Angel of the Lord

The word Angel found numerous times in the scriptures simply means 'messenger' and can either refer to a heavenly entity who delivers a message from God or a human messenger.

[8][9] In the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) Hugh Pope writes: "The earlier Fathers, going by the letter of the text in the Septuagint, maintained that it was God Himself who appeared as the Giver of the Law to Moses.

It was not unnatural then for Tertullian [...] to regard such manifestations in the light of preludes to the Incarnation, and most of the Eastern Fathers followed the same line of thought."

[11] This would be consistent with the usage of ancient spokesmen: After an introductory phrase, they used the grammatical first person point of view in stating the message of whomever they represented.

Later, copyists inserted the term mal’akh before the divine name to modify the narratives, in order to meet the standards of a changing theology which more strongly emphasized a transcendent God.

If the term mal’akh is removed from these passages, the remaining story fits neatly with a "default" format in Near Eastern literature in which the deity appears directly to humans without an intermediary.

[13][14] The early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, identify the angel of the Lord as the pre-incarnate Christ whose appearance, i.e. Christophany, is recorded in the Hebrew Bible.

So, when early Christian authors like Justin Martyr connected Jesus with God’s word and that word, in turn, with the angel of the Lord, they were not inventing from scratch...[16] In the time of the early Church, "an essential ingredient of anti-Jewish polemics" was identification of the Angel of the Lord as Jesus Christ.

[17] In Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, Louis Goldberg writes: "The functions of the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament prefigure the reconciling ministry of Jesus.

In this way, they link the prince of the people of Israel mentioned in Daniel 10:21 to the firstborn called "the Son of God" because he was created with qualities like those of his Father.