Halakha requires that secondary rules be placed around the primary law, to reduce the chance that the main law will be broken. As such, it is common religious practice to restrict the use of the word "Adonai" to prayer only. Almost all Orthodox Jews avoid using either Yahweh or Jehovah altogether on the basis that the actual pronunciation of the tetragrammaton has been lost in antiquity.
Early Christian writers, such as Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century, had used a form like Yahweh, and claim that this pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was never really lost.
Light Definition and Meaning - Bible Dictionary
The name corresponds to the Greek spelling Iesous , from which comes the English spelling Jesus. Some Quakers refer to God as The Light. Abba Father is a common term used for the creator within Christianity because it was a title Jesus used to refer to God the Father. Despite the Godhead doctrine, which teaches that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are three separate, divine beings, many Mormons mainstream Latter-day Saints and otherwise, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints view their beliefs as monotheist since Christ is the conduit through which humanity comes to the God the Father.
The Book of Mormon ends with "to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the eternal Judge of both the quick and dead. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that God has only one distinctive name, represented in the Old Testament by the tetragrammaton. In English, they prefer to use the form Jehovah.
Scriptures frequently cited in support of the name include Isaiah That is my name", Psalms Deus is the Latin word for " god ". Bog is the word for God in most Slavic languages. The term may have originally been a borrowing from the Iranian languages. Also used is the vernacular Haneunim , the traditional Korean name for the God of Heaven. Liberal-minded Korean Protestants also use Haneunim, but not Sangje, and conservative Korean Protestants do not use Sangje or Haneunim at all but instead use Hananim, which implied the oneness of the Almighty distinct from the mythological implications they see in the term Haneunim.
Tagalog -speaking Filipino Catholics and other Christians use Maykapal glossed as "creator" — an epithet originally applied to the pre-colonial supreme deity Bathala — to refer to the Christian godhead in most contexts.
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When paired with another term for God e. Among the Nguni peoples of Southern Africa , he is known as Nkosi roughly glossed as "king". This name is used in Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Allah —meaning "the God" in Arabic—is the name of God in Islam. Besides these Arabic names, Muslims of non-Arab origins may also sometimes use other names in their own languages to refer to God, such as Khuda in Persian , Bengali and Hindi-Urdu. Tangri or Tengri was used in the Ottoman Turkish language as the equivalent of Allah.
He is Allah, other than whom there is no deity, Knower of the unseen and the witnessed. He is the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful. Exalted is Allah above whatever they associate with Him. Whatever is in the heavens and earth is exalting Him. And He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise. Chapter 59, Verses In Tasawwuf , the inner, mystical dimension of Islam, Hu , Huwa depends on placement in sentence , or Parvardigar in Persian are used as names of God.
The sound Hu derives from the last letter of the word Allah , which is read as Allahu when in the middle of a sentence. Hu means Just He or Revealed. The word explicitly appears in many verses of the Quran:. The Sanatana Dharma focuses only on formless God, as is described in the most authoritative texts such as the Mundakopanishad and Mandukuopanishad. Some of the popular names for these Deities in Hinduism are:. Additionally, most Hindu gods and some revered saints have a collection of names. Each collection of names is known as that god's Ashtottara Shatanamavali, which is chanted during pujas or prayer.
Jainism rejects the idea of a creator deity responsible for the manifestation, creation, or maintenance of this universe. According to Jain doctrine, the universe and its constituents soul, matter, space, time, and principles of motion have always existed. All the constituents and actions are governed by universal natural laws and an immaterial entity like God cannot create a material entity like the universe.
The commonly held theology that Jesus is God naturally leads one to believe that the proper way to render the verse is the one which is most popular. The Greek article is often translated the , which is the English definite article, but it can have a range of meanings that can be quite different from those found in English, and require context to interpret. In interpreting this verse, Colwell's rule should be taken into consideration, which says that a definite predicate which is before the verb "to be" usually does not have the definite article. Ernest Cadman Colwell writes:.
