The Questioning Christian

Revisiting "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" in Titus 2.13

Written by

D. C. Toedt III

in

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Last night I got a comment on a post that I did two years ago today, “Jesus is Lord” Didn’t Mean “Jesus is God”.  Commenter ‘Norm’ asked: “How do [you] explain Titus 2:13 where Jesus is explicitly referred to as the Great God (capital “G”) and Savior?” 

I responded that you have to look at the whole sentence, which paints a completely different picture than what Norm suggests in his out-of-context snippet:

11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, 12 training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, 13 while we wait for / the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour, / Jesus Christ. 14 He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

(Quoted from the New Revised Standard Version; emphasis and slash-mark delimiters added, footnotes omitted.)

To put the sentence in context, we need to recall that elsewhere in his letter to Titus, Paul uses the title “our savior” to refer to both God (1.3; 2.10; 3.4) and Jesus (1.4; 3.6), usually one at a time without mentioning the other.

I know very little of Greek, but the text in my Greek-English interlinear Bible seems to make more sense if we read it as “while we wait for the blessed hope and the appearing of him who is [i] the manifestation of God’s glory and [ii] our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

The sentence beginning at 2.11 clearly says that to Paul, Jesus the Anointed One (christos), whose return the church was eagerly awaiting, was metaphorically the hope and the manifestation of the glory of God. It’d be an enormous stretch to think that Paul’s figures of speech meant he thought Jesus WAS God. (If he did think that, it’s not at all clear why we should assume he was correct.) 

By analogy, suppose I were to write a letter to my widowed father-in-law, mentioning that my wife was the manifestation of all that was good about her late mother. It’d be a mistake for a future reader to conclude that I believed my wife was her mother. By the same token, it’d be a mistake to read Titus 2.13 and conclude that Paul believed Jesus to be God.

Comments

3 responses to “Revisiting "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" in Titus 2.13”

  1. pepecristiano Avatar
    pepecristiano

    The odd thing, as usual, comes from the fact that we dont know anything about a Paul figure within a time-line where is regarded such individual could live in.
    I have my doubts about the existence of Paul. I dont think that such a person has ever existed. Somebody, much later, I think Marcio the gnostic, the guy who was the first to compile the letters as we know today. Paul could be indeed, the same Marcion, that would explain the gnostic theology shown in Paul.

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  2. Ian Avatar
    Ian

    I’m no expert in this however I found the following footnote, for the aforementioned text, from the Net Bible helpful:
    The terms “God and Savior” both refer to the same person, Jesus Christ. This is one of the clearest statements in the NT concerning the deity of Christ. The construction in Greek is known as the Granville Sharp rule, named after the English philanthropist-linguist who first clearly articulated the rule in 1798. Sharp pointed out that in the construction article-noun-καί-noun (where καί [kai] = “and”), when two nouns are singular, personal, and common (i.e., not proper names), they always had the same referent. Illustrations such as “the friend and brother,” “the God and Father,” etc. abound in the NT to prove Sharp’s point. The only issue is whether terms such as “God” and “Savior” could be considered common nouns as opposed to proper names. Sharp and others who followed (such as T. F. Middleton in his masterful The Doctrine of the Greek Article) demonstrated that a proper name in Greek was one that could not be pluralized. Since both “God” (θεός, qeos) and “savior” (σωτήρ, swthr) were occasionally found in the plural, they did not constitute proper names, and hence, do fit Sharp’s rule. Although there have been 200 years of attempts to dislodge Sharp’s rule, all attempts have been futile. Sharp’s rule stands vindicated after all the dust has settled. For more information on Sharp’s rule see ExSyn 270-78, esp. 276. See also 2 Pet 1:1 and Jude 4.
    For following up the references above you can download the Net Bible from: http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=3086.

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  3. Doug Avatar
    Doug

    It is a very nice try, but scripture is quite clear that Jesus and God are one in the same. Reading this verse in context (the exact context you use) show it to be true. However, there is scripture after scripture after scripture that will show you the truth.

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