Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Supplements to Novum Testamentum, 180) 9004437975, 9789004437975

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Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Supplements to Novum Testamentum Executive Editors M. M. Mitchell (Chicago) D. P. Moessner (Fort Worth) Editorial Board H. W. Attridge (New Haven) – C. Breytenbach (Berlin) C. Gerber (Berlin) – J. K. Elliott (Leeds) C. R. Holladay (Atlanta) – D. Marguerat (Lausanne) U. Poplutz (Wuppertal) – J. C. Thom (Stellenbosch) P. Trebilco (Dunedin) – C. M. Tuckett (Oxford) J. Verheyden (Leuven)

VOLUME 180

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/nts

Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity Edited by

Matthew V. Novenson

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Novenson, Matthew V., editor. Title: Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman antiquity / edited by  Matthew V. Novenson. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2020. | Series: Novum testamentum,  supplements, 0167-9732 ; volume 180 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027772 (print) | LCCN 2020027773 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004437975 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004438088 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—History of doctrines—Early church, ca.  30–600. | Monotheism—Rome—History. | Bible. New Testament—Criticism,  interpretation, etc. Classification: LCC BT198 .M645 2020 (print) | LCC BT198 (ebook) | DDC  230.09/015—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027772 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027773

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0167-9732 ISBN 978-90-04-43797-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43808-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Matthew V. Novenson. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

In memoriam Larry W. Hurtado

⸪

Contents Preface ix Abbreviations x Translations xi Notes on Contributors xii 1 Introduction 1 Matthew V. Novenson 2

The New religionsgeschichtliche Schule at Thirty: Observations by a Participant 9 Larry W. Hurtado

3

The Universal Polytheism and the Case of the Jews 32 Matthew V. Novenson

4

The Divine Name as a Characteristic of Divine Identity in Second-Temple Judaism and Early Christianity 61 Charles A. Gieschen

5

Jesus’ Unique Relationship with YHWH in Biblical Exegesis: A Response to Recent Objections 85 David B. Capes

6

God and Glory and Paul, Again: Divine Identity and Community Formation in the Early Jesus Movement 99 Carey C. Newman

7

Confessing the Cosmic Christ (1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15–20) 139 Richard Bauckham

8

One God, One Lord in the Epistle of James 172 Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr

9

Between Jewish Monotheism and Proto-Trinitarian Relations: The Making and Character of Johannine Christology 189 Jörg Frey

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God and Christ in the Earlier Martyr Acts 222 Jan N. Bremmer

11

Gnosis and the Tragedies of Wisdom: Sophia’s Story 249 Pheme Perkins

12

The One God Is No Simple Matter 263 April D. DeConick

13

How High Can Early High Christology Be? 293 Paula Fredriksen Index of Ancient Sources 321 Index of Modern Authors 345 Index of Subjects 355

Preface This volume is the outcome of a colloquium held at the University of Edinburgh in April 2019. The colloquium was hosted by the School of Divinity and the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, with kind support from Head of School Helen Bond. It was funded by a generous grant from—and, indeed, part of the impetus for the event came from—Mark Lanier and the Lanier Theological Library Foundation, whose longstanding interest in research on monotheism and Christology is warmly appreciated by those of us who work on these topics. Another impetus for the colloquium and for this volume was the tremendously generative work of Larry W. Hurtado, longtime Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh. The thirtieth anniversary of his One God, One Lord (Fortress, 1988) and the fifteenth anniversary of his Lord Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2003) put several of us in mind to organize a new colloquium on the issues raised in these books. We reconvened many of the contributors to another Hurtado-related project, The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Brill, 1999), as well as several other colleagues doing research in this area. In the year between the call for papers and the colloquium itself, Hurtado was unexpectedly diagnosed with a severe cancer, underwent several harrowing rounds of treatment, and then, happily, went into remission and was in good health for the event. Soon after, however, the cancer returned, and Hurtado died suddenly in November 2019. I can say, on behalf of all the contributors, how immensely grateful we are to have had him with us, at full strength, for those three wonderful days of spirited debate. This book is a record of those days and, I hope, a worthy contribution to the research project initiated by our friend Larry Hurtado. In addition to the authors of the chapters below, Ruben Bühner, Sara Parvis, and Marianne Meye Thompson were all participants with us at the colloquium, but due to their publication obligations elsewhere their essays were not able to appear here. Carey Newman did an enormous amount of logistical heavy lifting to make the colloquium happen, and Paula Fredriksen rendered invaluable last-minute help during that week. A crack team of Edinburgh graduate students helped to ensure that everything ran smoothly, and a number of them have helped me with copyediting the present volume, namely: Sofanit Abebe, Charles Cisco, Ryan Collman, Alex Muir, Manse Rim, Matt Sharp, and Sydney Tooth. My warmest thanks to all these good people, most of all to Larry and Shannon Hurtado. Matthew V. Novenson

Abbreviations Abbreviations follow the conventions of the SBL Handbook of Style, 2d ed (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014) and Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Translations All translations of non-English-language texts are the respective authors’ own unless otherwise noted.

Notes on Contributors Richard Bauckham is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. Jan N. Bremmer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. David B. Capes is Senior Research Fellow at Lanier Theological Library, Houston, USA. April D. DeConick is Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University, USA. Paula Fredriksen is Aurelio Professor of Scripture Emerita at Boston University, USA, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Jörg Frey is Professor of New Testament with focus on Ancient Judaism and Hermeneutics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Charles A. Gieschen is Professor of Exegetical Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. Larry W. Hurtado (d. 2019) was Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology from 1996 to 2011, and Professor Emeritus from 2011 to 2019, at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Carey C. Newman is Executive Editor at Fortress Press, USA.

Notes on Contributors

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Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr is Professor of New Testament at the University of Jena, Germany. Matthew V. Novenson is Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Pheme Perkins is Joseph Professor of Catholic Spirituality at Boston College, USA.

chapter 1

Introduction Matthew V. Novenson According to the founding myth of the Early High Christology Club, one November night in the early 1990s following a session of the SBL Divine Mediator Figures Group, Alan Segal ordered wine for all those there present, and Carey Newman stood to propose a toast “to early high Christology.” James Dunn waited a perfect comic beat, then proposed a counter-toast: “to high Christology.” Maurice Casey waited one beat more, then counter-countered, “to Christology.” Like all good founding myths, if it did not happen in exactly that way, then it really should have. The story beautifully encapsulates a unique period of ferment in the modern history of research on early Christology. The long 1990s—to indulge in a bit of historiographical artifice—saw the publication of a remarkable number of ground-breaking studies in this field: Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord (1988); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (1988); Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis (1988); the second edition of James Dunn, Christology in the Making (1989); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God (1991); Margaret Barker, The Great Angel (1992); Carey Newman, Paul’s Glory Christology (1992); David Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology (1992); Pheme Perkins, Gnosticism and the New Testament (1993); Marianne Meye Thompson, The Incarnate Word (1993); Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (1995); Jarl Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God (1995); Loren Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology (1995); April DeConick, Seek to See Him (1996); Richard Bauckham, God Crucified (1998); Charles Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology (1998); William Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (1998); Carey Newman et al., eds., The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (1999); Crispin Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam (2002); and Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ (2003)—to name only some of the most important.1 1  Bibliography as follows: Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: SCM, 1989); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991); Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s

© MATTHEW V. NOVENSON, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_002

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So great was this ferment that Martin Hengel, writing at the time, spoke of a new religionsgeschichtliche Schule,2 a late twentieth-century counterpart to the fin de siècle German movement represented by the likes of Eichhorn, Bousset, and Wrede.3 But whereas the original religionsgeschichtliche Schule looked for the origins of Christology in the welter of gentile religions from which the majority of early Christians came, the newer school pushed the quest further back to the Judaism of Jesus and the apostles. And with Judaism, also monotheism. If it were only second-century gentile Christians worshiping the apotheosized Jesus quasi deo, then we might well call it an instance of polytheism, but if first-generation, Jewish apostles are doing it, then (so the argument goes) it must, by definition, be an instance of Jewish monotheism—but with a twist (or a mutation, in Larry Hurtado’s preferred metaphor). And so, whereas for much of the twentieth century high Christology was widely thought to be late, gentile, and polytheist, over the last thirty years it has taken its place as early, Jewish, and monotheist.4 Second God (London: SPCK, 1992); Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); David Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT 2.47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); Pheme Perkins, Gnosticism and the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Marianne Meye Thompson, The Incarnate Word: Perspectives on Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (London: T. & T. Clark, 1995); Jarl Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995); Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology, WUNT 2.70 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995); April D. DeConick, Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas, VCSup 33 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998); Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, AGJU 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); William Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (London: SCM, 1998); Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis, eds., The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism, JSJSup 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 2  In his endorsement of Hurtado, One God, One Lord. From there, the phrase gained wider currency, e.g., in Jarl Fossum, “The New religionsgeschichtliche Schule: The Quest for Jewish Christology,” in SBLSP 1991, ed. E. Lovering (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 638–646; Jörg Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive: Larry W. Hurtados Lord Jesus Christ und die Herausbildung des frühen Christologie,” in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey, AJEC 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 117–170. See further Hurtado’s essay in the present volume. 3  On whom see Gerd Lüdemann and Martin Schröder, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen: Eine Dokumentation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). 4  See further Andrew Chester, “High Christology: Whence, When, and Why?” EC 2 (2011): 22–50.

Introduction

3

Many of the names cited above have carried the argument further in the intervening decades,5 and others have taken up the mantle, as well. In his The Pre-existent Son (2006), Simon Gathercole argues—in particular from the numerous “I have come” sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels—that Mark, Matthew, and Luke, no less than John, assume that Jesus had a divine life before his human life.6 In his Paul’s Divine Christology (2012), Chris Tilling proposes that the letters of Paul attest a maximally divine Christology since, Tilling argues, the relation between Christ and believers in Paul is identical to the relation between God and Israel in the Jewish scriptures.7 Thinking even further with Paul, Wesley Hill, in his Paul and the Trinity (2015), argues that Paul’s particular ways of speaking of Jesus, God the father of Jesus, and the holy pneuma are not only consistent with but actually illuminated by the late ancient theological rubric of the trinity.8 James McGrath’s The Only True God (2009) is a very interesting case.9 McGrath strongly underscores the thesis of Hurtado, Bauckham, and others that all of the texts comprising (what we call) the New Testament fall entirely within the bounds of ancient Jewish monotheism. So much so, in fact, that for McGrath early Jesus devotion does not amount to any kind of twist, wrinkle, or mutation vis-à-vis monotheism. It is just another instance of it. With McGrath, the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule might seem to have proved one part of its thesis too well, and another part not well enough. Anyway, if one test of the worth of a historical hypothesis is its capacity to generate more, new, productive readings of the sources, then the early high Christology hypothesis has proved to be very worthwhile, indeed. Meanwhile, there are a number of key questions that loom over this field of research, many of them evergreen, others only recently raised. For one thing, the longstanding question of the relation between Judaism and Hellenism (and paganism, Romanitas, and other ethnic and cultural labels) continues to vex the early Christology discussion. In theory, all parties are on board with 5  E.g., Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North, eds., Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004); Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, Volume 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015); David B. Capes, The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2018). 6  Simon J. Gathercole, The Pre-existent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). 7  Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, WUNT 2.323 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). 8  Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). 9  James F. McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

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Martin Hengel’s almost fifty-year-old discovery that Judaism and Hellenism are not equal and opposite forces, that ancient Judaism is one of hundreds of indigenous traditions subsumed within imperial Hellenism (and, later, imperial Romanism).10 And yet, in the actual execution of the early Christology debates, parties on all sides seem to go back to this well again and again.11 For example: Michael Peppard, in his important The Son of God in the Roman World (2011), criticizes Hurtado for reinscribing the obsolete Judaism/Hellenism dichotomy by insisting so emphatically on a specifically Jewish context for early Christ-devotion.12 Hurtado, however, turns the same criticism back on Peppard, arguing that it is actually he who is rebuilding the dividing wall that Hengel tore down.13 Both parties agree on the ideal, and each confidently thinks that he is living up to it while the other is not. We seem to be incapable, so far, of achieving a meeting of minds on this issue. What is more—just to complicate this issue further—the first decade of the new millennium saw an explosion of research into so-called “pagan monotheism,” that is, Greek, Roman, and other ancient (non-Jewish, non-Christian) reflection on the one high god above all earthly powers. Several collaborative volumes, in particular—Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede’s Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (1999), Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen’s One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (2010), and also Mitchell and van Nuffelen’s Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (2010)—have sharply challenged the supposed bright line between pagan polytheism and Jewish monotheism.14 This body of research on pagan monotheism is a counterpart and complement to the discovery of (what elsewhere goes by the name of) polytheism in ancient Judaism.15 But if there is ample 10  Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. John Bowden, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975). 11  For a model intervention in this intellectual habit in a different corner of New Testament studies, see Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ed., Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001). 12  Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21–26. 13  See Hurtado’s review of Peppard in ExpTim 125 (2014): 461–462; the epilogue to the third edition of idem, One God, One Lord (London: T. & T. Clark, 2015); and his essay in the present volume below. 14  Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); eidem, eds., Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity, ISACR 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 15  E.g., Peter Hayman, “Monotheism—A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” JJS 42 (1991): 1–15; Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (New York: Oxford University

Introduction

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evidence for monotheism in ancient paganism, and for polytheism in ancient Judaism, then confident assertions about early Christology belonging to a Jewish or a Roman context may not tell us very much at all about the cosmology there assumed. In short, almost all aspects of this question are quite a lot more complicated than one might think from reading the standard textbooks. Yet another obstinate question is how best to understand, and to mean, that all-important word “divine,” as in “divine Christology,” “divine identity,” “divine honors,” “divine being,” “divine name,” and so on. Even amongst the leading lights of the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule, this issue has long been contested. Larry Hurtado has pleaded for a ritual definition over against a philosophical or theological one.16 For Hurtado, whoever receives worship is divine. If Christ receives worship, then he is divine. And if Christ receives worship from monotheists, then he is divine in a monotheistic sense. Richard Bauckham arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route. He embraces a philosophical taxonomy, but he insists that the essential criterion for divinity as he means “divine” is creator-ness:17 Whoever creates is divine; whoever is created is notdivine. If Christ is creator, then he is divine. And if Christ is creator within a monotheistic cosmology, then he is divine in a monotheistic sense. In practice, Hurtado and Bauckham tend to reach similar conclusions on the Christologies of most early Christian texts, but their different definitions do not require that they do so. One can think of ancient texts in which Christ receives worship but is not the agent of creation, and texts in which Christ is the agent of creation but does not receive worship; these liminal cases perhaps deserve more attention than they have received so far. Other interpreters, meanwhile— not least some critics of the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule—have rightly pointed out that in many of our ancient sources the dividing line between divine beings and not-divine beings is mortality: the immortal god(s) on the one side, mortal humans and animals on the other.18 But if we use that ancient Press, 2001); Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to God,” SR 35 (2006): 231–246; Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012); Emma Wasserman, Apocalypse as Holy War: Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul, AYBRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 16  Most importantly in Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ. 17  On this theme, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2008). 18  See Charles H. Talbert, “The Concept of Immortals in Mediterranean Antiquity,” JBL 94 (1975): 419–436; Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine, eds., The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

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rubric, then a very different understanding of a divine Christ is possible, not to say necessary.19 Bauckham’s working definition of God as creator, just noted, raises yet another question that emerges from our sources and continues to vex modern research, namely: Which god is the one god? The problem here is that monotheism itself evidences a certain ambivalence about the role of the creator.20 An ancient monotheist might say, as Bauckham does, that the one god is none other than the creator, full stop. But alternatively, an ancient monotheist might say, and a number of them do say, that whatever else the one god may be, the one thing he is not is the creator. The creator—which is to say, the demiurge— must needs be something subordinate to the high god. Polytheisms can cope with this problem easily enough, since they have ample dramatis personae to whom to assign the various functions. But a monotheism with a certain philosophical understanding of the high god may have to assign the demiurgical role to an abstraction such as Sophia, wisdom, or the like. In other words, what seems perfectly obvious to one monotheist may be unthinkable to another. One person’s high god is another person’s demiurge.21 A final still-contested question is the one posed by Paula Fredriksen in the concluding essay of the present volume: How high can early high Christology be? That is to say: Let us grant for the sake of argument (what most interpreters nowadays take to be true) that “high Christology” in the sense of belief in the divinity of Jesus is attested already in the first generation, in the letters of Paul. How high, exactly, is this early Christology?22 This brings us back to the debate over the precise sense of “divinity.” In these earliest sources—the letters of Paul, perhaps the Gospel of Mark—is Jesus divine as Herakles is divine? As Augustus is divine? As Enoch is divine? As Melchizedek is divine? As Sophia is divine? As Yhwh is divine? Here, even within the collegial ranks of the early high Christology club—let alone outside them—views diverge widely and 19  E.g., M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). 20  On this problem, see the essays collected in Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz, eds., Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, TSAJ 155 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 21  See further Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 22  See the kinds of distinctions drawn, e.g., by Charles H. Talbert, The Development of Christology in the First 100 Years, and Other Essays on Early Christian Christology, NovTSup 140 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and J. R. Daniel Kirk, A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016).

Introduction

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vigorously. If the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule laid to rest certain oncepopular theories, it has also begotten quite a few new ones, which now require no little sorting out. The purpose of the present volume is to sort them out, to revisit the central issues now—thirty years after Hurtado’s One God, One Lord, twenty years after the St Andrews Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism volume, fifteen years after Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ—taking stock of and engaging with all the very interesting research that has happened in the interim. The questions now are rather different from what they were thirty years ago. We now take for granted certain claims which, back then, were hard-won through heated debate. Some recent research has taken the early high Christology hypothesis and run with it in new directions not anticipated back then. And some new criticisms of the early high Christology hypothesis have emerged that were yet not on the table at the turn of the millennium. It is high time, therefore, for a reassessment. Hence this book. The colloquium from which the present volume emerged was entitled “God and Other Beings: Varieties of Theism in Antiquity,” and the participants were invited to write essays on any aspect of that theme relevant to their own recent research. The title of the book you are now reading, Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, reflects the ground actually covered in the essays the contributors chose to write. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a majority decided to focus on some aspect of Christology, that is, of the question how Jesus is understood to relate to God(s) in the primary sources. The essays by Capes, Newman, and Bauckham all discuss features of Christology in the letters of Paul: Capes the apostle’s citation of scriptural oracles in which Paul lets Christ stand in for Yhwh/kurios, Newman Paul’s pattern of referring to Christ as God’s doxa or glory, and Bauckham two particular loci classici for Pauline Christology, 1 Corinthians 8 and Colossians 1. If Paul’s letters are the earliest texts in the corpus we call the New Testament, the Gospel of John is probably one of the latest,23 yet it is arguably the most important text for the subsequent development of early Christian Christology. Jörg Frey’s essay considers how the Christology of John spans the distance between ancient Jewish monotheism and fourth-century, philosophical trinitarianism. The Epistle of James has often been said (famously, for instance, by Martin Luther) to be the least Christological text in the New Testament, but Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr’s essay challenges that dismissive judgment. Jan Bremmer’s essay takes us beyond the New Testament to the martyr Acts of the second and third centuries, 23  But see George H. van Kooten’s new argument for an early date in his John between Greek Mythology and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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considering how those sources portray the relation of Jesus to God in the martyrs’ beatific visions. The essays by Novenson and Gieschen are chiefly on God(s) in ancient Judaism. Novenson considers how ancient Greek and Roman writers interpret the Jewish god in their cosmologies, and how ancient Jewish writers interpret gentile gods in theirs. Gieschen asks how closely the name of God (Yhwh, the tetragrammaton) maps onto the identity of God in ancient Jewish sources, especially vis-à-vis name-bearing angels and other such (e.g., Yahoel, Jesus, Metatron). The essays by Perkins and DeConick show how, for philosophically minded Jews and Christians in antiquity (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, Valentinus, Marcion, Justin, and others), what we call monotheism had downsides as well as upsides, especially the theodicy problem generated by identifying the high god with the creator. Even for would-be monotheists, as DeConick puts it, “the one god is no simple matter.” Paula Fredriksen’s essay is a unique case. Her colloquium paper was an entirely different one, on messianic Christology in Paul.24 But after several days of rousing debate over early high Christology at the colloquium, she wrote and submitted a new essay for this volume, sharply posing the crucial question: How high can early high Christology be? Her essay interacts directly with several other essays in this volume, so it is placed last as a fitting capstone to the book. Larry Hurtado’s essay stands apart, and comes first in the lineup, because it gives a unique, autoethnographic account of the thirty-year experiment of the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule. I can think of no better entrée into this particular discussion.

24  On which see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

chapter 2

The New religionsgeschichtliche Schule at Thirty: Observations by a Participant Larry W. Hurtado In his generous endorsement of my 1988 book, One God, One Lord, Martin Hengel remarked that it reflected the work of a number of scholars from various settings who could be seen as comprising “a new ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’.”1 The term has been discussed occasionally, but it has not been bandied about much, even among those whose work might be seen as appropriate to include.2 Nevertheless, although there is no formal connection of the scholars in question, there are some shared features to their work. There is no real Schule in the strict sense of the term, but there is a certain convergence of emphases and, to some degree, results among the scholars whom we could link with Hengel’s memorable phrasing. In what follows, therefore, it will serve economic expression to refer to a new Schule, using the term in an extended sense. In this presentation, I wish to attempt a basic characterization of this convergence, and some of its results over the thirty years or so since Hengel’s comment. 1

The Older and the Newer Schulen

The works of early twentieth-century scholars associated with the so-called religionsgeschichtliche Schule are well known among those who study the 1  Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Hengel’s comment appeared on the back cover of this edition. 2  Jarl Fossum, “The New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule: The Quest for Jewish Christology,” SBLSP 1991, 638–46, actually devoted most of his discussion to advocating the importance of “Gnosticism” in the religious environment of earliest Christian circles. I briefly discussed the relationship of the older religionsgeschichtliche Schule to more recent studies in Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 11–18. Also, in a forthcoming essay, I discuss briefly the older and new Schulen, particularly with reference to theological concerns: “One God and Jesus-Devotion in Earliest Christianity: Theological Implications.”

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origins of Christianity.3 The scope of these works is truly impressive, and in their time they were genuinely new and controversial in theses and approach. It was fundamental to the religionsgeschichtliche Schule to analyze religious developments in their historical context, with a particular concern to identify sources of ideas and practices in Judaism and early Christianity from the wider cultural setting.4 With reference to the origins of Christianity, there was a pronounced effort to ascribe much to the influence of “oriental” cults and ideas, from Syrian, Iranian and Egyptian venues, part of an effort referred to by Suzanne Marchand as “the Furor Orientalis.”5 The focus was by no means confined to the origins of Christianity or the place of Jesus in early Christianity. But it is probably this latter topic that became the most salient, influential, and controversial in subsequent scholarship, and largely through the influence of one monumental work, Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos, helped also by endorsement of it by influential scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann.6 By the 1970s, however, the claims of the older Schule scholars on some other topics had longsince come to be seen as fallacious, including the notion of a pre-Christian 3  See, e.g., Werner Georg Kümmel, Das Neue Testament: Geschichte der Erforschung seiner Probleme (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1970); ET The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, trans. S. McLean Gilmor and Howard C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), esp. 120–324. 4  Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903), laid out the basic approach. 5   Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 212–51; also chap. 6, “Toward an Oriental Christianity” (252–91). As she notes, the efforts of the early religionsgeschichtliche Schule were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to reformulate Christianity into a set of beliefs that could be embraced by the German Volk, and so provide an ethical basis for modern Germans. On the theological agenda of the early Schule, see also Karsten Lehmkühler, Kultus und Theologie: Dogmatik und Exegese in der religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 76 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). See also Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), who argues that “Over time History of Religions became identified with the German Christian movement …” (225), also 58–60. 6  Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus, FRLANT 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913; 2d ed. 1921). I have discussed the impact of and response to the book in my Foreword to the reprint of the 1970 English translation: Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), v– xx. Already within the first few years after its publication, Kyrios Christos generated a large response, as reviewed in Geerhardus Vos, “The Kyrios Christos Controversy,” PTR 15 (1917): 21–89. Bultmann wrote a foreword to the fifth (reprint) edition (from which the English translation was made), declaring that he regarded Kyrios Christos “above all” among works of NT scholarship that he recommended to his students (7).

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gnostic redeemer and the alleged direct influence of mystery religions on earliest Christian rituals and beliefs.7 But Bousset’s book and his analysis of earliest beliefs about Jesus continued to be influential, as evident in the English translation of Kyrios Christos in 1970, and the reception given to it then by some prominent scholars.8 My 1979 critique of some key bases in Bousset’s argument, however, was intended to signal the need for a fresh and full reassessment of the origins of devotion to Jesus.9 Although the historical questions of the older Schule remained valid, drawing upon key findings of other scholars, I argued that the answers Bousset offered were flawed, and the bases on which those answers rested were dubious. To mention one matter by way of illustration, the notion that the phrase “the son of man” was the earliest christological confession of the “Primitive Palestinian Community” both had no support in the evidence, and also rested on the widespread but fallacious assumption that it was a wellknown and widely used title for a heavenly being in Second-Temple Jewish tradition.10 7  Carsten Colpe, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule: Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlösermythus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1961) is commonly seen as having laid to rest the pre-Christian gnostic redeemer thesis. Note also Marcel Simon, “The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Fifty Years Later,” Religious Studies 11.2 (1975): 135–44. On the “mystery religions” (more commonly referred to as “mystery cults” today), see now Jan N. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 8  Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970). See, e.g., comments by Hendrikus Boers, “Jesus and Christian Faith: New Testament Christology Since Bousset’s Kyrios Christos,” JBL 89 (1970): 450–56; and the friendly but somewhat more critical assessment by Norman Perrin, “Reflections on the Publication in English of Bousset’s Kyrios Christos,” ExpTim 82 (1970–71): 340–42. In this essay, I cite the English translation of Kyrios Christos. 9  Larry W. Hurtado, “New Testament Christology: A Critique of Bousset’s Influence,” TS 40 (1979): 306–17. A German translation appeared thereafter: “Forschungen zur neutestamentlichen Christologie seit Bousset: Forschungsrichtungen und bedeutende Beiträge,” Theologische Beiträge 11 (1980): 158–71. The English version is republished in Larry W. Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion: The Context and Character of Christological Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), 11–24. Note also Hurtado, “Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos: An Appreciative and Critical Assessment,” Early Christianity 6 (2015): 1–13. 10  See my discussion in “New Testament Christology,” 15–18. The dramatically titled volteface by Ragnar Leivestad, “Exit the Apocalyptic Son of Man,” NTS 18 (1971–72): 243–67 is illustrative of the shift in scholarly opinion in the 1970s. I have offered my own analysis of the expression in Hurtado, “Summing Up and Concluding Observations,” in Who is This Son of Man? The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus, eds. Paul L. Owen and Larry W. Hurtado (London: T.&T. Clark, 2011), 159–77, republished

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Among the publications that I cited in that essay were several by Martin Hengel that I continue to regard as landmark studies. Indeed, to my mind, Hengel was effectively the parent-figure in any new religionsgeschichtliche Schule.11 That means that the foundations of such a new Schule lie, in my view, in these works by Hengel, which actually take us back to the 1970s. These publications include Hengel’s influential study of the encounter between Hellenism and Judaism in the Hellenistic period.12 Although some details of his analysis have been criticized, I think that the major thrust of his work remains valid. Hengel effectively called into question the overly sharp distinctions between “Hellenistic” and “Jewish” categories in a lot of previous NT scholarship that were often used to construct an artificial scheme of discrete successive stages in the very earliest decades of Christianity.13 But more directly pertaining to the origins of Jesus-devotion, there was Hengel’s pithy essay emphasizing the rapidity that characterized earliest christological developments, a discussion that should be required reading for all NT scholars.14 As well, Hengel’s study of the origins and meaning of the references to Jesus as “the Son of God” set an example of how a more thorough and up to date analysis of historical data yielded revised results. In particular, this little book signalled what was to be perhaps the major identifying feature of the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule, a demonstration that the crucial matrix for early Christianity and Jesus-devotion lay, not in “oriental” mystery-cults, but in in Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 389–406; and my critique of the older idea in Larry W. Hurtado, “Fashions, Fallacies and Future Prospects in New Testament Studies,” JSNT 36 (2014): 299–324. 11  For assessments of Hengel’s work and its importance, see, e.g., Larry W. Hurtado, “Martin Hengel’s Impact on English-Speaking Scholarship,” ExpTim 120.2 (2008): 70–76; Roland Deines, “Martin Hengel (1926–2009): A Scholar’s Life in the Service of Christology,” in Earliest Christian History: Essays From the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel, eds. Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 33–72. 12  Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2 Jh.s v. Chr. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2d ed. 1973, lst ed. 1969); ET Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in the Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (London: SCM Press, 1974). 13  See Hengel’s doughty defence of his work: Martin Hengel, “Judaism and Hellenism Revisited,” in Theologische, historische und biographische Skizzen: Kleine Schriften VII (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 179–216. 14  Martin Hengel, “Christologie und neutestamentliche Chronologie: Zu einer Aporie in der Geschichte des Urchristentums,” in Neues Testament und Geschichte: Historisches Geschehen und Deutung im Neuen Testament, Festchrift Oscar Cullmann, eds. H. Baltensweiler and B. Reicke (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1972), 43–67, reprinted in Martin Hengel, Studien zur Christologie, Kleine Schriften IV, WUNT 201 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 27–51; ET Martin Hengel, “Christology and New Testament Chronology,” in Between Jesus and Paul (London: SCM, 1983), 30–47.

