Was Christology decisive in dividing Jews in the early decades of the church?

I've been reading a very stimulating article by Anders Runesson that appeared in JBL not long ago entitled "Rethinking Early Jewish-Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflict" (JBL 127.1 [2008]: 95-132). 

The essay is dense and well researched with a number of interesting and significant observations. Among the many points to ponder is Anders' argument that Pharisees should not be thought of as a sect as is so often the case. Instead he labels them with the sociological category "denomination", which is more "positive in terms of society tension" because of "their acceptance of the Jerusalem cult [the civic religion] and thus the religiously legitimate use of it by individuals other than their own members" (114-15). I'm giving only the briefest sketch of his argument. You'll need to consult the article for the full argument, but his argument is very convincing at least at first glance. 

It is the near afterthought that most caught my attention however. In the second to last paragraph of the conclusion, Anders raises a the controversial point that what divided Jews in the first century of the church was not Christology. He notes the diversity within the Pharisaic movement of the first century stating:

The Pharisees themselves, in existence since the Hasmonean period, whom we have defined sociologically as a demonination, had among them diverse groups that at times exhibited schismatic tendencies . . . This diversity calls into question the (anachronistic) tendency among many scholars to understand christology to be the distinguishing factor behind intragroup tensions that resulted in the parting of ways between people who originally belonged within the same institutional context (132). 

He appeals to two early Rabbis to advance the point. Rabbi Akiva was ridiculed by some, he notes, for acclaiming Bar Kokhba messiah, but he nonetheless became a celebrated authority in the rabbinic community. In contrast Rabbi Eliezer was excommunicated as a result of a dispute over a halakic issue (b. Bava Mesia 59a-59b). From this Anders concludes "it seems indeed that halakah was more central for Jewish identity than dogma" (132). 

What do you think of this conclusion?

McDonough - Christ the Creator

Sean McDonough

Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine

Oxford: OUP, 2010.

Available at Amazon.com

In this book Sean McDonough examines the origins of the NT statements that the world was made "through" Jesus Christ (1 Cor 8.6; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-3; Heb 1.2). For McDonough the answer lies not in the application of categories drawn from Hellenistic Judaism (who did not alone have the problem of finding mediators between heaven and earth), but was from the memory of Jesus and his redefinition of Messiahship. McDonough asks why Christ was attributed a role in creation. To which he answers: "The mighty works of Jesus, his proclamation of the kingdom of God, and the climatic events of the crucifixion and resurrection, clearly marked him as the definitive agent of God's redemptive purposes. But these mighty works could scarcely be divorced from God's creative acts. The memories of Jesus preserved in the gospels depict a man who brings order to the threatening chaotic waters, creates life out of death, and restores people to their proper place in God's world ... Reflections of these memories of Jesus, coupled with the experience of forgiveness and renewal on the part of the early Church, led to a startling but elegant (theo-)logical conclusion: If the one true God had sent Jesus the Messiah as the definitive agent of redemption, and if this redemption was at one level simply the outworking of the project of creation (a view with ample precedent in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East in general), it must be that the Messiah was the agent of creation as well" (pp. 2-3).

1. Sean, how did you come to this topic of Christ as Creator and the search for its origin?

SM: If your readers might indulge a bit of personal reminiscence, I had always been a nature lover in my youth. But when I became a Christian at the age of 18, I somehow got the idea that an appreciation for the material world must be inherently "unspiritual". It has been a long journey back to a healthy appreciation of all that God has made through Christ. So my interest in this topic is an outgrowth of a general concern with the theology of creation. Colin Gunton's book The Triune Creator sparked my thinking as much as anything. I also owe debts to my mentors Greg Beale and Richard Bauckham for shaping my thinking on creation, new creation, and Christology.

2. Often it has been thought that attribution of a Wisdom theology to Christ accounts for postulations of his role in creation. However, this view has recently fallen on hard times with numerous critiques (e.g., S. Gathercole, G. Macaskill, A. Lee). What are your own thoughts on the matter?

