... continued

We find further confirmation of this identification of the Torah with Christ also within the NT, in Romans 10:6-9:

Verses 6 and 8 are quotations from Deuteronomy 30:11-14 which reads:

A comparison of the text in Romans with that in Deuteronomy shows how Paul identifies the Law with Christ. Even more remark­able is the fact that the words spoken by Moses (the “I” in Deut.30:11), Paul declares as being spoken by “the righteousness that comes from faith” (Rom.10:6). Moses is thus the spokesman for faith-righteousness! This is factually correct because Moses was both a man of faith (Heb.11:24-29, where “faith” occurs 4 times) and a model of right­eousness for all time. Far from rejecting Moses, Paul claims him as speaking for Christ.

Some Christian scholars portray Paul as the adversary of the Law, regard­less of his declarations to the contrary, “Do we then nullify the Law through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law” (Romans 3:31, NASB). “Love is the fulfilling of the Law” (Rom.13:8,10; Gal.5:14). If the Law had been nullified or abolished, why would Paul concern himself with fulfilling it? [1]

In the book Christianity in Jewish Terms (Westview Press, 2000), in an essay entitled “Judaism and Incarnation,” the Jewish scholar E.R. Wolfson (Professor of Hebrew Studies and Director of Relig­ious Studies at New York University), shows that the notion of incarnation (cf. the Word in John 1:14) is not some­thing strange or unknown in Judaism. The following are some of his in­structive obser­vations:

Wolfson also points out that in rabbinic thought, there is the idea that “the name of God is symbolically interchangeable with the Torah,” that “the name is identical with the Torah,” and that “the name is implied in the rabbinic claim that the Torah is the instru­ment through which God created the world” (all quotes are from p.248).

What is striking about the quotations in the previous para­graph is that “the Torah,” if replaced by “the Word” in each of the three state­ments quoted, would make perfect sense in understand­ing “the Word” in John 1: It will be­come clear, when we study “the Word” in its Aramaic equivalent “the Memra,” that “the Name of God is symbol­ically inter­changeable with the Word,” that “the Name is identical with the Word,” and that “the Name is implied in the Johannine claim that the Word is the instrument through which God created the world”. None of these paraphrases of Prof. Wolfson’s statements would be objectionable to rabbinic Judaism provided that they are not understood in terms of trinitarian Christology, as he has pointed out.

On the next page of his essay (p.249), Wolfson again men­tions “the equat­ion of Torah and YHVH” in rabbinic thought which can “speak of the Torah as the name,” and also “the archaic belief that heaven and earth were created by means of the name of God, an idea attested in apocry­phal, rab­binic, and mystical sources as well, specifi­cally in terms of yod and he, the first two letters of the Tetragram­maton used to signify the complete name.” This last quotation in particular throws light on the repeated references in the Johannine Prologue that all things were created by means of the Word, John 1:3,10 (dia with genitive: “through, by means of”).

If we wish to avoid falling into confusion and error we must under­stand that a term like “the Word” is a metonym; the only question then is: a metonym for what? Closer attention should be paid to metonymy or synecdoche in Biblical language, that is, figures of speech in which a part represents the whole. A common example is “bread” as a synecdoche for “food” or suste­nance in gen­eral (e.g. “give us this day our daily bread,” Mt.6:11; Lk.11:3). In English a “hired hand” is a workman and a “deck hand” is a sailor; so “hand” serves as a meto­nym for “person”. There is also the phrase “the long arm of the law” by which is meant that the power of the agencies of law and order which can reach out and seize evildoers even if they try to hide in remote places. “Arm” is here a metaphor for action and power, very similar to its use in the Bible. Thus “the arm of the Lord” speaks of His powerful actions. There are several metonymic figures of speech in the OT such as “the hand of the Lord,” or His Wisdom, His light, His Spirit, etc. where, in each case, the part stands for, or represents the whole.

