William Horbury's Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ

I know I'm jumping around a little like a ping pong ball, but I do plan to close most of my loops eventually. I was very excited to receive my copy of William Horbury's Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ last week. The thesis/conclusion of the book would seem to be that "messianism constituted a major impulse toward the worship of Christ" (150).

This is in fact my thesis as well and one that I promised to follow up on in the final footnote of a JBL article I had published several years ago. I'm hoping to have a couple pieces come out next year that will at least skirt the topic. So I was excited to know someone else had explored this angle recently... and of course as usual a little nervous that I was too late to say anything on the topic.

Larry Hurtado has this to say of Horbury's book: "his proposal does not seem to me to take adequate account of the phenomena involved in Christ devotion" (28 n.2). I don't think my critique is coming at Horbury from quite the same angle as Hurtado, but I've read enough of Horbury's book to think it is not an adequate account of the origins of Christ devotion.

I mainly read the second half of the book this past week. Horbury knows that he is going against the majority opinion by supposing that there was a more prevalent and more common sense of messianic expectation than is the current sense. In chapter 3, "The Coherence of Messianism," he is also bucking the current wisdom on how prominent a sense of the messiah as a heavenly figure might have been at the time of Christ.

The current majority opinion is that it was not until around the time of Christ that the idea of a heavenly messiah rose. Prior to that time, those who had a conception of the messiah looked for a human, military figure to lead Israel to political independence. He tries to argue that in fact this idea of an angel-like, pre-existent messiah was actually quite widespread at the time.

I must say that I didn't connect with Horbury's arguments to the contrary at all. It is possible that the problem is mine, that I have not taken the time and effort to penetrate his dense writing to the genius it hides. I don't think it's intentional--some writers like Kierkegaard intentionally wrote obscurely so that only the enduring would get to the gems. Loser.

But until I am persuaded differently, Horbury goes on my list of people whose assumptions about Second Temple Judaism are so different from mine that I am not likely to gain much from reading them.

On the other hand, there may be some nuggets about the ruler cults of the time that I may want to return to. The final chapter is titled, "Messianic Origins of the Cult of Christ." As before, his paragraphs are filled with dense references and parallels in both Jewish and pagan literature.

But in the end I did not find the kind of specificity of explanation--or clarity of proposal--that I was expecting. Basically, Horbury's thesis is that there were already Jewish traditions relating to an angel-like messiah. Jesus plays into them.

The good I take from Horbury is a reminder of three key messianic texts that do picture a heavenly messiah:

1) 4 Ezra, where the messiah exists in some way in heaven from the creation. But he is also human and dies after a 400 year reign. But it dates to around AD 100.

2) The Parables of Enoch, which have very relevant Son of Man traditions as well and in which the messiah is worshipped. But it may very well date to the 1st century AD.

3) Sibylline Oracle 5--once again, late first/early second century AD.

I remain unconvinced that the idea of a heavenly messiah had any prevalence at all at the time of Christ or that the title Son of Man was well known at the time in reference to a heavenly figure. My sense that Jesus' royal, exalted to heaven status constitutes the major presupposition of his worship turns out to be quite different from Horbury's.