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One God, One Lord (Part 6)

I continue to work through the preface of Larry Hurtado’s classic, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. It has been published in its 3rd edition recently by Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, as a part of its Cornerstones Series.

Hurtado contended that divine agents, or better principal agents, provided a conceptual category whereby earliest Christians were able to understand how a second figure (like Jesus) could be closely associated with God in creation and sustaining the world, in redemption and future judgment.  For Hurtado, a good deal of early Christians’ assessment of Jesus and his significance owed its substance to this category.  But he never contended that divine agency (principal agency) was sufficient in and of itself to account for the rise of Christ-devotion in the early decades of the Christian movement.  What is unparalleled in second temple Judaism vis-à-vis the principal agent figure is the kind of cultic devotion that arose with Jesus as the rightful (God willed) recipient.  This is truly a “novel development,” that represented what he called a binitarian pattern of devotion.

One factor Hurtado noted was the powerful religious experiences that convinced Jesus followers that it was right and good to reverence the Lord Jesus as Jews were reverencing God.  Moreover, that to reverence Jesus did not distract in any way from one’s devotion to God.  The experiences had to be so forceful and compelling as to persuade scrupulous Jews to consider it God’s will that they reverence Jesus.

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Larry Hurtado, outside of New College, Univ of Edinburgh

Some scholars have questioned whether religious experience could have the kind of generative effect as Hurtado argued.  But he made the point in various articles that sociologists and anthropologists increasingly were recognizing that religious experience, particular “revelations,” did lead to significance innovations.  Any religious experience and language used to express it were culturally and religiously determined.  But there are novel interpretations of religious phenomena that led to structural changes in communities, new beliefs and practices.

The New Testament demonstrates that believers like Paul, a significant minor founder figure, had revelatory experiences that shaped and determined their lives (Galatians 1; 2 Corinthians 13; Acts 9).  These revelations caused Saul/Paul to rethink the concepts, beliefs, and practices that had previously characterized his life.  Whatever value he found in his previous life is now recast in light of knowing Christ (Philippians 3). As a result of his “conversion” or “call,” he joined a new group, the ecclesia of Christ, and found himself at odds with his previous community.  The role of “revelation” is significant in early Christianity.  Hurtado sensed this from the earliest sources and knew that it had sculpted what early Christianity was becoming in its first century.

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One God, One Lord (Part 4)

I continue to work through the preface to the second edition of Larry Hurtado’s ONE GOD, ONE LORD.

Regarding precedents for the worship of Jesus in early Christianity . . .

Hurtado appreciated Loren Stuckenbruck’s work on the veneration of angels and the Christology of Revelation (Angel Veneration and Christology, WUNT 2/70 [Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1995]).  He found Stuckenbruck’s conclusions largely in line with his own.  In his study of Jewish magical texts, angel veneration, and the angelic responses to humans, Stuckenbruck admits there is nothing like an organized cult of angel worship among Jews prior to or during the time of Jesus.  So, there is no precedent for the worship of Jesus in the Jewish posture toward angels, even principal angels. Hurtado 1

Clinton Arnold’s book (The Colossian Syncretism: The Interface between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae, WUNT 2/77 [Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995) also garnered attention from Hurtado.  In particular, devout Jews clearly had an interest in angels, but they did not organize themselves into religious communities gathering to worship or pray to angels as divine, or alongside the God of Israel.  What Hurtado and others demonstrated was that Jewish monotheism was elastic enough to allow for divine agents, like prinicipal angels, to be included in close association with God without somehow giving up on their commitment to God’s oneness.

Another criticism leveled toward Hurtado’s work has to do with whether the early Christians’ actions toward and beliefs about Jesus amounted to worship. Hurtado says yes and he details a number of these.  We will consider those in a future post.  But Jimmy Dunn regards these phenomena as adoration and not worship (see Theology of Paul the Apostle [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 257-60.  An analogy I’ve heard Dunn use is this: Catholics and (some) Protestants adore Mary but do not worship her.  Early Christians like Paul, Dunn believes, did gather and offer remarkable devotion to Jesus but that did not constitute “worship” as Jews worshiped the God of Israel.  This phenomenon does take place, eventually, but it is not as early as Hurtado alleges.  You can see my summary and review of Dunn’s arguments here.

