Jesus as Preached by the Apostles By Carey Clark

Matthew 16:16 Peter replied, “You are the Christ[1], the Son of the living God.”

John 17:3 This is eternal life, that they may know You (Father), the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

Acts 2:22  “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—

Acts 2:36  Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Acts 3:13-14  The God of Abraham and of Isaac  and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied in the presence of Pilate, after  he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One and demanded that a man—a murderer—be granted to you.  And you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses!

Acts 3:18-26 But the things which God foretold through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Anointed would suffer, he has fulfilled in this way.  Therefore repent and turn back, so that your sins may be blotted out,  so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and he may send the Anointed One appointed for you—Jesus,  whom heaven must receive until the times of the restoration of all things, about which God spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from earliest times.  Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You will listen to him in everything that he says to you. And it will be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet will be destroyed utterly from the people.’  And indeed, all the prophets from Samuel and all those who followed him have spoken about and proclaimed these days.  You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God ordained with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed.’  God, after he had raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning each of you back from your wickedness!”

Acts 4:30  while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

Acts 5:30-31  The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.  God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.

Acts 5:42  And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ (anointed one) is Jesus.

Acts 8:4-5  Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.  Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ.

Acts 8:12  But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.

Acts 8:31b-35 And he (Ethiopian eunuch) invited Philip to come up and sit with him.  Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth.  In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”  Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.

Acts 9:19b, 20, 22  For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus.  And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” …  But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ (messiah or anointed one).

Acts 10:34-43  So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality,  but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.  As for the word that he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all),  you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed:  how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.[2]  And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree,  but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear,  not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.  To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Acts 17:30-31  The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent,  because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Acts 18:5  When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

Acts 18:28  for he (Apollos) powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus.

Acts 22:12-14  “And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, well-spoken of by all the Jews who lived there,  came to me, and standing by me said to me, ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight.’ And at that very hour I received my sight and saw him.  And he said, ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear a voice from his mouth;

Acts 28:30-31  He lived there two whole years at his own expense,  and welcomed all who came to him,  proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

1 Corinthians 8:6  yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.[3]

________________________

[1] Christ means anointed. It is important to understand that Jesus is God’s anointed one. Notice Acts 10:38 and note [2].

[2] Not that Jesus was God, but that God was with him. All of Christendom needs to study and understand Acts 10:38 and then all these other verses in Acts to understand who the Jesus is that the apostles believed in and preached. It could bring a powerful revival and change the world.

[3] This statement by Paul is fully clear. The Father is God. Jesus is Lord, yet subject to the Father. See 1 Cor. 15:27-28.

The above article was taken from here

As-a-man Christology by Carlos Xavier

 

As-a-man Christology

Talking points:

1.    What is it?

I’ll give a brief explanation of what I mean by As a man Christology.

2.       History.

How this view developed and affected Christianity.

3.       How to Guide.

How to properly counter, engage and argue with your opponent without talking past each other.

 

1.       What is it?

Most people who believe Jesus is God would say that he was born, he grew up, etc., like most of us. After all this is what scripture says: “He grew in wisdom, and age, and grace with God" (Luke 2:52).

They would even say Jesus really suffered and eventually died.

But when you ask: How can this be if Jesus is God?

They will invariably say something like: Well, He did all those things in or through His human nature or His flesh only. In other words, they would say something like he was born as a man, he grew in wisdom as a man, he died as a man, etc. And by “he” most Christians refer to the 2nd Person of the Trinity, “God the Son.” It was this Divine Person who “took on flesh/human nature” at the virgin birth.

So whenever the NT refers to "Jesus" or "the Christ" or "Jesus Christ" what the NT writers really mean is that impersonal human nature that this Divine Person, God the Son, took on at the Incarnation. This means that you have to read the NT through some kind of bifocal lenses, as it were. But when you point out that the virgin birth records the genesis (origin) of the Messiah (Mat 1.1, 18), how he came to be, i.e., came to exist they will say something like: 
Of course, we agree that he came to be as a man.

And whether they know it or not, they're actually saying that the name Jesus and the title Christ refer to that impersonal human nature that God the Son assumed at the Incarnation.

In short, “Jesus” is the name of a human nature and not a human person.

However, when they say as a man that isn't the official trinitarian doctrine. It should really be as man because according to their own doctrine (as we shall see) the one we call Jesus was man but not a man.

For example, in a 1985 article from the noted Trinity Journal, by Geisler and Watkins, they say:

It is true that in Chalcedonian orthodoxy "God the Son" united himself to a personless human nature.

In other words, the Son of God had generic human nature but he was not himself a human person. For that would make 2 persons in a person, which was an early heretical view known as Nestorianism.

 

So in order not to talk or debate past each other we have to understand the history of this way of thinking about the Son of God.

 

2.       History

More than 125 years after the Council of Nicaea declared Jesus “true God of true God” and after dozens of other councils rejecting Nicea, the question of how to define the humanity of Jesus vs the Deity of the Son remained unresolved. And that's because Nicea ended up being the pandora's box that spawned other heresies that to this day plague Trinitarian Christianity.

At the center of it all were questions about how many persons, how many natures, or wills there really were in the Son of God.

Historian Dr. Richard Rubenstein in his book When Jesus Became God says:

“What was needed to clear up [this] confusion was something that the Nicene Creed alone could not supply: A doctrine explaining how God could be one and yet consist of two or three separate entities. And the development of this doctrine...could not take place without new language. It was necessary to create a new theological vocabulary….”  

Thus was born the so-called Chalcedonian creed of 451:

Following the holy Fathers we teach [and confess] with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God, perfect [very] God, and perfect [very Man]; begotten before the ages of the Father according to his Divinity, and in the last days, for us and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures.

