You have no business attributing motives or reasons to me or attempting to put me in the Gnostic camp.
You have yet to comment on why a version like the Vulgate would not use “theos” here. Or why the manuscripts that followed Aleph didn't use “theos” at 1 Tim. 3:16.
Keeping the trinitarian definition of God in mind placing “God” instead of “he” in this passage is impossible to make sense of. How could the Father be “justified in spirit” or the Holy Spirit?
Did Hort convince the translators of the ASV (1901) to use “he” instead of “God” in this verse or were they all Gnostics too? And what led Jerome to use which instead of God in his translation? He wasn't a Gnostic was he?
Clarke was without question a fine scholar but not the only one.
The Scriptures tell us that we must have not just knowledge but accurate knowledge so it behooves to seek out that accurate knowledge.
Well, I didn’t mean to attribute motivation directly to you other than what you have already explicitly expressed in your posts, and you most assuredly have openly expressed a strong dislike (perhaps hate was too charged a term) for the clear Trinitarian rendering of various passages, including 1 Tim 3:16. I’m not trying to read your mind. Just your posts.
It is also an objective fact that the Gnostic Valentinus and other with him were challenged by the same passages and deployed the same solutions as those you have repeatedly posted.
It’s not my fault that history makes your systematic effort to dismantle the deity of Christ so nearly identical to theirs. I am sorry if saying it upsets you, but I didn’t write history, and I didn’t construct the Arian theology that creates a greater and a lesser deity, and is therefore polytheistic, just like Gnosticism.
What is ironic to me is that I am coming more and more to realize, and this conversation has been very helpful in realizing it, that the Trinitarian solution to organizing the Scriptural data, so far from being a pagan derailing of primitive Christianity, was actually a robust and successful effort to protect authentic Biblical Christian monotheism from becoming corrupted by pagan Gnostic polytheism and angel worship.
You see, it was the Gnostics, not the Trinitarians, who gave in to the temptation to try and force-fit the Scriptural data into some finite model of human reason. But it was the Trinitarians who labored to preserve the teachings of Scripture as they stood, even if they could not be fully understood. That way was, and remains, the way of faith.
In any event, I am sorry if I offended you in any way. That was certainly not my intent. I am just being blunt about the extraordinary similarity I see between Arianism and Gnosticism. One would have to work very hard not to see the logical relationship there.
In that same spirit of sincere directness, I want to ask you a question, so that I can stop guessing and think more clearly. It may seem painfully obvious, but your about page doesn’t spell it out and I haven’t heard it directly from you, so I’m asking, do you believe and follow the teaching of the Watchtower Society?
Peace,
SR