Chapter 17 – One God Translation

John

   17 After Jesus spoke these words he then looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has arrived. Glorify Your Son so that the Son may glorify You, 2 just as You gave him authority over all mankind, so that he may grant the Life of the Age to Come to all You have given him. 3 This is the core and essence of the Life of the Age to Come:[708] that they may know You, the only one who is true God,[709] and the one You have commissioned, Jesus the Messiah. [710] 4 I have glorified You on the earth by completing the work You gave me to do. 5 Now, Father, glorify me at Your side[711] with the glory I had as a promise[712] with You before the world existed.
    6 “I revealed Your name — character and agenda — to the men You gave me out of the world. They were Yours, and You gave them to me, and they have kept Your Gospel-word. 7 Now they have learned that everything You have given me is from You, 8 because the words which You gave me I have given to them. And they received those words and have become convinced that I came forth[713] from you. They have believed that You commissioned me. 9 My request is for them. My request is not for the world, but for those whom You have given me, because they belong to You. 10 All that I have belongs to You and all that You have belongs to me, and I have been glorified in these men. 11 I am to be no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name which You have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I was keeping them in your name, the name[714] You have given me. I guarded them and not one of them has been lost, except the one destined for destruction, so that the Scripture may be fulfilled.
    13 “Now I am coming to You, and I am speaking these things in the world so that they may share completely in my joy. 14 I have given them your Gospel-word. The world hated them because they do not belong to this world-system, just as I do not belong to this world-system. 15 I am not praying that You take them out of the world, but I am asking You to protect them from the Evil One. 16 They do not belong to this world-system, just as I do not belong to it. 17 Make them holy through the truth; Your Gospel-word is the truth. [715] 18 Just as You commissioned me to go into the world, I have commissioned them to go into the world. 19 I make myself holy on their behalf, so that they may be made holy in the truth.
    20 “I am not praying only for these, but also for the ones who will believe in me through their Gospel-word. 21 I am praying that they all may be one in mind and purpose,[716] just as You, Father, are in me and I am in You. May they be in us, so that the world may believe that You commissioned me.
    22 “I have given them[717] the same glory which you have given me.[718] I want them all to be one, just as we are one: 23 I in them and You in me, so that they may be brought to maturity as one, that the world may come to know that You commissioned me and that You loved them just as You loved me. 24 Father, it is my desire that those You have given me[719] be with me where I will be.[720] Then they will see my glory[721] which You have promised to give me,[722] because You loved me before the world’s foundation.
    25 “Righteous Father, the world has not recognized or understood You. However I know You, and these know that You commissioned me. 26 I made known to them Your character and agenda,[723] and will continue to make it known to them, so that the love You had for me may be in them, and I may be in them.”

John

[708]

That is, this is how a human being may attain to immortality. Jesus’ unitarian definition of God is the most fundamental of all saving truths. Jesus’ words are a summary, concentrated on a single idea, expressed in the Greek as “This is the life of the Age to Come…”

[709]

