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he has now received what he already "had," i.e. laid up for him in God's plan. Christians are said
to have treasure in heaven (Mark 10:21), that is, a reward stored up with God now and destined to
be conferred in the future. This is only to say that they will one day in the future "inherit the King-
dom prepared for them from the foundation of the world" (Matthew 25:34).

When Jesus says that he "had" the glory for which he now prays (John 17:5), he is merely
asking for the glory which he knew was prepared for him by God from the beginning. The synoptic
way of expressing the same idea is to talk of the Kingdom "prepared before the foundation of the
world" (Matthew 25:34). That glory existed in God's plan, and in that sense Jesus already "had" it.
We note that Jesus did NOT say "Give me back the glory which I had when I was alive with you
before my birth." This notion would have been completely foreign to Judaism. It is quite unneces-
sary -- and indeed wrong -- to read Gentile ideas into the text of Scripture when we can make good
sense of them as they stand in their Jewish environment. The onus is on those who believe in literal
preexistence to demonstrate that the texts cannot be explained within their own Jewish context.

The so-called "preexistence" of Jesus in John refers to his "existence" in the Plan of God.
The church has been plagued by the introduction of non-biblical language. There is a perfectly
good word for "real" preexistence in the Greek language (pro-uparchon). It is very significant that
it appears nowhere in Scripture -- but it does in the writings of Greek church fathers of the second
century. These Greek commentators on Scripture failed to understand the Hebrew categories of
thought in which the New Testament is written.

The so-called "pre-human existence" of Christ in the Bible refers to the prior existence of
Jesus in God's Plan and vision. Preexistence in the Bible does not mean what it meant in later
creeds: the actual conscious existence of the Son of Man before his birth at which time he entered
the earth and the human condition by passing through the womb of his mother.

A Jewish and biblical conception of preexistence is most significant for Jesus' understand-
ing of himself as the Son of Man. The Son of Man is found in the book of Daniel. He "preexists"
only in the sense that God grants us a vision of him in His Plan for the future. The Son of Man is A
HUMAN BEING -- that is what the words mean. Thus what John wants us to understand is that the
human Messiah was in heaven before his birth (in God's Plan) and was seen in Daniel's vision of
the future (Daniel 7; John 6:62). Jesus at his ascension went up to the position which had been
previously prepared for him in God's Plan. No text says that Jesus WENT BACK (upostrepho) to
God, though this idea has been wrongly imported into some modern English translations of the Bi-
ble to support "orthodoxy." Such mistranslation of the Greek "go to the Father" as "go back to the
Father" tells its own story. The translation of the Bible has been corrupted to mirror traditional,
post-biblical ideas of who Jesus is.

The Son of Man is not an angel. No angel was ever called a "Son of Man" (= member of
the human race -- with good reason Jesus' favorite self-title). To call the Messiah an angel would
be a muddling of categories. Hence scholars rightly report that the idea of preexistence for the
Messiah "antecedent to his birth in Bethlehem is unknown in Judaism." The Messiah, according
to all that is predicted of him in the Old Testament, belongs, in his origin, to the human race --

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