Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 146:584 (Oct 1989)
Article: An Apologetic Study of John 10:34-36
Author: W. Gary Phillips

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BSac 146:584 (Oct 89) p. 405

An Apologetic Study of John 10:34-36

W. Gary Phillips

Chairman, Department of Bible and Philosophy
Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee

Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” (John 10:34–36).

One writer states, “I have never heard a sermon preached on this text; it seems to be like ‘Why callest thou me good? There is none good but One,’ one of those submerged rocks that orthodoxy instinctively steers away from.”1 Many have used this passage to support their view that Jesus was a misunderstood itinerant rabbi whose followers deified him.2

Precisely what was Jesus saying? Was He rescinding previous claims? Was Jesus shrewdly using the Jews’ own gullibility against them, flinging the provincialism of their naive bibliology or their rabbinic hermeneutics back in their teeth? Was He disassociating Himself from what He termed “your law?” Was He proving logically that He is God? (And if so, to whose satisfaction?) How should readers interpret His statements?

Theologically, evangelicals glory in the implications of “Scripture cannot be broken” for bibliology, and delight in the Christology of the surrounding verses: “I and the Father are one” (v. 30), “the Father is in Me, and I in the Father” (v. 38). But they may be tempted to sever these affirmations from the argument of verses 34–36 .

BSac 146:584 (Oct 89) p. 406

It is disconcerting to turn to standard works and find that, though these verses are popular in discussions of bibliology, the passage is not treated Christologically. It is not mentioned in the theologies of Berkhof, Chafer, Erickson, or in the tome of H. P. Liddon; it is dealt with only in passing by Berkouwer, Buswell, Hodge, Shedd, and Warfield.3 Possibly the reason for such seeming disregard among conservative scholars is that the passage contains a matrix of interwoven problems that must be chiseled away before beginning to mine what may be, after all, suspicious ore. Will the final result be an explanation, or something that will itself require an explanation from a theological framework?

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