Because John 1:1 has been misleadingly translated to give the impression that the Son of God existed eternally (the capital on Word is not warranted by the Greek text), it is essential to point out that scholars recognize that the Bible does not teach the “eternal generation” of the Son. Many also recognize that John “is as undeviating a witness as any NT writer to unitary monotheism” (Rom. 3:30; James 2:19; Jn. 5:44; 17:3” (Dr. J.A.T. Robinson, Twelve More New Testament Studies, p. 175). All the Bible writers were obviously unitarians. The later move away from Jesus to an alien definition of God as Triune is one of the most remarkable shifts away from and loss of essential information, in the history of (mis)communication. Jesus expressed his unitarian confession of faith here by asserting that the “Father is the only one who is true God.” This text merely repeats the 1300 NT references to GOD as the equivalent of the Father. Jesus declares himself to be not GOD, which would make two Gods, but God’s unique human agent. The simplicity of the confession in John 17:3 may be illustrated like this: “You (singular), Father (singular), are (singular) the (singular) only (singular and exclusive) true (singular) God (singular).” Standard commentary finds itself obliged to write: “How often may these last solemn words of Jesus have stirred the soul of John. To this corresponds the self-consciousness, as childlike as it is simple and clear in its elevation, the victorious rest and peace of this prayer, which is the noblest and purest pearl of devotion in the whole New Testament. For plain and simple as it sounds, so deep rich and wide it is that none can fathom it” (Luther). “Spener never ventured to preach on it because he felt that its true understanding exceeded the ordinary measure of faith; but he caused it to be read to him three times on the evening before his death” (Meyer, 1884, p. 475). Meyer comments, “Only one, the Father, can be termed absolutely ‘the only true God,’ ‘the one who is above and over all” (Rom. 9:5), not at the same time Christ (who is not even in 1 John 5:20 the true God).” Meyer says that the Son is in unity with the Father, works as His commissioner (10:30) and is His representative (14:9, 10). Meyer loses himself in a befuddling confusion over the “genetic subsistence” of the Son, but he has already admitted to the unitarian statement of Jesus. The famous commentary by Barrett notes that in Wisdom literature (Prov. 11:9) “through knowledge the righteous will be saved,” and that the world will eventually be “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord” (Hab. 2:14), and that “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6; Isa. 5:13). “Clearly then the notion of knowledge as the ground of salvation is very widespread…knowledge and believing are not set over against each other but are correlated. The God whom to know is to have eternal life is the only being who may properly be so described; He, and it must follow, He alone is truly God” (Commentary on John, pp. 419-20). This is straightforward unitary, non-Trinitarian monotheism. Professor Loofs described the process of the early corruption of biblical Christianity: “The Apologists [‘church fathers’ like Justin Martyr, mid-2 nd century] laid the foundation for the perversion/corruption (Verkehrung) of Christianity into a revealed [philosophical] teaching. Specifically, their Christology affected the later development disastrously. By taking for granted the transfer of the concept of Son of God onto the preexisting Christ, they were the cause of the Christological problem of the fourth century. They caused a shift in the point of departure of Christological thinking — away from the historical Christ and onto the issue of preexistence. They thus shifted attention away from the historical life of Jesus, putting it into the shadow and promoting instead the Incarnation [i.e., of a preexistent Son]. They tied Christology to cosmology and could not tie it to soteriology. The Logos teaching is not a ‘higher’ Christology than the customary one. It lags in fact far behind the genuine appreciation of Christ. According to their teaching it is no longer God who reveals Himself in Christ, but the Logos, the inferior God, a God who as God is subordinated to the Highest God (inferiorism or subordinationism). In addition, the suppression of economic-trinitarian ideas by metaphysical-pluralistic concepts of the divine triad (trias) can be traced to the Apologists” (Friedrich Loofs, Leitfaden zum Studium des Dogmengeschichte [Manual for the Study of the History of Dogma], 1890, part 1 ch. 2, section 18: “Christianity as a Revealed Philosophy. The Greek Apologists,” Niemeyer Verlag, 1951, p. 97, translation mine). Those who are dedicated to restoring the identity of the biblical Jesus, Son of God, may take heart from the incisive words of a leading systematic theologian of our times. He restores the biblical meaning of the crucial title “Son of God,” rescuing it from the millennia-long obscurity it has suffered from Platonically-minded church fathers and theologians. Professor Colin Brown, general editor of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, writes, “The crux of the matter lies in how we understand the term Son of God…The title Son of God is not in itself an expression of personal Deity or the expression of metaphysical distinctions within the Godhead. Indeed, to be a ‘Son of God’ one has to be a being who is not God! It is a designation for a creature indicating a special relationship with God. In particular, it denotes God’s representative, God’s vice-regent. It is a designation of kingship, identifying the king as God’s Son…In my view the term ‘Son of God’ ultimately converges on the term ‘image of God’ which is to be understood as God’s representative, the one in whom God’s spirit dwells, and who is given stewardship and authority to act on God’s behalf… It seems to me to be a fundamental mistake to treat statements in the Fourth Gospel about the Son and his relationship with the Father as expressions of inner-Trinitarian relationships. But this kind of systematic misreading of the Fourth Gospel seems to underlie much of social Trinitarian thinking…It is a common but patent misreading of the opening of John’s Gospel to read it as if it said, ‘In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was God.’ What has happened here is the substitution of Son for Word (Gk. logos) and thereby the Son is made a member of the Godhead which existed from the beginning” (“Trinity and Incarnation: Towards a Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Ex Auditu, 7, 1991, pp. 87-89).

