4

The Lord Jesus Christ

In the first part of this brief study we examined the language and practice of the worship of the first Christians as attested by and reflected in the New Testament. The most consistent answer to the question, ‘Did the first Christians worship Jesus?’, was that Jesus was not usually worshipped as such, even though his name was regularly invoked in liturgical contexts, and even though he was linked with the Father in benedictions and his help was sought in particular personal crises. Except in the Apocalypse of John (Revelation), Jesus was the theme of hymns rather than the one to whom hymns were sung. There was no thought of sacrifice being offered to Jesus, only of Jesus as the decisive sacrifice making right the relationship between God and believers. Even so, it also became evident that a simple or predominantly negative answer to our question (‘Did they worship Jesus?) did not provide an adequate assessment of all the New Testament data. For Jesus was not simply the object of praise, nor was what he had done only the reason for prayer. He was also understood to be the means by which those who believed in him could come to God: his body giving them their corporate identity; his body and blood giving them their spiritual nourishment; approach to the divine presence being in his name; he himself being the one through whom they could pray and draw near to God.

If the first part of our inquiry has focused on the how and what of worship, the second part has focused on the whom of worship. To whom is worship to be given? And if worship defines the one worshipped as god/God, who is to be defined as god/God alone worthy to be worshipped? In this second part of our inquiry we have started by examining the question of who was worshipped in Israel and in early Judaism. The answer in one sense was simple – only the God of Israel is to be worshipped. But here again the answer is not straightforward. For the ways in which God has made himself and his will known to Israel have been various, or so the scriptures of Israel and the sharpest minds of early Judaism attest. The one God – or should we say the only God? – had made himself known through angels – or should we say in angelic form? – and through his Spirit, by his Wisdom and in his Word – or should we say as Spirit, as Wisdom and as Word?

If God so encountered humankind in such ways, did that also determine the channels and focus of worship of the one God? If God comes to us in/as Spirit/Wisdom/Word, do believers come to him similarly through Spirit/Wisdom/Word? And if so, what corollaries follow for worship – not only for the how and what of worship, but for the whom as well? These are the kind of questions posed by our examination thus far and remain in mind as we turn to the testimony of the New Testament writers to ask whether Jesus was included in the who of the worship offered by the first Christians. The discussion naturally falls into several sections, and with an important corollary:

Here again we remain in close dialogue with Hurtado and Bauckham. As already noted, Bauckham believes an approach to the New Testament data through or in the light of the material documented in Chapter 3 to be unhelpful or even mistaken; he prefers to approach the subject in terms of ‘divine identity’.1 But since Wisdom, Word and Spirit are almost certainly ways of speaking about God, about God’s immanence and interaction with his cosmos and his people – which means they certainly share in God’s identity – the possibility that such ways of speaking about God also informed the early Christian way of speaking about Jesus should surely not be ignored. Hurtado’s argument takes seriously the earlier ways of speaking about God, but sees in the emergence of Christ devotion a decisive ‘mutation’ of this trend within Second Temple Judaism, a mutation without precedent. He refers to this as the ‘binitarian shape’ of earliest Christian worship, a ‘characteristic “two-ishness” of their devotional practice’, ‘a distinctive pattern of binitarian devotion in which Christ is included with God as a recipient of devotion that can properly be understood as worship’ within ‘a strongly monotheistic religious commitment’.2

4.1 Was Jesus a monotheist?

The question, ‘Was Jesus a monotheist?’, has a slightly shocking ring for those brought up in the Christian tradition. It conjures up fanciful pictures of Jesus engaged in the great debates of the fourth and fifth centuries on God as Trinity, and the possibility of his refusing to affirm the Nicene Creed, or even siding with Jews and Muslims of later centuries in accusing Christians of tri-theism. But after the initial jolt, the appropriateness of the question in reference to a first-century Jesus soon asserts itself.

The relevance of the question should also be noted. Whether Jesus himself would have approved of the worship subsequently given to him is a question almost impossible to answer clearly and finally.3 But it is one that should not be ignored, and an answer in terms solely of the high christologies of the Evangelists themselves, while entirely relevant, is in itself insufficient.

The question can be posed legitimately and meaningfully to the extent of asking whether Jesus would have shared the common beliefs of his fellow Jews of the time and would have affirmed that ‘the Lord our God is one Lord’ (Deut. 6.4). And if we can further inquire into Jesus’ teaching in reference to God and draw legitimate inferences in this connection from the Jesus tradition, we will be well on the way to answering the question, to the extent that an answer is possible at this distance in time.

I offer first some inferences from Jesus’ upbringing, then examine the explicit God-talk of his teaching as attested in the Jesus tradition, and finally probe what further deductions may be drawn from the impression he left on his disciples by the character of his mission.4

(a) Inferences from Jesus’ upbringing

We can probably infer that Jesus was brought up by pious parents. Their piety is indicated by the names they gave their children (Mark 6.3) – James/Jacob (the patriarch), Joses/Joseph, Judas/Judah, Simon/Simeon – the latter three being the names of three of Jacob’s 12 children, and heads of the resultant tribes. Nor need we hesitate to draw a similar inference from the name given to Jesus himself – Jesus/Joshua. Other inferences are worth noting briefly:

Most of this is circumstantial, but the overall picture that emerges is certainly coherent and is entirely consistent with the affirmation of Jesus’ belief and practice as a devout Jew. That this included the conviction and regular affirmation that ‘God is one’ is a corollary hard to escape.

(b) Jesus’ God-talk

What was Jesus’ own theo-logy, his own teaching about God and the worship of God?

Most immediately striking is the fact that Jesus evidently drew upon the Shema in his own teaching. According to Mark 12.28–31,12 when asked what is the first commandment, Jesus responded by citing the Shema in total:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

(NRSV)

According to the same passage, the second commandment is drawn from Leviticus 19.18: ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mark 12.31 pars.). The point to be noted here is that Jesus is remembered in earliest Christian tradition not simply for putting the love command (‘love your neighbour as yourself’) at the heart of his teaching (Mark 12.31 pars.); he is remembered as also putting the love command second to the primary command, to love God with all one’s being (Mark 12.30 pars.). For Jesus the Shema was evidently fundamentally determinative of the whole orientation of life. It is not the case that Jesus’ ethic can be boiled down to love of neighbour. On the contrary, the implication is that the two commands go together, and perhaps also that the second is only possible in long-term reality as the corollary to the first.

We may add the information already mentioned in the Introduction, that when tempted by Satan to worship him, Jesus replied explicitly, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’ (Matt. 4.10/Luke 4.8). And when he was addressed as ‘Good teacher’, he is recalled as replying, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’ (Mark 10.17–18). The implication is clear, that for Jesus God alone is worthy of worship and of such devotion, because God alone is the source and definition of all goodness.

Also worthy of notice are the first two petitions with which Jesus began the prayer that he taught to his disciples. The first was, ‘Hallowed be your name’ (Matt. 6.9/Luke 11.2). Basic to the idea of ‘holiness’, of the adjective ‘holy’ and the verb ‘hallow/sanctify’, is the thought of otherness, set-apartness from everyday usage. As referred to God, holiness denotes the wholly otherness of God, and provides a further rationale for the rejection of all attempts to configure God as a projection of human ideals (a man-made idol). God’s know-ability to humankind, that is God in/as his name, depends on humankind according him/his name absolute respect; anything less will simply mean that his name is not apprehended, and God is not known. This also is entirely of a piece with the affirmation that God is one, that Yahweh is alone Lord. For were there other worthy recipients of such devotion and commitment, the God of Israel could not demand such exclusive and total respect.

Equally noteworthy is the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘May your kingdom come’ (Matt. 6.10/Luke 11.2). For no one can have any doubt that the main theme and emphasis of Jesus’ preaching was ‘the kingdom (or kingship) of God’.13 But too few note the principal corollary, that in the kingdom of God, God is King, God alone; God alone as king, the only God as ruler over all (including all other so-called gods), God as the only one worthy to command complete and singular loyalty and obedience. In the kingdom of God the (human) subject owes unconditional obedience to the king; a double allegiance is impossible (Matt. 6.24/Luke 16.13). The king, and the king alone, has the power to determine the eternal destiny of his subjects (Matt. 10.28/Luke 12.4–5).

It is hard to avoid any conclusion other than that the Shema continued to be of central importance for Jesus during his mission and in the teaching he both gave and lived out. Which also means that the conviction that God was one continued to be axiomatic for Jesus, a core principle from which he drew his inspiration and instruction. In short, it is hardly possible to avoid giving an affirmative answer to the question that heads this section. Yes, Jesus was a monotheist.

Yet here too more is to be said.

(c) The impression Jesus made on his disciples

The data here can be summed up by reference to three strands of the Jesus tradition: those passages that indicate in some way or other that Jesus envisaged himself as God’s son; those where he is remembered as teaching with a surprising degree of self-asserted authority; and those in which he may have spoken of himself in terms of the Danielic ‘one like a son of man’. For if Jesus was remembered as referring or alluding to himself in status terms beyond the ordinary, then that finding could certainly have a bearing on our central question. The references here will have to be brief, but the first two in particular command a considerable degree of agreement among New Testament scholars.

First, more than a generation ago Joachim Jeremias argued that Jesus consistently and distinctively addressed God as Abba (‘Father’). Abba being a familial word, equivalent to the affectionate ‘Dad’ or even the childish ‘Daddy’, it can reasonably be inferred that Jesus perceived his relationship with God as son to father in terms of the intimacy of a family relationship.14 For my own part, the key consideration here is the repeated testimony of Paul (Rom. 8.15–17; Gal. 4.6–7) that the abba-prayer was a distinctive feature of earliest Christian worship, and distinctive not least as attesting a sonship that the Christian pray-ers shared with Jesus (as ‘fellow heirs with Christ’). If Paul, who would have been no stranger to Jewish prayer, could regard the abba-prayer as such a distinctive feature of Christian prayer, and a sign of an inheritance shared with Jesus, then we can be confident that Jeremias’ conclusion was basically sound.15

Here we are in effect back where we found ourselves at the end of Chapter 2: the New Testament writers’ conviction that the Christian’s relationship with God is intimately bound up with Jesus. For the implication is clearly that the sonship of believers is derived from Jesus’ sonship, is a sharing in Jesus’ sonship. Jesus can even be thought of as the eldest brother in a new family of God (Rom. 8.29).16 Yet there is also the implication that Jesus as Son not only represents other sons before God as Father, but also represents the Father to the other sons, makes known the Father to them. This latter is an emphasis of John’s Gospel,17 but it is also present in the other Gospels, nowhere more clearly than in Matthew 11.27/Luke 10.22:

All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

(NRSV)

Second, it has often been noted that Jesus was remembered as speaking with an authority that not only rivalled but even outstripped the authority usually accorded to Moses and the great prophets. One example is the ‘but I say’ formula that Matthew has retained in the antitheses of Matthew 5 (‘You have heard it said . . ., but I say . . .’), which include radical interpretations of commandments of Moses. The phrase stands in some contrast also to the familiar formula of the prophet, ‘Thus says the Lord . . .’ A second example is Jesus’ habit of introducing points of teaching by prefacing them with ‘Amen’.18 The word was familiar from regular liturgical usage, where the congregation said ‘Amen’ to affirm or endorse the words of someone else.19 But in the Gospels the term is used without exception to introduce and endorse Jesus’ own words, presumably as a strong solemn affirmation of the importance of what was about to be said. No wonder, then, that the authority that Jesus seems thus to have claimed for his teaching made a considerable impact on his hearers – as in Mark 1.27, ‘What is this? A new teaching with authority!’ On the basis of such data it is highly plausible to say that in effect Jesus claimed to speak with divine authority, even as a ‘spokesman for God’.20

The third strand of evidence is more controversial. It focuses attention on the passages where Jesus is recalled as referring to the vision of the man-like figure in the visions of Daniel 7 (‘one like a son of man’) in what is best understood as self-reference. The most important passage is Mark 14.61–64 (and parallels),21 where in his trial before the Jewish council Jesus responds to the high priest’s questions about his status by alluding to Daniel 7.14: ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven’. The fact that the high priest is represented as accusing Jesus of blasphemy (Mark 14.63–64 par.) reminds us immediately of the Jewish reflection about divine or heavenly intermediary figures that came close to the blasphemy of recognizing a divine presence in heaven other than God.22 The implication is that Jesus was portraying himself in or as fulfilling the role of the man-like figure of Daniel’s vision (Dan. 7.13) in taking the second throne beside the Ancient of Days in heaven (7.9, 14). In other words, a charge of blasphemy was plausible in that Jesus seemed to be placing himself among the heavenly mediators of mystic vision, and was therefore claiming a status and authority that in at least some degree challenged the status and authority that belonged to God alone.

