The Worship of Jesus: The Spectrum of Positions

For some time, New Testament scholarship has debated the question of when the earliest Christians worshipped Jesus and what exactly that might mean. Wilhelm Bousset put forward the most influential hypothesis of the twentieth century, in which he argued that the worship of Jesus arose in the context of Greco-Roman religion in Paul's churches. The earliest, Aramaic-speaking believers, according to Bousset, did not worship Jesus.

In the post-Holocaust world, however, voices like Krister Stendahl, W. D. Davies, and E. P. Sanders began to undermine long standing views about the nature of "early" Judaism and early Christianity's relationship to it. The ripple effects of their re-examination has drastically impacted the study of Paul (the "new" perspective) and the historical Jesus (the "third" quest). Similarly, it has brought intense scrutiny on Bousset's understanding of the "parting of the ways," so called, between Christianity and Judaism. A slew of studies in the 90s opened what some have called a new religionsgeschichtliche Schule, in which Christian origins are located in relation to early Judaism as the primary influence rather than Greco-Roman religion.

We can largely categorize this diverse body of literature and its voices by the way a given scholar addresses three questions. First, did those who believed Jesus was the messiah worship him in the strictest sense of that term? Secondly, if they did, did this worship stand outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish monotheism? Finally, if they did, when did this worship first take place and what factors facilitated it?

A first group of contemporary scholars would answer affirmative to the first question and would see the worship of Jesus early in answer to the third. At the same time, however, they understand the "Judaisms" of the time to be so diverse that monotheism was not a strict boundary to be violated. Jewish believers in Jesus would thus have violated monotheism by later standards, but such standards would be anachronistic in relation to the first century. Christian Judaism would simply stand as one of many diverse Jewish options of the day. Such scholars include individuals like Jarl Fossum, Margaret Barker, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis.

A second group of contemporary scholars has attempted to bolster a position that more or less aligns with traditional Christian views. This perspective sees monotheism as an established boundary within Judaism at the time and sees the worship of Jesus as a relatively early phenomenon within the Christian movement. However, they argue that this worship was not a violation of Jewish monotheism. Although the various ways in which they argue for this position differ significantly from one another, we might mention Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and N. T. Wright as exponents of this perspective.

The view that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century affirmed Jewish monotheism and saw the worship of Jesus fairly early (usually with Paul or Hellenistic Christianity). However, it did see the worship of Jesus as a significant departure from Jewish monotheism. Wilhelm Bousset was of course the fountainhead of this perspective and the impact of his work dominated the scholarship of the early and mid-twentieth century.

A final view affirms Jewish monotheism as a relatively fixed boundary, but does not see the worship of Jesus in the fullest sense of that term as a phenomenon of the earliest Christian believers. Rather, it sees the full worship of Jesus as the end of a process of development that only reaches its destination in John and the latest writings of the New Testament, if even then. The best known proponents of this position are James D. G. Dunn and Maurice Casey.