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Second-Temple Judaism.15 Certainly, to speak for myself, these and other studies by Hengel were particularly inspiring and formative for my own efforts.16 In earlier discussions of the matter I have noted a significant difference between the composition of the older and the newer Schulen. The former was centered in a group of colleagues in the University of Göttingen, all of them of a liberal Protestant stance, and, in the case of Bousset at least, quite clearly concerned to advocate a particular theological position.17 By contrast, the so-called new religionsgeschichtliche Schule takes in the work of scholars of various nationalities and educational backgrounds, and of varied religious identities as well. For that reason, as indicated earlier, the term Schule can be used only in a loose sense to describe them. Hengel did not specify the scholars to whom he was referring at the time of his comment about my 1988 book, but I suspect that among them he may have had in mind Alan Segal’s 1977 study of “two powers” controversies in rabbinic texts.18 Although focused on intra-Jewish controversies, Segal argued that the earliest reports of “two powers” Jewish minim seem to reflect beliefs in what he called a second, “complementary” power closely linked with God. He judged (rightly in my view) that the best candidates for this “heresy” were likely Jewish Christians, whose claims for, and devotion to, Jesus provoked outrage among some other Jews concerned to preserve the religious integrity of their nation. I think it also likely that Hengel had in mind Jarl Fossum’s study of the Jewish origins of gnostic thought.19 Certainly, early in the research that led to my 1988 book, in my conversation with Hengel in the Autumn of 1984, he pointed me to Fossum’s study as forthcoming in a series that Hengel edited. Although some of Fossum’s claims remain controversial and his handling of some evidence seems to me sometimes debatable, his work broadly furthered the stance that

15  Martin Hengel, Der Sohn Gottes, Die Enstehung der Christologie und die jüdischhellenistische Religionsgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975); ET The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). 16  Note in particular the collection of essays: Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995). 17  E.g., Wilhelm Bousset, The Faith of a Modern Protestant, trans. F. B. Low (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909). This and others of Bousset’s more popularizing works were translated quite early and made him trans-nationally known as an advocate of his theological views. 18   Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, SJLA 25 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977). 19   J. E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1985).

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the rich and diverse Jewish tradition was the fertile ground in which influential developments, including “high” christological claims, first emerged.20 To speak for myself, another important figure who has made important contributions to the renewed interest in the remarkable place of Jesus in earliest Christian beliefs and practice is Richard Bauckham. In particular, I found stimulating his incisive essay published in 1981 comparing the tradition of angelic refusal of worship with the scene in Revelation where the exalted Jesus receives heavenly worship along with God.21 As further indication of the significance of Bauckham’s essay, Loren Stuckenbruck’s 1995 study, Angel Veneration and Christology, was an extended analysis of the tradition of angelic refusal of worship identified by Bauckham and its relevance for early Jesus-devotion.22 To be sure, there is an evident broad convergence in the work of these various scholars. I have already mentioned one convergence, the agreement that the varied Second-Temple Jewish tradition provides the initial conceptual resources for understanding the status and significance of Jesus, and the initial setting in which Jesus-devotion was expressed. This marks a departure from the older Schule, which posited “oriental” influences as the key factors, often by a bizarre use of evidence, such as citation of Mandaean texts from centuries later to serve as putative evidence of pre-Christian ideas.23 Moreover, whereas Bousset presumed an earlier “pure” Old Testament monotheism, and characterized Second-Temple Jewish tradition disparagingly as having eroded this purity under the influence of various foreign religious forces, it is now evident that precisely in the Second-Temple period Jewish cultic exclusivity and emphasis on the uniqueness of the biblical deity, “ancient Jewish monotheism” in that sense of the term, actually became more pronounced, not less so.24 Of 20  Fossum’s focus on gnostic texts and phenomena has been taken up by his former pupil, April DeConick, in a number of publications, with particular reference to the Gospel of Thomas: e.g., Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas, VCSup 33 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); eadem, Voices of the Mystics: Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and Thomas and Other Ancient Christian Literature, JSNTSup 157 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). 21   Richard J. Bauckham, “The Worship of Jesus in Apocalyptic Christianity,” NTS 27 (1981): 322–41. See Bauckham’s expanded discussion in The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1993), 118–49. 22   Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology, WUNT 2/70 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995). 23  Cf., e.g., Edmondo Lupieri, The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 24  For Bousset’s discussion of Second-Temple Judaism, see Die Religion des Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter, ed. Hugo Gressmann, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1926), esp. 302–57. See my discussion of what appear to be differences of emphasis between this book and Kyrios Christos in this matter in Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 137–38

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course, late Second-Temple Jewish tradition had been in contact with Greek language, philosophical ideas, and Greco-Roman religious practices for a few centuries, and we should not re-erect some impermeable barrier between “Judaism” and “Hellenism.” But, whatever the selected appropriation of Greek language, concepts (e.g., Paul’s use of “conscience”), dining customs, and other cultural phenomena, Jewish concern for the cultic exclusivity of their ancestral deity remained strong. Whether early contributors such as Segal, Fossum, or Bauckham, or subsequent figures such as Newman, or Stuckenbruck, or Gieschen, or Capes and still others more recently, and whatever the differences over this or that specific matter, the shared view among all those who could be associated with the new Schule is that the Second-Temple Jewish tradition is the immediate matrix of the earliest expressions of the remarkable religious movement that became early Christianity. Across the first century and thereafter, to be sure, we also see the reaction to, and engagement with the wider cultural world of the time. But efforts to understand contextually the origins of the Jesus-movement must give first priority to Second-Temple Jewish traditions.25 Another distinguishing feature of the more recent Schule in comparison with the older one is the focus on christological issues. Personally, I see “christology” as usually understood to be a sub-set of phenomena dealing with the verbal expression of beliefs about Jesus, and I prefer the broader, umbrella term “Jesus-devotion” which allows us to take account also of the place of Jesus in worship, prayer, and associated ritual practices. But, whatever the terms used, this interest in the place of Jesus in earliest Christian circles marks the work of all who could be linked with the new Schule. I return to the importance of devotional practices later in this discussion. 2

Broad Results

To turn now to the broad results of the works in question, we can begin with chronology. To my knowledge, a shared emphasis of the new Schule scholars is that devotion to Jesus as somehow sharing in divine glory erupted and developed remarkably early. Actually, Bousset had arrived at a similar view, stressing (3rd ed., 199). Cf. also Larry W. Hurtado, “Ancient Jewish Monotheism’ in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” JAJ 4.3 (2013): 379–400. 25  For a recent example of this emphasis, see the multi-author volume, The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought, eds. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Benjamin E. Reynolds (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017).

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that from the first after his Damascus Road “revelation” Paul was introduced into circles of the Jesus-movement that were characterized by the sort of beliefs and ritual practices that are reflected in his letters.26 Given that Paul’s life-changing experience is typically dated sometime within the first couple of years after Jesus’ crucifixion, this is indeed early. To repeat the point for emphasis, however, the crucial difference between Bousset’s position and the newer Schule is that the latter scholars tend to agree that the treatment of the risen Jesus as sharing divine honors initially emerged among Judean-based circles of the Jesus-movement, not in diaspora locations.27 It was, in short, initially a novel development within the rich and varied Second-Temple Jewish tradition, not a simple case of the adoption of pagan religious ideas in a setting where they were dominant. This emphasis on the very early origin of Jesus-devotion, including beliefs that he shares the glory of God, and the accompanying ritual treatment of Jesus as rightful recipient of cultic reverence, distinguishes the scholars of the newer Schule from some other voices, who tend to place the development of a “divine” view of Jesus later in the first century and thereafter. These include, notably, James Dunn and Maurice Casey.28 These two scholars differ in specific explanations of why and how Jesus came to be treated as worthy of divine honor, but they agree in placing its development in the late first century CE. As we will see, however, to judge from the observations of most other scholars recently, Casey and Dunn represent now a minority view of the matter. Among the new Schule there are differences in how to understand the “high” Christology of the earliest years of the Jesus-movement, how precisely to express the relationship of the risen Jesus to the one God. But there is broad agreement that, at the very

26  Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 119–52. 27  See, e.g., my discussion of this topic in How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 32–38, and also the evidence of a Judean origin of Jesus-devotion, 38–42. 28  Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1991); idem, “Monotheism, Worship, and Christological Developments in the Pauline Churches,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, eds. Cary C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 214–33; J. D. G. Dunn, “The Making of Christology—Evolution or Unfolding?” in Jesus of Nazareth, Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology, eds. Joel B. Green and Max Turner (Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 437–52; idem, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), esp. 252–60; idem, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (London: SPCK; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).

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least, Jesus was posited as linked with God in beliefs and in devotional practices in a novel and remarkable closeness. To repeat the point for emphasis, the combined focus on a very early origin and a Judean provenance of devotion to Jesus as uniquely sharing divine glory and reverence is one of the major widely agreed results of scholarly work of the last several decades. It confirms Hengel’s memorable statement about the significance of the short time between Jesus’ crucifixion and the developments evident by the date of Paul’s earliest letters: “In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subsequent seven hundred years of church history.”29 There remains the question of how much Paul himself contributed to the developments reflected in his letters. In the work of some scholars, Paul is presented, if not as the founder of Christianity, at least as a highly creative theological figure.30 To be sure, Paul was a talented and articulate exponent and defender of his beliefs and apostolic ministry. He claimed a particular importance as “apostle to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:13), and fought to secure the legitimacy of his mission and his message to Gentiles over against some other Jewish believers who sought to require circumcision of male Gentiles and, it appears, a full observance of Torah. Paul’s defence of his Gentile mission led to his developed emphasis on the redemptive effects of Jesus’ death and resurrection, his “justification” language, and the transformative effects of the Holy Spirit, especially in the lives of the former pagans who were the typical recipients of his letters. But in basic matters of Jesus-devotion, so far as I can see he made no claim to originality, and the extant evidence suggests that the christological beliefs and devotional practices reflected in his letters were shared by Aramaic-speaking circles in Judea as well as among believers in the churches that he founded.31 Whatever your personal attitude toward the Jesus-devotion reflected in Paul’s letters, it is a fallacy to credit (or blame) him for inventing it. 29  Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, 39–40. 30  Note, e.g., the huge study of Paul’s theology by Dunn (The Theology of Paul the Apostle), and the still more massive one by N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2 vols. (London: SPCK, 2013). 31  E.g., Jerry L. Sumney, “Paul and Christ-Believing Jews Whom He Opposes,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts, ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 57–80, who rightly found that the differences between Paul and the other Jewish believers who opposed him had to do with questions about gentiles as members of the community of believers and the continuing applicability of Torah-observance to them. And see the recent judgement by Paula Fredriksen about Paul and James that “No ideological breach yawned between the two men” (Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018], 188).

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I tend to think that in basics of Jesus-devotion Paul mainly echoed “those who were in Christ” before him (to use his own phrase).32 And as I consider the work of other scholars who can be linked with the new Schule, there seems to be a broadly similar view of the matter.33 That is, Paul’s letters are important historically as windows opening onto the beliefs and practices broadly characteristic of Jewish and Gentile circles of believers, and not simply as novel theological tractates expressive of Paul’s creativity.34 This is reflected in various passages, such as 1 Corinthians 15:1–11 (recounting the shared kerygma stemming from Jerusalem witnesses), and his relating of his conversations with Jerusalem leaders in Galatians 2. Even the logic of his rebuke of Kephas/Peter in Galatians 2:11–16 actually presupposes a shared belief in the unique efficacy of Jesus, and the necessity of trust in Jesus (among Jews as well as Gentiles) for eschatological justification/salvation. Paul then used this shared belief as the premise for his critique of Kephas’ withdrawal from table-fellowship with gentile believers in Antioch. Another broadly convergent view among new Schule scholars is that, in its original setting in Second-Temple Judaism and the wider Roman environment, the Jesus-devotion reflected in Paul’s letters (and thereafter in later texts) is historically novel and noteworthy.35 In my 1988 book, One God, One Lord, I detailed the similarities of early christological beliefs to elements in other Jewish traditions of the time, especially “chief agent” figures, and I proposed that these traditions were initial conceptual resources that earliest believers drew upon in framing a view of the risen Jesus vis-à-vis God. But I also noted that 32   The phrase comes from Romans 16:7. Still instructive is the pioneering study by A. M. Hunter, Paul and His Predecessors, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961; 1st ed., 1940). 33  I mention here Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr’s study, Heidenapostel aus Israel: Die jüdische Identität des Paulus nach ihrer Darstellung in seinen Briefen, WUNT 62 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), which preceded the now-growing number of works emphasizing Paul’s Jewish self-identity and his mission to bring pagans to the God of Israel. 34  Consequently, I have preferred to discuss “Early Pauline Christianity,” in Lord Jesus Christ, 79–153, rather than Pauline theology. 35  I am aware of Jonathan Z. Smith’s critique of claims about early Christian distinctiveness in Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), esp. 36–53. The matter deserves a fuller discussion, but I will only say here that the historical data justify the judgement that in some features the Jesus-movement was already distinctive and novel from the outset, and to make that judgement does not have to serve any apologetic purpose. Of course, distinctiveness (or Smith’s preferred term “difference”) does not mean validity. The latter is a theological judgement. And if we should be wary of apologetical strategems, we should also not be allergic to the historical judgement of distinctiveness if it is supported by the data.

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early christological claims appeared to comprise a breadth that went beyond the claims about other chief agent figures. For example, the Melchizedek of the Qumran texts is to be the heavenly leader in the eschatological triumph of the elect, but he is assigned no other role.36 Likewise, the messianic figure of the Parables of Enoch is chosen and designated (named) from the beginning of creation (1 Enoch 48:2–3; 62:7), but seems to have no role in creation, and is kept hidden until his eschatological appearance. On the other hand, the personified Wisdom or Philo’s Logos are active in creation and the continuing manifestation of God in the world, but do not have an eschatological role.37 But, already in Paul’s letters, for example, Jesus is posited as “pre-existent” and the unique agent of creation (e.g., 1 Cor 8:4–6) as well as the exalted Messiah and Lord who is to execute divine eschatological redemption and judgement (e.g., 1 Thess 1:9–10; 4:13–18); and he is also the promised “seed” of Abraham who incorporates into one multi-national family all those who trust in him (e.g., Gal 3:6–18). In short, although one can find parallels for this or that christological claim in Second-Temple Jewish traditions, the collective breadth and combination of christological claims and roles heaped upon Jesus seems to be novel. Likewise, when we take account also of the constellation of devotional actions characteristic of earliest circles of believers, we are presented with another novel and highly noteworthy development in historical terms. I first drew attention to this matter in my 1988 book and have reiterated the point in a number of publications since then.38 In order to make that point as clear as I could, I have repeatedly specified the devotional/ritual actions that comprise this novel “mutation” in Second-Temple Jewish devotional practices. I will not, therefore, lay them out again here in detail. But, to cite only a few examples, the baptismal initiation-rite of earliest circles of the Jesus-movement involved the ritual use of Jesus’ name, a practice for which we have no analogy, and which 36  See now the summary of Qumran references to Melchizedek with key bibliography by Eric F. Mason, “Melchizedek Scroll (11Q13),” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, eds. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 932–34. I have surveyed the Qumran evidence and its relevance for earliest Jesus-devotion in my essay, “Monotheism, Principal Angels, and the Background of Christology,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, eds. Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 546–64. 37  See, e.g., Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 41–48. 38  E.g., Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 93–124; idem, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); idem, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? esp. 48–53; idem, Lord Jesus Christ, 134–53; and most recently, idem, Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).

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effectively made Jesus the one with whom the baptized identified themselves.39 The place of Jesus in prayer practices of early circles also gave them a distinctive character, prayer typically offered in Jesus’ name and/or through Jesus, prayer offered to God and Jesus jointly, and even (though less frequently) to Jesus directly.40 Another practice, the ritual invocation of Jesus in the context of gathered worship, indeed, perhaps as the constitutive ritual of gathered worship, is also remarkable. Indeed, Paul refers to this practice in 1 Corinthians 1:2, as a simple designation of believers, who are “all those in every place who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The practice seems to be reflected also in Romans 10:9–13, which climaxes in declaring that the Lord (Jesus) is “rich to all who call upon him,” then appropriating the text from Joel 2:32 (LXX 3:5), “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Paul’s phrasing in these texts is an obvious christological adaptation of the biblical expression, “call upon the name of the Lord,” which typically designates worship of, and prayer to, YHWH.41 But I emphasize that this also reflects a ritual adaptation, in which the Lord called upon in prayer/acclamation is the exalted Jesus. In earliest Christian ritual practice, in the worship gathering believers “call upon the name” of Jesus, another phenomenon for which we have no analogy in Second-Temple Jewish tradition. But it has been a bit frustrating that some other scholars have apparently found it difficult to grasp the historical significance of these and other related ritual phenomena.42 Of course, as some critics have been keen to point out, in earliest circles of believers Jesus was not worshipped as a separate or second deity, and reverence for Jesus did not lessen or interfere with their worship of 39  Lars Hartman, “‘Into the Name of Jesus’,” NTS 20 (1974): 432–40; idem, “Early Baptism— Early Christology,” in The Future of Christology: Essays in Honor of Leander E. Keck, eds. A. J. Malherbe and W. A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 191–201; idem, ‘Into the Name of the Lord Jesus’: Baptism in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997). 40   Larry W. Hurtado, “The Place of Jesus in Earliest Christian Prayer and Its Import for Early Christian Identity,” in Early Christian Prayer and Identity Formation, eds. Reidar Hvalvik and Karl Olav Sandnes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 35–56. Also Paul F. Bradshaw, “The Status of Jesus in Early Christian Prayer Texts,” in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology, ed. Susan E. Myers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 249–60. Among older studies, see Joseph Jungmann, The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer, 2d rev. ed., trans. A. Peeler (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1965); Aleksy Klawek, Das Gebet zu Jesus: Seine Berechtigung und Übung nach den Schriften des Neuen Testaments: Eine biblisch-theologische Studie, NTAbh 6/5 (Münster: Aschendorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1921). 41  E.g., Psalms 116:13, 17; Zephaniah 3:9. Similar expressions are, e.g., in Psalms 18:3; 80:18; 86:5, 7; 99:6; 105:1; Isaiah 12:4; Jeremiah 29:12. 42  E.g., Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? Dunn practically ignores the specifics and focuses more on smaller terminological issues, such as the use of the term proskyneo.

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God. Instead, Jesus was given cultic reverence precisely in his relationship to the one God, and cultic reverence of Jesus was seen by earliest believers as now a mandatory feature of the worship of God.43 They likely saw themselves as anticipating and ritually enacting the future universal obeisance to the exalted Jesus that is projected in Philippians 2:9–11. But, whether one labels the ritual practices in question as comprising “worship” or some weaker term, my claim is that the constellation of devotional practices featuring Jesus centrally and uniquely comprised a historical innovation in the devotional practices otherwise observed in Second-Temple Jewish tradition. Moreover, given the centrality of worship practices in ancient Judaism and the wider Roman world as the core of what we would call “religion,” this innovation must be seen as historically noteworthy.44 To cite another example, in contrast to the invocation of various powerful beings in pagan and Jewish magical practices, the exclusive use of Jesus’ name in healing and exorcism surely sets apart earliest Christian practices.45 I reiterate the point that the various ritual practices that featured Jesus so centrally are, thus, important early expressions of a discrete group-formation distinguishing early Jesus-believers in their religious environment, and yet studies of the social formation of earliest Christianity do not often take account of these phenomena.46 My emphasis on the devotional practices of earliest circles of Jesus-believers, however, actually echoes a view of some key scholars of many decades ago, including Bousset. In his view, the emergence of the “Kyrios cult” (his term) was a major step with momentous consequences (although he placed this development in diaspora locations and in the “Hellenistic Gentile” churches).47 43  I have discussed the relationship of Jesus and God, both in earliest Christian discourse and in devotional practices, in Hurtado, God in New Testament Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010). 44  For emphasis on this point, see Hurtado, Honoring the Son. 45   Larry W. Hurtado, “The Ritual Use of Jesus’ Name in Early Christian Healing and Exorcism,” forthcoming in a multi-author volume edited by Tommy Wasserman. 46   Larry W. Hurtado, “Earliest Expressions of a Discrete Group-Formation among Jesus-Believers,” Estudios Biblicos 75.3 (2017): 451–70; Gerard Rouwhorst, “Identität durch Gebet: Gebetstexte als Zeugen eines jahrhundertelangen Ringens um Kontinuität und Differenz zwischen Judentum und Christentum,” in Identität durch Gebet: Zur gemeinschaftsbildenden Funktion institutionalisierten Betens in Judentum und Christentum, eds. Albert Gerhards, Andrea Doeker and Peter Ebenbauer (Zürich: Ferdinand Schnöningh, 2003), 37–55; and, on the importance of ritual in the study of early Christianity more generally, Risto Uro, Ritual and Christian Beginnings: A Socio-Cognitive Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 47  Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 119–52.

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Similarly, other earlier scholars such as Johannes Weiss and Adolf Deissmann agreed on the historical importance of the cultic reverence given to Jesus, and furthermore, contra Bousset, insisted that its origins lay in Judean circles of believers.48 Among more recent scholars, note David Aune’s judgement: “Perhaps the single most important historical development within the early church was the rise of the cultic worship of the exalted Jesus within the primitive Palestinian church.”49 Likewise, although Stuckenbruck urged the possible significance of “venerative language” about angels in ancient Jewish tradition, he granted that there is no parallel or precedent for the full devotional pattern reflected already in Paul’ letters in which the exalted Jesus features so characteristically and centrally.50 Among other results of the work of scholars associated with the new Schule, there is Newman’s study of Paul’s use of “glory” (doxa) as both a key attribute of God and one uniquely shared with Jesus.51 Newman persuasively showed that Paul’s use of the term owes entirely to its prior (and distinctive) usage in the LXX and ancient Jewish tradition (a point reinforced now in his own essay for this conference). The remarkable and innovative step was to ascribe to the risen Jesus uniquely the role of reflecting and sharing this divine glory. Donald Juel’s pithy study, Messianic Exegesis, showed how earliest believers searched their scriptures and read them creatively in light of Jesus.52 David Capes provided what is now the best discussion of the appropriation of particular biblical texts that originally referred to YHWH to make christological claims in earliest circles of Jesus-believers.53 More recently, this emphasis on 48  Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, trans. William E. Wilson, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 113–32; Johannes Weiss, Earliest Christianity, trans. Frederick C. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959; original ed. 1937), 1:37–38. 49   David E. Aune, The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity, NovTSup 28 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 5. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann’s echoing of Bousset’s stance in Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 1:51, “In any case, the earliest Church did not cultically worship Jesus, even if it should have called him Lord; the Kyrios-cult originated on Hellenistic soil.” 50  Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology, esp. 269–73; and also “Worship and Monotheism in the Ascension of Isaiah,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers From the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, eds. Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila and Gladys S. Lewis (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 70–89. 51   Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). See also Newman’s essay in this volume. 52  Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). 53   David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT 2/47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), and now his essay in this volume. Note also Carl Judson Davis, The Name and Way of the Lord: Old Testament Themes, New Testament Christology, JSNTSup 129

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the earliest mining of biblical texts in the formation and expression of beliefs about Jesus is the subject of a study by David Allen, focusing on the appropriation of OT texts to interpret Jesus’ death.54 I have mentioned already Stuckenbruck’s studies of angel-veneration and their relevance for earliest Jesus-devotion. In the 1970s–1990s, there were a number of other works that focused particularly on the significance of traditions about principal angels as a conceptual resource in framing christological beliefs, including those by Darrell Hannah, Kevin Sullivan, Peter Carrell, and Charles Gieschen.55 All of them agreed, however, that the full cultic reverence given to Jesus reflected in the NT writings was a distinctive development. 3

Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive?

There is a certain satisfaction in having the work noticed in which one has participated, and it is all the more encouraging when that work is affirmed by other scholars. It was, therefore, a distinct pleasure to take part in a colloquium sponsored by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Theologie in Berlin in 2005 that was devoted to a critical appraisal of my 2003 book, Lord Jesus Christ.56 In a sizeable discussion originally presented in that colloquium, Jörg Frey referred to “eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive,” rightly citing Hengel as initiating it, but then also taking notice of the work of other scholars, including my 2003 book, as comprising this “new perspective” on the origins

(Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1996). Also worth noting is Larry J. Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology, JSNTSup 19 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987). 54  David Allen, According to the Scriptures: The Death of Christ in the Old Testament and the New (London: SCM, 2018). Allen’s title makes an obvious allusion to the classic study by C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology (London: Collins, 1952). 55   Darrell D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, WUNT 2/109 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999); Kevin P. Sullivan, Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship Between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament, AGJU 55 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Peter Carrell, Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John, SNTSMS 95 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, AGJU 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 56  The papers from that colloquium were included with those from another colloquium on the book by Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte, eds. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

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of devotion to Jesus, an outlook that Frey affirms.57 Another indication of the impact of this body of work is given in Andrew Chester’s assessment in 2011: The clear (though not unanimous) scholarly consensus is that, despite all the problems it creates for our understanding of early Christianity, a Christology that portrays Christ as divine emerges very early, in distinctively Jewish terminology and within a Jewish context.58 A page later, in commenting on the import of Philippians 2:6–11, Chester wrote of there having been made “a sustained, cumulative case for there being some kind of cult of Christ in Christian circles in Palestine as well as in the Pauline communities.”59 But not everyone agrees with the views taken by those associated with the new Schule. One of the critics is Adela Yarbro Collins, who has contended that more influence should be granted to pagan cults, particularly emperor-cults. She acknowledged that cultic devotion to Jesus emerged early and in circles of Jewish followers of Jesus, but urged that “non-Jewish Hellenistic and Roman traditions as well as Jewish traditions” shaped their views and experiences. She appears to refer to notions of apotheosis and multiple divine beings. So, she contended that it is plausible that early Jesus-followers “deliberately and consciously” adopted these non-Jewish traditions “as a way of formulating a culturally meaningful system of belief and life.”60 Indeed, she even proposed

57  Jörg Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive: Larry W. Hurtados Lord Jesus Christ und die Herasusbildung der frühen Christologie,” in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion, 117–69. Also particularly noteworthy is the essay by Jens Schröter, “Trinitarian Belief, Binitarian Monotheism, and the One God: Reflections on the Origin of Christian Faith in Affiliation to Larry Hurtado’s Christological Approach,” 171–94. 58  Andrew Chester, “High Christology—Whence, When and Why?” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22–50, citing 38. 59  Chester, “High Christology,” 39. I note also the generous statement by Richard Bauckham: “that it is no longer unusual to seek the origins of high Christology within early Jewish Christianity is in large measure due to [One God, One Lord], supplemented by Hurtado’s numerous subsequent publications on the subject,” in “Devotion to Jesus Christ in Earliest Christianity: An Appraisal and Discussion of the Work of Larry Hurtado,” in Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado, eds. Chris Keith and Dieter T. Roth (London: Bloomsbury T.&T. Clark, 2014), 176–200, citing 176–77. 60  Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, eds. Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila and Gladys S. Lewis (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 234–57, citing 242.

