Candidates for Jewish Worship

I am working through a section of a chapter that first presents various proposals for entities the Jews might have worshiped in some way in addition to or subordinate to God. My earlier delineation of categories is here.

Category 1: Were other beings worshiped alongside YHWH?

• Two powers in heaven (Segal)
• Elohim, the Great Angel (Barker)
• Divine consort, etc (Hayman)

Category 2: A subordinate entity worshiped in harmony with the worship of YHWH

• Yahoel (Capes, Apocalypse of Abraham)
• Metatron/Enoch (3 Enoch)
• Son of Man (Bauckham - "exception that proves the rule," 1 Enoch)
• Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian (Schenck, in a derivative way)
• Adam (Fletcher-Louis, Life of Adam and Eve)

Category 3: How early did Christians begin to worship Jesus?

• Very early (Hurtado, Bauckham, current majority)
• Late first century (Dunn, Casey)

Category 4: Degree of continuity with Judaism

• High continuity (Bauckham)
• Early, distinct innovation (Hurtado)
• Significant discontinuity that developed over time (Dunn, Casey)
• Blasphemy (Segal)

Creational and Eschatological Monotheism...

I'd be interested in reactions to these paragraphs. Basically, I accept the logic of creational and eschatological formulations of God's oneness. But would most ordinary Jews of Jesus' day have come up with these ideas without prompting?
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... It is hard to know how extensively Jews at the time of Christ might have conceptualized the oneness of God in creational and eschatological terms. It is one thing to quote a text like Isaiah 45:18: "Thus says YHWH, the one who created the skies—he is the God who formed the earth and made it… 'I myself am YHWH and there is no other.'" This verse demonstrates a connection between God as creator and any other divine claimant. Logically it makes sense that the being who created other beings would have a claim to primacy over the beings he or she created. However, how often did Jews at the time of Christ actually conceptualize God’s oneness in these terms?

For example, did most Jews actually have a clear sense of the origins of evil powers? There does not seem to be a single Jewish narrative in this regard, although no scenario at the time of the New Testament saw any other gods in existence prior to the God of Israel. [1] We have a tendency today in our analysis of Jewish thought to systematize, connect dots, fill in gaps, when most people do not have a systematic, coherent theology. To what extent did God as creator play into ordinary Jewish thinking about God as the one God at all? Presumably an ordinary Jew might have be attracted to this notion if someone had suggested it to them, but how many ancient Jews would have volunteered this dimension as part of the oneness of God without suggestion?

Similarly, we should not assume that all Jews, especially ordinary Jews, had a strongly linear sense of history. Although G. B. Caird held that the biblical writers did believe in an ultimate end to the world in the future, he also indicated that, “they regularly used end-of-the-world language metaphorically to refer to that which they well knew was not the end of the world.” [2] Perhaps with the exception of Daniel 12:2-3, all the apocalyptic imagery of the Hebrew Bible should be understood in terms of world changing events rather than the end of history. N. T. Wright has captured this element of modern speech with examples like saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall was an “earth-shattering” event. [3] Similarly, he has used the example of someone who might say after a tragedy, “This is the end of the world for me.” Only some forms of Judaism at the time of Christ were apocalyptic, and some of them may not actually have looked for an end to history in the way we so commonly assume.

For example, it is not at all certain that all the Jews at the time of Christ looked to the coming of a messianic king, but even most of those that did probably expected this individual simply to restore Israel and give it pride of place among the nations of the earth. [4] The apocalyptic imagery and nationalistic fervor may have increased in times of Israel’s oppression, [5] but it remains that many if not most Jews at the time of Christ had no sense of a final cosmic battle between good and evil. [6] This observation raises the question. Assuming that most of those Jews without a strongly linear-oriented eschatology affirmed the oneness of God, how can we consider eschatological monotheism anything like a central factor in ancient Jewish monotheism in general?

[1] Later Gnostic thinking would, by contrast. We can say, however, that all the Jewish narratives we know, prior to the New Testament, saw evil powers either as fallen angelic powers or as a result of the fall of angels, all which they presumably thought God created. The Life of Adam and Eve saw Satan’s fall in conjunction with his refusal to bow before Adam in the Garden of Eden (13-16). By contrast, 1 Enoch saw the fall of the angels in relation to their lust after the daughters of men in Genesis 6:2-4 (e.g., 1 Enoch 10, 15).

[2] The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1980), 256.

[3] New Testament and the People of God, 282-83.

[4] E.g., Psalms of Solomon 17. See James Charlesworth, ed. The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Even the imagery of Revelation, as apocalyptic as it is, gives hints that its author may have seen history continuing in some way alongside the redeemed (e.g., Rev. 21:24-27).

[5] So even the generally philosophical and “vertical” Philo arguably became more “horizontal” and eschatological in lieu of the Jewish crisis during the reign of Caligula. See Rewards 95; cf. Peder Borgen, “There Shall Come Forth a Man, in The Messiah, 341-61, and Kenneth Schenck, A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 37-41. Even here, however, Philo did not look for an end to history.

[6] We should keep in mind that Jewish thinking before the destruction of the temple in 70CE was considerably more diverse than it would become after Jewish thinking became somewhat standardized in the Rabbinic period. Even in rabbinic thought, however, there is no end to history, and rabbinic thought is far from apocalyptic in flavor.

Writing of the Day: Monotheism

Trying to write a chapter on "Hebrews and Christology" for a book I'm under contract for: A New Perspective on Hebrews.

Let me just say how amazed I am at how the accessibility of scholarship has changed. Google alone is fantastic. Good grief, when you think of how I scoured paper encyclopedias for some hint of knowledge about things in high school.

But this morning I went from thinking,

1. "I wish I could get my hands on Larry Hurtado's most recent article on monotheism" to

2. Doing a Google search on the journal it's in, "Journal of Ancient Judaism," published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht to

3. Realizing I can buy and download a copy for 6,20 €.

Reading Hurtado's summary, I was glad to see him saying things that I am also saying in the first part of my chapter. For example, he says in his summary, "It’s hard to find ancient Jews (or Christians) who denied the existence of all other divine beings. Instead, for them the issue was the validity of worshipping any deity other than the one deity of the biblical tradition."

I think I differ a little with Hurtado on the question of early Jewish and Christian worship, but I think he is spot on with this comment here.

Now off to read his article in all its 8 dollar glory...

Ehrman Chapter 2: Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism

I am working through Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God, on Mondays.  Here are the posts so far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

Today is chapter 2, "Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism."

In this chapter, Ehrman aims to show that there was a spectrum of "divinity" within Judaism just as within the Greco-Roman world. For most of this review, I want to take the examples he gives and put them into my own sense of the flow of Jewish thought.

A key point comes at the end of the chapter and is worth starting with: "It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (83). So what is his point in the chapter then?  It would seem to be this: Humans nonetheless, "could share some of the authority, status, and power of that one God." I am good with this assessment.

However, I'm not sure that is the same thing as the next sentence: "Even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity." I don't think that's quite right. The sentence before shows that, in Judaism, it was really only when a being was representing God in a very, very narrow sense that we come anywhere close to saying such a being "shared" in the "authority, status, and power" of the one God.

That is to say, in Judaism we only get divine language used of other beings in a derivative way. No being comes close to such language on its own but only in some special relation to the one God, in a representative or reflective sense. And even then, it's not like we have a lot of examples of this sort of thing.

Old Testament Henotheism
So we start with some OT passages he mentions that reflect a henotheist view. Yes, Israel not only had its share of polytheists (the sort Elijah contended with). Yes, the Israelites were mosly henotheists and "monolaters" who only worshiped Yahweh while not denying the existence of other gods (e.g., Ps. 82; Deut. 32:8-9).

Nothing new here. Again, even he says, "by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (54). So this is fun historical background... largely irrelevant to the question of what the earliest Christians thought about Jesus.

The Old Testament King 
It might shock you to know that the Israelites could refer to their earthly king as "God," but there's nothing to see here. This is well known. Psalm 45 was originally a wedding psalm for a king. But, as Michael Bird points out, there was no confusion for anyone in ancient Israel between the king and God himself (42). The king as God's representative on earth is clearly distinguished from the God in 45:7.

The question, again, is whether this aspect of Israelite thought centuries before Jesus is relevant to the time of Jesus. It does seem to me that the incident in the play by Ezekiel the Tragedian (ca. 200BC) does indicate that some Jews at the time of Christ could think of an earthly king "sharing" the honor due God in a derivative way. But I disagree with the way Ehrman puts it.

