Mark Moore posted a video on his YouTube channel, “EARLY GENESIS, THE REVEALED COSMOLOGY” titled, The “Sons of God” are NOT Angels or Spirit Beings.
His premise is to, “show you from the scriptures why this teaching that Angels are also the sons of God,” such as in the Gensis 6 affair, as I term it, “and that God has this heavenly family of divine beings and then there’s this earthly family that are also his sons: why that teaching is mistaken.”
He sets the stage by noting, “I can see why people would see…certain things in the Old Testament that point that way” and in order to cut off that fact from the get-go, he merely asserts, “the Jews of Jesus’ day and, and beyond, were confused by it” and further asserts, “they brought some ideas with them, I believe, from, from Babylon, from the captivity, and those ideas influenced the way they
saw things and the church mostly didn’t mess with that during its early history.”
This, that part of it was based on a subjective, “I believe.” Interestingly, considering that Daniel became, “ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon” (Dan 2:48) then why not believe that it was the Pagan Babylonians who got it from the Jews—and/or from the actual events themselves as they would have trickled down to them?
Mark Moore then states what I take to be a combo tactic: scare-tactic, genetic logical fallacy, and being vaguely generic This comes in the form of, “these old Jewish ideas that, frankly, were held by the factions of Jews that did not accept Jesus as Messiah.”
1) I term reference to, “old…ideas” an argumentum ad chronologicum since how long ago an idea was proposed doesn’t tell us anything about their accuracy.
2) That an idea was held by, “Jews that did not accept Jesus as Messiah” is a genetic logical fallacy since who held it doesn’t tell us anything about its accuracy: ought we reject monotheism since, after all, “Jews that did not accept Jesus as Messiah” held to it?
3) It obviously should not scare us to accept a view held by, “Jews that did not accept Jesus as Messiah.”
He notes, “in the church fortunately we have the New Testament to illuminate the Old Testament,” to which I will add and visa versa.
He begins his actual argument thusly:
I want to start with Hebrews. And you will see, and then we’ll go through the New Testament verses, and you’ll see that well, gee, there’s a conflict between what the New Testament says about Angels and their role and who the sons of God are and what this teaching tells me that these Old Testament verses seem to say and you’ll understand that there’s, there’s a paradox there and then we’re going to go through and try to resolve the paradox.
That strikes me as a misguided way to state what in linguistics terms would be noting that in any language, a word, phrase, term, etc. can refer to more than one thing and that ultimately, context determines meaning in any given usage.
Now, he notes:
I’m going to ask you to do something I’m afraid that’s, that’s a little difficult: I’m going to show a long passage on the screen, two long passages, and I’m going to do a voiceover so you will not have anybody here as a video, a talking head, but you’ll see the scriptures and we’re not going to flip from verse to verse with a bunch of narrative in between that tries to connect to things that that may or not may or may not really be connected.
But rather, we’re going to take you through the writer’s thought processes as he goes through a long passage of scripture.
And so, I would ask you to bear with me as we go through that process be like the Bereans who are more noble to study these things and see if they are so.
Now, I quoted that time wasting qualifier to point out that he starts reading thusly:
Let’s start with Hebrews, thank you, Hebrews chapter one starting with the fifth verse, “For unto which of the Angels said He at any time, ‘Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee’?
And again, “I will be to him a father and he shall be to me a son.”
The writer of Hebrews is quoting the Old Testament throughout this passage, he quotes the eighth Psalm, he quotes various Old Testament passages, and he’s asking his audience a rhetorical question…
I quoted the time waster just to show that he didn’t stick to his own rules, he interrupted the narrative within seconds in order to add, “a bunch of narrative in between that tries to connect to things that that may or not may or may not really be connected.”
In any case, Mark Moore continues thusly, “He’s basically challenged them, showing them the superiority of Christ to the Angels, saying that He is the Son: they are not. That’s really the whole point of Hebrews chapter 1.” See, he told you what to think about it rather than continuing to read. Well, of course Christ is superior to Angels: no one claims otherwise. The whole point of Heb 1 is not, “they are not” but rather, “they are not in the same way that Christ is.”
