Son of God

Son of God is a phrase found in the Hebrew Bible, various other Jewish texts and the New Testament. In the holy Hebrew scriptures, according to Jewish religious tradition, it is related to many diverse subjects, as to angels, humans and even all mankind. According to most Christian traditions, it refers to the relationship between Jesus and the God Yahweh (see God the Son) as well as a relationship achievable by believing Christians: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God."^[1]

Similar terminology was present before, during and after the Ministry of Jesus and in his cultural and historical background. The Roman emperor Augustus was called "divi filius" (son of the deified Julius Caesar):^[2] "Divi filius", not "Dei filius" (son of God), was the Latin term used.^[3] In Greek, the term huios theou was applied to both,^[4] but, while huios theou is used of Jesus three times in the New Testament, he is usually described as ho huios tou theou, not just "a son of God", but "the son of God".

It is generally agreed that the language Jesus ordinarily spoke was Aramaic, even if he perhaps also spoke some Greek (see Aramaic of Jesus).^[5] The lack of primary sources in Aramaic about the life of Jesus makes it impossible to determine whether he himself or others referred to him in that language as "a son of God" or as "the Son of God" or neither.

Historians believe Alexander the Great implied he was a demigod by actively using the title "Son of Ammon–Zeus". (His mother Olympias was said to have declared that Zeus impregnated her while she slept under an oak tree sacred to the god.) The title was bestowed upon him by Egyptian priests of the god Ammon at the Oracle of the god at the Siwah oasis in the Libyan Desert^[6] The title was also used of wonder-workers.^[7]

While in a polytheistic culture rulers and heroes were called sons of Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo or some other god among many, Christians, being monotheists, consider Jesus to be the son of the only God there is.^[8]

By historical method

In the Gospels, the being of Jesus as "son of God", corresponds exactly to the typical Hasid from Galilee, a "pious" holy man that by divine intervention performs miracles and exorcisms,^[9]^[10] an opinion not shared by all (see, below, "Son of God" in the New Testament).

"Sons of God" according to Judaism

In the Old Testament, the phrase "son(s) of God" has an unknown meaning: there are a number of later interpretations. Our translation most likely comes from the Septuagint, which uses the phrase "Uioi Tou Theou", "Sons of God", to translate it.^[11]

In Judaism the term "son of God" was used of the expected "messiah" figure.^[12] Psalm 2 addresses someone as both God's messiah (anointed king) and God's son.

In the Jewish literature that was not finally accepted as part of the Hebrew Bible, but that many Christians do accept as Scripture (see Deuterocanonical books), there are passages in which the title "son of God" is given to the anointed person or Messiah (see Enoch, 55:2; IV Esdras 7:28-29; 13:32, 37, 52; 14:9). The title belongs also to any one whose piety has placed him in a filial relation to God (see Wisdom 2:13, 16, 18; 5:5, where "the sons of God" are identical with "the saints"; comp. Ecclesiasticus [Sirach] iv. 10).

It has been speculated that it was because of the frequent use of these books by the Early Christians in polemics with Jews, that the Sanhedrin at Yavneh rejected them around AD 80.

"Son of God" in the New Testament

Throughout the New Testament (see "New Testament passages", below) the phrase "son of God" is applied repeatedly, in the singular, only to Jesus. "Sons of God" is applied to others only in the plural.^[13] The New Testament calls Jesus God's "only begotten son" (, , ), "his own son" (). It also refers to Jesus simply as "the son" in contexts in which "the Father" is used to refer to God.^[14]

John Dominic Crossan's interpretation

John Dominic Crossan writing in God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), says, early in the book, that "(t)here was a human being in the first century who was called 'Divine,' 'Son of God,' 'God,' and 'God from God,' whose titles were 'Lord,' 'Redeemer,' 'Liberator,' and 'Saviour of the World.'" "(M)ost Christians probably think that those titles were originally created and uniquely applied to Christ. But before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus." Crossan cites the adoption of them by the early Christians to apply to Jesus as denying them of Caesar the Augustus. "They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. Either that was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majistas and we call high treason. " ^[15]

Augustus as son of a Roman god, not Son of God (Yahweh)

The word applied to Julius Caesar as deified is "divus", not the distinct word "deus".^[23] Thus Augustus was called "Divi filius", but never "Dei filius", the expression applied to Jesus in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament, as, for instance, in 1 John 5:5, and in earlier Latin translations, as shown by the Vetus Latina text "Inicium evangelii Ihesu Christi filii dei" preserved in the Codex Gigas. As son of Julius Caesar, Augustus was referred to as the son of a god, not as the son of God, which was how the monotheistic Christians referred to Jesus.^[24]

