Exhibit #A : Jesus Christ used the Divine Title

"Unless you believe that I AM, you will die in your sins," Jesus told a stunned audience in John 8:24.  The Jews were already angry with him.  Now they were furious.  He claimed to be the "light of the world," to be the way, the truth, and the life, and to have life in himself.  Now He dared to use the words of the Septuagint, εγο ειμη, and apply them to himself!  

To understand how Jesus' words were taken, we must turn back to the Old Testament.  In Exodus chapter 3, Moses struggles with the idea of proclaiming a largely unknown God to the Israelites, who are now familiar with hundreds of Egyptian deities under whom they are in bondage.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had heretofore gone only by a generic "Elohim" (pl., God), or by the affectionate title, of "Adonai," which loosely translates "My Lord."  Now that Israel was in her most desperate hour, she needed a God she could count on to save her.  That God must have some kind of identity.  

"I am that I am," the Lord replied, inscrutable as ever.  "Tell them that I AM sent you" (3:14b).  

The name I AM, or YHWH in Hebrew, appears 6,828 times in the Old Testament.  It was originally pronounced "Yahweh" by Hebrews, but later altered to read "Jehovah", so that good Jews would not take the Lord's sacred name in vain by not pronouncing it at all.  Most English translations of the Bible render YHWH as "The LORD," using small capitals to distinguish this title from "Adonai."  

During the time of the Hellenistic empire, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, in order to accommodate the growing population of Greek-speaking Jews, as well as Gentile converts to Judaism.  This translation, called the Septuagint, consistently translated the cryptic "YHWH" as "Εγο ειμη."  

Εγο, means "I".  (From it we get the English "ego" and its derivatives.)  

ειμη means "am".  It is the first verb you learn as a Greek student.  

Verbs change their form depending on the tense; ειμη is in the present active indicative form.  Εγο ειμη translates directly into English as "I am."  Any other rendering would require a different form of the Greek verb.  

Εγο ειμη is the same Greek expression used in the Septuagint, when God tells Moses that "I AM what I AM," (εγο ειμη o εγο ειμη).  

So, in John 8:58, Jesus again quoted the very words that his scholarly audience knew and loved: "I tell you the truth, before Abraham was, εγο ειμη!"  

At those words, the Jews picked up rocks to stone him, a reaction to what they considered blasphemy, that he, a "mere man" in their eyes, would make himself out to be... not just "a god", but YHWH Himself!  

What are the implications of this idea today?  As I have written before, the idea that Jesus would claim to be YHWH God would be more than blasphemy if it were untrue.  It would be unspeakably evil, because in so doing, he insisted that we trust in him for our eternal salvation.  In John 8:24, He warned that "Unless you believe that εγο ειμη, you will die in your sins."  Yet, if His followers believed in Him as YHWH God, and He was not... then they surely WOULD die in their sins as idolaters.  Only one who is evil would toy with your eternal salvation.