Bible Difficulties (84 page)

How can Jesus' statement "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) be reconciled
with the doctrine of the Trinity?

In John 14:28 Jesus says, "If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I" (NIV). The Trinity is defined in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (No. 6) as follows: "There are three Persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory." How, then, can the Son affirm that the Father is greater (
meizon
) than He?

Our Lord Jesus Christ was speaking here, not in His divine nature as God the Son, but in His human nature, as the Son of Man. Christ came to suffer and die, not as God, who can do neither, but as the Second Adam, born of Mary. Only as the Son of Man could He serve as Messiah, or Christ (the Anointed One). Unless He could take to Himself a true and genuine human nature, He could never have represented Adam's race as Sin-Bearer at the Cross. But as the Son of Man, He certainly was lower in station than God the Father.

As Isaiah 52:13-53:12 makes clear, He could only become our Savior by becoming the Servant of Yahweh. The servant by definition can never be as great as his master. Hence it was as the death-conquering Redeemer, the God-man, that Jesus would enter into the presence of the Father, who of course would be greater in dignity and station than the Son of Man.

But as for God the Son, apart from the Incarnation, Scripture never suggests any contrast in glory as between the Father and the Son. The following passages make this abundantly clear: John 1:1, 18; 8:58; 10:30; 14:9; 17:5; Romans 9:5 ("Christ ... who is God over all"); Colossians 2:2; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; 1 John 5:20; cf. also Isaiah 9:6

(which affirms that the Virgin-born Immanuel is also the Mighty God--
'el gibbor
).

As for 1 John 5:7--which in KJV reads: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one"--the only portion of this verse that appears in any Greek manuscript earlier than the fifteenth century is the first clause only: "For there are three who bear witness"--followed immediately by v.8:

"the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are in agreement" (lit., "are unto one"). The rest of v.7 appears in Old Latin manuscripts as early as the fifth century but not in Greek until the very late miniscule 635, in the margin. It therefore seems best to omit this verse in the list of attestations of the Trinity, even though it seems to contain excellent theology.

382

Was Christ crucified on Thursday or Friday?

The uniform impression conveyed by the synoptic Gospels is that the Crucifixion took place on Friday of Holy Week. If it were not for John 19:14, the point would never have come up for debate. But John 19:14 says (according to NASB): "Now it was the day of preparation [
paraskeue
] for the Passover; it was about the sixth hour. And he [Pilate] said to the Jews, `Behold, your King!'" The NIV suggests a somewhat less difficult handling of the apparent discrepancy: "It was the day of Preparation of Passover Week, about the sixth hour." This latter translation takes note of two very important matters of usage.

First, the word
paraskeue
had already by the first century A.D. become a technical term for "Friday," since every Friday was the day of preparation for Saturday, that is, the Sabbath. In Modern Greek the word for "Friday" is
paraskeue
.

Second, the Greek term
tou pascha
(lit., "of the Passover") is taken to be equivalent to the Passover Week. This refers to the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread (Heb.

massot
) that immediately followed the initial slaughtering and eating of the Passover lamb on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month Abib, which by Hebrew reckoning would mean the commencement of the fifteenth day, right after sunset. The week of
masso-t
, coming right on the heels of Passover itself (during which
masso-t
were actually eaten, along with the lamb, bitter herbs, etc.) very naturally came to be known as Passover Week (cf.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 14th ed., 12:1041), extending from the fifteenth to the twenty-first of Abib, inclusively. (Arndt and Gingrich [
Greek-English
Lexicon
, pp. 638-39] state: "This [i.e., Passover] was followed immediately by the Feast of Unleavened Bread...on the 15th to the 21st. Popular usage merged the two festivals and treated them as a unity, as they were for practical purposes.") It was unnecessary to insert a specific term for "week" (such as
sa-buà
) for it to be understood as such.

Therefore, that which might be translated literally as "the preparation of the Passover"

must in this context be rendered "Friday of Passover Week."

It turns out, therefore, that John affirms just as clearly as the Synoptics that Christ was crucified on Friday and that His sacrificial death represented an antitypical fulfillment of the Passover ordinance itself, which was instituted by God in the days of the Exodus as a means of making Calvary available by faith to the ancient people of God even before the coming of Christ.

