Chapter 1 – One God Translation

Luke

   1 Many have taken in hand to write up a narrative of the events which have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the the Gospel-Word. [331] 3 In view of this fact, since I have carefully investigated everything from the beginning,[332] I also thought it would be good to write out a clear account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the absolute truth about the things you have been taught.
    5 During the rule of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zacharias, of the priestly division of Abijah.[333] He was married to Elizabeth, who also came from the line of Aaron the priest. 6 They both did what was right in God’s eyes, following blamelessly all the Lord’s commandments and requirements. 7 They had no children since Elizabeth could not become pregnant, and they were both growing old.
    8 While Zacharias was fulfilling his priestly duties before God in his division, 9 according to the priestly custom, he was chosen by lot to go into the Lord’s temple and burn incense. 10 A large crowd of people were outside praying at this time of offering incense. 11 An angel of the Lord[334] appeared to him, standing at the righthand side of the altar of incense. 12 Zacharias was startled when he saw the angel, and he was afraid. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zacharias. Your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to name him John. 14 You will have joy and happiness, and many people will celebrate his birth. 15 He will be great in the eyes of the Lord. He will not drink wine or any other alcoholic drink,[335] and he will be filled with holy spirit[336] while still in his mother’s womb. [337] 16 He will bring many people of Israel back to the Lord their God. 17 He will go before Him[338] in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the understanding of the upright, in order to make a people ready for the Lord.”
    18 “How will I know this is true?” Zacharias asked the angel. “I am an old man, and my wife is elderly too.” 19 The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in God’s presence, and I was sent to bring you this good news. 20 Look — you will be mute, unable to speak, until what I have told you happens, because you did not believe my words,[339] which will come true at the proper time.”
    21 The people outside were waiting for Zacharias, wondering why he was taking so long in the temple. 22 When he did come out he was not able to speak to them, and they realized he had seen a vision in the temple. He was making signs to them, and he was completely mute. 23 When he had finished his period of priestly service, he went back home.
    24 After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant, and she stayed hidden inside for five months. 25 “The Lord has graciously done this for me to take away my disgrace in people’s eyes,” she said.
    26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy God sent the angel Gabriel to the town of Nazareth[340] in Galilee, 27 to a young[341] virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, of the descendants of David. 28 The angel came to her house and said, “Greetings, you who are richly blessed! The Lord is with you.” 29 But Mary was very confused at what he told her, wondering what this greeting might mean. 30 “Do not be afraid, Mary,” the angel said, “because you have found grace with God. [342] 31 And listen: you will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be very great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David, 33 and he will be king over the house of Jacob forever; his Kingdom will never come to an end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How will this be possible since I have never been with a man?” 35 The angel answered, “Holy spirit[343] will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. For that reason precisely[344] the holy child to be fathered[345] will be called the Son of God.[346] 36 And Elizabeth, your relative, even she has become pregnant in her old age. The woman people said could not conceive is now in her sixth month of pregnancy! 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 And Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me come true.” Then the angel left her.
    39 At that time Mary went in a hurry to a town of Judea in the hills, 40 to Zacharias’ house. She called out to Elizabeth as she entered the home. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped inside her. Elizabeth was filled with holy spirit 42 and cried out, “How blessed you are among women, and how blessed is your baby! 43 Why am I so honored that the mother of my lord[347] would visit me? 44 As soon as I heard your greeting, my baby jumped for joy inside me. 45 How blessed you are for believing that what was spoken to you by the Lord will be fulfilled.” [348]
    46 Mary said, “My soul praises the Lord, 47 and my spirit is full of joy in God my Savior, 48 because He took notice of the low status of His servant.From now on every generation will know I am blessed. 49 The Mighty One has done great things for me. Holy is His name, 50 and His mercy lasts for all generations to those who stand in awe of Him. 51 With the power of His strong arm He has done mighty works; He has scattered those who were proud in their attitudes. 52 He pulls down the powerful from their thrones, and lifts up those who are humble. 53 He fills the hungry with all that is good, and sends the rich away empty-handed. 54 He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, 55 as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his descendants for the Age to Come.” [349] 56 Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months and then went back home.
    57 The time came for Elizabeth to have her baby, and she gave birth to a son. 58 Her neighbors and relatives heard how the Lord had been so mercifully kind to her, and they celebrated with her.
    59 On the eighth day it was time to circumcise the baby, and they were going to name him Zacharias after his father. 60 But his mother said, “No, he is to be called John.” 61 They replied, “But none of your relatives has that name.” 62 They gestured to Zacharias as to what he wanted to name his son. 63 He asked for something to write on and wrote, “His name is John.” They were all surprised. 64 Immediately he could talk again, and he spoke out loud, praising God. 65 Everyone living nearby was in awe of what had happened, and news spread throughout the hill country of Judea. 66 All who heard about it wondered and asked, “What will this child grow up to be?” For the hand of the Lord was truly with him.
    67 Then his father Zacharias was filled with holy spirit and spoke this prophecy: 68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because He has taken care of us and liberated His people. 69 He has raised up a power of salvation for us from the line of his servant David, [350] 70 as He promised through His holy prophets from the past: 71 salvation from our enemies and those who hate us. 72 He shows mercy to our fathers and remembers His sacred covenant — 73 the oathbound promise He made to Abraham our father. 74 He rescues us from our enemies so that we can serve Him without fear, 75 by being holy and doing what is right before Him all our days. 76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go ahead of the Lord to prepare His ways, 77 to give knowledge of salvation to His people by the forgiveness of their sins. 78 Because of our God’s tender heart of mercy, the sunrise from on high will visit us, 79 to shine on those who sit in the dark and the shadow of death, to guide our feet on the path of peace.”
    80 The boy John grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert until the time came for his public appearance to Israel.

