Is Jesus called “God” in Titus 2:13?

Interesting article — thank you.

Have you seen this short piece by J. Christopher Edwards?
http://www.tyndalehouse.com/Bulletin/62=2011/07_Edwards8.pdf

Thanks for a good article. Of course I agree with you. I tend to go with the third option where Jesus is God’s glory. Interestingly enough, Jimmy Dunn does too in his “Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?”

The tradition which dominated the first few centuries which became Trinitarian orthodoxy. Also distinguished between father and son . PSalm 110v 1. Is not an issue for ‘orthodoxy’ then or today. Here are some comments from Dan Wallace re the phrase in question here……………… The terms “God and Savior” both refer to the same person, Jesus Christ. This is one of the clearest statements in the NT concerning the deity of Christ. The construction in Greek is known as the Granville Sharp rule, named after the English philanthropist-linguist who first clearly articulated the rule in 1798. Sharp pointed out that in the construction article-noun-καί-noun (where καί [kai] = “and”), when two nouns are singular, personal, and common (i.e., not proper names), they always had the same referent. Illustrations such as “the friend and brother,” “the God and Father,” etc. abound in the NT to prove Sharp’s point. The only issue is whether terms such as “God” and “Savior” could be considered common nouns as opposed to proper names. Sharp and others who followed (such as T. F. Middleton in his masterful The Doctrine of the Greek Article) demonstrated that a proper name in Greek was one that could not be pluralized. Since both “God” (θεός, qeos) and “savior” (σωτήρ, swthr) were occasionally found in the plural, they did not constitute proper names, and hence, do fit Sharp’s rule. Although there have been 200 years of attempts to dislodge Sharp’s rule, all attempts have been futile. Sharp’s rule stands vindicated after all the dust has settled. For more information on Sharp’s rule see ExSyn 270-78, esp. 276. See also 2 Pet 1:1 and Jude 4.

The tradition which dominated the first few centuries which became Trinitarian orthodoxy. Also distinguished between father and son . PSalm 110v 1. Is not an issue for ‘orthodoxy’ then or today. Here are some comments from Dan Wallace re the phrase in question here……………… The terms “God and Savior” both refer to the same person, Jesus Christ. This is one of the clearest statements in the NT concerning the deity of Christ. The construction in Greek is known as the Granville Sharp rule, named after the English philanthropist-linguist who first clearly articulated the rule in 1798. Sharp pointed out that in the construction article-noun-καί-noun (where καί [kai] = “and”), when two nouns are singular, personal, and common (i.e., not proper names), they always had the same referent. Illustrations such as “the friend and brother,” “the God and Father,” etc. abound in the NT to prove Sharp’s point. The only issue is whether terms such as “God” and “Savior” could be considered common nouns as opposed to proper names. Sharp and others who followed (such as T. F. Middleton in his masterful The Doctrine of the Greek Article) demonstrated that a proper name in Greek was one that could not be pluralized. Since both “God” (θεός, qeos) and “savior” (σωτήρ, swthr) were occasionally found in the plural, they did not constitute proper names, and hence, do fit Sharp’s rule. Although there have been 200 years of attempts to dislodge Sharp’s rule, all attempts have been futile. Sharp’s rule stands vindicated after all the dust has settled. For more information on Sharp’s rule see ExSyn 270-78, esp. 276. See also 2 Pet 1:1 and Jude 4.

The sustained effort to detach Titus 2:13 from the New Testament’s highest Christology collapses when the verse is read with the ordinary tools of Greek syntax, with close attention to the epistolary context, and with awareness of how the earliest Greek readers and writers understood it. Granville Sharp’s first rule is decisive: when a single article governs two singular, personal, non-proper nouns joined by καί, the two nouns identify one and the same referent. Modern research has confirmed Sharp’s observation in some eighty New-Testament instances with no exceptions; the construction is equally solid in the wider Koine corpus. Daniel B. Wallace’s linguistic survey therefore judges the rule “inviolable” in the New Testament and applicable to Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 precisely because θεός and σωτήρ are common, singular, personal nouns and because no proper name stands between them. Robert M. Bowman’s re-examination reaches the same conclusion and adds that alleged counter-examples dissolve once Sharp’s original restrictions are honored.

Grammatical demonstration is reinforced by the local texture of Titus. In every occurrence of ὁ σωτὴρ ἡμῶν within the letter except 2:13 the noun carries its own article (1:3; 1:4; 2:10; 3:4; 3:6); the sole omission at 2:13 signals that the article before τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ also governs σωτῆρος, exactly as Sharp’s rule predicts. Attempts to evade the rule by treating σωτήρ as a quasi-proper name cannot survive this distributional evidence, nor can the proposal that θεός is itself a proper name, for Koine writers regularly conjoin θεός with other common nouns in the same construction and never treat it like κύριος Ἰησοῦς as a fixed designation.

The surrounding discourse, far from loosening the identification, tightens it. Every use of ἐπιφάνεια in the Pastorals refers to the personal appearing of Christ (2 Thess 2:8; 1 Tim 6:14; 2 Tim 1:10; 4:1, 8). To read 2:13 as an epiphany of the Father distinct from Christ would force the Pastorals to introduce, without warning, a second eschatological figure precisely where the author elsewhere knows only one. Likewise, the Old-Testament resonance of ἐπιφάνεια links divine manifestation and salvation (e.g., Ps 118 LXX), so that when Paul speaks in the same breath of epiphany and of the λύτρον accomplished by Jesus, the contextual logic requires that the One who appears in glory is the One who earlier “gave himself for us”.

The alternative in which Ἰησοῦς Χριστός apposes not θεός and σωτήρ but δόξα fares no better. It offends the normal rule that apposition follows immediately and without an intervening conjunction; worse, it leaves the following relative clause, “who gave himself for us,” dangling without a grammatical antecedent, for it is nowhere predicated of the abstract noun “glory”. Bowman therefore shows that all such maneuvers derive not from the text’s syntax but from prior dogmatic scruples that Paul “could not have” called Jesus God.

Historical reception confirms the grammatical verdict. Christopher Wordsworth’s survey demonstrated that Greek fathers, debating Arianism when precision mattered, consistently cited Titus 2:13 as evidence that the apostle names Christ both “great God” and “Saviour”, whereas Latin writers, whose language lacked the article, displayed understandable variety. Patristic unanimity is unintelligible if the construction were genuinely ambiguous.

Finally, the semantic coupling of θεός and σωτήρ in the Greco-Roman world underlined to first-century ears that a savior worthy of cultic veneration must be divine. The Pastorals exploit that discourse, but they do so in a uniquely Jewish-Christian idiom in which the One God of Israel is confessed as the One who saves in Jesus Christ. Moehlmann’s classical study of the formula θεὸς σωτήρ showed that, for contemporaries, calling someone “Savior” already implicated deity; to apply both titles to Jesus in a single Sharp construction therefore communicates nothing less than his full inclusion in the identity of the God of Israel.

In sum, the syntactical form, inner context, wider usage of key terms, and early reception converge. The phrase τὸν μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ identifies one subject. The blessed hope of the Church is the advent in glory of Jesus Christ, who is both “our great God” and “our Savior”. Far from distorting the narrative texture of the New Testament, this reading arises naturally from its language and secures the coherence of its apocalyptic proclamation: the God who once appeared in grace now appears in splendor, and his name is Jesus Christ.