The Ambiguity of Early Christianity: Was Jesus God?

[Ahanu]

"One last historical problem with early very high Christology: it renders the next several centuries of theological development all but incomprehensible. How could generations of theologians have consistently and universally failed to see Paul’s message? How could Marcion, that committed Paulinist, so miss the memo? How could Justin, so at ease with Septuagintal reference, so comfortably refer to Jesus as a second god and as an angel, if the identification of Jesus as and with the high god was so available in Paul’s letters? How could Origen—master of Paul’s corpus and probably in better control of Jewish biblical texts in Hebrew and in Greek than was Paul himself—still frame a godhead of graduated divinity? Why indeed did the Arian controversy even happen at all, if the radical identification of Jesus with God had already debuted back in the mid-first century?68 Why, if Paul provides the Christological Big Bang, do we have this big lag?"

68 Adela Collins, responding to Hurtado, raises this same objection: “This recognition of ambiguity … is supported by the Christological controversies of the fourth century. If the texts of the New Testament had been unambiguous, there would have been fewer disagreements about what the texts meant” (“ ‘How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?’ A Reply,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children, ed. David B. Capes et al. [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007], 55–66, at 64). Christology, as classical Christian theology more generally, was utterly dependent on Greek philosophy, just as physics is dependent on math. Philosophy itself had to develop from middle to late Platonism before binitarian and trinitarian Christian theologies would have the tools to articulate themselves. And as the radioactive fallout from Nicea and Chalcedon exemplifies—Arianism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, and all the other isms—even with the theological developments of late Platonism, high Christological claims were highly contested, unanimity impossible to achieve, even with the douceurs of imperial favor.
-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[TheLightWithin]

"One last historical problem with early very high Christology: it renders the next several centuries of theological development all but incomprehensible. How could generations of theologians have consistently and universally failed to see Paul’s message? How could Marcion, that committed Paulinist, so miss the memo? How could Justin, so at ease with Septuagintal reference, so comfortably refer to Jesus as a second god and as an angel, if the identification of Jesus as and with the high god was so available in Paul’s letters? How could Origen—master of Paul’s corpus and probably in better control of Jewish biblical texts in Hebrew and in Greek than was Paul himself—still frame a godhead of graduated divinity? Why indeed did the Arian controversy even happen at all, if the radical identification of Jesus with God had already debuted back in the mid-first century?68 Why, if Paul provides the Christological Big Bang, do we have this big lag?

68 Adela Collins, responding to Hurtado, raises this same objection: “This recognition of ambiguity … is supported by the Christological controversies of the fourth century. If the texts of the New Testament had been unambiguous, there would have been fewer disagreements about what the texts meant” (“ ‘How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?’ A Reply,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children, ed. David B. Capes et al. [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007], 55–66, at 64). Christology, as classical Christian theology more generally, was utterly dependent on Greek philosophy, just as physics is dependent on math. Philosophy itself had to develop from middle to late Platonism before binitarian and trinitarian Christian theologies would have the tools to articulate themselves. And as the radioactive fallout from Nicea and Chalcedon exemplifies—Arianism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, and all the other isms—even with the theological developments of late Platonism, high Christological claims were highly contested, unanimity impossible to achieve, even with the douceurs of imperial favor.
-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

Thanks, this looks interesting!

 

[Ahanu]

You're welcome. I was thinking about calling this thread "The Big Lag," but thought it would be too ambiguous with regard to the topic.

 

[TheLightWithin]

You're welcome. I was thinking about calling this thread "The Big Lag," but thought it would be too ambiguous with regard to the topic.

Yes, probably. I'm not sure I would have caught on.
Great topic though.

 

[Ahanu]

". . . sharp lines and clearly demarcated boundaries between divinity and humanity were lacking."

