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Author: David Englund (page 5 of 91)

Who Was Pierced?

In Zechariah 12:10, Jehovah gives the following prophecy: “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” (emphasis added)

So Jehovah is the one who will be pierced.

Yet in the New Testament, it is Jesus who was pierced at the time of his execution. Continue reading

Is Jesus the I AM?

John 8:56-59 reports the following conversation between Jesus and a group of Jews: “56 ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’ 57 So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ 58 Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” (ESV)

The vast majority of Bible translations agree that John 8:58 should be rendered substantially like this: “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. [Greek: ego eimi]’”

In contrast, the Watchtower Bible renders that verse: “Jesus said to them: ‘Most truly I say to you, before Abraham came into existence, I have been.’” Continue reading

Does Jesus’ Subordination Disprove His Deity?

When Jehovah’s Witnesses first started discussing Jesus with me in the 1970s, they asked me to read aloud John 14:28.

In that verse, Jesus said, “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”

“There, you see,” they told me, “Jesus himself said that the Father is greater than he is, so Jesus admitted he wasn’t equal to God. So why does your church teach that he is?”

At that time, I had no idea how to answer them. Continue reading

Is Jesus God or “a god”?

Having asserted that Jesus is a created being, the Watchtower had to figure out how to deal with John 1:1, which plainly states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

So they came out with their own version of the Bible (the “New World Translation”), in which they rendered that verse as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” Continue reading

Was Jesus Created?

The Watchtower does not believe that Jesus is God, so it concludes that he must be a created being.

Here are the two primary Bible passages they use in support of this claim, along with my suggestions as to how to answer them. Continue reading

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