The failure to understand Biblical metonymy has resulted in the kind of notion about the Logos seen in trinitarianism. The following are exam­ples of this important form of speech in the Scriptures:

The “word” (dabar; logos) of the Lord is no more an independent person from God than is His “arm”. For a fuller picture of the “arm of the Lord” we can consider the following verses:

Also John 12:38, “so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: ‘Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?’” which quotes Isaiah 53:1 “Who has believed what he heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

Yahweh’s “arm” appears here as though it were a distinct indiv­idual who went at the right hand of Moses, divided the waters of the sea, and “made for himself an everlasting name”!

Consider the parallel between Yahweh’s “hand” and His “word (LXX, logos)”:

Would it be right for us to conclude from Isaiah 48:13 that God’s “hand,” by which He created heaven and earth, is another person distinct from Him? If not, would it be right for us to conclude that “the word” of Yahweh in Psalm 33:6, by which He created the heavens, and which is used as an OT basis of John 1:1, is a person distinct from Yahweh, as trinitarianism insists?

We have noted earlier that the Hebrew Bible was not numbered in the way that most Bibles now have chapter and verse num­bers. Reference to a particular book was often done by quoting the first words of the book. Thus one referred to Genesis by its opening words, “In the beginning”. In so doing, there may be more meaning to these words in Genesis 1 that is intended than from merely refer­ring to its first verse or chapter; the intention could be to include refer­ence to the whole book and specifi­cally to the remarkable and unique self-revelation of Yahweh in Genesis. The message would then be: Yahweh who was so close to man, and so caring of man as seen in Genesis, has now drawn so close to man that He has become incarnate in Christ; in this way He “tabernacle among us” (Jn.1:14).

We have also seen that Yahweh God frequently communicated with people in Genesis; He spoke to them, so the notion of “word” is found throughout Genesis both as God’s creative word as also His commu­nicative word. The concept of “the word of God” is firmly rooted in Genesis, and from there it continues through the whole Bible. The import­ance of “the word” does not lie in itself but in whose word it is, in this case, God’s word. It is therefore God’s communicat­ion. And with whom does He communicate in this world but with us, His creatures, His people? Thus, in this sense, “the word” is the expression of God’s immanence.

By His Logos God communicates with us and to us. What He communi­cates to us is the manifold contents of His word, whet­her it is truth, light, or life. In so doing, God does not just commu­nicate something to us, but thereby gives of Himself to us. We cannot have life from Him without also having Him; this is because the life which He gives is not something which can exist inde­pend­ently of Him. No living being exists independently of Him whether or not they are aware of it. That is why Jesus could say, “Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Mt.10:29). Accord­ingly, the Apostle Paul could quote with approval the words of one of the Greek poets who rightly perceived that “in him (God) we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

So the Word in John 1:1ff is not something mysterious. But what may properly be called a “mystery” is that “the Word became flesh” (Jn.1:14) which is certainly the central element of John’s Prologue (1:1-18). This is surely what is meant by “the mystery of Christ” (Eph.3:4; Col.4:3). We shall consider this more fully in relation to the Memra.

We have considered in some detail the OT roots of “the Word” and we should now begin to realize that we cannot go much deeper in our under­standing of it on the OT basis alone. This is precisely what trinitarian scholars per­ceived, and thus assumed that there was no other way to go than to try to extract some­thing they could use from Greek philosophy. But here, too, they soon found that they could not get very far, hence their rather desperate conclusion that the idea of the Word was John’s own idea or invention. But this conclusion ran on to the rocks of this scholarly finding: what constitutes John’s Prologue is actually a poem which John incorporated into his gospel; in other words, it was not com­posed by John. This shatters all meaningful talk about the Word as John’s own idea. On the contrary, the evi­dence seems indisputable that the Word was something familiar to the early church, and was incorporated into this profound poem, song, or hymn used by the church, which John then used as an appropriate and effective introduction to his gospel.

