Book Review: Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ

Larry Hurtado is known principally for one thing in the guild of biblical studies, namely, his work on the origins of the worship of Jesus among early Christians. His claim to fame up to this point has been his well known, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. Although he is American by birth (in fact he comes from a charismatic background), he has taught at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland for at least the last 15 years.



It is fairly clear to me that the driving force behind Hurtado's long standing quest is Wilhelm Bousset's extremely flawed reconstruction of the development of early Christian worship of Jesus (Kyrios Christos, 1913). More than anyone else, Hurtado has thoroughly undermined Bousset's thesis, which was basically that the worship of Jesus was a phenomenon that didn't take place until Christianity came under the infuence of Greco-Roman religion. Bousset believed that the earliest Christians did not view Jesus as divine in any way.

I suppose we can appreciate the climate of Bousset's day by referencing another early 20th century work by William Wrede: The Messianic Secret (1901). In this book, Wrede suggested that Jesus had never claimed to be the messiah and that Mark's gospel was forced to explain how Jesus could have been the messiah if he never claimed to be the messiah. Wrede's answer was that Jesus had consistently told those around him to keep his messianic identity a secret until after the resurrection.

The "political" climate in 1900 was to distance Jesus from Christianity, to claim that Jesus himself was just as we would want him to be and that the problem was the corruption of his pure faith by what would become Christianity. Sound familar?

Of course there are other explanations for why Jesus might not have gone around publicizing himself as messiah, not east the fact that the Jews understood the messiah to be a military figure that would free Israel from Roman domination.

In any case, this post is about the introduction to Hurtado's recent Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. The title deliberately echoes the title of Bousset's book,
Kyrios Christos--Lord Christ. Hurtado's goal is to do exactly what Bousset did but to do it correctly. "In this book my aim is to offer a full-scale analysis of the origin, development, and diversification of devotion to Christ in the crucial first two centuries of the Christian movement" (2).

Hurtado has three basic claims to make in his book: 1) a noteworthy devotion to Jesus emerged phenomenally early in the circles of his followers, 2) that devotion had an unparalleled intensity for which there is no clear analogy in the religious environment of the day and 3) that referencing him as divine was expressed and articulated firmly within a context of Jewish monotheism.

One of the strengths of Hurtado's work is that he is primarily concerned with the practice of Christ-devotion even more than with the "creedal" or belief statements of the early Christians. For him, the real test for whether the early Christians considered Jesus divine was in their devotional practice, their actions in worship.

One section of his introduction has to do with addressing potential assumptions his readers might have. He wants to get the elephant in the room out into the open. For example, he confesses that he is "guilty of having Christian faith" (9). Yet he does not think his faith in Jesus as the Christ stands or falls on when the early Christians came to believe Jesus was divine. Clearly, he is at least trying to be dispassionate about his study rather than "cook the books" because his faith needs to come out with a particular conclusion on when the worship of Jesus emerged.

He also rejects out of hand (and knowing his conservative charismatic background, one can imagine that there is a good deal of personal story behind these rejections) both the liberal and conservative sense in the past that "the theological and religious validity of traditional Christian devotion to Christ would be called into question if it were really treated as a historical phenomenon" (5). The "liberal" has said in the past, if we can show that the beliefs and practices of Christianity unfolded in a historical process, it is false. The "conservative" of the past responded in kind--Christianity did not unfold in a historical process, it is true.

But Hurtado responds, "this devotion manifested itself within history and therefore, in principle, can be investigated in the ways we inquire about any other historical person, event, or movement" (7).

Hurtado also addresses what in the late 90's/early 00's has been called the "new religionsgeschichtliche Schule" (the new history of religions school). He refers here to the spate of studies engaging the question of Jewish monotheism including people like Jarl Fossum, Margaret Barker, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Richard Bauckham, Loren Stuckenbruck, Maurice Casey, etc. He will deal with some of them directly in chapter one.

For now he briefly summarizes Bousset's view as part of the earlier "history of religions" school. That school, based largely in Göttingen, Germany in the early 20th century, looked for the origins of Christian belief in Greco-Roman religion. By contrast, the so called new history of religions school (at this point I am doubtful that the label will stick) looks for the background (rightly) in Judaism.

Two points were key to Bousset's unfolding of early Christian faith: 1) the treatment of Jesus as divine was key to all subsequent developments and 2) this did not take place until the second stage of Christian development, which took place on Hellenistic Gentile soil. Hurtado strongly disagrees with the second point.

He sketches the basic contours of his critique of Bousset at the end of the introduction:

1. Bousset's thesis was based on a "son of man" Christology. In his view, "first stage" belief in Jesus saw him strictly having a future role in the judgment. It did not see him currently as Lord, which Bousset believed was a belief that emerged in a Gentile context.

Hurtado counters that we have no evidence of the earliest Christians using "son of man" as a matter of confession. In the gospels, only Jesus himself uses this title of himself and it does not create any controversy. It is never a creedal matter in the New Testament.

2. The idea that "Lord" emerged as a designation for Jesus on Gentile soil is absurd. After all, 1 Corinthians 16 uses the Aramaic marana tha (Our Lord, come) without need for translation. It does not arrive, as Bousset argued, from Greek mystery religions.

3. Bousset's distinctions between "Palestinian Jewish," "Hellenistic Gentile," and "Pauline" have long been debunked as simplistic. The classic work here is Martin Hengel's Judaism and Hellenism, which showed that Palestine had been Hellenized for 300 years before Christ from the time of Alexander the Great. The old Jewish thought/Greek thought has been passe for almost 40 years now. There were Gentile believers who were far more "conservative" than Paul and there were Jewish believers who were far more liberal than your average God-fearer.

So Hurtado's game begins.