Without any doubt, the mystery of our
religion is great: He was revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by
angels, proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up
in glory. (1 Tim 3:16 NRSV)
The earliest and best manuscripts of 1 Tim 3:16 does not read of “God” being manifest in the flesh, but “he who” (ος [i.e., Christ]) who was manifest in the flesh (ἐφανερώθη
ἐν σαρκί). Interestingly, this verse, as it stands in the earlier texts, is a
strong witness to the personal pre-existence of Jesus, and therefore, a “high
Christology” (unlike “God was manifest in the flesh,” one cannot wriggle out of
it by claiming it is a “God-manifestation” [as Christadelphians and others
claim] and/or Jesus being “God” in a representational sense merely):
the subject of the construction is clearly
not God or any of his qualities or attributes, but Jesus Christ, who was
revealed/appeared ἐν σαρκί, in a human body. Seen in the language of revelation
this dative construction contains a profound christological implication...
while ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί is not a categorical assertion of Christ's
pre-existence and his incarnational ministry and does not explicitly tell us of
the mystery's hiddenness and subsequent revelation, the language and thought of
line 1 echo that used elsewhere in the NT to depict how the Son of God had
entered history, incarnated at a particular moment in time (cf. 'came into the
world' - 1 Tim. 1.15; cf. 2.5-6); ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί indeed can be understood
in terms of the revelation and the execution of God's salvation-plan in the
historical (incarnate) appearing of Christ on earth. (Andrew Y. Lau, Manifest in the Flesh: The Epiphany
Christology of the Pastoral Epistles [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1996], 98-99)