Modern-day trinitarians, like the popular Desiring God ministries, interpret Chalcedonian Christology as follows:

The kind of humanity Jesus took in the incarnation was impersonal. He did not add a human person to himself when he took a fully human nature. His humanity is not only impersonal (anhypostasis), but it’s also in-personal (enhypostasis), in that its personhood is in the personhood of the eternal second person of the Trinity. The fully divine Son is the person who took full humanity and remains the “one person” of the God-man.

So, according to this official trinitarian doctrine, Jesus is not a man, i.e., a human person. That’s because the real Person of Jesus is God the Son. Hence, scriptures like Mat 24.36 have to be reinterpreted, reimagined in ways that are not only unbiblical but nonsensical!

Note the amazing ways such verses are twisted by Evangelical publications like the ESV Study Bible:

“In his incarnate life, Jesus learned things as other human beings learn them (cf. Luke 2:52; Heb. 5:8).  On the other hand, Jesus was also fully God, and, as God, he had infinite knowledge (cf. John 2:25; 16:30; 21:17). Here he is apparently speaking in terms of his human nature. This is similar to other statements about Jesus which could be true of his human nature only, and not of his divine nature (he grew and became strong, Luke 2:40; increased in stature, Luke 2:52; was about 30 years old, Luke 3:23; was weary, John 4:6; was thirsty, John 19:28; was hungry, Matt. 4:2; was crucified, 1 Cor. 2:8). How Jesus could have limited knowledge and yet know all things is difficult, and much remains a mystery [card], for nobody else has ever been both God and man.”

The noted Anglican Bishop Richard Hanson was right to describe this so-called Double Nature doctrine, aka Hypostatic Union “as a Space-suit Christology. Just as the astronaut, in order to operate in a part of the universe where there is no air and where he has to experience weightlessness, puts on an elaborate space-suit which enables him to live and act in this new, unfamiliar environment, so the Logos [i.e., the eternal Son] put on a body which enabled him to behave as a human being among human beings. But his relation to this body is no closer than that of an astronaut to his spacesuit.”

 

3.       How to Guide

How to refute this way of thinking or, at the very least, how not to talk past our opponents?

First, show them that the NT writers never portray Jesus as a “God-man” (some kind of a human-divine hybrid) but simply as a man, I.e., a human person. Show them that nowhere in scripture is Jesus ever said to have done anything as a man.

For example, scripture doesn’t say that the Son was born as a man, the Son was about 30 years old as a man, no one knows the day or hour nor the Son as a man, that the Son died as a man only.

As a matter of fact, Jesus’ favorite self-designation comes from a well-known Hebraic title, son of man, which simply means a human person.

In other words, Jesus' all-time favorite designation was not as a man.

For example, imagine if Jesus had meant: “I as a man will return on the clouds of heaven.”

The son of man title goes back to the OT prophecy about how God one day would procreate (beget) a unique and special human Son, who would also be the lineal descendant of King David. God would designate this human person as His specially anointed one, “the Lord’s Messiah” [YHVH's Messiah] (Luke 2:26).

Hence, the most used and alluded to OT verse by the NT writers: Daniel 7:13.

There are more than 40 NT references that echo or directly cite Dan 7:13 and the one that follows it is another NT favorite, Dan 7:14.

NOTE the reason why God [called the Ancient of Days here] granted this human person unprecedented authority in the first place. Because he is a human being!

This is perhaps why Jesus uses the title over 80 times in the 4 Gospels alone!
Also NOTE the interesting usage by John in his Gospel.

John 5:25 “Truly, truly, I say to you that an hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and the ones having heard will live.

26 For just as the Father has life in Himself, so also He gave to the Son to have life in Himself.

27 And He gave Him authority to execute judgment, because He is a son of man [i.e., a human person].

When we break down this last verse we see how it fits with Dan 7:13-14 like a puzzle.

John 5:27a reads: “And he [God] gave him [son of man] authority…”

And Dan 7:14a: “And authority was given to him [son of man]…”

Then John 5:27b tells us why: “Because he is son of man [i.e., a human being].”

And Dan 7:13 has already identified the subject as the same exalted, glorified human being.

In fact, the humanity of Jesus is so important that later Paul warns:

"If someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed....or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted....let them be under God's curse" (2Cor 11.4; Gal 1:8)!

This warning is nicely captured by the late prominent Finnish scholar Räisänen:

“The farther one moves from the Jewish-messianic roots of Christology, the more the humanity of Jesus fades.” (The Rise of Christian Beliefs, p 225)

Hence, in John 6.57 the Son says “I live because of the Father” just like in 5.26.

John 1:14 says "the glory of the one and only Son" is "from the Father."

John 3:35 "The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands."

John 5:19 “The Son can do nothing by himself."

And John 17:2 says The Father gives the Son “authority to judge.”

This means the Son is forever subordinate to God; something that a “God-man” by nature should never be!  

John goes on to say the Father is greater than the Son, without qualification:

John 10:29 The Father "is greater than all";

John 14:28 The Son explicitly says "the Father is greater than I."

Hence, the virgin birth is an account of the “origin” (genesis) of the Messiah, the human Son of God. It doesn’t say this is the origin of the Son of God as a man.

That’s why Luke 1:30-35 describes how the Son came to be, i.e., a coming into existence of a human person and not the Incarnation of a 2nd Person, God the Son.

John’s famous phrase “the only-begotten Son” further reinforces the fact that God procreated a human person.

Hence, John talks about how “God gave His only-begotten Son....as a sacrifice to take away our sins." 
John 3.16; 1 John 4.10

This is a clear reference to the atoning sacrifice and death of the human Son of God and not some impersonal human nature/flesh called Jesus.