It is true that the material that can be gathered from the OT alone does not in itself provide an adequate basis for understand­ing the Word in John’s Prologue. But up to now, when we talked about the OT, we were mainly talking in terms of the Hebrew Bible. We have already mentioned that in the time of Christ and the early church, Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the primary language of the people. The failure to take this crucial fact into account resulted in the discussion about the Word either coming to a dead end or getting side­lined into the error of the Biblically baseless trinitarian interpret­ation of it as “God the Son”.

In NT times, the Jews who went to the weekly synagogue services would hear the Hebrew Bible read aloud, but it had to be interpreted for them in Aramaic. These interpretations were called “targums” (meaning “translations”). It is these that constitute what scholars call the Aramaic Old Testament. What can be learned about “the Word” (Aramaic: Memra) in the Aramaic OT will clarify, strengthen, and confirm the understanding of the Word gained from our study of the Hebrew OT. This means that the OT roots of the Word in John 1:1 can ultimately be traced to the Memra of the Aramaic Old Testa­ment.[2]

Memra is the Aramaic word for the Greek logos. Because Aramaic was the language spoken in Israel (Palestine) at the time, Memra was a word that the Jews would have often heard in their syna­gogues, and which they understood to be a well-known form of reference to the Name of Yahweh, or simply to Yahweh Himself. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives a concise and clear defin­ition of Memra: “‘The Word,’ in the sense of the creative or directive word or speech of God manifesting His power in the world of matter or mind; a term used especially in the Targum as a sub­stitute for ‘the Lord’”. We are on firm ground when we con­clude that John was undoubt­edly fam­iliar with the Aramaic OT (the Targums), as indeed were the people in Israel generally in John’s day.

Why, then, did Gentile Christian theology fail to quest­ion its own assump­tions and ask: Why would the gospel written by the Jewish Apostle John derive the central theme in its prologue, namely the logos, from a Greek (Gentile) source when an obvious (or what would have been obvious to a Jew in the first century AD) Jewish source (the Aramaic OT) was at hand and well known to the Jews? The answer, obviously, is: What was well known to the Jews was not well known to the Gentiles. Gentiles think as Gentiles, and very few (if any) of them were versed in Jewish life, literature, and language.

Few of the early “Fathers” of the Christian church could be shown to have any knowledge of Judaica or Judaism. The same is generally true of Christians and church leaders today. Judaism is not usually a subject listed in the curricu­lums of Christian theolog­ical seminaries, and even Biblical Hebrew is usually an optional subject. How many Christians have heard of the Memra? So when we are constantly told that the logos derives from Greek thought, who is in a position to know that there is a better option which has its basis in the OT, especially the Aramaic Targums?

The solid and undeniable fact is that nowhere in the OT is there even a single reference to the logos as person. In the LXX, logos occurs 1239 times, yet not one of these so much as suggests that logos had any personal traits or charact­eristics. This means that logos as a personal being simply does not exist in the OT. Trinitarian scholars are, of course, fully (and sorely) aware of this fact. The Expositor’s Commentary (on Jn.1:1) manages only to quote Ps.33:6 (LXX 32:6) (“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.”). But what exactly is its contribution to under­standing John 1:1? In Psalm 33:6 “the logos of Yahweh” is equated (by way of parallel­ism) with “the breath (pneuma)” of Yahweh, and while the reference is to the Genesis 1 account of the creation, it is lim­ited (unlike John 1:3) to the creation of the heavens with its “starry host” (NIV). But the point is: here, too, there is no indic­ation whatever that the logos is a personal being.

The evidence indubitably indicates that the trinitarian notion of the Logos in John 1:1 as providing evidence for the second person of the Trinity simply does not stand up to investigation. The OT does not provide a single shred of concrete evidence for it. A survey of the learned reference works shows that none is able to provide any OT basis for the idea of a pre­existent person called Logos. If, there­fore, we want to construct a doctrine of God the Son (without which there could be no doctrine of the Trinity) by using the Logos as its foundation stone, we simply cannot find any basis for it in the OT, either Hebrew or Aramaic. Can any help be found in the OT concept of Wisdom?

