The following is taken from the monumental work titled The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense, authored by Robert M. Bowman Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski, published by Kregel Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2024, Part 2: Like Father, Like Son: Jesus’ Divine Attributes, Chapter 10: The Preexistence of Christ, 198-206. All emphasis is mine.
In my estimation this is THE best and most comprehensive exposition and defense of the biblical basis for the Deity of Christ. Every serious Trinitarian Christian student of the Holy Bible, apologist, and/or theologian must have this book in the library.
Christ with Israel in the Wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:1–9)
In 1 Corinthians, written about 54 or 55, Paul makes two statements about the relationship to Christ of the Israelites in the wilderness following the exodus. Here is the first one:
For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. (1 Cor. 10:1–4)
Paul assumes here that his readers have some knowledge of the account in Exodus. The Israelites escaped from Egypt, led by a pillar of “cloud” representing God’s presence (Exod. 13:21–22; 14:19–20, 24), and they “all passed through the sea,” that is, the Red Sea (14:21–29). Paul is speaking figuratively when he says that they “all were baptized into Moses,” comparing the Israelites’ covenant relationship with God through Moses to Christians’ covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ. After the Israelites entered the wilderness, Yahweh’s glory “appeared in the cloud” (Exod. 16:10). On that occasion, God provided manna for them to eat (16:12–36). Soon afterward, God began providing water for the Israelites (17:1– 7). Paul calls the manna and the water “spiritual” food and drink, meaning not that they were immaterial but that God provided them supernaturally. Here is how Yahweh told Moses to get the water: “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink” 17:6 NRSV). This is the first Old Testament text that uses the word “rock” (ṣûr). Later, the Song of Moses actually calls Yahweh “the Rock” five times (Deut. 32:4, 15, 18, 30, 31). The implication of these texts is that God himself was “the Rock” from which the water ultimately came.
It is in this context of God as “the Rock” that Paul says, “and the Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4b). An allusion here to Deuteronomy 32 is confirmed a few verses later when Paul makes a strong allusion to Deuteronomy 32:16–17 (1 Cor. 10:21–22).37 Of course, as Ben Witherington III comments, “Paul is not discussing an earlier incarnation of the Christ on earth as a rock!”38 In Paul’s day, a Jewish tradition was developing that later described a rock-shaped “well” of water that followed the Israelites around in the wilderness. Scholars debate whether the “well” was an explicit part of the tradition in Paul’s day and whether his statement assumes that idea. We may safely say that Paul was part of the same broader theological community within which the moving well motif developed, but we should probably not read that motif into 1 Corinthians.39
Whatever the precise interpretive tradition concerning “the Rock” known to Paul, what he says in 1 Corinthians 10:4b indicates that Christ was a divine person present with the Israelites in the wilderness. Buzzard vehemently objects to this understanding of the text, mostly on a priori grounds that it would contradict what he claims the Bible teaches elsewhere. However, he also objects that Paul meant only that the “rock” was a type of Christ, quoting (twice) Paul’s statement, “Now these things happened to them as an example” (1 Cor. 10:11a), which Buzzard translates, “These things happened to them typically.”40 Here Buzzard has things a bit muddled. Of course, the inanimate, literal rock in the wilderness was a type, as were the cloud, the sea, the manna, and the water. However, “the Rock” in Deuteronomy 32 is not a type but a metaphorical name for God.
When Paul uses the Old Testament typologically or allegorically, he does so in the present tense: “Now Hagar is [estin] Mount Sinai in Arabia” (Gal. 4:25), interpreting Hagar in Genesis 16 as symbolic of the Mosaic covenant enacted at Mount Sinai. That is not what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 10. Instead, he writes, “and the Rock was [ēn] Christ.”41 Thus, a sound exegesis of the passage leads to the conclusion that Paul was identifying Christ as “the Rock” to whom the Israelites were supposed to look in faith. This conclusion, which for some people will be difficult to accept, is confirmed just a few sentences later, when Paul warns the Corinthian Christians: “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents” (1 Cor. 10:9). Here Paul states in a matter-of-fact manner that some of the Israelites in the wilderness “put Christ to the test,” and he warns the Corinthians not to make the same mistake!
