by Sir Anthony F. Buzzard presented at the 2nd Human Jesus Conference

It is an assault on Scripture to find a preexisting Son of God only in John! To do this is to follow the Gnostics and other Protestants and the Catholics, that John is to be taken as superior to the other Gospels (who said?!). To do this is to follow and repeat the same pattern of apostasy as occurred nearly 2000 years ago.

It is well-known that the church quickly departed from truth, from the second century on, and Gnosticism was the evil, fatal influence! Our own Kegan Chandler, among many, has very powerfully documented this truth in his full account in The God of Jesus in the Light of Christian Dogma (see especially chapter 3“Another Jesus.”)

“The direct Apostolic conflict with the Gnostic movement is easily detected in the late first-century writings of the Apostle John…The Christians we find utilizing the most peculiar metaphysical tenets of Trinitarians in the first two centuries of the Church were, in fact, the Gnostics” (p. 83). “It cannot now be denied that the Gnostic schools had a far-reaching effect on the subsequent formation of Christian doctrine…Many of mainstream Christianity’s most treasured Christological ideas may in fact be owed to the Gnostics early pressing of the historical Jesus through the preexisting Platonic framework” (p. 84).

Exactly so, but are we on guard against repeating the same mistake today? It was the Gnostics who used, or rather abused, the Gospel of John to twist the truth and to promote a non-fully human Jesus.

Let us not ever risk believing this pagan Gnosticism.

In fact John’s Gospel was abused as it still is to this day, and Gnosticism introduced a second God Person by simply capitalizing the word as Word in John 1:1. If we say it does not matter whether a person believes in a pre-existing, pre-human Jesus — if we say that both preexistence and non-preexistence are equally good and valid — then we might as well say that truth and error please God and Jesus equally. How do we know that we are not falling for the very lie which John called the spirit of antichrist (1 John 4:2; 2 John 9)? These facts demand close attention in the interests of saving truth and fleeing from error.

Note too that “there is nothing in Matthew’s narrative either in 1:1 or the rest of the Gospel to suggest that he knew of or subscribed to the notion that Christ had existed before his birth” (Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p. 76). How very unreasonable then to force this view on John! A preexisting Son is a different Jesus, and this is not a matter of indifference. Do we really want to disagree with Luke and Matthew as to who the true Jesus is? Luke wrote more of the NT than even Paul.

The spirit of antichrist is to be recognized by this test: Every teacher who does not confess Jesus as having come “in the flesh” (en sarki), not “into the flesh.” Jesus, the Son of God, came from the womb of his mother, as all humans do (except Adam!)

Luther could not deal with this “in flesh” in the Johannine test for recognizing the only genuine human Jesus. And so Luther forged the Greek of 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 9 to read “come into the flesh.” So desperate was he to make his traditional theology of Jesus fit the Bible!

Raymond Brown observes that “come into the flesh” would be an attempt to force preexistence and thus Incarnation into the text. Brown thus fully endorses my point that “come in the flesh” cannot support Incarnation and thus does not support a literal preexistence! Brown rightly points out that if Scripture supported a preexisting Son, such a Son would indeed have come “into the flesh.” Luther was willing to alter Scripture to make it fit with his traditional Incarnation of a preexisting Jesus. On no account should we do this! This would be tampering with the Bible.

How do you know that a preexisting, pre-human Jesus is not a different and false Jesus, to be exposed as antichristian and to be avoided as such?

Disagreement on this issue is not less than confusion over the identity of God and His Son. As Dan Gill told us at the recent Kingdom of God Missions Conference: “We must get God and Jesus right.” These are non-negotiable issues of truth and error. Hebrews 1:1 says that God did not speak in a Son in old times, i.e. in Old Testament times. That should settle the issue about the identity of the real and only Son of God, easily.

If there is a pre-existing, pre-human Jesus, then that would feature clearly in the NT Apostolic documents. Preexistence or not dramatically affects who Jesus is! The whole NT is profoundly interested in defining who Jesus is. But there is not a hint of any preexistence in the first three gospels or Acts! You mean that Dr. Luke did not bother to tell us about a so-called half-human, preexisting Jesus?