Ehrman puts it this way: The stars "bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they" (61). I don't agree. They bow down to Moses because he is sitting on God's throne, representing the one God. It is a derivative bowing, not an instance of Moses himself being transformed into the divine. I have argued this elsewhere.

The Angel of the Lord
The Angel of the Lord is an interesting figure in the early OT. Genesis and Exodus seem to consider this messenger of Yahweh so much to be identified with Yahweh that those who see the angel are said to see God. John Collins puts it this way, "there is no substantive difference between the deity and his agents" (57).

An interesting history lesson. But is it relevant to the time of Jesus? It was some 1000 years earlier or so.

Angels Having Sex
I'm not sure this is really relevant either to the topic of how the earliest Christians came to equate Jesus with God. Yes, many Jews did believe that angels could have sex with women. 1 Enoch explains Genesis 6:1-2 in this way. As a side note, Dale Martin might suggest that many Jews thought of angels as truly masculine such that they didn't have "to assume human shape" (63). Isn't it just as likely that these Jews assumed angels were literally male?

Exalted Angels
Ehrman mentions a number of exalted angels, but you can't blur Psalm 82 with the Prayer of Joseph or the Apocalypse of Abraham. They are separated by numerous centuries. Is Ehrman's implied argument:

• The word God is plural in OT Hebrew and can mean "angels."
• There are angels who come to earth in the Prayer of Joseph and Apocalypse of Abraham. 
• Therefore, we can say that these angels who come down to earth in later texts are gods come to earth.

Maybe I'm missing something but this logic doesn't seem to work. The meanings of words at any one point in time are a function of that point in time, not hundreds of years earlier.

Humans who become angels
Again, it feels like he's mixing up some different times and places. So Enoch doesn't become an angel in Genesis or in most of 1 Enoch. There are some texts from around the time of Christ where humans become angel-like (2 Baruch). I do believe there are places where the dead are thought of as becoming angels (Acts 12:15). Basically, it's all over the map.

I'm waiting to see, though, any evidence yet that the earliest Christians thought Jesus had become an angel.

Hypostases and Philo
I think Ehrman goes too far in thinking of wisdom and word in Jewish thought as hypostases. I think for the vast majority of Jewish literature, wisdom and logos are simply personifications of God's attributes, spoken of poetically and figuratively. For example, I disagree with him in thinking that the Wisdom of Solomon thinks of wisdom as an actual being. She's still just an attribute of God, referred to poetically.

Even in Philo, I believe the word and wisdom of God are, more often than not, personifications of God's attributes. True, there are times in Philo where I think the Logos crosses a line and becomes an actual entity, "created but not created like mortals" (Heir 205-6). But there is no question in Philo's mind, even in this case, that the Logos is not "uncreated like God."

Philo's use of allegory and figural language requires some care in reading his comments. Without a sense of his overall point, you can easily mistake an allegorical comment for a literal one. For example, is Philo really talking about the literal Moses or does Moses represent something else, such as a characteristic of God.

Ehrman is right that the rabbis of the second century began to clamp down on how exalted some Jews had come to think of there being "two powers" in heaven (67-69). He is also right that, whatever the official position of a religion, people are going to believe all sorts of things on a popular level (50). I personally question whether Colossians 2 is about worshiping angels, but I suspect there were Jews who crossed the line in their devotion to angelic beings.

Is he suggesting that the earliest Christians had precedents for crossing a similar line? I guess we'll find out.

The Son of Man
Ehrman introduces us to the heavenly figure of Daniel 7 known as the "Son of Man." He is right that, in 1 Enoch, this figure sits on God's throne and judges the nations. This picture may very well have influenced the picture of Jesus sitting on a throne in Matthew 25.

I do want to make a strong distinction, however, between parallels like these generating the heart of early Christian understandings of Jesus and the possibility that the earliest Christians drew on some images like these to find ways to express what they already had experienced in relation to Jesus. In other words, resurrection faith came first. Drawing on existing imagery to describe these unbelievable events came second.

Larry Hurtado
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen a direct response to Ehrman's book on Hurtado's blog. But Ehrman does quote the classic One God One Lord at one point in support of his thesis. Hurtado concludes that "principle angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking... provided the earliest Christians with a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God without having to depart from their monotheistic tradition" (61).

I might selectively agree with Hurtado here, but I wonder whether Hurtado likes the way Ehrman paraphrases this quote: "to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form" (61).

I really don't think that's what Hurtado said. Hurtado, like me, believes that the earliest believers drew on Jewish precedents to describe their recent experiences. As far as I can remember, I don't think he holds to any sort of "angelic Christology," the belief that the earliest Christians saw Jesus as a kind of angel.

Next week: "Did Jesus Think He Was God?"

James McGrath on Tom McCall

I'm glad to call both of these gentlemen my friends.  James McGrath has just reviewed Tom McCall's new book, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism.

Quote from Alan Segal

From Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion, p.179. Segal is a genius, and the usual idiosyncratic professor. I once heard him read an SBL paper from his lap top, no doubt finished on the plane (if indeed it was finished :-). He is hilarious and generally on the list for a party of any significance at a scholarly convention. Jewish scholar of all things Jewish, including the New Testament, professor at Columbia in New York.
_________
"Though many think that dualism and monotheism are opposing phenomena, dualism actually seems to be a consequence of some difficulties with monotheism. From the perspective of ethics, monotheism is in opposition to polytheism, not to dualism. Once there is one god, he or she must be the author of all evil as well as good. Indeed, one might argue that dualism is not a stage on the way to monotheism so much as a stage beyond it, a strategic retreat from monotheism governed by the recognition that monotheism makes the explanation of evil problematic. In these dualisms, good will eventually conquer evil."

This passage appears in his treatment of Zoroastrianism.

Monday Hebrews Writing: Defining Monotheism

Blogging raises a number of issues for me. Does it hinder my put out in terms of permanent writing? Does it keep me from getting work or family responsibilities done? I've tried to argue to myself that what I do here helps me with my writing and thinking.

Certainly I have written a number of things on this blog that are now in print and wouldn't have otherwise existed. But I'd also have to admit that a number of projects seem stymied and blogging takes away from them. Even working through a book like Dunn's takes hours that I might otherwise spend writing and only dipping into books as appropriate.

So I need to spend more blog time writing things I'm writing. It actually helps me write. Just the thought that someone out there might be reading along helps motivate me in a way sitting in front of a silent screen of Microsoft Word doesn't. It even seems to flow better.

So I'm setting aside Mondays for the foreseeable future toward the writing of my stymied Hebrews book. Today we join chapter 3 in progress, "Hebrews and Monotheism," on page 17, second paragraph:
________
The earliest example—although the specific word worship does not appear—is the seating of Moses on God’s heavenly throne in the Exagōgē of Ezekiel the Tragedian. Ezekiel’s Exagōgē dates to around 200BC. In it, God hands over his scepter to Moses, withdraws from his heavenly throne and has Moses mount it, then hands him the crown (74-75). Then a multitude of stars bow down before him (79-80).

Bauckham is quite keen to show that “[w]hat the dream means is something other than what it says.”[1] The throne dream is meant to explain Exodus 7:1, where God says he will make Moses “god” to Pharaoh. It figuratively portrays the role that Moses will play as ruler of Israel and was never meant to imply that Moses literally would ever take God’s heavenly throne.

Certainly Bauckham is correct in the bulk of his understanding of the Exagōgē. Where we might accuse him of over-reading the text is when he finds great significance in the fact that God vacates his throne before Moses sits on it.[2] For Bauckham, this is a point of great importance. Part of the unique monotheism of Judaism for Bauckham is the implication that only God can sit on the divine throne. For someone else to sit there, God would have to remove himself. Further, the fact that Moses realizes this fact contributes to the terror he experiences when he awakes from the dream.

None of these claims are necessitated by the text itself. They have an air of plausibility, but they seem to fill in gaps in the text itself on the basis of conclusions Bauckham has drawn from outside the Exagōgē, such as his sense of what all Jews of the period might have considered appropriate in relation to God’s throne. On the other hand, if Artapanas and Aristeas are any indication, Egyptian Judaism at this time was apparently far less scrupulous about the contours of monotheism than Jews at other times in other contexts. In short, Bauckham and other interpreters likely have more of a problem with Moses sitting on God’s throne than Egyptian Jews at the time might have.

[1] Jesus and the God of Israel, 167.
[2] Jesus and the God of Israel, 168-69.