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that “the imperial cult was a catalyst in the origin of the worship of Jesus.”61 Elsewhere I have given reasons why I find her proposals unconvincing, so I shall be brief here.62 I simply find it implausible that self-identifying Jews deeply committed to their messianic hopes and to their ancestral traditions and deity would deliberately adopt from pagan cults ideas that we know Jews of the time typically found repellent. To imagine that they did so to make their message more in line with pagan ideas is, likewise, simplistic and fails to engage the evidence that those who spread the gospel message, such as Paul, were concerned to distinguish their message in the religious environment of the time (e.g., 1 Cor 8:4–6; 10:14–22). To be sure, Paul and other early believers sought to make themselves understood by the pagans they addressed. But I see no indication that this involved them in appropriating pagan religious ideas in some sort of communications or marketing tactic. Indeed, the exalted place of Jesus in earliest circles of the Jesus-movement actually caused difficulties in promoting their gospel, especially, but by no means exclusively, among Jewish audiences.63 And Celsus’ critique of early Christianity shows that Jesus-devotion made no sense to a good many pagans also.64 From another standpoint, Dieter Zeller has observed, contra Bousset, “today it is generally agreed” that the cultic veneration of Jesus as Kyrios “probably goes back to the primitive community [in Judea].”65 But he then urges that the “former pagans” in the wider Roman world who converted to the early Jesus-movement would have understood the various christological themes in light of their own religious/mythological background. Zeller might have a point, in the case of pagan outsiders and critics such as Celsus, or if we imagine the “former pagans” in question to have confronted the christological claims of the earliest proponents of the Jesus-movement “cold” (so to speak), with no advice or teaching to assist them in grasping these claims. But is this really 61  Yarbro Collins, “The Worship of Jesus,” 251. 62  In an epilogue to the third edition of One God, One Lord (London: T.&T. Clark, 2015), 135– 88, I review and assess the discussion of the origins of Jesus devotion after the 1998 second edition. I consider Yarbro Collins’ position, 143–49. 63   Larry W. Hurtado, “Early Jewish Opposition to Jesus-Devotion,” JTS 50 (1999): 35–58, republished in Hurtado, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? 152–78. 64  Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). On Celsus and the attitudes toward early Christianity in other pagan critiques, see, e.g., Robert L. Wilken, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and, more recently, Jeffrey W. Hargis, Against the Christians: The Rise of Early Anti-Christian Polemic, Patristic Studies 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 65  Dieter Zeller, “New Testament Christology in Its Hellenistic Reception,” NTS 47 (2001): 312–33, citing 315.

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plausible, or is it not more likely (as reflected in Paul’s letters) that the declaration of earliest christological beliefs and practices went hand in hand with efforts to clarify and distinguish them within the wider religious environment? Is it not unhistorical to imagine that Paul’s “former pagans” were left on their own and orphaned, so to speak, as to the meaning of the gospel that Paul proclaimed? As an example of the clarification that went on, there is Paul’s distinction between the “many gods and many lords” of the pagan environment and the exclusive “one God” and “one Lord” that his converts are to reverence (1 Cor 8:4–6). Moreover, whatever their lack of previous exposure to christological claims, pagan converts would have quickly experienced the group interactive effects of the ekklesias in interpreting and responding to these claims. Zeller also contends, however, that the scholars of the older Schule were correct to propose direct pagan influences on the shaping of christological beliefs and terminology. He argues, for example, that the reference to Jesus as Kyrios reflects the use of the term for “Egyptian, Syrian and Thracian gods.”66 That the term was used for pagan deities, however, is both true and irrelevant as far as the question of the stimulus and origin of the application of the term to the exalted Jesus. For, clearly, as evident in the frequent appropriation of “YHWH texts” in the NT, the more immediate and relevant use of Kyrios is in Greek-speaking Jewish usage of the term as the verbal surrogate for YHWH, and the use of Hebrew and Aramaic equivalent terms.67 Zeller also opposes as “improbable” the view that 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 represents any adaptation of, or allusion to, the Shema. Instead, he claims, “Paul 66  Zeller, “New Testament Christology,” 318. 67  On the use of Kyrios in Paul’s letters, Hurtado, “Lord,” DPL, 560–69. On the Semitic equivalents, see J. A. Fitzmyer, “The Semitic Background of the New Testament Kyrios Title,” in A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 115–42. Earliest Jewish usage of Kyrios with reference to YHWH may have been as the Greek oral substitute. The earliest extant manuscripts of the Greek OT writings typically have YHWH in Hebrew characters, but Albert Pietersma argued that this was actually a secondary development, and that originally YHWH was translated as Kyrios: “Kyrios or Tetragram: A Renewed Quest for the Original Septuagint,” in Studies in Honour of John W. Wevers on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, eds. Albert Pietersma and Claude Cox (Mississauga: Benben Publishers, 1984), 85–101, a view now supported also by Martin Rösel, Adonaj, warum Gott ‘Herr’ genannt wird, FAT 29 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); idem, “Die Übersetzung der Gottesbezeichnungen in der Genesis-Septuaginta,” in Ernten, was man sät: Festschrift für Klaus Koch zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, eds. Dwight R. Daniels, Uwe Glessmer and Martin Rösel (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991), 357–77. On the use of “YHWH texts,” see Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts. On the written treatment of the tetragrammaton and the use of oral substitutes, see now the wide-ranging study by Anthony Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism: Use and Non-Use in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2017).

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or his tradition clothed their monotheistic confession in a Hellenistic form moulded not on Deut 6.4 but on Xenophanes, as is often the case in Hellenistic Judaism.”68 Granted, the use of the prepositions in 1 Corinthians 8:6, positing “one God the Father from whom [ἐξ οὑ�͂] are all things” and “for whom [εἰς αὐτοῦ] we are,” and the “one Lord Jesus Christ through whom [δι’ οὑ�͂] are all things and through whom [δι’ αὐτοῦ] we are,” seems to be an adaptation of the use of these prepositions in Greek philosophical discourse. But, as Zeller notes, these prepositions also had been adopted in Jewish discussion about originating and intermediate causation and creation, and likely reached Paul through this prior Jewish usage, as reflected in Philo (e.g., Cherubim 125–27). Zeller seems to me to commit the historiographical equivalent of the etymological fallacy, taking the origin of an item as key to its subsequent meaning. But, as in linguistics, it is the usage of a term or phrase that determines its meaning. Although originating in Greek philosophical circles, by Paul’s day such prepositional phrases were a part of learned Greek-speaking Jewish discourse, which is the more immediate and relevant context and usage in which to approach Paul’s use.69 Moreover, Paul’s emphasis on the singularity of “one God” in the passage must surely reflect traditional Jewish confession of God’s uniqueness.70 So, however improbable it may be to Zeller, with most other scholars who have looked at the question, I think that 1 Corinthians 8:6 represents a distinctive christological adaptation of the traditional Jewish confession of the one God, using these Greek prepositional phrases for an inclusion of the one Lord, Jesus, vis-à-vis the one God, as the unique agent of creation and redemption.71 I should also mention two other studies that posit an adversarial stance over against the positions advocated by Hengel and others in the new Schule. I begin with Michael Peppard’s book in which he urges the relevance of imperial divine sonship language for NT christological texts, in particular, the Gospel of Mark.72 Peppard starts out declaring that he wants only to explore 68  Zeller, “New Testament Christology,” 320. 69  Gregory Sterling, “Prepositional Metaphysics in Jewish Wisdom Speculation and Early Christological Hymns,” in Wisdom and Logos: Studies in Jewish Thought in Honor of David Winston, eds. D. T. Runia and Gregory E. Sterling (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 219–38. 70  On the use and particular import of “one God” and “only God” expressions, see now Darina Staudt, Der eine und einzige Gott: Monotheistische Formeln im Urchristentum und ihre Vorgeschichte bei Griechen und Juden, NTOA 80 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 71  On 1 Cor 8:4–6 see, e.g., Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 635–38. 72  Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). I offered an extended

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“resonances” of early christological claims in the context of the Roman-era environment, that is, how pagan readers of Mark may have understood it, not what the authors of early Christian texts intended.73 But then he quickly turns to arguing for supposedly intentional connections on the part of NT authors, and this kind of argument is really his main focus in the book. His discussion of imperial sonship and adoption practices is informative and interesting, but, despite his valiant efforts he seems to me to fail to make the case that the baptismal scene in Mark depicts a divine adoption of Jesus.74 In any case, I also have to complain about the gratuitously negative and misleading characterization of my own work, and to a lesser degree Hengel’s work as well. Across some six pages of a virtual fusillade fired at me, among other charges he accuses me of “a spirit of neo-orthodoxy,” and an apologetical purpose undergirded with “a Platonic framework,” and then he reaches a rhetorical crescendo in asserting “Hurtado’s analysis ignores just about everything religious going on in the Roman world.”75 Readers of my work can judge for themselves, but his caricature of my efforts seems to me unfair. Such wild exaggerations as his statement are hardly conducive to serious academic engagement with the relevant issues. To turn to a substantive matter, Peppard fails to see that his project and mine are different, and the conflict between them imaginary. His more narrow focus is on how imperial divine sonship claims may have helped to shape divine sonship discourse in early Christianity, especially in the Gospels, whereas my broader focus has been on when and how devotion to Jesus as sharing in divine honor emerged and developed across the first couple of centuries. Contra Peppeard’s charges that I ignore the matter, I have in fact indicated that the increased prominence of divine sonship language in the later first century and thereafter may well have been in response to the increasing prominence

review in a blog post: https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/the-son-of-god-in and-the-roman-empire-a-review-essay/. 73  Peppard cites two essays by Adela Yarbro Collins as the sort of study of “resonances” that he seeks to undertake: Adela Yarbro Collins, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Jews,” HTR 92 (1999): 393–408; eadem, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Greeks and Romans,” HTR 93 (2000): 85–100. 74  Cf. also Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 149–50, who grants that “it may be” that in some contexts the language of the heavenly voice in Mark 1:11 could have “evoked ideas of adoption,” but she prefers to see the scene as depicting God’s appointment of Jesus as messiah. I discuss the text in an essay, “Mark’s Presentation of Jesus,” forthcoming in a multi-author volume edited by Anthony LeDonne. 75  Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World, 21–26.

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of divine sonship claims in the Flavian dynasty and subsequent ones.76 But imperial divine sonship claims will hardly serve to account for the initial eruption of cultic devotion to Jesus and the impetus for the striking christological claims (including Jesus’ divine sonship) that pepper the earliest texts of the Jesus-movement.77 Another work to mention here is David Litwa’s study, Iesus Deus.78 As with Peppard, Litwa’s review of previous scholarship includes particularly a chiding of Hengel and me as well, accusing us of a one-sided emphasis on the Jewish origins, to the neglect of the wider cultural resources available to early Christians in their depictions of Jesus. I have responded to Litwa’s book in a blog post shortly after it appeared, and here I will simply reiterate a few main points.79 The first, and perhaps most important point to make is that Litwa (as also the case with Peppard) really does not focus on the same questions that those of us he criticizes have addressed. Litwa explores how early Christians reflected and adapted wider ways of expressing a figure’s divine status in their literary depictions of Jesus. He rests his case on literary motifs in the Gospels. For example, as he rightly argues, the nativity accounts attribute to Jesus a remarkable birth-story, a motif often ascribed to great figures in the Greco-Roman era. As another example, the miracle-stories of the Gospels, he cogently contends, would have also signalled in that era the claim that Jesus was endowed with divine power. There is little to argue about here, for Litwa cites matters that have been commented on since at least the second century. Indeed, as others (including me) have noted, the very bios-shaped accounts of Jesus in our NT narrative Gospels reflect the appropriation and adaptation of a genre from the 76  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 75–76; idem, “Christ-Devotion in the First Two Centuries: Reflections and a Proposal,” TJT 12 (1996): 17–33, esp. 24–25. See also my analysis of divine sonship in Paul: “Son of God,” DPL, 900–906; and “Jesus’ Divine Sonship in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” in Romans and the People of God, eds. Sven K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 217–33; and more recently in Lord Jesus Christ, 101–8. Still worth consulting is A. D. Nock, “‘Son of God’ in Pauline and Hellenistic Thought,” in Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 928–39. 77  Cf. also Adolf Deissmann, Bible Studies: Contributions From Papyri and Inscriptions to the History of the Language, the Literature, and the Religion of Hellenistic Judaism and Primitive Christianity, trans. A. J. Grieve (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1923 [German 1897]), 166–67, who saw imperial divine sonship language as forming part of the background of early Christian usage, but not indicative of the origin of divine sonship claims in the NT. 78   M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). 79  https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/jewish-and-hellenistic-in-recent-scholar ship-on-christian-origins/.

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wider literary environment of the day.80 The questions that Hengel and others associated with his work have focused on, however, concern the impetus and origins of the core convictions about Jesus’ significance, and the early ritual expression of these convictions as well. But neither Litwa nor Peppard addresses these more fundamental questions of those whom they criticize! A second point to make is that the sharp distinction between “Jewish” and “Hellenistic” criticized by Litwa (and Peppard) actually originated with the scholars of the older history of religion Schule, not with Hengel and those others whom Litwa accuses of this. Pfleiderer, for example, sometimes referred to as the father of the religionsgeschichtliche approach (and whom Litwa cites approvingly several times), wrote of “the deliverance of the Christian idea from the rigid fetters of Judaism” that was accomplished by adopting “myths and rites” from various pagan sources, which were “free from that slavery to history which is the characteristic of Judaism and every legal religion.”81 Also, Bousset’s disdain for things Jewish is well attested, as is his dubious claim that the treatment of Jesus as sharing divine glory could not have originated in Jewish soil, but only in a pagan setting.82 As I have noted already, this programme of portraying early Christianity as decisively shaped by non-Jewish forces involved an over-simplification of ancient Jewish tradition, an overt anti-Jewish attitude, and a cultural and theological agenda shaping the historical analysis.83 Those such as Hengel and others of the new Schule, subsequently, who have pointed to the rich and diverse Second-Temple Jewish context as the more immediate matrix of fundamental beliefs and devotional practices of the early Jesus-movement were trying to re-balance matters. Contra Litwa (and J. Z. Smith on whom he relies), they did not create the “Jewish or Hellenistic” divide, but responded to the overly sharp and simplistic schema of scholars of the older Schule by giving a more nuanced and rich view of Second-Temple Judaism.

80  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 270–82, esp. 277–82. I adopt the term “bios” from Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). 81  Otto Pfleiderer, The Early Conception of Christ: Its Significance and Value in the History of Religion (London: Williams & Norgate, 1905), 168. 82  See my critique of Bousset on this matter in One God, One Lord, 22–24. 83  Again, see Lehmkühler, Kultus und Theologie; Marchand, German Orientalism, esp. 252–91.

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4 Conclusion There is, however, rarely a complete consensus on anything in the study of Christian origins, and so it is not surprising that disagreements remain about the origins of Jesus-devotion, perhaps the single most neuralgic issue in the field.84 But, to judge from the observations of some others, such as those cited earlier from Frey and Chester, there appears to be at least a growing groundswell of opinion that reflects the work of those who might be associated with “a new religionsgeschichtliche Schule.” As a further example, note Bart Ehrman’s recent general-reader book on the subject. He confesses that in doing his research for it he was compelled to change his initial assumption that the treatment of Jesus as sharing somehow in divine status emerged only slowly across the first century, and in considering recent scholarly work came to the view that it erupted early and quickly.85 But, whatever the extent of the acceptance of the work of the new Schule, the continuing flow of PhD theses and books on the origins and early development of Jesus-devotion, almost always showing engagement with the works of scholars who can be associated with the Schule, surely shows that they have helped to shape the agenda of the investigation of Christian origins. That, in itself, may be a sufficient contribution.

84  I mention here another zealous critic of the new Schule: J. R. Daniel Kirk, A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). Despite the martial language he uses (referring to the “onslaught” of high-christology advocates), his work, likewise, is not really a refutation of, or even a direct engagement with, the questions and arguments of those whom he criticizes. He is correct to emphasize that the Synoptic Gospels in particular narrate the activities of a fully human figure. There is surely little argument over that. But he errs in supposing that the Synoptic writers do not suggest that this historical figure also bore any transcendent significance. See my review of his book here: https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2017/03/11/a-man-approved-by-god -a-review/. Cf. also Larry W. Hurtado, “Resurrection-Faith and the ‘Historical’ Jesus,” JSHJ 11.1 (2013): 35–52, republished in Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion, 583–99, in which I propose that the experiences of the resurrected Jesus underscored for earliest believers the importance of Jesus’ earthly ministry. 85   Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 279, on the “remarkably early” emergence of belief in Jesus’ “pre-existence” and “incarnation”. And see 235, where he notes approvingly my emphasis on the early cultic veneration of Jesus. I cannot engage here Ehrman’s erroneous claim that Paul saw the pre-existent Jesus as a high angel, or his curious views on some other issues. See my review of his book in The Christian Century (21 July, 2014), republished in Hurtado, Honoring the Son, 67–76.

Chapter 3

The Universal Polytheism and the Case of the Jews Matthew V. Novenson “You shall have no other gods before me,” someone has said. But what if another god is not actually another god, but one’s own god under a different name? The implications for sogenannte monotheism would be significant, to say the least. The present essay takes as a point of departure the claim recently advanced by Robert Parker that there was in antiquity something that we could—or indeed should—call “the universal polytheism.” In his 2017 book Greek Gods Abroad (the print incarnation of his Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley for 2013), Parker coins that phrase and explicates it as follows: “[There was] the shared assumption, grounded in interpretatio, that at bottom the gods you worship are also the gods I do or might worship … Perhaps it is a mistake to speak of ancient polytheisms in the plural at all. From an actor’s perspective the world was divided between different countries and tribes and political systems, but it was not divided between different gods: there was only one ancient polytheism, one set of gods ruling the entire world.”*1 Parker’s claim is something more than the familiar notion, mentioned in his opening sentence cited above, that many ancients practiced interpretatio, that is, the identification of a foreign god with an indigenous god via a theory of multiple divine names (e.g., Zeus is Ammon, Thoth is Hermes, and so on). That interpretatio happened is well known and has been much discussed. Parker’s more ambitious claim is that the ubiquitous ancient practice of interpretatio presupposes an equally ubiquitous and quite particular cosmology, a cosmology according to which there is precisely one pantheon, “one set of gods ruling the entire world,” one universal polytheism. This is a big, bold claim. I happen to think that it is probably true, at least for a great deal of our extant evidence. But my purpose in this essay is not to re-litigate the question of its truth or falsehood; people interested in doing so can read Parker’s book.2 *  This essay benefited a great deal from critical discussion at the Edinburgh colloquium, in particular Paula Fredriksen’s prepared response and perceptive questions from Richard Bauckham and Jan Bremmer. I am liable for any remaining faults in the essay. 1  Robert Parker, Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures, and Transformations (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 76. 2  For discussion, see the reviews by Frederick G. Naerebout in BMCR (2018) and Barbara Graziosi in TLS (17 April 2018).

© MATTHEW V. NOVENSON, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_004

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My purpose in this essay is to take Parker’s universal polytheism as a working hypothesis and to consider a case that might be taken, and certainly has often been taken, to represent a counterexample: namely, the case of ancient Jews and their god. I raise the question of the case of the Jews, first, because that is my own area of specialism and, second, because the secondary literature is rife with claims that ancient Jews stood apart from the prevailing Graeco-Roman practice of interpretatio. Sometimes this claim is made in sympathy with ancient Jews, as, for instance, in Anathea Portier-Young’s account of the Seleucids’ introduction of the cult of Zeus Olympios to Jerusalem: I argue that even the suggested identification of Yhwh and Zeus entails a negation of all that Israel’s traditions claimed for the Lord … If the rededication of Yhwh’s Jerusalem temple to Zeus Olympios meant identifying the Lord with Zeus, it could affirm the Lord’s power only by assimilating Israel’s God into the pantheon of Greek gods. While not denying the existence of Israel’s God, this assimilation would deny the particularity of Israel’s confession and election. Worse than meaningless, such an identification would lay claim to a tradition in order to negate it.3 Elsewhere, fascinatingly, one finds the selfsame claim advanced from an opposite posture of hostility to the view supposedly held by ancient Jews. The standard-bearer for this perspective is Jan Assman: The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new distinction which considerably changed the world in which it was drawn … We may call this new type of religion ‘counter-religion’ because it rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as ‘paganism.’ It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement. Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.4 Praise them as Portier-Young does, or blame them as Assman does, but many scholars evidently agree that ancient Jews were unable or unwilling to translate 3  Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 202. 4  Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.

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their god into a foreign idiom, or foreign gods into theirs. If there was a universal polytheism, it was not altogether universal, since it did not extend as far as the Jews. So the argument goes. But is it so? 1

The Universal Polytheism

First of all, we may briefly sketch the evidence for Parker’s universal polytheism, just to get an idea of what it is that ancient Jews are said not to have participated in. The core idea is that, although the gods have many names among the many peoples of the inhabited world, nevertheless the pantheon is one. As Cicero has Cotta explain: “Come now, do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you; you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain” (Cicero, De natura deorum 1.83–84; trans. Ando).5 If Cicero’s Cotta is right about the one pantheon, then it should, in theory, be possible to look past the several indigenous (e.g., Italian, African, Spanish) names to the selfsame god (e.g., Vulcan) standing behind them. And in fact, ancient efforts to do just this are ubiquitous in the sources. Modern interpreters call this theological activity interpretatio,6 borrowing a line from Tacitus’s account of a certain Germanic cult: “Among the Naharvali is shown a grove, the seat of a prehistoric ritual. A priest presides in female dress, but the gods commemorated there are, according to interpretatio Romana, Castor and Pollux. That, at least, is the power manifested by the godhead, whose name is Alci. There are no images, no trace of any foreign superstition, but nevertheless, they worship these gods as brothers and young men” (Tacitus, Germania 43.4; trans. Hutton and Warmington in LCL). The Naharvali call the gods Alci, but Tacitus recognizes them as Castor and Pollux. When Tacitus does this, we call it interpretatio Romana, but by extension, one can imagine an interpretatio Graeca, an interpretatio Persica, and so on—even, perhaps, an interpretatio Judaica. Sometimes an ancient writer performs interpretatio in an unreflective manner, simply plugging in familiar theonyms for gods worshiped abroad. Thus, for instance, Julius Caesar’s account of the religion of the Gauls: “Among the gods 5  Clifford Ando, “Interpretatio Romana,” Classical Philology 100 (2005): 41–51. 6  Especially following Georg Wissowa, “Interpretatio Romana: Römische Götter im Barbaren­ lande,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 19 (1918): 1–49.

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they chiefly worship Mercury. There are very many images of him, they call him the inventor of all skills, they call him guide over roads and routes, they think he has the greatest power in the acquisition of wealth and in trade. After him they worship Apollo and Mars and Minerva. About them they have much the same views as other people: that Apollo drives away diseases, Minerva conveys the elements of works and crafts, Jupiter holds sway over the heavens, Mars controls battles” (Caesar, Gallic Wars 6.17.1–2; trans. Parker). Of course, the Gauls did not worship “Mercury,” but they worshiped a god of skills, roads, and trade, whom Caesar recognizes as Mercury and names accordingly. Other times—very often, in fact—an ancient writer is uncertain about the most accurate interpretatio of a foreign god. In such cases, he or she will usually report whatever options are on offer. Thus, for instance, Tacitus, who was quite certain about identifying the Germanic Alci with Castor and Pollux, is much less so about the Graeco-Egyptian Serapis: “Many identify him with the god Aesculapius because he heals the sick; some with Osiris, a very ancient divinity of those peoples; many again identify him with Jupiter for his power over all things; but most identify him with Dis Pater from the emblems that are manifest in him, or through arcane reasoning” (Tacitus, Histories 4.84.5; trans. Ando). Tacitus does not doubt that interpretatio is possible in the case of Serapis; it is just that he does not know of precisely one right answer. Because of the demographics of our literary sources, we most often hear talk of interpretatio Romana and interpretatio Graeca, but we do have examples from a number of provincial perspectives, as well. One of these, an interpretatio Syriaca, comes from the remarkable treatise On the Syrian Goddess attributed to, and probably actually written by, Lucian of Samosata.7 Describing the sanctuary of the goddess Atargatis in Hierapolis, Lucian tries to explain the goddess’s iconography in terms of her Greek counterparts. He writes, “In it are two images, one Hera, the other Zeus, whom they call by another name … Certainly the image of Zeus resembles Zeus in all respects—his head and cloak and throne—so that you would not willingly liken him to anyone else. But Hera will reveal to you as you look at her a form of diverse appearances. Taken all together, to be sure, she is Hera, but she also has something of Athena and Aphrodite and Selene and Rhea and Artemis and Nemesis and the Parcae” (Lucian, Syrian Goddess 31–32; trans. Ando). Atargatis, Lucian reckons, is essentially Hera, but there is more to it than that. The equivalency is not one to one.

7  The definitive edition is now Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess, ed. J. L. Lightfoot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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Speaking of high goddesses, this idea that one and the same god might be worshiped under many names among many different peoples comes to elaborate expression in the final book 11 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, in the account of Lucius’s induction into the mysteries of Isis.8 Lucius petitions the regina caeli, queen of heaven, trialling several Latin names to which he hopes she might answer: O queen of heaven—whether you are bountiful Ceres, the primal mother of crops, who in joy at the recovery of your daughter took away from men their primeval animal fodder of acorns and showed them gentler nourishment, and now dwell in the land of Eleusis; or heavenly Venus, who at the first foundation of the universe united the diversity of the sexes by creating Love and propagated the human race through ever-recurring progeny, and now are worshipped in the island sanctuary of Paphos; or Phoebus’ sister, who brought forth populous multitudes by relieving the delivery of offspring with your soothing remedies, and now are venerated at the illustrious shrine of Ephesus; or dreaded Proserpina of the nocturnal howls, who in triple form repress the attacks of ghosts and keep the gates to earth closed fast, roam through widely scattered groves and are propitiated by diverse rites—you who illumine every city with your womanly light, nourish the joyous seeds with your moist fires, and dispense beams of fluctuating radiance according to the convolutions of the Sun—by whatever name, with whatever rite, in whatever image it is meet to invoke you: defend me now in the uttermost extremes of tribulation … apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.2; trans. Hanson in LCL

Ceres, Venus, Diana, and Proserpina. But if Lucius is expansive in his form of address, the goddess is even more so in her self-identification when she answers: Behold, Lucius, moved by your prayers I have come, I the mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, and first offspring of the ages; mightiest of deities, queen of the dead, and foremost of heavenly beings; my one person manifests the aspect of all gods and goddesses. With my nod I rule the starry heights of heaven, the health-giving breezes of the sea, and the plaintive silences of the underworld. My divinity is one, worshipped by all the world under different forms, with various rites, and by 8  On the historical context, see Greg Woolf, “Isis and the Evolution of Religions,” in Power, Politics, and the Cults of Isis, RGRW 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 62–92.