Not all of the extant Greek manuscripts containing 1 Corinthians 10:9 have the name “Christ” there; some say “Lord” instead. The reading “Christ” (christon) has the earliest, most diverse, and most numerous manuscript support (starting with P46, dated about AD 200), and it is also better attested by early translations into other languages (such as Coptic and Latin) and in other early Christian writings. It is the reading given in most contemporary critical editions of the Greek New Testament (notably NA28 and SBLGNT). It was the reading followed in the KJV and is followed by most contemporary English versions (CSB, ESV, LEB, NABRE, NET, NIV, NKJV, NLT, NRSV).
The reading “Lord” (kyrion) does have the support of two major codices from the fourth century (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), which led Tregelles (1879) and Westcott and Hort (1881) to prefer this reading in their critical editions of the Greek New Testament. The recent edition published by Tyndale House (THGNT), which was based on the Tregelles edition, also accepts the reading kyrion. However, the rest of the manuscript support for kyrion is quite weak compared with the evidence for christon. Moreover, while it would be understandable for scribes to change the strange sounding “Christ” to “Lord” here, it is highly unlikely that scribes would change “Lord” to “Christ.”
For these reasons, the reading kyrion is followed by only a few English versions today (NASB, NJB). Manuscript discoveries in the twentieth century, especially P46 (which was rediscovered and published for scholars to study in the 1930s) have convinced nearly all textual critics and other scholars that “Christ” is the correct reading.42
Predictably, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible version follows the less likely reading kyrion in 1 Corinthians 10:9 and then substitutes Jehovah there, so that Paul is made to say, “Neither let us put Jehovah to the test” (1 Cor. 10:9 NWT). The Watchtower’s online study Bible cites the Westcott–Hort and THGNT editions of the Greek New Testament in support of the reading kyrion. Of course, no Greek manuscripts of 1 Corinthians use any form of the name YHWH (“Jehovah”). The Watchtower therefore speculates that “the divine name was originally used in this verse and later replaced with the title ‘Lord’ or ‘the Christ.’”43 Even granting the baseless assumption that the text originally had YHWH here, it is extremely implausible to claim that scribes might have replaced that name with “the Christ.” Thus, one must accept three implausible claims in order to defend the NWT rendering: that kyrion is better attested than christon; that kyrion originated as a substitute by apostate scribes for YHWH; and that some scribes would also have substituted christon for YHWH (or even for kyrion).
The Watchtower’s zeal to avoid having Paul say that the Israelites put Christ to the test in the wilderness is understandable. What Paul says here about Christ is what the Old Testament said about the Lord Yahweh: that the Israelites had put him to the test, resulting on one occasion in some of them dying from poisonous serpents (Num. 14:22; 21:5–6; Pss. 78:18–20; 95:9).44 Once again, the New Testament not only affirms Christ’s preexistence, but affirms his divine preexistence.
Jesus the Savior and Judge of Israel (Jude 5)
A similar statement appears in the epistle of Jude. He warns his readers about those “who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). Immediately after that warning, he starts giving examples from Jewish history, beginning with the Israelites’ apostasy in the wilderness. This text has come down to us mainly in two forms, with variations similar to what we saw in 1 Corinthians 10:9. We will quote two different translations to illustrate the difference:
Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. (Jude 5 ESV; similarly, CSB, LEB, NET, NLT, NRSV).