Hurtado does conclude that in the first two decades of the Jesus movement there is a “binitarian” pattern of worship that sets Jesus as a rightful recipient of worship along with God.  This is not ditheism (belief in and worship of two distinct figures), but a different pattern that includes Jesus within God in some important way.  So that to bow the head and bend the knee to Jesus is the will of God and constitutive of proper worship (Phil 2.9-11).

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In Memoriam

I include a notice from Mr. Jesse Hurtado, the surviving son of my friend and mentor, Larry Hurtado.   I’m pleased to note that Larry’s blog will remain active for now.  You can find it at

 

https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com

from Jesse Hurtado

As many of you now know, my father Larry Hurtado has passed away on the 25th of November 2019. I will keep his blog online as it is a testament to his work and engagment with the wider community interested in bibical scholarship. In the spirit of this, I have news to share from Edinburgh University below:

Professor Larry Hurtado PhD Scholarship Fund 

We hope that friends of Larry will forgive this intrusion into his blog, but we have an announcement that some of you may be interested in. Larry devoted his life to building up the study of New Testament and Christian Origins at Edinburgh, and many PhD students from all over the world have benefited from his friendship and guidance. In an effort to remember Larry’s legacy, and even to build on it in a small way, we are delighted to announce the establishment of a new scholarship fund in honour of Larry. It will be known as the Professor Larry Hurtado Scholarship and will support a PhD candidate at the School of Divinity working in the area of Christian Origins. We would very much value your support in this venture.

To give online go to https://www.ed.ac.uk/divinity/support/professor-larry-hurtado-phd-scholarship-fund

Alumni and friends who are taxpayers in the USA can support the University through the University of Edinburgh USA Development Trust http://www.edinburghtrust.org/make-gift

Tributes to Professor Hurtado can be found here

https://www.ed.ac.uk/divinity/news-events/latest-news/professor-larry-hurtado

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One God, One Lord (Part 3)

I continue to work through the preface to the second edition of Larry Hurtado’s ONE GOD, ONE LORD.

One of the criticisms leveled against Larry Hurtado’s work on Christ-devotion has had to do with his claim that reverence for Jesus is a significant innovation. On the contrary, critics assert that precedents did exist for the practice in Judaism before Jesus.  In other words, the counter-claim is that “well, we’ve seen this all before . . . or at least something like it.”Larry-Hurtado-1756565

In the Life of Adam and Eve God orders all the angels to reverence Adam since he is made in God’s image.  Might this be an antecedent to the worship of Jesus as the bearer of the image of God (a new Adam)?  Hurtado says no because there was no Jewish group who took up any sort of religious reverence for Adam.  Hurtado writes: “in my view the absence of any Adam-cultus practice is crucial” (xiii).  If it could be demonstrated that devout Jews took up the worship of Adam (in imitation of the angels) and that there was evidence for Adam-devotion, then it might be a different story.  So there is no analogy here for the programmatic inclusion of Jesus as a recipient of devotion as we see in early Christianity..

Another scholar pointed to the story of Joseph and Asenath (15.11-12).  In that account Asenath asks an angel to tell her his name so she could worship him.  But this is not an antecedent either because the angel refuses to give her his name.   This is part of a larger angelic-refusal tradition that characterized a number of second temple Jewish writings.  What we have here then appears to be a corrective to any that might take up angel-worship (a common feature of paganism in places).  Jewish monotheism ruled out the worship of angels.

1 Enoch is often cited by those who believe the worship of Jesus was not as innovative as Hurtado argues. In 1 Enoch there is a figure known as “the Elect One” or “Son of Man” to whom obeisance is given (1 Enoch 48.5-6; 62.9) in some grand, eschatological future.  But again Hurtado notices that no Jewish groups actually engaged in the worship of this figure.  No cult has yet been identified.  The situation is somewhat complicated because when you dig down into 1 Enoch, some scenes appear to show how one day the nations of the world will reverence God’s people, Israel (Isa 45.14-15; 49:7, 23).

