Twilight of the gods

Unitarian Roman Montero has attempted another response to me:

https://theologyandjustice.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/where-is-hays-argument/

So tell me what your argument is for asserting that Jesus is alluding to the Shema.

Several reasons. For instance:

i) Suppose Jesus said "The Father is one". Even unitarians would recognize an allusion to the Shema. After all, they think the Father is Yahweh. So "the Father is one" would be equivalent to "Yahweh is one". How could that fail to evoke the Shema? If so, what about "the Father and I are one"?

ii) You have the reaction of the Jews, who prepare to stone Jesus (v31). What would provoke that reaction? If they sense that Jesus has made himself the Lord of the Shema, that would explain their indignation. That's reinforced by v34: "we are going to stone you for blasphemy because you, being a man, make yourself God." If they take his statement in v30 to reference the Shema, where he audaciously incorporates himself into the Shema, their reaction makes perfect sense–since they think he's just a man. By contrast, the insipid unitarian interpretation would not provoke that reaction. 

iii) Finally, I don't interpret this pericope (Jn 10:22-39) in isolation. Rather, this is a resumption of an ongoing debate between Jesus and the Jewish establishment, beginning in chap 2 (e.g. vv19-21). It escalates to a breaking point in passages like 5:17-18 and 8:55-59, as well as here, where, not coincidentally, Jesus makes Yahwistic claims. So I construe Jn 10:30 as another case in kind. 

Now, I understand Jesus and his enemies were not speaking Greek; but I don’t have the original Aramaic text and neither do you, what we have is what John gave us.,,Claiming that ἕν in John 10:30 means something different then εἷς in the Shema (the former being conceptual and latter being individual) only proves my point.

i) Needless to say, Deut 6:4 doesn't use εἷς. Deut 6:4 was written in Hebrew, not Greek. This is Montero's predicament. He keeps leaning on a distinction that only exists in Greek, yet Deut 6:4 wasn't written in Greek, and the conversation in Jn 10:22-39 wasn't conducted in Greek.  

ii) It's hardly unusual for NT speakers and writers to paraphrase OT verses or offer interpretive summaries. 

The question was about whether or not Jesus was the Christ, not whether or not Jesus was Yahweh Incarnate.

Montero is constitutionally unable to engage the argument. What does it mean to be messiah? What are the properties and prerogatives of messiah?  

If verse 30 is an allusion to the Shema, how does it fit with the rest of the text? The entire point of the rest of Jesus’s answer is that he perfectly obeys his father and does the work of his father—because his father’s sheep have been given to him by the Father. This makes sense if the question he is answering is the actual question asked him i.e. are you the Messiah—it makes no sense if he decided to answer another question about whether or not he is Yahweh incarnate.

i) Where does the imagery of Jn 10:27-28 come from? Let's compare two passages:

27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand (Jn 10:27-28).

7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice... (Ps 95:7).

Notice the specific parallels. Jn 10:27-28 is directly modeled on Ps 95:7. Yet in Ps 95, Yahweh is the shepherd. This means Jesus is reprising the role of Yahweh. So vv27-28 are a prooftext for the deity of Christ.

ii) Of course, a unitarian will say, no, that just means Jesus is Yahweh's agent. But that strategy is self-defeating. If a mundane agent can assume all of the roles of Yahweh, then there's no differential factor distinguishing the creature from Yahweh. Everything the OT says about Yahweh, to differentiate Yahweh from false gods, is take over by messiah. 

Here’s the point, instead of just making a claim, for goodness sakes—Make an actual argument for your claim.

Montero wouldn't know an argument if it slapped him in the face.

Let’s move on to the accusation and Jesus’s response. You assume two things here: that the opposers are claiming that Jesus calls himself Yahweh, the text doesn’t say that, it only says that they accuse him of making himself god (which can mean a number of things)

It can't mean number of things in the context of stoning a speaker for blasphemy. 

and that their accusation is valid—there is absolutely no reason we should think that the opposers understand Jesus correctly, or are making a valid accusation; all over the place in John the opposers misunderstand Jesus and slander him, why should we assume that in this one place they are perfectly lucid, rational and correctly understand Jesus and are correctly applying the Jewish law? It makes no sense to just assume that.

I don't just "assume" that. Rather, I notice how often Jesus reinforces their interpretation of his claims and actions. 

