the Elder’s
writings remain, but the oldest come seven hundred years after Pliny wrote. Plutarch’s
Lives are found in manuscripts no earlier than 800 years after he penned these volumes.
Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews is found today in more than twenty copies, none earlier
than the ninth century. The earliest copy of Polybius was written 1200 years after he
lived. There are massive gaps in copies of Pausanias’s Description of Greece—all of these
manuscripts coming more than 1400 years later. Herodotus’s Histories has twenty-six
copies, the earliest coming half a millennium later, and the first substantial copy does
not appear for another millennium after that. The first substantial copies of Xenophon’s
Hellenica come eighteen centuries after he penned his tome. If this were the case with
the New Testament, the first substantial copies in existence today would not have been
written until after the Wright brothers invented the airplane!

For some of the better-preserved writings, there are gaps galore even within the
books that have been preserved. One scholar complained that the surviving copies of
some of these writings are “[filled with gaps], corrupt, dislocated and interpolated…”80
He then proceeded to lay out principles to fill in the lacunae with nothing but his own
reason because he could not find the original wording in any manuscript. Another
scholar noted that for the manuscripts of his author, “The chief blemishes are gaps in
the text, where the manuscript tradition fails us entirely.”81 The task of filling the gaps
without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most of Greco-Roman
literature, and almost entirely unknown for the New Testament.

In terms of extant manuscripts, the New Testament textual critic is confronted
with an embarrassment of riches. If we have doubts about what the autographic New
Testament said, those doubts would have to be multiplied at least a hundred-fold82 for

80 Miroslav Marcovich, Patristic Textual Criticism, Part 1 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1994) ix.

81 W. H. S. Jones, translator, Pausanias: Description of Greece (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969) xxvii.

82 Technically, our doubts should be a thousand-fold if there are 20,000 New Testament
manuscripts (in Greek and the ancient versions) and less than 20 manuscripts for the average
classical author. However, if one were only to look at the more ancient copies of such
documents, the ratios could be closer. A hundred-fold is an amount that is hard to argue with.

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the average classical author.83 And when we compare the New Testament manuscripts
to the very best that the classical world has to offer,84 it still stands head and shoulders
above the rest. The New Testament is far and away the best-attested work of Greek or
Latin literature from the ancient world. Precisely because we have hundreds of
thousands of variants and hundreds of early manuscripts, we are in an excellent position

83 Note that I did not say that we have no doubts about the autographs of these other
ancient writers. But far greater skepticism toward the New Testament is shown than its
manuscript testimony would warrant. Further, it is a curious thing that Ehrman in Misquoting
Jesus can sound so skeptical of the wording of the original New Testament when a part of his
basis for such skepticism is certainty about what some ancient writers said! In other words, part
of his argument against the reliability of New Testament manuscripts is his assumption of
accuracy of what certain ancient writers’ texts read, even though we have to do textual criticism
on their extant manuscripts to try to reconstruct what they wrote. In Misquoting Jesus, he enlists
Seneca (46), Martial (47), Hermas (48), Irenaeus (53), Dionysius (53), and Rufinus (54). And most
significantly, he discusses Origen’s quotations of Celsus, an antagonist to the Christian faith who
wrote about seventy years before Origen did, with the tacit assumption that the copies of Origen
that we have accurately reflect what Origen wrote and that Origen accurately recorded what
Celsus wrote, even though seventy years separated the two men. If we had the original text of
Origen, we would still be dealing with a seventy-year gap after Celsus. But when a similar time-
gap occurs for the New Testament manuscripts, Ehrman says, “We don’t even have copies of the
copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are
copies made later—much later” (Misquoting Jesus, 10), and “If we have very few early copies—in
fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New
Testament began to be reproduced in such large quantities?” (Lost Christianities, 219).

84 Homer’s Iliad has just over 2200 extant manuscripts, while his Odyssey has 141 (so
Martin L. West, Homeri Ilias, volumen prius: Rhapsodias I-XII Continens, Bibliotheca Scriptorum
Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana [Stutgardiae et Lipsiae: In Aedibus B. G. Tevbneri,
1998], XXXVIII-LIV; Victor Berard, L’Odyssee: Poesie Homerique, Tome I: Chants 1-VII, Collection
des Universites de France [Paris: Societe D’Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1924], XXXVI-XXXIX. The
data on the Odyssey, however, need to be updated). Nothing in the ancient Greco-Roman world
comes close to this—except, of course, for the New Testament and some patristic writers such as
Chrysostom. Not counting patristic citations of the New Testament, there are still almost ten
times as many copies of the New Testament as there are Homeric manuscripts extant today.

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for recovering the wording of the original.85 Further, if the radical skeptics applied their
principles to the rest of Greco-Roman literature, they would thrust us right back into the
Dark Ages, where ignorance was anything but bliss. Their arguments only sound
impressive in a vacuum.

The Nature of Textual Variants
The high number of variants may give a false impression as to their nature. How

many differences are trivial, affecting nothing? How many of them change the meaning
of the text? And how many of these meaningful readings are ‘viable’—that is, they are
found in manuscripts with a sufficient pedigree that they have a good possibility of
duplicating the original wording? The variants can be broken down into the following
categories:

• Neither viable nor meaningful
• Viable but not meaningful
• Meaningful but not viable
• Both meaningful and viable

Neither Viable nor Meaningful; Viable but not Meaningful
The first and second groups of variants can be treated together. Of the hundreds

of thousands of textual alterations, the majority are spelling differences that have no
impact on the meaning of the text. The ancient scribes did not have standardized
spelling but often followed regional usage or their own whim on many words. Yet
spelling differences account for about seventy percent of all textual variants. Thousands
of these are neither viable nor meaningful, while thousands of others are viable but not
meaningful.

The name for John is spelled in Greek two different ways, either Ioannes or Ioanes.
The same person is in view either way; the only difference is whether the name has two
n’s or one. The single most common textual variant involves what is called a movable

85 In my debate with Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill (1 February 2012, available on
www.youtube.com), when I declared that the more variants we have the better off we are for
reconstructing the autographic wording of the New Testament because it implied that we had
more manuscripts, Ehrman was incredulous. He said that instead what would help the
reconstruction would be thousands of manuscripts that were identical to each other. This
response is typical of how radical skeptics address the textual problems of the New Testament:
they create completely unrealistic expectations for the transmission of the New Testament—
expectations that could not possibly be met for any documents that were copied by hand—and
then declare that the New Testament text is unreliable because it does not live up to such
standards. Applying the same criteria to any other ancient literature would result in almost total
rejection of our knowledge of human history until the printing press had been invented.

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nu. The Greek letter nu (n) can occur at the end of certain words when they precede a
word that starts with a vowel. This is similar to the two forms of the indefinite article in
English: a and an. But whether the nu appears in these words or not, there is absolutely
no difference in meaning.

A good number of the spelling differences are nonsense readings. These come
about when a scribe is fatigued, inattentive, or perhaps does not know Greek very well.
Nonsense readings are the easiest to weed out—both for the modern textual critic and
for the scribe who copied the errant exemplar. Further, nonsense readings tell scholars a
great deal about how a scribe went about his work. The scribe of the medieval
manuscript, codex Neapolitanus (or Gregory-Aland 109), inattentively wrote out Luke’s
version of Jesus’ genealogy, which had been set forth in two columns in his exemplar.
Without noticing the two columns in the manuscript he was transcribing, this scribe
copied across the columns as though they were a single block of text. The result was a
uniquely bizarre family tree, with mistakes everywhere. God, in fact, is said to be the
son of Aram in this manuscript! In 1 Thessalonians 2:7 an interesting textual problem
appears. Most manuscripts read “we became gentle among you” while a few early and
important manuscripts have “we became little children among you.” The difference
between ‘gentle’ and ‘little children’ is a single letter: either nepioi or epioi. This is a
classic textual problem that is not particularly easy to solve. The HCSB, RSV, ESV,
NASB, REB, TEV, NIV and most other translations have ‘gentle,’ while the NET, TNIV,
and NIV 2011 read ‘little children.’ One late medieval manuscript instead has
‘horses’ (hippoi)! It’s a nonsense reading here, but no doubt due to the scribe’s
misreading of one of the other variants in the manuscript he was copying. These
nonsense readings are easy to detect and usually point to another word that is well
represented among the manuscripts. It is not insignificant that a very large amount of
the textual variants in New Testament manuscripts are of this sort.

Sometimes such nonsense readings occur in early and important manuscripts.
An early third-century manuscript of Luke and John, known as P75, has a few nonsense
readings. Each reading involves one or two letters, suggesting that the scribe copied the
text one or two letters at a time.86 Indeed, this scribe was overall very careful, though
overly concerned with writing exactly what his exemplar read without also wrestling
with the sense. The eighth-century manuscript, codex Regius (a.k.a. codex L), an
important witness to the New Testament text, has a number of blunders in it, the most
amusing being in John 1.30. The original text here is undisputed: John the Baptist says,
“after me comes a man…” (opiso mou erchetai aner). John was referring to Jesus when he
spoke of this ‘man’ (aner). But the scribe of codex L forgot the nu in the word aner,

86 E. C. Colwell, “Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P45, P66, P75,” in
Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament, New Testament Tools and Studies
9, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), 115–16.

