Category: Bible Interpretation (page 4 of 16)

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

Is Jehovah the Father Only?

This post isn’t about how to prove the doctrine of the Trinity (or the deity of Christ) to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Rather, it’s about overcoming the language barrier so that at least Jehovah’s Witnesses understand what you are and aren’t saying. Continue reading

How to Combat Proof Texting and Bible Hopscotching About the Deity of Christ

“Proof texting is the method by which a person appeals to a biblical text to prove or justify a theological position without regard for the context of the passage they are citing.” (Theopedia)

Bible hopscotching is jumping from one part of the Bible to another or one topic to another without taking time to examine anything in detail.

Here is an example of both, taken from Watchtower argumentation against the deity of Christ, which appears on page 203 of its book What Does the Bible Really Teach? Continue reading

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