The main verses are John 10:34-36:
34Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods'[a]? 35If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken— 36what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'?
On the face of it, it looks like Jesus is saying they were gods. If they were gods, why is it blasphemy that Christ calls Himself the Son of God? Seems like a good argument. If it's blasphemy for Christ to call Himself the Son of God, then it's blasphemy for the Jews to say they were gods. So, if Christ is blasphemous, so are the Jews. But I don't think the Jews are gods and I do think Christ is making another kind of argument.
1. One thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is talking to Jews, the most fiercly monotheistic people next to the Muslims. With that in mind, 'gods' has got to mean something else.
2. Jesus is alluding to Psalm 82: human judges are called gods. From this, it looks like Jesus is using a kind of rhetoric. If they have no problem calling human judges gods, why can't Christ claim to be the Son of God?
3. It looks like they were called gods because they were judges that decided the life and death of people. They aren't gods in the sense of being divine, because later on in the Psalm it says that they'll one day die and that they're mere men.
4. Some scholars think Asaph (the author of the Psalm) was using irony. Remember, the judges in the Pslam were unjust. So to call them gods is ironical. It was almost an implicit insult. This sheds new light on what Jesus might have meant when He made the allusion. Since the Jews knew the Bible inside and out, they would have known exactly what He meant, which is this: what God called the unjust judges in irony, Christ is in reality. This is the interpretation I lean toward.
So, in context, the main point is about Christ's diety instead of man's.
This is my first opinion of this.
Beautifully written and thought out. IS this your own reasoning or that of other authors?
ReplyDeleteI found that Asaph used irony from Matthew Henry, John Gill, R.C. Sproul, Matthew Keener, and Ben Witherington III. But the rest I concluded just by reading the passage. The monotheistic point I think anyone knows. It's funny how many of these questions rest on issues in literary criticism. I love the many literary genres and personalities God uses to get His message across. It reminds me of that quote from Nietzsche: What if truth was a woman? What then? It can't be got at by the direct, cold instruments of the scientific frame of mind of the West, at least not the spiritual things. They have to be awoken in consciousness in some indirect way, coaxed out of us, flirted with, lured, wooed, independent of our will, but dependent on the will's searching. Then there's the unpredictable 'switch', like a Gestalt image.
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