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manifold names. In one place the Phrygians, first-born of men, call me Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, in another the autochthonous people of Attica call me Cecropian Minerva, in another the sea-washed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus; to the arrow-bearing Cretans I am Dictynna Diana, to the trilingual Sicilians Ortygian Proserpina, to the ancient people of Eleusis Attic Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, others Hecate, and still others Rhamnusia; the people of the two Ethiopias, who are lighted by the first rays of the Sun-God as he rises every day, and the Egyptians, who are strong in ancient lore, worship me with the rites that are truly mine and call me by my real name, which is Queen Isis. apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.5; trans. Hanson

She is called by the names Pessinuntine Magna Mater, Cecropian Minerva, Paphian Venus, Dictynna Diana, Ortygian Proserpina, Attic Ceres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, and Rhamnusia. But she has one true and original name, known to the Ethiopians and Egyptians, namely Isis. This would seem to bear our Arthur Darby Nock’s point that “In spite of interpretatio, foreign gods were foreign gods.”9 Interpretatio does have its limits, most of them epistemic. As we have seen, sometimes an ancient writer is unsure precisely which of his own gods corresponds to a particular foreign god. Plutarch, for instance, reports about Sulla, “It is said, also, that to Sulla himself there appeared in his dreams a goddess whom the Romans learned to worship from the Cappadocians [i.e., Cybele, presumably], whether she is Semele or Athena or Enyo” (Plutarch, Sulla 9).10 Plutarch is unsure which Greek goddess she is, but he knows that she is one of them. Sometimes an ancient writer pleads entire ignorance as to the identity of a foreign god. Maximus of Tyre, for instance, has interpretationes for the god of the Celts and the god of the Paeonians, but not the god of the Arabians. “The Celts worship Zeus, but the Celtic cult statue of Zeus is a high oak tree. The Paeonians worship Helios, but the Paeonian cult statue of Helios is a small disc on a long pole. The Arabians worship a god whom I do not know, but I have seen the cult statue; it was a square stone” (Maximus of Tyre, Dissertations 2.8).11 There are, moreover, some gods, even very well-known ones, who do not admit of interpretatio anywhere in our sources. This is true quite apart from 9  Arthur Darby Nock, “Ruler-Worship and Syncretism,” in idem, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 2:558. 10  Greek text ed. Bernadotte Perrin in LCL. 11  Greek text ed. George Leonidas Koniaris in Maximus Tyrius, Philosophumena—Dialexeis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995).

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the god of the Jews. Parker highlights the case of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of gates and transitions, to whom no ancient source assigns a foreign counterpart.12 Foreigners who honour Janus, therefore, honour him as Roman Janus. The god of the Jews, as we shall see, is much more translatable than Janus is. At any rate, as Parker notes, the universal pantheon is a metaphysical given, even if mortals may not always know which names apply to which god. What, then, about the case of the Jews? Was their god translatable, whether by themselves or by others, into other terms? And how, if at all, did ancient Jews translate foreign gods into their own idiom? Let us consider, first, the Jewish god in interpretatio and, second, gentile gods in interpretatio. 2

The Jewish God in interpretatio

Some well-informed classical sources actually know the Jewish god by the name that he revealed to Moses (or rather, its transliteration in Greek or Roman characters), which is striking in light of the ancient Jewish taboo on pronouncing the name.13 Diodorus Siculus, for instance, writes, “Among the Jews, Moyses referred his laws to the god who is invoked as Iao” (Bib. hist. 1.94.1–2; trans. Oldfather in LCL). This, of course, is not interpretatio, just naming. The theonym Iao is relatively rare in literary sources but extremely common in the Greek magical papyri.14 Meanwhile, the fourth-century emperor Julian (called the Apostate by the Christians), who aspired to reintroduce the Jewish cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem (Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 23.1.2–3), calls him by another one of his ancestral names: I revere always the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who being themselves Chaldeans of a sacred race, skilled in theurgy, had learned the practice of circumcision while they sojourned as strangers with the Egyptians. And they revered a god who was ever gracious to me and to those who worshiped him as Abraham did, for he is a very great and powerful god, but he has nothing to do with you [Christians]. For you do not 12  See Parker, Greek Gods Abroad, 49, 59. 13  Most of the texts discussed in this section are included in the still invaluable collection by Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–1984). 14  See Morton Smith, “The Jewish Elements in the Magical Papyri,” in idem, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, 2 vols., ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 2:242–256; Hans Dieter Betz, “Jewish Magic in the Greek Magical Papyri,” in Envisioning Magic, ed. Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg, SHR 75 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 45–64.

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imitate Abraham by erecting altars to him or building altars of sacrifice or worshiping him as Abraham did, with sacrificial offerings. julian, Against the Galileans 354; trans. W. C. Wright in LCL

“The god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is gracious even to the pagan Julian, evidently because Julian offers him cult in the traditional manner (i.e., by building altars and offerings sacrifices as the patriarchs had done), which the Christians do not do. Unlike many of the interpretationes we shall see below, which identify the Jewish god with one or more foreign counterparts, Julian thinks of him simply as the patron god the descendants of Abraham, even if that god also welcomes offerings from pious gentiles.15 In most of our ancient sources, however, interpretatio is the rule, for the Jewish god as for other gods. I will not dwell on it here, but there is, first of all, no little interpretatio of Yahweh in relation to Bronze- and Iron-Age Canaanite deities attested in the Hebrew Bible. This has all been much discussed, most recently and significantly by Mark Smith in his God in Translation.16 Yahweh himself perhaps came from Midian originally (Deut 33:2; Judg 5:4–5; Hab 3:3), but when his cult took root in Canaan, it became a matter of urgency to sort out his relation to the established gods of that place, especially El, Elyon, Baal, and Asherah. In short, Yahweh was pretty seamlessly identified with Canaanite El via interpetatio, and further with Elyon, who was already identified with El in some strands of Canaanite cosmology. In relation to Baal, Yahweh was conceived mostly as a rival, as, for instance, in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel: “You call on the name of [Baal], and I shall call on the name of Yahweh, and the god who answers by fire, he is the god” (1 Kgs 18:24).17 Both Baal and Yahweh are gods of the storm and of warfare, which accounts for their rivalry, but also for their occasional identification via interpretatio (e.g., Hos 2:16: “On that day, says Yahweh, you shall call me ‘my husband,’ and you shall no longer call me ‘my Baal’”).18 Asherah, being a goddess, was not easily identified with Yahweh, but some sources do figure her as the wife or consort 15  See further Pieter W. van der Horst, “Did the Gentiles Know Who Abraham Was?” in idem, Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 80–94; Ari Finkelstein, The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 16   Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Translation in the Biblical World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). See also the older but still valuable treatment by John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, JSOTSup 265 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000). 17  Translations of biblical texts are my own unless otherwise noted. 18  See now James S. Anderson, Monotheism and Yahweh’s Appropriation of Baal, LHBOTS 617 (London: T. & T. Clark, 2015).

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of Yahweh (inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud; cf. 2 Kgs 21:7; 23:6–7), the same position she occupies in relation to El in other sources (here, again, perhaps suggesting an interpretatio of Yahweh as El).19 If, in important strands of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh is El Elyon, Greek θεὸς ὕψιστος, the most high god, then it was all but inevitable that he would eventually be identified with Greek Zeus, who is also θεὸς ὕψιστος (as, for instance, in the temple of Zeus Hypsistos near Damascus), and likewise with Roman Jupiter Optimus Maximus. “The most high god” is, by definition, a set with only one member, even if he may have different indigenous names.20 Varro, writing in Rome in the first century BCE, reasoned in exactly this way, according to Augustine: Yet Varro, one of themselves—to a more learned man they cannot point—thought the god of the Jews to be the same as Jupiter [deum Iudaeorum Iovem putavit], thinking that it makes no difference by which name he is called, so long as the same thing is understood. I believed that he did it being terrified of his sublimity. Since the Romans habitually worship nothing superior to Jupiter, a fact attested well and openly by their Capitol, and they consider him the king of all the gods, and as he perceived that the Jews worship the highest god, he could not but identify him with Jupiter. augustine, De consensu evangelistarum 1.22.30; trans. Stern

A theological reasoning like Varro’s may lie behind the curious passage in Valerius Maximus about the Jews in Rome in the second century BCE who were censured for spreading the foreign cult of Jupiter Sabazius. The passage reads: Cn. Cornelius Hispalus, praetor peregrinus in the year of the consulate of P. Popilius Laenas and L. Calpurnius, ordered the astrologers by an edict to leave Rome and Italy within ten days, since by a fallacious interpretation of the stars they perturbed fickle and silly minds, thereby 19  See William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). 20  See Robbert M. van den Berg, “Does It Matter to Call God Zeus? Origen, Contra Celsum I 24–25 against the Greek Intellectuals on Divine Names,” in The Revelation of the Name YHWH to Moses: Perspectives from Judaism, the Pagan Graeco-Roman World, and Early Christianity, ed. George H. van Kooten, TBN 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 169–183. On the various theos hypsistos cults, see Stephen Mitchell, “The Cult of Theos Hypsistos between Pagans, Jews, and Christians,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 81–148.

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making profit out of their lies. The same praetor compelled the Jews, who attempted to infect the Roman customs with the cult of Jupiter Sabazius [Iudaeos, qui Sabazi Iovis cultu Romanos inficere mores conati erant], to return to their homes. Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 1.3.3; trans. Stern

Here there is no self-conscious interpretatio. Valerius evidently just thinks that the Roman Jews in those days worshiped a god called Jupiter Sabazius. Jupiter we may perhaps take, as Varro did, as an equivalency for the most high god of Jerusalem. But Sabazius looks like the Latinization of Sabazios, a patron god of Phrygia and Thrace. The most likely explanation is phonetic, that Valerius or his source has mistaken Sabaoth (as in Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts) for Sabazios. Further evidence, in any case, for the equivalency of Yahweh with Zeus or Jupiter.21 And it is not only gentile writers who suggest this equivalency. The Hellenistic Jewish author of the Letter of Aristeas has his main character Aristeas explain Jewish theology to the Graeco-Egyptian king Ptolemy in this way: “The god who gave them their law is the god who maintains your kingdom. They worship the same god, the lord and creator of the universe, as all other men, as we ourselves, O king, though we call him by different names, such as Zeus or Dis. This name was very appropriately bestowed upon him by our first ancestors, in order to signify that he through whom all things are endowed with life and come into being, is necessarily the ruler and lord of the universe” (Letter of Aristeas 15–16; trans. R. H. Charles). According to this tidy interpretatio, the god who gave the law to Moses is the god whom the Greeks worship as Zeus: the ruler and lord of the universe. Moving from Ptolemaic Egypt to Flavian Rome, it is striking that, when Josephus paraphrases the Letter of Aristeas in part of his Jewish Antiquities, he reproduces this interpretatio essentially unchanged: “For both they [the Jews] and we worship the god who created the universe, whom we call by the appropriate term Zeus [Ζῆνα], giving him that name from the fact that he breathes life [ζῆν] into all creatures” (Josephus, Ant. 12.22; trans. Ralph Marcus in LCL). For Josephus, as for the Jewish author of Aristeas before him, it was not an impiety but a piety to say that their god, the lord of the universe, was the god whom the Greeks call Zeus. This same equivalency is taken for granted by other Jewish writers including Aristobulus in the second century BCE and Luke the Evangelist in the first or second century CE, both 21  On which see further Eugene N. Lane, “Sabazius and the Jews in Valerius Maximus: A Re-examination,” JRS 69 (1979): 35–38; Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 34–65.

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of whom quote Aratus’s famous verse about Zeus (τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν, “for we are his offspring” [Phaenomena 5]) as being true and referring to the god of the Jews (Acts 17:38; Aristobulus apud Eusebius, P.E. 13.12). The full strophe reads: “From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring” (Phaenomena 5; trans. Mair and Mair in LCL). Whom Aratus calls Zeus, Letter of Aristeas, Josephus, Aristobulus, and Luke call God.22 This interpretatio, I think, helps us to understand what is often thought to be the hardest case, the case highlighted by Assmann and Portier-Young as proof of the untranslatability of the Jewish god: the introduction of the cult of Zeus Olympios to Jerusalem in the first half of the second century BCE. Our most proximate source, 2 Maccabees, relates the event as follows: “Not long after this, the king [Antiochus IV Epiphanes] sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their fathers and cease to live by the laws of God, and also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and call it the temple of Zeus Olympios, and to call the one in Gerizim the temple of Zeus Xenios, as did the people who dwelt in that place” (2 Macc 6:1–2 RSV, mod.). It is clear that the author of 2 Maccabees regards this change as a defilement and an offense against the laws of the Jews; thus far we can agree with Assmann and Portier-Young. But our author also admits that what actually happened was a change of name: Antiochus IV called the temple in Jerusalem the temple of Zeus Olympios. Now, we could understand this as the introduction of an altogether different god; so 2 Maccabees understands it, and so likewise Assmann and Portier-Young. But it is also possible (and, I think, better) to understand it as an instance of interpretatio.23 As we have seen, the god of the Jews was frequently identified with Zeus, and in the case of the Seleucid Zeus Olympios, the connection was arguably closer still. Eberhard Nestle suggested in the late nineteenth century that Daniel’s “abomination of desolation,” shiqqutz shomem (Dan 9:27; 11:31; 12:11), was a wordplay on Baal Shamem, that is, Baal of Heaven or Lord of Heaven, the Syrian god whose interpretatio Graeca was Zeus Olympios, Olympian Zeus or Zeus of Heaven. Antiochus IV being a 22  I have not found any other Hellenistic- or Roman-period Jewish writers who expressly make this equivalency, so the extant evidence is relatively slim. But what to make of this fact? In our conference discussion, Richard Bauckham suggested that it was a deafening silence, evidence of a prevailing ancient Jewish refusal to identify the god of the Jews with any other. Perhaps. But I suspect this may be overinterpreting an absence. 23  Thus rightly Beate Ego, “The Hellenistic Crisis as Reflected by the Animal Apocalypse,” in Judaism and Crisis: Crisis as a Catalyst in Jewish Cultural History, ed. Armin Lange et al., SIJD 9 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 75–88.

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Graeco-Syrian, it is likely that the cult he introduced to Jerusalem was not the Achaean cult of Zeus but the Syrian cult of Baal Shamem, Lord of Heaven.24 By his lights, and perhaps by the lights of those Jews who supported the measure (whom 2 Maccabees, of course, counts as apostates), this was not theologically absurd, even if it was politically inflammatory. Indeed, even the stridently anti-Seleucid author of Daniel calls the Jewish god (in Aramaic) Marē Shemaya, Lord of Heaven (Dan 5:23). In fact, the preferred name for the deity in Jewish sources from the Persian and Hellenistic periods is God of Heaven, Hebrew Elohei ha-Shamayim or Aramaic Elah Shemaya (Ezra 5:11, 12; 6:9, 10; 7:12, 21, 23; Neh 1:4; 2:4, 20; Psalm 136:26; Dan 2:18, 19, 37, 44).25 Hence, if we set aside the problem of a change of rites (which is a big problem to set aside, but we shall come back to it), the introduction of the name Baal Shamem or Zeus Olympios to the temple in Jerusalem is not at all incredible by ancient Mediterranean standards. (I suspect that Hadrian’s introduction of the cult of Jupiter Capitolinus on Mount Zion some 300 years later is yet another example of the same, but time and space prevent a full discussion.) While, of the named Greek gods, Zeus is—understandably—the one most often identified with Yahweh, he is by no means the only one. The wine god Dionysus is another, evidently because of a homology of iconography and ritual.26 Plutarch explains the Yahweh/Dionysus equivalency at some length in his Quaestiones convivales: The time and character of the greatest, most sacred holiday of the Jews clearly befit Dionysus. When they celebrate their so-called Fast [i.e., Yom Kippur], at the height of the vintage, they set out tables of all sorts of fruits under tents and huts plaited for the most part of vines and ivy. They call the first of the days of the feast Tabernacles [i.e., Sukkot]. A few days later they celebrate another festival [i.e., Shemini Azeret?], this time identified with Bacchus not through obscure hints but plainly called by his name, a festival that is a sort of ‘Procession of Branches’ or ‘Thyrsus Procession,’ in which they enter the temple each carrying a thyrsus [i.e., lulav, palm branch]. What they do after entering we do not know, but it is probable that the rite is a Bacchic revelry, for in fact they use little trumpets to invoke their god as do the Argives at their Dionysia. 24  Eberhard Nestle, “Zu Daniel,” ZAW 4 (1884): 247–250; and see further Smith, God in Translation, 283–288. 25  See Smith, God in Translation, 222–223. 26  See further Morton Smith, “On the Wine God in Palestine,” in idem, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, 1:227–237.

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Others of them advance playing harps; these players are called in their language Levites, either from Lysios (Releaser) or, better, from Evios (God of the Cry). I believe that even the Sabbath is not completely unrelated to Dionysus. Many even now call the Bacchants Sabi and utter that cry when celebrating the god. Testimony to this can be found in Demosthenes and Menander. You would not be far off track if you attributed the use of this name Sabi to the strange excitement (sobesis) that possesses the celebrants. The Jews themselves testify to a connection with Dionysus when they keep the Sabbath by inviting each other to drink and to enjoy wine; when more important business interferes with this custom, they regularly take at least a sip of neat wine. Now thus far one might call the argument only probable; but the opposition is quite demolished, in the first place by the High Priest, who leads a procession at their festival wearing a mitre and clad in a gold-embroidered fawn skin, a robe reaching to the ankles, and buskins, with many bells attached to his clothes and ringing below him as he walks. All this corresponds to our custom. In the second place, they also have noise as an element in their nocturnal festivals, and call the nurses of the god ‘bronze rattlers.’ The carved thyrsus in the relief on the pediment of the Temple and the drums [provide other parallels]. All this surely befits, they might say, no divinity but Dionysus. Further, the Jews use no honey in their religious services because they believe that honey spoils the wine with which it is mixed; and they used honey as a libation and in place of wine before the vine was discovered. plutarch, Quaestiones convivales 4.6; trans. Hoffleit in LCL

The agricultural festival of Sukkot, the procession of the thyrsus or lulav, the liturgical music of the Levites, the homophony between Sabbath and Bacchic Sabi, the customary wine at the Sabbath meal, the bucolic festal garments of the high priest, and the iconography of the thyrsus or lulav in the temple. From all of these correspondences (“All this corresponds to our custom”), Plutarch infers, not unreasonably, that the god worshiped by the Jews is Dionysus. Even Josephus describes the grand facade of Herod’s temple thusly: “The gate opening into the building was, as I said, completely overlaid with gold, as was the whole wall around it. It had, moreover, above it those golden vines, from which depended grape-clusters as tall as a man” (Josephus, War 5.210–211; trans. Thackeray in LCL). How else could a Greek be expected to interpret this iconography? Contemporaneously, but further west, Tacitus knows the same interpretatio and at least some of the reasons for it, but he decides against it on grossly

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chauvinistic comparative ritual grounds. He writes about the Jews, “Since their priests used to chant to the accompaniment of pipes and drums and to wear garlands of ivy, and because a golden vine was found in their temple, some have thought that they were devotees of Father Liber, the conqueror of the East, in spite of the incongruity of their customs. For Liber established festive rites of a joyous nature, while the ways of the Jews are preposterous and mean” (Tacitus, Histories 5.5; trans. Stern). Even Tacitus concedes that the rituals and icons are very close, indeed. His reason for rejecting the interpretatio is as impressionistic as it is bigoted.27 A different possible connection between Yahweh and Dionysus comes from Valerius Maximus’s report (already mentioned above) about the Jews at Rome in the mid-second century BCE. The relevant bit of the text reads, “The same praetor [viz. Cornelius Hispalus] compelled the Jews, who attempted to infect the Roman customs with the cult of Jupiter Sabazius, to return to their homes” (Valerius Maximus, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 1.3.3). Valerius or his source thinks that the Jews worshiped Jupiter Sabazius. Jupiter we have discussed above. Sabazios was originally an indigenous god of Phrygia and Thrace, whom the Greeks identified variously with Zeus or with Dionysus. The pairing with Jupiter here obviously suggests the former link, but if, ex hypothesi, Yahweh were already associated in some quarters with Dionysus, then the Sabazios association could conceivably be secondary to that. Then again, there need not have been any such intermediate step. The Sabazios association could have come about directly from a perceived identity with the Jewish theonym Sabaoth. The same paragraph in 2 Maccabees 6 that recounts the establishment of the cult of Zeus Olympios on Mount Zion also tells of the forcible celebration of the feast of Dionysus, according to Greek custom, in the Jewish metropolis. “On the monthly celebration of the king’s birthday, the Jews were taken, under bitter constraint, to partake of the sacrifices; and when the feast of Dionysus came, they were compelled to walk in the procession in honor of Dionysus, wearing wreaths of ivy” (2 Macc 6:7 RSV). The well attested interpretatio of Yahweh as Dionysus may add an extra layer to this story. Perhaps this was not a random act of forced idolatry. Perhaps, as with the cult of Zeus Olympios, it was an expression of a quite particular interpretatio, an introduction of Greek rites thought to be proper to the wine god of the Jerusalem temple.28 27  On Tacitus’s contempt, see further Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 179–196. 28  A similar dynamic may obtain in another story in 2 Maccabees: Nicanor’s threat to build a shrine to Dionysus on the site of the sanctuary of Yahweh. “He stretched out his right

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If Yahweh was sometimes thought to be Zeus, other times Dionysus, then still other times he was recognized as Helios (or Sol, or Shamash), the god of the sun.29 Thus an oracle of Apollo of Clarus (in a passage to be discussed further below) can say: “In summer he is Helios, while in autumn he is the graceful Iao” (Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.18.18–21). Gentiles who made this interpretatio came by it honestly, since there is no little testimony from the Jewish side that might suggest it. In a telling passage in War book 2, Josephus describes the morning prayers of the Essenes as follows: “Their piety towards the deity [τὸ θεῖον] takes a peculiar form. Before the sun [τὸν ἥλιον] is up they utter no word on mundane matters, but offer to him certain ancestral prayers [πατρίους δέ τινας εἰς αὐτὸν εὐχάς], as though entreating him to rise” (Josephus, War 2.128). The Essenes pray to the sun, εἰς αὐτόν, Josephus says.30 But that, some interpreters have noted, sounds worryingly heterodox. “Josephus, in our passage, expressed himself badly; his words might give the impression that the Essenes honoured the sun as a divine being.”31 Might give the impression, indeed. Perhaps, though, Josephus said exactly what he meant, in which case we should conclude either that the Essenes worshiped both Yahweh and Helios or, perhaps more likely, that they worshiped Yahweh as Helios, via interpretatio. There are several passages in the Hebrew Bible that already suggest that interpretatio. The prophet Malachi gives Shemesh or Helios as an epithet for Yahweh Sabaoth. “For you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness [shemesh tzedakah, ἥλιος δικαιοσύνης] shall rise, with healing in its wings” (Mal 3:20 [ET 4:2]). An oracle of Third Isaiah may reflect the same identification: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of Yhwh has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but Yhwh will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising” (Isa 60:1–3). Nor is this mere poetry. There is biblical evidence, like the evidence of Josephus for the Essenes, for the ritual identification of the Jewish god with the sun. In Ezekiel’s vision of the temple in Ezekiel 8, he sees the following: “And he brought me into the inner court of the house of Yhwh; and behold, at the door hand toward the sanctuary, and swore this oath: ‘If you do not hand Judah over to me as a prisoner, I will level this precinct of God to the ground and tear down the altar, and I will build here a splendid temple to Dionysus’” (2 Macc 14:33 RSV). The parallel in 1 Macc 7:35, however, has no mention of Dionysus. 29  See Morton Smith, “Helios in Palestine,” in idem, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, 1:238–262. 30  On this passage, see Steve Mason, Judean War 2, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary vol. 1B (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 105–106. 31  Otto Michel and Otto Bauernfeind, eds., Flavius Josephus, De bello Judaico, 2d ed. (Munich: Kösel, 1962–1969), 432n44; trans. Morton Smith.

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of the temple of Yhwh, between the porch and the altar, were about twentyfive men, with their backs to the temple of Yhwh, and their faces toward the east, worshiping the sun toward the east [προσκυνοῦσιν τῷ ἡλίῳ]” (Ezek 8:16). The prophet regards this as an abomination, but he concedes that it happened, and happened in the Jerusalem temple. The question is whether the anonymous worshipers thought they were worshiping a different god or the same god under a different aspect or name, “sun of righteousness,” perhaps.32 While, as we have seen, some sources identify Yahweh with Zeus, or Dionysus, or Helios, other sources suggest that he subsumes aspects of numerous other deities within himself.33 Like the Syrian goddess Atargatis, who, Lucian says, is not only Hera but also Artemis, Aphrodite, Selene, and more, Iao, too, contains multitudes. According to Macrobius, the oracle of Apollo of Clarus was once specifically asked who Iao was, with what god he should be identified. The oracle’s answer, however, was not single but multiple. The full passage reads as follows: That Liber is the sun, Orpheus clearly proclaims in the line, Helios that is called by the name of Dionysus. And this verse certainly makes perfect sense, but another line by the same poet is rather more elaborate: One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysus. The authority of this last line is supported by an oracle of Apollo of Clarus, in which yet another name is attached to the sun, which is called in the same sacred verses, among other names, by the name of Iao. For when Apollo of Clarus was asked who among the gods should be identified with him that is called Iao he declared as follows: Those who have learned the Orgia should keep them in secrecy, but if the understanding is little and the mind feeble, then ponder that Iao is the supreme god among all. In winter he is Hades, at the beginning of the spring he is Zeus, in summer he is Helios, while in autumn he is the graceful Iao. The meaning of this oracle, and the explanation of the deity and the name by which Iao is denoted Liber pater and the sun, are expounded by Cornelius Labeo in a book entitled “On the Oracle of Apollo of Clarus.” macrobius, Saturnalia 1.18.18–21; trans. Stern

32  On the ancient Israelite evidence, see J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel, JSOTSup 111 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993); Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 148–159. 33  A theological notion sometimes called “theocrasy” (e.g., by Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, trans. John Bowden, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974], 1:261–267).

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This passage incidentally supports all three of the interpretationes noted above, that Iao is Zeus, or Dionysus, or Helios. But the answer of the oracle transcends all of these particular identifications. Because, it says, Iao is the supreme god over all, Hades, Zeus, Helios, and others are really just so many aspects of his divinity. Some Greeks, reasoning from the accurate premise that the Jews do not figure their god in human or animal form, conclude that that god is identical with the heavens or the universe itself.34 Already in the fourth century BCE, Hecataeus of Abdera (according to Diodorus Siculus) attests this view: “[Moses] had no images whatsoever of the gods made for them [viz. the Hebrews], being of the opinion that god is not in human form; rather the heaven that surrounds the earth is alone divine, and rules the universe” (Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 40.3.4; trans. Stern). Writing at the turn of the era, the geographer Strabo gives a rather more fulsome version of this interpretatio: “[Moses] said and taught that the Egyptians were mistaken in representing the divine by the images of beasts and cattle, as also were the Libyans; and that the Greeks were also wrong in modelling gods in human form; for, according to him, god is the one thing alone that encompasses us all and encompasses land and sea—the thing which we call heaven [οὐρανός], or universe [κόσμος], or the nature of all that exists [φύσις τῶν ὄντων]” (Strabo, Geographica 16.2.35; trans. Stern). Moses’s unrepresentable god is οὐρανός or κόσμος or φύσις τῶν ὄντων. Ouranos/Uranus is personified as one of the primeval deities in Greek mythology, so Strabo’s interpretatio is not entirely removed from the universal polytheism, but it certainly tends in a philosophical and pantheistic direction. From the fact that the Jews do not have images of their god, one might reason, as Strabo does, that he is heaven or the cosmos. Alternatively, however, one might also reason that he is some member of the universal pantheon, but which member we simply do not know. (We saw Tacitus and Plutarch reason thusly in the cases of other foreign gods above.) And some of our sources do just this, calling the god of the Jews incertus deus, ἄδηλος θεός, or ἄγνωστος θεός, an unknown or unidentified deity.35 This was Livy’s understanding of the Jewish god, according to Lucan: “Judaea given over to the worship of an unknown god [incerti Iudaea dei].” And again, “They do not state to which of the gods pertains the temple at Jerusalem [Hierosolimis fanum cuius deorum 34  See Schäfer, Judeophobia, 34–37. 35  See Eduard Norden, Agnostos Theos: Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913); Pieter W. van der Horst, “The Altar of the ‘Unknown God’ in Athens (Acts 17:23) and the Cult of ‘Unknown Gods’ in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” ANRW 2.18.2 (1989), 1426–1456; Albert Henrichs, “Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos,” Illinois Classical Studies 19 (1994): 27–58.

