3

Monotheism, heavenly mediators and divine agents

So far we have focused on the term ‘worship’ in trying to answer our question, ‘Did the first Christians worship Jesus?’ Most of the evidence so far considered discourages an unequivocal ‘Yes’, and points at best to a qualified ‘Yes’, or perhaps more accurately a qualified No! Worship language was little used with reference to Jesus. Apart from the hymns of Revelation, the practice of worship rarely had Jesus (the Lamb) in view as the one worshipped. Yet it also became increasingly clear that to answer the question solely in these terms was to miss important aspects of the evidence. For again and again it became evident that the worship of the earliest Christians involved Jesus in different ways. Not only was he the theme and content of their worship – hardly surprising for Christians – but also Jesus was understood as bound up with their worship, as its locus and mediator. They worshipped in him and through him. Their entry into the very presence of God was possible not simply because of Jesus, by virtue of what he had done in the past in his mission, death and resurrection, but also by means of Jesus, by virtue of the continuing presence and ongoing role as the risen and exalted Christ. So a simple ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ (or more ‘No’ than ‘Yes’) in answer to our central question is simply inadequate.

Now therefore we will view the question from another perspective. Thus far we have examined the question of ‘worship’. But now we need to focus on the one worshipped. If we are to use the term ‘worship’ in a tight or narrow way (only God/god is to be worshipped), then we have to ask how loose or wide is the word ‘God’/‘god’? We have clarified to some extent the term ‘worship’. But now we have to clarify the term ‘God’/‘god’, and the relation of Jesus to that term.

We begin by looking at how Israel would have focused and restricted its worship. Jesus’ reply to the tempter, ‘(You shall) worship the Lord your God and (shall) serve only him’ (Matt. 4.10/Luke 4.8) quoted Deut. 6.13.1 That passage followed on from Deuteronomy 6.4, which became Israel’s principal credo, the Shema: ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord’, or ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is one’. What did this ‘oneness’ mean? What did it mean to serve (latreuein) only him?

These questions invite a consideration of:

As should be obvious, it is important to clarify how restricted was Israel’s worship since that is the context within which our question, ‘Did the first Christians worship Jesus?’, arises. Our question may thus be reformulated: ‘Given that Israel restricted its worship to God, the one God, did the first Christians include Jesus within this restricted worship, or did they somehow loosen the restrictions, or did they regard the restrictions as excluding Jesus and as in effect forbidding the worship of Jesus?’

I should at once acknowledge that this way of exploring how earliest high christology came to expression – that is by comparing and contrasting how Second Temple Judaism conceptualized the immanence of God, how God interacted with his creation and his people – has been a well trodden path for several decades. The material is usually grouped under the heading of ‘divine agency’ or ‘heavenly intermediaries’ or ‘divine hypostases’.2 Bauckham has expressed some reservation about such attempts ‘to find a model for Christology in semi-divine intermediary figures in early Judaism’ and regards such trends as ‘largely mistaken’. He prefers to focus rather on ‘the unique identity of the one God’ in early Judaism and argues that ‘from the earliest post-Easter beginnings of Christology onwards, early Christians included Jesus, precisely and unambiguously, within the unique identity of the one God of Israel’.3 I will have to comment on this use of the term ‘identity’ later.4 Here it is simply necessary to observe that Bauckham’s attempt to distance his approach from the ‘divine agency’ approach is questionable. For he recognizes that to speak of God’s Spirit, his Word or his Wisdom is to speak of God: these, he avers, ‘are included in the unique identity of God’; ‘as aspects of the unique divine identity, they are included in it’.5 So it is not entirely clear why an attempt to clarify how such ways of speaking of God (of God’s identity) is ‘largely mistaken’ as a way of clarifying how Jesus was included within that identity. Even the talk of angels cannot be excluded from such an attempt, since, as we shall see, the ‘angel of the Lord’ tradition within Israel’s scriptures and early Judaism was also a way of speaking of divine presence. And even the question of apotheosis cannot be excluded from consideration, since the christological issue is precisely how a man, Jesus of Nazareth, could be said to embody/incarnate God. So, despite Bauckham’s misgivings, a study of how early Judaism (the matrix within which earliest high christology came to expression) conceptualized divine immanence and agency is necessary if a clear answer to our central question is to be attained.6

We start, however, by clarifying what is meant by Jewish ‘monotheism’.

3.1 ‘The Lord our God is one Lord’

It has often been observed that in Deuteronomy the Shema (Deut. 6.4) should be understood in the same way as the first of the Ten Commandments: ‘You shall have no other gods besides (or before) me’ (Exod. 20.3). That is, it does not deny the existence of other gods, but calls for Israel’s devotion to Yahweh to be exclusive.7 Even when we read the earlier passages in Deuteronomy – ‘the Lord is God; there is no other besides him’ (4.35); ‘the Lord is God in heaven above and on earth beneath; there is no other’ (4.39) – that could be taken to mean that Yahweh is unique (as we might say, the only god who is God), and the only god for Israel.8 This is better described as monolatry (the worship of only one god) rather than monotheism (the belief that there is only one god/God), or perhaps as ‘henotheism’ (belief in one’s god without asserting that he or she is the only god).9

The issue is complicated by the fact that Yahweh had not been the only name used for Israel’s god/God. We find several other names, such as El-Elyon (God Most High), Shaddai (Almighty) and Elohim (God) in the patriarchal narratives. Did these originally denote several gods worshipped by the patriarchs, or were they simply different titles for God who came to be known by Israel especially as Yahweh, or indeed were they actually titles of other gods absorbed by Yahweh? The fact that the Hebrew word Elohim is itself a plural form raises another question of some relevance to us: what is the oneness of a plurally denoted God? The plural form used in the first creation narrative, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’ (Gen. 1.26), has long posed just such a tantalizing issue.

The most likely answer to the question of Israel’s monotheism is that early Israel regarded its God as the supreme God, unique in relation to other beings designated as god, in a class of his own, as alone Creator, alone final Judge.10 Above all, this God was the God of Israel, the God who had revealed himself to the patriarchs and to Moses, who had rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt, and who had made a covenant with Israel as his own people: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me’ (Exod. 20.2). And this foundational belief grew into a conviction more aptly described as monotheism, of which the prophet Isaiah (or Second Isaiah) is the clearest exponent:

          There is no other god besides me,

      a righteous God and a Saviour;

          there is no one besides me.

      Turn to me and be saved,

          all the ends of the earth!

          For I am God, and there is no other.

(Isa. 45.21–22, NRSV)

Certainly the oneness of God, or the conviction that only Yahweh was worthy to be designated God and worshipped as God, is well established by the first century ce. As the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo puts it early in the first century when commenting on the first commandment:

Let us, then, engrave deep in our hearts this as the first and most sacred of commandments, to acknowledge and honour one God who is above all, and let the idea that gods are many never even reach the ears of the man whose rule of life is to seek for truth in purity and guilelessness (De Decalogo 65).11

Josephus, the Jewish historian, writing at the other end of the first century, makes the same point regarding the decalogue: ‘the first word teaches that God is one’; recognition of the one God, he affirms, was common to all Hebrews (Jewish Antiquities 3.91; 5.112). As the great rabbinic scholar Ephraim Urbach notes, ‘The belief common to all Jews at the beginning of the first century was that their God was the only God and their religion the only true religion.’12

From our point of view it does not matter whether the religion inherited by Jesus and his first Jewish disciples was technically monotheistic or monolatrous.13 We may recall that Paul seems to share a similar ambivalence on the subject:

Even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth – as in fact there are many gods and many lords – yet for us there is one God, the Father . . .

