The Messiahist view of Acts 20:28.

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Acts 20:28 Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of god that he obtained with the blood of his own Son. New Revised Standard Version

Acts 20:28 prosecete eautoiV kai panti tw poimniw en w umaV to pneuma to agion eqeto episkopouV poimainein thn ekklhsian tou qeou hn periepoihsato dia tou aimatoV tou idiou. Westcott-Hort text from 1881

AimatoV is just a different usage of blood; idiou is “of his own” while aimatwn is the plural genitive “of blood.”

So, “the blood” possessed by “his own” but idiou is in the genitive, there is no object in the Westcott-Hort text.

Genitive: it’s the case generally of possession.

Example: ARXH KTISEWS, Creation’s beginning; it’s the beginning possessed by the group of creation. Basically, think of it like an English ‘s.

So, hAIMA is “blood” while hAIMATOS is “of blood”

Chester Beatti, dates 2nd Century. Acts 20:28 “...To shepherd the ekklesia of the master and of god, which he acquired through his own blood.”

Byzantine Majority Acts 20:28 prosecete oun eautoiV kai panti tw poimniw en w umaV to pneuma to agion eqeto episkopouV poimainein thn ekklhsian tou kuriou kai qeou hn periepoihsato dia tou idiou aimatoV

World English Bible Acts 20:28 Take heed, therefore, to yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood.

Therefore, the true God does not bleed, but rather it is the master/lord (referring to the Messiah) who bled on the cross/stake.

Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an authority on the history of the New Testament, the early church, and the life of Jesus. And I will be quoting from his book ‘Misquoting Jesus’ concerning Acts 20:28, pages 113-114 (I have a recommendation of a few of his books on my Homepage):

And it happens in a passage in Acts 20:28, which in many manuscripts speaks of “the Church of God, which he obtained by his own blood.” Here again, Jesus appears to be spoken of as God. But in Codex Alexandrinus and some other manuscripts, the text instead speaks of “the Church of the Lord, which he obtained by his own blood.” Now Jesus is called the Lord, but he is not explicitly indentified as God. Alerted to such difficulties, Wettstein began thinking seriously about his own theological convictions, and became attuned to the problem that the New Testament rarely, if ever, actually calls Jesus God. And he began to be annoyed with his fellow pastors and teachers in his home city of Basel, who would sometimes confuse the language about God and Christ—for example, when talking about the Son of God as if he were the Father, or addressing God the Father in prayer and speaking of “your sacred wounds.” Wettstein thought that more precision was needed when speaking about the Father and the Son, since they were not the same. Wettstein’s emphasis on such matters started raising suspicions among his colleagues, suspicions that were confirmed for them when, in 1730, Wettstein published a discussion of the problems of the Greek New Testament in anticipation of a new edition that he was preparing. Included among the specimen passages in his discussion were some of these disputed texts that had been used by theologians to establish the biblical basis for the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. For Wettstein, these texts in fact had been altered precisely in order to incorporate that perspective: the original texts could not be used in support of it.

Thanks Bart D. Ehrman, for the nice explanation of the corruption of Acts 20:28 among many, many other passages. If you, the reader, want to know what these other passages are, buy his book.

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