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sit non nominant], nor is any image found there, since they do not think the god partakes of any figure” (Scholia on Lucan, Pharsalia 2.593; trans. Stern). Lucan himself reasoned similarly, according to Lydus: “In conformity with Livy, Lucan says that the temple of Jerusalem belongs to an uncertain god [ἄδηλος θεός], while Numenius says that the power of this god is not to be shared by any other, and that he is the father of all the gods, and that he deems any other god unworthy of having a share in his cult” (Lydus, De mensibus 4.53; trans. Stern). To call the Jewish god incertus deus or ἄδηλος θεός is not to deny the universal polytheism, but simply to say that one does not know where he fits in it. The famous speech of the apostle Paul on the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17) arguably belongs here. “Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said: Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: To an unknown god [Αγνώστῳ θεῷ]. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:22–23 RSV). Prima facie, at least, the apostle’s reasoning would seem to presuppose something like Parker’s theory. This ἄγνωστος θεός is a member of the universal pantheon about whom the Greeks have too little information to name him. Paul, therefore, supplies what they lack: This god is the creator of all things and the one who raised Jesus from the dead. Elias Bickerman ingeniously argued that the Athenian altar noted by Paul was not an altar to an altogether mysterious deity, but one erected specifically for offerings to the patron god of the Jews, whose name, however, was unpronounced and therefore unknown.36 Bickerman perceptively points to the rabbinic instructions for gentile altars (bamot, high places) to the Jewish god (b. Zebah. 116b). The Torah strictly forbids Jews erecting bamot, of course, but it says nothing about gentiles doing so, and later halakhah took this silence as permission. Paul’s speech in Acts 17, however, seems to me to assume that the Athenians know neither the name nor anything else about the god of the Jews, in which case the altar to ἄγνωστος θεός is unlikely to be a gentile bamah to Yahweh. On either reading, however, Acts 17 offers yet another interpretatio Graeca of the Jewish god, of which, as we have seen, there were very many, indeed.37

36   E. J. Bickerman, “The Altars of the Gentiles: A Note on the Jewish Ius Sacrum,” in idem, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, ed. Amram Tropper, 2 vols., AJEC 68 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2:596–617. 37  See further George H. van Kooten, “Moses/Musaeus/Mochos and His God Yahweh, Iao, and Sabaoth, Seen from a Graeco-Roman Perspective,” in Revelation of the Name YHWH, 107–138.

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Gentile Gods in interpretatio

Thus far the Jewish god in interpretatio, but how did ancient Jewish thinkers translate gentile gods? Or did they do so at all? On Assmann’s Mosaic distinction, they did not, and indeed could not. “False gods cannot be translated.”38 This is a nice, tidy idea, but there is a mountain of evidence against it. Our sources are littered with the efforts of ancient Jewish thinkers to render gentile gods intelligible. We have already seen some of this evidence above, in reciprocal form. As Parker notes, “Interpretatio is always potentially a two-way process. If a Greek identifies Mars as Ares, it becomes very natural for a Roman to identify Ares as Mars.”39 An interpretatio of Yahweh as El is, at the same time, an interpretatio of El as Yahweh. Likewise for Zeus in Letter of Aristeas and Josephus’s Antiquities, and so on. A large part of the ancient Jewish literary effort at interpretatio of gentile gods is interested in them as a class rather than in particular gentile deities (although there is plenty of interest in the latter, too, on which more anon). One key development here was the joining up of the very old myth of the divine council with a theory of the gods of the nations. The divine council, the bene elim, “sons of the gods,” are the host of lower deities who attend the high god El or Elyon. “On what were the bases [of the earth] sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of the gods [bene elohim] shouted for joy?” (Job 38:6–7). Some biblical psalms celebrate Yahweh by vaunting him above the undifferentiated bene elim. “Ascribe to Yhwh, O sons of the gods [bene elim], ascribe to Yhwh glory and strength” (Ps 29:1). And again, “For who in the skies can be compared to Yhwh? Who among the sons of the gods [bene elim] is like Yhwh?” (Ps 89:7 = ET Ps 89:6). So far, so Yahwhist.40 In a fateful theological move, however, the author(s) of the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 conceived of the idea that there is a ben elim for each particular gentile nation. The much-discussed text reads: “When Elyon gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. For Yhwh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:8–9). As is well known, in v. 8 the MT reads “according to the number of the sons of Israel [bene yisrael],” but the older text attested in 4QDeut reads “according to the number of the sons of God [bene elohim].” The LXX, meanwhile, reads “according to 38  Assman, Moses the Egyptian, 3. 39  Parker, Greek Gods Abroad, 40. 40  See further Ellen White, Yahweh’s Council: Its Structure and Membership, FAT 2.65 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

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the number of the angels of God [ἀγγέλων θεοῦ],” which certainly reflects a Vorlage like the Qumran text, not the MT. In this passage, then, Elyon, the high god, apportions the various human nations according to the number of the (lower) gods, each nation having its own patron god. Jacob/Israel, naturally, has Yahweh for its patron god.41 In a number of Hebrew Bible texts, however—including, probably, the MT form of Deuteronomy 32 itself—the Judean authors came to identify Yahweh, the patron god of Israel, with Elyon, the ancient Canaanite high god. (Voilà, c’est interpretatio.) But once this move is made, the symmetry of the myth is undone, since now one of the nations belongs not to its designated lower deity but to the high god himself. Perhaps for this very reason, some late biblical texts introduce a new designated lower deity for Israel, namely, the archangel Michael. In Daniel 10–12, as in Deuteronomy 32, each nation has its own god, here called a sar, “prince” (e.g., the prince of Persia, the prince of Greece, both in Dan 10:20), but the prince of Israel is not Yahweh but rather Michael (Dan 10:21; 12:1). Michael sharply illustrates the theological puzzle of having Yahweh be both the patron god of the Jews and the high god over all the nations.42 The myth of the angels of the nations has its roots in the earliest text of Deuteronomy 32, but by late antiquity it acquires real explanatory power, becoming a principal site for interpretatio Judaica (and interpretatio Christiana) of gentile gods. The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, for instance, give a fully rounded account of the myth: Every nation has an angel, to whom God has committed the government of that nation; and when one of these appears, although he be thought and called god by those over whom he presides, yet, being asked, he does not give such testimony to himself. For the most high God, who alone holds the power of all things, has divided all the nations of the earth into seventy-two parts, and over these he has appointed angels as princes. But to the one among the archangels who is greatest was committed the government of those who, before all others, received the worship and knowledge of the most high God. Ps-Clem. Recog. 2.42; trans. Thomas Smith in ANF

41  See Smith, God in Translation, 195–212. 42  On this puzzle, see Ioan P. Culianu, “The Angels of the Nations and the Origins of Gnostic Dualism,” in Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions, ed. R. van den Broek and M. J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 78–91.

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Each nation, Pseudo-Clement says, calls its patron angel “god,” but the angels themselves know that they are angels, not gods. Other Jewish (and Christian) texts, however, do not share this anxiety about calling gentile gods “gods.” One famous passage in the Septuagint established precedent for many Greek-speaking Jews. The MT of Exod 22:27 reads, “You shall not revile elohim, nor curse a ruler of your people.” Most modern versions plausibly take the MT to mean, “You shall not revile God” (although even in Hebrew the sense could conceivably be “You shall not revile the gods,” perhaps meaning neighboring deities or divinized ancestors). In any case, the Greek translator, either neglecting or, more likely, exploiting the singular/plural ambiguity of Hebrew elohim, writes, “You shall not revile the gods [θεούς], nor speak evil of the rulers of your people” (LXX Exod 22:27). The result is an unambiguous scriptural exhortation for Jews to pay all due respect to gentile gods.43 Philo of Alexandria, for instance, takes the lesson: “He [Moses] counsels them that they must not … deal in idle talk or revile with an unbridled tongue the gods whom others acknowledge [οὓς ἕτεροι νομίζουσι θεούς], lest they on their part be moved to utter profane words against him who truly is [τοῦ ὄντως ὄντος]” (Special Laws 1.53; trans. F. H. Colson in LCL). The apostle Paul is rather less diplomatic on this issue, but even he concedes, “There are so-called gods either in heaven or on earth, just as there are many gods and many lords” (1 Cor 8:5). Elsewhere, however, Paul seems to call gentile gods—or, at least, to associate gentile gods with—daemons. About the gentiles, Paul writes, “What they sacrifice, [they sacrifice] to daemons and not to God [θύουσιν δαιμονίοις καὶ οὐ θεῷ]” (1 Cor 10:20). This form of words is almost certainly taken from the Greek version of the Song of Moses (LXX Deut 32:17: ἔθυσαν δαιμονίοις καὶ οὐ θεῷ), where δαιμόνιον renders the rare Hebrew word shed (cf. Ps 106:37). If, in the Pseudo-Clementines, gentile gods are not gods but angels, here gentile gods are not gods but daemons. This identification is explicit in OG Psalm 95. The MT of Psalm 96:5 reads, “For all the gods [elohim] of the peoples are idols [elilim]; but Yhwh made the heavens.” Written thusly, the verse is a piece of idol polemic, a contrast between the manufactured cult statues of the gentiles and the aniconic cult of Yahweh the creator. The Greek translator, however, introduces a subtle but important change. OG Psalm 95:5 reads, “For all the gods of the nations are daemons [πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια], but the Lord made the heavens.” Crucially, the translator renders elilim, “idols,” with δαιμόνια, “daemons,” erasing the contrast between deities and statues and introducing a different contrast between one class of deities and another. In short, the Greek 43  See Pieter W. van der Horst, “Thou Shalt Not Revile the Gods: The LXX Translation of Ex 22:28 (27), Its Background and Influence,” SPhA 5 (1993): 1–8.

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psalmist grants gentile gods greater ontological status than his Hebrew predecessor had done. A daemon may not be a high god, but it is quite a lot more than a statue.44 Is this an interpretatio Judaica? It might seem so, as if the Jewish psalmist were rendering gentile gods as daemons within his own, different cosmology. Against this view, however, is the fact that Greek-speaking gentiles themselves call the gods daemons. In a great many texts from Homer onward, δαίμων just means god, though sometimes it has the sense of “divine power” in contrast to θεός, which is the person of the god him- or herself (see LSJ, s.v. δαίμων). Even the Christian Augustine reckons that daemons and gods are more or less the same class of beings. “If the Platonists prefer to call these gods rather than daemons, and to count them among those whom Plato their master writes about as gods created by the highest god, let them say what they want … for then they say exactly what we say, whatever word they may use for them” (Augustine, civ. Dei 9.23; trans. Marcus Dods).45 The examples cited so far in this section show gentile gods, taken as a group, glossed via interpretatio Judaica. They are idols, or daemons, or angels, or indeed just gods. And it is significant, I think, that our extant Jewish texts perform interpretatio at this taxonomic level more than they do the interpretatio of particular gentile gods, that is, interpretatio of the familiar form: Ammon is Zeus is Jupiter, etc. But our extant Jewish texts do perform the latter kind of interpretatio, as well. Because there is this well attested Jewish motif of the angels of the nations, it would, of course, be fascinating if our Jewish texts singled out particular angels of particular nations for interpretatio. The evidence for their doing so, however, is relatively slim. Daniel 10 does name the prince of Persia (Dan 10:13, 20) and the prince of Greece (Dan 10:20), but there is no way of knowing if the Jewish author might have identified the former with, say, Ahura Mazda, or the latter with, say, Zeus, or otherwise. There are several particular angels of the nations who acquire names in the developing tradition. The early rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah identifies the elohim who wrestles with Jacob in Genesis 32 as the patron angel of Edom. On the brief, puzzling Gen 32:25, And there wrestled a man with him, the midrash says, “R. Hama b. R. Hanina said: It was the guardian prince of Esau. To this Jacob alluded when he said to him [Esau], To see your face is like seeing the face of elohim, with such favour you have received me [Gen 33:10]” (Gen. Rab.

44  See further Dale B. Martin, “When Did Angels Become Demons?” JBL 129 (2010): 657–677. 45  See further Jan den Boeft, “Daemon(es),” Augustinus-Lexikon, ed. Cornelius Mayer et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1996–2002), 2:213–222.

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77.3).46 Because the mysterious wrestler is called elohim (Gen 32:29, 31), and because when Jacob meets Esau soon after he says that seeing Esau is like seeing elohim, R. Hama b. R. Hanina concludes that the elohim with whom Jacob wrestled was the patron angel of Esau/Edom. The later Midrash Tanhuma on Genesis concurs, and also supplies a name for the angel of Edom: “And there wrestled a man with him [Gen 32:25]. It was Samael, Esau’s guardian angel, who wanted to kill him [Jacob].”47 This is interesting. In late rabbinic mythology, Samael becomes the angel of death and the prince of demons,48 but here he is one of the angels of the nations. One wonders if the rabbinic use of Edom as a name for Rome contributed to the diabolization of Samael. At any rate, Samael is not the indigenous name of any Edomite (or Roman) god. Wilhelm Bousset suggested that Samael is derived from the name of a Syrian god, Shamel,49 but as far as I know, this theory has only Bousset’s learned speculation to commend it, and it would complicate rather than resolve the connection with Edom. More straightforward is the case of Dobiel (or Dubiel), the name the Talmud Bavli gives to the patron angel of Persia. Bavli Yoma tells a story of the angel Gabriel being punished for failing to execute a sentence decreed by God against Israel. “R. Johanan said: In that hour Gabriel was led out behind the curtain and received forty fiery strokes, he being told, ‘If you had not executed the command at all, well, you simply would not have executed it. But since you did execute it, why did you not do as you were commanded? Furthermore, don’t you know that one brings no report about mischief?’ Thereupon Dobiel, the guardian angel of the Persians, was brought in and placed in his stead, and he officiated for twenty-one days” (b. Yoma 77a).50 As in the case of Samael noted above, Dobiel is not the Persian name of any Persian god. Rather, it probably comes from the dov, “bear,” in the vision of Persia as an animal in Daniel 7:5: “And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear [dov].” But this “bear god,” Dobiel, comes from Daniel’s vision, not from any indigenous Persian myth or icon. In the case of Egypt, the rabbis assign the angel of the nation the name of the nation itself, Hebrew Mizraim. The medieval midrash Exodus Rabbah, 46  Trans. H. Freedman, Midrash Rabbah, vol. 2 (London: Soncino, 1939). 47  Trans. Samuel A. Berman, Midrash Tanhuma-Yelammedenu (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1996), 213. 48  See Joseph Dan, “Armilus: The Jewish Antichrist and the Origins and Dating of the Sefer Zerubbavel,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen, SHR 77 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 73–104. 49  Wilhelm Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, 2d ed. (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1906), 291n2. 50  Translations of the Babylonian Talmud follow the Soncino edition.

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commenting on Exod 14:10, And behold, Egypt was marching after them, reads as follows: Now, it does not say ‘were marching’ [plural] but ‘was marching’ [singular], because when Pharaoh and the Egyptians began to pursue them, they raised their eyes heavenward and saw the guardian angel of Egypt hovering in the air and they became very afraid, as it says, And they became very afraid. What then is the meaning of, And behold, Egypt [Mizraim] was marching after them? Because the name of the guardian angel is Mizraim, and God does not cast down a nation before he destroys their guardian angel first. You will find that in the case of Nebuchadnezzar also God first overthrew his guardian angel, for it says, While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell Qol [a voice] from heaven [Dan 9:28]. R. Joshua b. Abin said: The guardian angel of Nebuchadnezzar was named Qol, and God cast him down. Ex. Rab. 21.551

The name Mizraim for the angel of the nation Mizraim (Egypt) is at least reasonable, even if here it comes from a too-clever reading of a grammatical singular in Exod 14:10. We know of some nations with theophoric names (e.g., Israel and its god El) and some nations with eponymous gods or heroes (e.g., Rome and its founder Romulus). But the name Qol, “voice,” here suggested for the angel of Babylon, is really based on nothing other than an acrobatic interpretation of Dan 9:28.52 So our Jewish sources do name some of the angels of the nations, but not by identifying them with particular gentile gods; this is something less than interpretatio. Meanwhile, however, we do find several interpretationes Judaicae of particular gentile gods, but not in connection with the angels of the nations. These texts’ solution, rather, is to identify a gentile god with a Jewish ancestor or hero. As Gerard Mussies argued a generation ago, these interpretationes Judaicae are broadly euhemerist in outlook. That is, as per the theory attributed to the Sacred History of Euhemerus of Messene (fl. ca. 300 BCE), they explain the gods as mythological riffs on actual great human beings (kings, benefactors, etc.) from the distant past.53 51  Trans. S. M. Lehrman, Midrash Rabbah, vol. 3 (London: Soncino, 1939). 52  On the midrashic names for certain angels of the nations, see further Ludwig Blau and Kaufmann Kohler, “Angelology,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), 1:583–597. 53  See Gerard Mussies, “The Interpretatio Judaica of Thot-Hermes,” in Studies in Egyptian Religion, ed. M. Heerma van Voss et al., SHR 43 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 91: “For the remaining gods of lower status [i.e., after Yahweh/Zeus] the Jews had to resort to the method which

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Thus Bavli Avodah Zarah, commenting on a mishnah which prohibits the use of certain vessels bearing idolatrous images, gives euhemeristic interpretationes of two Graeco-Egyptian gods, Isis and Serapis. The mishnah itself reads: “If one finds utensils upon which is the figure of the sun or moon or a dragon, he casts them into the Salt Sea. Rabban Simeon b. Gamaliel says: If it is upon precious utensils they are prohibited, but if upon common utensils they are permitted” (m. Avodah Zarah 3:3). The Bavli elaborates on which images, in particular, would render a vessel unfit for Jewish use. And it is especially preoccupied with conventional icons of Isis, portrayed suckling her son Horus, and Serapis, portrayed with a kalathos or grain-measure atop his head. The passage in b. Avodah Zarah reads, “For it has been taught: ‘R. Judah also includes the picture of a woman giving to suck [i.e., Isis] and Serapis.’ A woman giving to suck alludes to Eve who suckled the whole world; Serapis alludes to Joseph who became a prince [sar] and appeased [hephis] the whole world. He is holding a measure and is measuring, and she is holding a child and giving it to suck” (b. Avodah Zarah 43a). On this interpretatio Judaica, Egyptian Isis is in fact the biblical Eve, who gave suck to all the living, as it were (Gen 3:20). And (Graeco-) Egyptian Serapis is in fact the Hebrew patriarch Joseph, son of Jacob and governor in Egypt. For the Serapis/Joseph equivalency, the rabbis give a Hebrew etymological explanation: sar-hephis, the appeasing prince. Elsewhere in late antiquity, the Christian Firmicus Maternus gives an equally implausible Greek etymology: Σάρρας παῖς, “Sarah’s [great grand-] child” (De errore profanarum religionum 13.2). The key thing for our purposes, however, is not the reason adduced but the interpretatio itself: Isis is Eve. Serapis is Joseph.54 From the amoraim we learn that Isis is Eve, mother of all the living, and Serapis Joseph the patriarch. But it is thanks to earlier, Hellenistic Jews that we know that the titan Atlas is actually Enoch, who walked with God (Gen 5:24). Eusebius cites Alexander Polyhistor, who in turn cites Eupolemus (here probably Pseudo-Eupolemus) as saying, “The Greeks say that Atlas invented astrology, and that Atlas is the same as Enoch; and that Enoch had a son Methuselah, who learned all things through angels of God, and thus we gained our knowledge” (Eusebius, P.E. 9.17; trans. E. H. Gifford). This interpretatio is premised on mythological function. Atlas and Enoch are here understood as culture heroes, the persons responsible for bringing the art of astrology to their is called after Euhemerus the Messenian…. Following this example the Jews sometimes identified lower pagan gods with ordinary men and women who had played a part in their own history”; also idem, “The Interpretatio Judaica of Sarapis,” in Studies in Hellenistic Religions, ed. M. J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 189–214. 54  See further Rivka Ulmer, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash, Studia Judaica 52 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 215–244.

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respective peoples, and thus are identified with one another. What Atlas does for the Greeks Enoch does for the Jews; hence Atlas is Enoch.55 Likewise Hellenistic-Jewish is the more elaborate identification of the Greek god Hermes and his Egyptian counterpart Thoth with Moses.56 Artapanus, the Egyptian Jewish historian who flourished at the turn of the second century BCE, writes about Moses as follows (according to Eusebius): He [Moses] was called Mousaeus by the Greeks. This Mousaeus was the teacher of Orpheus. As a grown man he bestowed many useful benefits on mankind, for he invented boats and devices for stone construction and the Egyptian arms and the implements for drawing water and for warfare, and philosophy. Further, he divided the state into 36 nomes and appointed for each of the nomes the god to be worshiped, and for the priests the sacred letters, and that they [the gods of the nomes] should be cats and dogs and ibises. He also allotted a choice area to the priests. He did all these things for the sake of maintaining the monarchy firm for Chenephres, for formerly the masses were disorganized and would at one time expel kings, at others appoint them, often the same people but sometimes others. On account of these things, then, Moses was loved by the masses, and was deemed worthy of godlike honor by the priests and called Hermes, on account of the interpretation of the sacred letters. eusebius, P.E. 9.27.3–6; trans. John J. Collins in Charlesworth, OTP 2:898–899

There are actually two different connections to Greek myth here. At the beginning of the passage, Artapanus identifies Moses with Musaeus the teacher of Orpheus. In Greek tradition, Musaeus is usually said to be the son or the student of Orpheus, but Artapanus reverses the relation, making him Orpheus’s teacher. And at the end of the passage, the Egyptian priests bestow divine honours on Moses and recognize him as Hermes (who is Thoth, via interpretatio Aegyptica) for his oracular powers. As noted above, Gerard Mussies argued that these latter interpretationes (Isis/Eve, Serapis/Joseph, Atlas/Enoch, Hermes/Moses) are euhemerist in their theology. And this is broadly true, inasmuch as they identify gentile gods with 55  See further Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Ancient Jewish Sciences and the Historiography of Judaism,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature, ed. Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 195–254. 56  See Mussies, “Interpretatio Judaica of Thot-Hermes”; David Flusser and Shua Amorai-Stark, “The Goddess Thermuthis, Moses, and Artapanus,” JSQ 1 (1993/1994): 217–233.

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biblical humans. But we should qualify this. The particular biblical humans in question are exceptional even apart from these identifications with deities. Enoch and Moses, in particular, become gods even within Jewish tradition.57 Eve is a direct creation of God, without mother or father, and arguably begins her life as an immortal. Only Joseph fits the bill of a straightforwardly euhemerist interpretation, and that probably because he occupies the role of a culture hero in Egyptian Judaism: the one who supplies food to the nation. In sum, we have a great many interpretationes Judaicae of gentile gods, some specific and others general, some euhemerist and others in terms of the angels of the nations, and other variations beside. Ancient Jews lived in a world teeming with gentile gods. How, we might ask, could they not undertake to translate them? 4 Conclusions What, then, can we conclude about the universal polytheism and the case of the Jews? First and most importantly, it seems to me, the evidence we have considered overwhelmingly suggests that the Jews and their god did not live in splendid isolation from the prevailing ancient practice of translating gods across cultures. They do not in fact constitute an exception to Robert Parker’s rule. Hence any strong form of the Assmann/Portier-Young hypothesis, noted in the introduction above, is to be rejected. Gentile writers promiscuously translated the Jewish god into Greek or Roman terms, and Jewish writers sometimes did likewise. Meanwhile, Jewish writers promiscuously translated gentile gods into their own terms, rendering them as the divine council, angels, princes, demons, or human heroes from the primeval biblical past. “False gods cannot be translated,” Assman has said.58 Of course they can. Our sources do it all the time. Or perhaps, we are better off abandoning altogether the notion of “false gods” with reference to biblical and ancient Jewish sources. I strongly suspect, although I cannot argue the point here, that we often mistake idol polemics in our sources for metaphysical claims.59 To wit: The English phrase “false gods,” 57  See Philip S. Alexander, “From Son of Adam to Second God: Transformations of the Biblical Enoch,” in Biblical Figures Outside the Bible, ed. Michael E. Stone and Theodore A. Bergen (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), 87–122; Wayne A. Meeks, “Moses as God and King,” in Religions in Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 354–371. 58  Assman, Moses the Egyptian, 3. 59  On this complex of issues, see Thomas A. Judge, Other Gods and Idols, LHBOTS 674 (London: T. & T. Clark, 2019).

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which is so central to Assmann’s Mosaic distinction, occurs just three times in the RSV of the Hebrew Bible (Ps 40:5; Jer 14:22; 18:15), and none of those contains any form of the word “god” (el, elohim, etc.). In Ps 40:5, the term rendered “false gods” is just kazav, “falsehood” (OG Ps 39:5: ματαιότητας καὶ μανίας ψευδεῖς), in Jer 14:22 havlei ha-goyim, “the futilities of the nations” (OG Jer 14:22: εἰδώλοις τῶν ἐθνῶν), and in Jer 18:15 shavē, “an empty thing” (OG Jer 18:15: κενὸν). There are, strictly speaking, no “false gods” at all in the Bible. The idols of the nations—that is, the cult statues themselves—are considered futile and empty by many (but not all) of our biblical and Jewish sources, but that is an expression of contempt for iconism, not a denial of the reality of gentile gods. What we meet in our Jewish sources are not false gods but gentile gods (foolishly represented by statues). And gentile gods certainly can be, and very often are, translated. Indeed, the issue of iconography arguably goes a long way toward explaining much of the evidence discussed above. Recall Maximus of Tyre trying to give an interpretatio of the patron god of Arabia: “The Arabians worship a god whom I do not know, but I have seen the cult statue; it was a square stone” (Dissertations 2.8). Now consider the case of the patron god of Judea, who had no cult statue, but who was acclaimed as “god of heaven” and “most high god” (plausibly suggesting Zeus Olympios or Jupiter Optimus Maximus) and whose temple was adorned with golden grape vines and grape clusters (plausibly suggesting Dionysus). Even those more philosophical interpretationes that identify the Jewish god with Ouranos or Kosmos or Phusis do so expressly on the grounds of Moses’s principled aniconism. If the god cannot be figured as a human or an animal, then he may have to be translated in more cosmological terms, but he can still be translated. Or, as incertus deus (thus Lucan), the Jewish god may in fact be, say, Zeus or Helios; it is just that we lack the onomastic or iconographic information that would allow us to know. Meanwhile, several established Jewish interpretationes of gentile gods likewise reason from iconography. Isis is Eve because her icon portrays her as the primeval mother. Serapis is Joseph because his icon portrays him providing life-giving grain for the Egyptians. And so on. If iconography helps to explain many of the interpretationes discussed above, then ritual is, I think, usually to blame when interpretatio goes wrong. By “goes wrong” here, I refer not to theological error (which is often in the eye of the beholder) but to social unrest and political violence. Consider the identification of Yahweh with Zeus, which Jewish writers like the Letter of Aristeas and Josephus can make without batting an eye. But when Antiochus IV Epiphanes makes the same identification, war breaks out. Why this difference? Because

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Antiochus IV did not just give an interpretatio; he changed the rites (2 Macc 6:1–6), which is another can of worms entirely.60 Parker makes this theoretical point in a different context. He writes, “There was no reason why believing that god A was the same as god B also entailed that the rituals by which the two were honoured should be the same; ancestral tradition, doubtless pleasing to the god in question, retained its validity. Customs differ and should be respected, but metaphysical reality is the same everywhere.”61 Just so. Judean ancestral custom was pleasing to the patron god of Judea. Judean customs differ from Syrian or Greek ones and should be respected. The real problem is not saying that Yahweh is Baal Shamem or Zeus Olympios; it is compelling the priests to offer the wrong sacrifices, or to offer sacrifices on the wrong days, or replacing Judean priests with Syrian ones, etc. The pantheon may be universal, but ritual rules are not. “Think global, act local.”

60   Thus rightly Robert Doran, “The Persecution of Judeans by Antiochus IV: The Significance of Ancestral Laws,” in The Other in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins, ed. Daniel C. Harlow et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 423–433. John Ma (“Re-examining Hanukkah,” Marginalia [July 9, 2013]) is right to insist that the Seleucid intervention in the Judean cult was an administrative matter, but wrong to deny any religious aspect to it. The administrative is religious. 61  Parker, Greek Gods Abroad, 72.