The same spells true when Paul says in Gal 2.20b that he lives "by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” And Romans 5.10: “We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”

 

Summary

The Chalcedonian creed implies that the Son is at best equivocating, at worst lying when he says things like:

“Why do you call me good? Only God is good” when in reality Jesus was talking about himself!
[Wink wink Christology]

Or “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” when Jesus really did know but wasn't saying! In other words, I'm not tellin'!!

But according to the NT the Son and not just his “human nature” didn’t know all things:

·       In Mark 5.7,[9]; Luke 8:28,[30] The Son doesn’t know the name of the demon…who knew him!

·       In Mark 5.30; Luke 8:45 The Son didn’t know who touched him!

That’s why Luke 2:52 says “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”

 

Chalcedon states the Son was "begotten before the ages/worlds" and came "into the world," i.e., into Mary. But as we just saw the virgin birth is an account of how the Son of God came to be and not how God the Son took on or assumed human nature/flesh.

The Son came from the womb of Mary not through the womb of Mary! That is, the Son did not enter the womb of Mary from outside. But more importantly the God-man of the Chalcedon creed offers no real salvation because there’s no real human representation!

Paul in 1Tim 2.5 says “For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, himself human.”

This is the reason why the Apostle John wrote his whole Gospel:

"But these have been recorded so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief/this faith you may have life in his name." John 20:31

In other words, if you do not believe that the human Son of God is the promised Jewish Messiah (who suffered and died for your sins), you will not be saved.

Again, there's nothing here about a God-man who suffered and died through a human nature/flesh called Jesus. After all, what would it mean to die through a nature?

There were many opportunities for the NT writers to identify this Chalcedon "God-man." Instead what we find are statements about a human person who....

·       The people "praised God for sending a man with such great authority" (Mat 9.8);

·       The people knew that the Son of David had to be a man (Mat 12.23);

·       A centurion remarking: "Truly this man was the Son of God." Mar 15.39

·       Peter telling people that "Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know" (Acts 2.22);

·       Paul telling the Athenians how God has "set a day in which He is about to judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He appointed" (Acts 17:31);

·       And Paul describing how "by a man came death, by another man has come also the resurrection of the dead." 1Cor 15:21, similar to Romans 5:12.

NOTE: none of these biblical statements say as a man.

...

The above was taken from
As-a-man Christology
Some editing has been done.

 

The Prophet Jesus by Sir Anthony F. Buzzard:         

Jesus the Prophet — The Ultimate Teacher

• The Prophet Jesus from Nazareth (Matt. 21:11)
  
  
• Mark 6:11: “receive you or listen to you.”
  
  
• Receive My Son = “listen to him” at the transfiguration (Matt. 17:5).
  
  
• They “came to listen to him in the temple” (Luke 21:38).
  
  
• Luke 24:19: Jesus, “a prophet mighty in deed and word.”
  
  
• John the Baptist was also a prophet.

...

 

Jesus the Prophet — The Ultimate Teacher

These opportunities give me just what I need to remind us all of the fixed and firm nonnegotiable basis of our Christian faith. I want to do this, because I think that some unitarians currently suffer from a degree of disorientation, failure to be clear about the Bible’s timetable in terms of the two covenants, which must always be clearly distinguished. This results from not paying proper attention to the words, teachings of Jesus our prophet. Not to know when the Old Covenant Law of Moses in the letter ended, and when the New Covenant in the spirit — the Torah of Messiah — began to be in force, presents the extreme danger of falling for the dreadful mistake of confusing the Christian faith.

Losing Christianity means losing the words, teachings of Jesus, the prophet, as our one solid, indispensable rock foundation.

John 12:44-50 is so clear — as well as very threatening:

ESV “And Jesus cried out [for special emphasis as he did in Luke 8:8, the parable of the sower] and said, ‘Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in Him who sent me….If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own initiative, but the Father who sent me has given me a command, namely, what to say and how to say it [CJB]. I know that what He commands is eternal life [Life in the Age to Come]. Whatever I say is what the Father told me to say” (GWN).

The value of us all thinking of Jesus as the Prophet will also get the ear of millions of Muslims ... What they need is the only real and true Prophet Jesus from Nazareth. That is the prophet Jesus as defined by Peter in Acts:

CSB Acts 3:22-23: “Moses said: ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to everything he says to you. Everyone who fails to listen to that prophet will be removed from the people and destroyed’” (CJB).

Again, an ultimate threat and warning:

Every system of learning, supremely the Bible, needs a clear, central, backbone core and theme and thesis. In the case of New Testament Christianity, I select the unmistakably clear statements of Paul and John. Let us see if we really believe the prophet Jesus and his servant spokesmen. In 1 Timothy 6:3, Paul gives us the precise litmus test for telling the difference between true and false. Paul states categorically that anybody who does not bring the teachings of Messiah is ignorant and dangerous, and worse, and to be firmly rejected.

Another Apostle in 2 John 7-9 makes the same dramatically interesting point. Our destiny depends on our hearing the teachings of Jesus. We might say that the Devil has only one master trick — that is, to detach and separate the prophet Jesus from his own teaching. In that way the clever impression is given to the public that Jesus is being “received or preached,” when the actual teaching of Jesus is cleverly omitted and suppressed. We must pay the closest attention to this threat.

I arrive at this point of view by thinking long about what is surely the most alarming of all of Jesus’ statements: “Why do you keep calling me ‘lord, lord,’ and you will not do what I say?” What Jesus says is what he teaches. “Many will say to me in that future day, ‘lord, lord, don’t you see that we preached in your name, expelled demons in your name, and even did miracles in your name?’” Their protests will be greeted with the chilling words: 
“Depart from me; I never recognized you.”