(1 Cor. 8.5–6, NRSV)

What matters is that only one was worthy to be worshipped as God, the God of Israel. This conviction had been reinforced by Israel’s long history of resisting the claims of other gods: for example, the syncretism with the Baal worship encouraged by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel (1 Kings 16.31–33), or the syncretism of the Syrian overlords in the second century bce as they tried to persuade the Judeans that Yahweh was just another name, the local name, for Olympian Zeus.14 As the speech attributed to Stephen, the first Christian martyr, reminded its listeners (Acts 7.42–43), the Babylonian exile was the consequence of Israel’s entrancement with worship of the host of heaven.15 We should equally recall the scathing attacks on pagan idolatry in Jewish literature, in which idols were scorned as nothing beside the living God of Israel.16 It was the memory of Israel’s own golden calf failure at Mt Sinai (Exod. 32), the memory of the chief cause of the Babylonian exile, and the memory of the Maccabees’ nation-shaping resistance to the syncretistic hellenizing policy of the Syrian regional power in the 160s BCE, that made Israel’s affirmation of the Shema and of the first commandment so strong and so emphatic at the time of Jesus.17

All that said, we need to remember also that the epithet ‘god’ could be used of kings and judges even within Israel’s scriptures themselves.18 According to Exodus, Moses was commissioned to ‘serve as God’ to Aaron (Exod. 4.16; 7.1), and Philo does not hesitate to interpret this as God ‘appointed him as god’; Moses ‘was named god and king of the whole nation’; Moses was ‘no longer man but God’.19 Similarly Josephus twice reports the speculation that Moses had been taken by or had returned to the deity.20 Now of course this was not a departure from the monotheism or monolatry that Philo and Josephus clearly affirm elsewhere. What is interesting, however, is that given their monotheism/monolatry they nevertheless had no apparent difficulty in using such language hyperbolically or in symbolical terms. The implication is that however central and of crucial importance the Shema was for all devout Jews at the beginning of Christianity, that did not prevent them from using god-language metaphorically or with poetic flourish.

3.2 Angels

Angels are familiar figures in religious perception of God’s dealings with his human creation. In both Hebrew (ml’k) and Greek (angelos) the primary meaning is ‘messenger’, and the words can be used of a human messenger serving as an envoy.21 The words are used also of prophets as messengers of God.22 But in both cases the terms are used pre-eminently of a messenger of God, ‘the angel of the Lord’, or ‘the angel of God’, and the Greek term has given us the transliteration into English of ‘angel’. Thus God sends an angel to communicate with prophets,23 and an interpreter angel appears regularly in apocalyptic visions and as companion in heavenly journeys.24

One of the most fascinating features of several ancient stories is the appearance of what can be called theophanic angels; that is, angels who not only bring a message from God, but who represent God in personal terms, or who even may be said to embody God. Thus the angel of Yahweh appears and speaks to Hagar in Genesis 16.7–12. But the story continues:

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing’; for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’

(Gen. 16.13)

Similarly in the other version of the same story, the angel of God speaks in the first person as God (21.17–18). In Jacob’s dream the angel of God says, ‘I am the God of Bethel’ (31.11–13). Likewise in the theophany at the burning bush, the one who appears to Moses is described both as ‘the angel of the Lord’ and as ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ (Exod. 3.2–6). In the wilderness wanderings of the children of Israel the divine presence in the pillar of fire and of cloud is spoken of both as ‘the angel of God’ and as ‘the Lord’ (Exod. 14.19–20, 24). And in Judges 2.1 ‘the angel of the Lord’ says, ‘I brought you up from the land of Egypt . . . I will never break my covenant with you.’

Clearly in these cases it is impossible to distinguish between the angel of Yahweh and Yahweh himself; they are obviously one and the same person. Or at the very least we have to say that the narrators of these stories neither saw any need to make a clear distinction nor thought it important to do so. The point that emerges presumably is that the tellers of these stories were primarily intent to indicate the reality of the divine presence in these theophanic experiences. It is not that they wished to deny either the otherness of Yahweh, or that God was invisible to human sight. For this was an equally ancient perception and lay at the root of Israel’s hostility to idolatry – the conviction that God is invisible, or, more precisely, un-image-(in)able (Exod. 20.4) and unlookable-on (Exod. 33.20).25 Perhaps we should say they were abandoning the simplicities of an anthropomorphism that could speak of God as such appearing to human sight (as in Gen. 2—3). But a more sophisticated way of putting it would be to say that by speaking thus of the angel of the Lord they had found a way of denoting the reality of divine presence in such theophanic encounters without diminishing the holy otherness of Yahweh. The angel of the Lord in such stories was a way of speaking of God’s immanence without detracting from his transcendence. The angel of God both was God and was not God. Alternatively expressed, the angel of God was God’s way of manifesting himself to his servants without manifesting himself. The angel of God was not God as such but could be said to be God in his self-revelation.

In Israel’s subsequent thought the subject becomes ever more complex.26 For in what appears to be a burgeoning angelology we hear of high angels, or archangels. These angels stand in especially close relation to God, ‘the angels of the presence’.27 Four are most prominent – Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and the variously named Sariel/Uriel/Phanuel.28 Here again we probably still have to say with Gerhard von Rad that ‘the angels of Judaistic angelology are always a naïve representation of the omnipresent and omniscient word and will of Yahweh’.29 A motivating factor in the growth of such an angelology will almost certainly have been the desire to depict Yahweh with the imagery of an all-powerful king who commanded a powerful army and whose majesty was attested by his extensive and glorious court retinue, as in the depiction of the heavenly counsel in Job 1.6 and 2.1.

Still more intriguing are the instances in the visionary and apocalyptic literature of later Israelite religion and of early Judaism; that is, up into the first century CE. In his awe-inspiring vision of the chariot throne of God, Ezekiel saw seated above the likeness of a throne the ‘likeness as it were of a human form’, with the appearance of a body of ‘gleaming bronze’ and enclosed round about by fire (Ezek. 1.24–27). This ‘vision of God’ became the basis for and stimulus to Jewish mysticism (Merkabah or chariot throne mysticism). What is also interesting, however, is that a few chapters later an angel appears to Ezekiel, who also had ‘the appearance of a man’, and whose torso was ‘like gleaming bronze’ and his loins of fire (Ezek. 8.2). Daniel too sees a similar glorious figure, loins ‘girded with gold’ of Uphaz, arms and legs like the gleam of ‘burnished bronze’ (Dan. 10.5–6). In the Apocalypse of Zephaniah (written some time during the first century BCE or first century CE) ‘a great angel’ appears, ‘his face shining like the rays of the sun in its glory’ and ‘his feet like bronze which is melted in a fire’ (Apoc. Zeph. 6.11–12). And the great angel in the Apocalypse of Abraham (first or second century) is identified as Yahoel (Apoc. Ab. 10.3). The name was almost certainly intended as a combination of Yahweh and El, and in obvious allusion to Exodus 23.21: ‘Behold, I send an angel before you . . .; my name is in him.’30

