Unique, Not Only-Begotten

[Free]

How do you know they can't speak any other languages?

Nowhere did I say they can’t speak I other languages. What verse 4 makes absolutely clear—it couldn’t be made clearer—is that the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak in languages they did not know:

Act 2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. (ESV)

What happened first is that the disciples “were all filled with the Holy Spirit,” and then “began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Notice that nowhere in the passage is it stated that the “Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven,” were filled with the Holy Spirit nor that each heard in their native language as an ability given by the Holy Spirit. The disciples were speaking in the native languages of the hearers—that is the whole point—and so obviously didn’t need the help of the Holy Spirit to understand.

The Lord instructed apostle John in Rev. 1:11 - "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia." I don't think Revelation was originally written in Galilean, if that's a real language instead of an accent, or anybody of the seven churches spoke Galilean.

What does this have to do with this discussion?

 

[Runningman]

Yes they do:

When He had come to the other side, to the country of the Gergesenes, there met Him two demon-possessed men, coming out of the tombs, exceedingly fierce, so that no one could pass that way. And suddenly they cried out, saying, “What have we to do with You, Jesus, You Son of God? Have You come here to torment us before the time?" (Matt. 8:28-29)

Son of God does not mean he is God.

 

[Runningman]

Jesus is the only legitimate begotten son of God, the firstborn among the dead, all the others are joined heirs adopted by God through him, that doesn't make "that people" equal with him. None of "that people" is the king of kings and lord of lords, only he is.

Offspring are not illegitimate sons of God. Someone who is "born again" is actually born again, spiritually. Care to take another swing?

Acts 17
29Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.

 

[Free]

And Thomas didn't say you (Jesus) are the Lord and God of me.

He didn’t need to; he had just stuck his hand and fingers into Jesus’s wounds, the resurrected Jesus. He was very clearly directly addressing Jesus—“the Lord of me and the God of me.” There is simply no other way to legitimately understand this verse other than Thomas declaring that Jesus was his Lord and his God.

Jesus taught all of the disciples that the only true God is the Father.

You’re taking things out of context, which I have pointed out before. Jesus claimed to be God, explicitly and implicitly. He pointed to the Father as God which he should have done, given that Judaism teaches there is only one God. But that in no way precludes Jesus from also being God.

He didn't teach Thomas that.

Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, did he not?

I see no reason to think Thomas meant what you seem to think he said.

Textually, there is every reason to believe that Thomas was telling Jesus that he was his Lord and his God; there is no reason to think otherwise. The only way to make it say otherwise is to read preconceived ideas into the text and make it say something that or doesn’t plainly say.

If Thomas really believed Jesus is God then he is on an island alone. No one went around saying Jesus is God, not even Jesus, not even God, or Paul.

On the contrary, Jesus made that claim explicitly and implicitly. John, Paul, and Peter did likewise. Again, on several occasions the disciples worshipped Jesus. Matthew really believed that Jesus was “God with us.” Everything points to Jesus being God, just not the Father.

 

[Carry_Your_Name]

What does this have to do with this discussion?

Evidence, that the disciples clearly spoke foreign language other than their native Galilean.

Nowhere did I say they can’t speak I other languages. What verse 4 makes absolutely clear—it couldn’t be made clearer—is that the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak in languages they did not know:

So they didn't know an iota about Greek before until they were baptized in the Holy Spirit? That sounds fishy.

 

[Free]

Evidence, that the disciples clearly spoke foreign language other than their native Galilean.

Sure, perhaps Aramaic and Greek, but that has no bearing on this discussion, which is the speaking of other languages “as the Holy Spirit have them utterance.” That can only mean languages unknown to the disciples, miraculously given by the Holy Spirit.

So they didn't know an iota about Greek before until they were baptized in the Holy Spirit? That sounds fishy.

Where did I say that? Where does the passage say that it was all Greek being spoken, or that Greek was even being spoken at all? Look at the list of nations.

 

[Carry_Your_Name]

Son of God does not mean he is God.

It does mean he's the presence of God in human form.

Offspring are not illegitimate sons of God. Someone who is "born again" is actually born again, spiritually. Care to take another swing?

Acts 17
29Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.

This is a reproach against idolatry, where does it state or imply that "offsprings" are illegitimate?

 

[Carry_Your_Name]

Sure, perhaps Aramaic and Greek, but that has no bearing on this discussion, which is the speaking of other languages “as the Holy Spirit have them utterance.” That can only mean languages unknown to the disciples, miraculously given by the Holy Spirit.