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thereby producing the word aer—air. In codex Regius, then, John the Baptist says, “After
me comes air”!87

Other examples of viable but not particularly meaningful variants involve the
use of the definite article with proper names and transpositions (in which the
arrangement of the words varies). Proper names sometimes use the definite article,
sometimes not. But in translation the article is left off. In Luke 2:16 we read, “They
hurried off and found both Mary and Joseph, and the baby who was lying in the
feeding trough” (HCSB). But in the Greek text, the couple are called “the Mary and the
Joseph.” Greek is a highly inflected language and word order is generally more a matter
of emphasis than meaning. Thus, one can write in Greek “Jesus loves John” and the
words can stand in any order without affecting the basic meaning. When these two
groups of variants—transpositions and definite articles with proper names—occur in a
simple sentence such as “Jesus loves John,” there are at least sixteen different ways to
write it in Greek, without even involving different spellings for ‘John.’ And when
spelling variations, synonyms, and particles that are frequently untranslated are taken
into account, the Greek clauses that would all be rendered “Jesus loves John” numbers
in the hundreds. In light of these possibilities, 400,000 variants for the New Testament
manuscripts are seen to be almost tiny in comparison with the potential pool of
insignificant wording differences.

Meaningful but not Viable
A rather large group of variants are those that make sense and are appropriate to

the context but are supported only by insignificant or late manuscripts. For example, in
1 Thessalonians 2:9, one medieval manuscript has “the gospel of Christ” instead of “the
gospel of God,” the reading found in all other copies. This is a meaningful variation, but
it has no credibility: there is little chance that a lone late manuscript could have the
autographic wording when all the rest of the witnesses uniformly support a different
text.

In a tenth-eleventh century copy of Luke’s Gospel, the scribe has an interesting
reading at Luke 6:22. The verse, as found in almost all manuscripts, is translated in the
HCSB as “You are blessed when people hate you, when they exclude you, insult you,
and slander your name as evil because of the Son of Man.” But codex 2882 lacks
“because of the Son of Man.” The manuscript thus makes a general pronouncement of
blessing for the persecuted, regardless of whether they are Christ-followers or not—
perfectly suited for our postmodern world. There is no obvious reason why the scribe
would have deleted the words, but this surely must have happened. No other

87 See Matthew P. Morgan, “The Legacy of a Letter: Sabellianism or Scribal Blunder in
John 1.1c?” in Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal
Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011) 91–126, for this and several other
examples of blunders in codex L.

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manuscript lacks “because of the Son of Man” and this codex generally follows the text-
form current in his day. For a scribe a millennium removed from Luke’s autograph,
whose text otherwise is in line with a generally later and less accurate form of Luke, is
hardly likely, by himself, to have the original wording here.

Harmonizations in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) occur in
manuscripts on a massive scale. Scribes had a strong tendency to harmonize the
wording in the Gospels, especially changing Mark’s text to conform to the wording
found in Matthew in parallel passages. Two groups of manuscripts—the Western and
Byzantine text-forms—were especially prone to harmonization. Since it is a known
scribal practice to harmonize the wording between two Gospels,88 the reading that does
not harmonize is typically considered to be authentic. When harmonizations are found
in later manuscripts and non-harmonizations in earlier manuscripts, scholars naturally
prefer the non-harmonized reading. The reason is simple enough: ancient scribes, like
modern-day Christians, tended to harmonize parallel passages, even when the
differences were trivial. What scribes would intentionally de-harmonize the parallel
passages? If every Gospels manuscript of substantial length harmonizes, the scribes
were clearly not malicious when it came to this issue. Further, by the second century,
scribes viewed the Gospels as scripture. But they also recognized that the exemplar they
were copying had mistakes in it. And they often thought they detected such mistakes in
parallel passages in which the accounts did not say the same thing. Examples of
harmonization in the Gospel manuscripts can be found on any page in the apparatus of
the standard critical text of the New Testament.

These first three categories of alterations—neither meaningful nor viable, viable
but not meaningful, and meaningful but not viable—constitute the overwhelming
majority of textual variants found in New Testament manuscripts. They give the proper
context for Ehrman’s provocative-sounding remark, “We could go on nearly forever
talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be
changed, either accidentally or intentionally.… the examples are not just in the
hundreds but in the thousands.”89

88 Gordon D. Fee, “Modern Textual Criticism and the Synoptic Problem: On the Problem
of Harmonization in the Gospels,” in Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual
Criticism, by Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 174–82. Even
some advocates of what is known as the ‘majority text’ recognize that harmonizations are
plentiful in their preferred text-form. See Willem Franciscus Wisselink, Assimilation as a Criterion
for the Establishment of the Text: A Comparative Study on the Basis of Passages from Matthew, Mark,
and Luke (Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschappij J. H. Kok, 1989), 87–90.

89 Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 98.

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Meaningful and Viable Variants
The last category of variants are those that are both meaningful and viable. This

is the group of textual differences that show up as marginal readings in Bible
translations. They are by far the smallest category, consisting of less than one percent of all
textual variations.90 How meaningful are these readings? They change the meaning of
the text to some degree, but not necessarily a lot. If the wording affects our understanding
of the passage then it is considered meaningful, and if it is found in sufficiently
significant and reliable witnesses, it is viable. Many skeptics have argued for sweeping
agnosticism about the wording of the original, when the reality is that our uncertainty
about the autographs is over a tiny fraction of the whole. To apply their skepticism to
the entire New Testament text is irresponsible and sloppy scholarship.

As an illustration of my last point, consider a debate I had with Bart Ehrman,
held at Southern Methodist University on 1 October 2011. The two-hour event boasted
the largest attendance ever of any debate over the text of the New Testament—more
than 1400 people! During the Q & A, a local pastor, Justin Bass, asked Ehrman what it
would take for him to be convinced that the wording of Mark’s Gospel was certain.
Ehrman responded that it would require ten manuscripts, all copied from the original of
Mark’s Gospel within one week of its composition, and having no more than 0.001%
deviation from each other.91 One would think that such a radical skeptic as Ehrman
would have thought about this question for some time and that his response would
reflect his well-thought-out reasoning. The reality is that he spoke off the cuff: not only
have his criteria never been met for any ancient writing (thus making them an
impossible standard to achieve, historically speaking) but it would mean that there
would be no more than one half of one letter difference among all these manuscripts!92
Ehrman later admitted on the Internet’s TC List that he was exaggerating when
answering Dr. Bass’s question, in spite of the fact that Bass was asking for the minimum

90 Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus is notorious for camping on this final category of variants,
but usually by leaving the reader completely unaware that they constitute a tiny fraction of all
textual differences. As Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver
Seminary, notes, “What most distinguishes the work are the spins Ehrman puts on some of the
data at numerous junctures and his propensity for focusing on the most drastic of all the
changes in the history of the text, leaving the uninitiated likely to think there are numerous
additional examples of various phenomena he discusses when there are not” (Denver Journal 9
[2006]; accessed on-line).

91 The DVD of the debate is available at www.csntm.org.

92 Mark’s Gospel in Greek has less than 57,000 letters; 0.001% deviation is one out of
100,000 or one half of one letter.

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amount of evidence required to convince Ehrman.93 This sort of skepticism, although
increasingly common today among non-Christian biblical scholars, creates Chicken
Littles by preying on the fear of the unknown of those who have not had the privilege
of studying the New Testament in Greek. And it reveals the real agenda of such
scholars: no amount of evidence will ever convince them that their wholesale cynicism
is even remotely improbable. When more evidence is produced, they simply move the
station a little farther down the railroad track.

As we have seen, the vast bulk of textual variants are inconsequential. Whether
John’s name was spelled in the Greek New Testament with one nu or two may remain a
mystery. But John’s name is never spelled M-a-r-y. The issues that textual scholars have
to deal with are so insignificant to most other New Testament scholars that the latter
often assume that there is nothing left to do in the discipline. But textual criticism has
historically been the backbone of exegesis, since one cannot tell what the text means
until he or she knows what it says. Although at the beginning of the twenty-first
century most of the text of the New Testament is not in dispute, some passages still are.

A meaningful and viable textual variant is found in Romans 5:1. Does Paul say,
“We have peace” (echomen) or “let us have peace” (echomen)? The difference between the
indicative and subjunctive mood is a single letter—either a long o or a short o. The
similar sounding omicron (ο) and omega (ω) were most likely both pronounced as o in
Hellenistic Greek (as they are in later Greek), making the decision even more difficult.
Indeed, scholars are on both sides of this textual problem, although most translations go
with the indicative. But neither variant is a contradiction of the teaching of scripture. If
Paul is saying that Christians have peace (indicative mood), he is speaking about their
positional status with God. If the apostle is exhorting believers to have peace with God
(subjunctive mood), he is urging them to appropriate the “indicatives of the faith”—the
foundational truths on which Christianity is based—by living them out in their daily
lives.

Textual critics consider a combination of factors when they try to ascertain the
wording of the autographs. The evidence is broken down into two categories, broadly
speaking: external evidence—that is, what the manuscripts, ancient versions, and
patristic quotations of the New Testament read; and internal evidence—what scribes
were likely to have done (such as harmonize passages) and what the author was likely
to have done. External evidence and internal evidence are usually on the same side—
that is, both of them normally point to the same reading as authentic. When this is the
case, the decision is easy. The agreement of these two categories of evidence becomes a
twofold cord, one that is not easily broken.

Yet there are plenty of examples in which the internal evidence is at odds with

93 Several exchanges between Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace on the TC-List, 10–14 Dec
2011, accessible at the site http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/tc-list.html.

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the external. For example, Philippians 1:14 says, “Most of the brothers in the Lord have
gained confidence from my imprisonment and dare even more to speak the message
fearlessly” (HCSB). The question naturally arises, What ‘message’ (in Greek: logos
[word])? Paul doesn’t tell us. Scribes predictably added “of God,” clarifying what word
was in view. Some even added “of the Lord.” Surprisingly, many of the early, better
manuscripts are the ones that add “of God,” while the majority of later manuscripts do
not have these words. This is a classic illustration of the clash between internal and
external evidence. The fundamental principle that textual critics follow is to choose the
reading that seems to give rise to the other(s). In this case, most scholars consider the
shorter reading to be authentic since scribes were prone to add clarifying notes to
ambiguous phrases. This textual problem involves meaningful and viable variants. But
no theological issues are at stake.

