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Luke knows nothing of such an idea. Unprejudiced readers will see (as acknowledged by a
host of biblical experts) that the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts and Peter is A HUMAN BE-
ING originating at his "begettal" and birth as do all other human persons. HE HAS NOT PREEX-
ISTED! Matthew even speaks of the "genesis" of Jesus in Matthew 1:18.

It is a serious imposition on the Gospel of John to understand him to teach a different sort
of Jesus than Matthew, Mark and Luke -- one who is really an angel or God appearing as a man.
Such a non-human Messiah is FOREIGN not only to the rest of the New Testament, but to the
whole revelation of God in the Old Testament in regard to his definition of the coming Messiah.
Deuteronomy 18:15-18 expressly says that the Messiah is to rise from a family in Israel. The
Messiah is expressly said in this important Christological text not to be God but God's agent born
to the family of Israel. All Jews who looked forward to the Messiah fully expected him to be a
human person -- not an angel -- much less God Himself! Though the Jews had not understood that
the Messiah was to be born supernaturally, even this miraculous begetting was in fact predicted
(Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23). A "pre-human" Messiah, however, is nowhere suggested.

According to Isaiah 44:24 God was unaccompanied at the original creation. Jesus in the
Gospels attributes the creation to the Father (Mark 10:6; Matthew 6:30; Luke 12:28) and has no
memory of being the agent in the Genesis creation. If Jesus had really been the creator of the Gene-
sis heaven and earth, WHY does he have no memory of this? WHY does he expressly say that God
was the creator? The answer is that Jesus worked within the Jewish and biblical framework of the
scriptural heritage he had received and which he "came not to destroy."

The spirit of God is available to all believers. As they learn to think as God does, they will
share the concept that "God speaks of things which do not exist as though they did" (Romans
4:17). It is a mistake to confuse "existence" in the Plan of God with actual preexistence, thus creat-
ing a non-fully human Jesus. The Christ of biblical expectation is a HUMAN PERSON, super-
naturally conceived. The supreme glory of his achievement for us lies in the fact that he really was
a human being. He was tempted. But God cannot be tempted -- James 1:13.

The "Rock" apostle (Peter) whom Jesus appointed to "feed my sheep" has given us a mar-
velous lesson in how to understand the meaning of preexistence as foreknowledge and predestina-
tion. It was Peter whose recognition of Jesus as the Messiah was greeted by the excited approval
of Jesus (Matthew 16:16-18). Peter and John understood that the glory which Jesus already "had"
is the same glory believers subsequent to the time of Jesus (and therefore not yet born when Jesus
spoke) also "had been given" (John 17:22). This means only that things which are fixed in God's
counsels "exist" in a sense other than actual existence. We must choose whether to understand the
language of the New Testament as Americans or Europeans or as sympathetic to Jesus and his
Jewish culture. A verse in Revelation speaks of things "being" before they were created. "They
were and were created" (Revelation 4:11). Their creation followed from God's original Plan to
bring them into being.

The use of the verb "were" is interesting in light of an alternative reading in John 17:5
which speaks of "the glory which was with you." This would be a statement about the preexisting
glory (not the pre-human Jesus) which Jesus prayed to have bestowed on him (John 17:5), and also
on his followers (John 17:22). (See Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, 1970, p.

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