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The Nature of Pre-Existence

in the New Testament

Jesus Christ came into the Mediterranean world at a time of deep religious
ferment. Many faiths and philosophies were competing for the allegiance
of that world -- and all of them were more congenial to that pagan Roman
world than were the teachings of Christ. The religion now known as Chris-
tianity, which became established as the official religion of the Roman
Empire during the time of Constantine, appeared to reject the "cult of the
gods" and the "cult of the Emperor." "Christianity" appeared to differ from
the Mystery Cults; yet it embraced all the KEY doctrines of the pagan Mys-
tery Religions. This included the concept that their God (Christ) was pre-
existent. However, the Bible (including the New Testament) nowhere pro-
motes this pagan concept.

Anthony Buzzard

"Within the Christian tradition, the New Testament has long been read through the prism
of the later conciliar creeds...Speaking of Jesus as the Son of God had a very different
connotation in the first century from that which it has had ever since the Council of Nicea
(325 AD). Talk of his preexistence ought probably in most, perhaps in all, cases to be
understood on the analogy of the pre-existence of the Torah, to indicate the eternal divine
purpose being achieved through him, rather than pre-existence of a fully personal kind"
(Maurice Wiles, The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, The Hulsean Lectures, 1973,
London: SCM Press, 1974).

"The mainstream churches are committed to a certain doctrine about Jesus, but specialists
in early Christian thought are questioning the arguments by which that doctrine was
reached. New Testament scholars ask if the New Testament teaches it at all, and
historians wonder at the gulf between Jesus himself and fully-developed Christianity.
These questions are very unsettling, for they imply that Christianity may be in worse
condition that was thought. It is perhaps not a basically sound structure that needs only to
be modernized, but may be in need of radical reconstruction...The New Testament never
suggests that the phrase 'Son of God' just means 'God'" (Don Cupitt, The Debate About
Christ, London: SCM Press, 1979, p. vii, 4).

Yet evangelicalism insists on that equation if one is to be considered a Christian!

"When the Jew wished to designate something as predestined, he spoke of it as already
'existing' in heaven" (E.G. Selwyn, First Epistle of Peter, p. 124.).

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