In Matthew 27:16–17 we read, “At that time they had a notorious prisoner called
Barabbas. So when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, ‘Who is it you want
me to release for you—Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Messiah?’” (HCSB). This is
substantially the text found in most of the manuscripts, including the earliest and best.
However, one group of manuscripts has ‘Jesus’ before ‘Barabbas’ in both verses. One
can easily see why scribes would be prone to omit the name ‘Jesus’ before ‘Barabbas’
since Barabbas was an infamous criminal who certainly did not deserve the same name
as the Son of God. One patristic writer, in fact, arguing against the addition, said that no
sinner was ever called ‘Jesus’ in scripture, so the word must be expunged before
Barabbas’s name.94 Pious scribes who thought along the same lines would naturally
delete the name. What is not so easy to explain is why some scribes would add the name
‘Jesus’ before ‘Barabbas.’ The internal evidence, in this case, seems to better explain the
rise of the omission than the other way around. Consequently, the NET, TNIV, NIV
2011, TEV, REB, and NRSV have “Jesus Barabbas” in each verse. But again, no
theological issue is at stake. In fact, it may be that Matthew is preserving a historical
tidbit that involves a bit of irony: One Jesus died in the place of another Jesus, the
second one being unworthy of the name.

The two longest textual variants among the manuscripts involve a dozen verses
each—Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11. There are no other variants that come close. Not
surprisingly, some skeptics are hardly even-handed in dealing with these problems. As
one scholar complained,

[Ehrman’s] first extended examples of textual problems in the New Testament
are the woman caught in adultery and the longer ending of Mark. After
demonstrating how neither of these is likely to be part of the originals of either

94 See Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed.
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994) 56.

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Gospel, Ehrman concedes that “most of the changes are not of this
magnitude” (p. 69). But this sounds as if there are at least a few others that are of
similar size, when in fact there are no other textual variants anywhere that are
even one-fourth as long as these thirteen [sic]- and twelve-verse additions.95

In Mark 16, the earliest and best manuscripts end the book at verse 8: “So they
went out and started running from the tomb, because trembling and astonishment
overwhelmed them. And they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid” (HCSB).
Such an abrupt end to the Gospel has caused no end of debate among scholars. Did
Mark intend to end his Gospel this way? Was the real ending lost? Or were verses 9–20,
found in the great majority of manuscripts, the real ending to this Gospel?96

A similar situation occurs in John 7:53–8:11, the story of the woman caught in
adultery. New Testament scholars by a wide margin regard this text in the same way
they regard Mark 16:9–20: these verses are not authentic. Most Christians, if forced to
make a choice, would rather have the story of the woman caught in adultery than the
long ending to Mark in their Bibles.97 Yet the evidence is significantly weaker for John
7:53–8:11 than for Mark 16:9–20. In spite of its appeal as an important story about Jesus’
tenderness and forgiveness toward a sinner, it most likely was not penned by the author
of the Fourth Gospel.

For our purposes, we need to point out that whether either of these passages is
authentic or not, no fundamental truth is gained or lost by them. To be sure, the textual
decision will affect how one views these Gospels as a whole, but it does not affect any
cardinal doctrine.

Although the textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts number in
the hundreds of thousands, the nature of these variants is on a different scale. Those that
are both meaningful and viable are less than one percent of the whole; the numbers are
in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands. Remarkably, many skeptics write as
though the excision of such texts could shake up orthodox convictions.98 Such is not the
case. I am aware of no confessional statements at seminaries, Christian colleges, or
major denominations that were retooled in the slightest because of the excision of any of
the meaningful and viable variants.

95 Blomberg, Denver Journal 9 (accessed on-line).

96 For a debate over the text of Mark 16:9–20, see Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: Four
Views, ed. D. A. Black (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008).

97 In scores of lectures I have given on the text of the New Testament in churches,
colleges, apologetics conferences, and the like, I have found that overwhelmingly the Johannine
text is preferred over the Markan.

98 See, for example, the sources cited at the beginning of this chapter.

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Theological Issues Raised by Textual Variants
In this section, I wish to highlight two points. First, even though scholars have

argued from time to time that serious theological discrepancies are found in viable variants,
the evidence simply cannot be twisted in that direction. Second, we will discuss whether
inerrancy is affected by viable variants.

As we have noted throughout this chapter, Bart Ehrman is the primary protagonist
for major theological tampering of the New Testament by early orthodox scribes. Yet even
Ehrman had to stop short of claiming that any cardinal doctrine is in jeopardy because of
textual uncertainty. And the fact that he has done so reveals that the Muslim and atheist
apologists who depend on his scholarship have misread his books and have blown the
evidence way out of proportion.

In the appendix to the paperback version of Misquoting Jesus there is a Q&A section.
The most telling question asked of Ehrman is this: “Why do you believe these core tenets of
Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the
biblical manuscripts?”

Ehrman’s response: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in
the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” The question unmasked the prevailing
attitude by readers of Misquoting Jesus: they believed that Ehrman had indeed demonstrated
early orthodox scribes to have twisted scripture beyond recognition. This is also how many
followers, especially atheist and Muslim apologists, had read his book. Yet Ehrman’s answer
showed that he never demonstrated this. Suffice it to say that viable textual variants that
disturb essential Christian beliefs have not been found in New Testament manuscripts.
Although as we have seen that scribes did indeed change the scriptures to conform to what
they believed it meant, their tampering with the text has been severely overstated.99 And
the very fact that scholars have been able to detect these changes shows that the

99 For an extended critique of Ehrman’s Orthodox Corruption of the Scripture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), on which his Misquoting Jesus was based, see Revisiting the
Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B.
Wallace (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011).

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autographic wording is knowable.100 It is unfortunate that so many have abandoned the
Christian faith on a feeling that the scriptures are unreliable, or on bloated claims of
corruption. After all the dust is settled, the manuscripts of the New Testament are, in all
essentials, reliable witnesses to the apostolic faith.

Regarding inerrancy, we should first of all note that evangelical theologians have
insisted that the autographs are inerrant, and that the copies are inerrant only insofar as
they faithfully duplicate the original wording.101 Those outside the evangelical community
routinely assume that the fact of thousands of textual variants necessarily proves inerrancy
to be a false doctrine.102 But the fact of variants is irrelevant to the doctrine since inerrancy is
about the wording of the original text. Second, we should note that the doctrine of
inerrancy does not mean that differences in spelling, grammar, or idioms are relevant. For
example, John uses the Greek word for “he opened,” spelling it three different ways in eight
verses!103 Inerrancy has to do with the message of the Bible, not necessarily the packaging of
that message. From Calvin to Kantzer, those who embrace inerrancy have no problem

100 Moisés Silva gave an insightful critique of those scholars who wanted to jettison the
quest of determining the wording of the original text (“Response,” in Rethinking New Testament
Textual Criticism [ed. David Alan Black; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002] 149):

For us to retreat from the traditional task of textual criticism is equivalent to shooting
ourselves in the foot. And my exhibit A is Bart Ehrman’s brilliant monograph The
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture … Although this book is appealed to in support of
blurring the notion of an original text, there is hardly a page in that book that does not in
fact mention such a text or assume its accessibility… Indeed, Ehrman’s book is
unimaginable unless he can identify an initial form of the text that can be differentiated
from a later alteration.

101 For example, the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society, the
largest society of evangelical scholars in the world, says “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its
entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”

102 E.g., Roger Bolton, “The Rival to the Bible,” in the BBC News Magazine, 6 Oct 2008
(accessible at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7651105.stm), in discussing the
digitization of Codex Sinaiticus by the British Library, claimed “For those who believe the Bible
is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to
answer. [Codex Sinaiticus] shows there have been thousands of alterations to today’s bible.”

103 In John 9.14, 17, and 21 the third person singular aorist active indicative of ἀνοίγω is
spelled successively as ἀνέῳξεν, ἠνέῳξεν, and ἤνοιξεν.

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allowing for non-substantive errors in the text.104 Third, we should also note what the
impact of viable variants is on the doctrine. After all, if there are some variants that may well
be authentic and yet seem to contradict inerrancy, then the doctrine may be in jeopardy.
Although several potential textual problem passages have been produced, not one has
compelled evangelical scholars to abandon this doctrine.105
Conclusion
! Has the New Testament text been hopelessly corrupted? Even bona fide
textual critics who happen to be skeptics have not been able to demonstrate this to be so.
Instead, the text is certain in all essentials, and even in most particulars we can be relatively
sure what the autographs said. Further, in the passages in which the text is in doubt, no
cardinal doctrine is at stake. Most importantly, the death and resurrection of the God-man,
Jesus Christ—the core of the Christian faith—has not been tampered with throughout
fourteen hundred years of textual transmission.

Questions:
1. If a Muslim were to challenge your faith, saying: "Your Bible is corrupted and all your

Bible manuscripts have variants in them, how would you respond?"
2. 400,000 can seem to be a high number of varients between N.T. manuscripts. Why is it

that there are so many textual differences for the New Testament? Can you name the
different categories of variants?
3. If a Muslim were to challenge your faith, saying: "Your Bible is corrupted and all your
Bible manuscripts have variants in them, how would you respond?"
4. Do Bible manuscripts contain the essential Christian doctrines - how do you know?