"Philo’s first-century heaven glowed with gods, those sidereal bodies whom he names 'manifest and visible theoi' (Opif. 7.27; Spec. 1.13–14; Aet. 46). For Philo, further, the Jewish god’s logos was a 'second god' (QG 2.62) as, similarly, was Jesus for Justin (heteros theos, Dial. 59.1).13"

13 Fluid terminology marks Justin’s usage, too: in this same passage, he refers to Jesus as angelos, and shortly later as God the Father’s creative Logos (Dial. 61.1). Christ in other words is Justin’s go-between god, showing up in history, as the highest, 'nameless' god never would (1 Apol. 63, cf. 60).

Jews, Christians, and pagans, finally, all imputed divinity to special humans.15 Philo named Moses a “god” (Mos. 1.158; Somn. 2.189; Sacr. 9–10). And though he nowhere calls Jesus a god (a point that I see as significant), and though he specifically classifies Jesus as a human being (anthropos), Paul certainly imputes divine functions and characteristics to Jesus, elevated messianic status not least of all. For Origen, both David and Paul are gods (sine dubio non errant homines sed dii, Comm. Rom. II.10,18; SC 532, p. 438). And for pagans as well as (post-312 CE) for Christians, Roman emperors were also a type of god. Up until Constantine, emperors received sacrificial cult. Thereafter, though blood sacrifices were gone, divine prerogatives like priesthoods, liturgies, adoration of the imperial image, celebration of festal days, ritual proskynesis, incense (a marker of divine presence), and public acknowledgment of divine numen remained.16

In other words, for all of these ancient persons and groups, sharp lines and clearly demarcated boundaries between divinity and humanity were lacking.17 Scholars of higher-tier early high Christology require exactly such a clear line, however, in order to “identify” Jesus with God. They find it in their construction of a first-century Jewish “monotheism” that distinguished its high god from everything and anything else, by appeal to the issue of “creation.” God alone (so goes this argument) is uncreated; everything else (Jesus somehow excepted) is created by him.

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

"No idea of ex nihilo complicated the biblical stories—nor would it until long after Paul’s lifetime."

The concept of creation ex nihilo emerged after Paul as a way to affirm God's absolute power and the unique status of Christ by later Christian exegetes.

Where did all these other gods come from? A good question. Ancient Jewish texts display a certain narrative insouciance about divine origins. Some of these beings, sometimes, will be named as God’s “sons” (as at Genesis 6:2, 4, for example). The hierarchical family language organizes their relationship: “sonship” implies derivation, dependence, and subordination. Angelic origins likewise go unexplained, though angels abound in all sorts of ancient Jewish texts, with many powers and duties—including bearing the divine name, and providing God’s visual stand-in—delegated to them. God’s absolute power over all of these lesser beings is continuously asserted. His role as their maker, how- ever, usually must be assumed or inferred.19

As with these lesser divine entities, so also with the larger universe itself. In Genesis, God organizes what seems to be already to hand: empty and formless earth, primeval cosmic waters (Gen 1:1–2). Like gods and angels in the later narratives, these media, without apology, are just there. No idea of ex nihilo complicated the biblical stories—nor would it until long after Paul’s lifetime.

Pagan philosophy in the early Roman period, especially as inflected through the Timaeus, helped to organize the Septuagint’s opening chapter into rational cosmology. In theistic philosophies, theos and hylē were the two extreme poles of reality: cosmos represented a sort of organized precipitate formed between them. Definitions of theos, the eternal, unnamed and ungenerate god, expressed ideas of absolute perfection. The highest god was self-existing (that is, contingent upon nothing else), all good and all powerful, radically changeless (an aspect of his perfection), radically unembodied (body being a form of limitation), beyond space and time. This god’s metaphysical oppo- site pole was hylē, preexistent matter, absolutely without form, coeternal with theos which, otherwise, would have been implicated in change (and, worse, in imperfection).20

The actual “activity” of cosmic organization was tasked to divine subordinate powers, the highest god’s demiurge or logos (rational power) or logoi or (depending on the myth) to his angeloi. Activity and temporality do not really frame this idea of world making, however: to preserve theos from any imputa- tion of change, philosophers posited that hylē, thus cosmos, were co-eternal with God, his divine logos perpetually organizing the whole.21 In later centu- ries, Christian theologians will adapt such formulations to describe the effort- less co-eternality and inter-relationship of the persons of the Trinity.

