From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 22 1995 - 17:57:38 EDT
At 2:17 PM 9/22/95, Mark O'Brien wrote:
>I see your point and the distinction you are making. You may well be right in
>drawing a distinction between claiming to be God and claiming to have the
>authority of God... I need to ponder that one for a while.
>
>Another passage come to mind... how would you interpret Peter's confession
>in Mt
>16:16?
"You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God." The Messiah is, of
course, God's anointed, and one of the major titles of the Davidic Messiah
from the time of the prophecy of Nathan in 2 Samuel 7 was "Son of God."
This by no means implied the Messiah's divinity, nor do I think that there
is any reason to assume that it does in Matthew's gospel. Here again I
think this is a matter of our wanting to read the Christological
assumptions of a later century into a text, which does not in and of itself
imply them.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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