104 John Calvin sometimes noted the infelicities in the language of the biblical writers,
such as in Rom 5.15: “Although he [Paul] frequently mentions the difference between Adam
and Christ, all his repeated statements… are elliptical. Those, it is true, are faults in his
language, but in no way do they detract from the majesty of the heavenly wisdom which is
delivered to us by the apostle” (The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and Thessalonians,
trans. David and Thomas Torrance [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960] 114). J. I. Packer
appropriately comments on Calvin’s view of these grammatical and stylistic impoverishments:
“Calvin would fault an apostle for poor style and bad grammar but not for substantive
inaccuracy” (“John Calvin and the Inerrancy of Holy Scripture,” in Inerrancy and the Church, ed.
John D. Hannah [Chicago: Moody, 1984] 178-79). Kenneth Kantzer notes, in his essay on
“Inerrancy and the Humanity and Divinity of the Bible,” that “Inerrancy teaches us that God
kept the Biblical writers from bearing false witness as they wrote the Bible. However inglorious
human language may be, and therefore, however imperfect the human language of the Bible may be,
it still always tells the truth” (in The Proceedings of the Conference on Biblical Inerrancy 1987
[Nashville: Broadman, 1987] 156 [italics added]).

105 See Daniel B. Wallace, “Inerrancy and the Text of the New Testament: Assessing the
Logic of the Agnostic View,” in Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History,
Philosophy, and Science, edited by William A. Dembsky and Michael L. Licona (Grand Rapids:
Baker, 2010).

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! VIDEO LESSON 5 - Jesus in Islam and Christianity

I. Introduction
A. Imagine with me for a moment; at name of Jesus there is the image of Genghis
Khan
B. Imagine a world in which Jesus brings to mind the image of Confucius
C. But as a Christian, you find a part of you saying, “It’s nicer, but it’s not right
either.”
D. What is wrong with both of these pictures of Jesus? They are not historical.
E. When faced with multiple conflicting accounts regarding Jesus Christ’s nature
and ministry, how can we know that our Christ is the right one?

II. Seventh century Arabia and Muhammad
A. Amazing revelations about Jesus, AD 610-632
B. First attack: source material for the life of Christ is corrupted (tahrif)
1. Muslims believe the New Testament has been corrupted
2. But the Qur’an itself does not make the claim!
3. Same claim by Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code: Bible is corrupted!
4. Response to both the Qur’an and Brown:
a. Manuscript evidence: we have multiple copies of ancient texts, which do
not deviate in message or theology.
b. 25,000 manuscript fragments
c. 230 pre-date the Qur’an
d. We have no early Qur’anic manuscripts

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e. We wait over 322 years after Muhammad to establish a complete
manuscript of Qur’an
f. Muslims hold to different inspiration; Qur’an is perfectly preserved; not a
thing is missing. They then apply this standard to the Bible.
g. If even the smallest manuscript discrepancy exists, it is corrupted; but NT
discrepancies exist as errors in copying.
h. No evidence Bible was different before Muhammad’s time than from after
5. 86,000 scriptural quotations from other early church fathers’ writings
a. As early as AD 150-200
b. All but eleven verses accounted for in these writings
6. To prove Brown and Muslim’s view of Bible, it must be shown that
a. Show us an uncorrupted original
b. Show us the corrupted texts
c. Show us when the tampering occurred
d. Show us the corruptions as distinguished from original
7. Muslims turn to Qur’an for accurate information about Jesus; a book that came
700 years later!
C. Second attack: Jesus’ mythical miracles
1. The Qur’an and Islamic traditions present some amazing embellishments
2. Speaks from the cradle: “I am the servant of Allah” (Q19:30)
3. Brings clay bird to life (Infancy Gospel of Thomas)
a. “I am the Son of God” but in Qur’an: “I am the servant of Allah”

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b. Muhammad and his followers were surrounded by Nestorian and Eastern
Christians
4. Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse meeting Jesus and other
prophets. It was here Muhammad negotiated with Allah to have five prayers a
day. Dome of the Rock commemorates this event.
5. Jesus of the future
a. Jihading warrior on Day of Judgment
b. Medium height with a reddish complexion
c. Comes back to minaret in Damascus
d. Destroys all religions but Islam
6. What Jesus are Muslims talking about? A fabricated Islamic Jesus!
7. Qur’an is later source material that we must reject; too far removed from Jesus!
D. Third attack: Jesus was not crucified
1. Q4:157, “And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary,
Allah's messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto
them . . . they slew him not for certain.”
2. Jews thought they killed Jesus, but did not
3. Substitution took place
4. Moral and philosophical problem with this
a. Allah deceived Jesus’ followers, mother and friends?
b. 2 billion Christians are deceived today?
c. Paul thought he was crucified: “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23).
d. Paul’s argument (Acts 17:16):

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i. If Jesus rose from the dead, his message is from God
ii. Jesus rose from the dead
iii. Therefore, his message was from God

e. So, how can we be confident that Jesus was crucified?

i. Gospels as primary sources: crucifixion in all four

ii. Crucifixion confirmed by enemies of early Christians

! Tacitus (AD 56-120), Roman historian, Annuls, “a most mischievous
superstition.” And referring to Christians: “criminals who deserved
extreme and exemplary punishment. . . . Nero fastened the guilt
and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their
abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from
whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during
the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius
Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the
moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the
evil, but even in Rome ”

! Flavius Josephus (AD 37-100) Jewish War (AD 75-80) and Jewish
Histories (early 90s); “Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise
man, for he was a doer of marvelous deeds — a teacher of such
men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both
many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. When Pilate, at the
suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him
to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him,
and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at
this day” (Ant. 18:3).

! Talmud, later record of rabbinic discussions: “On the eve of the
Passover, Yeshu was hanged. . . . he has practiced sorcery
and enticed Israel to apostasy.”

f. This Islamic view must be rejected!

E. Fourth attack: Jesus is not divine and did not claim divinity; he is only a prophet.

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1. Show me where Jesus says, “I am God”

2. Q4:171, “O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion . . . The
Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of Allah . . . So believe in Allah
and His messengers, and say not ‘Three’—Cease! (it is) better for you! Allah is
only One God.”

3. Da Vinci Code is a modern challenge: “My dear . . . until that moment in history
(when the scriptures were changed), Jesus was viewed by His followers as a
mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”

4. NT says it differently

a. John 1:1-3 Jesus is eternal and creates all things

b. Col 1:16-17

c. Acts 7:54-60, Jesus is prayed to

d. Mt 12, 14, 18, Jesus received worshipped (only God was to be worshipped,
Mk 2:2,8,11; 14:33; 28:9,17; John 9:35-37).

e. Jesus omnipresent, Mt 28:20

f. Jesus said, "I AM the Resurrection and the Life," John 11:25

g. Jesus forgives sins in Matthew 9:1-7; Luke 5:20; 7:48

h. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, Heb 1:3

i. Jesus is called God by the New Testament writers, John 20:28; Phil 2:6-11

j. Explicit, John 8:58, ego eimi, I AM, (cf. Ex 3:14)

i. Jews understood him

ii. Legal to stone a man for leading others to idol worship, rebellious son,
adultery or rape, medium, and blasphemy

iii. John 10:32-33 leaves no doubt

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k. Why didn’t he just say, “I am God”? His actions declared it.

5. Islam has the view of Jesus it does because of its view of God

a. Allah is distant, isolated, secretive, impersonal and capricious

b. He only communicates his will

c. Muslims speak about a God they fear

d. Allah does not love unbelievers

e. Yahweh is different from the distant gods of Greek philosophy; he enters
time and space to help us; he is the unique creator.

f. Jesus walked with Adam and Eve; wrestled with Jacob; accompanied Moses
and Israelites; in dwelt the kings and prophets; God in the flesh; Immanuel.

g. So, when Muslims ask me “Do you believe Jesus is God?”

i. Do I think He is Allah as presented in the Qur’an? No.

ii. Do I think Jesus is Yahweh as presented in the whole of the Bible? Yes.

iii. The rejection of Christ’s deity fundamentally undermines the one and
only foundation and hope for eternal salvation.

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III. Conclusion
A. All cults begin by distorting and changing the person of Christ.
B. Basic problem is they are too far removed from the events of Christ’s life
C. Our Scriptures are reliable
D. Our faith in and experiences with Christ are reliable
E. The best way to defend our faith in Christ is to come to know deeply the Jesus of
history

Application:
Please go to page 308 and fill out the Video Lesson 5 Application sheet.
Small Group Discussion:
Discuss 2-3 points from video lesson 5 application sheet page 308

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Jesus the Eternal Son of God
David Abernathy

David Abernathy has an MA in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in
Charlotte, NC. He taught Greek, Hebrew, biblical exegesis and sociolinguistics in Kenya, assisted
in translation workshops in Nigeria, and has also lived and worked in Mexico. He currently lives
in the U.S. and does exegetical research.

Introduction
In recent decades there has been a trend among missionary Bible translators

working among Muslim people groups to avoid a literal translation of the phrase Son of
God because of the negative Muslim reaction. However, the term has tremendous
theological significance, both for understanding God’s Trinitarian nature, and
understanding the nature of the relationship believers in Christ share as God’s children.
This theological significance may be missed if the translation of the Son of God does not
clearly indicate that Jesus was truly the Son of God in a real sense; that is, in a sense that
is essential to his eternal nature and being. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the
significance of the term Son of God in light of historical creeds and biblical theology.

Understanding the problem
The Qur’an anathematizes anyone daring to say that Jesus is the Son of God;

guaranteeing that they will go to hell, possibly even causing the earth and heavens to
shake (Q4:165; 5:18; 6:101; 9:30; 17:111; 19:35, 88-92; 23:91). Muslims have traditionally
taught that the phrase Son of God can only mean that Christians believe that God
produced offspring by a sexual union with a woman. In some parts of the world, it
seems nearly impossible to convince devout Muslims that any other meaning is even
possible. The presence of the offending term could prevent the translated text from ever
getting a hearing, much less transform the thinking of the readers, unless a significant
change in understanding is made through a deep move of the Holy Spirit.

