When the Real Jesus was Replaced by Another

Socinian Christology

This is technical language to describe the understanding of those who maintain that Jesus, the unique Son of God, began to exist in the womb of his mother. Socinians take their name from the time of the Reformation in the 1500s when much investigation of the biblical view of Jesus was undertaken by scholars and other Bible students, in various parts of the world. The Italian uncle and nephew, Laelius (1525-62) and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) adopted an anti-Trinitarian view of Jesus. They denied that the Bible presents Jesus as an eternal spirit being arriving on earth from an eternal preexistence as God or a god. Rather they argued that Luke 1:35 and Matthew 1:18, 20, and the whole Old Testament expectation of the Messiah, describe a Jesus, Son of God, who is to arise within the human family and begin his existence from the time of his conception. In the case of Jesus of course, they recognized a unique begetting by the Father who, by miracle, and with a direct parallel to the creation of Adam, and without the intervention of a human father, caused the genesis of the Son of God.

The issue of the so-called “pre-human” existence of Jesus continues to divide Bible students very sharply. The majority view is that the Son of God was “eternally begotten by the Father,” that is, he had no beginning, but was always the Son of God, uncreated, though begotten (the Trinitarian view). For many others this is simply a meaningless concept. One cannot be “begotten” and yet have no beginning of existence. To be “begotten,” as the Bible describes Jesus (I John 5:18, not KJV; John 3:16, etc.), means that one is a created person with a definite beginning to one’s life.

Those students of the Bible who do not accept a “beginningless beginning,” that is “eternal begetting” of the Son of God are not agreed as to the moment in history at which the Son began to exist. Jehovah’s Witnesses are convinced that the Son was begotten sometime before Genesis 1, and that the Son is in fact the same personage as Michael the Archangel. Socinians, on the other hand, believe that Jesus was never an angel (see Heb. ch. 1). As Messiah he is a descendant of Eve and of Abraham and David and must therefore originate in the human biological chain. (The issue of preexistence, whether Jesus did or did not literally pre-date his begetting in the womb of Mary, will be the subject of a debate between myself, Anthony Buzzard, and a Jehovah’s Witness scholar, Greg Stafford. The discussion will be held in Wenatchee, Washington at the Church of God Abrahamic Faith, co-pastured by Kirby Davis (509-663-1025) and Merry Peterson (509-662-3865). The debate will be Sat., Oct. 23 and all are welcome. Free admission.)

Our Socinian view maintains that from the second century churchgoers became confused about the origin of Jesus, whether it was in time at his birth, in eternity, or in pre-history before Genesis.

A person who has preexisted himself is, we think, impossible to describe. If Jesus was Michael transformed into a man, who really was Jesus? Was he 100% Michael and 100% Jesus? Did Michael and Jesus coexist in the same person? If so, who exactly came into existence as the Son of God? If that Son was already alive before his own conception, what or who was conceived and began to exist in his mother’s womb? Did Michael cease to exist as an angel before or after he reduced himself to a human sperm? How can you “be” before you “are”?

Einstein, we think, was right when he declared that the principles of the universe are essentially beautiful and simple. The Bible demonstrates the same simplicity. The question of the origin of the Son of God in the debates of the early Christian centuries is a nightmare of complexity. The whole issue turned into a fierce war of words, heavily dependent on terminology drawn from Greek philosophy. Losing the simplicity of the Socinian position, the competing parties — led by Arius and Athanasius — argued as to whether Jesus was God or a god in heaven before he was metamorphosed (?) from angel or God Himself to human person.

John simply says that the word or mind or plan of God became a human person (John 1:14). The Son in other words did not exist until his genesis in Mary. Note the Greek word in Matthew 1:18 — genesis — suggesting the parallel with the book of Genesis and Adam (son of God, Luke 3:38). And note how translations slightly veil the significance of Matthew 1:20, which reads: “that which is begotten in her is from holy spirit.” The word here does not mean “conceived” (the part of the mother) but “begotten,” in this case the supernatural activity of the Father. That marvelous and miraculous act of God overshadowing Mary brought into existence the Son of God. Jesus alone of all men could say “God is my father,” by which he meant not the sonship shared by all believers when they are “born again” by receiving the “seed” which is the Gospel of the Kingdom (I Pet. 1:23; Luke 8:11), but an unprecedented Sonship originating in his mother’s womb.

How did this unfortunate loss of the simplicity of the creation or procreation of the Son of God occur? Luke had truthfully reported the direct causal link between the supernatural generation of Jesus and his right thus to be the Son of God (Luke 1:35: “for that reason the one begotten will be called the Son of God”).

The “prince of Church historians,” Adolf Harnack, in his massive account of the History of Dogma (4th and final edition, 1909), accurately describes the struggle which began in the second century over who Jesus is and was. It was, he maintains, a struggle between theologians. And it was the struggle, too, “of Stoic Platonism [the philosophies of the first century] for supremacy in the theology of the Church.” It was in fact “the history of the displacement of the historical Jesus by a pre-human, preexisting Jesus — the real Jesus by an imaginary Jesus — in dogmatic theology. More precisely it was the victorious effort to get rid of the difficulties which the earliest speculations about God and Christ had already created. But this was attempted not by a return [i.e., to original truth] but by a further speculative advance, which finally weakened pure monotheism by splitting it [i.e., between God and Jesus], and made Jesus unrecognizable by ‘making him double’” (Vol. 1, Bk. 2, p. 704).

The NT Jesus was replaced by a curious “double-person,” fully God and at the same time fully man. Mortal, yet immortal. Temptable and yet, as God, not temptable. Preexisting and yet coming into existence. Older than himself? While being God, he did not know what God knew. All this left the churches floundering in a morass of unanswerable puzzles and conundrums. Belief in the One God, Jesus’ own creed (Mark 12:28ff), was submerged in complex philosophical terminology. The witness of the NT is a blessed relief from those awful centuries of theological polemics, infightings, excommunications, banishments and murder.²