JESUS IS GOD

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, "I AM has sent me to you." (Exodus 3:14 NASV).

Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am." (John 8:58 NASV).

The Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament Scriptures into Greek.  At the time of the translation, three to two hundred B. C. Greek was generally the business language of the world; many of the Jews in the dispersion were losing the Hebrew language.  Seventy scholars in Alexandria were commissioned to do the translation.  Because of the dating, they certainly could not be accused of being Christian.  This is important to the translation and interpretation of John 8:58.

Islamists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and others cannot accept the fact that Jesus claimed Divinity.  They claim that Christian translators are perpetrating a fraud.  The problem for them is that the Septuagint translators translated the Hebrew into Greek in the same way that is written in the New Testament Greek Scriptures.  Even though Jesus might* have spoken it in Aramaic, John, the apostle, understood it and wrote it in the same Greek as Exodus 3:14.  Jesus quoted that Scripture.

Jesus is the eternal present.He did not say, "Before Abraham was, I was."  Rather, the original grammar is in the present tense, "I am."  Jesus quoted Exodus 3:14 as the Septuagint renders it;  He did claim to be God!  God has become flesh!  He is our merciful High Priest!  No one understands you like Jesus!

Our Father's Love,
Tom

*I'm pretty sure that for the most part, Jesus did speak Aramaic.  However, Jesus lived in a multi-lingual culture.  Jesus was raised in a village not far from a trade route on which the caravans traveled.  I'm pretty sure that he was conversant in several languages, but Greek was the business language of the world and many, many people spoke it.