Where did I say that? Where does the passage say that it was all Greek being spoken, or that Greek was even being spoken at all? Look at the list of nations.

Then how did they speak in all those different foreign languages at the same time? As I said, this is mostly about the hearing, the Holy Spirit did the translation to each individual.

 

[Free]

Then how did they speak in all those different foreign languages at the same time?

Are you serious? How many times have provided Acts 2:4 and additionally stated what it says?

Act 2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. (ESV)

As I said, this is mostly about the hearing, the Holy Spirit did the translation to each individual.

No, that is nowhere even implied in the text. It has nothing to do with the hearing; it has everything to do with the speaking.

 

[7thMoon]

Are you serious? How many times have provided Acts 2:4 and additionally stated what it says?

Act 2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. (ESV)


No, that is nowhere even implied in the text. It has nothing to do with the hearing; it has everything to do with the speaking.

Speaking gibberish? They communicated. The verb εἶπον is not used, but λαλέω is. First they spoke, then the HS translated. Verse 8 reveals the sound wasn't in sync with lips.

 

[Carry_Your_Name]

Are you serious? How many times have provided Acts 2:4 and additionally stated what it says?

How many times have provided Acts 2:8 and additionally stated what it says? Whatever language one spoke, the other heard it in their native language, that's all that matters. The first three one the list are Parthians and Medes and Elamites, how did three languages simultaneously spoken at once?

And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?

No, that is nowhere even implied in the text. It has nothing to do with the hearing; it has everything to do with the speaking.

Nowhere even implied that none of them could speak in any foreign language either, they didn't learn one foreign language all of a sudden, let along all those foreign languages. "Utterance", rhema, is specifically referring to an oral teaching, testimony or revelation of God, it's all about the content, and openly proclaiming your faith in Christ is a sign of being born again in Christ, that's the uttrerance in the sence of empowerment I talked about. Knowing about God and praying is one thing, proclaiming it publicly and facing potential pushbacks is another.

 

[Alfred Persson]

You have head knowledge of what the plain text of most Bible say, but you didn't actually look into it beyond the surface level.

John 1:1 is actually a mistranslation, likely motivated by bias. This is evident by the mass of scripture that contradicts it.

In John 1:1 he absence of the article (“the”) before “God” in the Greek makes the word “God” qualitative, which can be understood as “the Word had the character of God,” meaning that it was godly. There literally isn't a scholarly or academic way to make the word literally God Himself.

I apologize for my personal remarks.

I agree I seek the "surface level" of scripture.

Ordinary every day writing ("prose") is meant to communicate on the surface level. Rejecting the "surface meaning" for something "hidden" is called "eisegesis", reading into the text whatever one wants to be there.

John 1:1 "the Word was God" is not a mistranslation when properly understood. John is NOT saying the Word is "all of God", that would deny the Father and Holy Spirit exist.

Three plausible reasons explain why John left the definite article out, and out of the three I think the third most weighty:

First, God often functions as a proper name, and when a proper name has been used once in a context (so that one knows which Peter or John or whoever one is talking about), it can be used other times without the definite article.

Second, sentences with the verb “to be” in them (in this case, “was”) do not have a subject and an object, but a subject and a predicate noun or predicate adjective. In English subject and object are differentiated by word order. “Jim hit John” means Jim is the subject and John the object. Reverse the word order and Jim and John would reverse roles. In Greek you do this by special endings on the words. In that way you can, for example, place the object first if you want to emphasize it. Now if you have a sentence with a predicate noun, your endings will be the same. Yet you can indicate which is which by using the definite article with the subject and omitting it with the predicate noun. Thus the sentence would read, “The Word was God,” with God being emphasized.

Finally, another reason to omit the article is if the noun is functioning as a predicate adjective, giving a quality of the subject. That is probably John’s main reason for not including it here (although all three reasons may be true). That is, John is quite aware that the Word was not all of God. The Father still existed separately after the Word became flesh (Jn 1:14). Thus, “The Word was God” could be misleading; it could imply that all of God had become incarnate in Jesus. The omission of the article makes this verse mean “The Word was divine” or “What God was the Word was.” In other words, the text is indicating that the Word had all of the qualities of God, but this text is also indicating that not all of God was in the Word.-Kaiser, W. C., Jr., Davids, P. H., Bruce, F. F., & Brauch, M. T. (1996). Hard sayings of the Bible (pp. 490–491). InterVarsity.

