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From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology
In From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God , Maurice Casey suggests a new theory as to why New Testament Christology developed as it did. In making his argument, Casey pays particular attention to the culture of Jesus and the earliest Christians.
- GenresChristianity
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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May 29, 2024
AN ARGUMENT FOR HOW NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY DEVELOPED
Philip Maurice Casey (1942-2014) was a British New Testament scholar and an emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1991 book, “The purpose of this book is to put forward a new way of analyzing the evidence, and to use this in elaborating a new theory to explain why New Testament christology developed as it did. The new mode of analysis is … largely based on the work which Jewish scholars have done in analyzing modern Judaism, the major concept being that of identity. I then remove the secondary Christology of John’s Gospel and the synoptics. This leaves the way clear to argue that the Jesus of history recreated Jewish identity from a prophetic perspective, thereby making christological development essential. This development… began when the Christian community was still wholly Jewish, but it proceeded more vigorously because of the needs of the Gentile mission… Only when the Johannine community, removed from the synagogue by ‘the Jews,’ had Gentile self-identification, could they develop the deity and incarnation of Jesus.” (Pg. 9)
He observes, “The Gospel attributed to St. John is the only New Testament document in which the deity and incarnation of Jesus in unequivocally proclaimed… This is an explicit declaration of the incarnation in the strong sense … of the process by means of which a fully divine being is born as a person… John saw an ontological rather than merely functional difference between Jesus and other people… All this material is coherent, and quite unlike anything else in the New Testament… the author was in no way embarrassed by the full divinity of Christ… It is well known that the presentation of Jesus in the fourth Gospel is historically inaccurate. None the less… [I] argue … that the unique aspects of John’s Christology are the product of the Johannine community, and that these developments can be located in changes which took place in the community.” (Pg. 23-25) Later, he adds, “The Johannine community contained people who were thrown out of the synagogue after A.D. 70, when Jewish identity was recreated under Pharisees like Gamaliel II.” (Pg. 32)
He summarizes, “the major Christological titles in the synoptic Gospels … owe their appearance as titles to the early church, though they have some connection with the historical ministry. Term such as ‘son of God’ were occasionally applied to Jesus as a holy but not unique person: ‘messiah’ … was used by those who mocked him on the cross… ‘son of man’ was used by Jesus, but not as a title… [This study] gives us some insight into the ministry of Jesus. While he did not use christological titles, some genuine ‘son of man’ sayings show that he did preach with authority, and with total confidence in the divine authorization of a mission in which he brought the good news of forthcoming salvation.” (Pg. 54-55)
He states, “We must draw two conclusions from the attitude of the Jesus movement to the identity factors of Judaism. First, the Jesus movement was thoroughly Jewish… Secondly, the Jesus movement was on the opposite end of a spectrum from orthodoxy. Sabbath and purity are two areas of halakhah where we can document a large increase in enactments in the Second Temple period… the majority of arguments were caused by Jesus’ opposition of the orthodox expansion of the halakhah; he was not opposed to what he and the majority of Jews perceived the law to be… The fact that the Jesus movement was on the opposite end… means that conflict with orthodox Jews was functional, because it reinforced a different view of Judaism.” (Pg. 71-72)
He summarizes, “It took some 50 or 60 years to turn a Jewish prophet into a Gentile god. Cultural change was as important as the passage of time. To analyze christological development against this background of cultural change, I use a three-stage model. In the first stage, the Christian community was Jewish, a subgroup within Judaism, as the Jesus movement had been. In the second stage, Gentiles entered the Christian community in significant numbers, without becoming Jewish. In the third stage, Christianity was identifiable as a Gentile religion.” (Pg. 97)
He suggests, “the early chapters of Acts give us significant insights into the development of Christology in the earliest period. At this stage Jesus was ‘a man accredited to you by God’ (2:22). His life, death and resurrection were fundamental for salvation, but he was not seen as ‘the Son of God’ in any special or unique sense, nor as incarnate or divine. There is nothing in these early chapters that could not be believed by faithful and observant Jews who remained within the Jewish community, as the first apostles did.” (Pg. 109)
He notes, “Christological developments went ahead to a point far beyond the development of any other Jewish figure because of the internal drive produced by Jesus’ embodiment of Judaism followed by the Gentile mission, and only perceived monotheism to restrain them… It could only be a matter of time before the conflicts of the early period reached a stage where Judaism would reject Gentile Christianity, and Gentile Christianity … would reject ‘the Jews’ as Gentiles had always done.” (Pg. 138)
