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LORD,
Lord, and lord.,
A comparison of three honorifics. |
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| Evangelion |
| Posted:
Jan 2 2003, 11:58 AM |
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Archived
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There
are three main Hebrew words which the KJV has translated
as "LORD", "Lord", and "lord", respectively.
- The
first is Yahweh, which is (a) the Name
of God (also known as the Tetragrammaton),
(b) reserved for God and His representative
angel, and © never applied to mortal men. The
KJV translates it as "LORD", and sometimes (though
rarely) as "GOD", in cases where it is preceded
by Adonai.
- The
second is Adonai, which is (a) reserved
for God and His representative angel, and (b)
never applied to mortal men. The KJV translates
it as "Lord."
- The
third is adon (sometimes written as adoni),
which is used about 195 times in the OT, and
applied to mortal men, angels, and God. The
vast majority of cases refer to mortal men,
and the KJV translates it as "lord."
In order to demonstrate the importance of these
separate titles, I would like to quote from a book
which was written by two Biblical Unitarians:
The Hebrew Bible itself, carefully distinguishes
the divine title adonai,
the Supreme Lord, from adoni,
the form of address appropriate to human and angelic
superiors. Adoni, “my lord”, on no occasion refers
to the Deity. Adonai,
on the other hand, is the special form of adon,
“Lord”, reserved for address to the One God only.
No less than 195 times
in the Hebrew canon adoni marks the person addressed
as the recipient of honour but never as the Supreme
God.
This important fact tells us that the Hebrew Scriptures
expected the Messiah to be not God, but the human
descendent of David, whom David properly recognises
as his lord. The translators
of the LXX in the 3rd Century BC attest to a careful
distinction between the forms of adon used for
divine and human reference by translating adoni
as ho kurios mou, “my lord.” In Psalm 110:5 the
divine title adonai and the LXX renders adonai,
as usual, kurios. The Lord (God) of verse 5 is
thus sharply distinguished from David’s human
lord, the Messiah (verse 1.)
For an analysis of the occurrances of adoni, see
Herbert Bateman’s “Psalm 110:1 and the New Testament”,
Bibliotheca Sacra 149, (1992) pages 438-453.
The author, a Trinitarian,
argues that the Psalm cannot apply primarily to
Jesus because adoni describes a human Messiah!
Bateman’s Trinitarianism causes him to dismiss
the obvious direct Messianic reference of this
Psalm.
Jesus had no doubt that he was that “lord” (Matthew
22:41-45), and he knew that he was not the One
God. Neither the Hebrew nor the Greek of the Septuagint
and the New Testament will permit that “lord”
to be “Very God.” Both Testaments unite, therefore,
against Trinitarianism. Ephesians 1:17 reaffirms
this by declaring that the one Lord God is also
“the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Even Trinitarians
cannot accept the idea that one “person” of the
Trinity actually has another “person” of the Trinity
as his “God”, and yet that is the very problem
they face when this passage is raised.
Hunting, Charles & Buzzard, Anthony (1999),
The Doctrine of the Trinity - Christianity's
Self-Inflicted Wound.
Buzzard and Hunting are both prominent academics.
They used to be strict Trinitarians, believing and
teaching the Trinitarian dogma for more than 20
years before converting to Biblical Unitarianism.
Take careful note of their reference to Bateman
- the Trinitarian scholar. They reveal the subjectivity
of the Trinitarian method by demonstrating that
Bateman was prepared to reject Psalm 110
as a Messianic psalm because it did not match his
Christological preconceptions!
What does this tell you about Trinitarian exegesis?
I know what it tells me! |
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