In various writings Crispin Fletcher-Louis thinks there is a precedent for the worship of Jesus in those scenes that depict the faithful bowing down before the Jewish High Priest in second temple texts.  The primary evidence comes from a non-Jewish writer in the 4th century BCE who describes how on certain, high religious occasions the devout would offer proskynesis, that is, bow down before the High Priest.  But in that day and culture, such a posture indicated only that one is giving respect due to a king, general, priest, or other person in high position.  Hurtado concludes: “It [the proskynesis before the high priest] is hardly evidence of a pattern of cultic devotion directed toward the Priest in ancient Jewish worship gatherings” (xiv).

We will have more to say on this in our next post.  Page numbers are taken from the most recent edition of Hurtado’s One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 3rd edition (T & T Clark, 2015).

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One God, One Lord (Part 2)

I continue to work through the preface to the second edition of Larry Hurtado’s ONE GOD, ONE LORD.

Throughout his life Hurtado remained appreciative of the work of Wilhelm Bousset and the History of Religion School.  Bousset’s publication of Kyrios Christos in 1913 (the original German edition)  established him as the leading star in a galaxy of (primarily) German scholars interested in Christian origins.  In particular, Hurtado found value in the ways these scholars went about trying “to understand in historical terms the remarkable way in which Jesus figures in the religious devotion of ancient Christians” (xi, One God, One Lord [T. & T. Clark/Bloomsbury, 2015]).  The problem with these earlier explanations, according to Hurtado, was their simplistic and ultimately faulty model for how Christianity developed.  Bousset and his generation looked to Greco-Roman religions for their understanding of how early Christianity emerged; Hurtado and the new History of Religion School believed the rich and varied Jewish background held the key to understanding how Christianity developed.Larry-Hurtado-in-2016

Three theoretical approaches have dominated the discussions on Christian origins, particularly how Christ-devotion began.

First, some scholars propose that pagan religious ideas and practices were the primary shaping factors.  Not long after the Jesus movement began, non-Jews (therefore, polytheists) flooded into the movement in such numbers that pagan ideas became dominant.  Maurice Casey (From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, 1991) provides a good example  of this way of thinking.  However, as Larry demonstrated, Christ-devotion did not take several centuries or decades to take shape.  Within two decades of the execution of Jesus, Jewish Christians were reverencing Jesus in ways  that monotheists reverence the one, true God.  Hurtado used the word “mutation” to describe the changes in Jewish religious practice in this period, a period before the end of the first century (AD or CE).   Hurtado described this development as early—as early as we have evidence, Paul’s letters—and explosive.

There is a second approach.  Granting that the emergence of religious devotion to Jesus was early, it is possible to posit that pagan influences had already corrupted Judaism and its monotheistic scruples by the time of Jesus.  While some maintained a strict monotheism, others played more fast and loose with it.  But Hurtado and others have shown that an exclusive monotheism, a strict adherence to God’s oneness, characterized Judaism at that time.  Jews (by and large) saw themselves as separate and wanted to maintain that separation.  Idolatry was foolish and evil.  Devotion to the Roman gods was not tolerated.  Roman era Judaism had been Hellenized but not paganized.  Probably one of the best examples of this is Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee.

Hurtado’s work represents a third, and from my perspective, a more satisfying approach to the question of how religious devotion to Jesus emerged. It pays attention to the rich and various textures and nuances of Greco-Roman Jewish religion and the chronological reality that whatever devotion emerges, it emerges early.  Cultic devotion to Jesus was a novel development that drew (primarily) on the Jewish religious tradition, practices and concepts.  These traditions, practices, and concepts ultimately “mutate” under the influence of powerful, religious experiences that characterized the earliest communities of Christ followers.