Chapter 4

The Divine Name as a Characteristic of Divine Identity in Second-Temple Judaism and Early Christianity Charles A. Gieschen There are many titles for the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, but only one personal name: ‫( יהוה‬hereafter YHWH), the four-letter name also known as the tetragrammaton or divine name.1 There is an intimate connection between a being and its name in the ancient world, and that is certainly true of the God of Israel and his divine name in the Hebrew Bible. YHWH and his personal name cannot be separated. Possession of the divine name, however, has been an underappreciated characteristic in the descriptions of figures who are closely related or even identified with the God of Israel.2 One aspect of Richard Bauckham’s advocacy of divine identity Christology, which calls upon scholars to move beyond functional or ontic christological categories in looking at first century evidence, is the attention given to Jesus’ possession of the divine 1  For a wide-ranging and recent study of the tetragrammaton that includes extensive bibliography, see Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God from the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 179 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). It should be noted here that Wilkinson references my writings but consistently misspells my name as “Glieschen.” See also Karel van der Toorn, “Yahweh”, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons of the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1711–1730. 2  I previously highlighted possession of the divine name as one of five major characteristics of various theophanies in ancient Israelite and Second Temple Jewish literature; the other four were divine position, divine appearance, divine functions, and divine veneration. See Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, AGJU 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 30–33; reprinted in the Library of Early Christology Series (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), 30–33. My research on the divine name in early Christology has been further developed in four articles that are the basis for what is presented below: Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” VC 57 (2003): 115–157; Charles A. Gieschen, “The Name of the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch,” in Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 238–249; Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name that the Son Shares with the Father in the Gospel of John,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: Royal, Prophetic, and Divine Messiahs, ed. Benjamin Reynolds and Gabriele Boccaccini, AGJU 106 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 387–410; and Charles A. Gieschen, “Divine Name,” in Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

© CHARLES A. GIESCHEN, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_005

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name.3 This study will explore the significance of Jewish and Christian textual evidence that figures such as 1 Enoch’s Son of Man, Apocalypse of Abraham’s Yahoel, Philo’s Logos, and early Christianity’s Jesus possess the tetragrammaton, arguing that possession of the divine name was an important characteristic in the first century CE among Jews for communicating the identification of a figure close to, or even within, the mystery of the God of Israel. This testimony will also be contrasted with evidence of the divine name being shared or placed upon humans, such as the High Priest or the baptized, as evidence not of divine identity but of union with God, visible reflection of God’s image, or ownership by God. 1

Background for the Divine Name as a Characteristic of Divine Identity

There are two Hebrew Bible traditions about the divine name which continued to be influential in Second Temple Judaism that are foundational for understanding references to the divine name in early Christianity. First, an important Hebrew Bible tradition that influenced later traditions is that the divine name is the possession of the visible image of YHWH in various theophanies.4 One of the places where this is especially clear is when YHWH promises Moses that he will send “an angel/messenger” before Israel as a guardian on their journey from Sinai and also warns them that this angel/messenger shares his divine authority because “my name is in him” (Exod 23:21). The need for some distinction between YHWH and his visible form arises from the paradox that YHWH appears in some form on many occasions, yet one cannot see YHWH and live (Exod 33:20). Exodus 23:21 testifies that a figure that has some independence from YHWH can still share in his being through the possession of the divine name. If this “angel/messenger” has the name YHWH in him, he can be understood to be YHWH in a visible form. A similar phenomenon is present with “the Name” or “the Name of YHWH” used as a title for YHWH’s tangible 3  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 24–25, 30–31. He sees evidence of this in Phil 2:9, Heb 1:4, and the frequent mention of “calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 2:17–21, 38; 9:14; 22.16; Rom 10:9–13; 1 Cor 1:2; and 2 Tim 2:22). 4  See esp. Jarl E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1985), and the essays collected in Jarl E. Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, NTOA 30 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). See also Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, esp. 70–78.

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presence who dwelt in the tabernacle and temple as mentioned primarily in Deuteronomy, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, and Jeremiah (e.g., Deut 12:5, 11; 1 Kgs 8:16, 43; Jer 7:10–11, 14, 30). Much like the promise in Isaiah that the Glory of YHWH will be seen (Isa 40:5), Isaiah also offers a vivid description of the Name of YHWH coming as an eschatological warrior (Isa 34:27–33). Isaiah also promises the future (eschatological) revelation of the divine name: “my people will know my name in that day” (Isa 52:6). As will be evident below, Second-Temple Jewish and early Christian literature evinces considerable interest in figures who possess the divine name. Second, although the divine name is frequent in the Hebrew Bible and was surely vocalized in ancient Israelite religion, much mystery grew around it. For example, when Moses is called, he asks God for a name to share with Israel and is given a mysterious response that raises more questions than it answers: ‫ֶא ְהיֶ ה‬ ‫“( ְַא ֶׁשר ֶא ְהיֶ ה‬I am who I am”; Exod 3:14). For another example, when God in the form of a man wrestles with Jacob, he is surprised that Jacob needs to ask for his name and does not answer his question (Gen 32:29; see also Judg 13:17–18). The implication is that God’s name is a mystery that Jacob already should know. A prominent aspect of the mystery concerning the divine name in SecondTemple Jewish texts is due to the relationship of ‫ יהוה‬to the creative command ‫“( יהי‬let there be”). Because of this, the divine name came to be considered the most powerful word in the world, even the very word that God spoke to bring the world into existence (e.g., Ps 124:8). Jubilees, a second-century BCE Jewish text, testifies to the cosmogenic power ascribed to the divine name as it describes Isaac calling his sons to swear an oath by “the glorious and honored and great and splendid and amazing and mighty name which created heaven and earth and everything together” (Jub. 36:7; see also Pr Man 2). The mystery concerning the divine name increased during the Second Temple period with the lack of its vocalization.5 The prohibition among Jews against vocalizing the divine name, except by the high priest in the temple precincts on the Day of Atonement and possibly also in the daily blessing, appears to be in place during the early part of the second century BCE and was probably a pious attempt to safeguard the name from misuse. Even though later rabbinic sources identify the death of Simon the Just with the broad cessation of the vocalization of the divine name among Jews (e.g., t. Soṭah 13:8),

5  See further Sean M. McDonough, YHWH at Patmos: Rev. 1:4 in its Hellenistic and Early Jewish Setting, WUNT II/107 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 58–122, and Anthony Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism: Use and Non-Use in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek,” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2017), 280–304.

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it undoubtedly was a more complex historical process.6 Qumran literature (ca. 100 BCE) testifies to expulsion from the community for vocalization of the divine name (1QS VI, 27–VII, 2), avoidance of it in oaths (CD XV, 1–4), and avoidance of its vocalization (1QIsaa). Although most scholars see this evidence as representative of a widespread practice among Jews of not vocalizing the divine name at this time, such prohibitions may reflect that some outside the community did vocalize it and use it in oaths because polemics often presuppose praxis.7 There is evidence that the tetragrammaton was known but not vocalized also among Greek-speaking Jews. Dating from the latter part of the third century BCE, the Septuagint version of Lev 24:16 offers stark evidence against vocalization. The difference between the MT (in English: “And he that curses the name of YHWH shall surely be put to death”) and the LXX (in English: “But he that names the name of the Lord, let him die the death”) reveals a heightened sensitivity among Jewish readers/hearers of the LXX text to not only the possible misuse of the divine name, but even the vocalization of it. There is also evidence of the understanding that the divine name was a secret that Jews alone were to know and preserve.8 For example, Philo, an Alexandrian Jew who wrote prolifically in Greek in the first half of the first century CE, shows that he is familiar with the divine name in Hebrew, probably because it appeared in some Greek manuscripts of Exodus, by stating that Moses “says that the name is four letters [τετραγράμματον]” (Moses 2.114–115). Philo goes on to state this injunction against saying or hearing the divine name: “Only those who have been purified through wisdom in their ears and tongue are permitted to hear and say it on sacred ground [i.e., the temple], but no one else is permitted anywhere ever” (Moses 2.114–115). Philo reveals that the tetragrammaton is a name known but not pronounced by Jews and yet he does not actually reveal what the tetragrammaton is so that it remains unknown and unvocalized by Gentiles. Josephus, writing for a broad Roman audience in the late first century CE, confesses this prohibition in even stronger language: “God communicated to him [Moses] his name … I am prohibited from speaking about it” (Ant. 2.275–276). This lack of vocalization and hiddenness explains why so many references to the divine name in the texts cited below are implicit. 6  Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism,” 280–304. 7  Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism,” 280–290. 8  Nathaniel Andrade, “The Jewish Tetragrammaton: Secrecy, Community, and Prestige among Greek-Writing Jews of the Early Roman Empire,” JSJ 46 (2015): 198–223. The examples from Philo and Josephus that I present here are drawn from Andrade’s study. See also Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism,” 280–290.

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It is noteworthy that in spite of this Jewish practice of not vocalizing the divine name and instead vocalizing ‫“( ֲאדֹונָ י‬Lord”) or ‫“( ַה ֵּׁשם‬the Name”) as a substitute, and in spite of the avoidance of the divine name in Aramaic writings, the very few extant LXX manuscripts prior to the second century CE attempted to preserve the divine name in the Greek text by transliterating it in Greek as ΙΑΩ or writing it in Hebrew and by writing it in square-script Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew characters rather than rendering it with the Greek substitute κύριος (“Lord”) or θεός (“God”).9 There is, however, a distinct shift in the second century CE away from preserving the tetragrammaton in some form to rendering the divine name primarily with the title κύριος and occasionally with the title θεός.10 This evidence may explain why knowledge of the divine name is strong even among Greek-speaking Jews in the first century CE, but later wanes. 2

Second-Temple Jewish Evidence that the Divine Name Indicates Divine Identity

2.1 1 Enoch One of the most intriguing Jewish examples of a second heavenly figure sharing the divine name is the Son of Man11 in the Parables of 1 Enoch (chapters 37– 71), preserved in Ethiopic and certainly a Jewish writing which probably dates to the reign of Herod the Great, but no later than early first century CE.12 Before discussing the name of the Son of Man, however, it is important to observe that the Parables give significant attention to the other primary figure from the throne room scene in Daniel: the “one who was Ancient of Days” (Dan 7:9). This one is often identified in the Parables in Ethiopic with the designation 9  Although scholars in the past have been divided over how to interpret the limited data, Meyer argues convincingly that there is no solid evidence for the substitution of κύριος for the divine name in LXX manuscripts prior to the second century CE; see “The Divine Name in Early Judaism,” 210–279. For an argument that the practice of transliterating the divine name as Ιαω in LXX manuscripts was far more widespread than previously thought, see Frank Shaw, The Earliest Non-Mystical Jewish Use of Ιαω, CBET 70 (Leuven: Peeters, 2014). 10  Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism,” 210–279. 11  The title Son of Man is used here with an awareness that three other titles are used for this composite figure in the Parables (Chosen One, Righteous One, and Anointed One); see George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 37–82, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 113–120. 12  Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2, 62–63. The source of translations of 1 Enoch 37–71 below are from Nickelsburg and VanderKam, unless otherwise noted below.

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“the Lord of the Spirits,” a title which reflects the Hebrew title ‫( יהוה צבאות‏‬see Isa 6:3).13 These chapters also testify repeatedly that the Lord of the Spirits has a special and unique name.14 Three examples will suffice to illustrate this point. 1 Enoch 67:8 asserts that not believing in the unique name of the Lord of the Spirits is the reason for judgment: “so that their flesh will be judged, because they denied the Lord of the Spirits. And they see their judgment every day and do not believe in his name.” 1 Enoch 47:2c notes that the righteous know and praise this name: “they were glorifying and praising and blessing the name of the Lord of the Spirits.” 1 Enoch 50:3 links the salvation of the righteous to this name: “And they will have honor in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits, and in his name they will be saved.” That the “name” of the Lord of the Spirits is YHWH is self-evident for any Jewish reader or hearer of this text. The Lord of the Spirits is not the only one to possess the divine name according to the Parables.15 Beginning with the second parable, Enoch is given a vision that serves as the introduction to the Son of Man. [1 En. 46:1] And there I saw one who had a head of days, and his head was like white wool. And with him was another, whose face was like the appearance of a man; and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy angels. [2] And I asked the angel of peace, who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, about that son of man—who he was and whence he was (and) why he went with the Head of Days. [3] And he answered me and said to me: ‘This is the son of man who has righteousness, and righteousness dwells with him, and all the treasuries of what is hidden he will reveal; For the Lord of Spirits has chosen him, and his lot has prevailed through truth in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits forever. Although the characters are those of Daniel 7, the setting of eschatological triumph in Daniel is not the scene here; that setting is the basis for the depiction of the Son of Man in 1 Enoch 69:26–29. This scene is emphasizing the existence of the hidden Son of Man as the Chosen One long before he will be revealed to all in the latter days. Furthermore, the language of this text implies that the 13  Matthew Black, “Two Unusual Nomina Dei in the Second Vision of Enoch,” in The New Testament Age: Essays in Honor of Bo Reicke, 2 vols., ed. William C. Weinrich (Macon, GA; Mercer University Press, 1984), 1.53–59. 14  The phrase “the name of the Lord of Spirits” is used repeatedly in these chapters; see 1 En. 38:2; 39;7, 9, 14; 40:4, 6; 41:2, 8; 43:4; 45:1, 2, 3; 46:7; 47:2; 48:7, 10; 50:2, 3; 53:6; 55:4; 61:3, 9, 11, 13; 63:7; 67:8. 15  See Gieschen, “The Name of the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch,” 238–249.

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author understood the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7 to also be the Glory of YHWH who was seen by Ezekiel: “whose face was like the appearance of a man” (1 En. 46:1; cf. Ezek 1:26–28). Crucial for this study is the description of the Son of Man that follows in 1 Enoch 48. Far from being a scene of eschatological triumph inspired by Daniel 7, this scene depicts the Son of Man as a preexistent being who was given a special name by the Lord of the Spirits in the primal “hour” prior to creation. Because YHWH is the only being that existed prior to creation, this Jewish text expresses a very profound understanding of the relationship between the Lord of the Spirits and the Son of Man. [48:2] At that hour, that Son of Man was named by the name, in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits, the Before-Time; [3] even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars, he was named by the name in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits.16 Although this scene is certainly developed from the naming of the servant in Isaiah 49:1–2 (“YHWH called me from the womb; from the body of my mother he named my name”), the Isaiah text has been reinterpreted by changing the setting of the naming: it does not take place at the calling of the Son of Man from a mother’s womb, but it is done prior to creation.17 In 1 Enoch, “the name” by which the Son of Man “was named” appears to be the divine name of the Lord of the Spirits because there are numerous references to “the name of the Lord of the Spirits” throughout the Parables.18 Especially noteworthy is the description that follows in this scene: “All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship before him [the Son of Man], they will glorify, bless, and sing hymns to the name of the Lord of the Spirits” (1 En. 48:5). The implication is that they will use the name of the Lord of the Spirits in worshipping the Son of Man because both possess the same divine name.19

16  This translation is that of E. Isaac in OTP 1.35, but incorporates his literal rendering “named by the name” in place of “was given a name”; see n. 48b (emphasis mine). 17  For the influence of Isaiah on the Son of Man in 1 Enoch, see Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2, 116–120, 169. 18  Although there is clear testimony that this name is possessed before creation by the Son of Man, it should be noted that an enigmatic discussion about the Evil One revealing this name to Michael and placing it in his hand (1 En. 69:14–15) introduces the verses that describe this name as the source of creation (1 En. 69:16–26). 19  The concept of persons sharing the same divine name is prominent and important in first-century Christianity, as will be demonstrated below (e.g., Matt 28:19; Rev 3:12; 14:1).

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The fulfillment of this bold promise is depicted in the eschatological enthronement scene near the conclusion of the Parables: “And they [the righteous] blessed and glorified and exalted, because the name of that Son of Man had been revealed to them” (1 En. 69:26). This scene may have been understood as the fulfillment of what Isaiah promised about the eschatological revelation of the divine name, “My people will know my name in that day, that I am he who speaks” (Isa 52:6). The significance of the revealing of the name of the Son of Man becomes readily apparent when one sees the relationship between the divine name, the oath used in creation, and the name of the Son of Man in 1 Enoch 69.20 Immediately preceding the dramatic revelation of the name of the Son of Man to the righteous, 1 Enoch has an elaborate ascription of the creation and its sustenance to this “powerful and strong” oath (1 En. 69:14). [69:16] And these are the secrets of this oath [i.e., the divine name], and they are strong through his oath. And the heaven was suspended … before the age was created and forever. [17] And through it the earth was founded upon the waters; and from the hidden (recesses) of the mountains come forth the beautiful waters, from the creation of the age and forever. [18] And through the oath the sea was created and its foundation, for the time of wrath, he placed for it the sand, and it does not pass over it from creation of the age and forever. [19] And through that oath the deep were made firm and abide, and they have stood and are not shaken from their place from of old and forever. [20] And through that oath the sun and the moon complete their course, and they do not transgress their commands from of old …. [25] And over them this oath is mighty; and by it they are preserved, {and their paths are preserved,} and their courses will not perish. This description of the cosmogenic power of the divine name reflects similar understandings of the divine name as power in contemporary Jewish and Christian literature, even as the word used in creation.21 There is one other text in the Parables that discusses the name of the Son of Man:

20  Regarding the relationship of this chapter to mystical contemplation of the divine name, see Daniel C. Olson, Enoch: A New Translation (New Richland Hills, TX: Bibal Press, 2004), 128–131, esp. 270–273. 21  For example: Ps 124:8; Pr Man 2–3; Jub. 36:7; 3 En. 13:1; Heb 1.3; 1 Clem. 59.8; Herm. Sim. 9.14.5; see also Fossum, Name of God, 77–84.

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[70:1] Afterwards it came to pass that the immortal name of that Son of Man was exalted in the presence of the Lord of Spirits above all those who live on earth. [2] He was raised aloft on a chariot of wind, and his name became a household word.22 This text serves as a prologue to Enoch’s transformative ascent and identification as the Son of Man that is described in chapter 71. Here the ascent of Enoch is described as the exalting of “the immortal name of that Son of Man.” As 1 En. 69:26 states, the eschatological revelation of the identity of the Son of Man includes the revelation of his true name. Three conclusions from the evidence presented above are especially important to the presentation of this Son of Man as somehow within the mystery of YHWH. First, although Daniel 7, Ezekiel 1, and Isaiah’s servant are foundational to the description of the Son of Man in the Parables, 1 Enoch takes the Son of Man’s presence with the Ancient of Days back to before creation, implying the existence of a second figure alongside and within YHWH prior to creation. Second, 1 Enoch strengthens the identification of the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man within the mystery of the one God by indicating that they share the same divine name. Third, the understanding of the significance of this name is greatly enhanced by the elaborate description of the power of the divine name (“oath”) given in 1 Enoch 69:13–25. 2.2 Apocalypse of Abraham The depiction of Yahoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham, usually dated to the late first century CE and preserved in Slavonic, is another striking example of the divine name possessed by a theophanic figure.23 Yahoel’s doubly divine name (‫ יה‬and ‫ )אל‬is the first indication of his unique status above that of any created angel.24 Yahoel’s possession of the divine name is explicitly mentioned twice in relationship to his appearance to Abraham. 22  This is the translation of Olson, Enoch, 132–133; see his note on the challenges of the manuscript tradition here. For an argument supporting chapters 70–71 as an original part of the Parables (and not a later appendix), see James C. VanderKam, “Righteous One, Messiah, Chosen One, and Son of Man in 1 Enoch 37–71,” in The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 182–183. 23  See further Fossum, Name of God, 318–321, Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 142–144, and esp. Andrei A. Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron: Aural Apocalypticism and the Origins of Early Jewish Mysticism, TSAJ 169 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). 24  In a similar manner, the Epistle to the Hebrews indicates that Jesus’ divine status is above all angels just as “the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs” (Heb 1:4).

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[10:3] And while I [Abraham] was still face down on the ground, I heard the voice speaking, “Go, Yahoel of the same name, through the mediation of my Ineffable Name, consecrate this man for me and strengthen him against his trembling.” [10:8] “I am Yahoel and I was called so by him who causes those with me on the seventh expanse, on the firmament, to shake, a Power through the medium of his Ineffable Name in me.”25 Yahoel’s proclamation, “a Power though the medium of his Ineffable Name in me,” identifies him with the angel/messenger who bears the divine name in Exodus 23:20–21. The significance of his divine name in this document is augmented by an elaborate physical description that identifies him closely with the Glory of Ezekiel 1:26–28 (Apoc. Ab. 11.2–3). One part of that physical description indicates that he also bears the divine name outwardly: “And a turban was on his head, its look that of a rainbow” (Apoc. Ab. 11:3). Although this description certainly can be seen as a reflection of Israel’s high priest garb that included a turban with the divine name (Exod 28:36–38; 40:30–31), the Apocalypse of Abraham is depicting Yahoel as the heavenly high priest at the time of Abraham; thus, Yahoel is understood in this document to be the archetype for the earthly high priest later commanded in Exodus. It also appears that the forty-day Sinai theophany of Moses with the Glory of YHWH in Exodus 24:18 formed the pattern for understanding Abraham’s supposedly earlier encounter with Yahoel: “And we went, the two of us along together, forty days and nights. And I ate not bread and drank no water, because [my] food was to see the angel who was with me, and his speech with me was my drink” (Apoc. Ab. 11:1–2). Andei Orlov has recently recounted the debate about the status of Yahoel generated among a few scholars in the closing decades of the twentieth century.26 On one side of the debate were Jarl Fossum and Christopher Rowland. Both emphasized the presence of some divine attributes of the enthroned Glory in Ezekiel 1:26–28, especially the rainbow, are visible upon Yahoel.27 Fossum even concluded that Yahoel is presented as the Glory of God.28 Both call attention to Yahoel’s white hair (“like snow”)—Fossum calls 25  The translations of the Apocalypse of Abraham here and below are from OTP 1, 689–705. 26  Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron, 82–87. 27  Fossum, Name of God, 319–320, and Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 102–103. 28  Fossum, Name of God, 320.

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this detail “astonishing”—because Yahoel clearly features a divine attribute from the Ancient of Days who has “raiment as white as snow, and the hairs of his head like pure wool” (Dan 7:9). Both scholars also postulated that no anthropomorphic figure is seen on the throne in the later chapters of Apocalypse of Abraham because Yahoel is present with Abraham at the time.29 On the other side of the debate were Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham. Hurtado recognizes that “the enormous significance of the name of God in ancient Jewish tradition” suggests that Yahoel is “perhaps superior to all but God himself.”30 Hurtado falls short of understanding him being presented as the Glory of Ezekiel, concluding “Yahoel’s white hair and rainbow headdress may instead be intended to suggest a limited similarity between him and God.”31 Bauckham takes a firmer position by asserting that “Yahoel is wholly intelligible as a principal angel” and is “distinguished from God and never confused with God.”32 After his own fresh and extensive analysis, Orlov offers this balanced conclusion: … the results of this investigation might provide an additional insight helpful for the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the exact mediatorial status of Yahoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham. Accordingly, contrary to Bauckham’s and Hurtado’s positions, it opens the possibility that Yahoel might, indeed, be envisioned in the Apocalypse of Abraham as endowed with features of the Kavod, similarly to several other characters of the story who paradoxically emulate this theophanic symbolism. Yet, against Fossum’s and Rowland’s arguments, this study demonstrates that such a transference of Kavod attributes does not endow Yahoel with the status of the “true” deity in the aural context of the apocalypse’s ideology.33 Yahoel, especially due to his sharing of the divine name and visible divine attributes, is a figure that does not fit neatly into the category of “created angel.” These divine characteristics are startling and, at the very least, “suggest a limited 29  Rowland, Open Heaven, 102–103; Fossum, Name of God, 320. I have argued against this understanding, stating that the throne appears to be occupied by the invisible God (Apoc. Abr. 16:3) who is shrouded in fire and light (Apoc. Abr. 18:13; 19:1; 20:1); see Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 143 n. 61. This does not, however, preclude Yahoel from the possibility of being understood as the visible Glory who shares the throne, such as the Lamb does with the One seated on the throne in Revelation 4–5. 30   Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1998), 80. 31  Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 88. 32  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 227. 33  Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron, 95.

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similarity between him and God.”34 Orlov argues that Yahoel is an important Jewish precursor of developments visible in Metatron within Jewish mystical texts in subsequent centuries. For example, a similar tradition is found in 3 Enoch, a fifth or sixth century CE Jewish mystical text preserved in Hebrew that purports to be a record of the mystical ascent visions of Rabbi Ishmael, one of the second generation Tannaim (120–140 CE). It contains an account that depicts “the Holy One” (God) writing “the letters by which heaven and earth were created” upon a crown (3 En. 13:1) that he places upon Metatron: “He set it upon my head and he called me ‘the lesser YHWH’ [‫ ]יהוה הקטן‬in the presence of his whole household in the height, as it is written, ‘My name is in him’” (3 En. 12:5).35 2.3 Philo of Alexandria Philo, writing in the first half of the first century CE, also evinces considerable interest in the theophanic angel of Exodus 23:20–22 who possesses the divine name and uses him as the foundation of his teaching about ὁ λόγος (“the Word”). He quotes this text on several occasions when speaking about the Word’s function as a guide to lead people to the knowledge that facilitates a mystical ascent and vision of God which, in turn, bestows immortality.36 Here is but one example. [Agr. 51] This hallowed flock He leads in accordance with right and law, setting over it His true Word and First-Born Son who shall take upon Him its government like a lieutenant of a great king; for it is said in a certain place: “Behold I AM, I send My Angel before your face to guard you on the way.”37 For Philo, all of God’s activity, beginning with creation, is understood to be carried out by the Word who is the visible image of the High God above (Fuga 101). Philo carefully, and somewhat dangerously, distinguishes between God and the Word without totally separating them.38 Philo’s concept of the Word, therefore, allows him to affirm both the Middle Platonic philosophical 34  Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 88. 35  Translation from OTP 1, 265. 36   Somn 1.68–69, 86; Leg All 3.169–178; Quod Deus 143; Fuga 63. See Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 107–112. 37  Translation from LCL 247, Philo, III.135. 38  Although Philo speaks about the Word as “divine” (ὁ θεῖος λόγος; Somn. 1.62) or as “God” (θεός; Somn. 1.228–230), he also details how to distinguish between the “two Gods” (δύο …

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transcendence of the deity as well as the scriptural portrait of the God of Israel’s immanence. One of the reasons that Philo used ὁ λόγος as the dominant title for God’s visible activity in the world may have been the close relationship between ancient messenger traditions where the Word of YHWH is understood to be the angel/messenger who has the divine name.39 Note how closely “Name” and “Word” are related in this text. [Conf. 146] But if there be any as yet unfit to be called a son of God, let him press to take his place under God’s First-born, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, an archangel as it were. And many names are his for he is called: the Beginning, the Name of God, Word (of God), the Man after His Image, and ‘the One that sees’, namely Israel.40 Nor should it be assumed that this identification of the divine name angel traditions of ancient Israel as the Word is the invention of Philo under the influence of Hellenistic philosophy. Other pre-Christian Jewish evidence of this includes the identification of the theophanic Angel of YHWH who speaks to Moses from the burning bush in Exodus 3:4 as θεῖος λόγος (“Divine Word”) by Ezekiel the Tragedian in the second century BCE (Exāgōge 96–99) and the identification of the Destroying Angel of the Tenth Plague as ὁ παντοδύναμός σου λόγος (“your all-powerful Word”) in the first-century BCE Wisdom of Solomon (18:14–16). What do these three examples demonstrate about the divine name as a characteristic of these figures in Jewish texts? They testify to a complex understanding of monotheism, based upon ancient Israelite angel/messenger traditions, whereby a figure can share divine characteristics and be closely related or even identified with YHWH as his visible representation. A central characteristic used to communicate this identity is possession of the divine name. In a similar manner, as some Jews sought to understand Jesus, especially his relationship to God (i.e., the Father) in light of his resurrection, one of the divine characteristics that is used to express his divine identity is the divine name.

θεοί; Somn. 1.228–230) and on one occasion calls the Word “the second God” (ὁ δεύτερος θεός; QG 2.62). 39  See further, Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 103–114. 40  Translation from LCL 261, Philo, IV.89–91.