SM: I was never quite happy with the idea that commentators could toss out a few references to Proverbs 8 or the Wisdom of Solomon and imagine that they had thereby accounted for the problem of how creation was attributed to Christ. Ancient Jewish thinkers in fact wrote in all sorts of different ways about the way God went about creating the world: he is said to do it through his word, or by his Spirit, or by his name, as well as by his Wisdom; and there are also texts that associate his glory with the act of creation. If anything, word and Spirit are the dominant conceptions. Jewish writers typically speak of Wisdom when they want to affirm that the world is an amazing place that displays God's intelligence at every turn. I don't deny that some Wisdom texts might have contributed some vocabulary for the NT writers, but I find it extremely unlikely that there was some universally accepted idea that God created through Wisdom, full stop, and that Jesus was just slotted in there in place of Wisdom as "market positioning" for the new faith. I might add that I view "hypostatic Wisdom" as a slippery and unhelpful phrase. The majority of writers simply use personification when they speak about Wisdom, and the Wisdom of Solomon uses it as a kind of periphrasis for the power of God, akin to the Stoic logos. I don't think many Jews imagined there was really a lady up in the sky who helped God out in creating the world.

3. In chapter four you refer to creation as the beginning of the dominion of the Messiah. Could unpack on how you reach that conclusion and what role it has in your thesis?

SM: There are three main considerations here. The first is the general significance of Messiah/Christ in early Christian thought. I find it unbelievable, for instance, that the Pharisee, or ex-Pharisee, Paul could discover that Jesus is the Messiah, and then act as if this were no big deal. Imagine Paul telling Gentiles to give their lives over to "the Smeared One" (Hengel's rendering of Christos, with an appropriate sense of strangeness), and responding to queries about what that could possibly mean by saying, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just Jesus' second name." It strikes me as exponentially more likely that Paul and the other Christians would have developed their "Christology" as a very self-conscious reflection on what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah. Of course this involved all sorts of modifications of traditional conceptions in light of Jesus' radical redefinition of what it meant to be the Messiah -- but it is still messianic thinking. The second consideration is that the key creation texts in Colossians and Hebrews focus on Jesus' role as ruler: the Hebrews passage is saturated with messianic texts from the OT, and Colossians is at pains to stress Jesus' dominion over all things -- not the beauty of creation which we typically find in Wisdom creation texts. While the world may "lie in the power of the evil one", at a deeper level Jesus' doesn't come into a foreign world and take it over for God. He rules the world he made. It is absolutely fitting that he have dominion over it because he created it in the first place. Finally, the idea that Jesus is God's agent in creation -- all things were made "through him" -- is clearly modeled on the language of God saving "through him". In both cases, we have the idea of deputized agency, which is of course the Messiah's calling card: "Sit at my right hand..." etc.

4. You point out that Stoic philosophers and Hellenistic Jews were not the first ones concerned with the mediation of the heavenly and earthly realms. How does a wider ancient near east background help you understand the distinctive creation concept of Christ'd Schopfungsmittlerschaft?

SM: As with Wisdom, I don't want to rule out the possibility that some of the Greek philosophical koine might have shaped the NT writers' choice of words. But people often write as if Greek thinkers were the first ones to notice that the divine realm seemed to rather distant from the mundane one. In the book I note one Assyrian text where the conquering king is described as the image and glory of the god Enlil; he is the god's representative, his agent on earth. This strikes me as at least as relevant for the NT as texts about divine Wisdom. Not that Paul or John was reading such ANE texts directly, of course; but they were meditating on OT texts which were themselves taking shape in an environment where the human working out of divine plans was a part of the landscape. Naturally there are significant differences in the NT and ANE conceptions of divine kingship, but the ANE still provides a more helpful template for working through the problem than abstract philosophical conceptions.

5. In chapter eleven you refer to your own perspective on Christ and primal creation as rather close to Karl Barth's. What was Barth's view and distinguishes your view from his?

