There are above 300 texts according with our understanding, positively and by the clearest implication declaring the inferiority of Christ, against 11;” of which four are acknowledged interpolations and mistranslations.
In the estimation of the most rigid orthodox believers, there are not more than 11 passages in which the Lord Jesus is styled God. Of these 11, the word God is allowed by all to be interpolated in two places, and it is therefore printed in italics, to show that it is wanting in the original (Acts 7:59; 1 John 3:16); two others are proved by Trinitarian critics themselves to be mistranslations (Acts 20:28; 1 Tim. 3:16): two others are quotations from the Old Testament, in which the very same words are in the one case applied to the son of Isaiah, in the other, to Solomon; and therefore prove their deity as much as that of Christ (Matt. 1:23, quoted from Isaiah 7:14, and Heb. 1:8, quoted from Psalm 45:6); two others, when compared with the context, seem to us evidently not to refer to Christ, but to Almighty God (Titus 2:13; 1 John 5:20). Of the three remaining texts, our learned men think one a mistranslation, though in this their learned opponents in general do not agree (Rom. 9:5); another is the exclamation of the incredulous and astonished Thomas, when convinced that Christ was raised from the dead (John 20:28); and the remaining text (John 1:1), in which it is said that “the word was God,” is easily explained, when it is considered that in the Scriptures all are called Gods to whom the word of God came.”— Dr. Disney's tract, published by the London Unitarian Book-Society.
Eleven Texts, and these eleven resemble so many drops taken from the ocean and deprived of their homogeneous properties by the agency of man! Dr. Carpenter says, “even in common estimation, there are only about nine instances in which Christ is called God; that of these there are at most only three, in which the appellation was really given him by the New Testament writers, and that Moses also was called God; and, as may reasonably be supposed for the same reason, viz. that to him the word of God came.”
Dr. Clarke, one of the most learned men this country ever produced, admits but of two texts wherein the Son is clearly styled God, “and they do each of them at the same time no less clearly distinguish him from the God whom he was with, whom he came from, and who is styled his God, &c.”
It has, I think, been well said that “Trinitarians are against reason, because reason is against them.”
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