Christopher Rowland has studied such texts closely and concludes that what he calls a process of ‘bifurcation’ was taking place in the perception of divine presence that these texts express. By this he means a process whereby the divine human-like figure on the throne in Ezekiel 1.26–28 seems to have become separated from the throne and to function separately as ‘the agent of the divine will’, with ‘a gradual splitting in the way the divine functions are described’.31 Rowland has put his finger on an important aspect of these heavenly visions, though I am less persuaded by the interpretation he offers and its appropriateness. The language used in such cases is that of the visionary, overwhelmed by the majesty of a heavenly figure seen in his vision. Such visions quickly drain the pool of imagery and language available to describe them. The heavenly glory that appears on such occasions to humans is by its nature overwhelming and blinding. What the language describes is the overpowering experience of such glory, while the precise identity of the glorious figure is not the primary concern. Here again it is a matter of seeing what is possible for human eyes to see, not of achieving a definitive description – a sense of being given the awesome privilege of seeing into the divine presence without clearly perceiving the manifestation of the deity or being able to distinguish the messenger of the deity from the deity as such.32

In fact, such visionaries and writers of apocalypses make a point of warning against the confusion that can so easily result from such glorious visions. The Apocalypse of Abraham, for example, insists that ‘God cannot be looked upon himself’ (Apoc. Ab. 16.3–4). And characteristically the glorious angel makes a point of forbidding the visionary to worship him. Thus the Apocalypse of Zephaniah 6.15 reads: ‘He [the angel] said to me, “Take heed. Do not worship me. I am not the Lord Almighty, but I am the great angel, Eremiel . . .”’ And in the Apocalypse of Abraham 17 ‘the angel knelt down with me [the apocalyptist] and worshipped’ (17.2), and together they recite a hymn of adoration. This is all the more significant, since an angel who bears Yahweh’s name (Yahoel) could be said to share in at least some sense in Yahweh’s identity!33

Angels in the religion of Israel and early Judaism, therefore, are a reminder to us that in talk of worshipping God, the term ‘God’ can be just as unclear as the term ‘worship’. Given the fundamental gap between Creator and creation, recognition of which was shared by most religions of the time, communication across that gap was problematic from both sides. It is Israel’s conviction, of course, that God had communicated across that gap – to patriarchs, to Moses and to the prophets in particular. But human reception of that communication, and human perception of how that communication was achieved, were bound to be inadequate for the task, and bound to struggle to express how it came about. The concept of angels was one of the chief ways of perceiving that communication. But the very fact that predominant terms are not simply ‘angels’ but ‘angels of the Lord’, ‘angels of God’, and ‘angels of the presence’, is a reminder that already in Israel and in early Judaism the understanding was not simply of communications from God but of making real the presence of God.34 The angel of the Lord was not simply an envoy from God and did not simply bring humans into the divine presence; rather he brought the divine presence into humans’ daily reality – not simply a message from Yahweh, but the presence of Yahweh. He did not bring the whole of God (that was never possible), but he brought the real presence of God nonetheless.

3.3 Spirit, Wisdom and Word

In Israel’s theology angels were not the only heavenly intermediaries between God and humanity. Angels were sufficiently distinct from God that the question of worshipping even great angels, when it arose, was quickly dismissed. But the writers of Israel’s scriptures and of the post-biblical Jewish literature (apocrypha and pseudepigrapha) had other ways of conceptualizing God’s interaction with creation and divine immanence. The most prominent of these were the Spirit of God, the Wisdom of God and the Word of God.

(a) The Spirit of God

Although we find some overlap between angels and spirit(s) in Jewish thinking, the Spirit of God was more naturally understood as closely identified with God, as a dimension or an aspect of God, or as a way of characterizing God’s presence and power. For example, in 1 Samuel King Saul’s state can equally well be described as ‘the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul’ (1 Sam. 16.14) and as ‘the Lord had departed from Saul’ (18.12). Since the Hebrew ruach has a range of meaning from ‘wind’ to ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’, the wind at Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea can be called poetically the blast (ruach) of God’s nostrils.35 ‘The Spirit of God’ is synonymous with ‘the breath of the Almighty’.36 In Isaiah 31.3 the power of ruach is the distinguishing characteristic of God, just as the weakness of flesh is the characteristic of human beings. In Isaiah ‘my Spirit’, ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ and ‘God’s holy spirit’ are variant ways of speaking of the divine presence, the divine ‘I’.37 Particularly in Ezekiel ‘the Spirit’ is synonymous with ‘the hand of the Lord’.38 And in Psalm 139.7 ‘your Spirit’ is set in synonymous parallel with ‘your presence’. It is hardly surprising, then, that Paul can think of the Spirit of God as analogous to the human spirit: ‘the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within?’ (1 Cor. 2.10–11). As one could speak of one’s spirit as one’s inner being, a dimension or aspect rather than a part of oneself, so one presumably spoke of the Spirit of God as one of the ways of conceptualizing how God interacted with his creation and his people. The Spirit of God was/is the real presence of God, God breathing out his inspiration into prophet and sage.

Some would argue that in the literature of Second Temple Judaism the Spirit of God came to be treated as a semi-independent divine agent. Talk of the Spirit of God filling the world or being sent from on high, as in Wisdom 1.7 and 9.17, could be so interpreted. But a reading more consistent with the understanding of God in Israel and in early Judaism would think simply in terms of God’s omnipresence and of divine anointing or inspiration. Similarly with the Spirit’s role in creation, as in Judith 16.14 or 2 Baruch 21.4, what Israelite or early Jew would read such passages as asserting a power other than the creative power of God at work? Are such passages any different from, for example, Psalm 104.30 (‘When you send forth your Spirit they are created’), Psalm 143.10 (‘Let your good Spirit lead me on a level path’) or Isaiah 63.10 (‘But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit’)? These are all simply ways of speaking about God, the outreaching creative action of God, the inspiration supplied by God, the innermost grief experienced by God at the behaviour of his people.

We can see from all this that from earliest times Israel’s theologians recognized that there was what we might call a double aspect to God – on the one hand God invisible, unseeable, un-image-(in)able, and on the other God acting upon creation and reaching out to humankind, in revelation, salvation and inspiration. The one aspect was what could never be experienced by humans or seen by human eyes (however close apocalyptic vision and mystic ecstasy came to that impossible ideal). The other aspect was God in his self-revelation, in and through creation, in inspiration and in redemption – not so much the Spirit of God as though the Spirit were a being different and distinct from God, but more accurately God as Spirit.39

Notably, what we do not find is any hint that worship was offered to the Spirit of God. Neither in the language of worship nor in the practice of worship do we find it thought to be appropriate that the Spirit should be seen as the one worshipped or to be worshipped. If the Spirit was seen as semi-independent of God, then such worship might have been thought to be appropriate. But the fact that no such worship or the question of the propriety of such worship seems to have entered the minds of Israel’s prophets and sages, confirms that the Spirit was not seen as semi-independent of God. Rather we have to envisage an understanding of the reality of God as at least as complex as the reality of the human being. Perhaps, in view of the subsequent Christian Trinitarian understanding of God, we should be prepared to speak of a binitarian understanding of God in the religion of Israel and early Judaism.40 But if so, what that amounts to is an understanding of God as both unknowable in his transcendence and knowable in his immanence.

