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A Man Attested by God

 

Daniel Kirk has written an important new book entitled A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Eerdmans 2016).  At the heart of his project is an attempt to resuscitate an idealized humanity at the heart of the Gospels.  The tendency for many, he thinks, is to read Matthew, Mark, and Luke through the lens of John’s Gospel or of Paul’s divine Christology expressed in say, the Philippian hymn (Phil 2:6-11).kirk-a-man-attested

For Kirk Jesus is an extraordinary figure of history.  But he is not just extraordinary because of his deity; he is extraordinary because of his humanity.  The grand scheme of the Bible presents the God of Israel as One who does not give up on humanity.  From the beginning (Genesis) God had a great plan and vision for what humanity was supposed to be.  So Kirk proposes that the Synoptics offer a high human Christology (a play on words based on the emerging consensus of “an early high Christology”).  In this case high does not equal divine, but a fully realized and idealized humanity. In other words the Synoptic Gospels present us with a Jesus who is everything humanity was created to be.

Now Kirk doesn’t deny the orthodox picture of a divine Christ.  He just thinks the Synoptics are telling a different sort of story, a story that can be easily lost in accentuating Jesus’ divinity.  As long as we stress Jesus’ divinity, we don’t have to take seriously what it means to walk as he walk, live as lived, love as he loved.  In other words “following Jesus.”

Kirk’s monograph stands in contrast to recent work done on the Gospels by the likes of Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and even his own former teacher, Richard Hays.  But more about this in another post.

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Jesus Monotheism

I met Crispin Fletcher-Louis in 1998 at a conference at St. Andrews. He was a rising star in historical and theological matters relating to the origins of Christianity. His star continues to rise.

Recently he published the first volume of a four volume series entitled Jesus Monotheism. This particular volume is Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond (Cascade, 2015).

In this series Fletcher-Louis hopes to explain how it happened that early Jesus-followers came to see him as divine and worshiped him in continuity with the worship of the One God of Israel (what I like to call an early high Christology). His purpose is historical: where did it happen? With whom? What caused it? What shape did it take?jewish-monotheism

I’ll have more to say on this in an upcoming article.  For now at least let me introduce the key elements.

Fletcher-Louis thinks that there are antecedent traditions which anticipate the inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity (Bauckham’s phrase). While the worship of Jesus alongside God and beliefs in his divine identity are new and surprising, they could have been anticipated if we were attuned correctly to certain movements and ideas within second temple Judaism.

Fletcher-Louis situates the causative factor for an early high Christology not in powerful religious experiences post-resurrection but in Jesus’ own self-awareness. He claims that the historical Jesus had an incarnational self-consciousness. The resurrection, of course, is a key event. For the crucifixion appears on the surface to deny Jesus’ messianic and divine claims. In the event Christians call the resurrection something happened to reverse the negating elements of Jesus’ death and confirm not only that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah but that he is also the incarnation of a divine being. Now, for those of you who’ve been following the scholarship in this arena, that is a bold claim.

Fletcher-Louis starts with the emerging consensus. Frankly, I don’t know recall who coined the phrase but it is a good one. The emerging consensus among many scholars is that a divine Christology is indeed early (that’s why I am a founding member of the early high Christology club) and located historically within Jewish milieu. It did not arise late in the first century only after Gentiles had streamed in and overtaken the Jesus movement.   Divine Christology means that early followers included Jesus within the divine identity and engaged in actions toward him which can only be described as worship, or as Larry Hurtado has put it “Christ devotion.”

There are scholars, however, who haven’t emerged. These include Maurice Casey, Jimmy Dunn, James McGrath, and Bart Ehrman.

To this point Fletcher-Louis finds himself in broad agreement with the emerging consensus and its leading lights, Hurtado and Bauckham. Where he goes “beyond” is to try to locate (historically) the belief in a divine Messiah in pre-Christian Judaism and in the self-awareness of Jesus. Jewish writings which could have a pre-Christian origin such as the Life of Adam and Eve and the Similitudes of Enoch can be read in such a way to suggest that Jews before Jesus had a messianic expectation which included a divine Messiah who comes from heaven.

Hurtado has made the case that it is powerful religious experiences post- resurrection which caused these early, Jewish followers to consider Jesus divine and to worship him. Apparently, through visions and prophetic utterances early Christians “saw” Jesus enthroned at God’s right hand and came to believe that worshiping Jesus was the will of God. While Fletcher-Louis applauds Hurtado’s sense that we need to take seriously the role of religious experience, he does not consider it is enough to account for what happened so quickly after Jesus’ execution. The problem, as he sees it, is that with no precedent for the worship of a divine person or Messiah in pre-Christian Judaism or without taking seriously the possibility that Jesus’ himself had a sense of his own divine identity, it is hard to account for the speed and exact shape Christ devotion took in the first decades after Jesus’ execution. It is more believable, according to Fletcher-Louis, that Jesus had a divine self-consciousness.

Well, his chips are on the table. Scholars, emerging and otherwise, are likely to agree with some of his points and disagree with others. Three more volumes to come. These are a welcome additions to the conversation.

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OnScript

I found a podcast series which may interest you.  Matt & Matt cohost this series which describes itself as “conversations on current biblical scholarship.”  The reason I found it is because a friend, Chris Tilling, was a guest on their podcast recently to discuss a topic I have interest in: New Testament Divine Christology.Chris-Tilling

If you’ve followed this blog, you know I’ve highlighted Chris’ book Paul’s Divine Christology on a couple of occasions.  Chris is on to an important and overlooked feature of early Christology.