 

[7thMoon]

John 1:1 the Word was God is not a mistranslation.

It most certainly is. It should be "And the god it was." The to be verb for Greek has 3 persons for singular and plural.
At the beginning it was. A worder and a worder it was with a God, and the God it was. It feels something like this in Greek. Everything about the Greek article is abused. There are too few indefinite noun phrases in the English translations. Yet names of persons rarely have the article. Is it because few times a person needed an introduction, and the personal names were definitive without the article?

 

[Free]

How many times have provided Acts 2:8 and additionally stated what it says? Whatever language one spoke, the other heard it in their native language, that's all that matters. The first three one the list are Parthians and Medes and Elamites, how did three languages simultaneously spoken at once?

There were 120 disciples, which would potentially mean 120 languages being spoken at once.

And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?

It isn’t through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is the whole point. Speaking languages one doesn’t know is miraculous; understanding one’s own language is not. The other Jews heard each in their own language because the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak in other languages.

Nowhere even implied that none of them could speak in any foreign language either, they didn't learn one foreign language all of a sudden, let along all those foreign languages.

Exactly. That is the whole point. They were speaking in languages they didn’t know.

"Utterance", rhema, is specifically referring to an oral teaching, testimony or revelation of God, it's all about the content, and openly proclaiming your faith in Christ is a sign of being born again in Christ, that's the uttrerance in the sence of empowerment I talked about.

Where do you get rhema from? The Greek word translated as “utterance” in Acts 2:4 is apophtheggomai, and means “to speak out, speak forth, pronounce” (Thayer). Don’t go and find the same English word and assume that the Greek word is the same for both.

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/acts/2.htm

 

[Free]

It most certainly is. It should be "And the god it was." The to be verb for Greek has 3 persons for singular and plural.
At the beginning it was. A worder and a worder it was with a God, and the God it was. It feels something like this in Greek. Everything about the Greek article is abused. There are too few indefinite noun phrases in the English translations. Yet names of persons rarely have the article. Is it because few times a person needed an introduction, and the personal names were definitive without the article?

No. We’ve discussed this before and your understanding of the Greek is deficient at a very basic level, which is leading you to wrong conclusions. You give the definite article the very opposite meaning it is supposed to have. I’ve proven this by providing resources which support the obvious—definite articles mean they’re definite. Every single resource I look at supports this. You have been, unsurprisingly, unable to provide a single resource to support your position on the matter.

 

[Carry_Your_Name]

There were 120 disciples, which would potentially mean 120 languages being spoken at once.

And yet each one only heard it in their native tongue, they didn't hear 120 languages all at once like a background noise. It sounded like a background noise to the unbelievers who mocked them, but only native tongue to the believers.

It isn’t through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is the whole point. Speaking languages one doesn’t know is miraculous; understanding one’s own language is not. The other Jews heard each in their own language because the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak in other languages.

You think it's ability, I think it's courage. Did the Holy Spirit give John the ability to speak and write in Greek? Or reveal Christ's true form and the end time vision when he was "in spirit"?

Exactly. That is the whole point. They were speaking in languages they didn’t know.

Again, how do you know they didn't know any foreign language before that? The Ethiopian eunuch had no language barrier when Phillip approached him.

Where do you get rhema from? The Greek word translated as “utterance” in Acts 2:4 is apophtheggomai, and means “to speak out, speak forth, pronounce” (Thayer). Don’t go and find the same English word and assume that the Greek word is the same for both.

Then that definition is even closer to loud public proclamation than mere oral expression.

 

[7thMoon]

No. We’ve discussed this before and your understanding of the Greek is deficient at a very basic level, which is leading you to wrong conclusions. You give the definite article the very opposite meaning it is supposed to have. I’ve proven this by providing resources which support the obvious—definite articles mean they’re definite. Every single resource I look at supports this. You have been, unsurprisingly, unable to provide a single resource to support your position on the matter.

You don't know what is deficient. I have seen only incompetence when it comes to noun phrases in all basic grammar books. The worder is YHWH, and it is his name. You just don't want to reject your idolatry.

 

[Alfred Persson]

It most certainly is. It should be "And the god it was." The to be verb for Greek has 3 persons for singular and plural.
At the beginning it was. A worder and a worder it was with a God, and the God it was. It feels something like this in Greek. Everything about the Greek article is abused. There are too few indefinite noun phrases in the English translations. Yet names of persons rarely have the article. Is it because few times a person needed an introduction, and the personal names were definitive without the article?