Greek did not have a distinction corresponding to that in Latin between "divus" and "deus". "Divus" was thus translated as "", the same word used for the Olympian gods, and "divi filius" as "" (theou huios),^[25] which, since it does not include the Greek article, in a polytheistic context referred to sonship of a god among many, to Julius Caesar in the case of the "divi filius" Augustus. In the monotheistic context of the New Testament, the same phrase^[26] can refer only to sonship of the one God.^[27] Indeed, in the New Testament, Jesus is most frequently referred to as "" (ho huios tou theou), the son of God.^[28]^[29]

Jesus as divine

In mainstream Christianity the title of Son of God is used to describe Jesus as a divine being and a member of the Trinity. This is expressed, for instance, in the Nicene Creed, which refers to Jesus as God's only Son, true God from true God, who took human form in the flesh. This view interprets the New Testament as referring to or implying the deity of Jesus in, for example, , which quotes as addressing him as God, and in , where Jesus states, "Before Abraham was, I am", seen in this view as referencing God's name "I am", revealed in Exodus 3:14.

Jesus as godly

Another view is that, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus styled himself the Son of God in the same sense as a righteous person was sometimes referred to as a son or child of God (though not the son of God), as in . Since New Testament books present Jesus as without sin,^[30] those who hold the first view, that of Jesus as divine, can hold this view too, but not as an exclusive interpretation.

Christians as children of God

In the Gospel of John, the author writes that "to all who believed him and accepted him [Jesus], he gave the right to become children of God" [John 1:12]. The phrase "children of God" is used ten times in the New Testament.^[31] To these can be added the five times, mentioned above, in which the New Testament speaks of "sons of God". The New Testament speaks of no individual Christian as it speaks of Jesus, as the son of God, not just a son of God.

"Son of a god" in other belief systems

Human or part-human offspring of deities are very common in other religions and mythologies. A great many pantheons also included genealogies in which various gods were descended from other gods, and so the term "son of a god" may be applied to many deities themselves.

Ancient mythology contains many characters with both a human parent and a god parent. They include Hercules, whose father was Zeus, and Virgil's Aeneas, whose mother was Venus.

In the Greek and Roman cultures in which early Christianity expanded after first arising within Judaism, the concepts of demi-gods, sons or daughters of a god, as in the story of Perseus, were commonly known and accepted.

In the Rastafari movement, Haile Selassie is considered to be God the Son, a part of the Holy Trinity. He himself never accepted the idea officially.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded legends of humanity, Gilgamesh claimed to be of both human and divine descent.

According to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings, known as Sant Mat or Teachings of the Saints, "Son of God" refers to a living Master who connects souls with the Creator through the Shabd or Holy Spirit.

