I wanted to talk a little bit about Christophanies today. If you are totally ignorant of what a Christophany is, you can read this sickeningly basic primer. It is an appearance of Jesus Christ (or The Lord) on earth outside of the bounds of His historical physical life (in the Old Testament). Note that this does not include any appearances after His resurrection. He was raised bodily, not just in spirit.
Note that not all scholars agree that these appearances are the pre-incarnate Christ, but many do, and I tend agree with them. Many Christophanies are denoted by the use of the term "the Angel of the Lord" (malach elohim in Hebrew) to portray Christ, while at other times the term “an angel of the Lord” is used to portray angels or other beings. The word Malach in Hebrew, although translated into English as “angel”, actually means “messenger”. The title itself means "Messenger of God". That could, quite honestly, refer to a lot of things. Thus you do not necessarily get that these appearances are Christ simply from the title given Him.
The most important element in recognizing a Christophany for what it is (seeing that the text is referring to Christ and not an angel or other being) is to look at the text surrounding the appearance, the context. Never read just one Bible verse. If you do, you can come up with all sorts of weird stuff (much like journalists twisting the words of the people they interview by taking them completely out of context). When the text is talking about the pre-incarnate Christ, the being (malach) referred to is attributed things which we know from elsewhere in scripture only apply to God. Following are some examples of this (this list is by no means exhaustive):