[710]

Augustine, finding this creedal statement incompatible with the Trinitarian creed of the post-biblical Church, actually dared to alter the order of the sentence and fraudulently twist the words of Jesus. In his Homilies on John he said that John 17:3 ought to read: “This is eternal life, that they know you [Father] and Jesus Christ whom you sent as the only true God.” Reader, take careful note. The “church father” Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) conceded that the Trinity, of which he was an architect, “does not harmonize with the Jewish dogma” (he was referring to the strict monotheistic creed of Jesus and Israel in Deut. 6:4; Mk. 12:29). He thought that the Trinity destroyed “each heresy,” i.e. the unitary monotheism of Jesus and Israel and the pagan polytheism of the non-Jewish world, “and yet accepting what is useful from both [the Shema and paganism]. He argued that the Trinity was a truth which passes in the mean between the two positions [Jewish and pagan].” Gregory unashamedly condemned Jesus’ unitarian view of God as a “Jewish dogma” needing to be replaced.

[711]

Jesus is not returning to a position relinquished but one he had not previously occupied, i.e. in the presence of the Father, at his side (Ps. 110:1).

[712]

“to have with God” (para theo) is a common Hebrew idiom for having something as promised and stored up for the future as a reward (see Mt. 6:1-2). Cp. Isa.49:4: “the justice due to me is with the LORD, and my reward with my God” and 2 Cor. 5:1: “we have” a spiritual body, i.e. prepared for the future when we receive it.

[713]

A word connoting birth. Jesus’ origin in the womb of Mary was by miracle (Lk. 1:35 is decisive as defining the term Son of God for Jesus).

[714]

Name stands for the whole Gospel agenda of Jesus, which he preached on behalf of God, his Father.

[715]

Reminding us of Paul’s impassioned statement about the love of the truth in order to gain salvation. He noted that people are “on their way to ruin and loss because they refused to accept a love of the truth in order to be saved” (2 Thess. 2:10).

[716]

The same request for unity in the one Church was made by Paul in 1 Cor. 1:10.

[717]

I.e. “I promise to give them.” This is glory in prospect and promise as in 17:5.

[718]

“Promised to give me.” Again this is glory as promised for the future.

[719]

I.e. “promised to give me,” all disciples past and future to Jesus’ time on earth.

[720]

Literally “where I am,” meaning where I will be in the future when the disciples will have been glorified. Note the past tense of glorified in Rom. 8:30. The future is certain and can be expressed as having already happened (“as good as done”). Jesus is coming back to the earth!

[721]

The future glory which is the future Messianic Kingdom on earth.

[722]

As guaranteed by promise in God’s plan and thus “possessed” even before the creation as in 17:5. “The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), that is, in God’s plan.

[723]

Literally “Your name,” a concept foreign to our western minds. “Name” stands for the whole agenda of God, His revealed character and intention, in fact the saving Gospel of the Kingdom which offers immortality to presently mortal man, through the one “man Messiah Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), who is the unique Son and agent of that One God, the Father. Jesus’ whole commission to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom was defined in Luke 4:43. That commission is now the task of the Church, the body of Christ.