Wisdom (the word is feminine in both Hebrew and Greek, not masculine like Logos) is spoken of in personal terms in Proverbs, yet everyone is aware of the fact that the lan­guage there is poetic and metaphorical, and was therefore not meant to be understood literally. In the Bible, Wisdom is never thought of as a person, much less a person distinct from God, or another person in the “Godhead”.

Continuing his discussion on the Johannine Prologue, Prof. Witherington writes:

It is evident from the above passage and from the title of his book (Jesus the Sage) that Witherington interprets the Logos in terms of what is called “Wisdom Christology”. That Wisdom in the OT is important for the under­standing of the Logos in John 1:1ff is un­doubtedly true, and we shall give this fact further consideration later in this work. But in his last sentence of the sect­ion quoted above, there appears to be insufficient concern to draw attent­ion to the fact that “the personified Wisdom” in Proverbs was a hypo­stasized way of describing Wisdom and was certainly not an actual person. But it may be that Witherington assumes that his readers already know this. Trinitarians, of course, want to maintain that the Logos is a divine person distinct from God, but one who shares his nature and is therefore coequal with Him. But none of this can be derived from the Wisdom of Proverbs, and also not from Genesis 1 as Witherington also affirms. The plain fact is that there is simply no personal Logos mentioned in the OT.

It should be noted that in the following section where the “Spirit” is capitalized, it is not because the spirit is a person, but is used where the em­phasis needs to be brought out clearly that the spirit being referred to is not the human spirit, or “the spirit of man,” but to “the Spirit of God,” Yahweh’s Spirit. Since “Holy Spirit” is considered a name it is usually capitalized.

(1) References to the Spirit are remarkably few in the OT:

• The “Spirit of Yahweh” (ruach Yahweh, יהוח רוח ) 26 times, of which 7 are in Judges
• The “Spirit of God” (ruach elohim, אלהים רוח) 16 times, of which 8 are in 1Samuel
• “My Spirit” 12 times
• “His Spirit” 4 times
• “The Spirit” once in 1Chronicles, 4 times in Numbers, 7 times in Ezekiel, and once in Isaiah (32:15) = 13

This adds up to a total of only 71 times, indicating that refer­ences to the Spirit in the OT are few and that statistically, therefore, the Spirit is not a figure of central importance in the OT revelation. Compare this, for example, with “Abraham” who is mentioned 110 times in Genesis alone; or David, to whom there are 1025 references in the OT.

(2) The Spirit is never conceived of as a person apart from Yahweh

More important than the relatively few references to the Spirit, the OT pro­vides no basis whatsoever for supposing that the Spirit is a person distinct from Yahweh. This means that, certainly where the Spirit is concerned, there is no basis in the OT for the doctrine of the Trinity.

The following is a fuller excerpt about the Spirit from the book Christianity by the renowned German theologian Hans Küng:

The essence of the Word is the Spirit; these are inseparably related in Scripture. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth” (Psalm 33:6, NIV). The word translated as “breath” is ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek, and these are the words for “spirit” in both languages. Job 33:4 says, “The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.” (NIV)

The relationship of God’s word to His Spirit is seen also in 1Corinthians 2:12,13; John 3:34; 6:63. So, too, John 3:8 speaks of being “born of the Spirit” while 1Peter 1:23 speaks of being born again “through the living and abiding word of God.”

The relation of Word to Spirit could be stated in this way: the Word is the form, the Spirit is the substance. The word is com­pared to a “seed” (Mt.13:19,20, 22, etc) which carries within it the Spirit of life. Hence, as we have just seen, the Apostle Peter could speak of it as “the living word of God”. Thus, when “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (Jn.1:14) in the person of Christ, God’s Presence as life, light, truth, grace, salvation and, above all, His Spirit, was manifested in Christ; for, as John says, it is “from this fullness (of God in the Logos) that we have all received” (John 1:16).

