andy said:
Exactly my point is the deity of jesus, Jesus is not God. I was a non-believer and had a mind of show me when I first read the Bible. At no time when I read the Bible thought that Jesus was ever God from reading the scriptures. It was when I atteneded main stream Church I was introduced to the Trinity and the idea Jesus was God. The Bible does not teach Jesus is God but man doctrine. Hope this helps in your questions to my thread.
You know, I had almost the opposite experience
. I gathered that Jesus was God from reading the Scripture, and then had some errors on the Trinity straightened out by other Christians.
I have a debate
about John 1.1, so I won't repeat a rather lengthy argument here
.
However, for other Scriptures, I would like to add my personal favorite Phil. 2.5-11 as a starter. It doesn't argue for the Deity of Christ. It assumes it to teach a moral lesson. Paul starts by saying "have the mind of Christ," which literally means "have Christ's mind in you," and not some metaphorical "think like Christ."
It then asserts that Christ had the form of God, and that He didn't consider "equality with God" something to be exploited. Rival translations would be "something to be grasped," meaning that He didn't hang onto it tightly to prevent loss, and another "robbery," which indicates that Christ considered it something rightfully His. In all three cases, it requires the view of Christ as God to comprehend.
The rest of the verse goes on to explain how He humiliated Himself, died, and has been given the highest name (
yperypsoo denotes exalting to the highest category). There is no way to interpret this verse without ascribing Deity to Christ as St. Paul's intention.
Another key verse is Col. 1.15-16. Here, Christ is the image of God, and that He is the "firstborn" over all creation, which would be the only problematic phrase in the whole verse. However, the firstborn inherits everything from their Father, and Christ was "begotten" of the Father, and has everything. However, in 1.16, we find
all things were created by Christ (there is no "other" in the verse), and St. Paul goes to great lengths to explain that it is total: [color]in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.[/color] Christ, clearly, is the First Cause, the Creator of the Universe, according to St. Paul.
However, as a first set of arguments, this post is probably getting lengthy. I'd like to close (and offer more later if you want them) by pointing out that the Bible is a
Trinitarian book. There was no closed book called the Bible for hundreds of years. Instead, Christian bishops kept assigning different books as authoritative, and it gradually coalesced into the canon of Scripture (canon being the term for a Church law BTW). The people that finally determined this were all Trinitarians who believed in the Deity of Christ, and the majority spoke, read, and wrote Greek natively. Heck, the first person to propose the modern NT was St. Athanasius, the champion of the Council of Nicea
.