More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The late Martin Hengel exposed many of the tenuous arguments put forward for an evolutionary process of christological development. He argued: “The time between the death of Jesus and the fully developed Christology which we find in the earliest Christian documents, the letters of Paul, is so short that the development which takes place within it can only be called amazing.”
that Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking believers existed side by side from the beginning. They coexisted in Jerusalem and elsewhere, such as Caesarea, Damascus, Antioch, and Rome.
Therefore, confession of Jesus as the divine Lord was not the result of faith in Christ encountering Greek religion and philosophy.
patterns in the early church and what they tell us about the divine status of Jesus. His conclusion is that early Christian worship shows a clear veneration of Jesus as the God of Israel in human form. Jesus was treated as a recipient of devotion and was associated with God in often striking ways. Such devotion to Jesus as divine “erupted suddenly and quickly, not gradually and late, among first-century circles of followers” and exhibited “an unparalleled intensity and diversity of expression.”
The theological reflection of the church fathers did not so much develop this theme as transpose it into a conceptual framework to be readily explored in terms of essences and natures.
Furthermore, if the EHCC is correct, two things follow. First, belief in the divinity of Jesus emerged surprisingly early. While the coherence and grammar of “incarnation” still had to be worked out,
The creedal formulations find their theological DNA within the devotional practices and theological confessions of the primitive church. In other words, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creeds of the fourth century are not purely politically driven and radically innovative statements of faith. They are, instead, contextualized clarifications of New Testament teaching.
In his book, Ehrman argues that in antiquity there was originally no concept of God as the sole and supreme sovereign, who was up in heaven, far above and beyond all earthly life. Such a notion of “God,” as an exclusive and absolute deity, came much later and was a creation of the church in the fourth century, some three hundred years after Jesus.
Second, we must also remember that analogy does not mean genealogy. Just because there are verbal and conceptual similarities between Christian claims about Jesus and Greco-Roman claims about divine figures does not prove that Christians borrowed from pagan sources.
If Christian ideas about God were so snug and down within the ancient world, then why was Paul flogged by Jewish communities (2 Cor 11:24) and laughed out of the Athenian Areopagus by Greek philosophers (Acts 17:32)? Could it be that the Christian idea of God was startling, odd, and even offensive to Jews and pagans, who had trouble swallowing its claims about Jesus? Perhaps the reason why New Testament authors like Paul, Luke, and John spent so much time talking about Jesus and God is because they meant something very different by “God” than what their Jewish and pagan neighbors thought, and
...more
When the early Christians mentioned God, they had to mention Jesus as well, and whenever they mentioned Jesus, they felt constrained to mention God in the same breath. It’s like God was Jesified and Jesus was Godified.13 For this reason, a number of scholars have spoken about a “christological monotheism.” The God of Israel is revealed in, through, and even as the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, to say that monotheism has been revised raises some good questions about monotheism itself.
Given this Jewish monotheistic context — giving honorific status to Jesus’ name, identifying Christ as Creator, and making him a recipient of worship — was theologically adventurous, sociologically scandalous, and historically unprecedented as far as I can tell.
“This concern to define and reverence Jesus with reference to the one God is what I mean by the term ‘binitarian.’
Yet lest we think that the Metatron tradition has shown that Jewish monotheism was not quite so strict, we must remember a few things. First, in 3 Enoch, there is vigorous emphasis on God’s sovereignty over the world and his spatial remoteness from the human race. As per much Jewish mystical literature, God resides in the seventh heaven, and he is inaccessible to humans from there. In fact, the angels complain to God why he bothers with humans like Adam and Enoch, good for nothing idolaters that they are; in response, God withdraws his glory from the face of the earth (3 En. 5.10 – 14). In
...more
Evidently exalted angels serve God, but they do not share his rule, nor do they receive his worship.
The idea that one becomes an angel upon death is called “angelomorphism,” and in relation to Christ is known as “angelomorphic Christology.”
Second, among the church fathers, the strange “angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament (see, e.g., Gen 16:13; 21:17 – 18; 22:11 – 13; etc.) was regarded as an appearance of the preincarnate Christ (i.e., a “christophany”), a tradition that is as early as Justin Martyr in the mid-second century.
