[A]s to the declaration of our Lord, recorded in the Gospel of St. John:90 “Before Abraham was, I am.” Why, it may he asked in the outset, why, except for a purpose, have our translators departed here from their usual mode of rendering the exact Greek word so often used by our Lord? Here it reads, “I am”—literally, and without supplement; in other places, “I am he”?91 Why not here as there—“I am he"—the Messiah purposed in the counsels of God long before Abraham had being? This is the interpretation of Grotius, and I believe the true one. Trinitarians are accustomed to insist that our Lord meant to declare that he was the “I AM” of the Old Dispensation, who revealed Himself to Moses by the name or appellation, “I am that I am”; but Dr. J. Pye Smith tells us92 that “the words” there “are in the future tense, ‘I will he that which I will be,’ Exodus 3:14; and most probably it was not intended as a name, but as a declaration of a certain fulfilment of all the promises of God.” While Mr. Carlile of the Scotch Kirk says:93 “I do not mean to rest any argument on the expression I am, taken by itself. It occurs repeatedly in this chapter, and is translated I am he.”
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Author: Frederick A. Farley
Keywords: Trinity, Trinitarian, trinitarianism, Deity of Jesus, Deity of Christ, Jesus is God, Jesus is divine, Divinity of Jesus, divinity of Christ
Bible reference(s): John 8:58
Source: Unitarianism Defined (Boston: Walker, Wise & Co., 1935).
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