Since life is embodied in the Word (Logos), it is “the word of life” (1Jn. 1:1). In Scripture, life is frequently associated with the Spirit; this is true even on the level of the human spirit, James 2:26, “the body without the spirit is dead”. The Apostle speaks in Romans 8:2 of “the Spirit of life,” and in Romans 8:10, “the Spirit is life”. On the level of “the word,” in 2Corinthians 3:6 Paul both compares and contrasts the Law (also God’s word) with the Spirit, “the letter (of the Law) kills, but the Spirit gives life” (cf.Rom.7:6b). In John 6:63, Jesus says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” “The word of life” can also be described as “the word of truth” (Col.1:5; 2Ti.2:15; etc), “the word of righteousness” (Heb.5:13), and “the word of faith” (Rom.10:8)! This is fullness indeed—a fullness which, according to John 1:16, all those in Christ have received.

That this refers to “the fullness” of Yahweh’s Memra/Logos/Word is un­mistakable because it is not until the following verse (v.17) that “Jesus Christ” is mentioned for the first time in John; it is “the fullness” which filled the person of Christ. The word “fullness” (plērōma) is the same word used in Colossians 2:9, “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”. Thus the fullness of the Word is, evidently, “the fullness of deity”; see also Colossian 1:19, and Eph.3:19 “the fullness of God”. From this we see that the Word in John’s Prologue functions as a metonym for God, and points in particular to import­ant aspects of His Being, such as His life, His light, His truth, etc, which are highlighted in John’s Gospel as a whole. But no demonstrable connection of the Word to some sup­posed “second person in the godhead” can be found.

What is remarkable about Ephesians 3:19 (“the fullness of God,” quoted in the previous paragraph) is that we too can be filled with God’s fullness through Christ, for this verse exhorts us “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Three paragraphs earlier we saw the association, in Scripture, of life with the Spirit. What if we read “the Spirit” in place of “the Logos” in John 1:1? It would read like this, “In the beginning was the Spirit, the Spirit was with God, and the Spirit was God.” We would not have much problem with such a read­ing, especially be­cause it would, without diffi­culty, fit into what follows,

If it be argued from verse 3 that the Spirit is not said to have been involved in creation, then let us take note of Job 33:4, “The Spirit of God has made (עשׂה, asah, just as in Genesis 1:26) me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.”

The point of drawing attention to the parallel of the Logos with the Spirit is that in the OT there is absolutely no suggestion of the Spirit being a distinct person from Yahweh. Even so, the Spirit would fit seamlessly into John 1. Even the incarnation as being applicable to the Spirit would be unproblem­atic for the NT as can be demonstrated without difficulty from the fact that the Spirit of God is also described as “the Spirit of Christ” or “the Spirit of Jesus,” a fact that is other­wise with­out satisfactory explan­ation. There is also the (for trinitar­ians) inexpli­cable statement of Christ that “if I do not go away, the Helper [i.e. the Spirit] will not come to you” (Jn.16:7). If the Spirit is a third person, why should He be unable to come while Christ was on earth? As a trinitarian I was unable to give or find any satisfactory answer to this question.

Though the Spirit is never referred to as a distinct person, yet the NT enlightens us by revealing that he functions in relation to God in the same way as the spirit of man functions in relation to man:

So to the question, “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Rom.11:34; also 1Cor.2:16; both quotations from Isa.40:13), the Biblical answer is that the Spirit of God knows the thoughts of God in the same way as the spirit of a man knows the thoughts of the man. That is why a man can “examine himself” (1Cor.11:28), for just as “the Spirit searches the depths of God” (1Cor.2:10), so man’s spirit can search the depths of his own being.

This also helps us to understand the phrase in Genesis 1:26 “let us make man” in a way not previously thought of because of our failure to grasp the truth revealed about God and His Spirit as stated in 1Corinthians 2:10,11. In this light we can see that the “us” with whom Yahweh took counsel was His own Spirit.