SM: I was delighted to find after years of reflection that Barth had managed in a four page excursus in his Church Dogmatics (III.1.51ff) to state clearly what I had been straining to say for so long. Barth's key insight was that all the putative background material is essentially irrelevant to understanding why the early Christians said that Christ was creator. Jesus through his words and deeds created the fundamental problem; he showed himself to be who God is, and then the early church puzzled over how to articulate what they in one sense already knew. They didn't start with a philosphical problem of a world estranged from God and then pump up Jesus until he closed the gap. I don't have any huge distinction from Barth on these essentials (apart from laying much greater weight on the messianic dimension of the NT presentation); I was simply able to address the question at greater length with more of a historical focus.

Getting High on NT Christology

The "Early High Christology Club" (i.e., Hengel, Hurtado, Bauckham) have argued that 1. Jewish monotheism was strict, 2. In the first twenty-years of the church some momentous developments happened in christology that resulted in Jesus being identified with the God of Israel and incorporated into patterns of religious devotion normally reserved for YHWH. In contrast, scholars such as James Dunn, Maurice Casey, and James Crossley have argued that we have to wait until the Gospel of John (e.g., 1.1, 8.58) before we encounter any christological beliefs in Jesus' identity that genuinely transgresses what was acceptable in the first century Jewish monotheism . However, some are now contesting whether Johannine christology (from the Gospel and Revelation) really go so far as to include Jesus within the identity of God, or simply place Jesus in an exalted and divine state beside God. I've already noted the arguments of A.Y. Collins that the Johannine materials present Jesus as the most eminent created being (was Arius right afterall?). Now James McGrath in his book The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context, contents that:

1. In the Fourth Gospel - "The claim that Jesus was the Messiah, God's supreme agent, was clearly a sticking oint between Christians and non-Christian Jews, and the group whose traditions and experiences are reflected in the Gospel of John are no exception. However, it seems that it was not the things that were said that were in themselves provocative and controversial in the abstract. Rahter, what was really at issue was the fact taht these things were said about Jesus. Similar language applied to an even, or even to a huan being was was universally accepted within Judaism as having been divinely appointed and sent, did not provoke this sort of controversy. This simple fact makes clear that what was at issue was not hte idea of the Logos, nor the idea of a divine agent bearing the divine name, but the claim that Jesus was such a figure" (pp. 68-69).

2. In Revelation: "The inclusion of God's appointed representative alongside God as recipient of praise is noteworthy, but it is neither unique nor without precedent. Such a development was foreseen to a certaiin extent and was perhaps even to be expected as a response to the appearance of God's agent in the realization of his eschatological salvation ... And so the depiction of Christ in the Book of Revelation represents a development within the context of Jewish monotheism rather than a development away from Jewish devotion to the only one God" (p. 76).

Several criticims could be made here (James McGrath and Michael Whitenton had an exchange over this I believe) and I'll leave it to others to examine McGrath's points.

High Christology in the Fourth Gospel and Revelation?

I've just finished reading A.Y. Collins and J.J. Collins King and Messiah as Son of God, and what blew me over was this concluding quote from A.Y. Collins about the christology of the Gospel of John and Revelation:

"The Gospel and Revelation both present Jesus as pre-existence and as divine in some sense. In the Gospel he is either an emanation of God or God's first creature, namely, the only-begotten god. In Revelation, the evidence suggests that he is God's first creature, namely, the principal angel" (p. 203).

I like some of Adela Collins' stuff, but that is about as convincing as Dick van Dyke's cockney accent in the musical Mary Popins! I think I might tackle this in my post-1 Esdras book on Jesus as Messiah and Lord. On another note, Adela may have given the JW's the best source of apologetic argumentation that they've had for years.

The Return of the Messiah

No, I'm not talking about the parousia here. Rather, I'm talking about what I perceive to be a "surge" of sorts in ascribing a messianic paradigm, intent, self-consciousness to the historical Jesus in recent scholarship. In the Wrede to Bultmann era, the messiahship of Jesus was a theological construct, a profession of the christology of the believing community, read back into the earthly life of Jesus in the Gospels. N.A. Dahl provided a glimmer of continuity between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter christology by arguing for the authenticity of the titulus on the cross. So Jesus did not claim to be the messiah, but he never denied the allegation of being a messianic claimant at his trial either, which is why the titulus was put up. Others (e.g. Fredriksen, Dunn) argued that while Jesus' followers and some of the crowds thought him the messiah, Jesus himself shied away from this leadership role. Some like Sanders say that Jesus saw himelf as the royal arbiter of God's kingdom, but not in fact as a messiah.