Missionary Bible translators have long operated under the premise that if the
reading audience gets little meaning, no meaning, or the wrong meaning from a
passage, then the wording of the passage must be altered in order to solve the problem.
Consequently, some translators have opted to use different wording for Son of God in
order to avoid the wrong meaning Muslims attach to the phrase. Translators reason that
since Son of God is a metaphor, a suitable non-metaphorical equivalent can be
substituted. Because the Qur’an uses the terms Messiah (al masih) and Word to refer to
Jesus, some translators, wanting to avoid the reaction that the prohibited term Son of

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God causes, choose to use Messiah, Word or God’s beloved in place of Son of God. However,
most Christians have understood the phrase Son of God to mean that Jesus actually is
God’s eternal, preexistent Son. Changing the phrase to Messiah or Word—or anything
else—fails to communicate the reality of this eternal Father-Son relationship.

The meaning of the term Son of God
Metaphorical or metaphysical?
One of the arguments translators use for substituting Son of God is that the term is

considered a metaphor, and as such, can be altered to communicate the same intended
non-metaphorical meaning, whatever the metaphor’s meaning is determined to be for
the context. The rationale is that since Jesus does not have a divine mother, he cannot
literally be the Son of God; so it is assumed that the only other option is that he is Son in
some metaphorical sense. That is, if the sonship is not physical, it can only be
metaphorical. No other alternatives are recognized.

But when talking about the persons of the Trinity, there is a third category in
addition to the physical and the metaphorical: the metaphysical. Christ’s sonship is a
metaphysical and essential sonship that is eternal and real; it is the essence of who he is
eternally. As St. Hilary of Poitiers put it, “He is the only-begotten, perfect, eternal Son of
the unbegotten, perfect, eternal Father.”106 The statement that “God sent his own Son”
means that Jesus was already the Son of God when he was sent; that is, Jesus is the
eternal, preexistent Son of God.

The church has always understood Christ’s sonship in this way, going far beyond
metaphor. If Son of God simply were a metaphor, it would originate in human
relationships—with divine relationships described in terms of the human. This implies
that God is at a loss for ways to describe his being, and can only draw from human
experiences to do so. This is not the case. Just as a computer hard drive must be
formatted before data can be written to it, so the human experience and personality is
stamped with certain eternal patterns enabling us to understand something of the
essential nature of the God who created us in his image. The Father-Son relation is an
eternal pattern, inherent in the very nature of the persons of the Trinity. It is a pattern
God has built into human experience in order to teach us something about himself.

Paul says, “I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on
earth derives its name” (Eph 3:14-15). Paul is saying earthly fatherhood has its origin in
God himself. Most Reformation confessions of faith assert the Son is eternally begotten
of the Father, as do many of the ancient creeds. Most of the doctrinal statements of
mission organizations, Christian academic institutions, or denominational church
bodies that are conservative enough to have a doctrinal statement, will assert, in one
form or another, that God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If God exists

106 Hilary, De Trinitate 3.3. ISLAM’S'ISSUES,'AGENDAS'&'THE'GREAT'COMMISSION
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eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then fatherhood and sonship are an eternal
aspect of their relationship: God is Father eternally and Jesus is the eternal Son.

Metaphor, archetype, and inherent sonship
Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck argued that when we refer to God as Father, we
are not using a metaphor, as though fatherhood is primarily an attribute of humanity,
and so referring to God only in a secondary or derived sense.107 Bavinck said the
relation is reversed: “God is Father in the real and complete sense of the term.”108 His
fatherhood pertains to his eternal essence, and fatherhood on earth is but a dim
reflection or shadow of God’s eternal fatherhood. The eternal character of God’s
fatherhood implies the eternal character of Christ’s divine sonship.109 Fatherhood and
sonship are archetypes: eternal patterns that correspond to realities encountered within
the temporal and natural realm. Human fatherhood and sonship are, by comparison,
faint copies of the eternal Father-Son relation.110 The nouns Father and Son have their
proper biblical meaning only in relation to each other; that is, the Father is called the
Father of the Son, and the Son is the Son of the Father.111 Richard Bauckham comments
in regard to Jesus’ revelation of himself as being one with the Father (John 10:30):

The terms Father and Son entail each other. The Father is called Father only because
Jesus is his Son, and Jesus is called Son only because he is the Son of his divine
Father. Each is essential to the identity of the other. So to say that Jesus and the
Father are one is to say that the unique divine identity comprises the relationship in
which the Father is who he is only in relation to the Son and vice versa.112

Only God is Father in the fullest sense for he was the first father. Bavinck went on to
conclude that whoever refuses to honor God as Father shows more disrespect toward
the Father than the one who does not acknowledge him as creator. Douglas Kelly
believes it is significant that both the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed mention the

107 Herman Bavinck 1977 (1977). The Doctrine of God. (307) Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust.

108 Athanasius, commenting on Eph 3:15, said, “God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and
truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named” (Contra
Arianos 1.7.23).

109 Herman Bavinck. In John Murray (1982). Collected Writings of John Murray: Studies in Theology (v. 4, 66). Carlisle, PA: Banner of
Truth Trust.

110 Merrill C. Tenney (1981). The Gospel of John. (196). EBC Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

111 Robert Jensen. “The Trinity in the Bible.” Concordia Theological Quarterly. 68(3–4): 204.; cf. Murray, Collected writings 66. Calvin,
citing Augustine, says that Christ is called God with respect to himself, but Son with respect to the Father; the Father is called God with
respect to himself, but Father with respect to the Son (Institutes I, xiii, 19).

112 Richard Bauckham (2008). God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of divine identity (106). Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans.

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fatherhood of God before speaking of him as creator; that is, he was always Father, but
he was not always creator.113 This understanding of God’s eternal fatherhood is
common; Athanasius elaborated the point in the fourth century.114

The epistle to the Hebrews illustrates the concept of archetypes. The earthly
tabernacle was a copy that corresponded to a heavenly reality (Heb 9:11, 23). Likewise,
Melchizedek, as a priest and king, is like the Son of God. The writer is not using the
Jewish tabernacle as a pattern for heavenly realities, nor is he taking Melchizedek as a
pattern for Jesus’ ministry. He does exactly the reverse. The earthly tabernacle and the
earthly priest-king, Melchizedek, display certain similarities to the preexistent heavenly
realities.

Note also that the Father-Son-Son of God conceptual cluster, which occurs several
hundred times in the New Testament, occurs far more frequently and is distributed far
more widely than normal biblical metaphors. The biblical authors do not indicate that
Christ’s sonship is metaphorical. They viewed it as substantive and real in the fullest
sense. This is also true of the sonship of believers. 1 John 3:1 says, “How great is the love
the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is
what we are!” We do not need to assume the term Son of God must be metaphorical. It
does not have to be understood in a literal-physical sense. There is an eternal and
metaphysical sense in which Jesus is the divine Son, the Son of God.

Divine sonship as prototype for humans becoming God’s sons and daughters
Many scholars state it is Christ’s natural and eternal sonship that leads to our
adoption as sons and daughters of God. The mission of God’s Son was to bring others
into a relationship with God as his children.115 It is Jesus’ uncreated, natural, eternal
sonship that makes all the other sons of God possible.116 Larry Hurtado notes that in
Paul’s view, God’s purpose in sending his Son was that we might become sons by
adoption.117 In Romans 8:29 and Galatians 4:4-6, Paul shows that it is through the work

113 Douglas F. Kelly (2008). Systematic Theology: Grounded in Holy Scripture and Understood in the Light of the Church (449). Fearn, Ross-
shire, Scotland: Mentor.

114 Athanasius said, “It belongs to the Godhead alone that the Father is properly father, and the Son properly Son, and in them, and
them only, does it hold that the Father is ever Father and the Son ever Son.” Against the Arians: Discourse Four, Ch. VI, section 21. http://
www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.xxi.ii.i.iv.html (accessed 2/3/11).

115 George Eldon Ladd (1974). In Donald A. Hagner (Ed.). A Theology of the New Testament. (458) (Rev. ed.). Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans.

116 Donald G. Bloesch (1978). Essentials of Evangelical Theology: God, Authority, and Salvation (126). San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Calvin notes that although God was never Father to either angels or men, but only with regard to his only begotten son, he
nevertheless enables sinful men to become God’s sons by free adoption through Christ, who is the Son of God by nature, and who
always possessed sonship (Institutes II, xiv, 5).

117 Larry W. Hurtado (1993). “Son of God” (905–906). In Gerald F. Hawthorne and Ralph P. Martin (Eds.). Dictionary of Paul and
His Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity; cf. Gerald O’Collins (1999). The Tripersonal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity
(62). New York, NY: Paulist Press.

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of the preexistent Son whom God sent to die for us that we are adopted as God’s
sons.118 The Son leads other sons to salvation as well as to the inheritance associated
with sonship; this inheritance is both his and theirs.119 This means that Jesus, as the
divine Son, whose sonship is not derived from another, is the prototype and agent
granting others the right to be God’s sons. The sonship of Christians is derived from
Jesus’ own sonship and patterned after it,120 and the pattern of that sonship is
obedience.121 Jesus mediates for believers a new relationship with God, bringing them
into the same intimate relationship with God that they may call him Abba.122 Through
the Son of God, believers are accepted as children of God, calling his Father, their
Father.123 Dumitru Staniloae says,

The revelation of the Trinity, occasioned by the incarnation and earthly activity of
the Son, has no other purpose than to draw us after grace, to draw us through the
Holy Spirit into the filial relationship the Son has with the Father.124

Further, Staniloae characterizes this relationship as one of eternal love and
communion.125

According to J. N. D. Kelly, it is through the incarnation that the Son of God
revealed the heart of God to the human race. On their behalf and in their place, he gave
the perfect filial responses required by God so they could know the Father as the Son
knows him.126 F. F. Bruce characterizes the process this way:

The Son and the Father exist together in an eternal relationship of reciprocal love,
and all those who are united to the Son through believing in him are welcomed into

118 I. Howard Marshall (1980). “Titles of Jesus Christ” (778). In J. D. Douglas (Ed.). The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, part 2. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity; cf. Millard Erickson (1991). The Word Became Flesh (35). Grand Rapids: Baker Books.