The absence of the article does not make the predicate indefinite or qualitative when it precedes the verb, it is indefinite in this position only when the context demands it. The context makes no such demand in the Gospel of John, for this statement cannot be regarded as strange in the prologue of the gospel which reaches its climax in the confession of Thomas [Footnote: The question is whether Colwell's rule helps in interpreting John 1: It has been pointed out that Colwell's rule has been misapplied as its converse, as though it implied definiteness.
Wallace argues that the use of the anarthrous theos the lack of the definite article before the second theos is due to its use as a qualitative noun, describing the nature or essence of the Word, not due to Colwell's rule. The rendering as "a god" is justified by some non-Trinitarians by comparing it with Acts However, it was noted that the Hebrew words El, HaElohim and Yahweh all referring to God were rendered as anarthrous theos in the Septuagint at Nahum 1: Moreover, in the New Testament anarthrous theos was used to refer to God in locations including John 1: Therefore, anarthrous or arthrous constructions by themselves, without context, cannot determine how to render it into a target language.
Wright and Tim Ricchuiti [42] reason that the indefinite article in the Coptic translation, of John 1: Many such occurrences for qualitative nouns are identified in the Coptic New Testament, including 1 John 1: Moreover, the indefinite article is used to refer to God in Deuteronomy 4: It is quite in harmony with the Hebrew tone of this Gospel to do so, and it can hardly be that St. From the Biblos Interlinear Bible: From Scrivener's Textus Receptus It is often translated into English as " Word " but can also mean thought, speech, account, meaning, reason , proportion , principle, standard, or logic , among other things.
It has varied use in the fields of philosophy , analytical psychology , rhetoric and religion. Of the canonical gospels, John has the highest explicit Christology. In mainstream Christian understanding of John's Christology, the conception that Jesus Christ is the Logos has been important in establishing the doctrine of Jesus' divinity, as well as that of the Trinity , as set forth in the Chalcedonian Definition. The debate about the nature of Christ from the first century through the Council of Chalcedon in CE must be understood in light of the pervasive world view of Platonic dualism.
Platonism is normally divided into four periods: Some scholars of the Bible [ who? Each of these two groups had its own history associated with the concept of the Logos, and each could understand John's use of the term from one or both of those contexts. Especially for the Hellenists, however, John turns the concept of the Logos on its head when he claimed "the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us" John 1: Gordon Clark translated Logos as "Logic" in the opening verses of the Gospel: Following Jesuit translations of the 18th century, most modern Bible translations into Chinese use the word " Tao " [59] in John 1: In Unitarianism there are other interpretations of John 1: In the commentaries on John 1 by Lelio Sozzini Zurich, c.
The passages in the New Testament referring to the Logos were explained by Fausto Sozzini as relating to the foreknown work of Christ as the author of the new creation , not as relating to the "old" Genesis creation. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. John bore witness about him, and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me. Solutions intermediate between the positions of Antioch and Alexandria were constantly proposed. Two particular solutions became so controversial…. The basic sources for the historical development of Christology are the New Testament, containing the foundational Christian writings; the creeds of Christianity, especially those from the first five centuries; and the reflections of theologians.
Clearly, those three are interrelated, with theological reflection occupying a pivotal place. Theologians explicated what they understood to be the meaning of both the New Testament and the creeds. In so doing they played a crucial role in the formulation of the Christological creeds. The argument has also been put forward that the liturgy of early Christianity played an incisive role in the formulation of the creeds, including those of Christology. Reflections about Jesus dominated Christian discourse from the apostolic age onward.
Most of that Christological reflection took place in the eastern Mediterranean, where it utilized the language Greek and concepts of Classical antiquity. The Christological debate is quite unintelligible without an awareness of how it was shaped by that context. Since there seem to be echoes of Classical concepts in Scripture, it is not surprising that Christian theologians appropriated them in order to explicate the meaning of Christian affirmations.