But times they are a changing. Obviously, you have guys like N.T. Wright and Craig A. Evans asserting the case for a messianic Jesus. I have my own contribution to the subject as well in the now released book, Are You the One Who is to Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question. Then there is also Dale C. Allison's work on Jesus of Nazareth: Millennarian Prophet and his more recent book The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith. What is more, in the latest issue of JSHJ there is a cracking good essay by Suzanne Watts Henderson titled, "Jesus' Messianic Self-Consciousness Revisited: Christology and Community in Context." Henderson's article concludes:

"In embodying God's dominion unleashed on earth, both Jesus and those who followed him apparently thought they were ushering in the messianic age of God's rule. As messiah, Jesus functioned authoritatively to bridge the chasm between divine and human power, making God's kingdom authority available to those who would trust in God's coming rule. Understood in this light, Jesus' messianic demurral, his messianic death, and his designation as 'messiah' in the post-resurrection age make more coherent and contextual sense than is often recognized"

I've said elsewhere, that this would make a great Ph.D topic for some brave soul.

Revelation Bonanza - Part I: Angel-Christology

I'm having a Revelation bonanza this weekend. In the first installment I look at angelomorphic christology in Revelation 10. That chapter reads in the TNIV:

¹ Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. ² He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, ³ and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. ⁴ And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say, "Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down."

⁵ Then the angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven. ⁶ And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, "There will be no more delay! ⁷ But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets."

⁸ Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: "Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land."

⁹ So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but 'in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.' " ¹⁰ I took the little scroll from the angel's hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. ¹¹ Then I was told, "You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings."

-------

Bob Gundry asserts the presence of an angelomorphic christology in Revelation 10. He argues for a theophany with Jesus appearing in angelic form. He notes the similarity between ch. 10 where the angel has a scroll in his hand and ch. 5 where Jesus the Lamb took a seven-sealed scroll in his hand. Also, the description of the angel's feet as likened to pillars of fire recalls the divine theophany that led Israel in the wilderness. He then states:

"The great variety of Christologies in Revelation makes the presence there of angelomorphic Christology unsurprising; and the role of Yahweh's angel in the Exodus-narrative and later Jewish literature concerning it combines with the prominence of Exodus-typology throughout Revelaltion and with the promiennce of angelology elsewhere in apocalyptic literature to provide multiple impetusues for an angelomorphic Christology in Revelation comparable to angelomorphic theology in the OT and later Judaism. Inasmuch as such Christology provides an angelic connection for the saints on earth with God in heaven, a further impetus may be found in the felt need of such a connection, due to the original audience's having suffering ostracism from Jewish synagogues, Greco-Roman civic life and culture, the Roman government and its agents ... and the rich and powerful elite."

On the one hand, in the NT there is clearly a critique of christologies that venerated Jesus as merely a supreme angel (Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1.15-20, 2.18 come immediately to mind). And yet, angelomorphic christology evidently manifested itself without necessarily undermining other facets of a christology of divine identity. For case in point, the "I have come" (ἦλθον) sayings in the Gospels (e.g. Mk. 2.17) with coming + purpose have their most analogous background in the coming of angels for specific purposes (e.g. Dan. 10.11). According to Simon Gathercole, these sayings function to demonstrate Jesus' pre-existence, his heavenly origins, and his transcendence of the heaven-earth divide.