Note that in 1 Corinthians 5:7 Jesus is referred to as the Passover Lamb for believers:

"Purge out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you were unleavened.

For Christ our Lamb was sacrificed for us." The statement of E. C. Hoskyns on John 19:14 is very appropriate here: "The hour of double sacrifice is drawing near. It is midday. The Passover lambs are being prepared for sacrifice, and the Lamb of God is likewise sentenced to death" (
The Fourth Gospel
[London: Farber and Farber, 1940], ad loc.). It simply needs to be pointed out that the lambs referred to here are not those that were slaughtered and eaten in private homes--a rite Jesus had already observed with His disciples the night before ("Maundy Thursday")--but the lambs to be offered
on the altar
of the Lord on behalf of the whole nation of Israel. (For the household observance on the 383

evening of the fourteenth of Abib, cf. Exod. 12:6; for the public sacrifice on the altar, cf.

Exod. 12:16-17; Lev. 23:4-8; 2 Chron. 30:15-19; 35:11-16. These were all known as Passover sacrifices, since they were presented during Passover week.) Thus it turns out that there has been a simple misunderstanding of the phrase
paraskeue
tou pascha
that has occasioned such perplexity that even Guthrie (
New Bible
Commentary
, p.964) deduced an original error, for which he had no solution to offer. The various ingenious explanations offered by others, that Christ held His personal Passover a night early, knowing that He would be crucified before the evening of the fourteenth; that Christ and His movement held to a different calendar, reckoning the fourteenth to be a day earlier than the calendar of the official Jerusalem priesthood; or that He was following a revised calendar observed by the Essenes at Qumran--all these theories are quite improbable and altogether unnecessary. There is no contradiction whatever between John and the Synoptics as to the day on which Christ died--it was Friday.

384

Acts

If Joel's prophecy (2:28-32) was fulfilled at Pentecost (Acts 2:16-21), why were no
miraculous signs reported as occurring at that time
?

Peter's purpose in citing Joel 2:28-32 (which is the same as chap. 3 in the Hebrew Bible) was to establish the fact that the last days had been ushered in by the advent of Jesus Christ and the charismatic empowerment of His church by the Holy Spirit of God. He declares that Joel 2:28-29 is being fulfilled before the very eyes of the multitude who are witnessing the multilingual presentation of the gospel on the part of the 120 disciples.

The spirit-filled sons and daughters of Israel, the young men, the greybeards, and even the bondslaves, are all telling forth the wonderful works of God as they preach Christ to the assembled worshipers at the Feast of Pentecost.

Acts 2:19-20 includes the concluding verses of the Joel passage, which predicts the occurrence of striking or even catastrophic phenomena in heaven and on earth before the eschatological return of the Lord in judgment. These include a darkening of the sun in the daytime; a bloody hue will be reflected from the moon, and in the atmosphere surrounding the earth will be "blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke." But Peter does not mean to say that such manifestations are occurring right then during the feast. He goes on to quote these last verses of Joel 2:30-32 in order to point out the prophetic scheme that must be completed before the last days will draw to a close and the Lord Jesus Himself will return to earth as sovereign Lord. In other words, Pentecost began the last days; the horrors of Revelation 16-18 will mark the close of these last days before the Lord returns.

The drama of human redemption has entered into the last act, from the time of the crucifixion of the Son of God until His enthronement on the seat of David.

Is the reference to Theudas and Judas in Acts 5:36-37 historically accurate?

In Acts 5:36 Paul's former teacher Gamaliel is quoted as citing the unhappy example of Theudas, who led a band of four hundred men against the Roman government, only to be destroyed along with all his followers. This account has been treated with skepticism by some scholars, on the ground that Josephus (
Antiquities
20.5.1) refers to a Theudas who raised a revolt against the Roman government in A.D. 44 but was caught by the forces of Cuspius Fadius near the banks of the Jordan and thereupon decapitated. But as S.B.