He is unique and uniquely authoritative so that God never told His Angels that they are His sons like unto how Christ is His only begotten Son—more on this to come.
Moore notes:
…in chapter 2 he expands that superiority to us…if it was obvious from the Old Testament that God was calling Angels his sons it would sort of ruin the point of this question…Job 38 he’s saying they’re the sons…but the writer of Hebrews is acting like no that’s not what they believed.
Let’s keep reading, “and again, when he brings in the first begotten into the world He saith, ‘Let all the Angels of God worship Him’ and of the Angels He saith, ‘Who maketh His Angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire.’”
He’s quoting all Old Testament verses here showing that Angels in the Old Testament had a lower station than the Son that that’s the whole point…
Again, that’s a non-issue.
As an important sidenote, he notes, “they’re ministering spirits” as he had quoted the one version he’s using but many versions rightly have it that they’re winds rather than spirits. Many people literally base their Angelology on that one word. And many versions have winds not due to flipping a coin but due to linguistic reasons, due to the demands of the Psalm’s context, and due to that Angels are described as looking just like human males and performing physical actions and without any indication that such isn’t their ontology.
Mark Moore continues with, “they’re a flame of fire but they are not the Son who is to be worshipped…he’s saying the Son has one position and these Angels have another, lower position…the Son is above the Angels,” etc., etc., etc.
He seems to be committing a category error as if the word son can only mean one thing, can only be defined in one way, can only be used to refer to one thing which isn’t the case no matter the language: ben, bar, son, etc.
Yet, he goes on and on and on to make this non-point time and again so we will fast forward—at this point, we may want to ponder if he denies that Christians are sons of God when, after all, Christ is God’s only begotten Son. If that reasoning fails, then so does denying that Angels are God’s sons: which they are by definition since they are God’s created beings.
He emphasizes:
…there is a distinction between the sons and the Angels and that is what this is saying they are ministering spirits they are sent forth to minister…Angels are greater and mightier in power than we are at this time but yet and we are made lower than them at this time…
At this point, he seems to be doing general Angelology so we will move on to when he gets back to the specific sons of God issue, which is with, “the people that are teaching you that God has this heavenly family of sons and they’re spirit beings and He has this earthly family of sons and they’re people:
they are not teaching you what the New Testament says about Angels and the sons of God.”
Well, speaking for myself: I don’t fall into such false dichotomies whereby sons of God can only ever only mean, “God has this heavenly family of sons” which Moore misidentifies as, “spirit beings,” or can only every only mean, “what the New Testament says” since both are the case given the contexts in which they are found.
Mark Moore then focuses on, “where Jesus is given a scenario” wherein, “‘a man takes a wife he dies his brother takes the wife the brother dies there’s another brother he takes the wife then he dies and goes on and on and they say in the resurrection whose wife will she be?,’ and Jesus says in all three
places [the synoptics] nobody’s, they’re not going to marry they’re not going to be given in marriage in the kingdom world to come, they will be like the Angels and some of might think well if we’re like the Angels then it feeds into” the Angel view of sons of God in certain contexts.
He elucidates, “Of the three [synoptic] passages, Luke is the one that makes this clear…chapter 20 verse 36” for which the KJV, which I will quote since he’s reading it, has, “Neither can they [“they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead”] die any more: for they are equal unto the Angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.” Oh, so then: being equal to Angels in being children/sons of God.
Moore even admits, “I have the it inter-linear, the Greek, English words below it…the King James translation…has children of God in it and children of the resurrection, the Greek word there is routinely translated son, that’s what it should be here son of God.”
Yet, that fact is inconvenient to his view so he goes on about, “if you translate it with the correct punctuation…it’s clear that being as like the Angels means being like the Angels in respect of: death does not apply to you anymore” and so, in short, he just ignores the point Jesus made, which Luke quoted, that makes the exact opposite point than Moore’s view makes and so he declares that humans being, “sons of God it is not connected to being like the Angels being
the sons of God, is not connected” even though we just saw that it is directly connected.