Luke

[331]

The Gospel throughout the NT is always the Gospel about the Kingdom of God. It did not need to be repeated in its full title, just as we know that USA stands for United States of America and not the University of South Australia. The Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the saving Gospel as preached first by Jesus (Mk. 1:14-15; Heb. 2:3). Luke unites the pre-cross and post-cross preaching of the same Gospel by reminding us in Acts 1:3; 1:6; 8:12; 19:8; 20:24-25; 28:23, 30, 31 that until the end of the age (the Second Coming, Mt. 28:19-20) there is one saving Gospel, “the Gospel about the Kingdom and the things concerning the name of Jesus Christ.” Acts 8:12 is an early summary creed, showing what was required for converts prior to baptism. The Gospel of the Kingdom appears in the shorthand, in-house phrase “word of God,” “word of the Kingdom,” and “word.” The public is severely misled by not recognizing this rather easy fact. “Word of God” is not in Scripture just a synonym for the Bible. The Bible refers to itself as the Scriptures, holy writings. Jesus defined the limits of the Hebrew canon as the “Law, Prophets and Psalms/Writings” (Lk. 24:44).

[332]

Luke was the model “Berean” who searched out everything conscientiously, talking to eye-witnesses. Even at common-sense level, we all know that eye-witnesses have an enormous advantage over those living centuries or millennia later! Scripture as we have it, Old and New Testaments, is the fixed basis for all discussion of Christianity as Jesus and his Apostles taught it.

[333]

The 8th division of the 24 “courses” of priests (1 Chron. 24:10). 888 is the numerical value of Jesus in Greek (cp. 666 for Antichrist). 8 following 7 is a number of new beginnings.

[334]

I.e. the one Lord God of Israel, the GOD of biblical monotheism, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word kurios was used by the LXX and equally by the writers of NT Greek Scripture (the only Scripture we have for the New Covenant) to reproduce the Hebrew name of God YHVH. No NT writer makes any issue at all about preserving the Hebrew name (though they could have done this easily). It is therefore a corruption of and implied attack on Greek Scripture to insist on inserting it into the NT documents.

[335]

This was a special regulation for Nazarites and certainly not for the people of Israel or the New Covenant community. Alcohol, used in proper moderation, was a God-given gift for celebration. Compare Jesus’ turning 120 gallons of water into alcohol at the wedding in Cana. Some American fundamentalist churches turned that wine into grape juice, an equal “miracle”! Oinos in Greek does not mean grape juice. If it did, Paul would have said, “Do not get drunk on grape juice, but be filled with the spirit”! (Eph. 5:18).