119 Kenneth Schenk (1997). “Keeping His Appointment: Creation and Enthronement in Hebrews.” Journal for the Study of the New
Testament 66: 98, 102.

120 Hurtado, “Son of God” 905–906; Schenk, “Keeping” 99.

121 D. R. Bauer (1992). “Son of God” (774). In Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Eds.). Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity.

122 I. Howard Marshall (1967). “The Divine Sonship of Jesus.” Interpretation 21: 90; cf. Craig L. Blomberg (1997). Jesus and the Gospels
(405). Nashville, TN: B & H.

123 Norval Geldenhuys (1977). Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes (130). Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

124 Dumitru Staniloae (1994). Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: The Experience of God (249). Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer (trans.).
Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Cited in D. F. Kelley, Systematic Theology 261.

125 Staniloae, Orthodox 249.

126 J. N. D. Kelly (1972). Early Christian Creeds. Essex, England: Longman/Pearson Education Ltd.

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this relationship: the Father of Jesus becomes their Father too.127

In other words, our own union with God “depends upon the intimate union of the
Father and the Son.”128 The salvation granted to believers as part of God’s eternal plan
—making us his own sons and daughters—was accomplished through the perfect Son,
our model.

The historical development of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine
The creeds, the Trinity, and the Son

At the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives his apostles their marching
orders using an aorist imperative: make disciples of all nations. Then using two present
participles in an imperatival sense, he describes the activities that accompany
discipling: baptizing and teaching them everything he taught them. Baptism was to be
in the name (singular) of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is the only place
in Scripture in which a member of the Trinity speaks objectively to name the persons of
the Trinity. This is why it has become the normative Trinitarian formula. The book of
Acts has seeming variations in the baptismal formula, but it is unknown whether these
are a matter of abbreviation on Luke’s part for literary reasons, or—and this seems more
likely—the formula had not yet been standardized.

The Didache is a church manual of instruction written toward the end of the first
century or beginning of the second century. The Didache’s baptismal formula is the
same as Matthew 28:19: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The
formula is used today in the west (Roman Catholic and Protestant) and in the east
(Orthodox, Coptic, Maronite, Roman Catholic and other communions). In other words,
the use of the Trinitarian formula is nearly universal.

In Latin tradition the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 culminated in the
Apostles’ Creed. The same formula resulted in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.129
It is natural that creeds would develop from earlier baptismal confessions. Baptismal
candidates were catechized to profess the faith into which they were baptized.130 In the
early third century, Hippolytus records a baptismal interrogation that included a three-
fold profession of faith, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity.131 J. N. D.
Kelly notes that the Trinitarian baptismal command of Matthew 28:19 was “the creative

127 F. F. Bruce (1986). Jesus: Lord and Savior (167). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity.

128 William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam (1971). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (389). ICC
Edinburgh: T. & T Clark; cf. Geerhardus Vos (1953). The Self-disclosure of Jesus (200-1) (Rev. ed.). Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing House.

129 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 89–91, 96, 121.

130 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 206; Schaff http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.iii.i.x.html (2/3/11).

131 Ralph Martin. (1964). Worship in the early church (61). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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model on which the baptismal questions, and so baptismal creeds, were constructed.”132
The creeds not only tell us how the early church understood the Trinity, they reveal

how Christ was understood. The old Roman creed, the predecessor of the Apostles’
Creed, clearly implies that Christ was the Son of God, and as the only begotten, he was
the preexistent Son.133 The creed’s nucleus is the command given by Christ to the
apostles in Matthew 28:19. In the phrase, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have the heart
of the Christian Gospel: God, who is a Father, revealed himself in history through one
who was at the same time both God and man—and who continues to operate in the
lives of his followers by his Spirit. This is “the uniqueness of Christianity.”134

The Word, the Son, and Marcellus
During the first three centuries of the post-apostolic era, many Church fathers made
considerable use of the term logos. This was natural given their ties to Greek
philosophical traditions, but they also continued to use Son of God or Son. This is evident
in Justin Martyr’s Apology, Clement of Rome (Epistle to Diognetus, chapter 9),
Athenagorus (Plea, chapters 10, 24), Ignatius (Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 20), The
Martyrdom of Polycarp (chapter 14), Irenaeas (Against Heresies, chapter 3), and others.
While they could speak freely of Christ as the logos, they did not lose sight of his eternal
sonship. However, when eternal sonship is removed, as happened in the case of
Marcellus of Ancyra, problems ensue.
Marcellus lived during the theologically turbulent fourth century as the debates
with the Arians were raging. As a signer of the Nicene canons, Marcellus was a
respected and influential theologian of his day, but had never promoted the Nicene
Creed. Marcellus’s legacy is his teaching that prior to the incarnation, Jesus existed as
logos not as Son. Many interpreted his view as a new variation of the old modalist135
heresy. Although it was not his intention, his teaching added fuel to the speculations of
the Arians. His error was rejected in the twenty-six anathemas of the First Sirmian
Creed in 351. Marcellus was condemned as a heretic at the council of Constantinople in
381, and a year later in a council called by Pope Damasus. One of the twenty-four
anathemas from Constantinople stated, “If anyone denies that the Father is eternal, that
the Son is eternal, and that the Holy Spirit is eternal, he is a heretic.”136
Marcellus’s error was his belief that the eternal logos did not become the Son of God

132 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 203–204.

133 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 148.

134 Kenneth Scott Latourette (1997). A History of Christianity: to A.D. 1500 (135). Peabody, MA: Prince Press.

135 Modalism denies the Trinity, claiming that God is not three persons but one person who reveals himself at different times in
three different modes, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

136 John Calvin, dealing with a similar error taught by Servetus and others, says that Jesus did not become Son of God at the
incarnation, but is so by virtue of his deity and eternal essence (Institutes II, xiv, 6).

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until the incarnation; therefore, Christ was not the personal, pre-incarnate Son.137 God’s
self-sacrifice of his own son means much less if sonship begins at the incarnation.138
Marcellus reasoned the logos existed as Word, but not as a hypostasis (understood then
as a personal entity). In fairness to Marcellus, it must be noted that he was not fully a
modalist or an adoptionist139 in the original sense of those terms, but the conclusion of
Constantinople that a sonless Trinity is conceptually and theologically unworkable was
correct.

The council of Chalcedon (AD 451) addressed the two natures of Christ in one
person. This was the last major council to deal with Trinitarian and Christological
issues. The doctrine was defined and though many of the same heresies continued to
recur, the Chalcedonian creed affirmed Christ as God the Word. As did its predecessors,
the council described Christ as Son. It affirmed the Son as only begotten (or unique,
monogenes); begotten by the Father before all ages, thus agreeing with the Nicene Creed
and most Eastern creeds. Chalcedon did not change the Church’s understanding of
eternal sonship; it affirmed it.

Son of God in biblical theology
Four senses of Christ’s divine sonship
Geerhardus Vos outlined four different senses in which the designation Son of God is

applied to Jesus in the New Testament. These four aspects are not mutually exclusive,
but are integrally related to one another. One sense is moral and religious: Jesus lived as
an obedient Son of God in terms of his perfect faith and character.140 When Jesus says the
peacemakers will be called sons of God, he is speaking of this moral and religious sense
of sonship. In a greater way Jesus proves himself to be God’s Son by the way he lived,
showing God’s character and nature through obedience to the Father as a faithful son.
Commentary on this aspect of sonship is found throughout exegetical literature,
especially with regard to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, where the real issue was
not whether Jesus was actually the Son of God, rather what kind of Son he would be.

The second sense of Jesus’ divine sonship is the nativistic: the basis for Jesus’
occupancy of throne of his father David is not human paternity, but divine action (Lk
1:32, 35). This nativistic aspect of Jesus’ divine sonship is linked to his genealogy
reaching back to Adam. Adam is called a son of God in the sense that his existence was
directly due to the action of God, not human parents.

The third sense of sonship is Messianic. A few, largely critical scholars, view this as

137 Harold O. J. Brown (1984). Heresies: Heresy and orthodoxy in the history of the Church (121). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

138 Vos, Self-disclosure 221.

139 Adoptionism believes Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism, part of a testing required to prove his worthiness.

140 Vos, Self-disclosure 141-142.

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the primary meaning—some, the only meaning—of the term Son of God in the Gospels,
especially the Synoptics. They interpret it as an adoptive sonship, keeping with Psalm
2, Isaiah 42:1, and 2 Samuel 14:7.