Two notions in particular played important roles: Logos theology, which was formulated by the Jewish philosopher Philo , sought to describe how God is active and effective through the divine will, reason, and power. That activity was named the logos Greek: Christian reflection understood Jesus as the manifestation of the divine will, reason, and power and therefore applied the concept of the logos to him—dramatically so in the opening of The Gospel According to John. There are intimations of the concept of preexistence both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the thought of Classical antiquity.
The good thus existed with God before any earthly appearance, which is merely the transition from hiding to manifestation. The concept of preexistence is related to the notion that there is nothing that God does not know, that there is neither past nor future with God, and that God is the Lord of History. In the New Testament, notions of preexistence, which Christian exegetes have found expressed in the Hebrew Bible, are applied to Jesus. The Letter of Paul to the Philippians 2: According to the apostle Paul , Jesus is voluntarily obedient in his descent from heaven , which is followed by his return there.
The four Gospels portray Jesus as having had a sense of mission much like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and they declare that Jesus saw himself as the decisive revelation of God to his people. That revelation consisted of his teachings, both about himself and about his role. Throughout the more than 2, years of Christian history, there has been what might be called a dual emphasis with regard to Jesus: The earliest Christological reflection focused on the titles given to Jesus in the apostolic writings.
Those titles, some of which were used more widely than others, derived in one way or another from the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus was also described as judge and as high priest as in the Epistle to the Hebrews. It was used in the liturgy, however, and the iconography of the lamb, generally depicted with a cross , became one of the foremost Christian symbols. Another title used in the New Testament, but only sparingly afterward, was Servant of God.
Despite its clear prominence in the Gospels, the term Son of Man enjoyed less-extensive usage. In Jewish Scripture e. The term does not appear in the writings of the apostle Paul, and the Letter of Barnabas The appellation Son of God seemed consistent with the notion of the eternal preexistence of all that is good. In its broadest sense, the notion of the Son of God denoted a special relationship to the Father: That affirmation marked the beginning of the orthodox Christian assertion that fully equated the Son of God with God, the Son. Christian scholarship traditionally argued that the Jewish expectation of the messiah at the time of Jesus focused on a political figure who would bring redemption to Israel through political might.
Scholarship since the midth century, however, has challenged that view, insisting that the picture was far more complex. The most widely used title for Jesus was Lord Greek: Kyrios , undoubtedly because for non-Jews it was more comprehensible than Christ; the former term also implied adoration. As indicated by the preceding discussion, in the apostolic age the titles and appellations given to Jesus were often used in a guarded and tentative way, as in the Second Letter of Clement written c. Ignatius of Antioch died c.
Until the middle of the 2nd century, such terms emphasized two themes: The first theme makes use of concepts drawn from Classical antiquity, whereas the second relies on concepts characteristic of ancient Jewish thought. Strictly speaking, Christology should be distinguished from Trinitarian theology, though the two subjects are closely related.
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Christology, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between the human nature of Jesus and his divine nature. Trinitarian theology is a prerequisite of Christological discourse, a fact reflected in debates between Christian theologians beginning in the 3rd century. The Arian controversy, for example, was not about Christology but about a Trinitarian issue: The basic contours of the controversy provided the context for the Christological debate that began once the church had concluded that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit formed a single Godhead and that the Son was fully divine.
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The remaining issue concerned how the divine nature of Jesus was related to his humanity. The richness of metaphor in the apostolic writings helped shape the early Christian understanding of Jesus. That extensive vocabulary was first given a coherent framework in the 2nd century, when Ignatius of Antioch rejected adoptionism to argue that Jesus was the conqueror of death, in whom both the divine and the human were present.
According to Ignatius, Jesus was spirit and flesh, created and uncreated, suffering and nonsuffering. As spirit, Jesus was one and equal with the Father; as flesh, he was subordinate and altogether obedient to the Father.