Philosophically educated readers of the LXX, whether Jewish (like Philo in the first century) or gentile (like Justin in the second), understood the biblical creation narrative in these terms. The divine lower rational agent in creation, God’s logos, is Philo’s “second god,” as he is Justin’s heteros theos, the pre-incarnate Son. And while biblical exegetes from Philo through Clement to Athenagoras will assert that the world was made “out of nothing,” their word choice is both cautious and telling. Cosmos is shaped ek mē ontos, not ek ouk ontos. The subjunctive form of the negative (μη) implies relative, not absolute non-being, “that is to say, [the world] is made not from that which is absolutely non-existent, but from relative non-being or unformed matter, so shadowy and vague that it cannot be said to have the status of ‘being’.”22 In brief: relative “nothing” is still something.

As the metaphysical opposite of theos, hylē represented imperfection and change. Despite the divine impress of Form, primal matter could communicate its intrinsic deficiencies to cosmos, especially in the sublunar realm. Hylē thus provided this system with a theodicy: unformed matter, not the perfect god, was the ultimate source of the world’s imperfections.23 In the crucible of developing second-century Christianities, however, various theologians fretted over this idea. Did pre-existent matter imply some kind of limit on God? Why would the good God have pronounced creation itself “good” if it were based in and on deficient matter? And to what degree would matter imply or enact a cosmic realm independent of God? It was only in these circumstances, as a battle between Christian intellectuals over the moral status of matter, that the (counterintuitive) idea of creation ex nihilo eventually took hold.24

Creation ex nihilo drove the arguments fueling later classical Christology.25 If only God was God, and if he “created” out of nothing, then was anything that was not-god by definition a part of his creation? To which pole of such a binary should Christ be assigned? Theologically (thus, philosophically) speaking, the issue was contingency. Was the Son independently God? If so, not ditheism? If not, was that then Sabellianism? Was Christ, qua “Son,” not contingent upon the Father? Simple vocabulary pulled in one direction (contingency), concerns about cosmology and soteriology pulled in another (equal- ity); and the great Origen, alas, could be read in support of either position.26 Imperial politics compounded the controversies; consensus documents (also known as “creeds”), hammered out by committee, shed more heat than light. The factions that resulted from all the fourth- and fifth-century Christological infighting remain to this day.

According to the higher tier of the EHCC, however, this issue—the status of Christ relative to God the Father—was already clarified by Jesus’ resurrection, celebrated in the worship practices of the earliest post-resurrection community in Jerusalem, and articulated in the letters of Paul.

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

"Pre-existent stuff was whipped into shape, ordered and sorted, with the heavy lifting timelessly subcontracted to divine intermediaries. In the first century, there were plenty of them."

"Consideration of the first-century context brings us to the so-called strict binary that “allows for no ambiguous semi-divine beings.”41 As I hope our earlier tour through pagan and patristic cosmologies established, there was no such “binary distinction” between Uncreated and Created in Paul’s lifetime. Before the (slow) birth of the idea of creation ex nihilo, there was no such idea of— well, of “creation” as such. Given the presumption, expressed both narratively (Gen 1:2) and philosophically (the theos-hylē-cosmos cluster) that something did not and could not come from (absolute) nothing, divine “making” was fundamentally a form of organizing. Pre-existent stuff was whipped into shape, ordered and sorted, with the heavy lifting timelessly subcontracted to divine intermediaries. In the first century, there were plenty of them. Several of them were Jewish. After his death, and after (some of) his followers’ experience of his resurrection, Jesus was interpreted to be such an intermediary too."

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

"And his role in creation did not require that Jesus be radically 'identified' with the creator, the Jewish high god: he only had to be that deity’s lieutenant."