Calvin excerpt and a spiraling stream of thoughts

I'm behind on Calvin, but read this today:

"Here we must more carefully attend to those subtleties with which superstition disports itself. Indeed, it does not so decline to other gods as seemingly to desert the highest God, or to reduce him to the level of the rest. But while it concedes to him the supreme place, it surrounds him with a throng of lesser gods, among whom it parcels out his functions. The glory of his divinity is so rent asunder (although stealthily and craftily) that his whole glory does not remain with him alone. Thus, in the past, men, Jews as well as heathen, put a vast throng of gods under the father and ruler of the gods. Each of these gods according to his rank held in common with the highest god the government of heaven and earth."

"the distinction between latria and dulia, as they called them, was invented in order that divine honors might seem to be transferred with impunity to angels and the dead. For it is obvious that the honor the papists give to the saints really does not differ from the honoring of God."

P.S. The distinction between latria and dulia has to do with the Catholic distinction between the worship appropriate to God alone and the kind of lower reverence appropriate saints and such.

This discussion really reminded me of Bauckham and the sharp divide he places between God and other heavenly beings. The religious traditions of scholars do affect their biblical interpretation. So I wondered if Bauckham was much of an Anglican and if this section of the Institutes has had any significant impact on him.

I know he did use to teach theology and now that he's emeritus at St. Andrews he's at Ridley at Cambridge, an Anglican theological training college.

That of course made me think of how Calvinist the 39 articles are and the strange fact that the Westminster Confession is Anglican, that John Knox took it back to Scotland where it became ground zero for Presbyterianism.

Then I thought of N. T. Wright's strange view of faith as a "badge of covenant membership," not as what gets you in or justifies you. Sure seems Calvinist to me--faith does not get you in but is a sign that you're in.

So then there's a discussion I had with Bounds yesterday I think. Apparently Anglicanism was heavily Calvinist at the beginning until some Arminian influence came in the mid-1600's. Wesley came at the right time for this trend to influence him. Unfortunately, that trajectory apparently went heavily Deist, to where those Anglicans who take doctrine seriously today tend to be the Calvinist trajectory.

I'm sure I'm perverting the Bound discussion... I take responsibility. Is this right?

There, now free to carry the spiraling stream of consciousness where you will...

Friday Review: David Capes' "YHWH Texts..."

This morning I read through David Capes' "YHWH Texts and Monotheism in Paul's Christology," which is in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, edited by Loren Stuckenbruck and Wendy North.

By the way, Stuckenbruck is a genius among geniuses and one of the best doctoral advisors you could ever wish for. He's tireless, has an exhaustive knowledge of second temple Judaism, and is one of the most personable scholars I know. At Durham, he is like an unofficial advisor to everyone, even those like me who weren't actually his advisees. He's quick to write a reference--I attribute my Fulbright in large part to his reference. Many a scholar is better known because they can write in a more popular style, but few a scholar can come close to this man's intellect or mentoring ability.

If you're looking for a place to do a PhD in New Testament or Second Temple Judaism, you can't go wrong with Stuckenbruck at Durham. But back to Capes...

Capes' first section surveys how the divine name, YHWH, was written in manuscripts at the time of Paul. What he finds is a variety of practices. Sometimes it was written as any other word. But he agrees that there was an archaizing tendency at the time as well, where some were making it distinct by writing it in an archaic Hebrew script. He does not see this as the older practice but as a new trend.

Similarly, Greek manuscripts seem to have had some variety as well. Sometimes it was simply translated with the Greek kyrios for Lord. But at other times other ways of writing it appeared too. His conclusion is that Paul would have been aware of the divine name standing behind the kyrios of various Old Testament texts.

Capes then launches into the thirteen texts where Paul quotes OT YHWH texts (by the way, did you see that the Roman Catholic Church will no longer vocalize Yahweh in worship. The Christian Reformed Church has similarly stopped singing Jehovah in "Guide me, O Thou Great Redeemer"). He engages with the prior work of Lucian Cerfaux, which he then critiques. In general, "Unless otherwise specified, kyrios in Paul's quotations refers to Christ" (126). The rest of the paper examines Paul's use of two important YHWH texts he uses of Christ: Joel 2:32 and Isaiah 45:23.

1. Romans 10:13
As Capes looks at the use of Joel 2:32 in Paul, he notes the cultic context of "calling on the name of the Lord," as well as other uses. This seems potentially very significant to me. Capes believes that "The application of Joel 2:32 to Christ with its attendant cultic associations appears to imply the worship of Jesus by Paul and his churches" (128).

2. Romans 14:11 and Philippians 2:10-11
Now you see some of the reason I'm reading this paper this morning. We're almost to the Philippian "hymn" in my Prison Epistles class.

Capes' first suggestion for how Isaiah 45:23 is clever, but uncertain. He suggests that Paul takes the first half of the quote in relation to Jesus and the second half in relation to God: "the text should be understood as follows: 'As I live (again by the resurrection), says the Lord (Jesus), every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will confess to God (at the judgment seat)'" (129).

I don't think I will end up going with Capes here. The most likely reading of the text is "all will stand before the judgment seat of God," and from this point Paul launches into the quote of Isaiah. Yes, this reading thus contrasts with comments by Paul elsewhere about the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10) and his use of this verse in relation to Christ (Phil. 2:10-11). So sue him. If your interpretive scheme does not allow Paul this room to wind through interpretations of Scripture, you are bound to skew Paul.

I agree, however, with this comment Capes quotes from L. J. Kreitzer: "It is difficult to imagine any first-century Jew or Christian even remotely familiar with Isa. 45 hearing this final stanza of Phil. 2.9-11 without recognizing that words of theistic import have now been applied to Christ." Thus, Capes concludes, "the universal worship of Jesus as Lord by creatures inhabiting the heavenly, earthly, and subterranean realms" (131).

So Capes begins his conclusion. He sees the understanding that Jesus bears the Name of God explains many aspects of early Christian faith and practice, not least the application of theos to Jesus. At the same time, Paul never confuses Jesus with God or rejects monotheism.

In this final section, he discusses the positions of Larry Hurtado, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, and James Dunn on the worship of Jesus. Hurtado sees precedents in Jewish ideas of divine agency but sees a distinct mutation in the cultic worship of Jesus. Fletcher-Louis finds distinctiveness in the worship of a specific person rather than an office, but sees precedents in the earlier worship of individuals who are in one way or another the image of God. Dunn largely agrees that the worship of Jesus became distinctive but only after a long process, that Jesus was not yet worshiped in this way at the time of Paul.

Of these, Capes sides more with Hurtado than with Fletcher-Louis or Dunn. He disagrees with Dunn on the timing. He disagrees with Fletcher-Louis on the question of precedent. So he raises what is a crucial question: what exactly "should be regarded as 'cultic' worship that contravenes the uniqueness of God" (134). Unfortunately, he never answers the question.

The remainder of the paper disappoints in that Capes simply presents and endorses Richard Bauckham's sense of divine identity as the right path toward proper understanding of the worship of Jesus. He affirms Bauckham's idea that "the catalyst for this innovation [the worship of Jesus within monotheistic faith] emerges in scriptural exegesis" (136).

So the paper starts out strong, but fades into Hurtado and Bauckham at the point where we expect the real contribution. No offense.

Defining First Century Jewish Monotheism

After years of some general hunches and vague feelings, I believe I am finally ready to formulate a positioned statement on what I think Jewish monotheism was at the time of Christ. This should appear in print with refinement and extensive footnotes in one or two places next year.

A word of preface is in order. The very term monotheism is a product of the Enlightenment and, as we will see, tends to smuggle in anachronistic notions into the discussion. Ancient Judaism was clearly a religion of "one God," but this notion must be defined on their terms, not on modern philosophical or theological terms.

First, Jewish monotheism at the time of Christ was, first and foremost, a statement of God's sovereign power. Power, more than any other thing, was the defining characteristic of a god in the ancient world. (Immortality was the other) The notion that the divine is transcendent, ontologically distinct and unknowable from human categories, is largely anachronistic for the ancient world. Only Philo seems to approach such a view. We should more think in terms of a scale of being, with gods on the top.

So for some Jews at the time of Christ, monotheism might more aptly be described as "monarchism," the idea that there is one sovereign God who is more powerful than any other god or spiritual power. God is the King who reigns supreme over all the other gods.

Artapanus perhaps represents the last outpost of first century monotheism in that he does not seem to deny the existence of other gods or to condemn the other nations from worshipping them. But he presumably would not worship them himself and his God is of course the "master of the universe."

Other Jews took a more adversarial position between the one God and these other spiritual powers. The War Scroll at Qumran looks to a final battle between the sons of darkness and the sons of light. And it uses the word gods in reference to the spiritual forces among the sons of darkness. God will of course defeat them, an aspect of God's sovereignty that Richard Bauckham aptly calls "eschatological monotheism."