Now I want to remind you, though you know everything once and for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. (Jude 5 NASB; similarly, KJV, NABRE, NIV, NJB, NKJV)45
These two translations reflect the fact that many manuscripts have “Jesus” here, while many others have “Lord” (kyrios). A third reading comes from the earliest extant manuscript, a papyrus known as P72 and dated to the third or fourth century. In P72, Jude 5 has “God Christ” (theos christos) instead of either “Lord” or “Jesus.” This is so far the only extant manuscript containing this reading, which is one reason why virtually no one argues that it is the original reading. If it were, of course, it would mean that Jude was explicitly affirming the preexistence of Christ as God! Not only is this an isolated reading, but it appears in a manuscript that scholars regard as particularly unreliable.46
Deciding between “Lord” and “Jesus” in Jude 5 is not so easy. On the one hand, most scholars acknowledge that the manuscript evidence for “Jesus” is significantly better than for “Lord.” On the other hand, many scholars find it hard to accept that Jude actually wrote “Jesus” here. In his textual commentary first written in 1971 and revised in 1994, Bruce Metzger, writing for the committee that produced the Greek New Testament for the United Bible Societies, famously explains: “Despite the weighty attestation supporting Iēsous . . . a majority of the Committee was of the opinion that the reading was difficult to the point of impossibility.”47 Yet this was a bare majority ruling, with three committee members taking this position and two (including Metzger) dissenting. Normally the more difficult reading is preferred on the grounds that scribes were more likely to amend a difficult reading than to create one, but in this case many scholars think “Jesus” is just too difficult a reading.48
Other scholars have defended the reading “Jesus” as difficult but not too difficult, arguing that it is most likely correct.49 When Metzger produced the two editions of his textual commentary for the United Bible Societies, their published Greek New Testament, through its fourth edition, reflected the committee’s majority ruling and had kyrios in Jude 5. However, the fifth edition (as well as NA28, which presents the same Greek text) changed its reading to Iēsous (“Jesus”). In addition, the other two main critical texts of the Greek New Testament, the SBLGNT and the THGNT, also both favor “Jesus.” In keeping with this shift in favor of the reading Iēsous, the updated edition of the NRSV changed its translation of Jude 5 from “the Lord” to “Jesus.”
We think that the reading “Jesus” in Jude 5 is more likely to be correct, based on the currently available evidence. If that is true, then Jude 5 undeniably affirms that Jesus preexisted his human life and was involved in Israel’s history. However, even if one prefers the reading “Lord,” in context the statement would still refer to Jesus Christ because in the immediately preceding sentence Christ is called “our only Master and Lord” (Jude 4). Reading the two sentences together (and using a translation with the reading “Lord” in verse 5) should make the point clear:
For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Now I want to remind you, though you know everything once and for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. (Jude 4–5 NASB)
After speaking of Jesus as “our only Master and Lord,” Jude can hardly have referred immediately to someone other than Jesus as “the Lord” without qualification. The Lord who delivered his people out of Egypt, then, must be the Lord Jesus.
Who Led the Israelites Out of Egypt?
The statements we have just examined from Paul (1 Cor. 10:4, 9) and Jude (Jude 4–5) indicate that Jesus Christ was the divine figure who led the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness on their way to the promised land. Yet both authors, of course, in those same epistles differentiated the Lord Jesus Christ from God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:6; Jude 1, 25). How, then, are we to understand their statements about Christ’s role in the Israelite exodus in relation to the Old Testament narrative? Who is it exactly that Paul and Jude thought the preincarnate Christ was?
When we turn to the book of Exodus, we find a likely answer. It turns out that there is a similar complexity, even paradox, in what Exodus says about the divine deliverer of the Israelites. The divine figure who appeared to Moses from a burning bush is first called “the angel of the Lord” (Exod. 3:2), but the one whom Moses sees and hears in the bush is identified repeatedly by the names “the Lord” (Yahweh) and “God” (3:4–16). Once the Israelites begin their journey out of Egypt, we are told that “God” led them out and that “the Lord went before them” in a pillar of cloud and fire (13:18, 21). When the Egyptian army attempted to overtake the Israelites, “the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them” (14:19). In these passages, the angel of the Lord, also called the angel of God, is both distinguished from and equated with God, the Lord. Elsewhere, the Old Testament tells the people of Israel both that “the Lord” brought them out of Egypt (Exod. 20:1–2; Lev. 11:45; Deut. 20:1; Neh. 9:18) and that “the angel of the Lord” did so (Judg. 2:1). In other places, especially in the early narrative books of the Bible, the angel of the Lord speaks to human beings as though he were the Lord himself, and those who see him confess that they saw God (e.g., Gen. 16:7–13; 21:17–18; 22:1, 11–18; 31:11–13; Judg. 6:11–24; 13:2–23).