So we can answer the question, ‘Was Jesus a monotheist?’, at least initially with a straight ‘Yes. Jesus was a monotheist; he confessed God as one; he proclaimed the one God’s royal rule; he prayed to and encouraged his disciples to pray to this God. He worshipped God alone.’ The circumstantial evidence regarding Jesus’ upbringing reviewed above (a) strongly disposes the questioner towards that answer. And the clearest evidence, in Jesus’ own God-talk (b), can hardly be interpreted in any other way.

Yet at the same time we can hardly ignore the evidence briefly reviewed in the final section (c). For Jesus left a huge impression of an intimacy with God as his Father that the disciples could only begin to experience as they stood with him and came to God as Father in dependence on him, as though youngsters who found it possible to stand before their father only when accompanied by their older brother. Jesus’ first disciples recalled his mission and teaching as revealing God and God’s will to them as never before; he spoke with the voice of God, but more clearly and definitively than either Moses or the prophets. And Jesus himself probably also drew on Daniel’s vision of heavenly reality to explain his own mission and destiny. In short, even in the way the first Christians remembered Jesus they found every encouragement not only to come to God through him, but also to recognize that God had come to them through him and his mission too.

4.2 ‘Jesus is Lord’

Whatever we can or should say about Jesus and his mission, there can be little or no question that what the first Christians believed had happened to Jesus after his death transformed their appreciation of him completely. For they were convinced that God had raised him from the dead. This is the core affirmation of Christian faith, and it can be traced back firmly to the earliest days of the movement that stemmed from Jesus, and in particular to the visionary experiences that the first Christians had of Jesus as risen from the dead and exalted to heaven.23 Such belief was already a confession by the time Paul was himself converted, which was probably less than two years after Jesus’ crucifixion (1 Cor. 15.3–7). And Paul was probably converted to beliefs that he had persecuted, beliefs already well established among the first members of the sect of the Nazarenes. Theirs was an astonishing belief in itself. Many Jews believed that there would be a resurrection at the end of time and before the day of last judgment; that is, a general resurrection of the dead. But the thought of one person being resurrected (not simply revived to his previous life) was unheard of. Something of mind-blowing significance had happened, and Jesus was at the centre of it.

More to the immediate point, these earliest believers were also convinced that Jesus had been taken or exalted to heaven. What had happened to Jesus was not simply a translation like that of Enoch or Elijah, nor simply a vindication such as Wisdom 5 assures the righteous they could anticipate. What then? We can safely assume that the first disciples would have searched the Scriptures to help explain and make sense of what had happened to Jesus. A key verse that shed much light for them and that evidently informed and shaped the earliest Christian reflection on the subject was Psalm 110.1:

The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’.

This verse runs like a gold thread through much of the New Testament,24 and is so interwoven into the language of the New Testament writers that it evidently was a primary starting point or stimulus for the strong strand of New Testament christology summed up in the confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’. The title (‘lord’) in itself did not necessarily signify any more than the status of a (human) master to his servant or slave; but in the context of the times, use of the title for Jesus in a cultic setting affirmed that he was being ranked alongside the gods of other cults (Asclepius, Isis, etc.), or alongside the Emperor in some degree of competition with the divine claims made for Caesar. And in the context given to the title ‘Lord’ (kyrios) by Psalm 110.1, its reference to Christ immediately indicates that in earliest Christian faith Jesus was now to be reckoned in terms similar to those used for the heavenly beings of earlier Jewish reflection, or, more precisely, to be reckoned as sharing the one God’s rule. With this title Jesus is seen to be more on the side of God reaching out to humankind, than of humankind coming to God.

The significance of the title can be demonstrated by reference to several key texts in the first generation letters of Paul.

(a) The Yahweh texts referred to Jesus

In the many uses of kyrios in Paul’s letters, the great majority refer to Jesus. Kyrios was Paul’s favourite title for the exalted Jesus.25 For example, he summarizes his gospel as the preaching of ‘Jesus Christ as Lord’ (2 Cor. 4.5), and a positive response to such preaching as ‘you received the tradition of Christ Jesus as Lord’ (Col. 2.6). ‘Jesus is Lord’ in Romans 10.9 looks like one of the earliest baptismal confessions, perhaps the earliest: ‘if you confess with your lips that “Jesus is Lord” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved’. The only real exceptions to the exclusive reference of kyrios to Jesus are a number of Old Testament passages that Paul quotes, with their original reference to the Lord (Yahweh) unaltered.26 However, the picture becomes more complex when we realize that the Old Testament eschatological expectation of ‘the day of the Lord’ seems to have become the Christian hope for ‘the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 1.8; 2 Cor. 1.14).27 Still more striking is the fact that in several instances Paul quotes an Old Testament reference to the Lord (Yahweh) and refers it to the Lord Jesus Christ.28

One striking example is the passage just cited – Romans 10.9–13. The passage concludes by quoting Joel 2.32:29 ‘for everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’ (Rom. 10.13). Now in Joel 2.32 ‘the Lord’ is obviously Yahweh. But equally obviously in Romans 10.9–13 ‘the Lord’ is the Lord confessed with the lips – ‘Jesus is Lord.’ The salvation of which Joel spoke is promised to those who confess Jesus as Lord. He is the Lord upon whose name those who believe in Jesus call. As already pointed out in Chapter 1, the fact that Paul thought of his readership in these terms is confirmed by his description of believers in the opening of his first letter to the Corinthians, as ‘all those who in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 1.2). The calling of which Joel spoke is a calling on God to exercise his saving power on behalf of the remnant of Israel. So the fact that Paul refers the same verse to the exalted Jesus presumably means for Paul either that Jesus is Yahweh,30 or, more likely, that Yahweh has bestowed his own unique saving power on the Lord who sits on his right side,31 or that the exalted Jesus is himself the embodiment as well as the executive of that saving power.

The most striking example is found in the hymn or hymn-like passage in Philippians 2.5–11, already quoted in Chapter 2 in full. I repeat the climax of the hymn:

      Wherefore God exalted him to the heights and bestowed on him the name that is over every name,

      that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow . . .

      and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

          to the glory of God the Father.

The most remarkable feature here is the confidence that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee should bow . . . and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’. Those familiar with the scriptures of Israel would have quickly recognized the obviously deliberate echo of and allusion to Isaiah 45.23 (NRSV):

      By myself I have sworn,

          from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness

          a word that shall not return:

      ‘To me every knee shall bow,

          every tongue shall swear.’

They would also no doubt be aware that this verse was the conclusion to one of the most emphatically monotheistic passages in Israel’s scriptures:

          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.

      By myself I have sworn . . .

(45.21–23, NRSV)

That just this passage should be taken up in the Philippian hymn is astonishing. Was the obeisance called for by Yahweh to be given to Christ? Was the oath of fealty to the one and only God now to be given to Christ? The answer is not so straightforward as at first it may seem. For the hymn does not actually say that Jesus as Lord is to be worshipped as the one God is to be worshipped. The hymn could simply be saying that the worship of the one God is now to be expressed by confessing Jesus as Lord. Here, the final line of the hymn should not be forgotten. The obeisance and acclamation will be ‘to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil. 2.11).32 As Larry Kreitzer notes, ‘The very presence of such a qualifying phrase as eis doxan theou patros indicates something of the way in which Jewish monotheism expressed itself in the light of the exaltation of Christ.’33 At the very least, then, the hymn asserts that the confession of Jesus as Lord is the way in which obeisance to the one God will be expressed. Jesus’ Lordship is such a definitive manifestation of the saving power of God that the confession of Jesus as Lord is a confession of the one God. It is the way in which one confesses that God is one, that the oneness of God is also evident in Jesus as Lord. Should we press a little further and conclude that the hymn asserts that Jesus as Lord will be a fellow-recipient of the worship of the one God – that the one seated at God’s right hand, God’s plenipotentiary, is equally due the worship that should be offered only to God?34 Who can now say precisely what the first Christians who sang or chanted such a hymn understood by it? At the very least, however, this hymn clearly affirmed that the Lord Jesus was on the other side, the divine side, of the act of worshipping the one God.

(b) 1 Corinthians 8.6

An even more striking passage comes in 1 Corinthians. In Chapter 8 Paul addresses the challenge of some Corinthian believers willing to eat food sacrificed to idols, on the grounds that ‘no idol in the world really exists’ and ‘there is no God but one’ (1 Cor. 8.4). Paul’s response is riveting for several reasons:

Even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are gods many and lords many, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things and us for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things and us through him.

(8.5–6)

For one thing, as already noted, Paul shows himself (or allows himself to be heard) to be somewhat ambivalent on the question whether the confession of God as one necessarily implies the denial of the existence of any other gods. He speaks of ‘so-called gods’, implying that other beings worshipped as god were not really gods, not gods in fact. But he also seems to affirm that there are ‘gods many and lords many’. Perhaps he was simply acknowledging that many gods were in fact worshipped and saying in effect, Whether there are other gods or not, for us what matters is the one God revealed to Israel.

The really crucial feature, however, is that Paul seems to have taken up the Shema, already in effect quoted in 8.4, and to have adapted, expanded or transformed it. Where the Shema confessed, ‘The Lord our God is one Lord’, or ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ (Deut. 6.4), Paul seems to have dismembered the confession of oneness into two parts: ‘For us there is one God, the Father . . . and one Lord Jesus . . .’ In view of this, how should we express the implications? That according to Paul Jesus now shares the Lordship of the one God? That Jesus as Lord expresses the Lordship of the one God? That Jesus has somehow been incorporated into the Shema, into the oneness of God?35

There is controversy at this point. Bauckham insists:36

the only possible way to understand Paul as maintaining monotheism is to understand him to be including Jesus in the unique identity of the one God affirmed in the Shema‘ . . . He is identifying Jesus as the ‘Lord’ whom the Shema‘ affirms to be one . . . the unique identity of the one God consists of the one God, the Father, and the one Lord, his Messiah.

However, the point is not quite as clear cut as Bauckham suggests. For the question arises as to whether Paul did indeed intend to ‘split the Shema’. It is quite possible to argue, alternatively, that Paul took up the Shema, already quoted in 8.4 (‘there is no God but one’), only in the first clause of 8.6 (reworded as ‘for us there is one God, the Father’); and to that added the further confession, ‘and one Lord Jesus Christ’.37 Bauckham argues that ‘the addition of a unique Lord to the unique God of the Shema‘ would flatly contradict the uniqueness of the latter’.38 But if anything the fuller confession of 8.6 could be said to be a more natural outworking of the primary conviction that ‘the Lord (God) had said to the Lord (Christ), “Sit at my right hand . . .”’ (Ps. 110.1), a confession set precisely in contrast to the gods many and lords many of Graeco–Roman worship.

Perhaps we can draw something from the prepositions used in the qualifying phrases: ‘one God, from whom all things and us for him’; ‘one Lord, through whom all things and us through him’. A distinction remains between the one God and the one Lord. The one God is not only referred to as ‘the Father’ but is also seen as the source and origin of everything, and as the goal towards whom believers should direct themselves;39 whereas the one Lord is referred to in terms of agency, the mediating agency through whom all things and believers have effective being. We seem to be back in the sort of distinction that the Wisdom tradition and Philo strove to maintain, between God as the ultimate and unknowable source of being, and God making himself known through his acts of creation and what he created. This sharing of divine identity (to use Bauckham’s terminology) is equivalent to the way Wisdom and Word were conceived of as sharing divine identity – precisely by making a distinction between origin and agency.40

However 1 Corinthians 8.6 should be interpreted, it remains a riveting and mind-blowing fact that the Jesus who had lived only about 30 years before this letter was written was being seen as synonymous with that divine agency. Where Paul could think of worship and prayer offered to God in Jesus and through Jesus, he also evidently thought of God acting through Jesus and making himself known in and through Jesus. The passage ‘through’ Jesus was a two-way passage, from humankind to God, but also from God to humankind.

