As salamu 'alikum wr wb (May the Peace, Mercy of Allah and Blessings be upon you)
Is Christ Jesus God? Part 3
Christian misunderstanding of the Semitic terms "us" and "our"
Genesis 1:26 "Then God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."
Now there are some problems with assuming the above text to be trinitarian.
1) First a person can not deduce how many individuals 'us' and 'our' is unless there is enough internal evidence to determine such a number.
2) If one were to interpret it as the tri-theist suggest it would mean dialogue and conversation and than there would be more than one god.
Simple understanding of the Hebrew usage of 'we' and 'us' would be beneficial for those desperate to cling to an untenable position.
In the Holy Qur'an chapter 7 verse 160
"We divided them into twelve Tribes (or nations). We directed Moses by inspiration, when his people asked him for water: "Strike the rock with your staff" ":out of it there gushed forth twelve springs: each group knew its own place for water. We gave them the shade of clouds, and sent down to them manna and quails, "Eat of the good things We have provided for you" " but they rebelled; to Us they did no harm, but they harmed their own souls."
"It is a feature of literary style in Arabic that a person may refer to himself by the pronoun nahnu (we) for respect or glorification. He may also use the word ana, (I) indicating one person. or the third person huwa (he). All three sytles are usedin the QUr'an, where Allah addresses the Arabs in their own tongue." Source: (Fataawa Al-Lajnah Al-Daa'imah, 4/143)
Comments: The words us, we and our are used in Semitic tongues as a plurality of respect not of number.
An example is that you may own a Nike shoe store and be the only owner of the store. A person comes and ask you, "Excuse me do you sell Air Jordan's here?" You can reply simply "We don't carry that. I'm sorry" In English this is called the 'royal we'.
Another look at Genesis 1:1
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (KJV)
Genesis 1:1 Bereisheet barah Elokim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz. (Hebrew Transliteration)"Christians point to the name of G-d used in this first verse of the Bible: Elokim. This word ends in "im," which is an indication of plurality. Obviously, there must be a plurality to G-d, right? Absolutely not! If the meaning of this word were to be plural, then the verbs would agree, also being in the plural. The word for "created" is "barah," in the singular. "
This is taken from a Jewish web site in which they answer Christian claims made about their faith. I would encourage anyone interested to take a look at what the Jews have to say in response to the Christians here: http://www.messiahtruth.com/trintorah.html
The learned Jewish man makes a great point. In English it is easy to miss the importance of verb tense since in our case it is always in the singular.
If I say Jack ran to the bus you can see that Jack is singular and ran is a verb tense for the past.
If I say Jack and David ran to the bus you can see that Jack and David are together but the word ran the verb tense is past but still singular.
In Hebrew it does not work like that. In the case of Genesis 1:1 The trinitarians would have a very strong point since the word for God (Elokim) is plural if the verb created is singular not plural.
I think this wraps up nicely the section in this series yesterday and today that focus on the fact that there are no trinitarian 'proof text' in the Bible. Now what usually happens is that the seasoned trinitarian also knows this is a lost case. So what he/she may attempt to do is to establish the proofs for the deity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Father and than bring these disparate passages together and than collate or juxtapose the passages together.
From this point they will than superimpose their theological musings into the text to come up with the trinity doctrine.
Tomorrow Allah-willing I will continue on in this series dealing with passages from the Qur'an and the Bible that show that God is absolutely one. I will also show how the Qur'an gives clarity to the oneness of the creator on a very important point.
Than we will jump right into it going over various Biblical text that clearly refute tri-theism!
May Allah open your hearts and your minds and pour his mercy and love into your hearts. May we all be guided to what the creator loves for us. Ameen!
