Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?

by Anthony Buzzard

From the Doctrine of the Trinity – Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound pp 279-281

Titus 2:13; 2 Peter 1:1

A number of contemporary discussions advance the so-called “Granville Sharp’s rule” to support their claim that Jesus is called “the great God and Savior” in Titus 2:13. Sharp contended that when the Greek word kai (and) joins two nouns of the same case, and the first noun has the definite article and the second does not, the two nouns refer to one subject. Hence the disputed verse should read “…our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,” and not as the King James Version has it, “...the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” The rule about the omission of the article, however, cannot be relied on to settle the matter. As Nigel Turner (who writes as a Trinitarian) says:

Unfortunately, at this period of Greek we cannot be sure that such a rule is really decisive. Sometimes the definite article is not repeated even where there is clearly a separation in idea. “The repetition of the article was not strictly necessary to ensure that the items be considered separately” (Moulton-Howard-Turner, Grammar, Vol. III, p. 181. The reference is to Titus 2:13).

[1] Since the absence of a second article is not decisive, it is natural to see here the appearing of God’s glory as it is displayed in His Son at the Second Coming. There is an obvious parallel with Matthew’s description of the arrival of Jesus in power: “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of his Father with his holy angels” (Matt. 16:27 ). Since the Father confers His glory upon the Son (as He will also share it with the saints), it is most appropriate that Father and Son should be closely linked. Paul had only a few verses earlier spoken of “God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior” (Titus 1:4 ).

A wide range of grammarians and biblical scholars have recognized that the absence of the definite article before “our Savior Jesus Christ” is quite inadequate to establish the Trinitarian claim that Jesus is here called “the great God.” At best, the argument is “dubious.”

[2] It is unfortunate, as Brown says, “that no certainty can be reached here, for it seems that this passage is the one which shaped the confession of the World Council of Churches in ‘Jesus Christ as God and Savior.’”

[3] It should also be noted that the Roman emperor could be called “God and Savior,” without the implication that he was the Supreme Deity. Even if the title “God and Savior” were most exceptionally used of Jesus, it would not establish his position as coequal and coeternal with the Father. It would rather designate him as the One God’s supreme agent, which is the view of the whole Bible.

The same grammatical problem faces expositors in 2 Peter 1:1. Henry Alford is one of many Trinitarians who argue that Jesus is not called “God” in this verse. For him the absence of the article is outweighed here, as in Titus 2:13, by the much more significant fact that both Peter and Paul normally distinguish clearly between God and Jesus Christ. The writer of the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges agreed that “the rule that the one article indicates the one subject… [cannot] be too strongly relied upon as decisive.

[4] A Trinitarian writer of the last century was much less generous to those who sought proof of the Deity of Christ in the omission of the article: “Some eminently pious and learned scholars…have so far overstretched the argument founded on the presence or absence of the article, as to have run it into a fallacious sophistry, and, in the intensity of their zeal to maintain the ‘honor of the Son,’ were not aware that they were rather engaged in ‘dishonoring the Father.’

[5] The last statement may in fact be true of the whole effort of orthodoxy to make Jesus equal in every sense to the Father.

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