First, the identification of the “angel of the Lord” with the preincarnate Christ does make sense if one engages in a self-consciously retrospective and deliberately canonical and christological reading of the Old Testament.
The problem with the angel is whether or even how he is identifiable with YHWH’s own presence and person. However, Christ’s person was understood as being distinct from God the Father, and his mode of divine presence was couched in far more concrete language, like “form” of God, “glory” of God, “image” of God, and even “God enfleshed.”
Lord, we have no analogous accommodation of a second figure along with God as recipient of such devotion in the Jewish tradition of the time, making it very difficult to fit this inclusion of Christ as recipient of devotion into any known devotional pattern attested among Jewish groups of the Roman period.”
The early church did not invent a strict monotheism; rather, they inherited it from Judaism. But they did create a christological monotheism, where the one God was now known through, in, and as the Lord Jesus Christ.
If the preceding analysis is correct, the early church did not simply rip off existing ideas of descending gods and ascending humans and not-so-subtly apply them to Jesus. Rather, it seems that what happened was that the among Jesus’ earliest followers there was an immediate move to reconfigure Jewish monotheism, whereby the one God of Israel was now known and experienced as the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father.
Psalm 45 was originally a wedding psalm recited to celebrate the marriage of a Judean king to his new bride.
erection
Lol
Many scholars claim that the New Testament confession of Jesus Christ as “Lord” is meant as a deliberate challenge to the honorific status and divine power claimed by the Roman imperial apparatus. In other words, to confess that “Jesus is Lord” was to imply that “Caesar is not.”
Moses represents the elevation of Israel to rule over the nations, a point found in other writings too
Approaches like Ehrman’s, which begin by casting doubt on the historical value of the Gospels for reconstructing the life of Jesus, but then proceed to formulate a hypothesis about the historical Jesus anyway, are essentially creating a vacuum and then filling it with scholarly fiction.
The objective of the Evangelists was not to write a life of Jesus to satisfy modernist demands for detail, nor was it to offer an image of Jesus that they pretty much made up to satisfy their own ideological bent. The Evangelists intended to narrate a story and evoke the significance of one called “Jesus,” Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord.
But even then it verges on the ludicrous. Think about it. A story about Jesus or as a saying attributed to Jesus is only historical if it does not sound anything like what the church was saying about Jesus.
Who thinks that the real John Wesley can only be retrieved by searching for un-Wesleyan things that Wesleyans said about John Wesley?
Rather than try to drain the theological dross from the historical silver in the Gospels through several fallible criteria, more recently scholars have been interested in the application of social memory research to the study of the historical Jesus.27 In other words, how did the things Jesus said and did create a memory in his followers, a memory that was faithfully transmitted, yet also refracted according to the theological framework that the early church was developing.
But then again, Jesus may have spoken of himself in far more elevated ways than Ehrman imagines. It is certainly not the case that Jesus proclaimed God’s kingdom and later on the church proclaimed Jesus. For even within Jesus’ kingdom message there was always an implicit self-reference. Not only is the kingdom coming, but Jesus is the one who inaugurates it through his mighty deeds, exorcisms, healings, and preaching. Jesus is remembered as saying: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20; cf. Matt 12:28). Jesus is not
...more
When I say that Jesus knew himself to be God, I mean that he was conscious that in him the God of Israel was finally returning to Zion (i.e., Jerusalem) to renew the covenant and to fulfill the promises God had made to the nation about a new exodus.
However, the hope of Israel, going back to the prophets, was that one day God would restore the twelve tribes, bring them back together, forgive the sins that led to Israel’s exile, defeat Israel’s enemies, bring forth a new Davidic King, inaugurate a new covenant, and build a new temple. There would be great agricultural fecundity, and the nations would flock to Zion to worship Israel’s God as well. Furthermore, another crucial element of that hope was that YHWH himself would return to Zion.
This speech starts off by saying that YHWH is coming to shepherd his people, but then we are told that the one doing the actual shepherding will be “my servant David.” Now obviously this does not mean that David is YHWH, but neither is David just a kind of subcontractor. What it does mean is that David will be to the people what YHWH has promised he will be to the exiles: a shepherd.