How could that ultimate, crushing disappointment come to be? The answer must be that the sayings and teachings of Jesus had been neglected, overlooked, disregarded, while the name of Jesus had been offered to the public. This would be the essence of crafty, diabolical deception. It will be no less threatening of course to reject or twist the words of Paul, who spoke for the prophet Jesus.

The prophet Jesus says to us: “You call me rabbi and lord, and you do well to do so, for that is just what I am” (John 13:13). I suggest that current Christianity has lost much of this central thrust of rabbi Jesus’ teaching.

How well are we doing?

We need to reset our thinking and reestablish the NT timetable and program, fully grasping that the prophet Jesus is the minister and founder and High Priest of the New, not the Old Covenant (Heb. 12:24; 8:6; Luke 22:29-30; Heb: 9:15: or “will,” CJB). Note that Jesus “covenants to give us the Kingdom as God covenanted to give it to” him. The loss of the word covenant in many translations is a serious mistake.

Rotherham Luke 22:29: “And, I, covenant to you — as my Father hath covenanted to me — a kingdom…

Thus the Kingdom of God teaching of Jesus is the “whole deal.” Let us take stock of the enormous fact that Jesus the Prophet is the minister and servant of the New, not Old, Covenant.

Listening as we all do these days to a mass of Bible opinion coming at us from all quarters, certain statements are emblazoned in my heart as being shocking. I refer to a conversation in which I was told that when Paul said “I [a Jew and a Pharisee] am not under the law” (1 Cor 9:20), that really means “I, Paul, am not under the penalty of the law.” The effort on the part of the speaker was to promote the mistaken notion that Jewish Christians must remain as Christians under the Law of Moses in the letter, while non-Jewish Christians are under no such obligation.

I think we must reject that distinction as creating a divided New Testament church. There is in fact “one faith,” and only one faith. God is equally the God of the Jews and the Gentiles (Rom. 3:29). Circumcision in the flesh means nothing at all (1 Cor. 7:19). The New Covenant in the spirit is for all of us Christians, whatever nationality we may be. There is one faith only, and our practice as Christians is to be unified. We are to be the international Israel of God (Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3). Never of course must we forget the other, equally important definition of present ethnic Israel as the currently blinded ethnic Israelites or Jews. For these Jews a great future is promised as in Romans 9-11. This was a huge discovery by Abrahamics.

I want to advise all of us to pay careful attention to the backgrounds on which we may have been nurtured. We have all been there: in my case it was Armstrongism (Worldwide Church of God) with its heavy emphasis on clean foods, Sabbath and holy days, and “two Gods in the God family.” In the case of others, it was the heavy and very uneducated hand of Wierwillism (Way International) which formed our way of thinking, in those earlier days of ignorance. Under that system the dread word Dispensationalism appeared, learned unexamined and uncritically from the Bullinger Bible.

With my thesis that separating Jesus from his own teachings is the ultimate subtle and ruinous deception, it very easy to see how for example the Bullinger Companion Bible achieved its dangerous results. According to Bullinger the Gospel was not to be found in the Gospels! The Gospel in the Gospels was said to be only for Jews, not the rest of us. This is also exactly what C.S. Lewis announced: “The Gospel is not in the Gospels.” But that sort of view is antichrist, pure and simple, since it gets rid of the teaching of Jesus, and pushes Jesus back into the Old Covenant, removing him from us who claim to be, and must be, his followers, and followers of his teaching. To say that “the Gospel in the Gospels is really only for Jews” is a not too subtle way of saying that the prophet Jesus does not really count! That is pure Antichristianity!

The NIV cleverly invites you to the same sort of error by telling us that Jesus preached “the Good News,” but Paul preached “the Gospel.” The distinction hinted at is very false. It gets rid of the saving Gospel of the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, the prophet Jesus. Note too that the NIV very cleverly misled its readers to think that Jesus went “BACK” to heaven! (John 13:3; 16:28). Jesus was also made to “preexist” via the wrongly capitalized “Word” in John 1:1.

This Antichristian teaching is also what is so astonishingly stated in the following two quotations.

Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries (he died in 2007):

Many people today think that the essence of Christianity is the teachings of Jesus. That isn’t so. The teachings of Jesus are somewhat secondary to Christianity. If you read the epistles of the Apostle Paul, which make up about half of the New Testament, you’ll see almost nothing whatsoever said about the teachings of Jesus. Not one of his parables is mentioned. In fact, throughout the rest of the New Testament there’s little reference to the teachings of Jesus. In the Apostles’ creed, the most universally held Christian creed, there is no reference to the teachings of Jesus or to the example of Jesus. In fact, in recounting Christ’s earthly life, the creed states simply that He was ‘born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and was buried.’ It mentions only two days in Jesus’s life — that of His birth and that of His death. Christianity centers not in the teachings of Jesus but in the person of Jesus as the incarnate God who came into the world to take upon himself our guilt and to die in our place.

Also from Kennedy:

But Jesus says, “I am the way.” It is not the teachings of Jesus, it is not the preaching of Jesus, it is not the example of Jesus, it is not the Sermon on the Mount, it is not the Beatitudes, or anything else that He taught or said that is the way. The way is Christ Himself, the divine second Person of the Trinity, the Creator of the galaxies that came into this world.

I trust that these quotes leave you gasping, or as Greg Deuble would say in Australia, “gobsmacked.”

These statements are a huge and glaring falsehood, since Paul preached exactly the same Gospel of the Kingdom as did Jesus, to all, Jews and Gentiles alike, in Acts (14:22; 19:8; 20:24-25: 28:23, 31).

