. . . Jesus treats Ps 82:6 not as
a historical statement about anybody in OT times but as a predictive prophecy
fulfilled by his coming to his contemporaries, called “gods” by that text
because Jesus has appeared on the scene to them and has done so as the Word of
God. The fulfillment demonstrates the unbreakability of Scripture and falsifies
the charge of blasphemy. (Robert Gundry, “How the Word in John’s Prologue
Pervades the Rest of the Fourth Gospel,” in The Old Is Better: New Testament
Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretations [Wissenschaftliche
Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 178; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005; repr.,
Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2010], 348)
It might be objected that against
the foregoing interpretation that if it were correct Jesus would be quoted as
saying, “If he called you [not ‘those ones’] gods . . . “ But the expression
“those ones” includes more people than Jesus’ immediate audience, who have just
taken up stones with which to stone him (10:31-33); for again in reference to
1:11 “he came to his own, and his own did not receive him.” The immediate
audience falls short of making up the entirety of “his own, “ and as recently
as 9:39-41 he has used the third person plural alongside the second person
plural in reference to his audience. Therefore the objection would fail.
(Ibid., 349)
This again shows us that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament did not always engage in the historical-grammatical method of exegesis.