Book Notice: Seeking the Identity of Jesus

Richard Hays and Beverly Gaventa (eds.)
Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008
Available at Amazon.com

A recent Eerdmans volume from a series of interdisciplinary seminars held at the Centre for Theological Inquiry (Princeton) is Seeking the Identity of Jesus edited by Beverly Gaventa and Richard Hays. It includes sections on "Sources and Methods", "The Testimony of the Biblical Witness", "the Testimony of the Church", and "Epilogue: Who is Jesus Christ for us Today?". In the opening chapter, "Seeking the Identity of Jesus", Gaventa and Hays begin by examining the conflicting images of Jesus in scholarship and culture including the personal saviour Jesus and the Jesus of liberal theologies related to the Jesus Seminar and Gnostic spiritualities. I liked this quote about the Jesus Seminar: "This portrait was of a strikingly non-Jewish Jesus, a laconic wandering sage who loved witty aphorisms but had no interest in Israel's heritage or destiny, and no interest in leading a new religious movement" (p. 2). Amen! The Identity of Jesus Project at CTI, in contrast to the Jesus Seminar, came to believe that: "Jesus is best understood not by separting him from canon and creed but by investigating the ways in which the church's canon and creed provide the distinctive clarification of his identity. The church's ancient ecumenical creeds are not artificial impositions of Scripture but interpretative summaries of the biblical narratives. Therefore, they offer us an overarching sense of the meaning of the whole Bible, and of Jesus' place within that story" (p. 5). The highlight of the chapter is Hays and Gaventa's listing of the convergences between the various contributors: (1) Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew; (2) The identity of Jesus is reliably attested and known in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; (3) The Entirety of the canonical witness is indispensable to a faithful rendering of the figure of Jesus; (4) In order to understand the identity of Jesus rightly, the church must constantly engage in the practice of deep, sustained reading of these texts; (5) To come to grips with the identity of Jesus, we must know him as he is presented to us throught the medium of narrative; (6) The trajectory begun within the New Testament of interpreting Jesus' identity in and for the church has continued through Christian history; (7) Because Jesus remains a living presence, he can be encountered in the community of his people, the body of Christ; (8) Jesus is a disturbing destabilizing figure; and (9) The identity of Jesus is something that must be learned through long term discipline. So far it's a great book and I'll blog on anything more interesting that I come across.

The Earliest Christology was also the Highest

I remember reading a quote some time ago from George Caird (his NT Theology I think) that the earliest christology was among the highest in the NT. To back that up is this quote from Richard Bauckham:

"The early Christian movement, very consciously using this Jewish theological framework, created a kind of christological monotheism by understanding Jesus to be included in the unique identity of the one God of Israel. Probably the earliest expression of this to which we have access - and it was certainly in use very early in the first Christian community's history - was the understanding of Jesus' exaltation in terms of Psalm 110:1. Jesus, seated on the cosmic throne of God in heaven as the one who will achieve the eschatological lordship of God and in whom the unique sovereignty of the one God will be acknowledged by all, is included in the unique rule of God over all things, and is thus placed unambigously on the divine side of the absolute distinction that separates the only sovereign One from all creation. God's rule over all things defines who God is: it cannot be delegated as a mere function to a creature. Thus the earliest christology was already in nuce the highest christology. All that remained was to work through consistently what it could mean for Jesus to belong integrally to the unique identity of the one God. Early Christian interest was primarily in soteriology and eschatology, the concerns of the Gospel, and so in the New Testament it is primarily as sharing or implementing God's eschatological lordship that Jesus is understood to belong to the identity of God. But early Christian reflection could not consistently leave it at that. Jewish eschatological monotheism was founded in creational monotheism. If Jesus was integral to the identity of God, he must have been so eternally. To include Jesus also in the unique creative activity of God and in the uniquely divine eternity was a necessary corollary of his inclusion in the eschatological identity of God. This was the early Christians' Jewish way of preserving monotheism against the ditheism that any kind of adoptionist Christology was bound to involve. Not by adding Jesus to the unique identity of the God of Israel, but only by including Jesus in that unique identity, could monotheism be maintained. This applies also to the worship of Jesus, which certainly began in Palestinian Jewish Christianity. This expressed the inclusion of Jesus in the unique identity of the sole Creator of all things and sole Sovereign over all things."

