"If you went to a modern church today…and tried to take two people from that church and ask them questions about the faith, odds are eventually you'll get two different answers to a question. There's so much diversity within contemporary Christianity. And it was that way in the first and second century. It's always been that way. There have been different perspectives, slightly different points of view, different ways of articulating the same reality, maybe some disagreement, and there are ways that we can understand them in unison, as harmony where they don't have to identical." ---Dr. Hugo Mendez, UNC Chapel Hill on the podcast The Bible for Normal People episode 272 "Who Wrote the John?"
It would be a mistake to take for granted our modern concept of Jesus. It's been a long and sometimes strange theological trip that might make our heads spin from all the argument, coercion, physical violence, lots of letter writing and public debate, starting even before Jesus was halfway through his ministry. Luke's gospel has Jesus uttering these words in chapter 12: "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three." Could this reflect a current reality for the Christian movement a few decades later, or indeed did Jesus fire up debate as he aimed parables and insults at those who tried to corral him into a familiar category? (see Matthew 12, Mark 3 and Luke 11 for the same pericope in which Jesus is accused of demonic action)
Why the ambiguity?
One answer is that we westerners find it difficult to tolerate a plurality of views in light of how we have learned to define truth. We've had 500 years of growing confidence in scientific approaches to explaining the world, which has inflicted us with an allergy to uncertainty. We imagine our universe as a complex structure built on one absolute set of truths, accessible to our searching and understandable to our intelligence. The success of the scientific method overwhelms any archaic thinking about causes and effects like evil spirits or alignments of planets and stars. Were the ancients open to plural answers when it came to determining a final answer? Even the most cursory look at the history of the church tells us that they were just as committed to narrowing down the answers as we are.
And agreement remains elusive, even with our "enlightened" methodologies.
Particular traditions in Christianity have laid claim to absolute truth based on their persuasion that the Bible is the actual perfect word of God. The true story of our place in the universe was put down in writing for anyone to read and understand. If we interpret this anthology of ancient documents correctly, they say, the entire human race should be able to align around one accurate picture of our past, present and future. Usually that picture is identical to their own preferences for how the world should be. The fact that Christendom remains fractured into a wide variety of theological systems bursts that bubble.
The story of how people have tried to explain Jesus and rally the church to their exclusive point of view is a long and complex tale. The theological Christ and the historical Jesus are inextricably threaded together and there's no pulling them apart.
We know that in ancient times and places, anything reduced to written language did not originate from people belonging to the middle or lower classes. The written source material that generated the copies that we now use in our Bibles came from processes to which only upper class elites had access. One example is the fact that enslaved persons were widely used in the labor-intensive phases of production. A seated scribe balanced a sheet of papyrus on his knee and painstakingly hand printed each character with a stylus or quill, sometimes having to translate into another language. With no natural lighting, no modern desks and a limited expensive supply of materials, this meant hours of difficult work. Many scribes used a kind of shorthand to take notes, filling in the details and grammatical construction later.*
Before the gospels were ever written down, they formed and proliferated as word of mouth stories, passed along to neighbors, co-workers, family members and peers around the eastern Mediterranean region. Various affinity groups likely started among groups of Jewish believers in the Jerusalem area as they became interested in the Jesus stories. After thirty to fifty years of this, these tiny communities began to differentiate from each other, as some possessed a certain set of core sayings and anecdotes that were different from the material that other groups favored. Eventually, many of them found their way into the carefully crafted, rhetorically persuasive books we call the gospels. These were selected from the many, many other purportedly authoritative stories and writings in circulation at the time.**
Not only was the physical production of copies of Paul's letters and the gospels foreign to us, another matter to consider when trying to decipher what's true about Jesus is the intellectual and philosophical frameworks used by ancient writers. We have in Paul and in John a particularly Hellenistic starting point for things like beliefs about the dualistic nature of reality; that there exists an invisible ideal realm to which humans can attain, but not with our current flesh-and-blood bodies. Matthew tends to approach things from a Jewish perspective, like mentioning the bodily resurrection of the dead at the moment of Jesus' death, and no mention of gentile Luke's "Into your hands I commit my spirit." The gospel of Mark doesn't even include any original material about the resurrection leading scholars to wonder why, and what were the circumstances around the later additions in chapter 16.