(b) The Wisdom of God

The need for wisdom to lead a good and honourable life, a life pleasing to God, was fully recognized in the ancient religions. In Israelite religion, as elsewhere, a whole genre of wisdom literature became the most natural and fruitful means of exploring, explaining and exhorting the pursuit of wisdom. Jesus himself was a considerable teacher of wisdom, and in the New Testament the letter of James is a classic expression of wisdom literature.

Within Israel’s wisdom literature it became common to speak of wisdom in personal terms, notably in Proverbs 1— 9, where Wisdom is regularly portrayed as an attractive and persuasive woman in contrast to the corrupting female deities who offered themselves as prostitutes to draw individuals away from the Lord.41 In the wisdom literature this figure of Wisdom is drawn in ever more elaborate and cosmic colours, as the wisdom by which God created the world, the wisdom at the heart of the universe. So in Proverbs 8.22–31 lady Wisdom claims to have been created at or as the beginning of creation, and to have been a companion with God in his creative acts, ‘like a master worker (or little child)’ (8.22, 30).

In the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) Wisdom sings a great hymn in praise of herself:

      Wisdom praises herself,

          and tells of her glory in the midst of her people . . . :

      ‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,

          and covered the earth like a mist.

      I dwelt in the highest heavens,

          and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.

      Alone I compassed the vault of heaven

          and traversed the depths of the abyss . . .’

(Sir. 24.1–5, NRSV)

Similarly in the Wisdom of Solomon. She is described as ‘the fashioner of all things’ (Wisd. 7.22; 8.5–6). ‘She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and she orders all things well’ (8.1). She ‘sits besides God’s throne’ (9.4). And she is described at length as:

      . . . intelligent, holy,

      unique, manifold, subtle,

      mobile . . .

      For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

      because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.

      For she is a breath of the power of God,

      and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.

(7.22–25, NRSV)42

Now, how should we understand such language? Some would argue, as in the case of the Spirit of God, that Wisdom was being portrayed as a divine being, an independent deity, like the near parallels in Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions. Or, alternatively that Wisdom was being seen as a semi-independent being, somewhat in the way that Jesus came to be seen as the second person or hypostasis in the Godhead.43 But it makes much greater sense to see the language used of Wisdom as poetical or metaphorical. Three considerations point clearly in this direction.

First, Hebrew poetry delights in such personifications. For example, Psalm 85.10–11 depicts ‘righteousness’ and ‘peace’ as kissing each other.44 Isaiah 51.9 calls upon the arm of the Lord to ‘awake, put on strength’. In the novelistic love story of Joseph and Asenath, ‘Repentance’ is portrayed as ‘the Most High’s daughter . . . the guardian of all virgins . . . a virgin, very beautiful and pure and chaste and gentle’ (15.7–8).45 What Israel’s Wisdom writers seem to have been doing, then, is simply developing the technique of portraying desirable aspects of divine–human relations by means of personification, by means of elaborate metaphor. So in ben Sira the poetic analogies extend to Wisdom being likened to a variety of beneficial trees (24.13–17), and Proverbs’ portrayal of divine wisdom as a female figure is pressed into new modes of expression.

Second, it is hardly likely that the Wisdom writers were saying something different from their more formal declarations, such as:

      The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;

      by understanding he established the heavens . . .

(Prov. 3.19, NRSV)

      O God of my fathers and Lord of mercy,

      who has made all things by your word,

      and by your wisdom has formed man.

(Wisd. 9.1–2)

Evidently then the hymns in praise of Wisdom are simply more hyperbolic ways of praising God for the wisdom he displayed in creating the world. Moreover, in both ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon the distinction between Wisdom and Spirit is very slight; like the Spirit, Wisdom is the breath of God.46 So both are a mode of speaking of God acting in a way that is perceptible to the human mind. To say that God created the world by Wisdom, is to say that God created the world wisely, and that this wisdom is both evident to those with perception and attainable for those who seek it.

Third, both ben Sira and the similar passage in the book of Baruch (Bar. 3.9–37) end their eulogy of Wisdom by identifying the Wisdom thus praised with the Torah:

      All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob.

(Sir. 24.23, NRSV)

      She is the book of the commandments of God,

          the law that endures for ever.

      All who hold her fast will live,

          and those who forsake her will die.

(Bar. 4.1–2, NRSV)

Here clearly we see an apologetic or evangelistic motive at work. Since all morally responsible people desire wisdom, the Jewish sage both praised wisdom but also pointed to where, in Israel’s experience, such wisdom is most to be found – in the Torah, the law of Moses. Here again we can hardly speak of personal beings distinct from God, but only of God’s wisdom as it was embodied in the Torah.

Perhaps most significant of all, we know of no cult of Wisdom within Israel.47 In the polytheistic religions surrounding Israel it would have been quite natural to set up such a cult and to offer sacrifices to Wisdom. But Israel praised Wisdom precisely to avoid and prevent its people being enticed to worship other gods. There was no thought of an Israel cult of Wisdom to outbid the attractiveness of Astarte or the other gods of their neighbours. Wisdom was praised in order to bind Israel more firmly to Yahweh. It was the wisdom of God that was being praised; God in his wisdom. And that wisdom was most clearly evident to Israel in the covenant God had made with Israel and in the law he had given to Israel.

So here again we have to recognize that the Israelite conception of God was not painted in monochrome. Israel’s theologians did not insist that the only way to envisage God’s interaction with his creation and with his people was by confessionally affirming his oneness. They were adventurous and liberal (or liberating) in their poetic and metaphorical God-talk. Their understanding of how God acted gave rise to imagery and symbols that at times may seem grotesque, but that together expressed the diverse reality of Israel’s experience of God’s acting on his people’s behalf. To miss this point is to mistake their conception of God, of the one God, and to treat their conception of God in a narrow and stifling manner. Bauckham also weakens his argument by turning his back on attempts to illuminate earliest christology through the Jewish tradition of divine agency, and by in effect lumping the Jewish conceptualization of Wisdom under the heading of ‘semi-divine intermediary beings’. This despite the fact that he fully recognizes that Wisdom (and Word) share the divine identity.48 If he and I are right, Wisdom was not regarded as a ‘semi-divine intermediary’, but was a way of speaking of God’s activity in creation and salvation. The issue we have to leave open at this stage is whether ‘divine identity’ captures adequately or most effectively the thinking behind these early Jewish attempts to speak of God’s immanence without calling his transcendence into question.