Jesus’ putative role in creation was not the center of gravity of the early kerygma, however. Rather, it was the significance of his death and resurrection (to which I will shortly turn). And his role in creation did not require that Jesus be radically “identified” with the creator, the Jewish high god: he only had to be that deity’s lieutenant. Was he like a chief angel? In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Was he like God’s divine logos? According to the Fourth Evangelist, yes; according to Paul, only sort of. All of these similarities and differences can be (and have been) explored ad infinitum. In the first century, however, being an agent of creation was ipso facto a role clearly beneath that of the god, the one at the pinnacle of divinity. Everything about Paul’s vocabulary—“son,” “messiah,” “first born,” even “lord” (the term of address for any social superior and, certainly in Paul’s case, for a divine, “royal” Davidic one)42—subordinates the risen Jesus, raised not by himself but by the god, to God, the Father.

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

"The problem with the interpretive notion of 'purely Jewish monotheism,' in short, is that it has never existed."

"As we have seen, however, Jewish texts written in Hebrew, ages before Alexander, left scope for many gods. YHWH always had (lesser) colleagues; and his address to some undefined external others in Genesis 1:26 certainly implied superhuman assistants. The marriage of biblical myth to Greek language, thus conceptualization, opened the door to philosophical rationalization of scriptural stories. Philo’s oeuvre is an early monument to this intellectual achievement; Origen’s, a later one. The point of attending to the Semitic substratum underlying the LXX in the context of our current discussion, however, is to note that the Greeks were not the ones to introduce many gods (and lower divine beings) into traditions about the Jewish one. Other gods were always there. And before Hellenistic ideas of graded divinity rationalized the relationships of this divine throng, Canaanite “paganism” contributed in fundamental ways to Israelite ideas of divinity.28 The problem with the interpretive notion of “purely Jewish monotheism,” in short, is that it has never existed."

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

" . . . within the broader context of Second-Temple and even post-Second-Temple Jewish devotional practices, Paul’s do not seem egregious."

"Prayer in Paul’s communities seems to have occurred in Jesus’ name; but the prayers themselves are offered to God, not to Jesus. And when, at his parousia, the knees of superhumans bend and tongues confess that kyrios Iêsous Christos, it is God, not Jesus, who is glorified (Phil 2:10–11). By contrast, many other late Second-Temple texts invoke angels and venerate them (especially in the Scrolls).33 In Sefer ha-Razim 4.61–63, the Jewish adept bows down to and addresses the Sun as kyrios. Naming Jesus in prayer, even calling him kyrios, are indeed practices specific to Pauline communities. But within the broader context of Second-Temple and even post-Second-Temple Jewish devotional practices, Paul’s do not seem egregious."

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Ahanu]

 

[Ahanu]

"Cosmology recapitulated theology."

"Cosmology recapitulated theology. Divinity stood on a gradient, and it spanned heaven and earth: stars, planets, sun, moon, lesser superhuman beings (daimones and daimonia) were to varying degrees divine. “Lower” gods, like divine humans and heroes, stood further down and closer in to the geocentric center of the universe. “Higher” gods, especially the glowing, perfect, immortal somata pneumatika of astral deities, were quite literally “higher,” above the line of cosmic demarcation set by the moon, superior both morally and metaphysically to beings ranged beneath.11"

-Paula Fredrikson, "How High Can Early Christology Be?"

 

[Thomas]

Nice link!

I am somewhat a fan of Fredriksen – I used her a lot in my Pauline studies and my discussion with Victor Garaffa about Hellenic influences on Paul.

The essay is 25 pages ... I'm going to have to read it and digest, so don't expect an immediate reply.

 

[Thomas]

"One last historical problem with early very high Christology: it renders the next several centuries of theological development all but incomprehensible.
Well ... unless there is a degree of error in the conclusions she draws from the materials.

Overall, I'm not sold. While I agree that 'monotheism' is a questionable term in light of Scriptural sources, I find the easy separation into human and divine, and hierachies of divinity in between, not so compelling. Angelology informs Jewish theology, and was prevalent in Paul's time – David Bentley Hart makes much of the fact that the world was a much more spiritual place than it appears now.