One more complication: it's possible that the long fight over exactly how and why Jesus must have been some kind of hybrid God-man was unnecessary. The terminology used in the New Testament for Jesus' divinity must begin with the clues we have in our earliest sources, the closest we have to what Jesus might have actually believed and taught about his own identity. Initially, the title "Messiah" referred to a human being who was chosen by God usually for a role as Israel's king. It became a metonymy for a powerful leader who would sponsor a successful attempt to establish Israel as an independent nation, eventually becoming a superpower that would lead the world, but with more justice and peace. Only later did Christians imbue the word with divine implications. As time passed, the legend grew, and Jesus's followers had to explain why their messiah died a horrific death on a Roman cross. One solution was to expand the term messiah beyond its original meaning to encompass a much wider scope, beyond a powerful priest or king for Israel only. This also made it sensible for gentiles to join in, and when they did, "Christ" (the Greek rendering of Messiah) now included the sense of saving the entire world from condemnation by God at the Last Day.
Some Jewish answers to these questions come from Daniel 7 and 8.
The title, "Son of Man," refers to a mysterious figure in the apocalyptic section of Daniel, described a created divine being whose form is like a human, but more celestial. The gospels show some ambiguity on whether or not Jesus could actually be this figure, but mostly represent him as such. Matthew was sure that Jesus was the Son of Man and shows it by having Jesus refer to himself using the title. One of many examples is in Matthew 16 when Jesus questions his disciples, asking them what they have heard people say about who the Son of Man is. Jesus then turns the question to himself and affirms the truth of Peter's pronouncement, ending by adjuring them to keep quiet about it.
“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." Daniel 7:13-14
"As he came near the place where I was standing, I was terrified and fell prostrate. 'Son of man,' he said to me, 'understand that the vision concerns the time of the end.'" Daniel 8:17
The term is also found in Ezekiel, but is simply a reference to Ezekiel himself as a representative of humanity. And in Daniel, neither passage portrays the Son of Man as YHWH in another form, or as a trinity.
Mark also depicts Jesus as the Son of Man. In Chapter 9 the author has Jesus taking on the title when describing what's about to happen to him. "He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.”
Keep in mind these conclusions were established only after some ongoing reflection and theorizing about Jesus, showing us a later snapshot of what early believers thought as they struggled with their original Jewish identity while trying to accommodate gentiles into their communities. Conflating Jesus with the Son of Man figure in Daniel is made more confusing by the fact that on many occasions, the title is given to either Daniel or Ezekiel as a way of casting them as representatives of the human race.
Luke seems the most ambiguous. He oscillates between Jesus calling himself the Son of Man, but not fully identifying with the apocalyptic character that will return to end the age. The gospel of John also has Jesus appropriate the title in similar ways as the other gospels.
The debate in the early church centered on the theological issue of the nature of Jesus. Was he a regular human being who was exalted to a high position, like Caesar Augustus and other mighty men? Was he in some way a divine being in human form like Zeus, who was fond of appearing disguised as a mortal? Was he somehow a hybrid of both? What did his death and resurrection accomplish?
Son of God
Finally "Son of God." This term or title seems confusing to modern people because we are accustomed to a world structure that features an impermeable barrier between the material, physical world and whatever is beyond that. This was not as pronounced in ancient times. Greek and Roman mythology are full of characters who are literal sons or daughters of the gods, usually the result of some conjugal union between a male god and a female mortal. Julius Caesar, as we saw in the previous article was celebrated as a god posthumously, which politically aided his adopted son Octavian (Caesar Augustus) who could now call himself the son of god.
The Jerusalem temple was based on the proposition that YHWH could be somehow located in the Holy of Holies, which necessitated rigorous ritual purity rules for approaching the building. Deviance or defilement could bring disaster on the city or the nation, and certainly the individual found to be unclean in a temple zone that was forbidden to them.
