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by the famous Psalm 110:1, where the LORD (GOD -- YAHWEH, YEHOVAH) had announced
this staggering event a thousand years earlier. The "my lord" of David is a title not of Deity (there
is only one who is God) but of superior humans at various levels. Very occasionally an angel is
addressed as adoni, but on no occasion is God given that title. The Lord Jesus is that very lord
appointed by God. He is the adoni (my lord) of David. Adoni appears 195 times in the Old Testa-
ment and always distinguishes those so named from God Himself who is called ADONAI ("the
Lord God of all").

Luke and Paul were traveling companions. Do we really imagine that they had two totally
different ideas about the origin of the Son of God? Luke, in his two books, gives us a crystal clear
description of the Son who originated as a conscious person in his mother's womb. This of course
makes Jesus a genuine human being. Did Paul introduce an entirely different concept by proposing
that the Son of God had been alive (as an angel? Doing what?) before his birth?

If Paul really believed in a pre-human invisible Son of God, he must not have let Luke
know this! But note this: The letters of Paul were complete at the time when, in all probability,
Matthew, Mark and Luke were written. Why then did these writers say not a word about a so-
called preexisting Son -- especially in the light of the inspired letters of Paul which, it is claimed
(wrongly, we think), tell of such a non-fully human, pre-human Messiah? Paul in fact spoke of the
visible Son of God, the image of God. He did not imagine that Jesus had anything but a human ori-
gin -- supernatural of course, yet as an event of some two thousand years ago, and as the offspring
of a Jewish woman.

The notion that the Son of God is coequal and coeternal with the Father is a powerful idea.
It has gathered its strength from centuries of indoctrination. But is it true? Is it not obvious, even to
the casual reader of the New Testament, that the Son is not equal to the Father -- that the Son is
everywhere subordinate to the Father? Is it not merely a matter of understanding simple language
that all sons are derived from their fathers, that no son is the same age as his father, and that to be
eternally generated is pure contradiction and an abuse of the precious gift of language and mean-
ing? "All New Testament Christology is subordinationist," says scholar Dr. Howard Marshall
(Evangelical Quarterly, Vol. LXX, no. 1, Jan. 1998, p. 76).

A revolution in Christian thinking about who God and Jesus are is long overdue. Its begin-
nings are found in the works of countless excellent scholars of the Bible and this magazine hopes
to bring these insights to a wider public. As a striking example we offer the following quotation
from Norman Kraus' Jesus Christ our Lord ("Herald Press," 1987). He is commenting on John
1:1 and observes that John did not intend us to think that from the beginning the word was a Person
(hypostastis), in other words, that John did not write "In the beginning was Jesus, the Son." He
then commends the excellent translation of J. B. Phillips: "At the beginning God expressed Him-
self." He adds that the Living Bible "totally misses the point" when it renders the same words,
"Before anything else existed, there was Christ." We commend also the fine translation of John
1:1, 2 by English versions BEFORE the KJV. They read, "All things were made by IT," not by
him.

A simple way to understand John 1:1 brings John into harmony with Matthew and Luke,
who have not a word to say about any Son existing before the birth of Jesus. John was reflecting on

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