(c) The Word of God

That God acts by speaking and communicates by speech is taken for granted in Israel’s tradition. The scriptures common to Judaism and to Christianity begin with a dramatic sequence of divine commands – ‘Then God said, “Let there be light”’ . . . ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures”’ . . . ‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image”’ – in describing the successive acts of creation by which God brought form and life to formless and lifeless matter.49 The phrase ‘the word of the Lord’ occurs more than 240 times in the Hebrew scriptures, and the great bulk of these (over 90 per cent) describe a word of inspired prophecy. Thus again and again we read, ‘the word of the Lord came’ to Abram, to Joshua, to Nathan, to Solomon, to Isaiah, to Jeremiah, to Ezekiel, to Hosea, and so on.50

In some cases the language used could suggest that the word is an entity in itself, something that comes from God, but assumes a life of its own. Thus there can be talk of God establishing his word (1 Kings 2.4); the Psalmist praises God’s word (Ps. 56.4, 10), he trusts in God’s word (119.42) and hopes in God’s word (119.74, 81, 114); Isaiah speaks of the Lord sending a word against Jacob (Isa. 9.8) and affirms that ‘the word of God will stand for ever’ (40.8). But it is fairly obvious that these are just differing ways of speaking about what God has said through his servants.

The usage is still more extravagant in a number of cases. For example:

      By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

(Ps. 33.6, NRSV)

      He sent forth his word and healed them.

(Ps. 107.20)

He sends forth his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly . . . He sends forth his word, and the ice is melted; he makes the wind blow, and the waters flow.

(Ps. 147.15, 18)

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it blossom and bear fruit, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall it be with the word that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the task for which I sent it.

(Isa. 55.10–11)

More striking still is a passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, where the writer’s customary focus on divine wisdom is supplemented by his description of the last of the ten plagues in Egypt, with a powerful image of the divine word:

      For while gentle silence enveloped all things,

      and night in its swift course was now half gone,

      your all-powerful word leapt from heaven, from the royal throne,

      into the midst of the land that was doomed,

      a stern warrior

      carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command,

      and stood and filled all things with death,

      and touched heaven while standing on the earth.

(Wisd. 18.14–16, NRSV)

In all these cases the most natural way to read each of the passages is as a poetic flourish to heighten the significance and drama of what is being described. Today we are more aware that a spoken or written word can quickly assume a life of its own, as media reports and reviews take it in different directions, often well beyond (and even contradictory to) what the original speaker or writer intended. That is hardly to attribute a semi-independent or hypostatic status to the word itself. It is simply a natural, almost inevitable manner of speech, an obvious way of describing the effect and effectiveness of something said or written. In theological terms, it is the effectiveness of what God has said, that his word acts upon those addressed and brings about what God wills, which explains why the word of God can be spoken of in such terms.

The issue re-emerges with the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo.51 For the word, Logos (logos), is a major feature, or actor, and appears very frequently in Philo’s numerous expositions of the Pentateuch. In many cases Philo speaks of the Logos as though he/it were a real being distinct from God, acting as an intermediary between God and the world. Thus the Logos is described as God’s ‘chief messenger, highest in age and honour’, who ‘pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject’ (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 2–5). The Logos is ‘the ruler and steersman of all’ (De Cherubim 36). He/it is God’s ‘firstborn son, who shall take upon him its government like some viceroy of a great king’ (De Agricultura 51), ‘who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were’ (De Confusione Linguarum 146). The Logos can even be described as ‘the second God’ (Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin 2.62).

However, it would be unwise to read such passages outside the context of Philo’s world-view. For Philo’s thought was heavily influenced by both Platonism and the Stoic thought of the time. The Platonic conceptualization of reality presupposes a basic distinction between the material world known to the senses and the world of eternal realities that can only be known by the mind. The implication of Platonic thought is that the contents of the material world are at best shadows and copies of the ideal or perfect forms of the heavenly world. The possibility of merging this cosmology with the Jewish way of looking at the relationship between this world and the heavenly was enhanced by the word to Moses: ‘See that you make them [the furniture of the tabernacle] after the pattern for them, which is shown to you on the mountain’ (Exod. 25.40). And from Stoicism came the concept of divine reason (logos) immanent in the world, permeating all things and present also in human beings – the ‘seed logos’ (logos spermatikos). The Stoic ideal was to live life in accordance with this divine reason.

Philo takes up both concepts. The Logos provides the transition from the heavenly world of ideal reality to the material world of the senses. A key is the realization that logos can mean both the unuttered thought and the uttered word by which the thought comes to expression. So, for example, Philo can interpret the passages mentioned above, where Moses is said to function as God to Aaron (Exod. 4.16; 7.1), in terms of Moses representing the unspoken thought or mind of God, while Aaron represents the spoken word of God.52 Again, in his fullest treatment of the act of creation, Philo likens God’s creative activity to that of the architect of a city who first plans the city in his mind and then constructs the city itself in accordance with the image, the blueprint in his mind (De Opificio Mundi 16–44). On this analogy the Logos is the reasoning faculty of God in the act of creating the universe. Alternatively expressed, the Logos is the archetypal idea, the overall plan that comes to material expression in creation.53 It is only an alternative to or elaboration of this conceptuality that speaks of the Logos in terms of divine agency, as the power by which God effects his creation, the unspoken idea coming to expression in the uttered creation-forming word.

Equally important for Philo was that the Logos is the intermediary between God and humankind. The invisible world, the heavenly world of ideal reality, is not accessible to the senses but only to the mind, the logos within answering to the divine Logos. To know this world of the mind, the real world, the divine Logos, was for Philo the goal of philosophy.54 But beyond the intelligible world, beyond the Logos, is God himself, unknowable even to the purest intellect.55 It is true that creation is a kind of shadow cast by God, and that one can discern the artificer to some extent by his works. And since God is the archetype of the Logos, to perceive the Logos is to perceive God in still fuller measure. But the Logos is as close as one can attain to God (De Fuga et Inventione 101). To come to the Logos is to realize that God in himself is still far beyond.56

In other words, for Philo the Logos is the mind or intention of God coming to expression in creation and in prophetic word. The Logos is God in his self-manifestation in creation, in inspiration and in salvation. The Logos is what is knowable of God, God insofar as he may be apprehended and experienced. ‘That same word, by which he [God] made the universe is that by which he draws the perfect man from things earthly to himself’ (De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 8). It is this mediating role of the Logos that Philo attempted to explain by the kaleidoscope of imagery we noted earlier. For Philo the Logos was a way of speaking about God while realizing that all attempts at such speech were bound to be inadequate. He did not and never would have thought of the Logos as somehow independent of God, far less as a divine being worthy of worship apart from God. His whole conceptuality of the Logos was an extension of Israel’s more traditional poetic and metaphorical speech about God’s action and inspiration, made possible by the Platonic and Stoic world-view that he shared with so many of his intellectual contemporaries. Philo shows us just how widely a philosophical mind of the time could range in its attempt to speak with any degree of adequacy about knowing God and about God’s revelatory action in relation to his creation and to humankind, and to do so without calling into question Israel’s and early Judaism’s firm monotheism. The Logos was the one God in his self-revelation. The thought of worshipping the Logos as a divine being other than God would never have entered Philo’s head.

3.4 Exalted human beings

There is one other category that we should not ignore. It might at first seem to stand at some remove from what we have examined thus far. But in talking about the worship of Jesus we are (also) talking about the worship of the man Jesus of Nazareth. So we need to be alert to the fact that the concept of a human person being divinized was not unfamiliar in the world of Jesus’ time. Legendary figures of the past in ancient myths were spoken of as having become gods; Heracles was probably the best known.57 And the idea that the Emperor became a god when he departed this life was already common, even where the western Empire resisted the idea that the living Emperor was already divine. Such beliefs, of course, were quite far removed from the stricter monotheism of Israel and early Judaism. But there were still some potential precedents within Second Temple Judaism for understanding a particular individual to have been exalted or translated to heaven. The question is whether there was a precedent for the worship of such a person.