When the gospels took their place in the early church, much of the ideology was still Jewish, so it stands to reason that we look to Jewish conceptions when trying to pin down what these titles might have meant. "Son of God" was a common appellation for a king in the ancient near east. For example, in 2 Samuel 7, YHWH assures David that a dynasty had begun and each of his descendant kings would be called God's son: "When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son." See also Psalm 2.
So the Jewish sense of the phrase Son of God is closer to meaning something like YHWH's representative or broker on earth. In the Jewish mind, when God needs to engage in some activity in the physical world, he sends agents usually called angels or "Malakim" which can also be called "sons of God."
The phrase also operated as a political term, as we have seen with Caesar Augustus who was referred to as the "Son of God, Savior of the world." Jesus followers who adopted this nomenclature for their messiah were not interested in being friendly with Rome.
Like Son of Man, Son of God describes a person or being who represents, embodies or stands in for God. In most of the major ancient religions it was believed that a sacred object or person could "contain" the powers or attributes of a divine being and therefore act as a surrogate for that god or deity. The term Son of God seems to reflect that idea- we even have Jesus saying something to that effect when he interprets Psalm 92:8, "'Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?" (John 10) ***
Also John chapter 10, Jesus' accusers charge Jesus with blasphemy saying that he "claimed to be God." The Greek phrase "ποιεῖς σεαυτὸν Θεόν" (poieis seauton theon) when rendered in modern punctuation and filtered through our notions of what is meant by "god" leads the casual reader to assume that the Jews meant YHWH. It may simply mean, "you take to yourself god-ness," or literally, "You construct yourself as a god." The author of John's gospel drives his own opinion home when he has the enraged Jews begin to grab rocks with the intention of executing Jesus for his claim. Where they would have acquired enough suitable stones for murder in the temple courts is a mystery, as is the direct contradiction with John 18:31 which points out the illegality of their actions, and the entire reason they present him to Pilate. From a Jewish perspective, accepting the son of God title was much like declaring your candidacy for messiah / priest / king of Israel. And that made it a political problem.
When Jesus is called the Son of God, then, it's not a slam dunk that it means Jesus is a pre-existent embodied deity sharing the same substance as YHWH. Many of the meanings we invest in these terms come from later usage in non-Jewish settings. Case in point: the gospel of John was put together after the other gospels- around 90-100 CE- and gives us a later, more developed theological snapshot from a tradition that saw Jesus as an incarnated pre-existent divine being.
Paul- our earliest source
First Thessalonians is widely agreed to be our earliest glimpse into the lives of the first Christians. The Apostle Paul was active well before the gospels were published, and in them we see much that agrees with his viewpoints. Luke is especially favorable to Paul in both the gospel and Acts. How does Paul talk about Jesus in 1 Thessalonians?
In 1 Thessalonians, Paul frequently uses the Greek term Kyrios, which connotes the idea of a lord or master, or anyone exercising absolute ownership rights as in a slave-master relationship. It's not always clear whether he is using Kyrios to refer to Jesus or God the Father, so we have picked out only the material that specifically names Jesus as the subject. The following are eleven instances from which we can begin to glimpse Paul's early Christology:
We remember before our God and Father …your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
as apostles of Christ we could have asserted our authority.
For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.
For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you?
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you.
Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.
For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.
May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Conclusions:
Paul uses "God the Father" and "The Lord Jesus Christ" as two distinct descriptors. They are not the same person, or a blend of both. The only clue in 1 Thessalonians to indicate that Jesus was part human was that he died- something humans do that immortals don't. Paul seems to vote for the divine side of the dilemma- certainly after his resurrection, Jesus is a "life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15)." And this is what one would expect from a time period during which the "hypostatic union" of Christ was not yet a divisive issue. Paul had his hands full with the Jew-Gentile rifts that challenged his work.