(c) 1 Corinthians 15.24–28

For any inquiry into whether the first Christians worshipped Jesus, the fact that Paul spoke of Jesus sharing or expressing the one God’s Lordship is bound to be a powerful factor in determining the inquiry’s outcome. Yet Paul also expresses himself in other terms on the same point. In various passages he uses the formula, ‘The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’.41 The striking feature is that Paul speaks of God not simply as the God of Christ, but as ‘the God . . . of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Even as Lord, Jesus acknowledges God not only as his Father but also as his God. Here it becomes plain that the kyrios title is not so much a way of identifying Jesus with God, as a way of distinguishing Jesus from God. It cannot be unimportant that Paul can use both kyrios Yahweh texts in reference to Christ (a), and at the same time can speak of God as ‘the God of our Lord’.42

Most notable in this connection is 1 Corinthians 15.24–28. In effect it is the nearest we have in the New Testament to an exposition of the crucial text, Psalm 110.1, that so influenced the first Christians:

Then comes the end, when he [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet’ [Ps. 8.6]. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘he [God] has put all things in subjection under his feet’ [Ps. 8.6]. But when it says ‘All things are put in subjection’, it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.

(NRSV, adapted)

What is particularly striking here is the way the Christ’s heavenly rule at God’s right hand is portrayed. The kingship of the Lord Christ is undoubtedly thought of as complete and final. All things, all cosmic powers, every enemy, even the power of the last enemy (death) will be subjected to Christ. He will reign until the end.43 But Paul also makes it clear that there is a more ultimate kingship, that of God the Father. At the end the Lord Christ will hand over the kingdom to God, and himself be subjected (hypotagēsetai) to God who subjected (hypotagē) all (other) things to him, ‘so that God may be all in all’ (15.28). This again has echoes of Philo’s understanding of the Logos: that the Logos is the ultimate, as far as humankind can reach out to God, and as far as God can come to humankind, but that God is always beyond the Logos. So with the Lordship of Christ. In an important sense no acknowledgment of dignity and status is too high to indicate his significance. But even when the highest honour can be accorded to him or recognized as already his, even then the qualification has to be added: but God (the Father) is still beyond; God will only be ‘all in all’ when the Lord Christ is seen to be included in the ‘all in all’.44

What does this say about worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ? That he should receive honour and glory due to God alongside God, though as an expression of the ultimate honour and glory due only to God (Phil. 2.11). That the one Lord Jesus Christ is integral to the creedal confession of the one God, that he embodies the divine agency by which God accomplishes his creative and redemptive purposes, though praise to the source and origin of all things should be given only to the one God and Father (1 Cor. 8.6). That the worship due to God the ‘all in all’ should always be beyond the submission and devotion given to the Lord Christ (1 Cor. 15.28). Whether the first Christians would have expressed themselves in just these terms is hardly certain, but the care with which Paul in particular stated his kyrios christology should certainly give us pause before we answer a straightforward ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to our central question.

(d) Did Paul persecute the first Christians because of their Jesus devotion?

As part of his argument that the first Christians worshipped Jesus from the earliest days of the movement that became ‘Christianity’, Hurtado finds strong support in the likelihood ‘that prominent among his [Saul’s/Paul’s] reasons for proceeding against the early Jewish Christians was his outrage over their claims about Jesus and their reverence of him’. Prior to Paul’s conversion, Hurtado maintains, it can be inferred ‘that his [Paul’s] previous opposition had been directed against just the sort of view of Jesus that he felt divinely directed to embrace in his conversion’.45

Hurtado’s argument, however, is surprisingly weak. Of course it can be inferred that what Paul experienced as his encounter with the risen and exalted Jesus on the Damascus road radically changed his mind about Jesus. Paul’s own admission that Jews found the proclamation of Christ crucified to be a stumbling block (1 Cor. 1.23) strongly suggests that prior to his conversion such had been his attitude too. And many justifiably deduce from Galatians 3.13 that most Jews would regard the crucified Jesus as accursed by God. Obviously Paul’s views on the subject changed dramatically, as he himself implies in Philippians 3.7–11. But the argument that Paul’s pre-Christian dismissal of earliest Christian claims for Jesus can and should be read as outrage over early Christian cultic devotion of Jesus goes well beyond the evidence and is in grave danger of the classic fault of petitio principii; that is, of begging the question and reading into the data what one wants to read out from it. But since Hurtado builds so much on this argument a short excursus is called for to consider it.

For one thing, in asking why Saul/Paul persecuted the first Christians, Hurtado ignores almost completely the chief reason Paul himself gives for his persecuting. In Philippians 3.6 Paul explicitly states that his persecuting was motivated by and expressive of his ‘zeal’ – ‘as to zeal, a persecutor of the church’. The implication of Paul’s only other explicit recollection of his pre-Christian past and conversion is to the same effect:

You have heard of my way of life previously in Judaism, that in excessive measure I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it; and that I progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my people, being exceedingly zealous for my ancestral traditions.

(Gal. 1.13–14)

The implication is clear: that Paul’s persecution of the first Christians had been of a piece with his Pharisaic zeal for the law and the traditions of the fathers, the Halakhah, the ‘zeal’ being the same ‘zeal’ that he referred to in Philippians 3.6. This can only mean that Paul had persecuted the first Christians because he saw them as some sort of threat to his (fundamentalist) understanding of what being ‘in Judaism’ demanded of Jews, their loyalty to the law and adherence to the Pharisaic halakhoth. That we find it hard to fill out Paul’s recollection here from what we know of the first Christians should not justify bypassing Paul’s most explicit statement on the subject. I attempt to do some filling out in terms of the Hellenist Christians’ openness to Gentiles (most explicit in Acts 11.20–21) being seen as a threat to Israel’s set-apartness to God and from other nations; and I have shown that this is the direction in which the tradition of ‘zeal’ in Israel and early Judaism firmly points.46 But a Pharisee as zealous as Paul might well have taken violence-justifying offence at what he perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be unacceptable disregard for the law by other Jews. The tradition of Jewish zeal certainly includes various examples of such offence and such reaction.

Second, it should be remembered that Jewish believers remained largely undisturbed in Jerusalem for most of the period 30–62 CE. The spasms of persecution are not recalled as particularly motivated by hostility to Christ-devotion,47 though the final vision of Stephen could have been a factor in his case (Acts 7.55–56). Even so, the fact that the bulk of Jewish believers in Jerusalem could subsequently be described as ‘all zealous for the law’ (21.20) suggests that their reverence of Jesus did not incite open opposition from the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Despite Hurtado, it remains significant that explicit Jewish objection to claims of deity for Jesus do appear in the New Testament, but for the first time and only in John’s Gospel (John 5.18; 10.33), one of the latest of the New Testament writings, and almost certainly reflecting a post-70 situation.

Third, we know from 1 Corinthians 1.23, and by inference from Galatians 3.13, what it was about the earliest christology that offended the Jews.48 It was the claim that Jesus, a crucified felon, was Messiah and the instrument of God’s blessing. Hurtado notes the ‘conspicuous silence’ of Paul in that he ‘shows no need to reiterate and defend either beliefs in Jesus’ exalted status or the characteristic cultic reverence given to him’; ‘there were no challenges to the exalted status of Jesus asserted by Paul’s gospel or to the devotional practices by which Jesus was reverenced in Paul’s churches’.49 The point for him is, justifiably, that Paul’s christology should not be seen as a development or departure from the earlier Jewish Christian beliefs and practice. But he resists the equally justifiable inference that such beliefs and practices were not seen as particularly controversial or objectionable to most Jews of Paul’s time.50 Had they been so it would almost certainly have been referred to or reflected in the letters (Galatians, Romans) where Paul engages most directly and sharply with more traditional Jewish beliefs as they impinged on his mission. The facts that the main ground of dispute and contention was over the law and its applicability to Gentile believers, that this is so clearly evident in Paul’s letters, and that the only opposition to christology referred to is to Christian proclamation of a crucified Messiah, hardly give credibility to Hurtado’s thesis.

In contrast, Hurtado’s attempt to find support for his thesis in 1 Corinthians 12.3 and 2 Corinthians 3—4 shows how weak is his case. The fact that Paul could envisage someone crying out, ‘Let Jesus be cursed’, apparently under inspiration and within a worship situation (1 Cor. 12.3), is open to various explanations, of which an official curse by Jewish authorities is not the most likely.51 And in 2 Corinthians 3—4 Paul gives no hint as to his reasons for his own former hostility to the first Christians.

In short, the argument for a very early Christ-devotion among the first Christians is not helped or strengthened by the reasons for Paul’s pre-Christian persecution of the first Christians. If anything, the ‘conspicuous silence’ of Paul as to the controversial character of his christology implies that it was not so very controversial for both the first Christians and for most Jews of the time.

4.3 Word, Wisdom and Spirit

In Chapter 3 we concluded that the wisdom writers and sages of Israel and early Judaism understood the Spirit, divine Wisdom, and the Logos as different and complementary ways of speaking about God in his interaction with his creation and his people. They were variously used as ways of speaking of God’s immanence without infringing on his transcendent otherness. The New Testament writers were no doubt aware of this and knowingly drew on these ways of speaking of God’s action and revelation as they strove to express the significance of Christ and of what God had accomplished through him. The most obvious example is the prologue to John’s Gospel, where the assertion is made explicitly, ‘the Word became flesh’ (John 1.14); that is, became Jesus of Nazareth. In the other cases the drawing on wisdom language to refer to Christ is more controversial; but from the middle of the twentieth century there has been a widespread recognition that ‘Wisdom christology’ was one of the main strands of earliest Christian theological reflection.52 And the relation of Christ to the Spirit has always been somewhat problematic to formulate adequately.

We will look briefly at all three ways of speaking about God’s interaction and how they were applied to Christ or adapted to speak of him, starting with the clearest example – John 1.1–18.

(a) Logos christology

John 1.1–18 is the classic expression of Christian Logos christology:

      In the beginning was the Word,

      and the Word was with God,

      and the Word was God.

      He was in the beginning with God.

      All things came into being through him,

      and no created thing came into being without him.

. . .

      And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,

      and we have seen his glory,

      the glory as of the Father’s only Son.

. . .

      No one has ever seen God. It is the one and only, God [or Son],

      who is close to the Father’s heart,

      who has made him known.

The dependence on Israel’s Logos theology is evident, not least the deliberate echo of the account of creation in Genesis 1 – creation by the divine fiat, ‘God said, “Let there be . . .”’, creation by the divine word. As we saw in Chapter 3, the metaphorization of God’s speech53 into the Word was very familiar to Israel’s theologians and sages. So the Johannine hymn or poem was obviously taking up and developing further this metaphor, this way of speaking about God’s action in creation and revelation and salvation.

An interesting and not irrelevant question thus arises, as to whether we should translate the opening pronouns as ‘he’. The question arises since prior to John the Word is personalized but not genderized (‘he’ is used because logos is a masculine noun). Moreover, as we shall see below (b), the language of the prologue is drawn equally if not more from Israel’s Wisdom reflection, and Wisdom (sophia) is feminine. The issue is of some importance, because the translation ‘he’ could be taken to imply that the poem/hymn is speaking of Jesus as such from the beginning.54 How best, then, to read the prologue?

From a straightforward reading of John’s Gospel the answer would seem to be obvious. For in John’s Gospel Jesus speaks consistently as one who was conscious of his personal pre-existence with the Father. For example, he speaks of the glory he had in God’s presence before the world existed (John 17.5); Isaiah saw his glory in the Temple (12.41). Jesus asserts simply but bluntly, ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (8.58), the ‘I am’ echoing God’s own self-referential formula.55 And he speaks regularly of his having been sent by God, his Father,56 from heaven ‘into the world’ (3.17; 10.36; 17.18).57

Yet some hesitation remains. For John clearly felt free to attribute to Jesus words and sentiments that Jesus himself probably never uttered while on earth. As most commentators realize, had the great ‘I am’ sayings been uttered by Jesus during his mission in Galilee and Judea, they would hardly have been so ignored by the other Evangelists. It is much more likely that John has developed a portrayal of Jesus, on the basis of such traditional material as, in this case, Mark 6.50,58 a portrayal that makes clear how the significance of Jesus should be seen, in John’s eyes, rather than simply how Jesus was remembered.

Does such a consideration merely move the question of Jesus’ personal pre-existence from being a historically questionable description of Jesus’ own self-consciousness to John’s perception that Jesus as such had been with God? That is certainly plausible. The alternative would be to say that John has elaborated the rich poetic metaphors used to describe the Logos, and that in transforming the Creator–Logos image into a Father–Son image John has given the poetic metaphor of God’s immanence its richest and most elaborate expression.59 The genius of the creator of the poem/hymn would then be that 1.14 comes as a dramatic shock in the story of the Logos. Prior to 1.14 it was the Logos through whom the world was created, which was conceived as being the true light. As we shall see in the next section, prior to 1.14 nothing is said in the poem/hymn that would be strange to a Hellenistic Jew familiar with the Jewish reflection on the immanence of God.60 It is with 1.14 that the shockingly new is expressed: that the Logos became flesh, became a man, Jesus of Nazareth. Properly speaking, then, it is only with 1.14 that Jesus as such comes into the story. To be somewhat pedantic, according to the Johannine prologue, Jesus is not the Word; he is the Word become flesh. At the same time, the point should not be pushed too far. For John 1.14 also asserts that Jesus reveals what the true character of the Logos is, Jesus is the clearest expression of God’s immanence, the one who makes visible the invisible God. In other words, and the point is important, it is not so much that the personification language used of the Logos is now used of Jesus. It is rather that Jesus reveals the personal character of the Logos, a character that previously could only be expressed in personification terms.