So, he plays the versioning and original languages card to abscond from what we just verified, “not every translation…I wanted to show you the Greek…the punctuation,” etc. and punctuation which, by the way, Greek manuscripts don’t have.
He then comments again on his perception that, “the New Testament has a very different view of what the sons of God is
than is being taught in the church today but the church is drawing from the Old Testament.”
This is just another case of a false dichotomy since the church is teaching both due to drawing from both and also drawing contextual distinctions. Meanwhile, Mark Moore expects us to believe that one phrase can only ever only mean one thing regardless of the context or historical understanding of it and so he must force sons of God only mean one single thing regardless of what he has to do to accomplish his eisegetical goal.
Time and again he urges us to move away from the Old Testament and only focus on the New: yet, why would we have to do that if sons of God only ever meant only one thing? He references that, “some of these teachers are when they make these claims and they spin this narrative” about that sons of God means (at least) two things and that such teachers rely on, “some things that maybe some Jewish people believed in the first century” and follows directly with some of his opt repeated scare-tactics, “Well, those were the bad guys, those are the guys who didn’t get it, those are the guys who were wrong, those are the guys who opposed Christ.” This is another logical fallacy since being bad, not getting it, and opposing Christ doesn’t necessarily mean that they were wrong about one of the usages of the term sons of God.
Rather, Mark Moore argues, “we want to listen to the apostles and we want to listen to the New Testament and what it has to say about Angels” and we did just that, especially in the case of Jude and 2 Peter 2 who set the time of their sin to pre-flood days and correlated it to sexual since which, again, fits the Genesis 6 affair.
And yet, during moments of clarity, he admits, “The book of job is the linchpin, is the key, because all the other references to the sons of God they’re ambiguous, they could be referring to people or they could be referring to Angels.” And so, he must find ways to get around the statements in Job.
But before getting to Job, he throws in another scare tactic, “sons of God are mentioned…only a few early in the bible, except for out of the mouth of the Pagan king in [the book of] Daniel. He says, “I see one that looks like a son of God,’ but that that is a Pagan talking…Pagans had a different view of the sons of God” and yet, the king rightly identified a distinction, and he was well on his way to accepting Daniel’s God—to whatever degree. In any case, most Christians seem to think that it wasn’t an Angel anyway but what is typically (and paradoxically if not incoherently) termed a pre-incarnate incarnation of Jesus.
He gets to that:
Job has the phrase sons of God in it three times where they seem to be spirit beings or Angels and in particular Job 38 verse 7. It is unequivocal that is talking about a scene before mankind, before humanity, and it says the sons of God there. And so what, what is going on with Job if Angels are not the sons of God, then why does Job have a several places which says sons of God that seem to be talking about Angels, and in one place unambiguously must be.
Maybe, maybe Genesis and Psalms and all those other places, maybe the use of sons of God is ambiguous but they take what is said in Job and they say see sons of God are Angels and then they shoehorn that view into all these other places in the Old Testament.
Well, appealing to an unambiguous usage to assist in understanding others isn’t shoehorning, it’s appealing to the greater context (in conjunction with the immediate context).
Now, Mark Moore argues that there are, “two problems with Job: one of them is…” now, it seems that whenever he is about to make a weak point, he prefaces it and follows it with a scare tactic which serves as an emotional distraction from remaining focused on the facts (I don’t claim this is a purposeful tactic since I can’t read his mind but it’s certainly his modus operandi—consciously or not).
In this case, it’s not about reading Job but about, first, “the Masoretic Text, that’s the one that’s in most of our western bibles, it was compiled from the 7th to the 10th centuries by Rabbis who are hostile to Christianity” which, again, doesn’t necessarily mean that we can ergo conclude that they manipulated Job 38:7 for whatever hostile reason.
Rather, behold, “for the first thousand years of the church we use the Septuagint and that is the Greek version of the Old Testament” and yet, some would argue that the Jews who translated it were influenced by Greek culture and mythology. Yet, that’s just another side of the scare tactic coin.
