THIS ESSENTIALLY OUTLINES the binitarian ideas that developed in pre-Christian Judaism and can be viewed as the pool of ideas from which New Testament Christianity drew. Summarizing the range of the texts, it becomes apparent how many of them view the enigmatic godlike or semi-godlike figure alongside God to be an angel. This starts with the angel Michael in Daniel 7, the source of almost all further developments, and climaxes in the Qumran texts. This is hardly surprising, because the angels in Qumran are not by chance referred to as elim, “gods.” The Prayer of Joseph is an outstanding example of this line of tradition in Greek literature. It is important to thereby keep in mind that the “angel” in the prayer is by no means an ordinary angel but rather a godly or godlike figure beside God. The angel connotation is missing in the wisdom literature, the Similitudes of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, the Fourth Book of Ezra, and possibly also the Daniel Apocryphon. The part of wisdom literature that was influenced by the Bible also emphasizes the personal attributes of this second godlike being and its premundane creation, whereas the philosophically influenced part in the Wisdom of Solomon and especially Philo draws from the Platonic doctrine of emanation. The notion of a second godly figure is taken the furthest in the Son of God in the Daniel Apocryphon, the Son of Man in the main part of the Similitudes, and the Son of God in the Fourth Book of Ezra. The contrary line of tradition of a man who is divinized is most pronounced in the human elevated among or above the angels in the Self-Glorification Hymn from Qumran and the man Enoch who is transformed into the Son of Man in chapters 70–71 of the Similitudes. The redemptive component, finally, is already laid out in the wisdom literature and is then accentuated in an eschatological sense in Daniel 7, the Self-Glorification Hymn, the Daniel Apocryphon, the Similitudes, and the Fourth Book of Ezra.
Christianity appropriated these binitarian rudiments and developed them further based on the ideas of the Son of Man and Logos. This is not a new insight, but one that needs to be asserted on two fronts. On one side are efforts by New Testament scholars to highlight the novelty of the New Testament and distance it from contemporary Judaism. They tend to downplay connections with the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and judge skeptically any attempts to view the New Testament as primarily Jewish scripture. On the other side are efforts by Jewish studies scholars who try to link the New Testament as smoothly as possible with Second Temple Judaism, aiming to dissociate it from later rabbinic Judaism. This applies in particular to the circle of scholars that has for some time been actively propagating a pre-Christian “Enochic Judaism,”1 which revolves around the postbiblical Enoch and supposedly represents a mystically informed Judaism that was virtually free of all those exuberant legal qualities that are ostensibly so characteristic of rabbinic Judaism.
For a long time scholars of rabbinic Judaism therefore considered it an unwritten law that binitarian ideas were useless for Judaism since they had been usurped by Christians. Today, however, we know better. Recent research has shown that they continued to live on also in rabbinic Judaism, and were adopted in certain circles and harshly rejected by others (undeniably the majority). The following, second part of this book is dedicated to the continued life of binitarian ideas in rabbinic Judaism and early Jewish mysticism, and the polemics that developed against them. To that end, I again take up considerations that I developed in particular in The Jewish Jesus. These have recently given rise to a considerable echo and in part also harsh criticism.2 I hope that a new attempt to treat this volatile subject will contribute to a deepened clarification. In doing this, repetitions cannot be avoided, but I have tried to keep these to a minimum. The figures highlighted here are the Son of Man from Daniel, David, and Enoch-Metatron.