The success of the prologue in communicating its claim therefore depends on the background theology of Israel’s reflection on the Word. In other words, John must have assumed that his readers would think of the Word as a way of speaking about God acting. The Word is the expression of God, the unspoken thought of God coming to verbal expression. Hence the opening attribution of creation to the Word; that is, to the divine fiat. Hence too the understanding of the Word as manifesting divine glory (1.14), indeed as manifesting God, as making the unseen and un-seeable God61 known, or literally as expounding (exegēgēsato) God (1.18). For in effect the claim of Jewish theology is that the Word is the self-revelation of God, the way God makes himself known. And on that claim John in turn builds in asserting that the Word became incarnate in or as Jesus, so that Jesus is the epitome and summation of that self-revelation. This is presumably why the poem/hymn does not hesitate to speak of Jesus as the only Son in intimate personal relationship with God as Father, and not only so but also as ‘the one and only, God’ (1.18).62 Here, we may infer, the Johannine prologue has found itself in the same tension as Philo, when he spoke of the Logos as ‘the second God’ (Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin 2.62).63 In both cases, the attempt is evidently being made to assert that the Logos is as close to God as can be imagined, that the Logos is God to the extent that God can possibly be known.

The major breakthrough that the Johannine prologue makes, then, is that it identifies the Logos with the man Jesus Christ. It brings to expression the concept of incarnation. The ancients had no problem with the thought of the gods appearing in the likeness of human beings. But to ‘become flesh’ was a step beyond them. And the wisdom writers of Israel could think of Wisdom becoming or at least being identified with the Torah. But to identify Wisdom with a particular person was a step beyond them too.64 Yet this is what the Johannine prologue does. Jesus is the Word, God’s creative speech, God’s revelatory and redemptive action, become flesh. As the identification of divine Wisdom with the Torah was an evangelistic pitch (Here is where you will find the Wisdom you are looking for and need),65 so John’s identification of the Word with Jesus was evangelistic. John was saying that if you look at Jesus, his mission, death and resurrection, you will see the glory of God; you will hear God’s word, God himself speaking to you; you will be drawn into an intimacy with God that nowhere else is possible. You will see the unseen God in and through Jesus; you will encounter God in and through Jesus.

No wonder, then, that the Jesus of John’s Gospel is accused of making himself equal to God (John 5.18), indeed of making himself God (10.33). For the intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and God, the bound-togetherness of the Son and the Father, the mutual indwelling of each in the other, is all a way of saying that Jesus really is the Word of God, really is God speaking, though speaking in and through useless flesh (1.13; 3.6; 6.63). And no wonder that the Gospel climaxes in Thomas’ worshipful confession, ‘My Lord and my God’ (20.28).

In short, John’s Gospel shows very clearly why our question, ‘Did the first Christians worship Jesus?’, is so difficult to answer adequately. For Jesus was understood very early on as the human face of God, as the one who made the unseen God known and known more clearly and fully than he had ever been known before. In a real sense that the first Christians could only explain inadequately, to be in the presence of Jesus was to be in the presence of God – not, be it noted, in the presence of a god, but in the presence of God. The aim was still as with Israel’s Logos theology: to affirm a position for the Logos as close as possible to God, to the extent that they could easily be confused with each other; to assert that the Logos was truly God himself speaking and acting. That is why the Johannine Jesus can say that he is to be honoured (worshipped?) just as the Father is honoured (John 5.23). At the same time we should also note that John did not abandon all reserve on the subject. Jesus was the Son and not the Father. It was still the Father who is to be worshipped (4.23–24).66 So even when the evidence pushes us towards a positive answer to our question, we should not forget that John’s Gospel is a particular elaboration of Israel’s Logos theology, and that John too endeavoured to maintain a balance between the thought of Jesus both as God and as not God the Father, the incarnate Word as the most definitive revelation of God.

(b) Wisdom christology

Anyone familiar with the way lady Wisdom is portrayed in Jewish tradition will appreciate that the prologue of John’s Gospel also draws heavily on key strands of Jewish reflection on Wisdom. Like the Word in John 1.1, Wisdom was present when God made the world (Wisd. 9.9), and it was through Wisdom that the world was created (Prov. 3.19; Wisd. 8.4–6). Like the Word in John 1.4, Wisdom was conceived to be the true light.67 Like the Word in John 1.11, Wisdom sought a dwelling place among the children of men, but found none (1 Enoch 42.2). Like the Word in John 1.14, Wisdom had been told to pitch her tent in Jacob (Sir. 24.8). Similarly the rather striking terms to describe the Son in Hebrews 1.3 – ‘he is the radiance (apausgama) of God’s glory and the stamp (charaktēr) of his nature’ – are best explained as drawn from language used to describe Wisdom.68 So it makes good sense to recognize the same influence in passages where Paul asserts that it was through the one Lord Jesus Christ that all things came into being (1 Cor. 8.6), that he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, that it was in him, through him and for him that all things were created, and that he is before all things and in him all things hold together (Col. 1.15–17).69 For this again is language that is given its currency in such contexts by reference to Wisdom, ‘the image of God’s goodness’ (Wisd. 7.26), the firstborn of God’s creative work (Prov. 8.22, 25). Divine Wisdom and/or the Word were naturally understood to have been present before creation and were characteristically understood as the agency by which God created the cosmos. Wisdom (and Word) were equally thought of as penetrating throughout the world, the divine force by which the world was sustained, the rationale by which human beings could live to best effect.70 The thought in the theology of Israel and early Judaism was never of Wisdom (or Word) as separate beings from God, able to be conceived as independent personalities from God. Rather they were the presence of God in the world, God acting upon the world, the God-impressed moral and rational fabric without which the world and society cannot properly function as God intended.

In fact we are very close to the Logos christology of John just reviewed, even if neither Paul nor Hebrews is quite as bold and explicit as John. The points to be made are similar. Earliest Christian Wisdom christology took up the wisdom imagery and metaphor and applied it to Jesus. Not only that, it presented Jesus as the personal expression of the divine Wisdom whose personality previously could only be expressed in personification imagery. To be pedantic, again, Jesus as such was not Wisdom, but was Wisdom embodied in/incarnated as a man; or alternatively expressed, ‘the fullness of deity dwelt bodily’ in him (Col. 2.9). So far as the deity of Christ is concerned, the use of such metaphorical language brings with it the same ambiguities and ambivalence as in Jewish reflection on Wisdom. And presumably with the same or similar effect. If Wisdom is a way of saying that God acted wisely in what he created, then Jesus embodies/incarnates that same Wisdom. If Wisdom is a way of speaking of the invisible God, then Jesus can be said to make visible the invisible God (Col. 1.15). To put it more provocatively, to speak of Jesus as Wisdom (or Logos) is inadequate, unless we realize that Wisdom/Logos is a way of speaking about God. What these first Christian theologians were endeavouring to say was no less than that in some real sense, Jesus is God acting and outgoing; Jesus brings to visible expression the very purpose and character of God himself. Jesus is not only firstborn among many sons, he is the firstborn of all being; he embodies not only the reaching up of humankind to God, but also the reaching down from God to humankind.

In regard to our central question, Paul seems further from a positive answer than John, but the ambiguity that causes the question to be posed in the first place is already evident in Paul. If the corollary of Wisdom christology is that Jesus was (to be) worshipped, then presumably the corollary is that the worship was to be offered to Jesus as divine Wisdom, Jesus as God in that God had revealed himself in and through Jesus. Or, to be more precise, it was God who was to be worshipped in that he had made himself known in and through Jesus. The worship was both informed and enabled by Jesus, by the revelation of God in and through Jesus. It is some sort of ambivalent statement such as this that the earliest Wisdom and Word christologies push us towards.

(c) Spirit christology

With Spirit christology the issues become still more complex. For the Spirit was from the beginning a way of speaking of God’s life-giving action in creating humankind (Gen. 2.7), of God’s presence throughout the cosmos (Ps. 139.7). So the Spirit of God was, like Wisdom and Word, a way of speaking of the divine immanence, an earlier and more pervasive way of so speaking, but not dissimilar in intent and function, as the parallels in Wisdom 9.10 and 17 illustrate. Consequently we might have expected that as Wisdom and Word were as it were absorbed into Christ – Christ as the embodiment of divine Wisdom, Christ as the incarnation of the divine Word – so it would be with Spirit. Should we not speak of a Spirit christology, as we do of a Wisdom or a Logos christology? Did the implicit binitarianism of the Jewish conception of Wisdom and Word not resolve itself into a very early Christian binitarianism, including Jesus within the concept of God in his self-revelation? And, if so, should we not deduce that Christ was seen also to fulfil the role of bringing the divine presence into human experience that had hitherto been filled by the Spirit of God?

The answer, actually, is no. For while we see in more than one New Testament writing a conception of God’s action and revelation in and through the life, death and resurrection of Christ framed in terms drawn from Wisdom and Word theology, we do not find the same thing happening in Spirit terms. The Gospel writers hardly hesitate to ascribe Jesus’ mission to his anointing by the Holy Spirit,71 and Paul, despite few references to Jesus’ mission on earth, probably reflects the same emphasis (2 Cor. 1.21–22). More striking is the hesitation that Paul seems to display in avoiding explicitly attributing Jesus’ resurrection to the power of the Spirit. Paul had no doubt that the final resurrection would be accomplished by the power of the Spirit (Rom. 8.11), the Spirit transforming the body of this existence into the ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15.44–46). Yet in passages such as Romans 1.4, 6.4 and 8.11 he seems to avoid formulations that would attribute Jesus’ resurrection to the same Spirit.72 Perhaps he thought that the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God was an exaltation also over the Spirit (cf. Acts 2.33). But that would probably be too crass a way of expressing what Paul was doing.

The issue can only be clarified if we take note of three features of Paul’s treatment of the Spirit:

    1  Although he speaks of the Spirit regularly as ‘the Spirit of God’,73 he also speaks of ‘the Spirit of Christ’ and ‘the Spirit of God’s Son’.74 This presumably means that the Spirit of God is to be recognized as the Spirit that empowered Jesus and characterized his mission and that brings to expression in believers the same sonship and grace in those committed to God through Jesus (Rom. 8.15–17; Gal. 5.22–23).

    2  He refrains from speaking of the Spirit as given by Jesus, whereas he regularly describes God as the one who gives the Spirit.75 This, despite the formulation of Acts 2.33 (the exalted Christ poured out the Spirit on the day of Pentecost), and the implication that it was Jesus who baptized in Spirit in fulfilment of the Baptist’s prophecy;76 whereas when Paul talks of believers having been baptized in the Spirit he uses the divine passive (1 Cor. 12.13).

    3  Paul does however speak of Christ as the last Adam having become (in his resurrection) ‘life-giving spirit/Spirit’. What is so striking here is that ‘life-giving’ is elsewhere understood as distinctively the role of the Spirit,77 as subsequently confessed in the creed – the Spirit, ‘the Lord and giver of life’.

What follows from all this? First, that Paul was prepared to redefine the role of the Spirit in terms of the character of Jesus, or, probably better, in terms of the character of God as revealed in Jesus’ mission and death. Second, that he did not understand Jesus to have taken over the role of God in giving his own Spirit to humankind. And third, that he merged the ongoing activity of the risen Christ with that of the life-giving Spirit.78 Here, in this last point, we can see Paul’s christology doing something similar to what it did also with Wisdom–Christ as absorbing the Spirit’s life-giving role. The difference is that it was only with Christ’s exaltation that this happened, not in a concept of incarnation.