"Lord Jesus Christ" literally means "A master with ownership over people, named Jesus, who is anointed/chosen by God to have this level of high authority." The titles Paul uses for Jesus certainly point to the Greek connotations for a chosen, special anointed person of high status ("Christ") who is indeed a royal or lordly figure with authority to act. Be that as it may, we are hard pressed to derive any sort of trinitarian theory from 1 Thessalonians.
The Thessalonians were in a situation where endurance was needed; Paul felt that he should send them a message that encouraged their persistence under duress. Paul isn't specific, but we do get a clue in verse 9 when it mentions turning from to God from idols. This infers that a good number of Thessalonians in the ecclesia were gentiles who formerly worshiped at local temples for gods or goddesses. He equates their persecutions with the harassment endured by Jewish Christians in Judea.
Paul then makes a fairly clear statement of his idea of Jesus' identity:
He's the Son of the true and living God (see above)
He exists for now in a higher realm called heaven (this needs further definition which Paul doesn't offer)
The Thessalonians are waiting for the return of Jesus, Son of God, meaning that it's the same Jesus that was here earlier and ascended to heaven. In later writings, Paul explains more, but we're left unsure if he means in human form, or some other deific form. He is clear in 1 Corinthians 15 that a new type of body is needed for life in the heavens, and that Jesus is a life-giving spirit (pneuma zoopoioun- a spirit who makes something live)
He was raised from the dead by God the Father (bodily? Spiritually? In some other form?)
Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath of God, implying urgency as the end of the age is almost here. How Jesus rescues people is not revealed here, other than a cryptic "Jesus died for us"
Jesus has power and confers authority on Apostles like Paul
There are churches (ecclesia) in Judea who are persecuted by an identifiable class of people called "The Jews." These churches are "in Christ Jesus." This is a loaded phrase which invokes some of the conceptual framework of the Greek mystery cults. It means something like a deep vicarious connection with a god or gods that identifies you with their life and deeds, as if you participated with them. Being in Christ means being entangled with him in suffering and eventual victory over evil.
A general resurrection at the onset of the Last Day, in Paul's thinking, signifies that the dead who have previously identified with Jesus will also experience their own similar resurrection. This being in Christ is what positions a believer to escape the judgemental wrath to come, essentially saving us from condemnation. Later in his letter to the Roman ecclesia, he clarifies that being "in Christ" is the opposite of being "in Adam," in other words, a change of one's basic nature.
For Paul, Jesus is a broker of grace. That means that he represents the benefactor, God, in distributing favor to clients (us) who in return show allegiance and commitment. This is a first century social construct that describes the relationship between the upper and lower classes, between the "Patron-Benefactor" who distributes favor, influence and sometimes material help in return for loyalty, gratitude and public support. From this model we get the terms grace and mercy flowing from benefactor to recipient and glorification, honor and exclusive service flowing from client to patron.****
1 Thessalonians is unhelpful in the nature-of-Christ debate that arose in the second century onward. There's not much to support an incarnational position; Paul seems to write from a more exaltational view. Was Jesus a pre-existent divine person? Not in 1 Thessalonians.
Philippians and Kenosis
There are six other books attributed to Paul in the New Testament. The famous "kenosis" passage in Philippians chapter 2 reveals more about Paul's Christology at a later date. Scholars' best guesses about the date of 1 Thessalonians is around 45-52 CE and Philippians is dated closer to 60-64 or ten to twenty years later.
Philippians 2:6-11 is known as the "Carmen Christi." The passage appears to be inserted from a known hymn or poem about Jesus that Paul uses here to support his paraenetic (rhetorical advice-giving) direction to practice humility. His point isn't really to explain his Christology, but to hold Jesus up as an example worthy of emulating. Even so, someone before Paul described Jesus as a pre-existent divine being and Paul saw fit to include it in his encouragement to the Philippian believers. Here's the passage:
"…Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father."
Observations
First a comment on the phrase: "…existed in the form of God…" The Greek text has it as "ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων" transliterated as en morphe theou hyparchon. The meaning of the phrase isn't crystal clear, mostly because we don't decode ideas the same way Paul and his contemporaries did. When we see the word "God" we might put that in a category all by itself as there is only one God, transcendent and separate from our daily world. There are other ways that modern people organize the concept, from the multiple gods of Hinduism to the intimate best friend of some evangelical ways of thinking.