Now this equally alarming statement from another top evangelical scholar, Dr. Harold O.J. Brown:

Christianity takes its name from its founder, or rather from what he was called, the Christ. Buddhism is also named for its founder. And non-Muslims often call Islam Mohammedanism. But while Buddhism and Islam are based primarily on the teaching of the Buddha and Mohammed, respectively, Christianity is based primarily on the person of Christ.

The Christian faith is not belief in his teaching, but in what is taught about him. The appeal of Protestant liberals to ‘believe as Jesus believed,’ rather than to believe in Jesus, is a dramatic transformation of the fundamental nature of Christianity.

Is that not a colossal lie? You cannot believe in Jesus and not believe his teaching!

Then also C.S. Lewis. Lewis denies Jesus while claiming to follow him! He wrote: “The Gospels are not ‘the gospel,’ the statement of the Christian belief.” So then the words of Jesus are not the Gospel! This must be the ultimate falsehood, the ultimate deception. So Jesus has to be rescued from “church”!

Dr. James Dunn:

Hurtado does not think it necessary for Jesus to have thought and spoken of himself in the same terms as his followers thought and spoke of him in the decades subsequent to his crucifixion, in order for the convictions of those followers to be treated as valid by Christians today; though he also notes that most Christians probably think that there was ‘some degree of continuity’ between what Jesus thought of himself and subsequent Christology.

Has he read the New Testament?!

In all of these cases what this false teaching achieved was the removal of the teaching of Jesus, in the name of proclaiming only his death and resurrection. This appears to be also the core of the Billy Graham statement that “Jesus came to do three days’ work — to die, to be buried and to rise.” 
1 Corinthians 15:1-3 and Romans 10 were then twisted to support the false notion. Paul did not say 1 Corinthians 15:1-3 was an account of the totality of the Gospel but only of some of its principal themes. In Romans 10 Paul said that we must “hear Jesus teaching” (v. 14), i.e. not just hear about him, that he died and rose.

It was I think the blessed revelation granted to the Abrahamic Bible students of the 1850s to point out and found a whole denomination (not a small achievement!), re-establishing the centrally important Gospel preaching and teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God. Acts 8:12 was then very intelligently selected as the slogan of that rediscovered Christianity. Luke 4:43 (Jesus’ own Mission Statement) was then also highlighted in all preaching to ensure that we never, ever lose track of Jesus’ own mission statement. If one has had the chance, as I have, to examine hundreds of books on evangelism — how to “get saved,” it is alarming to find Acts 8:12, Luke 4:43, and Mark 1:14-15, where Jesus begins his evangelism, completely absent from all presentations of what is called “the Gospel.”

The NT timetable can be reasserted and reset for us all quite easily. John 1:17 is quite clear:“While the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Messiah.”

Luke 16:16: “The Law and the Prophets were until John; since then the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and everyone forces his way into it” (ESV).

It could hardly be clearer than this: Mark 1:1, 14: The beginning of the Gospel of God. Repent and believe the Gospel about the Kingdom.

Acts 10:36-37: “The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching the Gospel of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all) — that saying you yourselves know, which was published throughout all Judaea, beginning from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached.”

NAB Hebrews 2:3: “How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?

Announced originally [“had its beginning”] through the Lord, it was confirmed for us by those who had heard.

Then Paul:

ESV Galatians 3:23: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian” (CSB)

1 Corinthians 9:20: Paul speaks as a Jew, and for all believers, Jews or otherwise: We, including Paul, are not under the Torah of Moses.

I hope we all see how all the NT writers confirm the New Covenant which began when Jesus the High Priest showed up (Heb. 9:11). The beginning of Christianity is not the Ascension or Pentecost. It begins with the teaching, preaching of Jesus the Christian prophet and Messiah.

The claim by Armstrong that we are indeed still to be under the Law of Moses, was a not too well camouflaged invitation into Antichrist. Jesus was pushed back under the Old Covenant. The opposite error, just as insidious, happened when Bullinger’s ultra-dispensationalism relegated Jesus to the Old Covenant. The Devil’s trick persisted. The teaching of Jesus was disposed of.

Be it carefully noted that the historical Jesus before his death “cleansed all [unclean] foods” (Mark 7:19). He narrowed the rule on divorce given by Moses, putting the bar higher (Matt. 19:8-9): “But I say to you…” Jesus then reduces the reason for divorce to one cause only. He also moved away from strict Sabbath keeping by showing that even in the Law those who work in the temple are not subject to Sabbath keeping (Matt. 12:5).

Jesus illustrated a further wise policy of “compromise” and concession to others’ weakness when he told Peter that as Kingdom persons they did not need to pay the temple tax (Matt. 17:24-27). But in order not to offend the authorities, “let’s pay it anyway.”

Prominent in all our teaching and preaching there needs to be the easy fact that Matthew carefully structured his Gospel in five sections: “When Jesus had finished all these words,” to show that the prophet Jesus was the New Moses (whose teaching was in five books). Jesus was not just repeating Moses, but “fulfilling” his teachings (Matt. 5:17), bringing it to its new Christian perfection. The antitheses are crystal clear: “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you…”

Not to hear and understand this New Covenant is to fail to hear and understand Jesus. It is to promote antichristianity. I suggest that the current American “Bible atmosphere” is permeated with this false idea.

As to the matter of believing in the right rather than wrong Jesus, note that Trinitarianism bypasses Jesus’ own insistence on the superlatively greatest command, the Shema, in Deuteronomy 6:4: “The Lord our God is one Lord,” repeated in Mark 12:29. Trinitarianism adds two more Gods and makes a fully human Jesus impossible. Your friends who attend Trinitarian churches will not be told that the official creed under which they assemble says that “Jesus was man but not a man” and that Jesus had “a beginningless beginning.”