The eternal sonship, the fourth sense is the view held traditionally by most
interpreters. Vos argued that because the Messiah must act as an absolute representative
of God and is promised dominion over the ends of the earth (both in Psalm 2 and in
Revelation), only a Son in the highest sense is able to adequately fulfill the Messianic
office. A world ruler in such a comprehensive sense as the Old Testament prophecies
describe him, needs to be super-human.141

Eternal sonship: the basis of Messianic ministry
As Vos stated, it is this eternal sonship that qualifies the Son for the Messianic
sonship, which is simply the eternal sonship expressed in history. Only a Son could
fulfill such an office because it involves inheriting God’s rule over the world; such a
world ruler must of necessity be superhuman.142 It is crucial here not to make the
mistake of assuming that divine sonship is equivalent to being the Messiah; far more is
involved. Eternal sonship is the basis for the Messianic sonship.143 That is, Jesus is the
Christ by virtue of being the Son of God; he is not the Son of God because he is the
Christ. Being the Son of God means more than being the Messiah; the two are not the
same.144

Son of God in the New Testament
The Gospels
The Church did not slowly evolve an understanding of Christ’s deity over the first

few centuries of Christianity. His deity is made obvious by the New Testament, and
especially by the four evangelists. The titles Son and Son of God—and Jesus’ self-
revelation connected with the titles—are at the heart of the evangelists’ understanding
of his deity and the Trinity. William Lane believes the Church developed her
understanding of the Trinity through God’s salvific activity as Father, Son, and Holy

141 Vos, Self-disclosure 190, 192.

142 Vos, Self-disclosure 190–192.

143 Vos, Self-disclosure 190; cf. Donald J. Verseput (1987). “The Role and Meaning of the Son of God Title in Matthew’s Gospel.” New
Testament Studies 33: 538, 548; cf. Murray, Collected Writings 68; Ladd, Theology 163-166; Marshall, “The Divine Sonship” 99; Richard N.
Longenecker (1994). “The foundational conviction of New Testament Christology: The obedience/faithfulness/sonship of
Christ” (95-6). In Joel B. Green and Max Turner (Eds.). Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament
Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

144 Douglas J. Moo (1996). The Epistle to the Romans (45 fn 27). NICNT Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; cf. John Nolland. (2005). The
Gospel of Matthew. (163-4). NIGTC Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Darrell L. Bock (1994). “A Theology of Luke-Acts” (108). In Roy
B. Zuck (Ed.). A Biblical Theology of the New Testament. Chicago, IL: Moody Press; Rudolph Schnackenburg (1995). Jesus in the Gospels: A
Biblical Christology (310, 312). O. C. Dean Jr. (trans.). Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

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Spirit.145 The Church came to know the second person of the Trinity as Son because of
the relation Jesus, the man, enjoyed as Son to the Father. Since God’s self revelation in
history is true to his real being, the church was able to draw conclusions about God’s
eternal, triune being. The New Testament writers believed in the deity of Christ, Lane
says, and as they made reasonable conclusions about him as the preexistent, divine Son,
were able to think in terms of the Trinity. The starting point for Christology was the
historic Christ: Christians worked from Christology to Trinity, not the other way
around.146 T. F. Torrance agrees with this, saying, “The incarnational and saving self-
revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit was traced back to what God is
enhypostatically and coinherently in himself, in his own eternal being as Father, Son
and Holy Spirit.”147

Even from the beginning the Church did not hesitate to use the title Son of God to
indicate the supreme place occupied by Jesus.148 Turner states that it was the
resurrection that helped develop the early church’s belief in Christ’s deity. He says that
although Jesus clearly revealed himself to be the unique Son to God, it was not so clear
that he was God the Son—at least not at first. The primary stimulus that changed the
disciples’ understanding was the resurrection, which enabled them even in the forty
day period between the resurrect and ascension, to recognize his divinity—as Thomas
did when he confessed Jesus as Lord and God (John 20:31), or the disciples when they
worshipped him on the mountain in Galilee (Mt. 28:17).149 In commenting on Matthew
28:19, Blomberg also cites the resurrection as being the event that brought clarity to the
eternal aspect of Jesus’ sonship. He notices that after the resurrection, the term Son of
God is used in a manner that would be employed in later Trinitarian formulas; namely,
Jesus is deity and the Son of God is “God’s ontological equal and one part of the
Godhead itself.”150

We should not underestimate the significance of Jesus’ divine sonship in the Gospel
accounts; it is of paramount importance. I. H. Marshall calls it “the supreme category of

145 Cf. William L. Lane (1974). The Gospel According to Mark. NICNT. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

146 A. N. S. Lane (1982). Christology beyond Chalcedon (275-6). In Harold H. Rowdon (Ed.). Christ the Lord: Studies in Christology
presented to Donald Guthrie. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity.

147 T. F. Torrance (1991). The Trinitarian faith (199). London: T & T Clark. Cited in D. F. Kelly, Systematic Theology 450.

148 Ladd, Theology 168.

149 M. M. B. Turner (1982). “The Spirit of Christ and Christology” (173, 190). In Harold H. Rowdon (Ed.). Christ the Lord.

150Blomberg, Jesus 408. All the major Christian doctrines are interdependent. An adequate doctrine of salvation requires an adequate
Christology, which in turn presses for a satisfactory special theology of the Trinity (Brown, Heresies 150-2). Murray agrees, saying a
faith and confession that is not “conditioned by the faith of God as Trinity, and by the intra-divine and intrinsic relations involved in
Jesus’ identity as the eternal Son, does not provide the Christology biblical revelation demands. The true Christology is one that has its
starting point and finds its basis in Christ’s intrinsic sonship and therefore in its Trinitarian correlatives” (Murray, Collected Writings 80).

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interpretation of the person of Jesus in the Gospels.”151 He says it is a category that
subordinates even his Messiahship. Bauer suggested that the title, Son of God, is not
only the “foremost category” in each of the Gospels, but possibly the most significant
Christological title in the entire New Testament.152 Similarly Longenecker comments
that just as Jesus’ filial consciousness undergirded all he did, so also the evangelists had
a keen awareness of Jesus’ unique sonship, a consciousness that served as the
foundational conviction for all they wrote. The synoptic evangelists, he notes, edited
and arranged their material, each in his own way, to communicate to their readers the
importance of Jesus’ sonship. It was as though they said, “To understand Jesus, one
must see his divine sonship as basic to all that he did!”153

Schnackenburg points out that as the Son of God stands at the center of Paul’s
Christological statements,154 it also pervades the Gospels. For example, Mark’s picture
of Jesus is suffused with the divine sonship and John’s theme of the Son of God is woven
through his story. Schnackenburg concludes that the early church found an enduring
way to express Jesus’ deepest essence and significance: the title, Son of God.155

Interpreting the Gospel authors’ intended meaning of Son of God
Interpreting the term Son of God in the Gospels involves multiple levels of meaning.
Not every person in the Gospels who called Jesus the Son of God necessarily expressed
the author’s intended meaning of the title. A variety of players in the drama use the
title: soldiers, disciples, the high priest, God, Satan, demons, angels, and even Jesus
himself. The title Son of God is used to express a variety of thoughts: worship (Mt 14:33);
fear and awe (Mt 27:54); even mockery (Mt 27:40). It takes on new dimensions when
spoken by supernatural beings: God the Father’s deep affection for the Son (Mt. 3:17;
17:5); demonic terror (Mark 3:11); and for Satan, it becomes leverage for evil at the
temptation (Mt 4:3ff).
Our interpretive task is to determine the author’s intention. Although we may
know little of the reading audience, by the process of evaluation and drawing
conclusions from the literary clues, the authorial intention is established. The authors of
the four Gospels did not write their story as one would write fiction; rather they
functioned as gatekeepers, each choosing the material for his account, arranging and
shaping its final form. The Gospels convey real events and dialogues, but each author
crafted his own story with an individual literary purpose. Therefore to determine the

151 Marshall, “The Divine Sonship” 99.
152 Bauer, “Son of God” 769.
153 Longenecker, “Foundational Conviction” 476, 484-5.
154 Cf. Gal 1:16; 2:20; 4:4; Rom 1:3-4; 8:2, 32.
155 Schnackenburg, Jesus 310, 312.

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meaning of the terms Son of God and the Son in the Gospels, we primarily focus on what
each evangelist intends to communicate to his audience.

At the time the Gospels were being written, the evangelists and their audiences
knew more about Jesus than those in the events being recorded. Jesus’ life, his
teachings, his miracles, and especially the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit
at Pentecost—followed by serious theological reflection in the light of these events over
three or more decades—brought about dramatic changes to the Church’s understanding
of Jesus and his titles. Consequently we cannot limit our understanding of Son of God
and the Son to the first century Jewish understanding of Messiah prior to the
incarnation. One of the themes throughout the Gospels is that even Jesus’ closest friends
did not understand him. It was not until after the resurrection—and more importantly,
because of it—that everything changed.

Son of God and the Son in Matthew’s Gospel
Matthew has three episodes in which the Father is mentioned and Jesus refers to
himself as the Son (11:27; 24:36; 28:19). Two of the episodes help us understand Jesus’
self-awareness of his divine sonship (11:27; 28:19). According to Verseput, the title Son of
God is the key motif for understanding Matthew’s literary and theological purpose.156
Matthew and his audience share a common understanding that Jesus is the Son of God;
therefore his readers easily follow the direction of Matthew’s storyline.157 Carson
concurs that as Matthew’s readers move through the text of the Gospel, they know
things that people of Jesus’ day did not know, since many Christological truths were
only understood after the resurrection and exaltation. The reader can understand the
deeper truths about the Son of God, things not understood by those involved in the
actual Gospel accounts. Carson notes that those who confessed Jesus as Son of God may
have meant no more than Christ—even that understanding was probably lacking
recognition of Christ as Suffering Servant, or an ontological connection with deity.
Matthew’s readers, on the other hand, are able to appreciate the significance of Jesus,
the Son of God, far beyond the understanding of the actors in the drama itself.158
Matthew introduces the theme of Jesus’ divine sonship with key questions scattered
throughout his Gospel. In 13:56 the people of his own hometown, after hearing his
parables and about his miracles ask, “Where did this man get all these things?” The
crowds ask, “Could this be the Son of David?” (12:23), and later, “Who is this?” (21:10).
In 11:2-3 John the Baptist questions whether Jesus is the one they are waiting for, or is
another coming—i.e., is a greater One coming, or are you the One? Jesus himself asked
the question, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” (22:42).

