On various occasions in the New
Testament, passages from the Old Testament that refer to God himself are
applied to Jesus. This is another argument made by Bowman and Komoszewski.
David Capes also makes much of these texts. For example, Mark references Isa
40:3, the Hebrew text of which reads as follows: “A voice cries out: ‘In the
wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway
for our God.’” What Mark writes is: “the voice of one crying out in the
wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’” (1:3). The
“LORD” of Isaiah is YHWH, the divine name; the “Lord” of Mark is ο κυριος, which
apparently refers to Jesus. So also, Peter on the day of Pentecost cites from
Joel 2:32, which says: “Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall
be saved” (cited in Acts 2:21). Once more, Joel’s “LORD” is YHWH, the divine
name; the “Lord” of Peter is ο κυριος, which can plausible be taken in context to
refer to Jesus. This passage from Joel 2:32 is also cited by Paul at Rom 10:13.
In this way, passages that originally referred to YHWH are taken as applying to
Jesus. One might therefore argue that this shows that the New Testament authors
thought Jesus to be himself God or YHWH.
This is yet a further iteration of the
“basic” argument for Jesus’ divinity. What was once said of YHWH is now said of
Jesus; therefore Jesus is YHWH. Like the other iterations, this argument too is
invalid. It is invalid because it assumes what was said of YHWH is now being
said of Jesus in the same sense. Put another way, it assumes that the
New Testament authors always made use of Old Testament texts in a literal way,
as thought they believed that a contextually sensitive reading of the older
passage justified their citation of it in some particular case. As G. K. Beale
notes, (Beale, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament)
scholars are not at all agreed on this issue. There are a number of cases in
which it seems clear that the New Testament authors say that something from the
Old Testament is “fulfilled” in what happened Christ, and yet this Old
Testament passage has no native or inherent connection to what happens to Jesus
at all.
The classic example is Matthew’s
citation of Hos 11:1 to describe the return of Jesus’s family from Egypt to
Palestine: “Out of Egypt I called my Son” (Matt 2:15). The referent of “my Son”
for Hosea is clearly the faithless nation of Israel: “When Israel was a child,
I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my Son. The more I called them, the more
they went from me” (Hos 11:1-2). But for Matthew the referent is Jesus.
Obviously Jesus cannot be identified straightaway with the nation of Israel,
since Israel is a nation of people and Jesus is just one person. Jesus is a
proper part of the nation of Israel as an individual Israelite, and a proper
part of a thing cannot be straightaway identified with that whole thing. If
there is any kind of “identity” between Jesus and Israel, it is perhaps one of
representation, but not one of numerical or ontological identity as Bowman and
Komoszewski’s argument requires. Thus also, Jesus may well represent YHWH, yet
this does not entail any doctrine of incarnation. Another example is Matthew’s
citation of Isa 7:14 to explain the conception of Jesus’s birth: “Look, the
virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him
Emmanuel” (Matt 1:23). Isaiah’s prophecy refers to someone who will still be
young when Syria-Israel will be desolate (Isa 7:16). But Jesus was not even
born at this time. Even if Jesus preexisted his human birth, he would still be
“young” at that time. It would be extravagant to suppose that Matthew thought
Jesus himself was, in any literal or ontological sense, that child from
hundreds of years earlier about whom Isaiah was literally speaking (perhaps
Hezekiah; cf. 2 Kgs 18:1). Finally, Matthew notes that Jesus spoke in parables
in order to “fulfill” what had been written by the prophet: “I will open my
mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden since the
foundation” (Matt 13:34-35). But it would once again be extravagant to believe
that Matthew means to identify Jesus with Asaph, whose psalm the evangelist
cites (Ps 78:2). From the fact that Jesus is said to have “fulfilled” the
scriptures by doing something that Asaph said he would do, it does not follow
that Jesus is being ontologically identified with Asaph.
These examples show that the New
Testament authors may cite a text that originally referred to YHWH and apply it
to Jesus, just as they do with Israel and Asaph and others, yet it does not
follow that they thought that Jesus was YHWH any more than that they thought
that he was the reincarnation of faithless Israel, or some earlier Israelite
king, or Asaph. Indeed, if one were to insist that Jesus is identified with
YHWH because texts about YHWH are applied to him, then it would follow that
faithless Israel, Hezekiah, and Asaph are also YHWH. Identify is a transitive
relation. If Jesus is identified with YHWH and he is also identified with these
persons, then these persons are all YHWH as well. This peculiar textual
situation must therefore be understood differently. (Steven Nemes, Trinity
and Incarnation: A Post-Catholic Theology [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books,
2023], 149-51)