These and many other texts evidently refer to a divine person called God’s “angel” who is somehow distinct from God and yet is himself God. Keep in mind that the words translated “angel” (Hebrew malʾak, Greek angelos) literally meant “messenger,” which meant that the word could be used for human messengers, created spirit messengers, and evidently a divine messenger. Perhaps the richest example of this phenomenon comes in Jacob’s prayer for blessing over Joseph’s two sons:
The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked,
the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day,
the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys . . . (Gen. 48:15–16a)
As Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna observes, the parallelism of these three lines “strongly suggests that ‘angel’ is here an epithet of God.”50 This triadic blessing recalls the famous priestly blessing given later in the Bible:
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Num. 6:24–26)
Jacob’s crediting the angel with redeeming him from evil also implies the angel’s deity, especially since elsewhere in Genesis, Jacob prays to God and receives protection from God (Gen. 28:15, 20; 31:3; 32:10–13; 35:3). As Sarna also acknowledges, “no one in the Bible ever invokes an angel in prayer.”51 That the angel in Genesis 48:16 is God is confirmed by the singular form of the verb barak (“bless”).
Why, then, does Jacob use the term “angel” in his prayer for blessing over his grandsons? The answer is that the “man” with whom Jacob had famously wrestled, whom he then realized was God (Gen. 32:24–30), was the same figure called “the angel of the Lord” earlier in Genesis. The prophet Hosea later stated this explicitly: “In his manhood he strove with God. He strove with the angel and prevailed” (Hosea 12:3–4).
A strong case can be made on the basis of these and other passages that the figure called “the angel of the Lord” (and “the angel of God”) was himself God, yet in some way distinct from God. The traditional Christian view on this matter is that the angel of the Lord was in fact the preincarnate Son of God, and this view has received noteworthy defenses and expositions in recent years.52 Two New Testament passages we discussed earlier in this chapter, 1 Corinthians 10:4–9 and Jude 5–7, although they do not actually use the term “angel” for Christ, do seem to allude to Exodus passages about the angel of the Lord, as several scholars have argued.53
Not everyone agrees. On the one hand, some interpreters argue that the Old Testament texts in question refer to created angels who spoke and acted as God’s agents or representatives.54 This theory can appear to account for a few of the passages, but it just does not fit many of them, with Genesis 48:16 being one of the most compelling. The created angel interpretation also struggles to make sense of the passages in which a human being, when seeing the angel of the Lord, is afraid that he or she might die because of seeing God (Gen. 32:30; Exod. 3:6; Judges 6:22–23; 13:21–23). The point here is not merely that they feared for their life, but that they feared for their life because they understood that in seeing the angel of the Lord, they had seen God.55 In the light of such texts, evidently what the Lord meant when he warned that people could not see God and live (Exod. 33:20) was that they could not see him in an unfiltered or direct fashion.
The debate over the identity of the angel of the Lord will continue.56 For those who accept the interpretation that the “angel” in the Old Testament is a divine person who is somehow “God” and yet also distinct from “God,” this finding easily correlates with the New Testament revelation that Jesus Christ existed as a divine person distinct from the Father who was active in the history of the patriarchs and ancient Israel.
On the other hand, the view that the “angel” of the Lord was a created angel does nothing to overturn or weaken the evidence from the New Testament for the preexistence of Christ. Our study in this chapter has found passages in four different parts of the New Testament, written by four different authors, that clearly speak of the Lord Jesus as having been involved in the Old Testament history of Israel (Matt. 23:34–37; John 12:37–41; 1 Cor. 10:1–9; Jude 5).
It is especially striking that Paul and Jude—two quite different authors— in different ways both refer to Christ as involved specifically in the judgment of the faithless Israelites in the wilderness. Since Jude (whom everyone agrees wrote after Paul) shows no signs of literary dependence on any of Paul’s writings, both authors evidently were drawing from a common Christian understanding of Christ’s role in the history of Israel. That is an especially significant finding because it shows that Paul did not invent this idea. Together with the evidence from Matthew and John, we may conclude that the belief in a preexistent, divine Christ actively involved in the Old Testament history of Israel apparently had arisen among Christians even earlier than Paul’s epistles.
37. See our earlier discussion (pp. 135–37).
38. Ben Witherington III, The Indelible Image: The Theological and Ethical Thought World of the New Testament, Vol. 2: The Collective Witness (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 216 n. 21.