God is thus unique not least because He is the most powerful, the supreme deity. One expression of this unique sovereignty is His role as creator, which Richard Bauckham aptly calls "creational monotheism." But God's unique role of creator is really an expression of his sovereignty.

Here it's important to recognize that the Jews of this time had no sense of creation out of nothing, an idea that didn't seem to emerge until the late second century AD. We should think of creation at this time more in terms of giving order to chaos and formlessness than the generation of material.

Presumably, however, God as sole creator means that He created all parent beings. Certainly he created the human parents. But he also created all the angels, some of whom rebelled, whether the watchers at the time of the Flood in the Enoch tradition or Satan with the creation of Adam in the Life of Adam and Eve. Their rebellion was subsequent to their creation.

The second key aspect of monotheism corresponded to God's supreme sovereignty, namely, his exclusive rights to human worship. Again, there were apparently those like Artapanus that did not have a problem with other nations worshipping other (inferior) gods. Meanwhile, they served the "one supreme God" and their "one God." They "had no other gods before Him." Perhaps many of the anonymous and silent Diaspora Jews scattered throughout the world had such a view.

But by far the vast majority of the Jewish literature we have from this period sees YHWH as the sole legitimate God and thus the only God that should be worshipped. Bauckham calls this "cultic monotheism" and Larry Hurtado and others put a big premium on this element in the equation.

In my opinion, however, the way Bauckham and others treat worship in this period is slightly anachronistic in the same way that thinking of God's transcendence often is. To give worship is to honor and reverence a superior power. Since God is the superior power and the legitimate power, He is obviously in a category all its own when it comes to worship.

It is also true that there is a strong tradition within Jewish apocalyptic in which angels refuse worship in deference to the one God. In the words of Hebrews, angels are "ministering spirits." They are servants. You do not worship servants.

Where the line gets blurry is when we are talking about kings of various types. An earthly king is a "son of God," a divine son, not least because a king exerts over humans a power and authority analogous to the sovereignty of God over the cosmos. Indeed, the king mediates God's sovereignty. One can thus "bow the knee" or "worship" a human king as long as this reverence is properly subordinated to the glory of God the Father.

God made Moses "like a god to Pharaoh"--he gave him Godlike power and authority. Satan is told to "worship" Adam in the garden in the Life of Adam and Eve because Adam is his superior and an image of God, while Satan is merely a servant of God. And of course Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian is worshipped on a heavenly throne in a way analogous, but almost certainly subordinate to the worship of Moses' God. The fact that this is a dream does not obviate the basic dynamic of this uncomfortable example.

Things get even blurrier when the "royal" figure is a heavenly being. The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch is a heavenly king. He is thus worthy of "worship" as long as such worship is clearly subordinated to and a function of the glory of God. Yahoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham similarly occupies an ambiguous space between being a subject of God and participating in God's throne.

In my opinion, Bauckham is "making up the rules" when he assumes that participation in creation and God's throne were absolutely off limits as a function of monotheism. What ancient evidence is there for this other than his definitions? Certainly many if not most ancient Jews might agree with him. But on what basis can he imply that an ancient Jew who did not agree with these parameters was thereby disloyal to the idea of "one God"? As Hurtado has argued, we must let them set the parameters for what we allow under the heading of "monotheism."

We might finally mention the matter of sacrifice. It seems doubtful that--perhaps except for some Diaspora Jews on the fridge of what we call Judaism at the time--Jews offered sacrifices to other gods. As far as I can tell, even in those instances where veneration is given to "royal" subordinates of God, they are never given sacrifice.

And why would they? The purpose of sacrifice was to secure the favor of God, including the deflection of God's wrath. Since YHWH was the ultimate sovereign in question even in those instances where other "royal" figures were in play, He would clearly be the one who needed propitiated.

"Cultic monotheism" would thus seem to apply most properly, then, to the fact that no other being was the proper recipient of sacrifice. On this score, therefore, I would suggest that Hurtado is the one who "makes up the rules" as to where non-sacrificial "cultic veneration" could or could not apply to figures other than the one God.

Ancient Jewish "monotheism" was thus primarily a matter of God's superior, sovereign power and rule, a power and position captured most clearly in his role as sole creator. Accordingly, He was the only God appropriate to worship. However, kings and heavenly beings that participate in His throne might also be said worthy of a reverence or "worship" as long as it is clearly subordinated to Him. Few Jews, of course, had any notion of such a being. Those that did were by far the exception rather than the rule.

Artapanus and Jewish Monotheism

I thought I would kill a couple birds with one stone by quoting some Artapanus and reflecting briefly on what his work might imply about Jewish monotheism at the time of Christ.

First, Artapanus was an Egyptian Jew who probably dates to the late 200's BC. I find Barclay's suggestion that he was from the environs of Heliopolis very interesting, although Alexandria gets mentioned more often (128 n.5). His writings unfortunately are only known to us second and third hand. Most think that Josephus used him as a source for this portion of the Antiquites. But it is in Eusebius that we have the three surviving excerpts. Unfortunately, however, Eusebius himself is drawing from another historian, Alexander Polyhistor, drawing from Artapanus. Such are the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Carl Holladay has suggested that Artapanus might have been "typical of a large segment of Diaspora Jews who did not find pagan traditions threatening or compromising to fidelity to their religious traditions" (193). I find this plausible, especially since I suspect Philo himself seems to have started out more friendly with such things (cf. "On the Eternity of the World," the fact that he probably had a gymnasium education and his nephew actually apostatized). I wonder if Philo only went nationalistic in the wake of polarizing political developments in his environment.

Perhaps even more important is the fact that Artapanus is likely pre-Maccabean. This is the period of history where Judaism could easily have gone either way. It could have fully Hellenized and disappeared into oblivion. Or, as did happen, some king could push a certain segment of Judaism just a little too hard with the resulting backlash of nationalism and ethnocentric revival. The rest is history, and it is hard to see Christianity having come into existence if it hadn't turned in this direction. Go Maccabees!

So what was Artapanus' understanding of God? Here are some excerpts from Eusebius' excerpts, translated by the honorable John J. Collins in vol. 2 of the OTP (with some slight modifications).
_______________
Artapanus says in his Judaica that the Jews are named "Hermiouth," which, translated into Greek, is "Jews." They were called Hebrews after Abraham. He says that the latter came to Egypt with all his household to the Egyptian king Pharethothes, and taught him astrology. [from Fragment 1]

Artapanus says in his "on the Jews" that Joseph was a descendant of Abraham and son of Jacob... This man was the first to divide the land [of Egypt] and distinguish it with boundaries... This man also discovered measurements and on account of these things he was greatly loved by the Egyptians. He married Aseneth, the daughter of a Heliopolitan priest and begot children by her.

He [Artapanus] says that these, who were called Hermiouth, founded the temple in Athos and that in Heliopolis. [from Fragment 2]

Since she [one Egyptian queen] was barren, she adopted the child of one of the Jews and named it Moses. As a grown man he was called Mousaeus by the Greeks.

This Mousaeus was the teacher of Orpheus. As a grown man he bestowed many useful benefits on humankind, for he invented boats and devices for stone construction and the Egyptian arms and the implements for drawing water and for warfare, and philosophy. Further, he divided the state into 36 nomes and appointed for each of the nomes the god to be worshipped, and for the priests the sacred letters, and that they should be cats and dogs and ibises...

He did all these things for the sake of maintaining the monarchy firm for Chenephres... On account of these things then Moses was loved by the masses, and was deemed worthy of godlike honor by the priests and called Hermes, on account of the interpretation of sacred letters...

When Moses came to the district called Hermopolis, with about a hundred thousand farmers [as his army against the Ethiopians], he pitched a camp there... Those around Moses founded a city in that place on account of the size of the army, and made the ibis sacred there because it destroys the creatures that harm people. They called it Hermopolis.

The Ethiopians, even though they were his enemies, loved Moses so much that they learned the circumcision of the genital organs from him, and not only they, but also all the priests...

The king of the Egyptians [after Chenephres' death]... summoned him [Moses] and asked for what purpose he had come. He responded that the master of the universe had ordered him to release the Jews. When the king learned this, he confined him in prison. But when night came, all the doors of the prison opened of themselves, and some of the guards died, while others were relaxed by sleep and their weapons were broken.

Moses came out and went to the royal chambers. He found the doors open and went in. There, since the guards were relaxed, he woke the king. The latter was astonished at what had happened and bade Moses say the name of the god who had sent him, mocking him.