We could press the thought a little further. For Paul’s language seems to imply that for Paul experience of the Spirit was experience of Christ.79 So we could say that, for Paul, as the Spirit had hitherto mediated the presence of God, and as Jesus in his life had mediated the presence of God, so now the Spirit also mediated the presence of Christ. But this implies that for Paul the Spirit now related to Christ in the same way that the Spirit had always related to God – as the medium of divine presence. This implies in turn that both the exalted Jesus and the Spirit were bound up in the same divine presence.80

Could we infer, should we infer, that Paul thought it necessary to maintain a distinction between the exalted Christ and the divine Spirit understood as given to and active within humankind? This, even though he also sometimes spoke of Christ as indwelling believers,81 as the Spirit indwells believers.82 The Spirit remained the primary way of speaking of the divine presence within, whereas Jesus was most regularly thought of as exalted at God’s right hand – much as the Johannine literature was subsequently to speak of the Spirit as the Paraclete/Advocate on earth and Christ as the Paraclete/Advocate in heaven.83 The point not to be neglected, however, is that Paul saw the roles as overlapping. If the Spirit was the pre-eminent and classical way of speaking of the divine life and presence within humankind, Christ could also be spoken of as bringing and constituting the divine presence within humankind, or as the divine presence within which believers had their being and found their raison d’être (‘in Christ’) – the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, Christ as the life-giving Spirit. In other words, we are back into the mediatorial role of Christ – Christ not only as the way and means by which believers come to God, but the way in and as which God as Spirit enters into a life or human situation, Christ as embodying and defining the character of that divine presence.

What emerges consistently from this section is that the earliest Christians radically reinterpreted the language and imagery by which Israel’s sages and theologians spoke of God’s perceptible activity within human experience by filling it out by reference to Jesus. The creative energy of God, the moral character of the cosmos, the inspiration experienced by prophets, the saving purpose of God for his people all came to fuller/fullest expression in Christ. This did not mean that Jesus should be worshipped in himself, any more than the Word as such, divine Wisdom as such or the Spirit of God as such was or should have been worshipped. But it did mean that as the divine self-revelation, through Spirit, Wisdom and Word, more fully informed and enabled worship of the one God, the same was even more the case with Christ. As early as the first Christians, it was recognized that the one God should be worshipped as the God active in and through Jesus, indeed, in a real sense as Jesus – Jesus as the clearest self-revelation of the one God ever given to humankind. As the opening words of Hebrews put it: whereas God had spoken to previous generations in many and various ways by the prophets, now ‘in these last days he has spoken by a Son . . . the radiance of God’s glory and the stamp of his nature’ (Heb. 1.1–3).

4.4 The testimony of the Apocalypse of John

The book of Revelation deserves separate treatment on this subject, for it is unique among the New Testament documents. It is unique not simply as the only apocalypse to have gained a place in the New Testament. It is unique because unlike the other main writings in the New Testament its affirmation of the deity of Christ is unqualified. Paul we noted on the whole refrains from using worship language in reference to Christ, and though he speaks of the divine Lordship of Christ he also speaks of God as the God of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews affirms Jesus’ role and status uninhibitedly as the Wisdom of God, but it also speaks of Jesus as having to learn obedience and to be perfected through his suffering. Even John’s Gospel, which does not hesitate to use the term theos, ‘god’, for the Word, and indeed for the Word become flesh, also speaks of Jesus not simply as the Word, but as the Word become flesh; and the Johannine letters portray Jesus as still praying to the Father, now that he is in heaven (1 John 2.1). In the Apocalypse of John, however, all such restraint has gone, beyond the fact that Christ is represented as the Lamb that had been slaughtered.

The uninhibitedness of Revelation’s christology is easily illustrated:84

Now such unique lack of inhibition can be explained in part at least by the uniqueness of the book of Revelation as the only New Testament apocalypse. Apocalyptic visions major on the grandiose and the bizarre, on startling symbolism and hyperbole. The status given to or recognized for the Lamb has to be read in the context of the cosmic evil portrayed in the images of the great dragon, the horrific beast and the richly clad prostitute. That is not the language of everyday theology nor the context of everyday worship. Apocalyptic visions burst free from such constraints and portray their message in the symbolism, often grotesque symbolism, of a Hieronymus Bosch. The exaggerated lines of the brightly coloured depictions are a way of figuring a reality that is beyond everyday description and imagery. Even so, the status attributed to and recognized for the exalted Christ (the Lamb) should not be played down. The merging of the Son of Man with the Ancient of Days and of the Lamb with the Lord God are to be taken with the same seriousness as the high christologies of the other New Testament writers. The question posed, however, is whether the visions of the seer of Revelation are more like a highly coloured symbolical assertion of what he indeed shared with the other christologies just reviewed (the Lord Christ as the divine presence), than the description of a reality that can be expressed in literal terms and propositions. Is the imagery perhaps better described as surreal than as real metaphysics? The hermeneutical rule governing the interpretation of apocalypses should not be forgotten: to interpret them literally is to misinterpret them.

4.5 Jesus as god/God

In some ways this is the most difficult issue: that in the New Testament Jesus is sometimes called ‘god’, or should we say ‘God’? If ‘god’, is not that a step towards polytheism – Jesus as a second god beside the creator God? If ‘God’, then how are we to make sense of the first Christians’ clear memory that Jesus called for worship to be given only to God, and himself regularly prayed to God as his God and Father? The data itself poses as many questions as it resolves.

Did the first Christians think of Jesus as god/God? If Paul is the clearest, perhaps the only, spokesman for the first generation of Christians still available to us, the question draws our attention to Romans 9.5.86 On syntactical grounds a strong case can be made for reading the text as a doxology to Christ as God:

. . . from whom [Israel] is the Christ according to the flesh, he who is over all, God blessed for ever.

And a good many commentators on Romans take this to have been Paul’s intention – to pronounce a doxology to Jesus as God. But the punctuation, which was not indicated in the original letter, can be arranged differently:

. . . the Christ according to the flesh. He who is over all, God, may he be blessed for ever.

And there is more to be said for this latter reading than is often appreciated. Above all there is the fact that the passage is a catalogue of Israel’s privileges, where it is likely that Paul was enumerating the blessings that Israel claimed for itself and in the language that Israel would recognize and affirm – ‘to them [Israelites] belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises . . . the patriarchs and . . . the Messiah’. It would be entirely fitting after such a listing of God’s goodness towards Israel to utter a doxology in praise of this God, rather as Paul does in Romans 1.25 and 11.33–36. So it remains finally unclear and open to question as to whether Paul here, exceptionally for him, spoke of Jesus as god/God.

A stronger case is Titus 2.13, which speaks of ‘the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’. To be noted, however, is that the ‘appearing’ (epiphaneia) in view is the appearing of the divine glory, not the appearing of Jesus Christ in glory. This may seem a small point, but it may also signify that we are back in the thought most clearly expressed in earliest Christianity’s Wisdom christology: that in Jesus is to be seen the glory of God, the glory of the divine presence;87 Jesus Christ seen more as the visible manifestation of the invisible God, God manifesting himself in and through Jesus, than as God or a god as such. The fact that the Pastoral Epistles seem to be content to attribute the title ‘Saviour’ equally (and we might almost say, indiscriminately) to ‘our God’88 as to Christ Jesus,89 probably points in the same direction: Jesus’ death and life were to be seen as the saving action of God.

In Matthew’s Gospel we should note the strong strand of divine presence.90 Jesus is to be named ‘Emmanuel, God with us’ (Matt. 1.23), though we should recall that the passage quoted (Isa. 7.14) looked for the not too distant birth of an unknown child who was to be given the symbolical name Emmanuel. Matthew has taken seriously its application and appropriateness to Jesus by showing Jesus as promising to be present where even only two or three are gathered in his name (18.20) and the risen Jesus as promising to be with his disciples ‘always, to the end of the age’ (28.20). This is nothing other than a promise that the divine presence will be with Jesus’ disciples, wherever they gather in his name, and for evermore. Which is also to say that Jesus himself constitutes that divine presence – as he did already in his life and mission, so he continues to do in his resurrection and exaltation.

We have already noted the attribution of the title ‘God’/‘god’ to Jesus in John’s Gospel – the pre-incarnate Word as God (John 1.1), the incarnate Word as the only begotten God/god who makes known the unseen/unseeable God (1.18), and the risen Christ worshipped as ‘my Lord and my God’ by Thomas (20.28). The fact that even when describing the Logos as God/god (1.1), John may distinguish two uses of the title from each other is often noted but too little appreciated. The distinction is possibly made by the use of the definite article with theos and the absence of the definite article in the same sentence: ‘In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God (literally, the God, ton theon), and the logos was god/God (theos, without the definite article).’91 Such a distinction may have been intended, since the absence or presence of the article with theos was a matter of some sensitivity. As we see in Philo, in his exposition of Genesis 31.13 (De Somniis 1.227–30):

He that is truly God is One, but those who are improperly so called are more than one. Accordingly the holy word in the present instance has indicated him who is truly God by means of the article, saying ‘I am the God’, while it omits the article when mentioning him who is improperly so called, saying, ‘Who appeared to thee in the place’ not ‘of the God’, but simply ‘of God’ [Gen. 31.13]. Here it gives the title of ‘God’ to his chief Word.

The possible parallel is notable, since Philo was clearly willing to speak of the Logos as ‘God’, as we see here and already noted in Chapter 3. But he did so in clear awareness that in so doing he was speaking only of God’s outreach to humankind in and through and as the Logos, not of God in himself. John’s Gospel does not attempt similar clarification in his use of God/god for the Logos, pre-incarnate and incarnate, though he uses language in regard to Christ that is very close to that of Philo in regard to the Logos.92 But in possibly making (or allowing to be read) a distinction between God (ho theos) and the Logos (theos) the Evangelist may have had in mind a similar qualification in the divine status to be recognized for Christ. Jesus was God, in that he made God known, in that God made himself known in and through him, in that he was God’s effective outreach to his creation and to his people. But he was not God in himself.93 There was more to God than God had manifested in and through his incarnate Word.

The same is probably true of the other important Johannine text here – 1 John 5.19–20. For the passage expresses gratitude for the understanding that the Son of God has given us ‘so that we may know him who is true [presumably God], and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.’ If the last ‘he’ refers to Jesus (though the point is unclear and disputed), then as with John’s Gospel, the godness of Jesus Christ is that as God’s Son he fully represents God; to be in Christ is to be in God, or to be in him is to know God; the Son has made God known and present. As such he can even be described as ‘the true God and eternal life’. It is because the depth and profundity of God has been so fully revealed in and through Christ that Christ can be described as the revelation of the true God.

Since we have already given some attention to the Revelation of John, the only other text that needs to be taken into account here is Hebrews. For in Hebrews 1.8 the writer quotes Psalm 45.6 as an address to the Son: ‘Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever.’ Following the strong Wisdom christology of the opening verses (1.1–4), and the interpretation of Deuteronomy 32.43 as a call on the angels to worship God’s firstborn Son (1.6), the text must be given due weight. At the same time, however, we should recall that Psalm 45.6–7 was probably addressed to Israel’s king, a fact that the writer of Hebrews was probably aware of since he carries on the quotation to Psalm 45.7, which speaks of the king as having been anointed by ‘God, your God’. So again we are confronted with the use of ‘God’/‘god’ in a transferred sense, emphasizing the divinely accorded status of an individual while always aware that God was still the God of the one so described. In effect we are back into the powerful significance that Paul saw in Jesus’ Lordship while he continued to think of God as the God of the Lord Jesus Christ.

4.6 Last Adam, mediator, heavenly intercessor

Although our focus is naturally on the high christology of the heavenly or divine status of Jesus, before we close this chapter we should recall the fuller roundedness of the New Testament christologies. We have noted at various points how the understanding of Jesus as the one who brings God close to the human condition is balanced (is that the right word?) by the understanding of Jesus as the one who brings humankind close to God. The traditional attempt to capture this fuller portrayal has been to emphasize the human as well as the divine in Jesus. But the distinction is too crude, already for the New Testament writers.

(a) Last Adam

An important, though controversial aspect of Paul’s christology is his depiction of Christ as the last, or second, Adam. This is most explicit in Romans 5.12–19, 7.7–13 and 1 Corinthians 15.21–22, 45, but is probably alluded to or drawn on elsewhere.94 The message is clear: the first Adam (man) had failed by his disobedience; the last Adam had reversed, and more than reversed the failure. The implication is clear too: that in Christ, the last Adam, God’s purpose in creating Adam/man had been fulfilled. Christ, that is the Christ who died and has been resurrected, provides the pattern for God’s saving purpose. He is the firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8.29; Heb. 12.23); those who pray ‘Abba, Father’ thus share in Jesus’ sonship (Rom. 8.15–17; Gal. 4.6–7). He is the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1.18; Rev. 1.5), the beginning of the new creation. As (the last) Adam, Christ represents humankind before God. This is an important qualification beside Christ’s role in representing God to humankind. The point comes to expression in various ways, each indicating that the two-sidedness of Jesus’ role between God and humankind was important.