We are “up against” this difficulty: “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil” (Ecc. 8:11). A love of the truth remains, however, the only way to salvation (2 Thess. 2:10). God Himself says that He has remained silent (Isa. 42:14), but the demands of the prophet Jesus remain the basis of our relationship with God and Jesus.

The key to Jesus being the human Son of God is this:  Psalm 110:1 is massively quoted and alluded to in the NT.  In that oracle the one God YHVH addresses the lord of David, i.e. ADONI, my lord. 
This “my lord,” ADONI, is a non-Deity, human figure, all 195 appearances of ADONI.

Jesus as ADONI, David’s and our lord is now at the right hand of God. That “right hand” man is said to be “the man of Your right hand” (Ps. 80:15-17). This is “the Son of Man [the human being] whom you have made strong for Yourself” (v. 15).   This fits too with Psalm 8 and gives us the destiny of Jesus and of us (vv. 3-8). Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes this destiny for the human, Son of Man Jesus, now at the right hand of God, as in Psalm 110:1. “We do not YET see all things subject to him” (Heb. 2:8). This gives complete clarity to the Messiah as human. Daniel 7:13, 14, 18, 22, 27 (“obey them, the people of God”) fills out the same information in relation to the coming Kingdom, which is the heart of the saving Gospel first preached by the prophet Jesus and the Christians (Mark 1:14, 15: Luke 4:43; Acts 8:12).

The above was taken from
The Prophet Jesus by Sir Anthony F. Buzzard

Some editing has been done.

Can the Same Single Line Begin at Two Different Points? by Anthony Buzzard

 A very significant theological school has long protested the notion that one can preexist oneself. That school has asked its opponents to explain how such a thing is even imaginable. How can you be before you are!? I think that many students of the Bible have not thought this issue through, and it is the task of educators to invite reflection. It is reflection which is so significant that it will determine our view of who Jesus really is.

I maintain that the NT says, if one looks at the forest first, and not just certain isolated trees in John and Paul, that Jesus is the human Messiah promised by the Hebrew Scriptures. He is the Son of God promised for a time future to David
(2 Sam. 7:14-16; note the future tenses). The son of David is raised up “after David” and thus does not exist before! If this is not the first premise of all Christology, we might as well discard Scripture as the foundation of our faith. Is it unreasonable to insist that David’s son, who is also to be God’s Son, is younger than David, his ancestor?

The whole point of the Messiah is that he is a member of the human race, not God Himself and not an angel. He is an expression of the One God — His image, yes, but still a member of the human race. The profound truth in all this is the amazing thing God has chosen to do with a human being begotten personally by Him. It is the devil who keeps saying “Jesus is too good to be man or ‘mere man.’” The devil is the inveterate enemy of the human race. He has been relentlessly opposed to mankind as the pinnacle of God’s great creation. But if God so decrees — and He has —
a mediating human being can forgive sins and raise the dead, performing all sorts of miracles.
He can do this, as Jesus did, as the One God’s human agent and plenipotentiary.

I think that there is a great danger that Scripture on this point about the human Messiah Jesus is discarded. As I hope to show, this is what in fact happens when “orthodox” scholars write whole books to defend the ancient and classic Trinitarian idea that Jesus preexisted as the Son of God and then “assumed human nature” (the Incarnation, capital “I”). I maintain that one can only begin to get such a theory off the ground if 

1) one forgets who it was God promised as Savior throughout the OT;
2) one ignores the primary and clear Christology of Matthew and Luke, who brilliantly develop their Christology on the basis of the expectations and promises of the Hebrew Bible,
3) one does not critically inspect the whole concept of personal preexistence, and
4) one is willing to speak of two Persons who are God — a subtle polytheism.

Naturally enough I think that John and Paul did not overthrow the work of Matthew and Luke and thus agreed with them — and this they both say constantly — that Jesus is the Messiah. That is what the NT says plainly and constantly. That is their common confession, and it is chaotic for me to imagine that Paul disagreed with Luke, his companion, or that John who knew of the Synoptic gospels set out to contradict their clear teaching about the origin of the Son of God, the Messiah.

Yes, the origin of the Son as the Greek text has it in Matthew 1:18, the genesis of the Son, his beginning. Remember that according to mainstream churches the Son is not supposed to have a beginning at all. He has always existed! That is the umbrella teaching (the Trinity) under which some readers are gathering.

The same person cannot begin from two different points. Can the same single line begin at two points? The same person cannot be six months younger than his cousin (Jesus was six months younger than John the Baptist) and at the same time billions of years older. I think it impossible for the son of David, which Jesus must be, to be also the creator of David, or even the ancestor of David. Such mythology is not much less amazing than the fictions of The Da Vinci Code.

The notion that Jesus preexisted his own begetting in Mary (please think long and hard as to how this could be!) and was thus active and vocal during the OT period contradicts the plain statement in Hebrews 1:1-2 that God did not until the NT period speak through His Son. I don’t know how language can more clearly exclude the Trinitarian idea that the Son was in fact active and speaking in the prophets, appearing visibly as an angel or as a man. Yet this contradiction of Hebrews 1 is the view of the earliest church fathers, as is well known. It became the foundation of later Trinitarianism.

Yes, the early church fathers and apologists plainly declare that it was the preexisting Son who spoke throughout the OT period, beginning by speaking to Adam. In so doing they are telling us that they were imagining a different, pre-human and therefore non-human Jesus. You just cannot preexist yourself. You cannot be pre-human and human without being two persons. A son cannot be begotten, i.e., come into existence, if he is already in existence. Oh, he might be “morphed” into an embryo, but that is a curiously pagan idea, much more akin to reincarnation.