Martin Hengel on 1 John

‘The first letter of John, which takes the intentions of the Gospel further, defines this precisely: “Whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might love through him" (4.8ff). This means that in the Son who has become human, God’s love, his very nature, has become manifest for humankind; God himself comes to them. The incarnation of the love of God, not the deification of Christ, is the main theme of Johannine theology.’

Martin Hengel, ‘Christological Titles in Early Christianity,’ in The Messiah, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 432.

Divine Identity Christology Conference at Tyndale House

This came from Dr. Peter Williams today:

Divine Identity Christology in the Gospels: Tyndale House Colloquium

Thursday 11 December 2008

Prof. Richard Bauckham and Prof. Richard Hays

Programme:

9.45-11.00, Divine Identity Christology in Mark, Prof. Richard Bauckham

11.00-11.30, coffee

11.30-12.45, Divine Identity Christology in Luke, Prof. Richard Hays

12.45-13.45, lunch

13.45-15.00, Panel discussion with Professors Bauckham and Hays

Further details:
The event will be held at Tyndale House, 36 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge, CB3 9BA; www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk. Coffee will be available from 9.15. There is no admission charge for the colloquium, but a contribution of around £5 to cover costs including lunch would be appreciated. Spaces are limited, so please reserve a place in advance by contacting Ms Tania Raiola, administrator@tyndale.cam.ac.uk; (01223 566602).

Lincoln on the Christ Hymn of Col. 1.15-20

The NIB commentary series is good value and I particularly enjoy the "Reflections" section by most writers. Lincoln has this reflection on Col. 1.15-20:

"All the talk about the use of the hymn and its possible structure should remind us that the writer of Colossians has chosen to use the language of praise of Christ at a vital point in his message in order to reinforce the perspective he and his readers shared and to draw out its implication. It is an effective means of communication because it builds on religious experience - that of worship - and taps the religious emotions so frequently associated with songs of praise. From the perspective of Old Testament studies, Brueggemann has called attention to the power of doxology in the encounter with contemporary idolatries and ideologies. In its response to God, he claims, praise is also an assertion of an alternative world. The liturgy sings and proclaims that God reigns, disestablishing worldly powers and exposing their claims to ultimacy and control. Much the same can be said of the hymn in praise of Christ in Colossians. Its doxological language reinforces for its readers the alternative vision of the Pauline gospel in which Christ is supreme over the cosmos over all powers and has dealt with their disintegrating threat threat through his work of reconciliation. The language of worship still has both educative and affective force. Theological reflection and preaching would do well, therefore, to learn to employ the sources of traditional and contemporary hymns and poetry and to include a rhetoric of devotion in its repertoire in the attempt to instruct, to move, and to motivate congregations to live out of the alternative world of gospel values, where the crucified and risen Christ is cosmic Lord" (p. 611).

The rhetorical function of Col. 1.15-20

I doubt that the NT epistles are woodenly structured according to the types of outlines for speeches given in the rhetorical handbook. Yet given the prevalence of rhetoric in the ancient world and the aural/oral nature of the New Testament's, rhetoric probably figured somewhat in the structure and function of various units. What rhetorical function does the hymn/poem of Col. 1.15-20 have then? Andrew Lincoln argues that it is part of the exordium and Ben Witherington places it in a narratio. I would be more inclined to see it akin to a propositio since it contains a summary of many of themes of the letter (see also Markus Barth and Margaret MacDonald who hold a similar view). But if Col. 1.15-20 is a preview of the theological contents of the letter how does that relate to the hymn's origin? Would a pre-written hymn/poem just happen to fit so neatly with Paul's exhortation to the Colossians? Or was the hymn/poem selected precisely because it was suited to the context of Colossae and perhaps embellished only slightly to make it more direct?