Similarly, how many people understand the relationship of a man’s spirit to the man himself? Paul could speak of his spirit as being able to experience things apart from his physical being as in 2Cor.12:2,3: “whether in the body or out of it I don’t know”; or, “though absent in the body, yet present in spirit” (1Cor.5:3,4). The spirit is understood as a distinct reality within man, but not as a separate person. The same is true of God as shown in 1Cor.2:10,11. The Spirit (like the Logos) is a real­ity within God, which, like man’s spirit, has a definite function within God and can sometimes even be spoken of as though it functioned on its own (cf. too “the arm of the Lord,” Isa.51:9, etc), yet it is not an independent or separate person.

If even the Spirit of God cannot be shown from Scripture to be a distinct person from God, it is hard to imagine how trinitarianism could have misled us into supposing that the Logos, a previously unknown entity, is a separate person called “God the Son”. It does appear that it is not, after all, very difficult for even “the elect” to be deceived (Mt.24:24; Mk. 13:22).[3]

The parallelism of Hebrew poetry indicates that these two sen­tences are parallel to each other, the second rephrasing and complementing the first. Thus “your presence” and “your Holy Spirit” are semantic parallels. This means that the Spirit refers to Yahweh’s special pre­sence, and to all the divine qualities (such as His power, wisdom, word, etc) which His presence brings. When this mean­ing of “His Spirit” is applied to other verses where the term occurs, it fits in per­fectly and, indeed, helps to explicate more precisely what is meant.

This also helps to explain more specifically the connection be­tween the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost and the promise “I am with you always” (Mt. 28:20)—the promise of his abiding presence (the Spirit of Christ is none other than the Spirit of God) for the fulfillment of the great commiss­ion. The disci­ples received power at Pentecost so as to be able to fulfill that commiss­ion; but there is no divine power independent of the divine presence. The aspect of power which comes with God’s special presence is mentioned spec­ifically because the tiny infant church had to be reassured, as well as empow­ered, to accomplish what was entrusted to them.

As we saw in 1Corinthians 2:10,11, the Holy Spirit is to God what the spirit of man is to man; He is not a separate person from God any more than our human spirit is a separate person from us. To be filled with the Spirit is not to be filled with a “third person” but to be filled with Yahweh’s own presence. The problem of speaking of the Spirit as “he” is that it gives the impression that the Spirit is a distinct person from Yahweh; but the Scriptures teach us that the Spirit of God is integral to God’s Person, just as our spirit is an integral part of us, yet a distin­guishable element within us.

There are very many distinguishable elements (for lack of a better term) within God’s Person mentioned in Scripture, such as His power (“His arm,” or “His hand”), His wisdom, His holiness, His love, etc., and all these find expression through His Word (Logos). But just as we would not think of His love, etc, as a distinct being from Him, why do we think of His Word as a distinct or separate being from Him?

Even more important than the question, What is the Spirit?, is the question, What is the function of the Spirit in relation to us? Or, What is the meaning of the Spirit for our lives? We understand the answer to these questions better when we know:

(1) The Spirit of Yahweh is given to believers as His gift which, when received, has transforming effect on the life of the believer.[4]

(2) The Spirit as God’s seal upon us (the seal signifies that the believer belongs to God and carries His authority to represent Him, to function as His image) and as guarantee, or down payment, from God 2Cor.1:22; 2Cor.5:5 (guaran­teeing the receiving of eter­nal life, and the fulfilling of all God’s promises to us).

(3) The Spirit is the means by which we are joined or united with the Lord, 1Cor.6:17.

(4) The Spirit is in us (Jn.14:17), which is what makes us the temple of God: 1Cor.3:16; 6:19; 2Cor.6:16; Eph.2:22; 1Pet.2:5.

Because the Spirit is Yahweh God’s Spirit, in giving His Spirit to us He has, in effect, given Himself to us, to be with us and to live in us. The union and communion that this brings is the dynamic of all true Christian life.