Trinitarian scholar A.T. Hanson refers to the problem “which it seems so difficult to make sense of, a personal preexistence of Jesus Christ and a glorified humanity belonging to the risen Christ.” He candidly admits that “there is thus in the prologue to the 4th Gospel nothing that demands a doctrine of a preexistent person called Jesus Christ, only of the preexistent Word of God.” Dr. Colin Brown is even more assertive on this point:

“To read John 1:1 as though it said ‘In the beginning was the Son’ is patently wrong.”

The same Dr. Colin Brown, seasoned systematician at Fuller Seminary, says correctly, “to be called Son of God in the Bible means you are not God.”

...

This gives away a great clue. The church fathers were mistaken in their claim that the Son of God spoke constantly in the OT period. Hebrews denies this. Hanson picks up on another important fact, and as a Trinitarian is puzzled by it:

“The puzzling fact is that the synoptic gospels, which as publications are later than Paul and contemporary with Hebrews, do not exhibit any tendency to elaborate a doctrine of preexistence.”

In other words, if the synoptics are offering the faith to the public in the later NT period, how come they say nothing at all about a pre-historic existence of Jesus as Son of God? How is it that they exclude a pre-human Jesus altogether? Hanson, I would think, is on the verge of giving up his Trinitarianism. He concedes that “the historical evidence that in fact Jesus of Nazareth was conscious of his Divinity and remembered his pre-incarnate state is totally insufficient.”

I suggest that the whole theory of the Son existing as a conscious person before his birth is unwarranted and has led to a deluge of conflict and division in the faith, not to mention some martyrdoms and violent excommunications. Neither the angel Jesus nor the eternal Jesus is the Jesus of the Bible. There is no God the Son in the text of Scripture. But there is the uniquely begotten one Son of God, the human Messiah.

This whole concept of personal preexistence was an import from Greek thinking which invaded the Church by 150 AD. Adolf Harnack, the “prince” of church historians, was right that the entire orthodox dogmatic system is based on the false premise found in II Clement (9:5): “Jesus Christ being first spirit became flesh.” This contradicts Paul flat in I Corinthians 15:46 where he says that the [life giving] spirit of Jesus was not before Adam, but the other way round. Adam came first, then the second Adam. Of the mistaken idea of II Clement Harnack rightly says:

“This is the fundamental, theological and philosophical creed on which the whole Trinitarian speculations of the Church of the succeeding centuries are built and it is thus the root of the orthodox system of dogmatics.”

Those dogmatic decisions bind church members to this very day.

Let us
1) think about what we mean when we say “preexistence,” and
2) listen carefully to Matthew and Luke and see if they describe the assumption of human nature by an already conscious Person living in heaven.

Preexistence: Albert Reville, professor of the history of religion, wrote:

“The fact is that the two ideas — preexistence and Virginal birth — cannot be reconciled. A Preexistent person who becomes man reduces himself, if you will, to the state of a human embryo; but he is not conceived by action exterior to himself in the womb of a woman. But conception is the point at which an individual is formed, who did not exist before, at least as an individual.”

Scripture says that the Son of God was conceived (the mother’s part) and begotten (the action of the Father).

Listen to Professor Mackay on the extraordinary difficulty involved in preexistence as a concept at all:

“It is best to begin with the problem of preexistence, not only because there are linguistic difficulties here, but because it leads directly into the main difficulties encountered in all Incarnational and Trinitarian theology. As soon as we recoil from the suggestion that something can preexist itself, we must wonder what exactly preexists what else, and in what sense it does so.”

“It does not take a systematician of any extraordinary degree of perspicacity to notice how exegetes themselves are the unconscious victims in the course of their most professional work of quite dogmatic (that is, uncritical) systematic assumptions.”

I think this is absolutely right. Prince of church history, Adolf Harnack, agrees:

“The miraculous coming into being of Christ in the virgin through the holy spirit and real preexistence of Christ mutually exclude each other. Later, and in fact very soon, people were admittedly forced to think of them as compatible.”

Pannenberg makes our point well:

“Jesus’ virginal birth stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the Christology of the Incarnation of the preexistent Son of God…[According to the virgin birth] Jesus first became God’s Son through Mary’s conception. [Preexistence] is irreconcilable with this: that the divine Sonship as such was first established in time [as Matthew and Luke teach]. Sonship cannot at the same time consist in preexistence and still have its origin only in the divine procreation of Jesus in Mary…[Matthew and Luke] teach that from his birth onward Jesus has been God’s Son, because through his birth he is God’s Son…Preexistence cannot be connected without contradiction conceptually with the original motif of the virgin birth…The contradiction of preexistence and Virgin Birth the patristic church apparently did not notice…How was such a transformation of the original faith in Christ possible? How did Jesus, exalted through the resurrection from the dead, become the preexistent divine being descending from heaven? This remains to the present a chief problem of the history of the primitive Christian tradition.”

The problem is resolved by believing what Matthew and Luke have to say, and of course Acts and Peter, and then agreeing that Paul and John did not contradict them. The Son of God did not exist literally until he was supernaturally begotten in Mary. 
Luke 1:35 deserves to be shouted from the housetops. Pastors should be urged to give full-length expositions of this verse.

Virginal begetting, the supernatural coming into existence of the person Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God, is the unquestioned teaching of Matthew and Luke. It is a hopeless task to try to read a doctrine of Incarnation into them. This can only be done by destroying their testimony. Until recently the clear teaching of Matthew and Luke as having nothing to say about preexistence has been widely accepted. Now recently amazing efforts are being made to make Matthew and Luke believe in a preexisting Son.

...