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Early Christian Evidence that the Divine Name Indicates Divine Identity

4.1 The Pauline Epistles One significant way that the divine identity of Jesus is expressed within the Pauline epistles is to assert that he possesses the divine name.41 Using the language of YHWH’s speech in Isaiah 45:23–24, Paul writes to the Philippians: “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name in order that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:9–11; see also Rom 14:1).42 The unmistakable reference to the divine name in this hymn is widely recognized by scholars; it is the only “name that is above every other name.”43 In light of this, the genitive relationship in the phrase ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ (“at the name of Jesus”) in the hymn is expressing possession (as in “at the name that Jesus possesses”) and not apposition (as in “at the name which is Jesus”). The bestowal of the divine name becomes a public acknowledgement of the divine identity of the crucified servant. Another text that shows the prominent influence of the divine name upon Pauline Christology is the presentation in Ephesians of the unparalleled cosmic status of Christ that results from his resurrection and enthronement “above every name that is named” (Eph 1:21).44 The conclusion is quite clear: if Christ is enthroned in the heavenly places “above every name that is named,” then he must be enthroned on the unique divine throne and possess the unique divine name that is not “named” by humans. This is testimony to Paul’s nonvocalization of the divine name as well as to an awareness of the divine name and the practice of not vocalizing it among the Christians who received this letter, at least some of them. 41  There are, obviously, other very significant ways that Paul expresses the divine identity of Jesus that have been discussed by scholars, such as the application of OT YHWH texts to Jesus; see David Capes, Old Testament YHWH Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT 2/47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992). See also the chapter on “Paul’s Christology of Divine Identity” in Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 182–232. For a broader discussion, see Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007). 42  See Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 337–339; Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 128–131; and Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 41–45, 209. 43  E.g., Fee, Pauline Christology, 564–565. 44  Paul’s authorship of Ephesians is questioned by some scholars, but authorship is not critical to understanding the evidence presented here. For the wider context of this Christology in Ephesians, see Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 339–343.

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Much more implicit evidence of Paul understanding Christ as possessing the divine name is his frequent use of the title κύριος (“Lord”) for Jesus in relationship to using the title θεός (“God”) for the Father. As noted above, the lack of vocalization of the divine name meant that “Lord” became a safe way of confessing Jesus to be within the mystery of YHWH. Paul’s frequent use of these respective titles for the Father and the Son is drawn from the Shema: “Behold, YHWH Elohim, YHWH is one” (Deut 6:4). One of the most important texts that testifies to Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ identity as YHWH that is explicitly alluding to the language of the Shema is 1 Corinthians 8:6.45 It is especially important to see the careful parallel structure in Paul’s profound statements about the Father and the Son as creator.46 but for us there is one God [εἷς θεὸς], the Father from whom are all things [ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα] and we for him, and one Lord [εἷς κύριος], Jesus Christ, through whom are all things [δι᾿ οὗ τὰ πάντα] and we through him. 4.2 The Book of Revelation The significance of the divine name for the Christology of Revelation is apparent in the description of Christ as the eschatological conqueror on the white horse (Rev 19:11–16). He appears there with a mysterious “name written on him that no one except he himself knows” (Rev 19:12). This assertion is probably hyperbolic insider language reflecting the hidden divine name because Revelation states elsewhere that the saints are sealed with the name of God and Jesus, bearing it on their foreheads (Rev 14:1; 22:4). The enlightened hearers of this text are expected to know this hidden name because it was given to them when they were sealed with it in baptism.47 Further evidence of the divine name indicating the divine identity of Jesus is found in three other references to God’s name and Jesus’ name related to baptism.48 First, John writes of seeing the Lamb with the 144,000 who had “his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads” (Rev 14:1). These are 45  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 216–217. 46  For insightful observations about the structure of 1 Cor 8:6, see Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism. Volume 1. Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2015), 32–49. 47   Charles A. Gieschen, “Baptismal Praxis and Mystical Experience in the Book of Revelation,” in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April D. DeConick, SBL Symposium Series 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 341–354. 48  For more detailed discussion, see Gieschen, “Baptismal Praxis and Mystical Experience in the Book of Revelation,” 342–349.

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not two separate names, but the same divine name. Second, in the final scene of the New Jerusalem, John writes of the saints before the throne of God and of the Lamb while seeing “his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Rev 22:4). Third, in the eschatological promise given in the letter to the church at Philadelphia, Jesus promises the faithful he will write on them “the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God … and my own new name” (Rev 3:12). These are not different names, but the one divine name shared by Son and the Father because the imagery of these texts is grounded in the writing, speaking, and imparting of the divine name during the baptismal rite. The scene that supports this conclusion is the sealing of the saints depicted in Rev 7:2–3, where the imagery from Ezekiel 9:1–11 is used. The “seal of the living God” (Rev 7:2) used in the sealing action is the divine name because the result of the sealing is that the 144,000 bear the divine name (Rev 14:1; cf. 22:4). A more allusive reference to the divine name is the title “I am the Alpha and Omega” spoken both by God (Rev 1:8) and Jesus (Rev 22:13). Although this title is certainly confessing the eternal nature of both God and Christ as creator and closely related to the title “the First and the Last” (Rev 1:17; 22:13) which is drawn from Isaiah (44:6 and 48:12) as well as the title “the Beginning and the End” (Rev 21:6; 22:13), it also may reflect the divine name as the tetragrammaton was transliterated into Greek in some LXX manuscripts as ΙΑΩ (Iota, Alpha, Omega). Richard Bauckham has observed, “In the context of Jewish theological speculation about the divine name, the occurrence of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet in this Greek form of the name could have suggested that the name itself contains the implication that God is the first and last.”49 4.3 The Gospel of John One of the most important early Christian witnesses to show interest in the divine name as a characteristic of divine identity Christology is the Gospel of John.50 Although the implication that Jesus shares the name of the Father is present in Jesus’ statements, “I have come in my Father’s name” (John 5:43) and “the works that I do in my Father’s name” (John 10:25; cf. 14:10–11), the most clear presentation of Jesus as the possessor of the divine name comes in the prayer of Jesus at the close of the farewell discourse. There Jesus prays 49  Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28. 50  Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 135–141; Gieschen, “The Divine Name that the Son Shares with the Father,” 386–410; and Joshua J. F. Coutts, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, WUNT 2/447 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).

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about having revealed the Father’s name to his followers (John 17:6), signaling the fulfillment of the eschatological promise of YHWH in Isaiah 52:6, “my people will know my name in that day.”51 In the process of requesting that the Father protect his disciples in this name, he twice makes the statement “your name that you have given me” (John 17:11). In light of Jesus speaking in the same context about the glory he has because the Father loved him “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24; cf. 1:1–14), the implication is that he was also given the Father’s name prior to creation. This Gospel even depicts Jesus as the embodiment of the divine name of the Father, to the extent that Jesus can pray “Father, glorify your name” (John 12:28). That Jesus can be identified as “the Name” is made clear by the parallel announcement that comes shortly before this prayer: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). The “Son of Man” is, therefore, also “your name” (see also 3 John 7). This prayer “glorify your name” is expressed again in the farewell prayer with the words “glorify your Son” and “glorify me” (John 17:1, 5). It is noteworthy that the focus of this Gospel is not only on believing in the person Jesus, but specifically believing in his name: “But to all who received him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God” (John 1:12). In light of this Gospel’s testimony to Jesus sharing the divine name, “believe in his name” should be understood as trusting that Jesus possesses the divine name and, thus, he is identified as being within the mystery of YHWH. This idea is also expressed in the reaction of the disciples to Jesus’ sign at Cana: “many believed in his name” (John 2:10). Knowing the true name of Christ is the source of “life” according to the thematic conclusion of this Gospel: “in order that, because you believe, you have life in his name” (John 20:31). Conversely, the lack of belief that Jesus possesses the divine name brings eschatological judgment: “he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18). Reflection on the hidden or secret name of the Son found in Gnostic literature is dependent on earlier Jewish Christian traditions such as those in the Gospel of John.52 Two clear examples of teaching about the divine name of the Father that was given to the Son are found in the Gospel of Philip and Gospel of Truth, both of which originated in the Valentinian Gnosticism of the latter half of the second century. The Gospel of Philip speaks of “one single name is not uttered in the world, the name that the Father gave to the Son, the name

51  Influence of Isaiah’s divine name theology upon the name theology in the Gospel of John is argued convincingly by Coutts, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, 42–70. 52  See Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 154–155.

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above all things: the name of the Father” (Gos. Phil. II.54.5–8).53 The Gospel of Truth goes even further in identifying the Son as the (visible) name: “Now the name of the Father is the Son. It is he who first gave a name to the one who came forth from him, who was himself, and he begot him as a son. He gave him his name which belonged to him…. For indeed, the Father’s name is not spoken, but it is apparent through a Son” (Gos. Truth I.38.7–24). Both of these texts imply that the Son and the Father share the tetragrammaton because both explicitly mention the Jewish practice of not vocalizing it.54 4.4 The Epistle to the Hebrews The divine name is also part of the Christological confession at the beginning of Hebrews. After announcing that God created the universe through the Son, the author states that the Son sustains “all things by his word of power” (Heb 1:3). The conclusion that “his word of power” sustaining creation is the powerful divine name is supported by the overt reference in what immediately follows to “the name that he has inherited is more excellent” than the names of the angels (Heb 1:4). The divine name is the only name that fits such a lofty description, especially considering the meaning of a name like Michael (“who is like God”).55 4.5 The Gospel of Matthew In spite of the frequent use and longstanding importance of the baptismal formula in Matt 28:19, there is limited understanding of what is meant by the singular “name” in this formula. A first step towards clarifying the identity of “the name” is to observe that the genitive of the baptismal formula could simply be expressing possession: the name that is possessed by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As a Jew who was writing for Jewish followers of Jesus, this author certainly understood the name of the Father to be the divine name (cf. Matt 6:9), but he also proclaims that this name is possessed by the Son and the Holy Spirit. If the Son and the Holy Spirit can be identified with the same divine name, then a Jew can worship the Son and Holy Spirit together with the Father as YHWH (cf. Matt 28:17). The understanding that the baptismal formula invokes the singular divine name is also present in James (Jas 2:7) and Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 61). 53  These translations of the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth are from NHL. 54  For an argument that Gnostics using the divine name may have impacted its use within Christianity, see Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 157; see also Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton, 155–168. 55  See also Rowland, Open Heaven, 113; Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 197; and Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 239.

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This relationship between the divine name and baptism is helpful in understanding two statements earlier in the Gospel where Jesus speaks of “my name.” The first one is: “whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Matt 18:5). If one understands this as a reference to the divine name possessed by Jesus that is also possessed by the Father and the Holy Spirit, then this is primarily a reference to receiving children through the use of the divine name in baptism. Second, a similar idea follows in the same context: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt 18:20). This is a reference to followers of Jesus invoking the divine name given them in baptism. Even as the Name of YHWH dwelt in the tabernacle and temple of old, this Gospel states that now this same reality dwells in and among the baptized.56 A similar understanding is present in the eucharistic prayer found in the Didache: “We give thanks to you, O Holy Father, for your Holy Name [i.e., Jesus] that you made to tabernacle in our hearts” (Did. 10.1). 4.6 The Acts of the Apostles Most of the evidence concerning the divine name in the Book of Acts is found in chapters 1–10, probably because this portion of the Acts is dealing with the mission to Jews and Samaritans (Acts 1:8).57 The significance of the divine name is established in Peter’s Pentecost speech (Acts 2:14–36), especially through the quotation of Joel 2:32 [MT 3:5]: “And it shall be that whoever invokes the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2:21). It is clear from Peter’s speech that Jesus is “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). This, in turn, indicates that the referent of “Lord” in the Joel quotation of Acts 2:21 is Jesus. When the people ask Peter what they should do, Peter tells them: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Joel’s prophecy concerning the Spirit is fulfilled in baptism where the divine name possessed by Jesus is invoked (cf. Acts 22:16). The invocation of the divine name in baptism (Acts 2:38) and healing (Acts 3:6, 16; 4:30), as well as preaching about the name (Acts 4:17–18; 5:28; 8:12), appears to have angered those associated with the temple cult, as seen by the three arrests of the apostles (Acts 4:1–3; 5:17–21; and 5:27–42) and Saul’s plans to arrest those in Damascus who invoked the name of Jesus (Acts 9:14, 21; cf. 26:9). 56  For the role this text plays in the wider theme of Jesus as “the embodied presence of God” in Matthew (1:23; 18:20; 28:20), see Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scriptures in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 162–175. 57  For fuller discussion, see Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 146–148.

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This understanding of the name invoked through the baptismal formula helps explain other phrases associated with baptism in Acts such as “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38), “in the name of the Lord” (Acts 8:16), “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 10:48), and “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 19:5). Rather than understanding these as distinct formulae for baptism, these phrases may refer to baptism done in the divine name that Jesus possesses. Both the varied form of these phrases and the lack of evidence of their use as actual baptismal formulae points to the priority of the formula found in Matt 28:19. 4.7 Ascension of Isaiah An aspect of the Christology in the Ascension of Isaiah (ca. early second century) is the identification of Christ as a possessor of a secret or unknown name (cf. Rev 19:12).58 During the visionary experience, the angelus interpres tells Isaiah of the seventh heaven “where the One who is not named dwells, and his chosen One, whose name is unknown, and no heaven can learn his name” (Ascen. Isa. 8:7). The angelus interpres later states concerning the Lord Christ, “you cannot hear his name until you have come up from this body” (Ascen. Isa. 9:5). Christ is depicted as possessing a hidden name that is not heard on earth, which is an allusion to the widespread Jewish practice of not vocalizing the divine name. Possession of the divine name may be reflected in the designation “the Lord” that is given to both the Father and Christ in this document (Ascen. Isa. 4:14; 9:5; 10:14) since the Ethiopic term used here is the same one used to translate the tetragrammaton. Furthermore, the Ascension of Isaiah carefully distinguishes between this “unknown” name and the name “Jesus”: the latter is a designation applied to Christ only during his earthly state (Ascen. Isa. 9:5; 10:7). This same tradition is also present concerning the angel who guides Isaiah’s vision, who is identified as “the Angel of the Holy Spirit” in this document (Ascen. Isa. 7:2–4). This evidence testifies to the influence of the divine name tradition in both the Christology and Pneumatology of the Ascension of Isaiah as it communicates an early understanding of the relationship between the three whom Christians confessed as the one God of Israel.

58  For a fuller discussion of this document’s Christology, see Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 229–244.

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Evidence that the Divine Name Does Not Indicate Divine Identity

After having argued that there is substantial evidence that demonstrates that the divine name was a characteristic used to express the divine identity of a figure in some of the literature of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, it is now important to acknowledge that there is also evidence where a figure having the divine name is not indicating divine identity, but union with God (because his presence is mediated by the divine name), visible reflection of God’s image, or ownership by God. There is a substantial difference between evidence where the figure possesses the divine name inherently versus evidence where the figure has the divine name placed upon him (such as on the turban of the High Priest) or is given the divine name (such as when it is invoked or marked in baptism). The Hebrew Bible testifies that the divine name was an important part of the High Priest’s garb (Exod 28:36–38; 40:30–31). The High Priest could be understood as reflecting the visible image of YHWH, the angel/messenger who has the divine name in him (Exod 23:20–21); it would be understandable that the High Priest be shown some of the honor accorded to the actual visible image of YHWH whom he visibly reflects (e.g., Exod 3:5). There is no evidence, however, that the High Priest was identified or understood as being within the mystery of YHWH because he bore the divine name. Probably one of the most exalted descriptions of a High Priest in Second Temple Jewish literature is found in the account of Simon, Son of Onias, in Sirach 50:1–21. Crispin Fletcher-Louis has argued that this text presents Simon as the divine Glory of YHWH (Sir 50:5–7; cf. Ezek 1:26–28) and, thus, he is worshipped (Sir 50:17, 21).59 While Simon is certainly presented as a visible reflection of the image of YHWH, it is not apparent from this text that he is presented as divine and receiving worship that appears to be directed instead to “their Lord, the Almighty, God Most High” whom Simon represents and for whom he speaks (Sir 50:17, 21).60 There is abundant first-century Christian testimony to the divine name being invoked upon and marked upon individuals in baptism, some of which was presented above.61 There appears to be a qualitative difference between 59   Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “The Worship of Divine Humanity as God’s Image and the Worship of Jesus,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, JSJSup 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 112–128. 60  See the more extensive critique of Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 37–42. 61  This evidence is presented more fully in Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” 127–148.

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the identity of humans due to the receiving of the divine name and the identity of heavenly figures who possess the divine name within themselves as their own name such as discussed above. This evidence points to the result of receiving the divine name in baptism is not divine identity, but union with God through the divine name or even ownership and protection by God through this name. One can be given the divine name in baptism and be united to God, but still struggle with sin and certainly not have identity within the mystery of God as Jesus does (e.g., Romans 6–7). There are also several hymns in the Jewish Christian Odes of Solomon, dated between the late first to the third century, which evince reflections on receiving the divine name in baptism. Although it cannot be determined that the author actually knew and was influenced by the Book of Revelation, several texts appear to reflect similar baptismal praxis that has the sealing with the divine name as a central feature. In spite of the fact that the Matthean baptismal formula is clearly known by the author (Odes Sol. 23:22), some freedom is exercised in identifying the name used in sealing more succinctly as both “my name” (Odes Sol. 8:19; Christ is speaking) and “the name of your Father” (Odes Sol. 8:22). As in Revelation, the name is placed on the head: “And I [Christ] place my name upon their head” (Odes Sol. 42:20). Although it states here that Christ places his name on the head, elsewhere the author calls the faithful to put on the divine name: “Because the sign on them is the Lord, and the sign is the way for those who cross in the name of the Lord. Put on, therefore, the name of the Most High” (Odes Sol. 39:7–8). The sense here may be that the baptismal initiate is sealed (or “signed”) with the divine name, but then must put it on, in the sense of wearing it, on a daily basis. Furthermore, one sees here that the divine name belongs to both the Father (“the Most High” who is “Your Father”) and the Son (“the Lord”). There is a distinct difference here between the Father and Son possessing the divine name and the baptized receiving it. The baptized is not identified within YHWH because of receiving the divine name, but is united to YHWH by means of the divine name. The importance of ritual baptismal practices in preserving divine name traditions is visible in the Shepherd of Hermas (ca. early second century). This complex compilation of visionary revelations testifies in several places to the divine name as the creative word that is the name of the Son used as the seal in baptism. Notice what is said about the building of “the tower” (i.e., the church) upon water (i.e., baptism): “the tower has been founded by the word of the almighty and glorious name” (Herm. Vis. 3.3.5). Hermas also reflects the Jewish understanding of the divine name as the powerful word that “supports the whole world” (Herm. Sim. 9.14.5). Hermas testifies explicitly of “the name of the Son of God” that is received in “water” (i.e., baptism) as “the seal” (Herm.

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Sim. 9.16.3). Hermas states the important distinction highlighted above: the divine name is possessed by the Son of God and borne by the baptized (Herm. Sim. 9.14.5). More examples of receiving the divine name bringing about union with God are found in Clement’s Excerpta ex Theodoto, an invaluable source of information on Gnostic teaching. This compilation draws extensively from the writings of Theodotus, a disciple of Valentinius who wrote in the latter part of the second century. Theodotus taught that the divine nature (“invisible part”) of Jesus is “the Name, which is the Only-Begotten Son” (Exc. 26.1) that “descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove and redeemed him” at his baptism (Exc. 22.6–7). This document also testifies that the Gnostic receives “the Name” that was invoked upon him at baptism (Exc. 22.4) and bears the “seal” of “the Name of God” (Exc. 86.2). The experience of bearing the name is understood in light of the High Priest bearing the divine name on his turban that enabled him to enter the Temple’s Holy of Holies (Exc. 27.1–5). Clement adapted some of this teaching into his own baptismal theology reflected in his explanation of various parts of the temple in Stromateis where he expresses that the name of Christ is the tetragrammaton, the very name worn by the High Priest (Exod 28:36–38) that is also the basis for “his mark” placed upon the baptized (Strom. V.38.6–7). 6 Conclusion What role does this evidence about the divine name play in the early expression of the identity of Jesus? The evidence does not point to the divine name as a central characteristic leading early Christians to confess Jesus as within the mystery of YHWH; the conviction that Jesus was risen from the dead played a much more significant role in that action. Once that confession began, however, it appears that one of the characteristics of Jesus that some used to express the divine identity and preexistence of the Son was that he possessed the divine name, a name that he is said to share especially with the Father but also with the Holy Spirit. This divine characteristic, as seen in the early Christian evidence above, played a significant role in some early expressions of Jesus’ divine identity. It was a divine characteristic that existed prominently already in some texts of ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism where a heavenly figure was identified very closely to, or even within, the mystery of YHWH. It was also argued that the presence of the divine name on someone does not necessarily equate with divine identity. Sometimes it indicates union with God, reflection of his image, or ownership by God.

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From the second century BCE to the first century CE was a unique time for interest in the divine name because of widespread knowledge of it among Jews as well as the mystery that surrounded it. A majority of scholars argue that the personal name “Jesus” was accorded great honor and rapidly considered the most important name of the Son among the earliest Christians,62 but the evidence presented above indicates that an awareness of the Son possessing the divine name was significant in the first century and continued to exercise influence among some Christians in the second and third centuries. There is, however, clear evidence that this understanding waned among Christians after the first century, with the personal name “Jesus” being accorded honors as his unique name and the title κύριος being the dominant confession of his divine identity. Justin Martyr, for example, understood the personal name “Jesus” to be the hidden name of the Angel of YHWH (Exod 23:21) and the name in the mysterious explanation that YHWH gave Moses (Exod 3:14; see Dial. 75). The primary factor that explains this shift was the move of Christianity from being predominantly Jewish in its earliest decades to becoming predominantly Gentile. This change led to a wider ignorance of the tetragrammaton as the mysterious and unspoken personal name of God. Even before the birth of Christianity, the divine name was in the process of being supplanted by the title κύριος, due in part to the lack of the vocalization of the divine name. While the Septuagint evidence discussed above indicates that manuscripts prior to the second century CE preserved knowledge of the tetragrammaton, there was a very clear change by the second century CE to rendering the divine name consistently with the title κύριος. This change certainly contributed to the growing unawareness of the divine name as an important divine characteristic among Christians whose Scriptures included the Septuagint. Among Jews, this interest in the figure who shares the divine name continued in Jewish mysticism (e.g. Metatron).63

62  For example, see Adelheid Ruck-Schröder, Der Name Gottes und der Name Jesu: Eine neutestamentliche Studie, WMANT 80 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999). See also William Q. Parkinson, “‘In the Name of Jesus’: The Ritual Use and Christological Significance of the Name of Jesus in Early Christianity” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2003). The very early and widespread significance of the personal name “Jesus” is also argued by Hurtado in his Lord Jesus Christ. 63  See Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron, 141–203.

Chapter 5

Jesus’ Unique Relationship with YHWH in Biblical Exegesis: A Response to Recent Objections David B. Capes In Paul and the Faithfulness of God, N. T. Wright writes that it has become commonplace for scholars to point out that Paul regularly referred to Jesus using scriptural quotations where the Greek word kyrios stands for the tetragrammaton.*1 Exactly how and when this became commonplace he does not say, but I can at least take part of the credit or blame due to my 1992 monograph Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology.2 More recently, I have been able to reprise my work on the topic and engage various scholarly developments in The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel.3 Prior to my work, it was commonplace for scholars to say that in Paul’s letters kyrios refers to Jesus (about 200 times) except in those passages where Paul is quoting an Old Testament (hereafter, OT) passage containing the divine name.4 In those passages, so went this view, kyrios referred not to Jesus but to God “the Father”. Scholars provided no reasons for this conclusion, nor did they offer any contextual analysis of these passages. It appears to have been a working assumption rather than a reasoned conclusion. I suspect it had something to do with the reasonable scholarly inhibition against reading Paul’s letters through the lens of the later Christological controversies. Although this inhibition reflected a noble intent, it caused interpreters to misread Paul in various places, to underestimate the boldness of his exegetical practice, and therefore to miss a critical and distinctive element of early Christianity. Many years ago in a graduate seminar on Paul, my doctoral supervisor Earle Ellis pointed out a feature in Paul’s letters, namely, his propensity to quote * I am grateful to Larry Hurtado, who edited, revised, and greatly improved this essay when a family crisis was overwhelming me. He has been and always will be a good friend and mentor. 1  N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 701. 2  David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT 2/47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992; reprint ed. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017). 3  David B. Capes, The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel, Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018). 4  See my discussion of previous scholarship on the matter in Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts, 9–33.

© DAVID B. CAPES, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_006

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what I later called YHWH texts and apply them to Jesus. This struck me at the time—and continues to strike me—as a remarkable exegetical move made by an early, self-consciously Jewish follower of Jesus. Given the kind of reverence accorded the divine name in ancient Jewish tradition, and given the apostle’s high regard for scripture, I was astonished that so few scholars had taken the time to investigate the practice and consider its implications.5 A “Yahweh/YHWH text”—as I have come to use the term—refers to a New Testament (hereafter, NT) quotation of, or an allusion to, an OT text in which the tetragrammaton occurs. Since Paul writes to his churches in Greek, my focus has been on OT quotations and allusions in the LXX in which kyrios translates or renders the divine name.6 As reflected in the comment by Wright that I noted earlier, what my studies have demonstrated now to nearly everyone’s satisfaction is that Paul consciously and unambiguously applies to Jesus sacred words and texts originally referring to YHWH, the distinctive name of God. I have argued that this means among other things that Paul links Jesus with God in remarkable ways, including him within the name, dignity, and uniqueness of God. This practice, along with other patterns of religious devotion, points to a “high” Christology in the earliest extant documents of the Christian movement. But, as the chart below suggests, not all of the YHWH texts used in Paul’s undisputed letters are christologically focused; the apostle was also able to use YHWH texts with God “the Father” in mind as well. I refer to these as patrological uses of YHWH/kyrios texts. Whether a text is patrologically or christologically oriented cannot be merely assumed; it has to be worked out through careful readings of the quotations or allusions in context. The chart below records my own findings. Interpreters might disagree whether this or that text is christologically or patrologically oriented; but most agree that there are sufficient examples of both uses to reflect an intentional practice by the apostle to link Jesus with the divine name.7 5  One early exception: Lucien Cerfaux, “‘Kyrios’ dans les citations pauliniennes de l’Ancien Testament,” in Recueil Lucien Cerfaux, Tome I (Gembloux: Èditions J. Duculot, 1954), 173–88. 6  Extant Greek manuscripts of OT writings from pre-Christian dates typically leave the divine name untranslated, written in Hebrew characters. But in reading these texts, it appears that the practice was to substitute kyrios for the tetragrammaton, kyrios functioning thus as the Greek equivalent of the divine name in these cases, similarly to the use of adonai in place of YHWH in reading Hebrew manuscripts. In Christian manuscripts of the LXX kyrios is written in place of the tetragrammaton. I discuss the manuscripts data in Capes, The Divine Christ, chapter 2. See now also Anthony Meyer, “The Divine Name in Early Judaism: Use and Non-Use in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2017). 7  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 186–191, gives

Jesus ’ Unique Relationship with YHWH in Biblical Exegesis YHWH texts with God the Father as referent

YHWH texts with Christ as referent

Rom 4:7–8 (Ps 32:1–2) Rom 9:27, 29 (Isa 28:22; 1:9) Rom 11:34 (Isa 40:13) Rom 15:9, 11 (Pss 18:49; 117:1) 1 Cor 3:20 (Ps 94:11) 2 Cor 6:17–18 (Isa 52:11; 2 Sam 7:14)

Rom 10:13 (Joel 2:32) Rom 14:11 (Isa 45:23) 1 Cor 1:31 (Jer 9:23–24) 1 Cor 2:16 (Isa 40:13) 1 Cor 10:26 (Ps 24:1) 2 Cor 10:17 (Jer 9:23–24)

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Selected allusions to YHWH texts with Christ as referent 2 Cor 3:16 (Exod 34:34) Phil 2:10–11 (Isa 45:23) 1 Thess 3:13 (Zech 14:5)

As we explore other NT documents, we discover that Paul’s exegetical maneuvers and conclusions are not unique; they are shared among other early Christian writers and embedded in their standard exegetical practices. Consider, for example, how the Synoptic Gospels quote Isaiah 40:3 in regard to both John—as the voice crying in the desert—and Jesus as the kyrios whose “way” is to be prepared (Mark 1:1–3; Matt 3:3; Luke 3:4). In Isaiah 40:3, kyrios, of course, renders the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew, thus making it a prime example of a YHWH text. The witness of John the Baptizer, according to the Fourth Gospel, is that he says concerning himself: “I am the voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord (kyriou),’ even as the prophet Isaiah said” (John 1:23). The uniform witness, then, of the fourfold Gospel begins with the rather audacious claim that with Jesus the world itself is witnessing the long awaited return of God’s glory to his people (Isa 40:3–5). The author of Acts makes a similar exegetical move at the conclusion of his quotation of Joel 2:32 (LXX 3:1–3) regarding the unique events of Pentecost: “and it shall be that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord (kyriou) will be saved.” Within the context of Peter’s Pentecost sermon, kyrios here is clearly a reference to Jesus as both “Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:22–35). It is not other examples that deserve attention. Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 108–118, agrees with basic thrust of my argument and yet modifies some of my conclusions.