39. For an argument seeking to tie 1 Corinthians 10:4 to the “moving well” tradition, see Peter E. Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well’ in 1 Cor 10:4: An Extrabiblical Tradition in an Apostolic Text,” BBR 6 (1996): 23–37. For alternative views, see Thiselton, First Epistle to the Corinthians, 727–30, who argues for Wisdom as the dominant tradition of relevance, and Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 494–96, who cautions against reading the moving well into Paul and considered the Wisdom traditions irrelevant.
40. Buzzard and Hunting, Doctrine of the Trinity, 110, 111 (see 108–12).
41. Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, MA: Hendriksen, 2007), 95–96.
42. See Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1994), 494; Carroll D. Osburn, “The Text of 1 Corinthians 10:9,” in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis: Essays in Honour of Bruce M. Metzger, ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1–12.
43. NWT (Study Edition), Appendix C3, “Verses Where the Divine Name Does Not Appear as Part of Direct or Indirect Quotations in the Book of 1 Corinthians.” On this issue, see pp. 469–73.
44. Cf. Costa, Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters, 358–59 n. 479.
45. The NWT, as one would expect, presupposes this reading but changes “Lord” to “Jehovah.”
46. See Elijah Hixson, “Dating Myths, Part One: How We Determine the Ages of Manuscripts,” in Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, ed. Hixson and Gurry, 91. Jarl E. Fossum defends theos as the original reading in “Angel Christology in Jude 5–7,” in The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christianity, NTOA 30 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 41 n. 1.
47. Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 657.
48. Notable recent examples include Tommy Wasserman, The Epistle of Jude: Its Text and Transmission, ConBNT 43 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2006), 262–66; Herbert W. Bateman IV, “Disarming Significant Textual Issues in Jude: A Text Critical Study and Interpretation of Jude 5 and 12,” in New Testament Philology: Essays in Honor of David Alan Black, ed. Melton Bennett Winstead (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 145–49.
49. E.g., Gathercole, Preexistent Son, 36–41; Philipp Bartholomä, “Did Jesus Save the People Out of Egypt? A Re-examination of a Textual Problem in Jude 5,” NovT 50 (2008): 143–58.
50. Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 328; likewise, Bruce K. Waltke and Cathi J. Fredricks, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 599, and others.
51. Sarna, Genesis, 328. Sarna offers several good reasons to understand the “angel” here to be God, but then at the end suggests a possible way around this conclusion (which does not sit well with current Orthodox Judaism) by allowing that the passage “may reflect some tradition . . . concerning an angelic guardian of Jacob,” not otherwise found in Genesis.
52. E.g., Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 134–48; Anthony Rogers, “The ‘Heavenly’ & ‘Earthly’ Yahweh: A Proto-Trinitarian Interpretation of Genesis 19:24, Part I,” in Our God Is Triune: Essays in Biblical Theology, ed. Michael R. Burgos Jr. (Torrington, CT: Church Militant Publications, 2018), 34– 76; Matt Foreman and Doug Van Dorn, The Angel of the Lord: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Study, foreword by Michael S. Heiser (Dacono, CO: Waters of Creation Publishing, 2020); Michael R. Burgos Jr., “The Angel of Yahweh: A Biblical Appellation for the Second Person of the Holy Trinity,” American Journal of Biblical Theology 22, no. 31 (Aug. 1, 2021); Rob Phillips, Jesus before Bethlehem: What Every Christian Should Know about the Angel of the Lord, foreword by Rodney A. Harrison (Jefferson City, MO: High Street Press, 2021).
53. E.g., Fossum, “Angel Christology in Jude 5–7”; Darrell D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, WUNT 2/109 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 139–42, among others.
54. Perhaps most notably, W. G. MacDonald, “Christology and ‘the Angel of the Lord,’” in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation: Studies in Honor of Merrill C. Tenney Presented by His Former Students, ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 324–35; René A. López, “Identifying the ‘Angel of the Lord’ in the Book of Judges: A Model for Reconsidering the Referent in Other Old Testament Loci,” BBR 20, no. 1 (2010): 1–18.
55. Contra López, “Identifying the ‘Angel of the Lord’ in the Book of Judges,” 10–11.
56. We discuss the question of whether Paul identified Jesus as “the angel of God” (Gal. 4:14) in chapter 19 (pp. 371–75).
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