But he bent forward and pronounced it into his ear. When the king heard it, he fell down speechless but revived when taken hold of by Moses. He wrote the name on a tablet and sealed it, but one the priests who disparaged what was written on the tablet died with a convulsion.

... Again, Moses released a frog, through his staff, and in addition to these things, locusts and lice. On this account the Egyptians dedicate the rod in every temple, and similarly [they dedicate it] to Isis, since the earth is Isis, and when it was struck with the rod, it released its marvels. [excerpt from Fragment 3]
______________

We recognize in Artapanus "apologetic historiography," telling history in such a way as to defend your group against its detractors and despisers. The Egyptian Manetho had done the same against the Jews in the early 200s, considering them a collection of lepers.

Yet the way Artapanus goes about doing this is striking. Barclay categorizes him under the heading of "cultural convergence" or perhaps we might say cultural assimilation. He has Abraham teaching the Egyptians astrology and Joseph marries the daughter of an Egyptian priest no problem. Moses is the teacher of Orpheus in Greek religion.

Moses seemingly has no problem with helping the Egyptians worship their own gods--he even assigns them to them. Meanwhile, Moses himself is "like a god" to them. They call him Hermes. They found a temple in his honor.

The conception of God we draw from these excerpts is of God as indeed the "monarch of the universe," far superior to any of these other gods. I don't quite agree with either Barclay or Collins who stand on opposite ends of the spectrum on whether Artapanus takes the Egyptian gods seriously or not. He does not disparage or mock them, I would say (in tension with Collins). But he doesn't really invest them with full reality either (in tension with Barclay).

They seem representative to Artapanus. They depict a truth. But clearly the God whose name Moses knows is absolutely superior. Moses is godlike in the world of the Egyptians, but the monarch of the universe trumps him royally.

It looks like a kind of pluralistic henotheism. Artapanus does not exactly deny or affirm the existence of other gods, but he doesn't seem to have a problem with other people worshipping other gods. However, he only worships the sovereign God, it would seem.

Dunn's Partings 10: "Is Christianity Monotheist?"

OK, I changed my mind. I feel like I need to do a little more of James D. G. Dunn's, The Partings of the Ways. Chapter 11 is entitled, "Is Christianity Monotheist? The First Great Debate."

Hebrews
Dunn begins with Hebrews. His interpretations of wisdom language and Adam imagery are largely the same for Hebrews as they were for Paul and thus do not indicate a parting with Judaism for Hebrews with regard to monotheism. Dunn leans toward a fairly strong Platonic bent to Hebrews and so aptly concludes, "If Philo remains within the spectrum of recognizable and acceptable first-century Judaism, would the same not be true for Hebrews also?" (276).

James
James is no sweat on this issue. It barely expresss any Christology to speak of!

1 Peter
1 Peter also has no new spin on Christology that might be in tension with monotheism, although Dunn does discuss 1 Peter 1:20: "Jesus was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake." Does this statement imply pre-existence? I wonder if Simon Gathercole would say yes, given his expose on "I have come"language in the New Testament.

But Dunn cites the Testament of Moses 1.14: "Moses says, 'He designed and devised me, and he prepared me before the foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of the covenant.' No one would suggest that this statement implied Moses literal pre-existence.

Matthew
Matthew has a wisdom Christology in which Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. Matthew seems to modify Q and allude to Sirach in ways that imply that Jesus is God's wisdom. Dunn nevertheless concludes "that the terms of Matthew's christology are thoroughly Jewish and would have been so perceived by Matthew's Jewish readers when they made their own assessment of the significance of that christology" (281).

Revelation
The worship of Jesus in Revelation is indeed striking. In my opinion, it is more striking than anywhere else in the NT. Dunn points out precedents and parallels in Ezekiel 1 and Daniel 7 that show how imagery both of the Son of Man and the Ancient of Days are applied to Jesus.

Dunn concludes that "the visions of Revelation ... seem to be stretching that pattern [of apocalyptic] and indeed beginning to break it" (286).

Yes, Revelation would be unacceptable to the rabbinic Judaism that was beginning to take shape after the destruction of Jerusalem. But, then again, there are non-Christian Jewish movements within post-70 Judaism that they would similarly condemn. Yahoel, the angel of the Lord in the Apocalypse of Abraham was surely far too similar to God for rabbinic Judaism to accept.

It is during this period that the "two powers" in heaven heresy was arising and being defined as heresy by some rabbis. We remember that other rabbis--Akiba and especially Elisha ben Abuyah--had visions of Metatron as a second divine power in heaven. Similarly, Merkabah mysticism is similarly beginning to bloom. This wild and wacky world of post-70 apocalyptic and mystical Judaism is hardly what we tend to think of as "orthodox" Judaism. Dunn by the way argues in this chapter that the Parables of Enoch post-date AD70 (292-93).

John
At the end of a lengthy discussion of John--the longest in the chapter--Dunn concludes wisely, "So far as the Jewish authorities were concerned, the claims made by the (Johannine) Christians had gone too far: the Jesus of John's Gospel had made himself God" (299). On the other hand, "as far as the Fourth Evangelist was concerned, and the Christian Jews for whom he spoke, however, this last was a false evaluation of their belief" (299)--that is, that they had "knocked away the final pillar of second Temple Judaism," monotheism. Dunn claims, "John saw himself still as a monotheist."

If I were to explore these issues on a scholarly level, something I have neither the time nor the opportunity to do, I think statements like these are somewhat simplistic. To my surprise, I have felt like Dunn was simplifying things in this book for a somewhat more popular audience. I know it hardly seems that way in my circles, but there is a large number of really smart lay Christians out there who used to read Dunn's stuff, just like they read Tom Wright's stuff now.

Anyway, that's the only way I can explain why Dunn oversimplifies things in the book. I doubt we can study Revelation or John on a scholarly level without concluding they both had a composition history. I further suspect that their namesakes may not have been involved in the final stages of composition. We thus have to consider seriously the possibility of Christological development even within each book.

John clearly teaches that Jesus was pre-existent. John further is clearly in a major conflict with its Palestinian Jewish environment. Since J. Louis Martyn it has been passe in Johannine scholarship to see in the blind man ousted from the synagogue a reflection of the Johannine situation. Dunn says, "There is ... no indication that such a confession [of Jesus as Messiah] became a make or break issue between Jewish Christians and leaders of Judaism prior to 70. The earlier disputes, as we have seen, were about the Temple and the Torah. But in Palestine, Jews were evidently able to believe that Jesus was Messiah and yet remain largely undisturbed before the Jewish revolt" (289).

John sees Jesus as the exclusive revealer of God. As we've implied, Dunn sees most of the Daniel 7 speculation as consequent on the fall of Jerusalem. (292-93). Emerging rabbinic Judaism began to clamp down with the 12th Benediction condemnation of the minim. This condemnation probably was not formulated with Christians specifically in mind, but some certainly did come to include Christians under its condemnation.

John, however, sees Jesus as the exclusive revealer of God. Dunn suggests that "No one has ascended to heaven" in John is a polemic against other forms of mystical Judaism at this time, hints of which we also find in Colossians and possibly Hebrews 1.

Daniel Boyarin's term is a better description of what we find in Revelation and John than "parting." We are surely witnessing in these NT books the partitioning of the ways between some forms of Christianity and some forms of Judaism.

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.

Dunn's Partings 9: "One God, One Lord"

Chapter 10 of James D. G. Dunn's, The Partings of the Ways is "One God, One Lord," and it asks whether or not Paul's writings have yet departed from mainstream Judaism. Dunn's answer is "no." Throughout the chapter he concludes repeatedly that "nothing of what has been covered above seems to have caused any question or concern among Paul's Jewish contemporaries" in relation to the issue of monotheism (170). In a comment reminiscent of Hurtado--while ironically differing from him on the issue--Dunn suggests that "Had Paul's christology been equally, or more contentious [as his understanding of the Jewish Law] at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul's own letters."

1. Resurrection
The belief of Paul and the earliest Christians that Jesus rose from the dead, that he was exalted to heaven, did not threaten monotheism. A unique and remarkable belief about a person who had just been alive, yes. But squarely within Judaism.

2. Exaltation to divine functions
Here Dunn disagrees with what would become Bauckham's position. The fact that Jesus participates in the judgment is quite remarkable, but it does not threaten Jewish monotheism for Jesus judges as God's representative.

Jesus' resurrection, his ascension, his apotheosis/transformation, these are remarkable things to attribute that someone who was recently alive. But we find Jewish precendents for them. Peter facilitates the giving of the Spirit, and no one thinks he threatens monotheism.

So to extend Dunn, I don't find Bauckham's assumption that Jesus must be included within the divinity because Jesus is on a throne persuasive. I think he fails to demonstrate that this must be the case. He mostly assumes it must be. His valiant attempts to work around Ezekiel the Tragedian and the Parables of Enoch are unpersuasive to me.

3. Jesus as Lord
This sentence sums up Dunn on this issue, and I find it hard to disagree: "Paul in fact calls Jesus 'Lord' as much as a means of distinguishing Jesus from God as of identifying him with God" (250).

"The LORD said to my Lord," says Psalm 110:1. Hebrews 1:6: "Therefore God, his God anointed him." And the timing of the acquiring of the name LORD is at the point of resurrection/exaltation. Bauckham in my opinion largely ignores this dynamic.

4. Jesus as Last Adam
I hink most will agree that Paul's Adam Christology did not impinge on monotheism. However, Dunn tries to make it undo the pre-existence of Christ in the Philippian "hymn." Few will go with him here.

As I've said here before, the Philippian hymn is the one place in Paul's writings that is very difficult not to see an affirmation of Christ's pre-existence. Its uniqueness, in that regard, is suspicious. But Dunn's understanding of the hymn seems problematic--that the form of God is Christ's Adamic state in the image of God, but that unlike Adam Christ did not try to seize equality with God.

Dunn also notes the key passage in the Life of Adam and Eve where God commands the angels to "worship" Adam. Dunn would not see the worship of Jesus in Paul as any more of a departure from Jewish monotheism than this.

5. Jesus as wisdom
Dunn makes an excellent case, I think, in this section that a Jew reading passages like Colossians 1:15ff would hear an implicit comparison of Christ to God's wisdom. The strength of his argument is that he so much as asks us to picture how a Jew with no prior knowledge of Christ would understand such passages. I think he is absolutely right in his answer to this question. However, the retort asks, But these would be individuals who knew a little something about Christ beforehand?

6. Jesus and the Spirit
Dunn here shows the striking way in which Paul glides from virtually equating the Spirit with the risen Christ to distinguishing the two. "Jesus and the Spirit were seen to overlap in function, but not wholly to coincide" (266). This stretches mainstream Jewish categories, but Dunn thinks it still stands within Judaism.

7. Jesus as God
Since Dunn does not think Paul wrote Titus, the only place he really considers as a possible flat out reference to Jesus as God is Romans 9:5. But the punctuation is at issue and Dunn favors as more likely the reading that separates, "God be blessed forever" from Jesus. One's answer here will largely turn on one's assessment of Paul's broader categories.

Dunn also addresses Hurtado's argument that the cultic devotion to Jesus in Paul already marks a significant mutation of Jewish monotheism. Dunn does recognize its significance: "These are indeed remarkable and we should not allow our familiarity with them to dull the astonishing character of such language spoken of one who had so recently lived on earth" (269).

But Dunn considers such imagery "a development only begun." In other words, it would lead eventually to something beyond Jewish monotheism. Just not yet in Paul. The hymns Hurtado cites are about Christ rather than to Christ. And despite invocations of Jesus, prayer is more often in Paul to God through Christ.

I might close by saying that I think it is a mistake to assume that the Christian understanding of Christ's divinity stands or falls on the interpretation of Paul. I think people like Bauckham, Hurtado, Wright, Witherington, etc. find themselves strongly driven to see as much of a later Christology in Paul as they can make the evidence fit without soiling their academic conscience. They are good Protestants.

But Roman Catholic scholars often have exactly the same impulse, it seems to me. Can't we have as much faith that God was unfolding these things in the early church as much as we Christians have faith that the New Testament unfolds things not yet on the Old Testament page?

Just a thought...

With some regret I need to move on from Dunn's Partings. I may only do one or two more chapters in Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ as well for now. Too many things to write these next couple of months...

Dunn's Partings 8: "Jesus and the One God"

I've skipped three chapters in my review of James D. G. Dunn's The Partings of the Ways because the summer is nearly gone and there is so much I still want to do. Maybe some time I'll come back and fill in the gaps before archiving the review.

But I'm skipping his consideration of election and covenant and going to the set of chapters in which Dunn considers monotheism, beginning with chapter 9: "Jesus and the One God." Dunn's conclusion about Jesus is, "Jesus himself still stood well within the boundaries of second Temple Judaism at the point of Jewish monotheism" (240).

I might preface the following discussion by noting the absence of John from much of the discussion. It is not that Dunn does not consider John. It is that he has concluded that John at these points reflects later Christian reflection on Jesus more than Jesus' own words and self-presentation. Whether you agree with him or not, it is instructive to consider the synoptic portrait in itself, because you realize just how different John's portrayal is--and how much we shove its presentation down the Synoptic gospels throat without truly listening to them.

1. Jesus was a devout worshipper of the one God.
Dunn agrees with the general sense that "Jesus proclaimed God and not himself" (216). Jesus had a regular prayer life. Dunn decides not to speculate on Jesus' participation in temple sacrifices, although he notes that "It would presumably have been regarded as extremely odd if he had never done so" (217). On this matter the silence of the biblical record does not mention any oddness or issue in this regard.

The Shema shows up in his language at times, and Jesus deflects Satan by reference to it. Finally Jesus called for faith in God. Faith in him did not seem to be a feature of his call for faith.

Thus no contradiction of monotheism here. Jesus squarely placed himself under the one God.

2. Jesus as Messiah
Dunn makes an excellent case that people certainly wondered if Jesus was the Messiah. What is interesting is that Jesus rather consistently deflected these questions or distanced himself from this identity. Dunn puts it this way, "there is an indication on the part of Jesus of an unwillingness to accept what those who put the question would understand by the term (Messiah/King)" (222).

In any case, the Jews were not expecting the messiah to be superhuman anyway. So definitely no contradiction of monotheism here.

3. Jesus as God's son
Dunn considers it very clear that Jesus considered himself God's son. His use of Abba makes the case particularly for Dunn. However, there is no connotation of divinity here. "At the time of Jesus 'son of God' was a way of characterizing someone who was thought to be commissioned by God or highly favoured by God" (225). At most it might be a reference to the Messiah as Son of God, but even this use does not imply superhuman status.

4. Jesus as son of man/Son of Man
Dunn first rightly observes that the phrase "son of man" appears almost exclusively on the lips of Jesus himself in the NT. He concludes "the phrase must have been a very firm and clear characteristic of Jesus' own speech" (227).

After looking at several references and their parallels, Dunn concludes that Jesus must at least some of the time have used "son of man" simply as a way of referring to "man," to himself as a person. This is almost certainly true. The controversy comes when we ask whether Jesus ever referred to himself by this phrase as the Son of Man of Daniel 7.

Dunn does not commit to a position here. He does argue that the Parables of Enoch and 4 Ezra post-date Jesus. These writings do see the Son of Man as an exalted figure involved in the judgment. 4 Ezra dates from around AD100. The date of the Parables is disputed, but I think they must be roughly concurrent with the rise of the Christian movement or else the phrase son of man would impact the NT more.

In the end, Dunn concludes, "even if Jesus did draw on Dan. 7:13 to express his hope and conviction regarding his future vindication in particular, that would not be un-Jewish in character, and would be quite consistent with a strongly held monotheism" (230).

5. Jesus' authority
Here Dunn rehearses suggestions that Jesus' claims to authority might supercede the human. Not so. Priests had authority to pronounce sins forgiven (as we saw, this more the point of contention). There were other exorcists, other miracle workers who called themselves God's son. The Teacher of Righteousness claimed incredible authority.

6. Jesus in John
In this section, Dunn argues that the Fourth Gospel reflects a later stage of christology rather than the first stage and Jesus' historical self-presentation. "Had Jesus spoken in the terms ascribed to him in the Fourth Gospel the crisis [of parting] must have come must sooner" (234). He catalogs the stark difference between the way Jesus speaks in the Synoptics and the way he speaks in John. He notes the consistency of style across characters in John and 1 John and concludes that "the teaching of the Fourth Gospel can hardly be explained as other than the much developed theological reflection of the fourth evangelist" (253). If Jesus had historically said these sorts of things so early, "it is astonishing that there is no greater mark of it elsewhere in the NT, not just in the Synoptics, but also in the other NT writings" (234).

7. The eschatological plus
Dunn ends the chapter with features of Jesus' ministry that begin to move beyond the normal, elements that must have been "uncomfortable from the first" (235). While Jesus self-identified as a prophet, it was not just any prophet but the eschatological prophet of Isaiah 61. Jesus strikingly modifies the prophetic, "Thus says the LORD" to "I say to you." He was not just an exorcist, but the exorcist who would end the rule of Satan. Jesus saw himself as empowered by the Spirit. His use of Amen of his own sayings was striking when others used it of others' sayings. He called disciples, 12 of them, but did not include himself among them.

In short, "Jesus taught with a degree of self-consciousness of being God's spokesman, able to act and speak in God's stead, which is only partially paralleled within the Jewish tradition" (238). He saw himself as the eschatological spokesman for God, a role beyond any human role before him.

What do we conclude from all this? We conclude that Jesus could probably have been understood by those around him in human terms. At the same time, he also seems to have given hints of something unprecedented, of something more.

Hurtado 2: "Forces and Factors" behind worship of Jesus

Chapter 1 of Larry Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity is entitled "Forces and Factors." In this chapter Hurtado sets out four general elements in the equation of what he considers to be the unprecedented variation (he used to say "mutation" but apparently people took the word negatively) that took place within Judaism with the inception of Christian "binitarianism," the inclusion of the worship of Jesus within the worship of the one God.

Don't be off put by his language. Hurtado is actually quite conservative. The four key ingredients in early Christian devotion to Jesus are:

1. Jewish Monotheism
Hurtado's signature focus here is on cultic monotheism, that is, the exclusive worship of Yahweh in practice. Hurtado rightly recognizes that "the incorporation of Christ into the devotional pattern of early Christian groups has no real analogy in the Jewish tradition of the period" (31). However, I probably would see more precedent in works like Ezekiel the Tragedian, Life of Adam and Eve, and the Similitudes of Enoch than Hurtado does.

At the same time, Hurtado rightly criticizes Crispin Fletcher-Louis in his belief that Jews had a readiness to worship other figures alongside God (37). In particular, Hurtado does not believe Crispin considers carefully enough what kind of honor is being offered in these texts. Once again, Hurtado would say that cultic worship is not offered to any intermediate figure.

Hurtado also criticizes the following for not allowing for modifications to Jewish monotheism. Instead, he claims, these all do not "consider the possibility of significant reformulations and new adaptations of a religious commitment by adherents of a religious tradition" (45).

A. E. Harvey: Not until Ignatius in the early second century do we have the first unambiguous instances of Jesus being described as divine.

Maurice Casey: Casey believes it was impossible for Jesus to have been regarded as divine so long as Christianity was dominated by a Jewish religious outlook (43). Only in the Johannine community, when it was dominated by the attitudes of Gentile converts, was Jesus hailed as God.

J. D. G. Dunn: Hebrews, John, and Revelation may be comparable versions of speculations about divine figures in contemporary Jewish groups. Dunn's position here is of great interest to me, so you might expect to see me engage with his works on this topic later this week.

We can debate some of the details here, and I suspect we will as Hurtado's book goes on. But I believe Hurtado is certainly right about his fundamental claims. There is something unprecedented about early Christian devotion to Jesus and that the earliest Christians did not see their devotion to Jesus to contradict a strict monotheistic belief.

2. The Impact of Jesus' Ministry
In this section Hurtado makes what seems to me (and no doubt to almost anyone reading this) to be an obvious point. We can scarcely understand early Christian devotion to Jesus without taking into account the polarizing effect or outcome of Jesus' ministry (64). Hurtado in this section particularly takes on Burton Mack and others who have used Q to propose that earliest Christianity and the Jesus movement had none of the understanding of early Christianity.

I've alluded to this absurd suggestion before, indeed Wink brings it up in his recent book. I had a good laugh at his suggestion that although the simplest explanation is that Jesus, like John the Baptist and those after him, expected major events to happen in the near future, history is rarely simple. So he, like Mack, Borg, Crossen, and others, want to go with the more complex suggestion that Jesus differed with John the Baptist and the Christians that followed. And mind you, as Hurtado argues, leaving no trace in Paul or the Synoptic gospels of the kind of conflict that must have taken place in the supposed transition to what won out.

It is what it is. Wink and others want to distance Jesus from the Christianity that followed. Schweitzer was right on this score. You may not like this Jesus, but you'll just have to deal with it.

3. The Religious Experiences of the Earliest Christians
Hurtado's strength of taking into account the practice and experience of the earliest believers comes through here again. The vast majority of scholarly discussion talks only of ideas. I am utterly dumbfounded at any scholar who would take issue with a statement like this one: "it is clear that in the tradition that he [Paul] learned and circulated among his churches the resurrection appearances were the crucial bases for the faith that God had raised Jesus from death" (71).

Similarly, "there must have been some who experienced what they took to be revelations sent by God that convinced them that obedience to God demanded of them this cultic reverence of Christ" (72). Mind you, Hurtado remains thoroughly "objective" throughout this section. He does not validate their experiences or draw theological conclusions. He simply points out that no reconstruction of earliest Christianity that does not accept significant impact from Jesus himself and significantly formative "resurrection experiences" among the early Christians is worth a historical dime.

4. Interaction with the Greco-Roman World
Hurtado spends the least time in this chapter on this one. Basically, he recognizes that part of the formation of earliest Christian devotion will have taken place addressing the critique and opposition of both Jewish opponents and those in the pagan religious scene. The early Christians would have differentiated themselves from others in their environment while reacting to others (76-77).

Most likely more to come...

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.

Friday Review: Bauckham's "Throne of God"

Today I want to reflect on a paper Richard Bauckham gave at a conference in St. Andrews in 1998: "The Throne of God and the Worship of Jesus." It is now a chapter in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, edited by Carey Newman, James Davila, and Gladys Lewis.

Let me just say that St. Andrews knows to put on conferences. I don't know any place that does a better job--especially in the light of the location. I was actually present when Bauckham gave this paper (10 years ago next weekend), although I will confess to having a problem sticking with most papers of this sort if I don't have a paper copy in front of me. So I sadly admit that reading this chapter was like hearing it for the first time--except of course that it is quite typical of the other things on monotheism by Bauckham I have interacted with here.

Bauckham's thesis is now very clear to me:

1. YHWH was distinguished from all other supposed gods as a) in a completely different category, even if they might be spiritual forces of some kind, b) this uniqueness had to do with YHWH being the sole Ruler of all things and c) YHWH being the sole Creator of all things and thus d) YHWH alone being the object of worship by all things.

This is a summary out of my head rather than the precise wording of this chapter, but these things for Bauckham constitute the "unique identity of the one God."

2. Among "intermediary figures," we can distinguish figures like wisdom and the logos that are included within God's unique identity and other figures such as exalted patriarchs and angels who were never included within that identity.

3. The exaltation to God's right hand that the early Christians understood through Psalm 110:1, because it associated Christ with God's throne, would have immediately implied to the early Christians, says Bauckham, that Jesus was included within God's unique identity. That would thus mean that he was involved with creation and the rule of all things and could receive the worship afforded the one God.

This train of thought is logical enough, but seems to me to assume too many "musts" based on ideological constructs like "God's unique identity" (which as Bauckham acknowledges is not an expression we actually find in any of these texts).

With regard to the throne of God, the focus of this chapter, Bauckham argues that "the throne of God in the highest heaven became a key symbol of monotheism... While a few traces of other enthroned figures associated with God's rule can be found, the subordination of such figures to God's rule is almost always stressed, while the overwhelming trend of the literature is towards emptying heaven of all thrones except God's" (53).

I can go for that--except I question the word monotheism. As he makes clear in his treatment of MacDonald we mentioned earlier, the word is not a biblical word. It is an Enlightenment word. I would prefer to say that the throne of God in the highest heaven reflects the sole rulership of God over every other being and power among all things.

Let me also say that "the subordination of such figures to God's rule" also jumps out at me given comments in the NT like 1 Cor. 15:28: "When he has done this [put everything under Christ], then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all" and Philippians 2:11, "And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." These verses clearly subordinate the rulership of Christ to that of God the Father.

As an aside, these verses are "pre-orthodox." They do not yet reflect the full Christian understanding of the persons of the Trinity and their interrelationships. My purposes here are not to deny the orthodox Christian understanding but to ask where Paul was in the flow of revelation given his Jewish/Greco Roman context. Although it is debated among Christians currently, I am quite willing to affirm by faith the orthodox understanding that there is no subordination among the persons of the Godhead. Orthodoxy has generally understood passages like 1 Corinthians 15:28 in the light of Christ's humanity rather than his divinity, a distinction of course that I suspect Paul would not yet be able to understand.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Bauckham's paper are his discussions of three possible exceptions to his claim that only God can be on the throne.