[336]

The divine, operational, creative presence and power of God — certainly not a “third Person,” unknown to the NT. The imagined third Person is never worshiped and never prayed to and never sends greetings. The spirit of Jesus and of God in the NT is the operational presence and power of the Father and the exalted Son, very personal as coming from persons, as their outreach and influence, but never a “third Person” of a Trinity. The Comforter or paraclete of John’s gospel is defined as the risen Jesus in 1 John 2:1. Jesus departed from the disciples and, not leaving them as orphans, was present with them, after he rose, as the holy spirit Comforter (cp. 2 Cor. 3:17-18).

[337]

This is one of many scriptural testimonies to the fact that a fetus counts fully as a human person, before birth. The concept of taking the life of, thus murdering, the unborn is startlingly in opposition to the fact that the miracle of new life and personality takes place in the womb.

[338]

The work of the lord Jesus Messiah is identified with the work of the Lord God. They work as one in purpose (Jn. 10:30). This does not of course mean that Jesus is the Father, as quite wrongly held by Oneness Pentecostals. Nor is Jesus a second God, as mistakenly later developed by “church fathers” and argued about for centuries! Jesus was a Jew and believed, as did his followers, in the One and Only God of Israel (Mk. 12:29; Jn. 17:3, etc). “God” means the Father some 1300 times in the NT.

[339]

A crippling mood of “learned” unbelief continues to plague much of the theological enterprise. Scholars seem mesmerized by the notion that it is not possible ever to get back with certainty to the actual words of Jesus or the earliest witnesses. They fail to note that unless we have access to the real words of Jesus there is no Christian faith available, since Christianity in the NT is either based on the words of Jesus, and his Apostles and Bible writers, or is unknowable and lost. Not to believe what God has said brings its own penalty of non-comprehension (see 2 Thess. 2:10-14).

[340]

This was hardly what we would call a town today. It was only recently found by archeologists and may have been about 4 acres in size!

[341]

Most likely in her early teens.

[342]

The One God of Israel and of the Bible.

[343]

Holy spirit here is the operational presence and power of God to effect a biological miracle. The parallel phrase “power of the Most High” repeats and reinforces the meaning of “holy spirit.” The disaster of later theological speculation is signaled by the amazing misunderstanding of Justin Martyr who believed that the power coming over Mary was a preexisting Son engineering his own conception! Thus the departure into a pagan, crypto-Gnostic Jesus was under way by 150 AD and earlier in the writings of Ignatius and others.

[344]

“Precisely for this reason [and no other] he will be called the Son of God,” meaning that this was who he was and is! The KJV is misleading with its “wherefore also,” to promote by subtle insinuation the idea that there is another reason for being the Son of God! Luke is an embarrassment to later claims of “orthodoxy.” Houdini-like, some attempt to escape the obvious here that the origin of the Son of God, Jesus, was in the womb of Mary. To posit a second “origin” either just before Genesis or in eternity is to give to the Son a double origin. Massive confusion then disturbs the Bible’s beautiful and simple account of the origin of the Son of God. All humans originate in the womb of their mothers, and conception and begetting occur at the same time. “Orthodoxy” rejected these accounts of who Jesus is and invented a Son who because his origin was in eternity past could never by definition be genuinely human. 1 John 4:2, 2 John 7 were meant to warn against any Jesus who was not fully human.1 John 4:3 reads, “Whoever does not believe in that Jesus…” i.e., the one defined as really human in 1 John 4:2. The threat to true faith arises from belief in a false Jesus, the invention of tradition and not the historical Jesus of Scripture.

[345]

Begotten, which means brought into existence (gennao). Thus the “eternal begetting” of the Son is false to the Bible. As Trinitarian scholar McCleod notes, “It is uncertain what content if any may be given to the phrase ‘eternal begetting.’” This is a “polite” admission of a nonsense phrase in the “orthodox” system, since one cannot have a “beginningless beginning.” The only biblical begetting of the Son of God was in Mary (Mt. 1:20: “begotten in her,” by miracle some 2000 years ago). This of course means that Luke and those he wrote about, and those to whom he described the true faith, were not believers in a triune God. The Son was the human being brought into existence by biological miracle in Mary.