The Preeminence of Christ in Colossians

Gradually working my way through a commentary on Colossians. I much enjoyed writing this section of the supremacy or preeminence of Christ:

Paul provides two reasons why God has purposed to launch this new creation through his Son and what singularly suited him to this redemptive role. First, God’s plan was that in all things that Jesus would have preeminence or we could say ‘supremacy’ (NIB, NIV, NJB) or ‘first place’ (NRSV, NASB, NET). Here we are talking about far more than being a very important person. We are talking about authority, honour, and power rolled into one. The most analogous background I can think of was the Roman Emperor Augustus who claimed to exceed everyone in auctoritas, that is, a combination of power and prestige. The Augustan age created a pyramid of power and hierarchy that put him inviolabily at the top. Indicative of this is that Augustus held the proconsulship of Rome well beyond the normal limitations of service, he was invested with the power of the tribunate with power of veto over the senate, he was the princeps or chief citizen of the government, he had direct military command of over three-quarters of the Roman legions, the power of invention in imperial provinces, he was given titles like pontifex maximus or ‘high priest’ of the Empire and Imperator Caesar divi filius that is ‘emperor and son of a god’. The implied rhetoric in this poem is that Jesus as the preeminent one, Jesus is the real auctoritas over and against the pretentious claims of Caesar to be sovereign and divine. This becomes all the more powerful if we remember that Paul is perhaps imprisoned in Rome under the meglomaniac emperor Nero when writing this. Caesar is at best a twisted parody of the real Lord of the world and at worst a malevolent tyrrant who creates ‘peace’ through the application of violence. A second thought is proffered by Paul and that is Jesus’ unique qualification to be the agent of reconciliation. Paul say that in him [God] was pleased to have all his fullness dwell. The subject for the verb pleased (eudokeō) is missing, but the implied subject is God. God was pleased to have all his fullness inhabit the Messiah. The word for fullness (plērōma) was a near technical term in Valentian gnosticism for the totality of intermediaries or emmendations radiating from the supreme God. There may be an implied critique here of something from hellenistic philosophy that eventually became part of a gnostic cosmological framework and might even be part of the Colossian philosophy, but the main point is surely christological, the fullness of God - that is God’s word, wisdom, glory, spirit, and power - dwell in the Messiah.

Richard Bauckham's New Christology Book

In glancing over Paternoster's most recent catalogue I noticed that Richard Bauckham's newest book, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity should be out soon (in the catalogue it lists the release date as Dec 07 but Amazon says Sept 08). The blurb reads:

"The basic thesis of this important book on New Testament Christology, sketched in the first essay ‘God Crucified’, is that the worship of Jesus as God was seen by the early Christians as compatible with their Jewish monotheism. Jesus was thought to participate in the divine identity of the one God of Israel. The other chapters provide more detailed support for, and an expansion of, this basic thesis. Readers will find not only the full text of Bauckham’s classic book God Crucified, but also groundbreaking essays, some of which have never been previously published."

Book Notice: Putting Jesus in His Place

Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ
Robert M. Bowman Jr. and J. Ed Komoszewski
(Grand Rapids, MI: Kregal, 2007).
Amazon.com

I've spent part of the afternoon re-reading through this volume by Bowman and Komoszeski on the deity of Jesus. D.A. Carson offers a fairly positive review of this book at RBL. Basically the book is organized around the acronym HANDS:

Jesus shares the honours due to God.
Jesus shares the attributes of God.
Jesus shares the names of God.
Jesus shares in the deeds of God.
Jesus shares the seat of God's throne.

The volume is written in easy to read English at a semi-popular level and would be ideal for an adult Sunday school group or even a college class. The sub-headings have catchy titles drawn from recent movies and modern hymns. At the same time this book is not a substitute for Murray J. Harris' work on Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus and those wanting to go deeper really should engage the work of Bauckham, Hurtado, and Hengel (whom Bowman and Koniszewski are clearly dependent upon to varying degrees). The thrust of the book is largely apologetic, but it is never overly simplistic or crass; their interaction with alternative interpretation like that of Dunn on Phil. 2.5-11 are even handed and they lay out the issues relating to disputed texts like the "firstborn" of Col. 1.15 and Jesus' ignorance of the date of the parousia in Mk. 13.30-32 as it relates to his omniscience. I still wonder if a chronological or corpus driven approach might be a better way to tackle this subject, but the thematic approach of HANDS is clearly an easy and catching way to articulate Jesus' divinity and naturally lends itself to a single lecture or sermon based around these five points. Very useful book for pastors, students, and lay-people.

