Let’s pretend that this shows Jesus at the age of 3 months. Does the New Testament teach that no more than 12 months before, Jesus came into existence (for the first time), that is, in philosopher’s lingo, that he was generated?
Sir Anthony Buzzard has argued that the New Testament teaches exactly that, and explicitly so. There’s been a boiling discussion of this argument by our intrepid commenters on this post.
I think this issue deserves some posts. In the past I’ve never been sure I’ve quite understood his argument, and so have never taken a position on it. I’m going to think through it in this series of posts.
Let us first note that the truth and reasonableness of this humanitarian unitarian christology doesn’t stand or fall with this exegetical argument. There may be other textual, theological, or philosophical reasons to hold that Christ did not exist before his human life, i.e. before his conception. It is clear to me, in fact, that this argument is not Sir Anthony’s only reason for this view. (See e.g. comment #2 in the discussion linked above.)
Second, let’s note that it is a very strong or bold argument. Mr. Buzzard is arguing not simply that this christology best explains the texts, or that it is implicit in them, or that the authors assumed it, but rather that certain texts explicitly assert that Jesus came into existence a little over 2000 years ago.
Third, Sir Anthony’s first training and first scholarly love was languages, and he sometimes will present things as the text simply saying whatever his final exegesis is, but when you dig deeper, you see that the interpretation in question is actually built on complex reasoning, reasoning which he does not always patiently lay out for you.
In his 2007 book Jesus was Not a Trinitarian, he says,
Church creeds deny that the Son of God had a beginning of existence! Luke and Matthew say emphatically that he did. (p. 209)
Where? Matthew 1.
But when you read Matthew 1, this is not obvious. Picking up Matthew, we find a geneology going back to Abraham, and the a very succinct assertion of virgin birth:
…an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. Matthew 1:20, ESV
Sir Anthony reads Matthew as telling us about the coming into existence of the Son, rather than just about the Son’s genealogy, conception, and birth. The word most often translated as “conceived” here, he says means coming into existence.
But why take it that way, we should ask? It seems to me that considered alone, the text of Matthew isn’t that specific. Yes, it teaches that Jesus is the Son of Mary (v. 16, 18) and God (v.18, 20) But isn’t this, by itself, logically consistent with Jesus having already existed in some non-human form? Subordinationists – yes, inspired by Philonic speculations – have always thought that either eternally, or some time long ago, the Son originated from God, only later to become human. Isn’t this speculation consistent with the letter of the text?
In a passage Buzzard quotes James Dunn saying that
…Matthew presumably understands this as Jesus’ origin, as the begetting (=becoming) of Jesus to be God’s Son… (Christology in the Making, p. 50, original emphases)
Presumably? Why presume that? Because, according to Dunn, nothing of pre-human-existence is mentioned.
Unstated assumption: if the author of Matthew believed in a pre-human Son which only entered into a zygote or fetus at some point, then he would have said something to indicate this. But no – there’s just this genealogy going back to Abraham, culminating in a miraculous conception – Mary became pregnant not in the normal way, but by the operation of God’s spirit. Thus, the author of Matthew didn’t believe in a pre-human Son. This is indisputably a valid argument, but is not indisputably sound, because it is not obviously true that if the author believed in a pre-conception existence for Jesus, then he would have said so.
That doesn’t mean we should not accept the argument as sound, of course. We reasonably accept countless arguments as sound even though we are not absolutely certain that one or more premises is true. We’ll return to this in a later post.
Next post: “eternal generation”?
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Hi Dale,
Points to ponder for this series of posts:
Matthew and Luke explicitly asserted the approximate chronology for the origin of Christ’s humanity. However, Mark and John never mentioned that the conception and birth of Christ had anything to do with Christ being the Son of God.
Dale
I think standard biblical commentary would say that this is the standard for the Synoptics as a whole.
James
So what are you implying, that the Christ was not the Son of God?
Dale,
PS: sounds like your making the same point most of our opponents make: just because the writers don’t talk about a preexistence of the Son it doesn’t mean he did not LITERALLY preexist. i.e., argument from silence.