In the podcast Matt & Matt do a good job in laying out the contours of where current Christological discussions have gone over the past 20-30 years.  Chris is well-versed in “the state of the question.”  If you’re interested in whether the earlies followers of Jesus regarded him as divine, then you will want to take some time and listen to Chris’ take on things.

Here’s a link:

http://onscript.study/podcast/chris-tilling-talking-new-testament-christology/

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How Paul Read His Bible

Paul was not trained in a modern seminary to read Scripture.  As a man of his day, he read Scripture like the rabbis he had heard in the synagogue or studied under in the academy.  Often the ways he reads and interprets Scripture seem odd to us.  Still they were the strategies his teachers and other biblical writers were using at the time.

Midrash is a term used to refer to how Jewish teachers approached and explained the biblical texts.  It begins with a healthy respect for the Scriptures as divinely inspired, as God’s Word to the world.  Yet as God’s Word the books of the Bible must do more than tell about what happened back then, they must be read against our current questions, crises and moments.  Whenever you hear a sermon about timeless truths or life principles from the Bible, the teacher is engaging in midrash.  One way to think of it is to say these ancient texts also speak to modern problems.rembrandt-saint-paul-in-prison

For Paul there are many ways of realizing the significance of the Scriptures in his day.  The allegory of Sarah and Hagar (Gal 4:21-31) is one of them.  Paul offers a figural reading of Abraham’s two sons, one born to Hagar, the other to Sarah, his wife.  For him, these two women serve as representative figures of the current problem Paul is addressing in Galatians.  Now, this does not mean that Paul discounted the literal, historical meaning—a memorable story of how God had been working out his promises to Abraham and his family—he just sees in the conflict within Abraham’s family a correspondence between the conflict that he was trying to work out among believing Jews and Gentiles in his day.

Like Hillel, one of the great rabbis of his day, Paul often made use of catch words to link one text to another so that they become mutually interpreting. You might call this “stringing pearls.”  In Gal 3:6-9 Paul mixes his own commentary (midrash) with Scripture:

Text (Gen 15:6) Abraham put faith in God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness

Comment           Those who put faith (in Jesus) are the sons of Abraham

Comment           Scripture foretold that God would makethe Gentiles right by faith

Text (Gen 12:3) in you, Abraham, all the Gentiles would be blessed

Comment          Those who put faith (in Jesus) are blessed with Abraham who had faith

The story of Abraham provides Paul with a Scriptural image for how to address the predicament in Galatia.  Abraham’s “faith” became the occasion for how the patriarch was reckoned by God as “right/righteous”; but what was true for Abraham is also true for all the sons of Abraham, defined by Paul as those, including the Gentiles, who put faith in Jesus.  As Paul continued to think through the story of Abraham, his mind shot back to the initial promise itself where God promised Abraham that he and his kin would become a blessing universally to all the nations/Gentiles.  These keywords within Abraham’s story (faith, right/righteous, blessing, Gentiles) became the pearls by which the apostle could string together his Scriptures to include this new chapter, the climactic chapter of God’s story in the world.

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Household Codes

Household codes (Eph 5:21—6:9; Col 3:12—4:6)

Paul is not starting a conversation about house management—that had been going on for centuries—he is however joining the conversation from a new creation vantage point. Perhaps the most famous and influential commentator on family life had been Aristotle (Politics, 1.12-13). Aristotle and other philosophers of his day believed that man was more fit to rule than woman by nature. There were different kinds of rule, of course—a king’s rule of his subjects, a master’s rule of his slave, a father’s rule of his child, and a husband’s rule of his wife—but nature had equipped freemen to lead even as it equipped women, children, and slaves to be subordinate. Inequality, not equality, is the working assumption. From their perspective, preserving family order established good order in society. Keeping the masters, wives, and children in subjection to the paterfamilias (male head of household) was vital to the common good.romefamily

 

Now this probably rubs you the wrong way, but it was the social backdrop to everything Paul has to say on the matter.

Essentially, Paul’s directives to the family challenge Aristotle’s teaching and logic about the hierarchy. If there ever was a hierarchy imposed by nature or by the fall (Genesis 3), then Christ has effectively lifted it and given us an example of lordly service (Phil 2:5-11). The Christian disposition is one of mutual submission (Eph 5:21) and consistently looking out for the needs of others (Phil 2:1-4).

The new creation had radically redefined the social order and therefore family relationships (Gal 3:28; 1 Corinthians 7). This is more than “equal access” to God; it is the foundation of the new creation where God is Father, Jesus is elder brother, and all who are adopted in the family of God live as brothers and sisters.

The basis of this new order is not a hierarchy imposed by nature but the Lordship of Jesus. These instructions are to be lived out “in the Lord.”

It was Paul’s habit to address the “subordinate” members of the household along with the paterfamilias. This was uncommon because the typical pattern for most moral instruction outside of the NT was to address the male, head of house expecting that he would, of course, lead the slaves, children, and wives to proper conduct. So Paul’s direct address to wives, children and slaves is unusual if not unique. Margaret MacDonald calls it “a distinctly Christian innovation” (The Power of Children: The Construction of Christian Families in the Greco-Roman World, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014, p. 7-8).

The apostle’s direct address does two things. First, it demonstrates that Paul’s authority extended to the wives, children and slaves of other men. As such they are fellow members of the church and not just someone else’s property living in the shadows. Second, it confers upon the “subordinate” members of the family a kind of self-determining, moral authority. Wives, children, and slaves are responsible before the Lord for their behavior. In other words, Paul treats those deemed by society as lessers as moral agents equal to the greaters. Before we get carried away, we should probably recognize that these codes represent things as they should be not as they were in the rough-and-tumble of daily family life. Aspirations are seldom fully realized.