He asserts, “Whatever our definition, incarnation is clearly declared as the entry of a fully divine being into the world in the Johannine prologue, alone of all New Testament documents. Jesus was now a figure so elevated that observant Jews such as Jesus of Nazareth and the first apostles could not believe in him. The consequences of this for Christian belief are more serious than they are usually taken to be.” (Pg. 159)
He argues, “Two points are especially important in undermining belief in the deity of Jesus. One is Jesus’ expectation of the kingdom: he predicted that it would come very soon, and his predictions were mistaken… Jesus’ mistake is easy to understand if we perceive it as the mistaken prophecy of a fallible Jew. It is a mistake repeated by numerous Jews at crisis points in Jewish history… Jesus’ inaccurate predictions are not consistent with the portrayal of his two natures in the Chalcedonian Definition… Some Jewish Christians, however, did not leave the synagogue (cf. Jn 12:42-43)… neither God the Father nor the teaching of Jesus cold possibly require them to leave the covenant community, the chosen people. It is at this point that the second serious historical and theological problem arises ... Jewish identity … and monotheism in particular, was formed in the course of their divinely controlled salvation history. Thus most Jews have ultimately been prevented from accepting the Gospel by God’s revelation of himself to them.” (Pg. 169-170)
He concludes, “The deity of Jesus is… INHERENTLY unJewish… belief that a second being is god involves departure from the Jewish community. Hence the deity of Jesus was deliberately expounded in the Johannine community at the point where it took on Gentile self-identification… As a human process… the development of Christology is … a means of holding together a large social group. As Christianity spread to the Gentiles, the bonding forces had to be altered… This basic change from Judaism involved a significant shift from activity to belief. The sheer amount of belief required to hold together the mixed community of Jews and Gentiles was necessarily great than that of a subgroup within Judaism.” (Pg. 176)
He ends, “Scripture … leads us into the usual human muddle of truth and falsity… John’s misleading picture of Jesus is at the center of this. It… has him condemn the Jews, to whom the historical Jesus preached… We cannot reasonably believe in all the results of that developmental process. If Christianity is to remain a viable option for honest and well-informed people, it should surely undo that process of development, and emerge as something nearer to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.” (Pg. 177-178)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the development of Christology, and the early Church.
Philip Maurice Casey (1942-2014) was a British New Testament scholar and an emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1991 book, “The purpose of this book is to put forward a new way of analyzing the evidence, and to use this in elaborating a new theory to explain why New Testament christology developed as it did. The new mode of analysis is … largely based on the work which Jewish scholars have done in analyzing modern Judaism, the major concept being that of identity. I then remove the secondary Christology of John’s Gospel and the synoptics. This leaves the way clear to argue that the Jesus of history recreated Jewish identity from a prophetic perspective, thereby making christological development essential. This development… began when the Christian community was still wholly Jewish, but it proceeded more vigorously because of the needs of the Gentile mission… Only when the Johannine community, removed from the synagogue by ‘the Jews,’ had Gentile self-identification, could they develop the deity and incarnation of Jesus.” (Pg. 9)
He observes, “The Gospel attributed to St. John is the only New Testament document in which the deity and incarnation of Jesus in unequivocally proclaimed… This is an explicit declaration of the incarnation in the strong sense … of the process by means of which a fully divine being is born as a person… John saw an ontological rather than merely functional difference between Jesus and other people… All this material is coherent, and quite unlike anything else in the New Testament… the author was in no way embarrassed by the full divinity of Christ… It is well known that the presentation of Jesus in the fourth Gospel is historically inaccurate. None the less… [I] argue … that the unique aspects of John’s Christology are the product of the Johannine community, and that these developments can be located in changes which took place in the community.” (Pg. 23-25) Later, he adds, “The Johannine community contained people who were thrown out of the synagogue after A.D. 70, when Jewish identity was recreated under Pharisees like Gamaliel II.” (Pg. 32)
He summarizes, “the major Christological titles in the synoptic Gospels … owe their appearance as titles to the early church, though they have some connection with the historical ministry. Term such as ‘son of God’ were occasionally applied to Jesus as a holy but not unique person: ‘messiah’ … was used by those who mocked him on the cross… ‘son of man’ was used by Jesus, but not as a title… [This study] gives us some insight into the ministry of Jesus. While he did not use christological titles, some genuine ‘son of man’ sayings show that he did preach with authority, and with total confidence in the divine authorization of a mission in which he brought the good news of forthcoming salvation.” (Pg. 54-55)