But I think what your missing here is that the language of both Matthew and Luke [and I would even argue John (use of monogenes; John 1.13--singular reading; 1John 5.18) NEGATES any possiblity of preexistence. Because Jesus is said to originate [genesis] via miraculous begetting [procreation] in the womb of Mary.
Hi Xavier,
I never suggested that Christ was not the Son of God. After all, the four Gospel writers taught that Christ was the Son of God. But I said that Mark and John never referred to the conception and birth of Christ when they taught that Christ was the Son of God. Mark and John never wrote that the biological conception of Christ was critical for understanding his divine Sonship (not that I am denying the biological conception of Christ). For example, the New Testament concept of divine Sonship derived from the Old Testament declarations of divine sonship in the Davidic dynasty, which focused on coronation instead of conception and birth.
James
It could be said that the NT writers reinterpreted many Messianic texts, including those to do with the begetting of the Messiah [i.e., Ps 2.7].
But I would even argue that the initial promise of God creating a unique human being CAN be found in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. For example, Isaiah’s “the servant of YHWH”, who is said to be “created, made, brought forth, called from the womb” [Isa 44.2, 24; 49.1, 15; Ps 22.6]; “The prophet” [Jer. 1.5; Ps 71.6]; The future “Davidic King” [2Sam 7.14; Sal 2.7; 89.26-27; 110.3 (LXX)]; and the prototypical “Israel, the firstborn son” [Ex 4.22; Isa 46.3; Jer 31.9].
Of interest is the textual and theological history of Ps 110.3, a verse notoriously known for its “obscurity” in the Masoretic text. Many scholars actually believe that the Mosorites of the 8-9th-centuries purposely tried to hid the begetting language due, perhaps, to the growing disparity between them and Catholic-Christianity who were teaching a “God-man” Jewish-Messiah who was said to have been “begotten but not made”. The true meaning of the verse though has been preserved in the LXX, written hundreds of years before Christianity, which reads:
[...] Buzzard complains at length about Platonizing “fathers” insisting that the New Testament teaches the “eternal generation” of the Son, citing the Lewis Carrol passage here. (pp. 260ff) I think he’s right to do so; the exegetical crimes of the “fathers” are legion. But in the end, I think Buzzard goes a bit too far. [...]
I wonder are we trying to read too much in to some of these texts. For example I think we may want to ask why Mathew/Luke include a genealogy. I suspect their point is to connect Jesus with the expected Messiah and the traditions that formed the expectations of what that Messiah would be like. If that is right, reading a metaphysical view, one way or the other, into (or purportedly out of) the text seems deeply problematic. If they were trying to make a metaphysical point I would like to see an argument to show that. On my reading (I’m a philosopher not a NT scholar) it looks like John is trying to make a metaphysical point where as Mathew and Luke are making a point about who Jesus is in comparison to the Messiah traditions, and specifically the linage of David. Without asking further questions about what they expected about the Messiah and how those expectations were altered as they interacted with Jesus and developed a theology after his ascension, its a bit difficult to look at the text and draw a metaphysical conclusion, in fact it comes across a pretty big stretch.
Hi David,
Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure we can say these authors are devoid of metaphysical interest. They’re telling us where Jesus came from, and yes, establishing his credentials as Messiah. But part of what they’re asserting is that he’s a real human being, who yet had no human father, since God caused his mother to become pregnant. That sounds plenty metaphysical to me!
Yet I don’t read them as denying Jesus “pre-existence.” Mr. Buzzard does. But I agree with some of the sources he cites, to the effect that it is unlikely that they would have told the story of Jesus’ origins the way they do, if they’d believed him to always have existed, or existed at the foundation of the world, etc. It is enough for them that he was really God’s messiah, and God’s Son (because of God’s action in causing the conception in Mary). If correct, this is interesting – it may affect the way we read Paul.
[...] this recent video, Sir Anthony makes various relevant points. As I said in part 1 of this series, his linguistic argument against “pre-existence” is not his only one. At 3:11ff he [...]