The Development of Christology During the First Hundred Years and Other Essays on Early Christian Christology

by Charles H. Talbert, M.M. Mitchell (Series Editor), D.P. Moessner (Series Editor)

Entering the debate about the development of Christology among Jesus' earliest followers, this volume critiques both the traditional evolutionary view that posited an elementary early Jewish Christology that developed in complexity as it was increasingly Hellenized and the more recent attempt to see a full-orbed Christology both as early and as Jewish, not Hellenistic, in its categories. It contends that during the first 100 years Jesus' followers employed four models from their milieu, Jewish and Greco-Roman, both to understand and to communicate their Christologies. These models were appropriated because they were appropriate vehicles for expressing the impact of Jesus on them, past, present, and future.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published June 22, 2011

Reviews

[Alford Wayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book of essays discussing the early Christian views of Christ in comparison to their Greco/Roman/Jewish belief systems. This book covers the many pagan views of the ideas relating to gods,men, messengers, heroes, virgin births,men of valor, soteriology, and apocalypticism! Seeing how the belief system of Christianity came from a patchwork of ideas I is no longer surprising we find what we do in the literature of early Christianity concerning who they thought Christ was and is. I was able to read this from inter-library loan due to the books $336.00 price tag.

[Jose Papo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction is a must read synthesis to understand the state of knowledge about the controversies regarding the studies of Christology in early christianity/judaism.

This text is fantastic (and represents my point of view on the matter): "Would not the prayers directed to Jesus as such an End-time figure establish the fact that Jesus’ earliest followers regarded him as God? In 1 Cor 16:22 prayer is directed to Jesus: “Our Lord, come.” Paul in Rom 10:13 quotes Joel 2:32 and says that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. In 1 Cor 1:2 Paul describes Christians as those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Such data require a context. In Dan 10:12 Gabriel tells Daniel that he, the angel, has come to help because of Daniel’s words (apparently petition for enlightenment [10:19] addressed to a heavenly creature). Daniel addresses the angel as “my lord” (10:16–17). Being petitioned and addressed as ‘lord’ does not mean, however, that Gabriel was deity.38 In T. Dan 6:1–2 there is an exhortation to draw near to the angel who intercedes for you. The Jerusalem Talmud contains a saying that when one is in need, that one should pray to God, not to Michael or to Gabriel ( y. Ber. 9:13a). This surely reflects a practice of praying to angelic creatures. The Jerusalem Targum on Exod 20:23 has God say to the people that they should not worship the likeness of the angels who serve before him. There are early Jewish warnings against the worship of angels as well (Philo, Fug. 212; Somn. 1.232, 238; Pseudo-Philo, L.A.B. 34.2; 13.6). Such devotion to angels in popular Judaism did not imply the deity of angels. Such worship was opposed because it was directed to creatures rather than the Creator. The call to Jesus for an early parousia, then, did not, in and of itself, mean he was regarded as God by his earliest followers."