And Fredriksen, as one commentary noted, has made her life's work the journey from Judaism to Christianity to be one of increasing delusion and error. The first delusion was by an apocalyptic prophet who got himself crucified, the final one is his gentile followers declaring him a god.

Whereas her own journey is from Catholicism to Judaism.

How could Justin, so at ease with Septuagintal reference, so comfortably refer to Jesus as a second god and as an angel, if the identification of Jesus as and with the high god was so available in Paul’s letters?
But Justin does recognise Jesus 'as and with the high god'. This is cherry-picking from Justin and is really insupportable in its bald assertion.

How could Origen—master of Paul’s corpus and probably in better control of Jewish biblical texts in Hebrew and in Greek than was Paul himself—still frame a godhead of graduated divinity?
But Origen does not offer a 'graduated divinity' – rather, this is an over-simplification that does little justice to Origen's writings on the matter.

Why indeed did the Arian controversy even happen at all, if the radical identification of Jesus with God had already debuted back in the mid-first century?
But Arius does identify Jesus with God. He trips over on a technicality with regard to internal relation.

“This recognition of ambiguity … is supported by the Christological controversies of the fourth century. If the texts of the New Testament had been unambiguous, there would have been fewer disagreements about what the texts meant.”
I don't dispute that ... but that itself does not preclude the appearance of a very early high Christology.

Christology, as classical Christian theology more generally, was utterly dependent on Greek philosophy, just as physics is dependent on math.
Not quite. It was utterly dependent on Scripture, and employed the prevailing philosophy of the time to reason its belief. In that regard Plato was more useful than Aristotle – and Neoplatonism more useful still. Pythagoras, Aristotle or the Stoics hardly get a look in, by comparison.

Origen uses Platonic principle to reason the relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but they themselves derive from Scripture, not the other way round. He didn't fold a triune into Scriptural exegesis to accord with Platonic hierarchy.

Likewise, the Christological disputes arose from the ambiguities of Scripture, not philosophy.

Arianism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, and all the other isms—even with the theological developments of late Platonism, high Christological claims were highly contested, unanimity impossible to achieve ...
Because no amount of philosophy – then and now – could carry the day. And factor in personal politics ...

 

[Thomas]

I'd like to hear a Jewish critique of Fredriksen's position regarding the 'many gods' of Israel.

I don't dismiss it out-of-hand – but I do rather think that not all the degrees within the spiritual hierarchy are necessarily divine, and as 'the Divine' came to be more explicitly defined in Greek philosophical terms, then there had to be a re-evaluation of qualities and quantities, as it were.

As long as god is a somewhat generic term for a 'higher power', for the want of a better term', then OK, but as soon as one starts to speak in terms of the Absolute, then you can't have two absolutes, nor two infinites ... and even within the Jewish pantheon of Gods, The Lord emerged as the One Above All ... so there has to be something that distinguishes the One Above All from the Ones Among Many.

 

[Thomas]

And, of course, theres no discussion of the High Christology of John.

 

[RabbiO]

@Thomas -

As you can imagine my day to day living, and not infrequently my evenings, is spent in the trenches. I will get to your request in post #15….. but it won’t be today.

 

[Thomas]

". . . sharp lines and clearly demarcated boundaries between divinity and humanity were lacking."
Indeed, and Paul references such boundaries – between angels, archons and powers, for example (Romans 8:38-39), while John speaks of 'the prince of this world' (archon toutou kosmos) who holds sway over the world – but such things are more ignored now than they were then.

Thankfully, there are signs of their recovery.

"No idea of ex nihilo complicated the biblical stories—nor would it until long after Paul’s lifetime."
Nor does that doctrine have an impact on Christology, be it high or low.

"Pre-existent stuff was whipped into shape, ordered and sorted, with the heavy lifting timelessly subcontracted to divine intermediaries. In the first century, there were plenty of them."
So it would seem, and yet the work of creation is attributed to one?