I concur with Ehrman that Jesus saw himself as the king of this coming kingdom, the Messiah,35 but on the back of Jewish restoration eschatology I want to say more than that. Jesus believed that in his ministry and even in his person, YHWH was finally returning to Zion. In light of that premise, it is useful to read afresh a number of episodes from Jesus’ career that illustrate that the lines between divine author and divine agent were becoming blurred. Several stories and sayings in the Synoptic Gospels point toward Jesus’ unique role as a divine agent with an unprecedented authority and who
...more
Ordinarily there was nothing wrong with someone declaring a person’s sins forgiven, as long as that someone was a priest and everyone was in the temple. But nobody says, “Hang on, you’re not a priest!” or “Wait a minute, this isn’t the temple!” Rather, the complaint is, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7; see Isa 43:25). The offense that Jesus’ words provoke is by his presumption to speak with a divine prerogative. Clearly Jesus’ declaration of forgiveness in such a context was tantamount to assuming the authority to forgive on God’s behalf.
The bite of Jesus’ rhetoric is that he’s proven right. If he can make a paralytic walk, then he has the authority to pronounce the forgiveness of sins.
Jesus does not talk like an ancient prophet and tell wayward sinners to seek out God while he may be found (see Amos 5:4; Zeph 2:3). Instead, Jesus is seeking out marginalized Israelites in a manner reminiscent of how God in his climactic return to Zion was believed to be coming to regather the lost flock of Israel (Jer 31:10; Ezek 34:8 – 10; Zech 9:16). It is not hard to hear the echoes of such texts here with the coming of YHWH to seek out and to shepherd his people as representing a fitting description for Jesus’ own activity.
Ehrman’s view is that Jesus, the good apocalyptic visionary he was, preached a message about the kingdom to be brought by the Son of Man. Yet this Son of Man was not Jesus himself but a heavenly or angelic figure.
Matthew properly captures the meaning of the Semitic idiom by describing the crowd’s elation at God giving such authority to a “man,” because “Son of Man” in Hebrew and Aramaic means “man.”
The charge of blasphemy does not come from Jesus pronouncing the divine name, the Tetragrammaton “YHWH,” when he says, “I am.” More probably it comes from his conflation of Ps 110:1 and Dan 7:13 with the implication that he was going to be — or was already being — enthroned with God.
The resurrection alone did not create a divine Christology. Easter faith did not turn Jesus into something other than what he was before. Jesus made extravagant claims about himself as to his authority, mission, and origin, and the resurrection was a divine affirmation that those claims were good. Viewed this way, the resurrection magnified rather than manufactured Jesus’ claims to a divine status. Viewed this way, the resurrection intensified rather than initiated belief in Jesus’ unique relationship with God. Viewed this way, the resurrection transposed rather than triggered recognition of
...more
Ehrman dismisses the gospel of John as a source about Jesus because the Johannine Jesus makes explicit claims to be equal with God that are not paralleled in the Synoptic Gospels and do not pass muster with any of the criteria of authenticity.
The four Gospels as a whole agree that Jesus is God’s Son and that as the Son, he is the divine agent par excellence, and even part of the divine identity. John’s claim that Jesus is “equal with God” (John 5:18) and “one with the Father” (10:18) is simply verbalizing what is already assumed by the Synoptics Gospels, namely, that Jesus has a unique filial relationship with Israel’s God and Jesus possessed an authority equal to that of God.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John is saying that just as God’s glory dwelt in the temple, just as God’s wisdom dwelt in Torah, so now God’s word dwells in human flesh.
was docetism. Docetism is the view that Jesus was not really a physical human being, but more like a phantasm.
He argues for this on the basis that no tomb is mentioned in the earliest creed and on the basis of history and archaeology.
His description of Roman policy relating to crucifixion and nonburial is unnuanced and incomplete, especially as it relates to policy and practice in Israel in the time of Jesus. His arguments relating to Joseph of Arimathea do not take into account Jewish law and custom. He has also failed to take into account the archaeological evidence.
The fact that these poor men were crucified and then denied burial on a day when normally mercy is shown (and the anti-Semitic Alexandrians knew full well how important burial was to Jews) only underscores the brutality and callousness of the governor’s behavior.
