Defending the Deity of Jesus Christ with Modern Bible Translations

    By Ben Rast

    Contender Ministries

    August 13, 2004

Central to the Christian faith is the belief in the deity of Jesus Christ.  This is inescapable, and few things pose such an affront to Christianity as those who attempt to deny our Savior’s deity.  He is one of the three persons of the triune God, and Christians are compelled to counter any belief that He was simply a good man – a prophet.  Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet, but they reject His divinity.  Baha’is believe Jesus was one of many manifestations of God, just as Isaiah, Buddha, Muhammad, and others.  Mormonism teaches that Jesus was a God, but separate from Father God and the Holy Spirit (non-Trinitarian).  Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was a god, and a lesser god than Jehovah. 

Attacks on the deity of Christ are nothing new.  Early in Christian history, a heretic named Arius spoke out against the deity of Jesus.  Arius gained a following, and was effectively debated by a staunch defender of Jesus’ divinity – Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria.  So important was defending Jesus’ deity, that the Council of Nicea pounded the point home in the Nicene Creed in A.D. 325:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made...

You’ll seldom find me arguing more passionately than when I am arguing in defense of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus.  Typically, I do so with the aid of my NIV Bible.  It seems ironic that those who believe that the King James Version of the Bible is the only true Bible in the English language will argue that the NIV and NASB try to hide the deity of Christ.  It’s hard to read a King James Only (KJO) book or website without finding such a contention.  For example, the King James Bible Handbook says, “The KJV exalts the Lord Jesus Christ. The true scriptures should testify of Jesus Christ (John 5:39). There is no book on this planet which exalts Christ higher than the King James Bible. In numerous places the new perversions attack the Deity of Christ, the Blood Atonement, the Resurrection, salvation by grace through faith, and the Second Coming. The true scriptures will TESTIFY of Jesus Christ, not ATTACK Him!”¹ It is not my purpose in this article to malign the KJV or even the KJO activists.  Rather, I will demonstrate that this argument is baseless.  In fact, I will demonstrate that the NIV and NASB actually provide a clearer picture of the deity of Jesus than the KJV. 

The Modern Translation “Conspiracy”:

KJO proponents always accuse the modern translations of “deleting” words, phrases, and whole verses from God’s Word.  They frequently use tables comparing the wording of the KJV (also known as AV1611) and modern translations such as the NIV and NASB.  This can be an effective tool in their effort to show a conspiracy on the part of modern translations.  The following table is similar to some you might find in KJO works to show that modern translations attack the deity of Jesus:
 

Looking at a comparison like this can be troubling, and it’s easy to believe that modern translations are subtly erasing Jesus Christ from the Bible.  However, comparisons such as the one above are dishonest.  First, by using the word “omit”, they are suggesting that the KJV is the standard, and any deviation from it is a deviation from the only true Word of God.  As we’ve discussed in previous articles, the modern translations follow older and better manuscripts than those available to the KJV translators, so the variants in modern translations are based on variants between ancient texts, not from taking “White-Out” to the KJV.  There are places were even the KJV translation differs from the majority texts upon which it is based.  Yet the KJO proponents maintain the KJV as the standard by which other translations (including the Greek) must be measured.  Second, the table above only presents part of the picture.  Let’s recreate this table, but this time put the variant readings of the NIV/NASB: 

* Whenever the pronoun “He” is used in this chart, the passage makes it clear that “He” refers to Jesus

As you can see, by putting a little more context in this chart, the modern translations haven’t eliminated Jesus from these verses as the original chart implies.  Rather, the modern translations list less expansive names and titles for Jesus.  The ancient texts that form the basis for the modern translations have slightly variant readings in these verses from the later texts upon which the KJV was based.  For some time, textual critics have understood a tendency on the part of scribes to inflate sacred names, especially in the case of Jesus Christ.  James R. White referred to this as “expansion of piety.”² It would have been highly unlikely for a scribe to take away from Jesus name as written on the source document from which they copied, but it wasn’t uncommon for them to add to it, in a subconscious effort to afford the Lord all the worship and honor that is His due.  This view was put forth by the father of modern textual criticism, an 18^th century German scholar named Johann Jakob Griesbach.  Among his canons of textual criticism, Griesbach wrote, “The shorter reading (unless it lacks entirely the authority of the ancient and weighty witnesses) is to be preferred to the more verbose, for scribes were much more prone to add than to omit.  They scarcely ever deliberately omitted anything, but they added many things; certainly they omitted some things by accident, but likewise not a few things have been added to the text by scribes through errors of the eye, ear, memory, imagination, and judgement.”³

A clearer translation:

As I said earlier, I almost exclusively use my NIV Bible when debating the deity of Jesus Christ.  This isn’t because it’s easier to read, or because it has really nifty maps of the Holy Land.  I use the NIV because it is a better translation than others, and provides a less ambiguous view of the deity of Jesus.  In The King James Only Controversy, James White listed a dozen verses of Scripture that are most central to the deity of Jesus.  He then lists whether the reference to Jesus’ divinity is most clear, clear, least clear, ambiguous, or absent in the KJV, NASB, and the NIV.  The results may surprise you.