Mark's Christology

How is this for a statement:

Mark’s story of Jesus essentially unpacks the designation ‘Jesus Christ’ from the incipit so as to show that the Messiah that Christians confess is made known as the:

-The Son of God who is beloved by the Father, commissioned for his messianic mission by reception of the Spirit, and exercises command over God’s enemies be they demons or the armies of Rome.
-The Son of Man who is authorized to speak for God, appointed to suffer and rise from the dead, and to judge the inhabited world.
-The Son of David who heals the afflicted of Israel and is greater still than David himself.
- The King of the Jews who, in an ironic twist, at the end of his triumphus is enthroned as the King of Israel on the cross and there reveals the true power of his kingship by refusing to save himself by saving others instead.

Martin Hengel on the Origins of Christology

‘The comparison of the three hymns in the Johannine Prologue, the Letter to the Hebrews and the Letter to the Philippians shows, first of all, that christological thinking between 50 and 100 C.E. was much more unified in its basic structure than New Testament research, in part at least, has maintained. Basically, the later developments are already there in a nutshell in the Philippian hymn. This means, however, with regard to the development of all the early Church’s christology, that more happened in the first twenty years than in the entire later centuries-long development of dogma.'
Martin Hengel, ‘Christological Titles in Early Christianity,’ in The Messiah, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 443.

The First Liberal Theology: Docetism

"The blood of Christ was still fresh in Judaea when His body was said to be a phantasm"

Ignatius of Antioch

I used to think that "Liberals" were out to destroy or deliberately pervert Christianity. I have learned, to the contrary, that they are in fact trying to save it by making its beliefs and doctrines more amicable to the Spirit of the Age (I have my own views about whether that is desirable or even possible). The first liberals in that regards were docetists. They had to confront the problem of how could a great teacher sent from heaven and now enthroned in heaven possibly suffer (let alone exist) in human form. For instance consider this quote from Ovid (Fasti 3.701f):

I was about to neglect those daggers that pierced
Our leader, when Vesta spoke from her pure hearth:
Don’t hesitate to recall them: he was my priest,
And those sacrilegious hands sought me with their blades.
I snatched him away, and left a naked semblance:
What died by the steel, was Caesar’s shadow.’
Raised to the heavens he found Jupiter’s halls,
And his is the temple in the mighty Forum.
But all the daring criminals who in defiance
Of the gods, defiled the high priest’s head,
Have fallen in merited death. Philippi is witness,
And those whose scattered bones whiten its earth.
This work, this duty, was Augustus’ first task,
Avenging his father by the just use of arms.

This is about the apotheosis of Julius Caesar who became a god and was taken away by Vesta just before his attackers set upon him, leaving only a vague naked image or a shadow to be murdured by his assassin's daggers. What else would the gods do for one who was so great and now set among them?

You can understand then the context in which docetism emerged. It was out of a desire to venerate Jesus and to accentuate his greatness in terms that were readily acceptable to persons in the Graeco-Roman world. It witnesses to the acculturation of christology.

Christology of 1 John

Another good quote from Martin Hengel:

'The first letter of John, which takes the intentions of the Gospel further, defines this precisely: “Whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might love through him (4.8ff). This means that in the Son who has become human, God’s love, his very nature, has become manifest for humankind; God himself comes to them. The incarnation of the love of God, not the deification of Christ, is the main theme of Johannine theology.'

Martin Hengel, ‘Christological Titles in Early Christianity,’ in The Messiah, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 432.

NT Christology

The christological battles of the third and fourth centuries of the common era focused on explicating the divine and human nature of Christ as the Second Persons on the Trinity (e.g. Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, etc). The christological disputes of the second century seemed to have focused on whether Jesus was human at all (e.g. Caprocrates) or whether he was only human and adopted into God's favour (e.g. Ebionites). In contrast, the christological issues of the first century as found in the NT appear to have revolved around two important matters:

1. The identification of Jesus Christ with the God of Israel.

2. The identification of the risen and exalted Christ with the person Jesus of Nazareth.