Mark Moore’s point is that Job 38:7 of the Septuagint has, “Angelos” for what the Hebrew has as ben Elohim and is commonly in English as sons of God. Moore doesn’t seem to consider that the translators of the Septuagint understood so very clearly that sons of God can refer to Angels that they just cut to the chase and rendered ben Elohim as Angelos.
Rather, he argues (in a looping circle) that the Septuagint was employed:
…for about the first 800 years or so: it’s still used by the Eastern Orthodox…do not agree the Masoretic Text, the one that is in most of our bibles now was not the Old Testament of the Christian church for the first seven or eight centuries or so it still is not the text used for the Old Testament in Greek and Eastern Orthodox churches they use the Septuagint which is the Greek translation of some Hebrew documents that we no longer have and but it was old the Septuagint…the Old Testament, the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the church for the first eight centuries and still is for the Eastern Church, we have the Masoretic Text but it was made much later by Rabbis who were hostile to Christians and after enough time had passed where they understood what needed to be fiddled with…
And that’s all within a paragraph or two with some of it repeating what he had just finished stating moments prior.
His take-way point is, “if the Septuagint disagrees with the Masoretic text” then you must go Septuagint because and not think, “where the Masoretic Text says sons of God…you would think, ‘Oh my goodness, that Pagan king of Daniel was right the sons of god must be Angels because there were no humans around at this time.’ Not so fast, the Septuagint doesn’t say sons of God, it says Angels…”
To make a very long and very complicated issue short: his argument is that the Septuagint manuscripts are older than the Masoretic so we must go with it. This is very complicated due to various reasons I’m not going to get into since it would required an entire essay of its own: the time of the translation of the Septuagint to the time of its earliest manuscripts, the time of the compilation (key point) of the Masoretic versus the date of the manuscripts which were used to compile it, etc., etc., etc.
Mark Moore concludes, “that whole [Angel view] doctrine is just, it’s probably what a lot of the Jews of the period believed but they were the bad guys, they were the ones who didn’t get it, they were the ones who were wrong, we do not need to take our cues on what to believe from them, we need to take it from the apostles and from the New Testament”—which is not a re-quotation of his earlier statement, it’s just the tail end of the scare tactic.
He follows that up by continuing an earlier loop which he couples with a scare-tactic:
…the text is disputed Job reads differently if you read the Septuagint versus the Masoretic Text…there’s one holy spirit inspiring the whole bible but Job, according to Job itself, was a man of the East: he was not part of the Hebrew tradition, he was not a part of the Exodus from Israel [I think he meant to Israel], he was not a part of the stream of Abraham and the call his calling out from her from Mesopotamia, he was not a part of the conquest and the books the five books of Moses, he’s a different cultural stream and we know God called Abraham out of that cultural stream.
They had they had messed things up, their ideas about God were not right, He did not want them to stay among them, He called Abraham out, and they had a different idea about who the sons of God.
Were I’ve already said it, I’ve already mentioned it, the Pagan king in Daniel referred to a son of God as a divine being because that’s what they believed the sons of God were.
When the Jews went into captivity, they picked up some of these ideas and took them out with them the people in the East believed this stuff because they had Pagan practices…
Mark Moore seems to have overlooked at least one key point: the Book of Job doesn’t have that scary Eastern guy Job stating what’s recorded in 38:7 rather, those are words that are quoted from a statement by God, “the Lord answered Job…”
Mark Moore notes, “my point is the Pagans believed that gods could have children” but doesn’t seem to consider that, again, they may have gotten such beliefs from the real events recorded in Gen 6.
Yet, he goes as far as declaring, “Job has a lot of terminology” from, “a different tradition…a man of the East…even if the original text in job did say sons of God it doesn’t have to mean what sons of God meant in the rest of the bible because Job is from a unique literary stream…different literary streams.”
And that was part of his closing statement.
Thus, all of this came down to: sons of God are never Angels because the Septuagint has Angelos in Job and it has a different usage in the New Testament and you should be scared of any other reading or view.
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