The key persons are the great figures of Israel’s beginnings, particularly those cases where there was no knowledge of their burial (Moses) or where they were reported to have been taken to heaven without dying (Enoch and Elijah).58 These cases are worth at least a brief review.

(a) Moses

We have already noted that the Jewish historian Josephus reported some speculation as to whether Moses had been taken or had returned to the deity (Jewish Antiquities 3.96–97; 4.326). More striking is ‘The Exagōgē’ of Ezekiel the Tragedian, written some time in the second century BCE, perhaps in Alexandria. In the Exagōgē Ezekiel describes a dream that was seen by Moses and interpreted by his father-in-law:

      On Sinai’s peak I saw what seemed a throne

      so great in size it touched the clouds of heaven.

      Upon it sat a man of noble mien,

      becrowned, and with a sceptre in one hand

      while with the other he did beckon me.

      I made approach and stood before the throne.

      He handed o’er the sceptre and he bade

      me mount the throne, and gave to me the crown;

      then he himself withdrew from off the throne.

. . .

      Then at my feet a multitude of stars

      fell down, and I their number reckoned up.

(Exagōgē 68–80)

. . .

Moses’ father-in-law interprets the dream as predicting that Moses would cause a mighty throne to arise and that he himself would rule and govern men (85–86).59

What is striking about the poem is that it clearly draws on Ezekiel’s vision of God on his chariot throne in Ezekiel 1 (‘a man of noble mien’), and that it depicts Moses as replacing God on the throne. This of course could be understood as extravagant poetic hyperbole, drawing perhaps on the Genesis tradition of Joseph’s dreams (Gen. 37.5–9). And in what seems to have followed in the Exagōgē, the poem reverts to describing Moses in his traditional role and character as expressed in the narratives of Exodus.60 So, although there is no thought of Moses being worshipped, nevertheless, and even allowing for the Exagōgē’s poetic extravagance, it remains striking that within a Jewish document from more than a century before the birth of Jesus Moses could be so depicted – in a similar role, it would appear, to that attributed to the man-like figure (‘one like a son of man’) who came to share Yahweh’s Lordship in Daniel 7. Similar glorification of the memory of Moses we find in the so-called ‘Moses Romance’ of the Jewish Hellenistic historian Artapanus (second or first century BCE), where Moses is said to have been deemed worthy to be honoured like a god.61

(b) Elijah

Whereas it was unknown where Moses was buried (Deut. 34.6) – hence the scope for speculation as to what had happened to him – with Elijah there was no doubt. The story in 2 Kings 2 was clear: he had been taken up to heaven while still alive; that is, it would appear, without experiencing death. It was this conviction that Elijah had been translated to heaven without dying that led to the belief that he was holding himself ready to return to earth at the time of God’s choosing. Thus the famous ending to the prophecy of Malachi:

Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

(Mal. 4.5–6, NRSV)

The thought and hope is taken up and its continuing attractiveness over the following generations is clearly reflected in ben Sira 48.9–10 and in the expectation reflected in the Gospels.62 Nor should we forget that in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration, the two who appear to Jesus, presumably also clothed in heavenly glory, were Moses and Elijah (Mark 9.2–8 pars.).

Again we should stress that there is no thought of Elijah being worshipped in any of these accounts. But again the precedent for the belief that Jesus had been exalted to share in heavenly glory should not be ignored.

(c) Enoch

Enoch is the earliest of the three great figures mentioned in this section, but the speculation and belief that came to focus on him makes it appropriate to consider him last. The point is that the same thing as happened to Elijah had apparently already happened to the ancient patriarch Enoch, the father of Methuselah: ‘Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’ (Gen. 5.24). In other words, so Genesis was interpreted, Enoch had been translated to heaven without seeing death. Consequently he became a subject of considerable speculation, including his role as the heavenly scribe keeping note of human evil and writing condemnation and judgment,63 and the possibility that he would return with Elijah.64 The fascination with the figure of Enoch is evident particularly in the Enoch literature, now mostly contained in the book of 1 Enoch. His translation to heaven is described in terms of a heavenly journey, in the course of which he is transformed into angel-like form,65 and is identified as the Son of Man (of Dan. 7’s vision) in the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 71.14). More strikingly, in 3 Enoch (though it may be no older than the fifth or sixth century CE), Enoch (having been taken up to heaven) is identified as Metatron, the Prince of the Presence (3 —16), even being called ‘the lesser Yahweh’ (12.5).66 The feature here of particular interest to us is that this exaltation of Enoch as Metatron evidently came to be judged a threat to Judaism’s monotheism; the heresy of calling Metatron a second ‘divine power in heaven’ was traced back to Elisha ben Abuya (c. 110–35 CE).67 The data here relates to periods well after the first generation of Christians, but, as we shall see below, the sensitivities evident in the ‘two powers heresy’ may have been triggered in part at least by the early Christians’ devotion to Christ.

We should not assume that these three figures (Moses, Elijah and Enoch) were exceptional in the degree of hagiography by which their memory benefited in the period of our concern (early to mid first century CE). We may note, for example, that in the Jewish apocryphal (that is, near biblical) literature, Jeremiah appears in 2 Maccabees 15.13–14 as a figure of heavenly majesty, and in the Wisdom of Solomon the righteous after death are numbered among the sons of God and their lot is with the holy ones, that is the angels (5.5). In the Dead Sea Scrolls Melchizedek (presumably with Gen. 14 in mind) is envisaged in the role, it would appear, of captain of the heavenly hosts (11QMelch. 2.9–11), and so possibly as exalted to angelic status, to function like or as one of the archangels.68 Somewhat like Enoch and Elijah, in 4 Ezra 14.9 Ezra is said to have been ‘taken up from among men’ to live in heaven ‘until the times are ended’. In the Testament of Abraham 11 (Recension A), Adam is seen in heavenly glory on a throne. And probably most striking for us is the Life of Adam and Eve where we are told that the reason the devil was expelled from heaven was that he refused to worship Adam; that is, he refused to accept that he should worship the image of God (13–15).69

Nor should we forget 2 Peter 1.4, which speaks of the divine intention that believers ‘may become participants in the divine nature’. Theōsis, ‘deification’, of humans is made much of in Orthodox Christianity, and has a much more substantial role in Christian theology than is usually recognized in the West.70 No doubt this can be attributed to the influence of Greek thought, particularly the Platonic idea that there is a spiritual part of humanity that really belongs to the heavenly world and that can recover its true, godlike nature. Such influence is evident already in Second Temple Jewish literature.71 So it is hardly surprising to find it in the New Testament, even though 2 Peter 1.4 is an isolated example.

All of this raises the possibility that even within the monotheistic Judaism of the first century the thought of a great human figure being exalted to heavenly status, and thus receiving the honour due to such a one, was not so far from being admissible. That the figures reviewed above were all ancient, legendary or even mythical figures weakens significantly any potential parallel. Nevertheless, the fact that even such a possibility was entertained within early Judaism remains significant. As angels, Wisdom and Word diminished or even bridged the infinite gulf between God and humankind from God’s side, so, it may be said, the high evaluation placed on certain historic figures in Israel’s history diminished the gulf from the human side. And the broader prospect of martyrs or virtuous persons being deified presumably diminishes the gulf still more.

