How did Jews see the Son of God? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Well friends, I hate to say it but once again, we have a whole lot of nothing to reply to. Fatoohi goes through a lot of passages about the term “Son of God” in the Old Testament to see what they meant and yes, he is right that there are a variety of meanings to them. I gather that all of this is meant to somehow imply that since none of these categories includes something akin to being a divine being or the second person of the Trinity, that that rules that out for Jesus.
Unfortunately, the argument doesn’t work.
For instance, Fatoohi has said that no human who was the son of God in the Old Testament was considered to be deity. Fair enough, but then also no human who was considered to be son of God in the Old Testament was born of a virgin, which I do affirm. The realities Fatoohi has stated that set Jesus apart did not apply to any of these Old Testament saints.
It might seem like a bogus idea, but hear me out on this. What if, just what if, maybe it’s the case that all of these were just hints and shadows of what to come and maybe Jesus is the Son of God par excellence? Maybe He in His being fulfills what it means to be the Son of God?
Unfortunately, this is an item that Fatoohi never considers, at least in this section. Once again, if you are a Muslim and you are reading this, this is probably manna from heaven that you are enjoying, but if you don’t already buy into the claims of Islam, you’re not going to buy into these. Again, he might have more in the next chapters, but I doubt it.
However, in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I will applaud that he at least bothered to interact with some of the intertestamental material. He does refer to Hanini Ben Dosa and he does refer to Honi, also known as Honi, The Circle-Drawer. It’s good to see he at least did this level of study into the topic and while Protestants like myself don’t think of any of the intertestamental period as divinely inspired, we should still read it.
The intertestamental period shaped the thought of the Jewish culture at the time of Jesus regardless of if it was inspired or not. It’s also why I would encourage Catholics and Orthodox to read Protestant works since they will interact with many of them to understand their side and Protestants to do likewise. If we all stay in our own bubbles reading and ingesting only the ideas that agree with us, we will never really grow.
So next time, we’re going to start looking at how Christians use the term Son of God. Again, color me skeptical that Fatoohi will get it right. We’ll see what happens.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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