The term "form of God" meant something different to a first century hearer. Gods and goddesses, spirits, powers, unseen personal forces were everyday realities for them. One way to put it is that if one were to lay eyes on Jesus as he is in the heavens, there would be no doubt in the mind of the viewer that he possessed every necessary and sufficient attribute to qualify him as a god.
But is he part of some kind of trinity? It does not appear so. Jesus had some kind of equality with godlikeness, but in the second stanza it's clear that another deity called "God" acted as a separate agent, exalting Jesus to an ultra-high status that resulted in more honor for "God." Is this YHWH? Paul isn't that specific, content to call the cosmic creator by a Greek term- Theo- that had a more flexible meaning. Being Jewish, and a Pharisee, It's likely that Paul meant the God of the Jews: YHWH, but uses Greek terminology for rhetorical purposes.
As clear as it might seem on a surface reading, Paul's high Christology still is not a slam dunk in Philippians 2. The For more on the culturally embedded idea of a deities giving up their form of god to be found as a mere mortal, look at Euripides' Bacchae - a quite well-known ancient drama that describes the god Dionysus undergoing the same process as Jesus, incarnation from god to man in order to reveal himself. Michael Benjamin Cover in a Harvard Theological Review article makes the connection:
"Not only does Dionysus introduce himself explicitly as a son of god, born of a woman, but the whole purpose of his taking on a human nature is to unveil his divinity, to reveal his name, and to ensure his right worship as a god among the people of Thebes. Christ too, as a “new God” in human history, was not immediately recognized by all, and Paul’s hearers would have detected in this intertextual connection a similar pattern of economic katabasis [a downward journey] in the service of revealing a divine identity. Such convergences continue in the second part of the hymn, where the Christ of Philippians, like the Euripidean Dionysus, is revealed as a cosmic rather than a local lord."*****
In Paul's thinking, "God the Father's" relationship to "the Son of God" is not the same as occurred later in trinitarian thinking- they are distinct and Jesus is placed in a category like the Logos (Wisdom) personified and "in the form of God (morphe)." The fact that God the Father uses his ultimate authority to exalt Jesus to a name that is above all others betrays a sub-trinitarian contrast between the two. This is not to even mention the presence of a Holy Spirit in reference to his attempts to capture his nascent Christology.
The ancients who debated the possibilities for understanding the nature of Jesus, now "the Christ," were not unintelligent. Being closer to the original manuscripts, customs, language and rhetorical styles reflected in the NT writings gave them an advantage over us in our distance from all that. And history tells us that it was not an easy process. By the middle of the second century, scholars had the basic literary materials that we do today- like First Thessalonians and Philippians- and they could not agree on what we now assume to be the correct, orthodox trinitarian position.
In the next installment, we'll continue on our quest for the theological Jesus with more of Paul's thinking as reflected in some of his other writings, like Galatians 4, 1 Corinthians 8, 2 Corinthians 4 and Romans 9:5
*Moss, Candida; God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible
**Niditch, Susan; Oral World and the Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature
***McClellan,Daniel; YHWH’S DIVINE IMAGES, A Cognitive Approach https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9781628374407.pdf
****"Patrons were powerful individuals who controlled resources and were expected to use their positions to hand out favors to inferiors based on friendship, ship, personal knowledge, and favoritism. Benefactor patrons were expected to support generously city, village, or client. The Roman emperor related to major public officials this way, and they in turn related to those beneath them in similar fashion. Cities related to towns and towns to villages in the same way. A pervasive social network of patron-client relations thus arose in which connections meant everything. Having few was shameful. In the Gospels, God is the ultimate patron." Bruce Malina, Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (p. 236). Kindle Edition.
*****Michael Benjamin Cover; The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’s Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi
The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 111, No. 1 (January 2018), pp. 66-89 (24 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26855727
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