It comes to expression in the language of ‘image’ (eikōn). For the term can be used both of Adam, created in God’s image (Gen. 1.27), and of the divine Wisdom through whom God creates (Wisd. 7.26; Col. 1.15; cf. 2 Cor. 4.4). The stamp leaves its impression on the wax that is stamped, and eikōn can be used of both. This two-sidedness of Jesus’ role in the purpose of God remains important. Christ is the image to which his fellow brothers will be conformed (Rom. 8.29); his is the image into which they are being transformed (2 Cor. 3.18). But the claim can equally well be made of a renewal in accordance with the image of its creator (Col. 3.10). Here again the implication is that the saving purpose of God is to bring to full effect his creative purpose; the last Adam is the divine image, the pattern to which all will be conformed (1 Cor. 15.49).

In the same connection, one of the intriguing features of the earliest Christian reflection on Psalm 110.1 was the way it was merged in their thinking with Psalm 8.6. Psalm 110.1 spoke of the Lord God seating the Psalmist’s Lord at his right hand ‘until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’. But the earliest Christian reflection on Psalm 110.1 evidently saw a link with the description in Psalm 8 of God’s purpose in making humankind, itself a meditation on the second account of creation in Genesis 2.19–20:

      You have made them a little lower than God/the angels (elohim), and crowned them with glory and honour.

      You have given them dominion over the work of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.

(Ps. 8.5–6, NRSV, adapted)

Psalm 8’s talk of God having ‘put all things under [humankind’s/Adam’s] feet’ was evidently too close to Psalm 110’s talk of Yahweh making his enemies a footstool for the Lord Christ’s feet to be ignored. So what we find is that either Psalm 8.6b is drawn in to complement Psalm 110.1 (as in 1 Cor. 15.25–27),95 or the citation of Psalm 110.1 is modified by incorporating the phrasing of Psalm 8.6.96 Presumably the implication, for those who understood Psalm 110.1 in terms of Psalm 8.6, was that the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God was also the ultimate fulfilment of God’s purpose for humankind in creation. Here surprisingly, given the weight of the former, kyrios christology seems to overlap in earliest christology with what is usually described as Paul’s Adam christology. In other words, the readiness to apply Yahweh texts to the exalted Christ was complemented by the affirmation that Christ’s exaltation to God’s right hand also fulfilled the divine purpose for humankind intended from the very act of creation.

Hebrews is one of the best examples of a New Testament writing that tries to maintain this balance. For the climactic revelation through the Son (Heb. 1.1–4) can also be expressed (again) in the divine purpose for humankind fulfilled now in Christ, drawing directly on Psalm 8.4–6 (Heb. 2.6–9), and in terms of the Son who ‘learned obedience through what he suffered’ and who had to be ‘made perfect’ in order to become ‘the source of eternal salvation’ (5.7–9).97 The same point is presumably in mind in Hebrews’ repeated description of Jesus as ‘mediator of a new covenant’.98 And it may not be accidental that it is 1 Timothy, the member of the Pauline corpus that seems to go most out of its way to repeatedly affirm its strong monotheistic standpoint,99 which also declares the ‘one mediator between God and humankind’ to be ‘the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2.5). The ‘one God, one Lord’ formula of 1 Corinthians 8.6, is now, or is alternatively expressed as, ‘one God, one mediator’.

(b) Heavenly intercessor

In examining the striking features of the New Testament’s high christology, we should not forget that another strand, also drawing on the thought of Christ’s exaltation, sees Jesus as the one who intercedes for humans. This strand runs across an interesting spectrum of the New Testament. In the great climax to his exposition in Romans 8, Paul is confident that in the final judgment Christ Jesus will be at the right hand of God as the one who ‘intercedes for us’ (8.34). Since the motif of angelic intercessors was already familiar within Second Temple Judaism,100 the implication is that Paul saw the intercession of God’s own Son, who had died and been raised, as decisive, and thus presumably as much more powerful than that of even glorious angels. 1 John 2.1 likewise counsels encouragement: ‘If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ Here, as already noted, the assumption is that not only is the Holy Spirit the advocate (paraklētos) on earth,101 but Christ fulfils the same role in heaven, once again all the more effective in that he pleads his own ‘atoning sacrifice’ (1 John 2.2).

But once again it is Hebrews that makes the most of the thought of Jesus as the heavenly intercessor.102 This is an integral part of Hebrews’ conception of Christ as High Priest: Christ is not like earthly priests, whose office ends with death; rather, Christ

holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever. Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

(Heb. 7.24–25, NRSV)

It is this function of priestly office, the priest as intermediary between God and humans, that Hebrews emphasizes so much. Precisely as one who knows and has experienced the weaknesses of human beings, who has ‘learned obedience through what he suffered’, Christ can empathize with and help those who come to God through him.103 This is an important other side to the question of whether Jesus was prayed to by the first Christians. Equally, indeed more, important for many of these Christians was the assurance that Jesus was praying for them. Here again we find ourselves with the two-sidedness of the first Christians’ esteem for Christ, both as the mediator between God and man, the one through whom they could come confidently to God, and as the one who was also conjoint with God in the worship they brought to God.

4.7 How helpful is it to re-express the issues in terms of ‘divine identity’?

As noted at the beginning of Chapter 3, Bauckham argues that it does most justice to the New Testament texts and to the christology espoused by the first Christians to see them as identifying Jesus directly with the one God of Israel. In the light of our findings, it is appropriate to ask whether this new coinage of ‘divine identity’, and Bauckham’s thesis that the first Christians saw Jesus as sharing or included in the divine identity, is a helpful resolution to the tensions between the diverse ways in which Paul and the first Christians conceptualized the relationship of Jesus to God and to themselves. Bauckham offers this formula as a more satisfactory alternative to the standard distinction between a ‘functional’ and an ‘ontic’ christology, as providing a more satisfactory way of assessing the earliest christological reflection, within the matrix and traditions of Second Temple Judaism, than exploration of its concepts of divine agents and heavenly intermediaries. And certainly talk of ‘sharing the divine identity’ is a way of taking seriously and doing justice to the emphasis in the New Testament writings that I sum up in the previous paragraphs as Jesus seen to embody the divine presence. But I have some reservations.

The first concerns the value of ‘identity’ as the key structural term. It seems to me to run the danger of confusing rather than clarifying. The traditional term of classic christology, ‘person’, has long been recognized as caught in precisely that danger, since the usual present-day understanding of ‘person’ is so different from the technical understanding of persona, which was the term that was drawn in to provide a way of distinguishing Father, Son and Spirit within the Trinity.104 ‘Identity’ runs the same risk. What constitutes human/personal identity? Ethnic origin, country of birth and basic education, profession, family (parents, children, siblings, extended family), colleagues, friends, hobbies . . .? If not ‘essence’ or ‘being’, then relationships. So how does that diversity in identity-composition work in relation to Yahweh – the Creator, the Life-giver, the God of Israel, the Father and God of the Lord Jesus Christ, the final Judge . . .? The New Testament writers are really quite careful at this point. Jesus is not the God of Israel. He is not the Father. He is not Yahweh. An identification of Jesus with and as Yahweh was an early attempt to resolve the tensions indicated above; it was labelled as ‘Modalism’, a form of ‘Monarchianism’ (the one God operating first as Father and then as Son), and accounted a heresy.105 My question, then, is whether talk of ‘sharing divine identity’ does enough justice to the history of Jesus and to the diverse roles attributed to Jesus that are distinguished from God’s.

My second reservation follows from the first. For classic christology has always seen the need to affirm a paradoxical ‘both–and’, summed up in the traditional confession of Jesus as having both a divine and a human nature. The distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘ontic’ is a more modern attempt to hold together, however unsatisfactorily, the same two divergent or apparently contradictory sets of data, as summarized above. The language of ‘divine agency’ and ‘plenipotentiary’ are similarly attempts to hold together what seem to pull apart from each other. This is where, I still maintain, the early Jewish reflection about divine Wisdom and Word continues to provide important precedents for what the first Christians were trying to say about Jesus – that he embodied God’s immanence, that he was the visible image of the invisible God, that he was as full an expression of God’s creative and redemptive concern and action as was possible in flesh. Certainly embodying God’s ‘identity’ as embodying the creative and redemptive purpose and energy of God. But ‘function’ or ‘agency’ also expresses the point and without the confusion that would otherwise lead us to speak of partial identity.106 How different is it to affirm that the first Christians saw Jesus as included in the divine identity from affirming that they saw Jesus as exercising divine functions? So I remain unclear as to the advantages that introducing ‘divine identity’ as the key term produces, and I remain concerned as to the dimensions and aspects of New Testament christology that the term ‘identity’ pushes to the side.

One of the problems with Bauckham’s formulation, his enthusiasm for and insistence on it, is that he uses it in a way that may not unfairly be described as indiscriminate. If God’s unique role is as Creator, both source (ek) and agent (dia), as in Romans 11.36, then Jesus shares in that role as divine agent (dia) but not as source (ek).107 The identity is partial. If the uniqueness of God is that he is ‘the sole sovereign Ruler of all things’, then according to 1 Corinthians 15.24–28, Jesus as God’s Son shares that role as the one who sits at God’s right hand (all things subjected to him), but in the end ‘the Son himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, in order that God might be [the] all in all’ (15.28). If the uniqueness of God is that he is the God of Israel, then Jesus shares in that identity in a derivative way, as the one promised by the covenant God to be Israel’s Messiah. My concern with Bauckham’s thesis, then, is that by pushing so much through the narrow-holed sieve of ‘divine identity’, he may be squeezing out the rich diversity of allusion and the range of surplus meaning in the variety of images and language that the New Testament writers evidently felt both desirable and necessary to use in talking about Jesus and their reverence for Jesus.

Given the degree of confusion that ‘identity’ seems to involve, would ‘equation’ be a better term than ‘identity’? The mathematical distinction between the two terms may be helpful here: that is the distinction between ‘A equals B’ and ‘A is identical with B’. The equation formula means that for some values of A and/or some values of B, A and B are the same. The identity formula means that for all values of A and for all values of B, A and B are the same; A and B are never different or distinct from each other. ‘Equation’ seems to be a better way of saying that if Jesus is God he is not yhwh, he is not the Father, he is not the source of creation, he will finally be subject to God so that God (alone) will be all in all. ‘Equation’ allows a fuller recognition of the other emphases in the New Testament writings – Jesus as Jesus of Nazareth praying to God, Jesus as last Adam and eldest brother in God’s new creation family, Jesus as heavenly intercessor, God as God of the Lord Jesus Christ.

4.8 Conclusion

The results of this survey are astonishing. Here was the man Jesus of Nazareth, who had been executed within the lifetime of most of those who wrote the New Testament writings. He had made a huge impact as a prophet and exceptional teacher during his mission. He was regarded by his followers as the Messiah that Israel had longed for. But they were also convinced that in him the resurrection expected at the end of the age had already happened. They were convinced that God had exalted him to his right hand. They saw him as their Lord and did not hesitate to ascribe to him as Lord what various scriptures had ascribed only to the Lord God. They called upon his name in invocation and prayer. The roles that Israel’s sages and theologians had ascribed to Wisdom and God’s Word, they ascribed to him, even the latters’ role as the divine agents of creation; in Christ the personification became the person. They ascribed to him the outpouring of the Spirit and the Spirit’s life-giving power. The seer of Revelation saw visions of universal worship being given to the Lamb. The title or status of God/god was used for him.

Yet at the same time they recalled that this was Jesus of Nazareth, who affirmed the same monotheistic creed as they did, who forbad worship of any other than God, and who prayed to God as an expression of his own need of and reliance on God. They saw that the exalted Jesus was the mediator through whom they approached God, the one in whose name and through whom they gave thanks and glory to God, the one who at God’s right hand interceded for them. They recognized that God was still Jesus’ God, even the God of Jesus as Lord. Their use of Wisdom and Logos imagery was probably intended as an extension and creative reworking of the vivid imagery used by Israel’s sages and theologians, a ‘mutation’ in Hurtado’s words. Similarly their use of theos in relation to Jesus was probably with a similar qualification that there was much more to God than could be seen in and through Jesus. In short, Jesus was Last Adam as well as Lord, mediator as well as Saviour, the one who prayed for them as well as the one whose name they invoked.

