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John 10.33
apekrithēsan autō hoi Ioudaioi Peri kalou ergou ou lithazomen se alla peri
ἀπεκρίθησαν αὐτῷ οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι , Περὶ καλοῦ ἔργου οὐ λιθάζομέν σε , ἀλλὰ περὶ
Answered him the Jews For a good work not we stone you but for
blasphēmias kai hoti sy anthrōpos ōn poieis seauton Theon
βλασφημίας , καὶ ὅτι σὺ , ἄνθρωπος ὢν , ποιεῖς σεαυτὸν Θεόν .
blasphemy and because you a man being make yourself God.
‘We are not stoning you for any good work,’ they replied, ‘but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.’
The main issue raised by this verse is whether the people addressed by Jesus understand that he is claiming to be ‘a god’ (as the New World Translation and subsequently the New English Bible suggest), or ‘God’ (following the reading of all other English translations.
At first sight some of the arguments for the first view might seem attractive. The Greek word for ‘God’, theon, expressed here as the object of the sentence, is lacking the definite article, which as we point out in John 1.1, was regarded both by the Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, and by the early Christian writer Origen, as a pointer towards a lesser quality of deity.
On its own, such an argument carries relatively little weight, as John seems to switch freely between theos with and without the article in his references to the Father. However, the argument appears strengthened by the justification Jesus gives in his own defence. Far from quoting an Old Testament text such as Genesis 19.24 or Psalm 110.1 which might have jusified a claim for parity with the Father, he instead quotes Psalm 82 verse where theos (elohim in the original Hebrew) is used in a lesser sense, to apply to human judges:
Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I have said you are ‘gods’”? If he called them “gods”, to whom the word of God came – and Scripture cannot be set aside – what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?
The natural inference from Jesus’ use of such a verse is that he is claiming considerably less than an identity with Yahweh himself. Before drawing such a conclusion, however, it is worth remembering that Jesus is employing a common Jewish Rabbinical device here of arguing from the lesser to the greater. When questioned about the healing of the woman on the Sabbath in Luke’s gospel (13.10-
The background to the exchange may help us here. Jesus’ description of himself as the ‘Good Shepherd’ earlier in the chapter (verses 11 and 14) closely echoes the words of Yahweh, the Shepherd of Israel in the Old Testament, who is the true shepherd, not a worthless one (Ezek. 34.1-
The chapter climaxes in the extraordinary statement in 10.30: ‘I and the Father are one’. As we note in chapter ten of But is he God?, Jesus here appears to take the Shema‘, the uncompromising declaration of the uniqueness of God which provides the bedrock of Jewish faith to this day, and to split it quite shamelessly down the middle. So while Deuteronomy 6.4 (RSV) states, ‘Hear O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD’, he now divides it equally between himself and the Father.
It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Jesus is in fact claiming equality with the Father here, as John himself attests in 5.18 and as the words which follow the exchange in John 10 (‘the Father is in me, and I in the Father’, verse 38) would naturally imply. The crowd’s reaction (by threatening to stone him) does not make sense if Jesus was claiming anything less than this.
An obvious counter-
A more nuanced argument against a direct claim to divinity here is that despite Jesus being described on two or three occasions as ‘God’ elsewhere in the gospels, he never describes himself directly in these terms. But this is true of other designations such as ‘King’, and, with rare exceptions (usually in response to questions from others) as ‘Lord’, ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’. This underscores the general pattern in the gospels that it is others who make such statements about Jesus, not vice versa.
Indeed, the fact that it is his Jewish opponents who recognise that he is making a divine claim is highly significant. An early third century Rabbinical text declares that:
[God] beheld that there was a man, son of a woman, who should rise up and seek to make himself God, and to cause the whole world to go astray. Therefore . . . he spoke: Give heed that you go not astray after that man, for it is written, ‘God is not man that he should lie’ (Numbers 23.19), and if he says that he is God he is a liar; and he will deceive and say that he departs and comes again in the end, he says and he shall not perform.’<1>
In short, there is ample evidence here to support the traditional interpretation that Jesus is indeed described as ‘God’ in John 10.33. Since two or three witnesses form the required basis for proof in Jewish culture, John provides them in his gospel. He has presented his own evidence in chapter 1. In chapter 10 we adds in the testimony of Jesus’ enemies, and this in turn goes on to pave the way for the remarkable statement of Thomas in chapter 20. All these provide a commentary on Jesus’ extraordinary declaration in 14.9 that ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’.