"And his role in creation did not require that Jesus be radically 'identified' with the creator, the Jewish high god: he only had to be that deity’s lieutenant."
Perhaps not, but nevertheless, He was. Maybe because He is identified as the Logos of God that He is seen as active in creation.

"The problem with the interpretive notion of 'purely Jewish monotheism,' in short, is that it has never existed."
OK, that this should offer no impediment to the acceptance of Trinitarianism.

" . . . within the broader context of Second-Temple and even post-Second-Temple Jewish devotional practices, Paul’s do not seem egregious."
OK ...

 

[Thomas]

Various divinatory activities (prophecy, scriptural interpretation, glossolalia, visions, works of power, healing), attributed to the presence of spirit, may have characterized Jerusalem’s gatherings as they did Paul’s satellite communities. So too sharing common meals. Commemorating Jesus’ death “until he comes.” Exorcisms in Jesus’ name. These practices are indeed distinctive. Still: distinct from what? From what we know of those of Qumran—though in other ways, they are similar.
Yes, they are similar ... but they are, as you say, distinctive ... but it does rather seem you're trying to take what is distinctive and render it the same as, in which case it's not distinctive – there's a contradiction here (or is it straw man?)

+++

Does devotion to Jesus thus constitute worship of him? And does such worship encode a claim of radically identifying Jesus with God? Here we must consider a question not only of practice, but also of translation. Latreia is the term commonly rendered in New Testament translations as “worship” (e.g., Rom 9:5 RSV), but in fact it means “cult.”
Two points:
1: I think the reference is wrong – there's no 'worship' in Romans 9:5.
2: The Greek term Latreia and the Latin cult or cultus mean the same thing – service, worship. There's no real distinction.

The best a member of a diaspora ekklesia can offer, says Paul, is “rational” or “intellectual” cult (logik latreia); and this notional offering is made not to Jesus, but to God (Rom 12:1).
The text reads:
"This I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service(logikos latreia) – so this is not a case of 'rational' nor 'intellectual' but spiritual, this clearly being the thrust of his pedagogy with regard to elitism within the community – this precedes the 'one bread, one body in Christ' of verses 4-5.

The next verse reads: "and do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by the renewal (ἀνακαίνωσις anakaínōsis) of your mind (nous), so you may test the will of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect."

The tern for renewal, ἀνακαίνωσις, appears only twice, here and in his Letter to Titus:
"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit" (3:5)

The ἀνα is for emphasis, as καίνωσις itself means renewal.

So Fredriksen's 'the best' plays down something quite other in Paul, and her subsequent pinning that to worship in the Jerusalem Temple is something of a sleight-of-hand ... it does not mean that, as the ekklesia also performed their own liturgies in their house services, and presumably in a broader socio-religious context, teaching, community care, and so on ...

 

[Thomas]

Just to reiterate ... I have admiration for Fredriksen's work to recover the Jewishness of Paul, and her scholarship generally.

However, she is one who has transitioned from Christianity to Judaism, but I do not see the necessity to do so, nor do I wholeheartedly embrace all the conclusions she draws from her extensive range of materials.

Leaving aside her rejected of Christ as Christians see Him, current scholarship now suggests there was an early High Christology, clearly evident in John, but now seen in the synoptics which for a long time were assumed to be Low – even Mark now gets a High Christology rating, which was something we were offered when I did my degree some time in the last century!

+++

Really, I suppose the position of the early communities was 'fuzzy', and not at all as cut-and-dried as was the tendency to assume, looking back.

Fredriksen makes great use of this fuzziness to promote her own thesis, but that very fuzziness means it is not necessarily definitive or inarguable. And, at times, it seems to me perhaps she has tried to make fuzzy something in a way it was not fuzzy at all ... her claim that:
"For Origen, both David and Paul are gods (sine dubio non errant homines sed dii, Comm. Rom. II.10,18; SC 532, p. 438)."
It's unfortunate I cannot lay hold of the Commentary in question, but I would have though had Origen said as much, then that would have figured highly in his subsequent condemnations, which it didn't ... which leads me to wonder whether that's precisely what Origen meant?