He states, “We must draw two conclusions from the attitude of the Jesus movement to the identity factors of Judaism. First, the Jesus movement was thoroughly Jewish… Secondly, the Jesus movement was on the opposite end of a spectrum from orthodoxy. Sabbath and purity are two areas of halakhah where we can document a large increase in enactments in the Second Temple period… the majority of arguments were caused by Jesus’ opposition of the orthodox expansion of the halakhah; he was not opposed to what he and the majority of Jews perceived the law to be… The fact that the Jesus movement was on the opposite end… means that conflict with orthodox Jews was functional, because it reinforced a different view of Judaism.” (Pg. 71-72)
He summarizes, “It took some 50 or 60 years to turn a Jewish prophet into a Gentile god. Cultural change was as important as the passage of time. To analyze christological development against this background of cultural change, I use a three-stage model. In the first stage, the Christian community was Jewish, a subgroup within Judaism, as the Jesus movement had been. In the second stage, Gentiles entered the Christian community in significant numbers, without becoming Jewish. In the third stage, Christianity was identifiable as a Gentile religion.” (Pg. 97)
He suggests, “the early chapters of Acts give us significant insights into the development of Christology in the earliest period. At this stage Jesus was ‘a man accredited to you by God’ (2:22). His life, death and resurrection were fundamental for salvation, but he was not seen as ‘the Son of God’ in any special or unique sense, nor as incarnate or divine. There is nothing in these early chapters that could not be believed by faithful and observant Jews who remained within the Jewish community, as the first apostles did.” (Pg. 109)
He notes, “Christological developments went ahead to a point far beyond the development of any other Jewish figure because of the internal drive produced by Jesus’ embodiment of Judaism followed by the Gentile mission, and only perceived monotheism to restrain them… It could only be a matter of time before the conflicts of the early period reached a stage where Judaism would reject Gentile Christianity, and Gentile Christianity … would reject ‘the Jews’ as Gentiles had always done.” (Pg. 138)
He asserts, “Whatever our definition, incarnation is clearly declared as the entry of a fully divine being into the world in the Johannine prologue, alone of all New Testament documents. Jesus was now a figure so elevated that observant Jews such as Jesus of Nazareth and the first apostles could not believe in him. The consequences of this for Christian belief are more serious than they are usually taken to be.” (Pg. 159)
He argues, “Two points are especially important in undermining belief in the deity of Jesus. One is Jesus’ expectation of the kingdom: he predicted that it would come very soon, and his predictions were mistaken… Jesus’ mistake is easy to understand if we perceive it as the mistaken prophecy of a fallible Jew. It is a mistake repeated by numerous Jews at crisis points in Jewish history… Jesus’ inaccurate predictions are not consistent with the portrayal of his two natures in the Chalcedonian Definition… Some Jewish Christians, however, did not leave the synagogue (cf. Jn 12:42-43)… neither God the Father nor the teaching of Jesus cold possibly require them to leave the covenant community, the chosen people. It is at this point that the second serious historical and theological problem arises ... Jewish identity … and monotheism in particular, was formed in the course of their divinely controlled salvation history. Thus most Jews have ultimately been prevented from accepting the Gospel by God’s revelation of himself to them.” (Pg. 169-170)
He concludes, “The deity of Jesus is… INHERENTLY unJewish… belief that a second being is god involves departure from the Jewish community. Hence the deity of Jesus was deliberately expounded in the Johannine community at the point where it took on Gentile self-identification… As a human process… the development of Christology is … a means of holding together a large social group. As Christianity spread to the Gentiles, the bonding forces had to be altered… This basic change from Judaism involved a significant shift from activity to belief. The sheer amount of belief required to hold together the mixed community of Jews and Gentiles was necessarily great than that of a subgroup within Judaism.” (Pg. 176)
He ends, “Scripture … leads us into the usual human muddle of truth and falsity… John’s misleading picture of Jesus is at the center of this. It… has him condemn the Jews, to whom the historical Jesus preached… We cannot reasonably believe in all the results of that developmental process. If Christianity is to remain a viable option for honest and well-informed people, it should surely undo that process of development, and emerge as something nearer to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.” (Pg. 177-178)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the development of Christology, and the early Church.
June 4, 2016
A useful scholastic book. Particularly helpful are the three stages of change undergone in the early community of faith, along with identifying characteristics of Jewishness which were gradually dropped by believers as they transformed into Christians.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews