The State of Pauline Studies: Paul and the Messiah

I am in my late fifties. It is interesting to locate myself among those scholars I observed when I was in my late twenties. I would read articles and books they had written and wonder where they were now. Some hadn't seemed to have written much for a while, and I wondered if they were still alive. Some sat in the back of the room at SBL while the young people presented. Some didn't bother going to SBL anymore.

I still buy the books. Some of my purchases these last months have of course included James McGrath's two books on John the Baptist (started). I bought the landmark New Testament in Color. You'll find Vanhoozer's Mere Christian Hermeneutics on my shelf as well as Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology among several others outside of biblical studies.

One I may persist through is The State of Pauline Studies. I'm grateful to Nijay Gupta and Scot McKnight for doing these volumes. They help me know how out of touch I may or may not be. It doesn't matter much to the church. In the current hyper-populism of America, expertise is a sign of evilness.

I've made it through the first chapter, whoop-tee-do. It's by one of the youngin's, Josh Jipp, on "Paul and the Messiah." I didn't feel too out of date. Here is a very brief run down.

1. Christos as a Title
Jipp sets out well the transition in consensus that has happened over the last hundred years from a generation that largely saw Christ as almost a proper name to a growing new consensus that it does indeed invoke a sense of the title Messiah. He presents the sharpest pivot taking place in the 2012 work of Matthew Novenson, Christ Among the Messiahs. Novenson argued that Christos would have been recognized as an honorific -- thus having a clear content without having to spell it out.

I should also note references throughout this chapter to Jipp's own work, chiefly Christ is King (2015) and The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (2020).

2. Messianic Exegesis
I'm not sure if this section had much of a debate point. Jipp catalogs various works of recent years that have explored one or another way in which Paul read the Old Testament with Jesus glasses on. This seems to be beyond question. He starts the section going back to Don Juel's classic on Messianic Exegesis. 

A key resource for me here was an old chapter by Richard Hays in a Festscrift titled, "Christ Prays the Psalms." Since Hays is now an old guy, Jipp cites instead another youngin', Matthew Bates, in his The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation (2012). While I'm on the subject, another key recent work in the footnotes is Bates' Salvation by Allegiance Alone (2017).

3. Romans 1:3-4
Here Jipp pits an older reading of these two verses as a "two-step," "exaltation Christology" with adoptionist overtones with more recent readings that see Jesus' human messianic identity in full concert with his divine messianic identity. The trend of the last twenty-five years has clearly been toward a reading of Paul that is closer to the later creeds than the earlier Dunn generation that saw a longer development of Christology in the first century. At the moment, Hurtado and Bauckham have won the day among the younger generation of scholars.

4. Royal Christology
This section explores some suggested overtones for Jesus' kingship. Is it primarily Jewish messianism (Horbury)? To what extent does Paul present Jesus in contrast to Caesar (Wright)? Jipp himself sees some influence of ancient royal ideology.

I do think that there are overtones of Christ as a king in contrast to Caesar. I've generally thought however that Paul was careful not to be too explicit about these overtones for obvious reasons. But I do indeed see Paul's royal Christology as the very center of his Christology.

William Horbury's Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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