My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me? What Matthew 27:46 Reveals
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Matthew 27:46 records Jesus crying out from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The verse poses a direct and simple question to Trinitarian theology: if Christ is God, who is he addressing? The Coptic priest’s response avoids this question entirely, answering a different question altogether — and in doing so, his own analogy inadvertently confirms the very conclusion he is trying to deny.
The Verse
Matthew 27:46 (ESV) “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”
The question the verse raises is not complicated: Jesus is addressing someone as “my God.” If Jesus is himself God — as Trinitarian doctrine teaches — then who is the “my God” he is calling out to? Is God calling out to God? Is God asking God why God has forsaken God?
The Priest’s Response and What It Actually Answers
The priest’s response addressed a question that was not asked. He devoted his entire answer to the question: Did the divinity separate from the humanity at the moment of the crucifixion? He answered:
The priest’s reframing of the question “This phrase does not mean that His divinity left His humanity, nor that the Father left the Son. It does not mean separation, but rather that the Father left Him to suffer. His divinity did not leave His humanity for a single moment or the blink of an eye. It was not a hypostatic abandonment, but a dispensational abandonment. He left Him to suffer, sacrifice, and pay, without separating from Him.”
Every point in the priest’s response — “no separation,” “dispensational abandonment,” “divinity did not leave humanity for a blink of an eye,” “not a hypostatic abandonment” — is an answer to a question that was not posed. The priest diverted the questioner from the actual theological problem to a secondary internal Christological question, and answered that secondary question at length, leaving the original question untouched.
The actual question is: who is the subject and who is the addressee in “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If Christ is God, then God is crying out to God. If Christ is not the same being as the Father — which the priest’s own answer implies, since the Father and Son are distinct enough for one to abandon the other even “dispensationally” — then the Trinitarian claim that God is one is placed under severe strain.
The Priest’s Own Analogy Proves the Point Against Him
The priest offered the following analogy to approximate the meaning of the abandonment:
The priest’s analogy “Let us suppose that a child was taken by his father to undergo surgery, such as opening a boil or an abscess. His father held him by the hand, and the doctor began to do his work, while the child cried out to his father, ‘Why did you leave me?!’ In reality, he did not leave him, but rather held him tightly, but he left him to the pain, and left him in love. This type of abandonment, without separation, we say it merely to approximate the meaning, and to compare with the difference.”
The priest said explicitly: “to compare with the difference.” But the analogy does not function as he intended. In his analogy, the child is not his father. The child and the father are two distinct beings who share the same human nature — but they are indisputably two separate persons. When the child cries “why did you leave me?” he is addressing a being who is other than himself. This is precisely the structure of Matthew 27:46. Jesus is addressing a being who is other than himself. The analogy confirms that God is not Christ — just as the father is not the child — and that the relationship between them is one of two distinct subjects, not one being speaking to itself.
The priest introduced this analogy to illustrate abandonment-without-separation. He succeeded only in illustrating distinction-without-identity.
The Admission of Bishop Raphael
The confusion the priest creates by evading the real question has a deeper reason: the honest answer requires admitting that Christianity is not a monotheistic religion in the strict sense. Bishop Raphael — a candidate for the papal throne — stated this directly:
Bishop Raphael — Admission on the Trinity and Monotheism “The mistake that Christians make without realizing it is because of the non-Christian culture that has entered our minds against our will. All day long, there are microphones that control non-Christian thought. You believe in monotheism against your will, but we believe in the Trinity. What is the difference between the two? I will tell you the difference: the Father is different from the Son, different from the Holy Spirit, but the three are one in — what? In essence.”
Bishop Raphael’s admission is significant: he acknowledges that Christians have been conditioned by monotheistic cultural assumptions they should resist, and that the Trinity is explicitly not monotheism. The Father is different from the Son. The Son is different from the Holy Spirit. They are three distinct subjects who share one essence. This is the honest formulation — and it is what the priest should have told the questioner from the beginning instead of evasion.
The problem this creates is not small. The Old Testament — which Christianity requires its adherents to accept — calls for strict monotheism, not the Trinity:
Deuteronomy 6:4 (ESV) “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
Isaiah 45:5 (ESV) “I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God.”
The Old Testament does not describe a God who is three distinct subjects sharing one essence. It describes one God who is one. This is where the theological tension the priest is trying to manage originates — and why his evasion in the face of Matthew 27:46 is structurally necessary to the system he is defending. To answer the question honestly is to admit either that Jesus is not God in the same sense as the Father, or that monotheism as the Old Testament presents it has been abandoned.
What the Verse Actually Establishes
The cry of dereliction is the human nature of Christ speaking, not his divine nature Some Trinitarian theologians argue that the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was uttered by Christ’s human nature, not his divine nature — and is therefore not a problem for the doctrine of Christ’s divinity.
This argument does not resolve the problem — it deepens it. If the human nature of Christ is speaking, then the human nature of Christ has a God above it. That God is the Father. But Christ’s human nature and the Father are both said to be members of the same Godhead. For one member of the Godhead to cry out to another member as “my God” — using the possessive — establishes a clear and directional distinction of status. The one who calls another “my God” is not equal to the one he so addresses. A being does not address another being as “my God” if they are of the same divine rank. Furthermore, if only the human nature is speaking and the divine nature remains impassive and unspeaking throughout the crucifixion, then what died on the cross was the human nature — a man — and not God. This means the redemption, on the priest’s own terms, was accomplished by a human death, not a divine one, which undermines the entire framework of unlimited atonement the priest invoked to defend the inseparability of the two natures.
Conclusion
The priest’s response to Matthew 27:46 is a deliberate evasion. He answered the question of whether the divine nature separated from the human nature at the crucifixion — a question no one asked — and left the actual question untouched: if Christ is God, who is the “my God” he addresses? His own analogy — the child and the father — confirms that two beings of the same nature are nevertheless two distinct beings, not one. Bishop Raphael’s admission confirms what the priest would not say: Christianity is not monotheism in the Abrahamic sense. The Father is different from the Son. They are three who are one in essence — but three distinct subjects. The Old Testament, which Christianity requires its adherents to accept, does not know this God. It knows only one Lord who is one. Matthew 27:46 does not require elaborate interpretation — it requires the honest answer the priest withheld.