As for the title “son of God”. First of all, they considered it blasphemous for him to invoke Psalms 110:1 and Daniel 7:13–14 for himself, not to call himself the “son of God” (if that were a divine title, then all the angels, King David, King Solomon, Adam, and so on would all be Yahweh). 

That's so simplistic:

i) It's necessary to distinguish between the connotations of the singular and the plural. 

ii) It's necessary to take the context into consideration. How do normative characters and foil characters in the narrative respond?

iii) It's necessary to consider how usage varies from one Bible writer to another. For instance, John doesn't call Christians "sons of God". John reserves that appellation (in the singular) for Jesus. He uses a different term for Christians. 

Second of all the text doesn’t tell us why it is blasphemous, it could be any number of things: if could be that he used the divine name out loud (which would explain why Matthew replace Mark Yahweh, not with κύριος, as would be normal, but with δύναμις), it could be that they thought it blasphemous that someone who they considered unrighteous or unworthy would call himself God’s messiah, it could be that it was (gasp) a false charge, it could be any number of things.

Montero is casting decoys hither and yon to deflect attention away from the fact that the Gospels specify the words and actions of Jesus that his enemies found blasphemous. 

Also, what I consider to be blasphemous or not (Jesus being a god, in the sense of a divine creature) has no bearing on what the opponents of Jesus considered to be blasphemous.

I appreciate his concession that unitarian interpretations have no bearing on the issue at hand. 

So how about Jesus’s reply. So in your reading is this supposed to be a historical account? If yes then how on earth does you reading make sense? So Jesus, in your reading, responded to a charge of blasphemy by citing Psalms 82, and then saying “those to whom the word of god came were called ‘god’” and in saying that he was citing the prologue of John—which didn’t exist yet, by the time it was written almost everyone in that conversation would have been dead—but then saying that they are called gods? I still don’t understand your exegesis, where in Jesus’s reply is any thing regarding the not-yet-written prologue? 

i) Montero suffers from severe reading incomprehension. Did I say Jesus was citing the Prologue? No. In fact, I denied that. 

ii) What does "the word of God" refer to in this verse? It's a standard hermeneutical procedure to look for comparable usage in the same book when you wish to know what an author meant by a particular phrase. And, indeed, the Prologue is an interpretive guide for readers. That's why the narrator introduces his Gospel with that programmatic statement. 

iii) By contrast, people within the historical account found out who Jesus really is by seeing him and hearing him. They experience the truth of the Prologue. Is that such a foreign concept to Montero? 

Who are the god’s he is referring to? In Psalms 82 they are divine beings; to whom the word of God came (God was speaking to them in Psalms 82, it doesn’t matter who the text was written for, in the text God’s word came to them).

i) On one interpretation, Ps 82 is a satirical reference to the Canaanite pantheon. Polemical theology. 

On another interpretation, these are national guardian angels. That's a later Jewish gloss. A pious midrash. I think some Jews were uncomfortable with any suggestion that heathen deities exist. They had a tin ear for the satirical tone of Ps 82. 

On another interpretation, the "gods" are human (Jews). That's based in part on the fact that the "gods" in Ps 82 are mortal. However, in pagan mythology, the gods are not indestructible. Although they can't die of old age, they can be slain. 

ii) On the mythopoetic interpretation, what's the occasion that reference to the "word of God" harkens back to? In Ps 82, you have a contrast between the true God and false gods. And that fits the Christology of Jn 1, where the divine Logos is the creator of the world. The Creator God of Genesis. That's in opposition to pagan polytheism.  

And in the course of his public ministry, people discover what readers of the Prologue know. Jesus is Yahweh Incarnate. 

iii) The Prologue is paradoxical in the sense as it was written after the fact, yet in another sense the reader already knows something participants in the narrative do not, because, from the sequential viewpoint of the narrative, participants experience the past as future while readers experience the future as past. That's true of historical writing in general. We know how the story ends. But at the time, participants did not.  

iv) On the angelic interpretation, the Son is the Logos who made the angels. 

I’m getting quite bored of having claims thrown at me but no exegesis, no argument, not actual coherent reading of the text—let’s go there and then we can actually have a basis on which to discuss the meaning of the text. Once we do that, we can move on to other things, but you need to stop dodging the issue and actually give a proper exegesis and argument for your exegesis, otherwise you’re just playing pattycake and getting nowhere in getting to the bottom of John 10:24–39 … 

Montero is not my standard of comparison. I'm not writing for his benefit. He's just a foil.