New Testament passages

Unclear whether attributed to Jesus himself or only a comment of the evangelist

References

↑
↑ Augustus. The Facts
↑ See Lewis and Short for the meanings of "divus". The distinction is remarked on also in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica: "It became customary ? if emperors (and empresses) were approved of in their lives ? to raise them to divinity after their deaths. They were called divi, not dei like the Olympian gods".
↑ Borg, Marcus, and Crossan, Dominic, The First Christmas, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 96
↑ While Franciscan Friar Massimo Pazzini claimed: "The hypothesis -- often aired in the last two centuries -- that Jesus spoke Greek or Latin is impossible to accept", Ian Young, who teaches Aramaic at the University of Sydney, expressed the general view referred to in the Wikipedia article on the subject: "Some scholars have pointed out that Jesus' homeland, Galilee, in the north of modern Israel, was at that time very cosmopolitan, with a heavy non-Jewish influence. If Jesus was, as the gospels indicate, a carpenter, he may have needed Greek to deal with customers. Certainly, disciples like the tax collector Matthew would have needed to speak Greek. So it is plausible that Jesus knew Greek."
↑ "Not the least of the many extraordinary facts about Alexander is that both in his lifetime and after his death he was worshipped as a god, by Greeks and Ancient Macedonians as well as, for example, Egyptians (to whom he was Pharaoh). The episode that led to Callisthenes' death in 327 was connected to this fact. Greeks and Ancient Macedonians believed that formal obeisance should be paid only to gods. So the refusal of his Greek and Macedonian courtiers to pay it to Alexander implied that they, at any rate, did not believe he genuinely was a living god, at least not in the same sense as Zeus or Dionysus were. Alexander, regardless, did nothing to discourage the view that he really was divine. His claim to divine birth, not merely divine descent, was part of a total self-promotional package, which included the striking of silver medallions in India depicting him with the attributes of Zeus. Through sheer force of personality and magnitude of achievement he won over large numbers of ordinary Greeks and Macedonians to share this view of himself, and to act on it by devoting shrines to his cult."
↑ Bauer lexicon, 2nd edition, 1979, page 834. In Contra Celsus VI chapter XI, Origen uses the term of the Samaritan Dositheus, without saying he was a wonder-worker, rather saying that, in the case of Dositheus, the title was self-attributed: "Such were Simon, the Magus of Samaria, and Dositheus, who was a native of the same place; since the former gave out that he was the power of God that is called great, and the latter that he was the Son of God." The Samaritan Dositheus claimed to be the Messiah, which may be what Origen meant by saying that he gave out that he was the Son of God (cf. Catholic Encyclopedia: Dositheans).
↑ "Jesus' unique sonship is antithetical to concepts of sonship popular in the ancient world. In Hellenism, people believed a man could be a 'son of the gods' in many ways: in mythology, by cohabitation of a god with a woman whose offspring was imagined to be superhuman; in politics, by giving generals and emperors high honours in the cult of Roman emperior worship" (Comfort, Philip W., ed., and Elwell, Walter A., ed., Tyndale Bible Dictionary 2001 ISBN 0-8423-7089-7, article "Son of God").
↑ Vermes, Geza Jesus the Jew, Fortress Press, New York 1981. p.209
↑ Paolo Flores d'Arcais, MicroMega 3/2007, p.43
↑ While some hold that in previous centuries the Israelites were henotheists, by the end of the Babylonian captivity, Judaism is strictly monotheistic. The Septuagint translation is later.
↑ Qumran scroll #4Q246 states: "He shall be called the Son of God; they will call him Son of the Most High" (quoted inMark Eastman: ''Messiah?The Son of God?; also in Wise, Michael O. and James D. Tabor. The Messiah at Qumran in Biblical Archaeology Review, Volume 18, Number 6. (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, November/December, 1992), p. 61
↑ Five times explicitly (, , and , , and implicitly in
↑ For instance, , , , ; ;
↑ Crossan, John Dominic, God and Empire, 2007, p. 28
↑ Julius Caesar Biography
↑ Inscription on Porta Tiburtina in Rome
↑ 'Augustus' Gaius Julius Octavius
↑ As noted below, Augustus was called "divi filius" not "dei filius", the phrase used of Jesus
↑ ''Augustus (31 B.C. - 14 A.D.)'' by Nina C. Coppolino
↑ "Ostentatiously rejecting divinity on his own account, he rose to power via Caesar's divine image instead" (Augustus, by Pat Southern, p. 63).
↑ Coins of the Emperor Augustus; examples are a coin of 38 B.C. inscribed "Divi Iuli filius", and another of 31 B.C. bearing the inscription "Divi filius" (''Auguste vu par lui-m�me et par les autres'' by Juliette Reid).
↑ "It became customary ? if emperors (and empresses) were approved of in their lives ? to raise them to divinity after their deaths. They were called divi, not dei like the Olympian gods" (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
↑ Writing more than a century after the death of Augustus, Suetonius included among a series of wonders associated with his birth a story recounted by a certain Asclepias of Mendes in Upper Egypt that the birth of the future emperor resulted from the impregnation of his mother, while fast asleep, by a serpent in the temple of Apollo, and that her child was therefore called a son of Apollo, an Olympian deity (a "deus"), not a "divus", the word in the title given to Augustus.
↑ Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon
↑ Used of Jesus in Mk 15:39; Lk 1:35; Rm 1:4
↑ In that context there are no other gods to which it could refer!
↑ Swindler, Leonard J. Biblical Affirmations of Women. Westminster: 1979, John Knox Press, pp. 216-217. ISBN 0664221769
↑ The following are instances of the use of "" in the New Testament: Mt 16:16; 26:63; Mk 3:11; Lk 4:41; 22:70; Jn 1:34, 49; 3:18; 5:25; 11:4, 27; 20:31; Ac 9:20; 2 Cor 1:19; Ga 2:20; Ep 4:13; Heb 4:14; 6:6; 7:3; 10:29; 1 Jn 3:8; 4:15; 5:5, 10, 12, 13, 20; Rv 2:18. "" (huios tou theou) appears in Mt 4:3; Lk 4:3; Jn 10:36. Mark, according to most modern commentators the earliest of the gospels, uses "" once, attributing it to "unclean spirits" who were "making him known" () and "" (theou huios) in (), putting it in the mouth of a pagan centurion. In the first verse of this gospel, some manuscripts have (in the genitive case) "" (huios theou), others "" (huios tou theou), others omit the phrase in either form; critical editions such as that published by the United Bible Societies therefore bracket the phrase to indicate that in the present state of New Testament textual scholarship it cannot be taken as completely certain that the phrase is part of the text. Paul the Apostle uses "" (theou huios) of Jesus once, in , a letter in which he four times (, , , ) refers to Jesus as "his son" (literally "the son of him", not "a son of him"). He uses "his son", with "his" referring to God, also in other letters ( and , ) and uses "" three times (, , ).
↑ ,
↑ The other nine instances are , , , , , , ,
↑ Only verses that contain a reference also to "the Father" are listed here.