It is not. John said what he meant by leaving the article out:

and the Word was with God, and God was (c) the Word.
…
c. imperf. act. indic. of εἰμί (LN 13.1) (BAGD I.1. p. 223): ‘to be’ [BAGD, LN], ‘to exist’ [BAGD]. The clause θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the word’ is translated ‘the Word was God’ [AB, Gdt, HTC, NICNT2, NTC, WBC; KJV, NASB, NIV, NJB, NRSV, TEV; similarly NLT, Ph], ‘the Word was fully God’ [NET], ‘the Word … was truly God’ [CEV, NCV], ‘what God was, the Word was’ [REB]. The meaning of θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the Word’ is that all the characteristics of θεός ‘God’ apply to the λόγος ‘Word’ [LN (12.1)]. This verb means to possess certain characteristics, whether inherent or transitory [LN].

QUESTION—What is the significance of the word θεός ‘God’ being placed first in the clause θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the Word’?

It indicates that the deity of ‘the Word’ is being emphasized [Rd, CAR, Lns, My, NICNT1, NTC].

QUESTION—What is meant by the clause θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the Word’?

In such an equational sentence in Greek, the subject can be distinguished from the predicate by the fact that the subject has the article before it and the predicate does not. Since ‘God’ does not have the article before it, ‘God’ is clearly the predicate in this verse [TH]. If the word θεός ‘God’, had the definite article, ὁ θεός ‘the God’, the clause would mean that the Word and God were the same person with no distinction between them [Bar, BECNT, CAR, IVP]. The lack of an article indicates the deity of the Word while maintaining a distinction between the Word and God [Bar, IVP, Rd, WBC]. This does not mean that God and the Word are identical, but that the distinctive features of God fully apply to the Word (Christ), and this should be translated ‘the Word was God’, not ‘God was the Word’ [LN (12.1)]. This is a definite claim for the deity of the Word [CH, ICC, Lns, Kn, My, NICNT1, WBC]. The Son was with God and the Son was himself God. This does not mean that the Son was the Father, but that both the Son and the Father are God [CH]. The Word is one of the three divine persons of the eternal Godhead [Lns].-Trail, R. (2013). An Exegetical Summary of John 1–9 (pp. 12–13). SIL International.

 

[7thMoon]

It is not. John said what he meant by leaving the article out:

Yes, he did.

and the Word was with God, and God was (c) the Word.

God is not a substance, thus this pure idolism.

QUESTION—What is the significance of the word θεός ‘God’ being placed first in the clause θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the Word’?

It indicates that the deity of ‘the Word’ is being emphasized [Rd, CAR, Lns, My, NICNT1, NTC].

It indicates a change of subject, not a transformation into an adjective or mass noun.

QUESTION—What is meant by the clause θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ‘God was the Word’?

The God it was. A worder... notice where the other sentence should and does begin.

In such an equational sentence in Greek, the subject can be distinguished from the predicate by the fact that the subject has the article before it and the predicate does not.

Greek has inflections for subjects and objects, and even passive verbs to switch subject and object.

Since ‘God’ does not have the article before it, ‘God’ is clearly the predicate in this verse [TH].

The article is inflected in 4 cases plural or singular and is not a case, nor does it indicate an objective or nominative case.

If the word θεός ‘God’, had the definite article, ὁ θεός ‘the God’, the clause would mean that the Word and God were the same person with no distinction between them [Bar, BECNT, CAR, IVP]. The lack of an article indicates the deity of the Word while maintaining a distinction between the Word and God [Bar, IVP, Rd, WBC].

The Greek article is incompetently thought to be a definite article, yet is absent 90% of the time when human names are used.

 

[TrevorL]

Greetings Alfred Persson,

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. (Ps. 33:6 NKJ)

I find it interesting that you quote the above, and you may be interested in the following also:
Isaiah 55:8–11 (KJV): 8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. 10 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: 11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

Your video clip about electromagnetism was interesting, and yes these items are building blocks of our present world. I have done some Physics and Chemistry studies, but even at the level that I achieved it raised in my mind more questions about the Atom, Gravity, Magnetism, Electricity and other things than I could answer. I consider that our real knowledge of these things is limited and possibly the array of scientists in this video may have some more of the answers. We can measure some of these things, but not sure if we can explain them. One minor detail that fascinated me is that the two different Sodium electrons emit slightly different frequencies.

Kind regards
Trevor