But the findings are not adequately summed up in just these two apparently diverging lists. For the dominant impression that comes through is that Jesus was understood to embody the outreach of God himself, that Jesus was in a real sense God reaching out to humankind; that, as Lord, Jesus shared fully in the one Lordship of God; that, like Wisdom/Word and as Wisdom/Word, he was to be seen as God making himself known to his own; that the Spirit of God was now to be recognized as being defined more as the Spirit of Christ. As in the first two chapters we began to see that, for the first Christians, Christ was the means and the way by which they could come to God, so now the impression grows ever stronger that they also saw Christ as the means and the way by which God has come most effectively to humankind. Jesus as mediator mediated in both directions, not only to God but also from God. Jesus summed up and embodied for them the divine presence.108

So when we transpose our findings into an answer to our central question, the dominant answer for Christian worship seems to be that the first Christians did not think of Jesus as to be worshipped in and for himself. He was not to be worshipped as wholly God, or fully identified with God, far less as a god. If he was worshipped it was worship offered to God in and through him, worship of Jesus-in-God and God-in-Jesus. And the corollary is that, in an important sense, Christian monotheism, if it is to be truly monotheism, has still to assert that only God, only the one God, is to be worshipped. The Christian distinctive within the monotheistic faiths is its affirmation that God is most effectively worshipped in and through, and, in some real but finally unquantifiable sense, as (revealed in) Jesus.

Notes

  1  See further introduction to Ch. 3.

  2  Hurtado, One God, One Lord 2–3; also Origins 63, 70–2.

  3  Hurtado does ‘not think it necessary for Jesus to have thought and spoken of himself in the same terms that his followers thought and spoke of him in the decades subsequent to his crucifixion in order for the convictions of these followers to be treated as valid by Christians today’, though he also notes that most Christians probably think that there was ‘some degree of continuity’ between what Jesus thought of himself and subsequent christology (Lord Jesus Christ 9). Later he rightly draws attention to ‘the impact of Jesus’ ministry and its consequences’ (53–4; but also 60).

  4  In what follows I draw on my essay, ‘Was Jesus a Monotheist? A Contribution to the Discussion of Christian Monotheism’, in Stuckenbruck and North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism 104–19.

  5  J. Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1967) 66–81; Sanders, Judaism 196–7, 202–8.

  6  New Testament Theology, Vol. 1: The Proclamation of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1971) 186–91 (here 188), referring to Acts 3.1; 10.3, 30; Didache 8.3.

  7  Mark 12.39 pars.; Luke 11.43; Mark 13.9/Matt. 10.17.

  8  Matt. 4.23/Mark 1.39/Luke 4.44; Matt. 9.35; Matt. 13.54/Mark 6.2/Luke 4.16; Luke 4.15; Luke 6.6; 13.10; John 6.59.

  9  Matt. 9.20/Luke 8.44; Mark 6.56/Matt. 14.36.

10  With reference to the instructions of Num. 15.38–39 and Deut. 22.12 (note also Zech. 8.23).

11  Mark 1.40–44 pars.; Mark 7.15–23/Matt. 15.11–20; Matt. 23.25–26/Luke 11.39–41.

12  Matthew and Mark sum up the significance of the teaching in regard to the law in different but complementary words (Matt. 22.40; Mark 12.31b). And Luke has given the teaching an intriguing twist by having the key command uttered by a lawyer, with Jesus approving (Luke 10.27–28).

13  See Jesus Remembered Ch. 12.

14  Jeremias, Proclamation 63–8. The point should not be overstated; see J. Barr, ‘Abba Isn’t Daddy!’, JTS 39 (1988) 28–47.

15  See further Jesus Remembered 711–18.

16  See further Ch. 4.6, below.

17  See further Ch. 4.3(a), below.

18  E.g. Mark 3.28; 8.12; 9.1 pars.; 9.41 par.; 10.15 pars.; 10.29 pars.; 11.23; 12.43 par.; 13.30 pars.; 14.9 par.; 14.18 par.; 14.25; 14.30 pars.

19  Num. 5.22; Deut. 27.15–26; 1 Kings 1.36; 1 Chron. 16.36; Neh. 5.13; 8.6; Pss. 41.13; 72.19; 89.52; 106.48; Jer. 11.5; 28.6.

20  Mark 9.37/Luke 9.48; Matt. 10.40; Luke 10.16. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985) did not hesitate to conclude that ‘Jesus claimed to be spokesman for God’ (271, 281).

21  But see also Mark 8.38 pars.; 13.24–27 pars.

22  See Ch. 3.4; and further Jesus Remembered 749–52, with other bibliography.

23  Hurtado rightly emphasizes the importance of such earliest Christian experience in causing the mutation in the Jewish monotheistic tradition into Christian binitarian devotion: ‘rather than trying to account for such a development as the veneration of Jesus by resort to vague suggestions of ideational borrowing from the cafeteria of heroes and demigods of the Greco–Roman world, scholars should pay more attention to this sort of religious experience of the first Christians’ (One God, One Lord 117–22; here 121; also 126–8; also Lord Jesus Christ 64–74, 78; How on Earth Ch. 8). A. Y. Collins, ‘The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult’, in Newman, et al. (eds), Jewish Roots 234–57 (here 251, 257), does not disagree but argues that the imperial cult was another catalyst in the origin of the worship of Jesus, even though, presumably, that influence did not begin to be a factor till the Gentile mission was under way.

24  Mark 12.36 pars.; 14.63 pars.; Acts 2.34–35; Rom. 8.34; 1 Cor. 15.25; Eph. 1.20; Col. 3.1; Heb. 1.3, 13; 8.1; 10.12; 12.2; 1 Pet. 3.22. See further particularly M. Hengel, ‘“Sit at My Right Hand!”: The Enthronement of Christ at the Right Hand of God’, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) 119–225. Hurtado pays relatively little attention to Ps. 110.1, only briefly in Lord Jesus Christ 105, 179–80, 183–4. Bauckham gives it due attention and notes its ‘novel exegesis and novel claim’, though he regards ‘at the right hand’ of God’s throne as sharing God’s throne (Jesus and the God of Israel 173–9, 198 and index). Oddly enough, however, on Bauckham’s argument (Jesus and the God of Israel 224), earliest Christian use of Ps. 110.1 does not constitute ‘a christology of divine identity’, since it assumes some distinction between yhwh (ho kyrios) and the Lord Christ.

25  In the undisputed Pauline letters (excluding Ephesians and the Pastorals) ‘Lord’ is used in reference to Christ about 200 times.

26  Nineteen times in the Pauline corpus.

27  See further Theology of Paul 254–5.

28  See particularly D. B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology (WUNT 2.47; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); also ‘yhwh Texts and Monotheism in Paul’s Christology’, in Stuckenbruck and North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism 120–37; Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ 108–18; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 186–94.

29  In the Greek version (LXX) the verse is numbered Joel 3.5.

30  As Bauckham does not hesitate to affirm (Jesus and the God of Israel 193, 196). But if Ps. 110.1 allows the concept of two Lords, the second given his plenipotentiary status by the first, then there is presumably no reason why a passage like Joel 2.32 should not be referred to the second Lord (see the next note).

31  That God was understood to pass divine authority to others is indicated by the various individuals who were thought to play the role of heavenly judges – Adam and Abel (T. Abr. 11, 13), Melchizedek (11QMelch 13–14), Enoch and Elijah (1 Enoch 90.31; Apoc. Elij. 24.11–15) – including the saints themselves (Matt. 19.28/Luke 22.30; 1 Cor. 6.2–3). Cf. Hurtado’s careful formulation: ‘Early Christians saw Jesus as the uniquely significant agent of the one God, and in their piety they extended the exclusivity of the one God to take in God’s uniquely important representative, while stoutly refusing to extend this exclusivity to any other figures’ (Lord Jesus Christ 204).

32  In Rom. 14.11 Paul quotes Isa. 45.23 as referring to the obeisance and praise due to God.

33  L. J. Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology (JSNTS 19; Sheffield: JSOT, 1987) 161.

34  See e.g. Hurtado, How on Earth 92–5, 105–7; Fee, Pauline Christology 396–400. Bauckham presses the point: the Philippians passage claims ‘that it is in the exaltation of Jesus, his identification as YHWH in YHWH’s universal sovereignty, that the unique deity of the God of Israel comes to be acknowledged as such by all creation’ (God Crucified 53 = Jesus and the God of Israel 38; also 197–210). But would the acclamation given to the one whom the Lord God had made Lord at his right hand (Ps. 110.1) be any different? Bauckham insists that ‘the name that is above every name’ (2.9) given to the exalted Jesus is YHWH, not ‘Lord’, ‘which is not the divine name . . . but a conventional Greek substitute for the name’ (199–202). But he forgets that the Greek onoma (‘name’) can have the force of ‘title’ (Matt. 10.41–42; 1 Pet. 4.16; BDAG 714), and he surprisingly plays down the force of kyrios as used for Christ, of which he had made so much a few pages earlier (186–94). McGrath agrees that the name given to Jesus is the name of God, but reads the text as affirming that ‘God here shares his own exalted status with Jesus in a way that does not jeopardize God’s ultimate supremacy . . . In ancient Judaism, God could empower his agent to wield his full power and authority, precisely because any figure so empowered always remained by definition subject and subordinate to the one empowering him, namely God’ (The Only True God 49–52).

35  N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), e.g., speaks of ‘christological monotheism’ (114–18). Bauckham entitles the second chapter of God Crucified ‘Christological Monotheism in the New Testament’ and elaborates what he means by the term in Jesus and the God of Israel 184–5; see also 210–18. Fee follows Bauckham (Pauline Christology 89–94). Other bibliography in McGrath, The Only True God 114 n. 4. Richardson is more hesitant (Paul’s Language about God 300).

36  Bauckham, God Crucified 38 = Jesus and the God of Israel 28. For others who see here a Christian version of the Shema see Jesus and the God of Israel 211 n. 69 – including Dunn, Christology 180!

37  So McGrath, The Only True God 38–44: ‘When the oneness of God is coupled with another assertion of oneness in this way, we must look carefully to determine whether we are indeed dealing with a splitting of the Shema that is without parallel, or an addition of a second clause alongside the Shema, which is not in fact unparalleled in Jewish literature’ (40).

38  Bauckham, God Crucified; and more emphatically in Jesus and the God of Israel 212–13.

39  Elsewhere Paul takes for granted that Israel’s confession of God as one is still his own confession – Rom. 3.30; 1 Cor. 8.4; Gal. 3.20; Eph. 4.6.

40  Both C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (London: A. & C. Black, 1968) 193, and W. Schrage, Der erste Brief an die Korinther (EKK VII/2; Zurich: Benziger, 1995) 243, note that the language indicates a close relation between Christ and God, but not an identity of the two.

41  See Introduction n. 2.

42  Note also 1 Cor. 3.23 – ‘You are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s’; and 11.3 – ‘the head of Christ is God’. Bauckham seems to ignore this material, and Hurtado refers to it only as evidence of the ‘re-identification of God by reference to Jesus’ (Origins 74; also 108).

43  This is what Bauckham refers to when he argues that ‘Jesus’ sovereignty over “all things”’ indicates that for Paul Jesus shares in the identity of God as the unique universal ruler (Jesus and the God of Israel 21–3).

44  Unfortunately Bauckham does not seem to think it necessary to consider the whole passage (1 Cor. 15.24–28), including 15.28. Hurtado likewise passes over the passage too lightly (Lord Jesus Christ 104–5, 600). Contrast earlier attempts to clarify the relation between Jesus and God, where discussion of 1 Cor. 15.24–28 plays a central role; particularly W. Thüsing, Per Christum in Deum (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965) Ch. 6; Kreitzer, Jesus and God Ch. 3, particularly 158–60. See also A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) 1236–9, and Schrage, Korinther VII/4 (Benziger, 2001) 213–17, who both note how important the passage was in the early Trinitarian controversy over the subordination of the Son. O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1959) regarded 1 Cor. 15.28 as ‘the key to all New Testament Christology’, understanding it in functional rather than ontological terms: ‘It is only meaningful to speak of the Son in view of God’s revelatory action, not in view of his being’ (emphasized by Cullmann). Somewhat surprisingly Fee attempts a resolution by arguing that 15.28 does not refer to Christ’s person but rather his role or function, whereas 8.6 has in view Jesus’ ‘divine identity’ (Pauline Christology 113–14).

45  How on Earth 34–6; also 69–74, Lord Jesus Christ 175–6, and the more detailed argument of ‘Early Jewish Opposition to Jesus-Devotion’, JTS 50 (1999) 35–58, reproduced in How on Earth Ch. 7 (here 168–77).

46  See my Beginning from Jerusalem #25.2; Hurtado does not refer to my earlier treatment, particularly ‘Paul’s Conversion – A Light to Twentieth Century Disputes’, in J. Ådna, et al. (eds), Evangelium – Schriftauslegung – Kirche; P. Stuhlmacher FS (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) 77–93.