Hoenig points out (Buttrick,
Interpreter's Dictionary,
4:629), the Theudas mentioned by Gamaliel may have been an earlier rebel of the same name (which is probably a short form of
Theodores
) who raised a futile revolt back in A.D. 6, the year Herod Archelaus was deposed from the throne. (Gamaliel's remarks must have been made around A.D. 31, and therefore could not have referred to the same Theudas as Josephus mentioned.) In Acts 5:37 Gamaliel also refers to a Judas of Galilee who raised an insurrection during the time of unrest that arose during a general census taking for taxation purposes, ordered by the legate of Syria, P. Sulpicius Quirinius around A.D. 7. This may have been a year later than the revolt of Theudas, just mentioned above. Josephus refers to this Judas 385

several times (
Antiquities
18.1. 1-6; 20.5.2;
War
2.8.1; 2.17. 8-9). Apparently it was he who founded the terrorist order of the Sicarii or Zealots, from which one of Christ's disciples (Simon the Zealot, or the "Canaanite"--from the Hebrew
qana'
, "be zealous") was recruited. At any rate, he too was killed by the Romans, as we learn from this verse--

though Josephus does not mention his death at all.

Neither of these references presents any real discrepancy with the Josephan account.

That there should have been more than one Theudas is hardly more surprising than that there was more than one Judas. "Theodorus," after all, was simply the Greek form of the Hebrew "Nathaniel" or possibly "Mattaniah."

Was Abraham only seventy-five when he left Haran?

In Acts 7:4 Stephen asserts that Abraham did not leave Haran for Canaan until after his father, Terah, was dead. But Terah did not die, according to Genesis 11:32, until the age of 205. That would mean Abraham must have been 135 when he left Haran, since Terah fathered him at the age of 70, according to Genesis 11:26. But Genesis 12:4 states that Abraham was only 75 when he migrated to Canaan. Therefore Stephen was sixty years off in his statement, and Abraham must have left Haran sixty years before Terah died.

But things are not really as bad for Stephen as the previous paragraph declares, for there is one serious fallacy. Genesis 11:26 records: "And Terah lived seventy years, and became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran" (NASB). Normally the first named in a list of sons is the oldest, but that rule has its exceptions. Abraham was not Terah's oldest son, even though he was named first. It is far more likely that Haran was Terah's oldest, since he was the first of them to die (Gen. 11:28). Concerning Nahor's death we have no information, except that he outlived Haran, and that his descendants Laban and Rebekah were living up in the region of Haran by the time of Isaac's marriage. But in all probability the reason Abraham was mentioned first was that he was by far the most important of the three brothers. Even though he must have been born when his father was 130--and may therefore have been the youngest of the three--he was the most prominent of them all, so far as historical achievement was concerned.

How many migrated with Jacob to Egypt?

In Acts 7:14 Stephen recalls concerning Joseph in Egypt that he "sent for his father Jacob and his whole family, seventy-five in all." But in Exodus 1:1-5 in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Old Testament we read: "These are the names of the sons of Israel

[the twelve names are given, except for Joseph].... The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all; Joseph was already in Egypt." In the face of this apparent discrepancy, we should note that Stephen may have intended to include the expanded number in the Septuagint, which was seventy-five rather than seventy. In fact, the Septuagint gives Exodus 1:5 as follows: "But Joseph was in Egypt. And all the souls from Jacob were seventy-five."

386

The explanation for this difference in the total is found back in Genesis 46:26-27. The Masoretic Hebrew text says: "All those who went to Egypt with Jacob--those who were his direct descendants, not counting his sons' wives--numbered sixty-six persons. With the
two sons
who had been born to Joseph in Egypt, the members of Jacob's family that went into Egypt, were seventy in all" (italics mine). But the Septuagint contains the following: "And all the souls who came with Jacob into Egypt, who issued from his loins, apart from the wives of the sons of Jacob, were sixty-six persons. And the sons of Joseph who were born to him in Egypt were nine persons. All the souls of the house of Jacob who entered Egypt were seventy-five." In other words, the total of seventy-five arrived at by the LXX included nine descendants of Joseph, rather than just two. Apparently Manasseh and Ephraim had seven sons between them, not by the time of Jacob's migration in 1876 B.C. (when they would hardly have been older than seven and five, respectively), but later on before Jacob actually died in Egypt after a seventeen-year sojourn there. Manasseh would have been twenty-five and Ephraim twenty-two by that date. If they married in their late teens, they might have produced seven children by them.