156 Verseput, “The Role” 532.

157 D. A. Carson (1982). “Christological ambiguities in Matthew” (97–114). In Harold H. Rowdon (Ed.). Christ the Lord.

158 Carson, “Christological” 113.

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The disciples had a significant question following the calming of the storm: What
sort of man is this? (8:27). Matthew words these questions to guide the reader to the
correct answer.159 According to Nolland, the answer to all these questions comes at the
calming of the second storm (14:33): the disciples worship him. Jesus has acted as only
God can; they know they are in the presence of God, saying, “Truly you are the Son of
God.”160 Garland observes that the disciples’ confession, Jesus is the Son of God,
answers the question raised during the first storm. They had asked, “What kind of a
man is this? Even the winds and waves obey him!” (8:27). At the second storm they
have their answer—the answer to all the questions raised by others in Matthew’s
Gospel account, whether by John the Baptist, the crowds, or the people in his
hometown.161 Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ and Son of the living God (16:16)
is a Christological high point of the Gospel. At the end of Matthew’s story, the centurion
and the soldiers assigned to execute Jesus, acknowledge that he is the Son of God.
Regardless of what they actually meant, this profession seems to be Matthew’s desired
climax to the Gospel. As Gundry notes, Matthew, as well as Mark, intended their
readers to understand that Jesus is the Son of God.162

Son of God and the Son in Mark’s Gospel
Mark introduces his Gospel with, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God”; that is, his Gospel is about the Son of God. Later there are similar
statements: the heavenly voice at Jesus’ baptism; the terrified imploring of demons
(3:11; 5:7); God’s announcement at the transfiguration (9:4); and Jesus’ own executioner,
the centurion (15:39). Regardless the centurion’s meaning of Son of God, Mark’s readers
knew the meaning—Jesus’ divine sonship is at the heart of the Mark.
Schnackenburg observes that in Mark Son of God is mentioned in passages
particularly crucial for Christology. This is especially true of the centurion’s confession,
a point of crystallization for the proper understanding of Jesus. According to
Schnackenburg, the Gospel is framed at the beginning and the end by the profession of
Jesus as the Son of God.163 Although Son of God may mean no more than Christ to some
—such as the high priest (14:61)—when augmented by the accounts of healing,
miracles, exorcisms, powerful teaching, forgiving sins, the supernatural events that
accompanied his death, and of course by the resurrection, Mark uses the phrase to

159 John Nolland (1989). Luke 1–9:20 (372). WBC Dallas, TX: Word.
160 Nolland, Luke 603.
161 David Garland (2001). Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary (160). Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys.
162 Robert H. Gundry (1982). Matthew: A commentary on his literary art (578). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
163 Schnackenburg, Jesus 45, 49.

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prompt thoughts of Jesus’ divinity in his Roman readers.164

Son of God and the Son in Luke’s Gospel
Luke employs Son of God differently than Matthew and Mark; of those who
acknowledge Jesus’ divine sonship, the only human is Jesus himself. Luke reports
Peter’s more abbreviated confession. He also records the centurion saying only that
Jesus is a righteous man; however, this does not mean Son of God is unimportant in
Luke, or that it only has the connotation of Messiah. On the contrary, Jesus’ sonship is
quite important in Luke. Even at the temptation, which focuses on God’s statement at
Jesus’ baptism, two of the three trials are directed at his sonship. Luke intends to have
only supernatural agents testify to Jesus’ divine sonship: the angel at the annunciation
(1:32, 35), the voice of God at Jesus’ baptism (3:22), Satan in the wilderness temptation
(4:3, 9), demons being exorcised (8:28), and the voice of God again at the transfiguration
(9:35). Luke’s purpose may be to show that these supernatural beings understand Jesus’
sonship in a manner qualitatively different from the incomplete and partially skewed
understanding of humans.

Son of God and the Son in John’s Gospel
In the Gospel of John, Jesus calls God Father over one hundred times, and refers to
himself or is referred to as Son about thirty times. As Ladd said, Jesus’ sonship is the
central Christological idea in John’s Gospel. John’s account is written so that people
may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but more than Messiah: he is the Son of God,
partaking of deity. The Father-Son relation woven throughout the fabric of John’s story,
is a relationship characterized by the object of divine love, Jesus, having an exclusive
knowledge of the Father, and being given the power to mediate not only life, but to
bring humanity to God himself.165 Tenney describes sonship in John’s Gospel as
expressing close fellowship and intimacy between the Father and Son, as well as a unity
of nature. Since he shares the Father’s nature, he is able to reveal God.166 On this unity
and intimacy between the Father and the Son, Bruce wrote,

The relationship which the Father and the Son eternally bear to each other is
declared to be a coinherence or mutual indwelling of love. Jesus is in the Father; the
Father is in him. And the purpose of Jesus’ coming to reveal the Father is that men
and women may . . . be drawn into this divine fellowship of love, dwelling in God as

164 Robert H. Gundry (1993). Mark: A commentary on his apology for the cross (34). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

165 Ladd, Theology 283-5.

166 Tenney, The Gospel of John 196 and 38.

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God dwells in them.167

Thomas’s confession (20:31) necessarily involved a belief in Jesus’ deity. The Son
possesses the divine nature and is God by nature. This intimate and eternal knowledge
of God qualifies the Son to reveal God’s nature and character. Whereas the sonship of
believers is an adoptive sonship, Christ’s sonship is essential. He was in complete
intimate fellowship with the Father before and after the incarnation.168 D. Kelly says
that in Christ’s high priestly prayer (John 17), his saving work for humanity is
expressed in terms of the “eternal love and glory between Father and Son that are
conveyed from the very heart of the Father to them.”169 The high priestly prayer is
indisputably a transaction between Father and Son born of mutual interests,
culminating in mutual glory, and drawing new sons and daughters into the oneness
and glory of the eternal Trinity.

Christology of the Son of God in the epistles of Paul
Paul does not often refer to Jesus Christ as God’s Son; however, it is definitely a
concept of central importance for him, as he often uses the title in key places in his
letters.170 For instance if we judge only from a statistical standpoint, we would have to
say the phrase, “the righteousness of God,” was unimportant to him. It occurs only
about ten times, all but two of them in Romans, but it is significant in Romans because
those passages state the central theme of the letter. Paul does not often mention the
kingdom of God or Jesus’ role as Messiah, but this does not mean they are unimportant
to him.171 Jesus as the Word (logos), occurs in only two verses of John’s Gospel, once in 1
John and Revelation, though never in any clear reference by other New Testament
authors. The importance of logos hardly needs to be mentioned, as it has gripped the
imagination of Christian theologians, scholars, and preachers throughout the centuries.
We may conclude from this that a term occurring infrequently may still have
theological importance. Marshall observes that, statistically speaking, the fifteen
occurrences of the Son of God theme in Paul make it relatively unimportant (only one
tenth the number of times he calls Jesus Lord). He goes on to say that Paul uses this title
for Jesus when summing up the content of the Gospel or for other generally important
statements (e.g., in contexts about Christ’s relationship with God and in traditional
statements about “God sending his preexistent Son into the world”). Marshall also notes

167 F. F. Bruce (1983). The Gospel of John (14). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
168 Murray J. Harris (1992). Jesus as God: The New Testament use of Theos in reference to Jesus (87). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
169 D. Kelly, Systematic Theology 273.
170 O’Collins, The Tripersonal God 59.
171 Ladd, Theology 449-450.

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that Paul uses Son to emphasize that through his work as Son, believers are adopted as
God’s sons.172 When Paul discusses divine sonship he is usually focusing on soteriology,
the Son’s role as savior.173

Barclay commented that Paul’s use of Jesus as the Son of God at the beginning of
his letters, indicates that sonship was “the keynote of the Christian Gospel.”174
Schnackenburg says the theme of Jesus as the Son of God stands at the center of Paul’s
Christological statements.175 Ridderbos goes even further: “Christ’s being the Son of
God is none other than being God himself.”176

When Paul writes, “God sent his Son,” obviously Jesus was already Son;
conservative scholars are in consensus on this point. For Paul then, God gave his Son as
a sacrifice, the ultimate proof of his love.

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his
Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Rom
5:10 KJV)
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also,
along with him, graciously give us all things? (Rom 8:32)

Paul teaches that believers are adopted as sons through the eternal son, their
predetermined destiny is conformity to the image of God’s Son (Rom 8:29).177

Finally, we can see Paul’s exalted Christology in Colossians 1:15-20. The passage
begins with hos estin (Greek, who is), referring to the phrase “his dear son” (1:13). This
makes it clear that Christ’s sonship is as Lord over all created things. God’s son is the
image of the invisible God (v. 15), in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell
(v. 19). He is the firstborn of all creation (v. 15) for whom all things have been created (v.
16), and he is before all things (v. 17). So despite the relatively infrequent occurrence of
the title Son of God in Paul’s letters, Jesus as God’s Son is at the heart of Paul’s theology,
just as it is at the heart of his Gospel.

Some final reflections on Jesus’ divine sonship
The author of Hebrews tells us that God’s enduring plan is to bring many sons to

172 Marshall, “Titles” 778.

173 Marshall in Michel, O. (1986). “Son of God.” In Colin Brown (Ed.). The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology
(634-644). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan; cf. Marshall, “Titles” 778.

174 William Barclay (1958). The Mind of St. Paul (56). New York, NY: Harper and Row.

175 Schnackenburg, Jesus 312. See Gal 1:16; 2:20; 4:4; Rom 1:3-4; 8:3, 32.

176 Herman Ridderbos (1975). Paul: An Outline of His Theology (77). John Richard de Witt (trans.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

177 Hurtado, “Son of God” 905-906.

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