47  Acts 6.11–14 and 8.1–3; 12.1–3; 1 Thess. 2.14–16.

48  Capes observes that ‘no sure evidence exists regarding what non-believing Jews may have thought about Paul’s Christology beyond (1 Cor. 1.23)’ (‘YHWH Texts and Monotheism’ 134). This may be counted as an ‘own goal’, since it both (1) undermines Hurtado’s argument, and (2) ignores the obvious point that we do have evidence of Jewish opposition to earliest Christian views of Christ, but not of any Jewish hostility to early Christian claims for Jesus as violating the uniqueness of God.

49  Lord Jesus Christ 165–7; also 135–6, 172–3.

50  I addressed the issue earlier in ‘How Controversial was Paul’s Christology?’, in M. C. de Boer (ed.), From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology; M. de Jonge FS (JSNTS 84; Sheffield: JSOT, 1993) 148–67. McGrath also insists that ‘there is no evidence that belief in a supreme mediator or agent of God was controversial within Judaism’; and observes that Frances Young also notes the lack of awareness of a ‘Christological problem’ on the part of the NT authors (The Only True God 47, 52, 116 n. 23).

51  See e.g. the full discussion in Thiselton, 1 Corinthians 918–24.

52  I may refer to my following studies, all with bibliography: Christology Ch. 6; Theology of Paul 272–5; Beginning from Jerusalem 805 n. 272; also B. Witherington, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) Ch. 6. The large-scale consensus is critiqued by Fee, Pauline Christology (particularly 319–25, 595–619). But (1) he almost entirely ignores the parallel passages (John 1.1–18; Heb. 1.1–3) where the echoes of wisdom language are clearer and indicate that this line of reflection was well established in earliest Christianity; (2) he makes a highly questionable differentiation between personified Wisdom and wisdom as a divine attribute; and (3) he questions whether Paul even knew the Wisdom of Solomon, despite listing (Pauline!) ‘allusions’ to this work (620–6) familiar to Pauline scholars for more than a century. The unwillingness to recognize echo and allusion in Pauline use of OT and early Jewish literature is a retrograde step.

53  Contemporary linguistic philosophers would speak of God’s speech-act.

54  Some translations (or better, paraphrases) actually so translate.

55  See e.g. Bauckham, God Crucified 55 = Jesus and the God of Israel 40; and further ‘Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of John’, in R. N. Longenecker (ed.), Contours of Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 148–66. McGrath argues that the ‘I am’ statements of the Johannine Jesus constitute a further example of ‘God’s agent being given the divine name in order to be empowered for his mission’ (The Only True God 61–3).

56  John 4.34; 5.23, 24, 30, 36, 37, 38; 6.29, 38, 39, 44, 57; 7.16, 18, 28, 29, 33; 8.16, 18, 26, 29, 42; 9.4; 11.42; 12.44, 45, 49; 13.16, 20; 14.24; 15.21; 16.5; 17.3, 8, 21, 23, 25; 20.21.

57  See further Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ 365–89.

58  See my ‘John’s Gospel and the Oral Gospel Tradition’ (forthcoming).

59  This move was subsequently echoed when the Nicene Creed shifted the emphasis from the early patristic focus on Logos christology to Son christology.

60  Cf. Augustine’s famous comment that from his reading of the Platonists he was familiar with all that the Johannine prologue said; what he did not find was that ‘he came to what was his own, and they . . . gave him no welcome’; and what he did not read in the same books was that ‘the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among us’ (Confessions VII.9).

61  That God cannot be seen is a fundamental of Jewish thought – e.g. Exod. 33.20; Deut. 4.12; Sir. 43.31; Philo, Post. 168–9; Josephus, Jewish War 7.346.

62  Both the text and its rendering are unclear and much disputed. Monogenēs theos is the more difficult reading, and (for that reason) is favoured by the majority. If so, should we translate ‘a/the only begotten God’, or ‘a uniquely begotten deity’, or ‘the unique one, who is divine’? Or is the reading monogenēs huios, ‘the one and only Son’? Or indeed, monogenēs, ‘the utterly unique One’? See e.g. BDAG 658; J. F. McHugh, John 1–4 (ICC; London: T&T Clark, 2009) 69–70, 110–12; McGrath, The Only True God 64–6.

63  Hurtado is correct in noting that in Jewish tradition a statement like ‘Wisdom was God’ is never made (Lord Jesus Christ 367); here the closer parallel with John 1.1c (‘the Word was God/god’) is given by Philo.

64  In his allegorizing treatment of the Torah, Philo was happy to speak of such figures as Sarah as symbolizing wisdom (F. H. Colson, Philo [LCL, 10 vols; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962] 10.413–18); but this is far from ‘incarnation’. The fact that ben Sira praises the high priest, Simon ben Onias (Sir. 50), in language already used of Wisdom (Sir. 24) may indicate that he saw Simon as expressing the same Wisdom, but as ‘an incarnation of Wisdom’ (C. H. T. Fletcher-Louis, ‘The Worship of Divine Humanity as God’s Image and the Worship of Jesus’, in Newman, et al. (eds), Jewish Roots 112–28; here 115–19) presses the parallels too far.

65  See further Ch. 3.3(b).

66  Note the extensive usage of proskynein in John 4.20–24 (9 times); see further Ch. 1.1.

67  Wisd. 7.26; cf. Philo, Opif. 33; Conf. 60–3; Som. 1.75.

68  The clearest examples are Wisd. 7.26 and Philo, Plant. 18.

69  See again n. 52, above.

70  See further my Christology 164–6, 217–18.

71  Mark 1.10–11 pars.; John 1.32–33; Acts 10.38.

72  See further, and for what follows, my Christology 141–7; but see also Fatehi, The Spirit’s Relation to the Risen Lord 245–62.

73  Rom. 8.9, 11, 14; 1 Cor. 2.11, 14; 3.16; 6.11; 7.40; 12.3; etc.

74  Rom. 8.9; Gal. 4.6; Phil. 1.19.

75  1 Cor. 2.12; 2 Cor. 1.21–22; 5.5; Gal. 3.5; 4.6; Eph. 1.17; 1 Thess. 4.8.

76  Mark 1.8 pars.; and again Acts 1.6 and 11.16.

77  Note particularly John 6.63 and 2 Cor. 3.6.

78  Fatehi seems to struggle to avoid this conclusion (The Spirit’s Relation to the Risen Lord 285–6 – ‘a life-giving pneuma’), but accepts it in the end (286–8, 302–3 – ‘Paul does identify the Spirit with the risen Christ’).

79  See my Jesus and the Spirit (London: SCM Press, 1975) 322–4.

80  Fatehi does press the point: Paul’s Spirit-language ‘points in the direction of the concept of God itself in a way that it would include Christ. No divine agent or mediatorial being merely alongside God and separate from him could possibly be thought of as being present and active through God’s Spirit’ (The Spirit’s Relation to the Risen Lord 326; and further 315–30).

81  Rom. 8.10; 2 Cor. 13.5; Gal. 2.20; Col. 1.27.

82  E.g. Rom. 8.9, 11; 1 Co. 3.16; 6.19.

83  John 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7; 1 John 2.1.

84  More fully in The Partings of the Ways #11.4. ‘The presentation of Jesus’ exalted status in Revelation is unexcelled among first-century Christian texts’ (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ 594).

85  It is in Revelation’s merger (in effect) of the two thrones implied in Ps. 110.1 into one throne that we probably come closest to Bauckham’s understanding of the exalted Jesus being included in the divine identity (God Crucified 62–3 = Jesus and the God of Israel 45–6) – though he also observes that in Second Temple Jewish literature Wisdom is represented as sharing God’s throne (1 Enoch 84.2–3; Wisd. 9.4, 10) and that ‘in the Parables of Enoch, it is not on a second throne but on the single divine throne that the Son of Man takes his seat for eschatological judgment’ and accordingly is worshipped (1 Enoch 48.5) (Jesus and the God of Israel 162, 165–6, 169–72).

86  See Theology of Paul 255–7, with further bibliography.

87  As also in John 1.18 and 12.41.

88  1 Tim. 1.1; 2.3; 4.10; Titus 1.3; 2.10; 3.4.

89  2 Tim. 1.10; Titus 1.4; 2.13; 3.6.

90  See particularly D. Kupp, Matthew’s Emmanuel: Divine Presence and God’s People in the First Gospel (SNTSMS 90; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

91  Grammatically the absence of the definite article may simply indicate that theos, though preceding the verb, is the predicate and not the subject; see J. H. Moulton and N. Turner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, Vol. III (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1963) 183–4. Unfortunately the rule does not enable us to say whether the definite article was intended, and whether the hearer/reader was intended to assume its presence (no distinction between ho theos and theos). In John 20.28 the article is used, but its absence in 1.1c may reinforce the hesitation about identifying the pre-incarnate Logos tout simple with Jesus.

92  As noted in Ch. 3.3(c), Philo speaks of the Logos both as God’s ‘firstborn son’ (Agr. 51), and as ‘the second God’ (Qu. Gen. 2.62).

93  Hence, presumably, John had no qualms in depicting Jesus as defending himself against the charge that he was making himself God by citing the fact that Ps. 82.6 called other human beings ‘gods’ (John 10.33–35). See also McHugh, John 1–4 10.

94  Rom. 1.19–23; 3.23; 8.20–21; Phil. 2.6–11; see Theology of Paul 90–101. Bauckham thinks that ‘Adam has proved a red herring’ in the study of Phil. 2.6–11 (God Crucified 57 = Jesus and the God of Israel 41; also 203, 207–8). And Hurtado thinks I attribute too much to a supposed ‘Adam Christology’ in Paul’s letters (Lord Jesus Christ 121 n. 98; also How on Earth 98–101), though to play down an allusion to the temptation to ‘be like God’ (Gen. 3.5) because the temptation was actually made to Eve (How on Earth 100; similarly Fee, Pauline Christology 390–3) treats the character of an ‘allusion’ too woodenly (see my Theology of Paul 283–4). One should allow the possibility that the story of Jesus was being shaped to the template of the Adam story, the one who, acting differently from Adam, yet submitted to death like Adam, and thus far outdid Adam’s failure and tragedy (cf. Rom. 5.12–19). Like other templates (e.g. Christ as Word and Wisdom, priest and sacrifice, intercessor and mediator, eldest brother and forerunner, foundation and cornerstone) the template should not be treated as a rigid frame that imprisons the meaning of the story (the parable of the prodigal son has no place for Jesus), but as a suggestive parallel that allows the story to be seen from a different angle.

95  Also Eph. 1.20–22 and Heb. 1.3 —2.8.

96  Mark. 12.36/Matt. 22.44; 1 Pet. 3.22. ‘Under your feet’ (Ps. 8.6) was presumably taken to be synonymous with ‘a footstool for your feet’ (Ps. 110.1). For more detail see Hengel, ‘“Sit at My Right Hand”’ 163–71.

97  R. Bauckham, ‘Monotheism and Christology in Hebrews 1’, in Stuckenbruck and North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism 167–85, finds in this two-fold emphasis in Hebrews a foreshadowing of the two-natures christology of Chalcedon (185).

98  Heb. 8.6; 9.15; 12.24.

99  1 Tim. 1.17 (‘the only God’); 2.5 (‘one God’); 6.15–16 (‘the only Sovereign . . . he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see’).

100  E.g. Job 33.23–26; Tobit 12.15; 1 Enoch 9.3; 15.2; 99.3; 104.1; T. Levi 3.5; 5.6–7; T. Dan 6.2.

101  John 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7; cf. Rom. 8.27.

102  As Bauckham noted (Ch. 3 n. 30), Apoc. Ab. seems to regard the angel Yahoel as ‘the heavenly high priest’.

103  Heb. 2.17–18; 4.15–16; 6.7–10, 19–20; 10.19–22; 12.24.

104  As noted at the beginning (Introduction n. 1). The Latin persona denoted basically a ‘mask’, especially as used by actors in a play, which represented the character being played; and so by extension it came to denote the ‘character’ itself (ALD 1355–6).

105  See e.g. ODCC 1102; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrine (London: A. & C. Black, 21960) 115–23.

106  McGrath argues that ‘divine agency’ does more justice to the range of statements made about Jesus by the fourth evangelist, including the latter’s prominent ‘sent’ motif (The Only True God 118 n. 8; 119 n. 10).

107  This, partly in response to Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel 213–17.

108  It remains a question whether ‘divine agency’ is adequate or sufficient to express the full weight of this emphasis, just as the question remains whether ‘divine identity’ is adequate or sufficient to sum up the full range of imagery and language used for Jesus in the NT.