3.5 Conclusion

How does all this help us to answer our question whether the first Christians worshipped Jesus? In different ways:

In no case was the thought of worshipping other than God entertained. Or, to be more precise, when the thought did arise (worshipping a great angel?) it was quickly squashed. We can see, then, that for all that Second Temple Judaism had already created an atmosphere in which the question of Jesus being worshipped could arise, and arise as a natural corollary to the status attributed to him, it had provided no precedent to which the first Christians could appeal.

So, to answer our central question, we must now turn to the evidence of the New Testament itself.

Notes

  1  Deut. 6.13 does not say ‘only’ here, but the rendering of Matt. 4.10/Luke 4.8 is an acceptable compression of the fuller text – ‘The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you shall swear’ – especially in the light of Deut. 6.4.

  2  Early examples are G. H. Box, ‘The Idea of Intermediation in Jewish Theology’, JQR 23 (1932–3) 103 –19; W. Bousset and H. Gressmann, Die Religion des Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter (HNT 22; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1925, 41966) Part 5. More recently see particularly my Christology in the Making (London: SCM Press, 1980, 21989; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); L. W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); A. Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (WUNT 207; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007).

  3  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel ix, 2–3.

  4  See further Ch. 4.7.

  5  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 16 –17, 158 – 9, 182–5. If Second Temple Jews ‘drew the line of distinction between the one God and all other reality clearly’ (3), then Spirit, Wisdom and Word were understood to belong on the side of the one God.

  6  Cf. McGrath’s critique of Bauckham for suggesting that the early Jews had a clarity of definition of ‘divine identity and uniqueness’ that is not borne out by their writings (The Only True God 12–15, 117 n. 3).

  7  Yahweh has become the regular way of writing the tetragrammaton; that is, the four-lettered name revealed to Moses in Exod. 3.14 – YHWH.

  8  R. W. L. Moberly, ‘Towards an Interpretation of the Shema’, in C. Seitz and K. Greene-McCreight (eds), Theological Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 124 – 44; also ‘How Appropriate is “Monotheism” as a Category for Biblical Interpretation?’, in Stuckenbruck and North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism 227–30.

  9  McGrath presses the point that in earliest Judaism ‘many forms of acknowledgment of, and interaction with, figures understood to be subordinate to God Most High were considered compatible with Jewish monotheism’ (The Only True God 30).

10  See particularly R. Bauckham, ‘Biblical Theology and the Problem of Monotheism’, in C. Bartholomew, et al. (eds), Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004) 187–232 (here 210); reprinted in Jesus and the God of Israel 60 –106 (here 86 –7); see also 107– 9. Note also L. W. Hurtado, ‘First Century Jewish Monotheism’, JSNT 71 (1998) 3 –26, reprinted with small editorial changes in How on Earth 111–33.

11  More examples in Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 210 n. 67.

12  E. E. Urbach, ‘Self-Isolation or Self-Affirmation in Judaism in the First Three Centuries: Theory and Practice’, in E. P. Sanders (ed.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: Vol. Two. Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco–Roman Period (London: SCM Press, 1981) 269 – 98 (here 273). See also S. S. Cohon, ‘The Unity of God: A Study in Hellenistic and Rabbinic Theology’, HUCA 26 (1955) 425 –79, and P. Rainbow, ‘Jewish Monotheism as the Matrix for New Testament Christology: A Review Article’, NovT 33 (1991) 78 – 91, both summarized by Hurtado, How on Earth 117–20. Hurtado also notes the scruples expressed by faithful Jews about worship and prayer to figures other than God (121– 9).

13  M. Mach, ‘Concepts of Jewish Monotheism during the Hellenistic Period’, in Newman, et al. (eds), Jewish Roots 21– 42, notes cases of both exclusive monotheism (2 Isa., Judith, Sib. Or. 3) and inclusive monotheism (Jubilees, 1QM). W. Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism in the Herodian Age’, in Stuckenbruck and North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism 16 – 44, maintains that ‘exclusive monotheism was not clearly the dominant tendency in the Herodian age. Rather, exclusive and inclusive types of monotheism were concurrent, and the inclusive type was also influential . . . The conditions of the Herodian age . . . were suited to interpretation of Jewish monotheism in ways that rigorous monotheists might have avoided, and did later seek to avoid’ (43 – 4). The evidence has caused some scholars to question whether ‘monotheism’ is the most appropriate word to describe Israel’s belief; e.g. J. F. A. Sawyer, ‘Biblical Alternatives to Monotheism’, Theology 87 (1984) 172– 80; P. Hayman, ‘Monotheism – a Misused Word in Jewish Studies?’, JJS 42 (1991) 1–15. It is in view of such findings and misgivings that Bauckham has attempted to reformulate the issue in terms of the uniqueness attributed to Israel’s God (n. 10, above).

14  1 Macc. 1.41–50; 2 Macc. 6.1–2.

15  Amos 5.25 –27; similarly Jer. 19.1–13.

16  Especially Isa. 44.9 –20; Wisd. 11–15; Ep. Jer.; Sib. Or. 2.8 – 45.

17  The prophets found it necessary to rebuke Israel regularly for idolatry; see e.g. B. A. Levine, ‘Scripture’s Account: Idolatry and Paganism’, in J. Neusner, et al., Torah Revealed, Torah Fulfilled: Scriptural Laws in Formative Judaism and Earliest Christianity (New York: T&T Clark, 2008) 3 –24 (here 12–17).

18  Pss. 45.6; 82.6; cf. Exod. 21.6; 22.8; Isa. 9.6 –7.

19  De Sacrificiis 9; De Vita Mosis 1.158; Quod Omnis Probus Liber sit 43 – though Philo immediately adds, ‘though, indeed, a god to men, not to different parts of nature, thus leaving to the Father of all the place of King and God of gods’ (43).

20  Jewish Antiquities 3.96 – 97; 4.326.

21  E.g. Gen. 32.3, 6; Josh. 7.22; 1 Kings 19.2; 2 Kings 6.33; Isa. 14.32; Ezek. 23.40; Luke 7.24; 9.52.

22  2 Chron. 36.15 –16; Isa. 44.26; Ezek. 30.9. Mark 1.2 and Matt. 11.10/Luke 7.27 all refer Mal. 3.1 (‘I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’) to John the Baptist.

23  E.g. 1 Kings 13.18; 19.5, 7; 2 Kings 1.3, 15; Zech. 1.9.

24  As in Dan. 9.21–22; 1 Enoch 19.1; 72.1; 4 Ezra 2.44 – 48; 10.28 –59.

25  See also e.g. Deut. 4.12; Sir. 43.31; Philo, Post. 168 – 69; Josephus, Jewish War 7.346.

26  Mach notes that ‘exalted angels and the like were – at least quite often – introduced when Jewish identity underwent a certain crisis’ (‘Concepts of Jewish Monotheism’ 42).