This is really an amazing phenomenon. That statement of Gabriel provides the Bible’s main key to the status of Jesus as Son of God. Few verses actually unpack themselves with the clarity of Luke 1:35. Few verses actually interpret themselves. But this one does. Gabriel and Luke here tell us exactly how, why, when and where the Son of God was begotten. They provide a biblical definition of Son of God as applicable to Jesus. It was “precisely for this reason” (dio kai), i.e. the creative miracle in Mary, that the “holy thing to be begotten is the Son of God.” Matthew is no less clear that the genesis (Matt. 1:18) of Jesus is found in the miraculous begetting which is to occur “in Mary” (1:20). To beget means in Greek and English to cause to come into existence. To come into existence means you are not in existence already. Language has no clearer way of telling us this. Matthew has rehearsed the word “beget” some 40 times in his first chapter. He has called the Messiah son of David and son of Abraham and then proceeds to tell us how the Son of God came into existence, was begotten, in Mary (1:20), not through Mary. It was the Gnostics who first said that Jesus came through Mary, preexisting himself in some mystical way. Orthodoxy, with its notion of a preexisting Son, is in fact harboring a subtle Gnostic tendency. Harnack recognized what has happened. He spoke of the “Gnostic leaven” which orthodoxy never got rid of.

It is the paradox of all paradoxes then that the Nicene Creed actually anathematizes any who say that “before he came into existence he was not in existence.” The creed therefore excommunicates Matthew and Luke — and Paul in Galatians 4:4 and John in I John 5:18 (not the KJV). Paul speaks of the Son as “coming into existence” from a woman. And John speaks of a point in time when the Son was begotten, i.e. brought into existence (gennetheis).

No wonder that the very candid and celebrated Roman Catholic commentator on the birth narratives, Raymond Brown, confesses that Luke 1:35 “has embarrassed many orthodox theologians since in preexistence Christology a conception by the holy spirit in Mary does not bring about the existence of God’s Son. Luke is seemingly unaware of such a Christology [he was no Trinitarian]. For Luke conception is causally linked to divine Sonship.”

Dunn is right with us on this point. Dunn incidentally has now given up belief in preexistence even in John’s Gospel. “Luke is more explicit than Matthew in his assertion of Jesus’ divine sonship from birth (1:32, 35). But here too it is sufficiently clear that it is a begetting, a becoming, which is in view, the coming into existence of one who will be called, and will in fact be the Son of God, not the transition of a preexistent being to become the soul of a human baby, or the metamorphosis of a divine being into a human fetus…Luke’s intention is clearly to describe the creative process of begetting…Similarly in Acts there is no sign of any Christology of preexistence.” No Incarnation, according to Luke!

Godet is quite clearly in line with Luke: “By the word ‘therefore’ the angel alludes to his preceding words: he will be called the son of the Highest. We might paraphrase it: ‘And it is precisely for this reason that I said to you…’ We have then here, from the mouth of the angel himself, an authentic explanation of the term Son of God, in the former part of his message. After this explanation Mary could only understand the title in this sense:
a human being of whose existence God Himself is the immediate author. It does not convey the idea of preexistence.”

...

The Christology of the Synoptics is a barrier to all speculation about a Jesus who does not originate in the womb of his mother. Thus the human Jesus is established and emerges as a credible model for human spirituality as well as the chosen instrument for human salvation as the lamb of God, so constituted by God Himself. God, rather than councils, should be allowed the freedom to choose what sort of Savior is adequate to the task. I thank Him that He graciously appointed a member of the human race as mediator, savior and judge. “Every High Priest is selected from among men” (Heb. 5:1), not from among angels, and certainly God cannot be a High Priest to Himself.

If the Savior has to be God, it is hard to see how the immortal God can die (when God declares that He is immortal, I Tim. 6:16) and how even a created preexisting holy angel, who also has immortality, can do the job. Only a human being who is mortal can die as Savior for the sins of the world. All the later complex divisions of the one Person Jesus into two, will not answer this point.

...

Thus the precious son of David was turned into a cipher. Trinitarians were committed to the view, inevitable once the Son preexists, that Jesus was “man” but not “a man.” Who is willing to defend this view when in the future Jesus inspects what we have been teaching about him? Happily in our times voices of protest have arisen from many quarters (cited in our book The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound). Notably J.A.T. Robinson of Cambridge who remarks, “John is as undeviating a witness as any in the NT to the unitary monotheism of Judaism.” And from Professor Caird of Oxford, who warns us to beware of any theory which tries to make the God of Judaism into more than one Person:

“The Jews had believed only in the preexistence of a personification. Wisdom was the personification, either of a divine attribute, or of a divine purpose, but never a person. Neither the fourth Gospel nor Hebrews speaks of the eternal Word or Wisdom of God in terms which compel us to regard it as a Person.”

They knew this at Qumran also when they wrote “By God’s knowledge everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, God established by His purpose, and apart from Him nothing is done” (I QS XI.11). And Philo said of Moses, who preexisted in the plan of God according to Jews, that he was “by divine foreknowledge the logical embodiment of the Law” (nomos empsychos). No wonder then that John could think of Jesus as the embodiment of grace and truth — God’s expression.

Finally, this from Roman Catholic professor Roger Haight in his mammoth Jesus Symbol of God:

“Once Logos is hypostatized [i.e. made to be a Person before the birth of Jesus] one has the problem of a second God.”

That says it all. And if polytheism is a problem, we had better take note.

I remind you that no one reading the eight English translations before the KJV would have been misled into reading “All things were made through him [the Son].” They read “all things were made through it [the word].” Only under the influence of the Roman Catholic Rheims version did the English Protestant versions change the pronoun to introduce a preexisting Son.

To make sense of the God of Scripture we must return to that unitary God of Jesus, the Father who in Jesus’ words is “the only one who is truly God” (John 17:3), the God of Jesus as well as of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The above is a series of excerpts from the original article which can be found here.