[346]

This is a fundamentally important defining of the term “Son of God,” far removed from the post-biblical idea of a pre-human or “preexisting” Son, second member of a Trinity. Leading commentator Godet says: “We have here from the mouth of the angel himself an authentic explanation of the term Son of God…After this explanation Mary could only understand the title [and so should we!] in the sense: a human being of whose existence God Himself is the immediate author. It does not convey the idea of preexistence [and thus makes impossible the later idea of ‘God the Son’].” The later “dogmatic” definition of the Son of God as “eternally begotten” suppressed the easy truth reported by Luke. That “eternal begetting” is foreign to the Bible is widely recognized by scholars. Once Jesus was given a pre-history, prior to his begetting in Mary, an appalling confusion about who Jesus is ensued. Van Buren deplored this ruination of the beautifully simple accounts of Matthew and Luke (and John when the later, post-biblical confusion is not read back into John 1): “If one were to make the claim of priority in a temporal sense for Jesus, one would be claiming that Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, had existed with God before the creation of the world. That claim would be worse than unintelligible; it would destroy all coherence in the essential Christian claim that Jesus was truly a human being, that the word became flesh. The humanity of Jesus could hardly be eternal in that sense and still be ‘like us in all things, excepting sin’ (Council of Chalcedon; Heb. 2:17). Jesus of Nazareth began his life, that is, began to exist at a definite time in history: the word became flesh” (A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, p. 82).

[347]

“My lord” is the title for the Messiah as foreseen in the divine oracle of Ps. 110:1. The Hebrew word adoni, my lord, is never in all 195 of its occurrences a title of Deity. It is always a reference to an exalted human being, occasionally an angel. “My lord” (Messiah) is the common description among the biblical community for God’s uniquely begotten Son (Ps. 2:7; 2 Sam. 7:14). Jesus is “my lord,” or “our lord,” and these are the titles appropriate for the ultimate King of Israel, the Messiah, son of David. Jesus is lord, not Lord God some 200 times in the NT. He is the “lord Messiah” or “Messiah lord” (Lk. 2:11), as clearly distinguished from the Lord God (1 Tim. 2:5).

[348]

This is the essence of NT faith — believing the words and promises of God. Zacharias had already been punished supernaturally for failing to believe the angel. This is a fair warning for us all. Angels are to be believed as divine messengers. Not to believe them is to imply that God has made a false promise! People often wind up in the same unbelief by twisting the words of Scripture to bring them into line with a much later doctrine originating in post-biblical councils.

[349]

I take eis ton aiona to mean “in regard to the Age to Come,” the Kingdom of God. God did not speak “forever,” but more directly of the future Age to Come of the Kingdom of God to come on earth at the future Second Coming of Jesus to rule from Jerusalem, with the saints of all the ages (Dan. 7:14, 18, 22, 27, RSV). The Age to Come is contrasted everywhere in the NT with “the present evil age” which is under the domination of the very deceptive Satan, god of this system (2 Cor. 4:4; Gal. 1:4; Eph. 2:2; Rev. 12:9; 1 John 5:19). “Eternal life” means in fact “the life of the Age to Come” based on Dan. 12:2.

[350]

This inspired praise from Zacharias is delightfully free of the later fearful complications about the origin of Jesus, devised by post-biblical “church fathers” who turned the Messiah into a pre-human and thus essentially non-human person! Certainly Jesus was the unique expression of the One God, as His sinless Son, miraculously begotten. But he is never called “the Lord God,” or “the Almighty,” and never God the Son, nor the “God-man.” The Father is called God, and often “the [one] God” about 1300 times in the NT. The definite article appearing often for the One God designates Him as the One God of Israel and of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and of Jesus. Someone who has a GOD is not GOD! “The God” is the one true God of Israel and of Jesus, and that one God is to be carefully distinguished from all other “Gods.”