27  Jub. 1.27, 29; 2.2; etc.; Test. Levi 3.5; Test. Jud. 25.2; 1QH 6.13.

28  Dan. 8.16; 9.21; 10.13; Tobit 12.15; 1 Enoch 9.1–2; 20.1– 8; 40; 1QM 9.15; 4QSl 37– 40; 4 Ezra 5.20.

29  TDNT 1.81.

30  See also Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 225 –7; ‘the angel in question is the heavenly high priest’ (225).

31  C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study in Apocalyptic Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982) 96 –7, 100.

32  Bauckham responds similarly to Rowland (Jesus and the God of Israel 160 –1); see also Hurtado, One God One Lord 85 – 90.

33  See also Tobit 12.16 –20; Joseph and Asenath 15.11–12; and further Hurtado, One God One Lord 30 –5; L. T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology (WUNT 2.70; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995); also ‘Worship and Monotheism in the Ascension of Isaiah’, in Newman, et al. (eds), Jewish Roots 70 – 89; also ‘“Angels” and “God”’, where he notes cases of language of prayer and praise directed towards angels within a monotheistic framework, while also noting the difficulty of making sharp distinctions between ‘veneration’, ‘worship’ and ‘cultic devotion’. The only one other than God who is properly worshipped in Second Temple Jewish literature is the mysterious Son of Man figure (of Dan. 7.14), as elaborated in the Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 48.5; 62.6 – 9); the Son of Man is thought by some to be an angelic figure. Bauckham regards him as ‘the exception that proves the rule’ (Jesus and the God of Israel 171).

34  ‘The incorporation of angels into their view of God’s sovereignty was apparently seen by devout Jews as compatible with their monotheistic commitment’ (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ 34).

35  Exod. 15.8; 2 Sam. 22.16. The vigorous metaphor is taken up by other writers – Job 4.9; Ps. 18.15; Isa. 30.27–28; 40.7; Wisd. 11.20.

36  Job 33.4; 34.14; Ps. 33.6.

37  Isa. 30.1; 40.13; 63.9 –14.

38  Ezek. 3.14; 8.1–3; 37.1.

39  See further M. Fatehi, The Spirit’s Relation to the Risen Lord in Paul (WUNT 2.128; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) Part II: ‘in Judaism as a whole the Spirit refers to God in his active role of relating to his creation and his people . . . the Spirit is never conceived of or experienced as an entity distinct or somehow separable from God. The Jewish experience of the Spirit is always and essentially an experience of God himself . . . the Spirit-language is used precisely when God’s own personal presence and activity . . . is in view’ (163).

40  Hurtado is not persuaded that a postexilic Jewish binitarianism can be demonstrated (One God One Lord 37); the decisive ‘mutation’ to binitarianism does not take place till earliest Christian devotion to Jesus, which, however, was itself ‘a direct outgrowth from, and indeed a variety of, the ancient Jewish tradition’ (99).

41  Prov. 1— 6 was probably counteracting the influence of the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess of love, Ishtar–Astarte, the ‘strange woman’ warned against in Prov. 2, 5, 6 and 7. See particularly R. N. Whybray, Wisdom in Proverbs (London: SCM Press, 1965) 87– 92.

42  In both Sir. 24.4 and Wisd. 11, the divine presence with Israel during the wilderness period is Wisdom.

43  The term ‘hypostatization’ is regularly used to describe such depictions of Wisdom (e.g. Bousset and Gressmann, Die Religion des Judentums Ch. 18; other bibliography in my Christology 325 n. 21); Bauckham speaks of ‘real hypostatization’ (Jesus and the God of Israel 159). The concept of ‘hypostatization’ was an attempt to avoid a straight choice between Wisdom as an independent divine being and Wisdom as a personification. But the use of ‘hypostasis’ in this way is anachronistic, since that meaning for ‘hypostasis’ only emerged in the fourth century CE as part of an attempt to define God as Trinity; its use in this context in the first century would simply have been confusing. To use it for the period before Christianity is to claim, in effect, that the Christian Trinitarian conception of God had been anticipated in the Jewish Wisdom tradition.

44  Paul similarly personifies ‘righteousness’ in Rom. 6.15 –19 and 10.6.

45  Hurtado, One God One Lord 47– 8.

46  Sir. 24.3; Wisd. 7.25.

47  The point is stressed by Hurtado, Origins 72– 4.

48  As in Jesus and the God of Israel 217.

49  Gen. 1.3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 24, 26.

50  Gen. 15.1; Josh. 8.27; 2 Sam. 7.4; 1 Kings 6.11; Isa. 38.4; Jer. 1.4; Ezek. 1.3 (the phrase occurs nearly 30 times in Jeremiah and nearly 50 times in Ezekiel); Hos. 1.1.

51  For a fuller analysis see Christology 220 –30, on which I draw in what follows.

52  Philo, Det. 39 – 40, 126 –32; Migr. 76 – 84; Mut. 208.

53  Opif. 146; Plant. 18, 20; Decal. 134; Spec. Leg. 1.81, 171; 3.207; Praem. 163. See also McGrath, The Only True God 56 – 8.

54  See e.g. Opif. 31; Post. 69; Gig. 60 – 61; Migr. 52; Congr. 79.

55  Cf. Leg. All. 1.36 –37; Post. 15, 168 – 69; Immut. 62; Mut. 9; Praem. 40, 44; Legat. 6; Qu. Ex. 2.67.

56  See particularly Som. 1.65 – 66, 68 – 69; Post. 16 –20.

57  OCD3 384 –5.

58  See also Hurtado, One God, One Lord Ch. 3.

59  I use the version by R. G. Robertson in OTP 2.811–12.

60  Ben Sira had already spoken of Moses being made ‘equal in glory to the holy ones’ in describing his mission and character (Sir. 45.2).

61  Fragment 3.6 in OTP 2.899. See also D. M. Beegle, ‘Moses’, ABD 4.909 –918 (here 916 –17).

62  Mark 6.15 par.; 8.28 pars.; 9.11–12 par.; 15.35 –36 pars.; John 1.21.

63  Jub. 4.17–19, 23; 1 Enoch 12.4.

64  1 Enoch 90.31; Apoc. Elij. 3.90 – 99. This speculation may be reflected in Rev. 11.3, the ‘two witnesses’ being Enoch and Elijah.

65  Asc. Isa. 9.9; cf. Jub. 4.23; 1 Enoch 71.11; 2 Enoch 22.8.

66  Probably with reference again to Exod. 23.21, ‘For my name is in him’.

67  3 Enoch 16; b. Hag. 15a. See A. F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977); D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo–Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

68  See further A. Aschim, ‘Melchizedek and Jesus: 11QMelchizedek and the Epistle to the Hebrews’, in Newman, et al. (eds), Jewish Roots 133 –5; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 221– 4.

69  Heb. 1.6 may have a similar thought in mind when it quotes Deut. 32.43, calling for all the elohim (gods/angels) to worship God, as a call to the angels to worship God’s firstborn Son.

70  See particularly S. Finlan and V. Kharlamov (eds), Thedsis: Deification in Christian Theology (Eugene: Pickwick, 2006).

71  E.g. 4 Macc. 18.3; Pseudo-Phocylides 103 – 4; Philo, Qu. Exod. 2.29. See more fully R. J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (WBC 50; Waco: Word, 1983) 179 – 81.