1. Wisdom on the Throne
Here Bauckham looks at 1 Enoch 84 (from the Dream Visions) and Wisdom 9. Bauckham is right to see these as completely coherent with "monotheism." These are clearly personifications of God's wisdom.

The alternative to Bauckham sees the path to protological language about Christ through the path of wisdom and word. Psalm 110:1 places Christ at God's right hand--"wisdom" is at God's right hand--Christ embodies the meaning, the logos, of creation and is the instrument of new creation--equation of Christ with God's wisdom and logos. Philippians 2 remains the strongest argument against this perspective, in my opinion.

2. Moses on the Throne
Bauckham here treats Ezekiel the Tragedian's (ca. 200BC) placement of Moses on God's throne over all things. His reading seems plausible enough to me. Exegesis of Exodus, influenced by Genesis, leads to this image. The key passage is Exodus 7:1, where God tells Moses, "I will make you god to Pharaoh." Thus the metaphor of Moses on God's throne is God making Moses god to the universe. But it is not really God's throne but an image relating to Moses in relation to the Egyptians.

This picture does not violate "monotheism" because Moses is clearly subordinated to God's rule and in fact rules for God. His placement on God's throne makes us a little uncomfortable, but it is within the parameters of God's sole rule. I like Bauckham's interpretation, but Ezekiel T still puts Moses relative to God's rule on the throne of all things.

3. Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch
By far the most interesting parallel is the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch. The Son of Man is seated on the divine throne over all things and judges the world. "All those who dwell on the earth will fall and worship before him" (48.5). Bauckham says this is the "exception which proves the rule" (60).

But the problem is that this is Bauckham's rule. How is it not rather the "evidence that undermines his paradigm"? I don't think anyone questions that the Son of Man here is subordinated to the Ancient of Days. But apparently it was okay for such a figure to mediate God's rule.

Further, worship itself is an ambiguous concept. It was appropriate to "bow the knee" to a king, which is one of the words for worship. It is not clear to me that Bauckham or Hurtado have in any way demonstrated that Jewish thought could not accommodate "bowing the knee" to a ruler of all things who was clearly subordinated to the Ruler of all things.

Bauckham has called an exception one of the clearest parallels to the NT in Jewish literature on this topic. I'm a little puzzled that Bauckham distances Matthew 25 from these passages in the Parables. It reminds me of Simon Gathercole's distancing of Sirach and wisdom passages from Matthew. In both cases I suspect that interpreter bias is the ultimate cause rather than an inductive reading of the evidence.

Guest Post by Jonathan: A Response on Bauckham and Dunn

Hi Ken,

Interesting stuff. I've a great interest in these questions and would appreciate your thoughts. As I've studied the various interpretations of the development of NT Christology one thing that should be obvious, but is sometimes obscured by the nitty-gritty arguments, is that our conception of what constitutes monotheism in the NT period will essentially determine what we do with the christological texts.

E.g., as we move from the OT to the NT to the post-NT period, we can historically trace the conceptual development within Judaism from henotheism to monotheism to monism. This monism is a later rabbinic development - in reaction to the post-70 experience, during which boundaries were drawn tighter and earlier diversity anathematized - certain streams of apocalyptic thought were perceived to threaten God's unity (e.g., such as what became known as the two-power heresy). My concern with the Dunn-type line of understanding is that it retrojects back this later form of monism as normative for the NT period (most often as presuppositions, e.g., see the import of Partings 2nd ed., xxvi-xxvii). Thus, Paul can't really be seen to be saying that Christ is somehow intrinsic to God's own identity (as Bauckham puts it). That would constitute ditheism, so it cannot, by Dunn's definition of monotheism, be correct.

The logic of this, within monism, is that incorporating Christ within the Shema does not make sense unless you are collapsing their identities into one another, for how can two be one monad? Thus, as Dunn says, the one Lord must be being distinguished from the one God. It’s not that this isn’t true (they’re not being collapsed into one another) but that it’s not the whole picture. I think Dunn’s position on monotheism/monism in the NT period leads him to misunderstand what Paul was doing here. Monotheism was a doctrine which distinguished the “one” (God of Israel) over against the “many” (pagan gods and lords); monotheism was not about analysing the inner-being of the one God as a monad. All the "God is one" texts even show this (e.g., Rom 3:20 - the “one” God of all people groups, it’s just not about God's internal being). The question of God’s inner-being just doesn’t seem to have been an issue until the Christian understanding of Christ and other apocalypticists started sayings things which brought the question into play.

When this is historically taken on board, then I think that what Bauckham is trying to say can be more readily understood. As Second Temple Jews were more concerned with who God is, with his identity - not about conferring ontic estimations such as that he was a monad - then it was possible for the early Christians to now say that their God should be identified with reference to Jesus (leaving the Spirit out of the discussion for now). Before Christ, it was as the God of Israel, the eternal Creator and Ruler of all; after Christ, it was as the Father who raised the Son from the dead. The identification of who their God is, has changed in the light of the Christ-event.

Thus, with respect to 1 Cor. 8, it is precisely by saying that Jesus is intrinsic (not an addition) to God’s identity that allows monotheism (not monism) to be retained. Hence the Shema can be glossed with both Father and Son. This is further reinforced by the addition of the prepositions, “from”, “for”, and “through” (Rom 11:36). Splitting them among Father and Son ensures that God’s oneness (there is only one God, not two) is preserved. This is especially evident from the use of dia, which asserts the creative action of the Son. So the Son is intrinsic to who God is, and always was. It is the historical revelation of the Son which casts new light on who their God always was. Thus, Father and Son are not collapsed into one another, but are distinguished, but within the mystery of the one God’s being, not as the one God having one Lord added. This is ditheism, as Bauckham rightly objects. Hence Paul’s usual use of theos for the Father and kurios for the Son thus allows him to distinguish between them without collapsing them into one another, yet also then allows him to avoid ditheism – as in the Christianized Shema, in which they are both held together. I’ll come to the other YHWH texts which reinforce this below.

Historically, what Bauckham argues is that Christ was raised from the dead and exalted to God’s right hand over all things. This is the historical experience. This role/status that Christ received was not something that any ordinary man or messiah figure could have. As such, the logic goes that if he is now participating in these exclusively divine prerogatives/status then he must always have done so, for the adoption/apotheosis option must be rejected within a Jewish monotheistic matrix. It is their understanding of who Christ is now by what he does that led to an epistemological shift in their perception of who he must always have been. I wonder if part of your problem with Bauckham is that he’s not always entirely clear about the difference in his thesis between the historical unfolding of events for the early Christians (temporal sequence) and their perception of what it means (logical sequence)? I.e., it looks like Jesus is being “added” historically (temporal sequence), but it is actually a recognition of who he is always was (i.e., logical sequence --> the incarnate one – the person that they knew, Jesus messiah, was actually eternally Son).

However, Bauckham’s entire line of interpretation seems patently false if we start from monism rather than from monotheism. Monism precludes this: thus, 1 Cor 8 either seems like an addition of one Lord (ditheism), or must entail a denial of Christ’s divinity to ensure God’s oneness (just a man with a derivative role in exercising God’s sovereignty). Bauckham’s argument is rather that the texts suggests a greater perception and further identification of who God is in the light of Christ. We know and identify God by his character and his acts in history, in the Christ-event he has identified himself fully. He is not a new or two Gods (by adding a second figure), but it is a new perception on our part of who he is (the God known and revealed in the face of Jesus and by his Spirit).

The fact that Paul uses YHWH texts and applies them to Jesus should reinforce all of this or else Paul’s attribution of them to Christ seems frankly blasphemous. The weakness of Dunn’s analysis of these texts is very apparent as it’s difficult to avoid their import; it doesn’t just ascribe a derivative lordship, but connotes that the one historically known and experienced as Jesus, the incarnate Son, is the one known in times past as YHWH of the OT. Bauckham’s thesis assumes the progressive revelation of who God is through time, which is partly why I pointed you to this monotheism essay. God in himself might not change, but our understanding/perception and knowledge of him do. So, especially with the Christ-event, as our beloved Hebrews says (1:1-4).

YHWH texts and messianic ‘lord’: I can’t help feeling that this is a bit of a non-issue, for the different uses of ‘Lord’ are held together in the one person of the incarnate Son as the helpful and convenient linguistic nexus of two different conceptual ideas. While connoting divinity, YHWH texts are very important, but Jesus is still also the messianic lord with a role in salvation-history to perform (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:23-28).

I can't help wondering if a Dunnian influence makes it more difficult to get to grips with Bauckham’s thesis. I’ll really look forward to hearing your thoughts on all this ;-) Sorry it’s so long!