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coincidental that Paul takes that same text and interprets it christologically (Rom 10:13; cf. 1 Cor 1:2). There are other NT examples as well (Heb 1:10–12; 1 Pet 3:10–12). The point is that other NT writers, composing their books later in the first century, share this same tendency to quote and allude to texts regarding the divine name and apply them to Jesus as kyrios. These habits associate Jesus with God (YHWH) in remarkable and even unprecedented ways. The linkage of Jesus with God is so strong that we must conclude that, very early, at the beginning of the Christian movement, influential voices such as Paul considered Jesus constitutive of God’s unique identity.8 Paul’s use of kyrios for Christ and the way he associates him with the divine name offers us an early look at a remarkable feature of the early Jesus movement. 1 Objections These arguments have not persuaded everyone, however. Let us consider objections raised by some who think that too much is made (by me and others) of Paul’s application of the divine name to Jesus and his use of YHWH texts to describe his Lord’s significance. They point out that other Jewish texts from the period make similar exegetical moves related to various figures. But I do not find these objections valid. To cite one major reason, as we will see, the examples cited are not always the use of YHWH texts. 1.1 1QpHab 8.1–3 Daniel Kirk notes that “much is sometimes made of the fact that biblical passages that originally spoke of YHWH are, in their New Testament context, applied to Jesus … and entails an identification of Jesus with Israel’s God that recognizes them as, in some sense, one and the same.”9 He goes on to say that in the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical texts containing the divine name are interpreted similarly as referring to another figure. As an example, he refers to the commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab 8.1–3), pointing out how the pesher “shifts the object of faith(fullness) from God to the Teacher of Righteousness”.10 Although an interesting text, this example 8  In referring to Jesus and God’s “identity,” I echo an emphasis by Richard Bauckham, initially in his book God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998). 9  J. R. Daniel Kirk, A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 137–138. 10  Kirk, A Man Attested by God, 138.

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does not really constitute a parallel to the Pauline “Yahweh texts,” since the divine name is not part of Habakkuk 2:4 or 1QpHab 8.1–3. Kirk goes on to say that the “switch from God to the Teacher of Righteousness is conceptual.” He admits that there is no name or title of God here associated with the Teacher; he simply wants to note that loyalty has shifted from God to the Teacher. The passage in 1QpHab for his claim is a pesher on Habakkuk 2:4b (“the righteous will live by his faith”): Its interpretation concerns all observing the Law in the House of Judah, whom God will free from the house of judgment on account of their toil and of their loyalty [emunatem] to the Teacher of Righteousness.11 Loyalty to the Teacher here amounts to being true observers of the valid interpretation of the Law. These obedient members of the house of Judah are destined to be liberated from future (?) punishment. Kirk characterizes this text as reflecting a “shift” in loyalty from God to the Teacher of Righteousness. But is that the case? If there is a shift, does it mean that the covenanters are no longer loyal to God because they have shifted to the Teacher of Righteousness? Obviously that is not the case. Loyalty to the Teacher is loyalty to God precisely because in this final generation God has gifted the Teacher with insights beyond the prophets themselves. This is reflected in another passage in the same pesher text (1QpHab 7.1–2): And God told Habakkuk to write what was going to happen to the last generation, but he did not let him know the consummation of the era. Consider further the pesher on Hab 2:2 (1QpHab 7.4–5): Its interpretation concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God has made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants, the prophets. These statements in the pesher on Habakkuk should be read over against the opposition faced by the Teacher of Righteousness. Consider, for example, the pesher on Habakkuk 1:13b (1QpHab 5.8–12):

11  This and other quotations of Qumran texts are taken from Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

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Why do you stare, traitors, and remain silent when a wicked person consumes someone more upright than himself? Blank Its interpretation concerns the House of Absalom and the members of their council, who kept silent when the Teacher of Righteousness was rebuked, and did not help him against the Man of the Lie, Blank who rejected the Law in the midst of their whole Council. In the conflict, individuals who maintain neutrality when the Teacher of Righteousness is publicly reproached by the Man of the Lie are described as “the House of Absalom” and those who reject the Law. In other words, disloyalty to the Teacher of Righteousness is treachery toward the covenant, the Torah, the community, and thus by logical proxy to the giver of the covenant and Torah, God. If this is so, the loyalty to the Teacher is fidelity to the covenant, Torah, community, and ultimately to the same giver of the covenant and Torah. So, Kirk’s unfortunate use of the word “shift” skews the meaning of the text. Loyalty to the Teacher in these last days—according to the covenanters—is loyalty to God because the Teacher is aligned with God’s purposes, not because some sort of shift has taken place in their allegiance. Therefore, the Teacher is not identified with God in any substantial way. He is merely God’s agent, representing heaven’s interest on the ground at that time. A similar phenomenon is traceable in early Christianity as loyalty to the bishop is taken to be loyalty to Christ and by extension to God. But since love does not allow me to be silent concerning you, I have therefore taken the initiative to encourage you, so that you may run together in harmony with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, just as the bishops appointed throughout the world are in the mind of Christ. ignatius, Ephesians 3.212

For if I in a short time experienced such fellowship with your bishop, which was not merely human but spiritual, how much more do I congratulate you who are united with him, as the church is with Jesus Christ and as Jesus Christ is with the Father that all things may be harmonious in unity … Let us, therefore, be careful not to oppose the bishop, in order that we may be obedient to God. ignatius, Ephesians 5.1–3

12  Citations of Ignatius from Michael W. Holmes (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), emphasis mine.

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For everyone whom the Master of the house sends to manage his own house we must welcome as we would the one who sent him. It is obvious, therefore, that we must regard the bishop as the Lord himself. ignatius, Ephesians 6.1

I have this advice: Be eager to do everything in godly harmony, the bishop presiding in the place of God and the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles and the deacons, who are especially dear to me, since they have been entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ, who before the ages was with the Father and appeared at the end of time. ignatius, Magnesians 6.1

Similarly, let everyone respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as they should respect the bishop, who is a model [typon] of the Father, and the presbyters as God’s council and as the band of the apostles. Without these no group can be called a church [ekklēsia]. ignatius Trallians, 3.1

As we see, Ignatius considers the bishop to be aligned with the purposes and will of Christ and by extension with God. So the bishop deserves respect as the representative of Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, not because he is coidentified with them; rather it is that he has been entrusted by God and the church with the ministry of Jesus Christ. So, Ignatius could say obedience to the bishop is tantamount to obedience to God. Since the bishop superintends the church as God’s proxy, he should be treated with the honor one would treat the Lord Jesus himself. Neutrality or treachery toward the bishop would then by logical extension be understood as treachery toward the Lord Jesus himself. I think it is important to note that loyalty has not shifted from the Father to the bishop; rather because the bishop is aligned with God’s purposes, loyalty to the bishop is loyalty to God. I do not, therefore, find that 1QpHab 8.1–3 offers any conceptual parallel to what later becomes loyalty to, or faith in, Jesus. Furthermore, and more importantly still, it fails to provide any analogue for Paul’s application of OT YHWH texts to Jesus. For there to be a true analogue, two conditions must be met: (1) the text must quote from or allude to an OT passage that contains the divine name (YHWH/kyrios); and (2) the text must refer to a setting in which a mediator figure is called by, referred to, or otherwise identified with that name. Since neither criterion is met, 1QpHab 8.1–8 does not provide a true analogue to Paul’s use of OT YHWH texts.

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1.2 4Q167 Another example cited by Kirk comes from 4Q167 frag. 2, 2–3.13 This pesherlike text interprets Hosea 5:14: For I will be like a lio[n [to E]phrai]m [and like a lion cub to the House of] [Judah. Its interpretation con]cerns the last priest who will stretch out his hand to strike Ephraim … The text is fragmentary, so it is unwise to speak with certainty about all that the scroll is trying to say. What seems likely is that judgments spoken by YHWH in the first person in Hosea 5 are brought into the community’s present to refer to the actions of “the last priest.” The prophetic “I” from Hosea 5:14 clearly refers to YHWH, but the interpretation does not identify the last priest with God; it merely shows that the last priest is God’s tool in order to discipline Ephraim. In fact, no text in Hosea 5 says specifically that YHWH will stretch out his hand to strike Ephraim. The interpretive statement in the pesher seems more like an epitome of coming judgments at the “hand” of the high priest. Kirk is correct that the scroll depicts that last priest as an eschatological agent God. Where I disagree is with his claim that when God acts through a human agent, that agent is somehow “identified with God.”14 God has a habit of using people throughout the biblical story, but that does not mean that these agents are divine in themselves or that they are necessarily identified with God. Consider, for example, the lofty status given to Cyrus in Isaiah 45. Through the prophet God claims Cyrus as his “anointed.” He commissions the Persian king to subjugate Babylon and the other nations, all on behalf of his people. But though kings rattle and march against their enemies, YHWH alone determines the course of history. Yet he does so through powerful leaders who are his tools. All those who question Cyrus’ mission on behalf of God are quickly put in their places. Again, God does all of this on behalf of his exiled people: I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness, And I will make all his paths straight; He shall build my city And set my exiles free, Not for price or reward, Says the LORD of hosts. (Isa 45:13 NRSV) 13  Kirk, A Man Attested by God, 138. 14  Kirk, A Man Attested by God, 138.

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I do not find that 4Q167 offers any precedent to the kinds of divine agency credited to Jesus by early Christian writers such as Paul. Furthermore, and more specifically, it fails to provide any analogue to Paul’s application of OT YHWH texts to Jesus. 1.3 11QMelchizedek More interesting, and more potentially significant, is the Qumran document known as 11QMelchizedek. Crispin Fletcher-Louis is correct to point out that this Qumran scroll should figure more prominently in discussions among advocates of an early high Christology.15 Of all the texts cited by critics of my emphasis on the NT use of YHWH texts to refer to Jesus, this one might be the most important. But given that it refers to Melchizedek, it remains a mystery as to who exactly this figure is. 11QMelchizedek (11Q13) appears to link Melchizedek with a YHWH text from Isaiah 61:1–2 (here NRSV): The spirit of the Lord God [adonai YHWH] is upon me, because the Lord [YHWH] has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s [YHWH’s] favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.16 Specifically, an allusion to Isaiah 61:2 appears in 11QMelch 2.9 when the scroll reads “it is the time for the year of the favor for Melchizedek and his armies …” According to some, the phrase “the year of the LORD’s [YHWH’s] favor” from Isaiah 61:1 is interpreted or applied here as “the year of Melchizedek’s favor.”17 Scholars are not exactly sure what to make of Melchizedek in this text.18 Some regard him as none other than Michael the archangel, a heavenly being

15  Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism. Volume 1, Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 195. 16  It is interesting that Jesus is portrayed as claiming to fulfil this same text (Isa 61:1–2) in Luke 4:16–22. 17  Kirk, A Man Attested by God, 138. 18  Eric Mason reviewed the many options in a paper given in the 2007 annual meeting of the SBL, available online here: https://www.hebrews.unibas.ch/documents/2007Mason.pdf.

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who functions to exercise God’s judgment in the end.19 Others think it is best to identify him with the mysterious priest-king of Genesis 14 and Psalm 110. If so, he is an exalted human being to whom God has granted extraordinary—one could even say “divine”—status.20 Yet another scholar, Franco Manzi, believes that Melchizedek in this scroll is not the name of a human or heavenly being; for him it is divine appellation that should be best rendered “King of Justice.”21 If so, it is a title for YHWH, not a reference to an agent of YHWH. To muddy the waters a bit more, the messenger anointed by the Spirit (2.18–20) appears to serve as a kind of forerunner to the judgment and deliverance exercised by Melchizedek. Should the messenger be regarded as distinct from Melchizedek or identified with him?22 As with many of the scrolls, the fragmentary nature of the evidence makes it hard to be definitive on these matters. Still, applying the phrase “the LORD’s [YHWH’s] favor” from Isaiah 61:2 to Melchizedek is taken by some as an extraordinary interpretive move if Melchizedek is a messianic or angelic figure. But does it rise to the same level as Paul’s use of YHWH texts to refer to Jesus? In my view, no. This text is all the more interesting because of how the year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) is brought into connection with the release of the captives from exile (Isaiah 61). All of the biblical texts referred to in 11QMelchizedek are regarded by the author as participating in some grand, eschatological conclusion; and the principal figure, Melchizedek, is right in the middle of it. As noted, some regard this text as in some sense parallel to the NT application of YHWH texts to Jesus. But, to underscore the point, the fragmentary nature of the text plus other features make such a claim problematic.23 Another particularly interesting feature of this text is how the word “God” (Elohim) in an allusion to Psalm 82:1 is associated with what appears to be Melchizedek: “Elohim will stand in the assem[bly of God], in the midst of the gods he judges” (11QMelchizedek 2.10). Now we must note that the divine name is not part of this quotation, so it is not a YHWH text; yet it does refer to Melchizedek as “Elohim” who presides in God’s assembly (that is, YHWH’s) and judges among the “Elohim.” We should regard the assembly of “El” (God) 19   John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 176, proposes that Michael, Melchizedek, and the Prince of Light are three different names for the same heavenly being. See also Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 501. 20  E.g., Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 195. 21  Franco Manzi, Melchisedek e l’angelologia nell’Epistola agli Ebrei e a Qumran, AnBib 136 (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1997). 22  Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology, WUNT 207 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 259–60. 23  Carl Davis, The Name and Way of the Lord: Old Testament Themes, New Testament Christology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 47–48.

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as referring to retinue of good angels (here referred to as the Elohim) who comprise the august company ready to defeat Belial and do God’s bidding. Chief among them is Melchizedek, whose exalted status as one of the principal angels authorizes him to preside over the assembly and pronounce judgment. Perhaps we could read the text this way: “Melchizedek will stand up in the assembly of God (El), in the midst of the angels he judges.” Melchizedek is then said to carry out “the vengeance of God’s judgments” (11QMelch 2.13) aided by the other gods, that is, the Elohim (2.14). Bauckham argues that ‘ēl in 11QMelch 2.10–11 distinguishes YHWH from this other figure who stands in the assembly to judge.24 This certainly appears to be the case because the text has ‘ēl for the tetragrammaton in the citation of Psalm 7:8–9: “Above [it,] to the heights return: God (‘ēl) will judge the peoples” (11QMelch 2.10–11). In the Hebrew text, YHWH is said to “judge the peoples.” So ‘ēl must be a pious substitute for the divine name here in 11QMelchizedek. This combination of texts, along with the author’s interpretation of them, presents Melchizedek in an exalted status. Yet the word “God” (Elohim) is already associated with angelic beings in other biblical texts (Psa 82:1, 6; 86:8) and so we should not regard the application of the word in Psalm 82:1 to Melchizedek in 11QMelch 2.10–11 as anything new. It does not identify Melchizedek with God in any substantial way; it identifies him only as chief among the heavenly council. Similarly, we may consider the modification of the phrase “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isa 62:1) in association with Melchizedek in 11QMelch 2.9 as reflecting his exalted status (among the angels) as one destined to lead in carrying out YHWH’s eschatological vengeance and judgment. This is explicitly stated in 11QMelch 2.13. To sum up, in 11QMelch Melchizedek is never referred to by the divine name in scriptural quotations or allusions, nor is he called “LORD” (YHWH) independent of biblical texts. So, although Melchizedek has a significant status in this Qumran text, this appears to reflect a practice distinct from what Paul and other early Christians are doing in regard to Jesus in their direct application of YHWH texts. There is yet another way of reading 11QMelch 2.9 that removes it from consideration as a YHWH text applied to Melchizedek. While there is no doubt that certain Elohim texts are applied to Melchizedek, the current text does not apply Isa 61:2 to him as the source of divine favor but as its beneficiary. The text may well be read in this way: “it is the time for the year of the favor [of YHWH] for (‫ )ל‬Melchizedek and for (‫ )ל‬his armies, the people of the holy ones of God [Melchizedek?].” Out of respect for the divine name, the reference to YHWH is here understood (that is, not explicit), with Melchizedek and his people taken 24  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 222–3.

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as the rightful and sole recipients of this divine favor in the coming eschatological drama. Since “for/of Melchizedek” is co-ordinated with “for/of his armies, the people of the holy ones of God,” Melchizedek cannot be substituted for YHWH without also substituting his armies for him as well. Properly understood, in 11QMelchizedek YHWH’s favor in the great, eschatological Jubilee is “for” Melchizedek (Michael) as the angelic patron of the faithful people of God. This interpretation situates the passage within its context and offers a satisfying way beyond any abstracted reading that merely substitutes Melchizedek for YHWH.25 1.4 Paul, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and YHWH Texts So we have seen that some scholars identify a few instances in late Second Temple Jewish literature where scriptural texts associated with God or YHWH are applied to another figure. As I have shown here, however, only 11QMelchizedek offers anything close to an analogue to the kind of exegesis we find in the NT. So the question is this: Do these instances in any way detract from the significance of Paul’s Christological exegesis of the YHWH texts discussed above? I think not, for several reasons. First, Christological YHWH texts in Paul’s letters occur with some frequency and are part of a corpus of a single individual, all composed within a narrow period of time, little more than a decade. They represent, then, a pattern of thought and exegesis unique to a self-consciously Jewish writer. In contrast, among other contemporary Jewish writings, God/YHWH texts applied to other figures are rare, found (it is argued) in a handful of texts composed (probably) by various authors over what is likely a century or more. In other words, there is no pattern or programmatic use of YHWH texts in the scrolls like we see in Paul’s letters and other early Christian documents. Second, Paul applied YHWH texts to only one figure other than “God the Father,” namely, Jesus the Messiah. On the other hand, the Dead Sea Scrolls typically cited as associating God texts with figures other than God refer to a variety of figures including Melchizedek, the last priest, and possibly the Teacher of Righteousness (e.g., 1QpHab 8.1–3). Unless these figures can be collapsed into a single person, what Paul is doing by applying OT YHWH texts to a single individual, Jesus the Messiah, is distinct from these other exegetical practices. Third, Paul insists that not only should Jesus be understood as the proper referent of various YHWH/kyrios texts, but he also claims that God has 25  This reading of the text was suggested to me by Richard Bauckham in private correspondence (June 2019).

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bestowed upon Jesus the divine name (e.g., Phil 2:9–11) and regularly refers to Jesus as kyrios independent of any reference to scripture. As I have shown elsewhere, Paul routinely referred to Jesus as kyrios in ethical, eschatological, and liturgical contexts.26 Each of these uses has a strong association with the kind of language used in the OT to describe YHWH’s relationship with Israel. For example, the biblical phrase “day of the Lord” is interpreted as “the day of our Lord Jesus” (2 Cor 1:14; cf. also 1 Cor 5:5; 1 Thess 5:2).27 Furthermore, as Larry Hurtado has demonstrated in various publications, early Christianity was distinct from other religions in the Mediterranean world by virtue of a constellation of devotional practices that featured Jesus as the rightful recipient.28 It was distinct from Judaism because it included the risen Jesus as a recipient of worship along with God. It was distinct from other Roman-era religious practices because it excluded the worship of all gods except the one, true God of Israel and the man seated at his right hand. At the heart of Christ-devotion is the declaration that “Jesus is kyrios (Lord)” (Rom 10:13; 1 Cor 1:2; Phil 2:9–11). If we wish to understand how Christianity began, Hurtado insists that we focus on worship, not simply on beliefs, doctrines, or even exegetical practices. Accordingly, among extant Jewish writings, none claim that other mediator figures are the rightful recipients of worship in the gatherings of actual Jewish groups.29 Fourth, Paul’s letters contain a variety of quotations and readily identifiable allusions to YHWH/kyrios texts with Christ as referent, whereas these other possible YHWH texts or God texts in Jewish writings of the time are not quotations. They are at best uses of a particular phrase or expression found in an OT text. Also, because of their fragmentary nature, it is difficult to determine whether we have examples of exegesis regarding the divine name or simply of individuals acting as God’s agents. In fact, these texts may be little different 26  Capes, The Divine Christ. 27  Capes, The Divine Christ, 55–83. See also Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, WUNT 2/323 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 3, 73. 28  See Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelpia: Fortress, 1988; 2d ed. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998; 3d ed. London: T&T Clark, 2015), esp. 93–124; and more recently idem, Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practices (Lexham, 2018). 29  Contrary to some claims, the “Chosen One” of the Parables of Enoch does not give us a direct analogy for the place of Jesus in the devotional practices reflected in Paul’s letters. It is not clear that the reverential gestures toward this figure amount to more than the obeisance of conquered rulers to the victor over them (e.g., 1 Enoch 46:4–5; 62:6), and the praise and worship is said there to be given to “the Lord of Spirits” (also, e.g., 1 Enoch 61:9). In any case, these are scenes of some future acclamation of this figure, whereas Paul’s letters reflect the actual devotional practices of circles of believers of his time.

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from those that depict Cyrus the Persian subduing the nations for God (Isaiah 45) or the Babylonians marching throughout the earth to judge and correct the nations, including Judah, directed by God (Habakkuk 1). In both cases, they serve as God’s agents of judgment or deliverance in the world. But they are not personally invested with the divine name, identified further with YHWH, or regarded as proper recipients of worship.30 Finally, we should not miss the fact that Paul’s use of YHWH texts to refer to Jesus has to do with a person of recent memory, a person whose years overlapped the life of the apostle and perhaps other early Christian authors. He is not applying these texts to a man of the distant past, a person shrouded in mystery (assuming Melchizedek refers to the priest-king of Genesis 14), or a heavenly being (assuming Melchizedek is to be identified with Michael, or some other principal angel). Granted, there may be a handful of pre-Christian Jewish texts which allude to a God text and associate certain phrases to another figure in some way, but the phenomenon we encounter in Paul’s letters is of a different order. The apostle describes Jesus as bestowed by God with the name above every name, YHWH/ kyrios, and as someone who is worshiped “to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2.9–11); and he routinely refers to Jesus as kyrios in particular contexts. There is nothing quite like this in other Jewish texts from the era. At the same time, he sets Jesus in relation to the church as its Lord (kyrios) using the same terms and concepts that his ancestral scriptures employed to describe the relationship of YHWH to Israel. Furthermore, as I have emphasized in this and earlier publications, in those letters where he often quotes scripture, he has no qualms about taking texts which originally refer to God by the divine name and applying them to Jesus. This he does right alongside quotations of YHWH texts that refer to God the Father. Taken together, what we have in Paul’s letters is an unprecedented application of God’s unique covenant name to Jesus that results in a lofty estimation of his significance for the churches. The apostle does not present this as something new or peculiar to his own thinking; instead, he appeals to this practice as if it is known and the common property of the churches. 30  The angelic figure Yahoel in Apocalypse of Abraham is said to be “of the same name” as Yahweh, and acts “through the mediation of my [Yahweh’s] ineffable name” (ApocAbr 10.3, 7–8). In my Yahweh Texts (170–73), I understood the prayer-song in ApocAbr 17.1–7 as directed to the angelic figure Yahoel. But I am now not so confident of this. Cf. Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 87–90.

Chapter 6

God and Glory and Paul, Again: Divine Identity and Community Formation in the Early Jesus Movement Carey C. Newman 1

Mercurial Glory

The recent flurry of interest in a governing cultural and/or religious background, the specific literary context, and the precise semantic range of glory (δόξα) and glory of God (δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ) in Paul has yielded an impressive array of interpretive strategies:1 (i) a Reformed reading that makes δόξα/δοξάζω the semantic equivalents of δικαιοσύνη/δικαιόω and then sweeps Paul’s discussion of glory away to timeless systematic categories of providence;2 (ii) an Adam reading that conflates δόξα with ἐικών to argue for humanity’s recovery of a 1  I herewith thank Reinhard Feldmeier, Teresa Morgan, Richard Hays, and Michael Gorman for reading and commenting upon drafts of this paper. Only they will recognize the many places I heeded their good advice and caution, and those places I remained obstinate.   I must admit my taxonomic descriptions that follow unfairly and severely underdetermine the readings of my good colleagues. That is, none of their interpretations can be reduced without remainder to a single sentence (as I have dared to do). My colleagues have produced readings that are far, far more robust and complex than my listing betrays. They are, indeed, sophisticated combinations and permutations of each other. Still, this admission noted, I persist for heuristic reasons. I will also admit to being possessed by more than a passing interest in the subject. See Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); idem, “Resurrection as Glory: Divine Presence and Christian Origins,” in The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus, ed. Gerald O’Collins, Stephen T. Davis, and Daniel Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59–89; idem, “Glory,” , ed. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 394–400; idem, “Glory,” New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 1:576–80. Finally, I am certain that C. E. B. Cranfield (1915–2015) would be quite chuffed that his observation, made to me some thirty years ago (Paul’s Glory-Christology, ix), has occasioned much of this recent interest in δόξα. It is with deep gratitude for his warm friendship over the years that I am pleased to dedicate this article to his good and lasting memory. 2  Donald L. Berry, Glory in Romans and God’s Unified Purpose of God in Redemptive History (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016). A more extreme form of the imposition of systematic categories can be found in James M. Hamilton, Jr., God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010).

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glory that Adam supposedly fumbled away in Eden;3 (iii) a Sinai reading that identifies δόξα as the presence of God that Israel forfeited in the making of the golden calf (Exod 32) and as that glory someday to be restored to believers in their eschatological conformity to Christ;4 (iv) a competitive honor/shame reading that turns δόξα into the human social capital of τιμή and the divine gift of ἀφθαρσία;5 (v) a political, imperial reading that equates δόξα with the Latin gloria to situate Paul’s rhetoric in the Roman ideal of glory;6 (vi) an apocalyptic reading that construes δόξα as one of Paul’s conflict symbols ordered onto the battlefield of Romans to describe the entirely new state of affairs ushered in by the cross;7 (vii) a purity reading that places δόξα in the anthropological categories of clean/unclean to measure humanity’s nearness to/distance from God;8 and (viii) an apophatic reading that plays upon δόξα’s enigmatic semiotics as an invitation to read δόξα in Paul as obscuring as much about God as it reveals.9 3  Haley Goranson Jacob, Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory in Romans (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018); Mikko Sivonen, “The Doxa Motif in Paul: A Narrative Approach to the Vindication of the Glory of God through Christ” (PhD thesis, University of Helsinki, 2018). The work of both Jacob and Sivonen is seriously (and fatally) flawed by their dependence on a supposed Adam glory narrative that runs the risk of turning—and indeed, in Jacob’s case, does turn—Jesus into simply an idealized human, as does J. R. Daniel Kirk in A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). 4  Sigurd Grindheim, “A Theology of Glory: Paul’s Use of Δόξα Terminology in Romans,” JBL 136 (2017): 451–65. 5  Ben C. Blackwell, “Immortal Glory and the Problem of Death in Romans 3.23,” JSNT 32 (2010): 285–308; idem, Christosis: Pauline Soteriology in Light of Deification in Irenaeus and Cyril of Alexandria, WUNT 2/314 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Preston Sprinkle, “The Afterlife in Romans: Understanding Paul’s Glory Motif in Light of the Apocalypse of Moses and 2 Baruch,” in Lebendige Hoffnung—ewiger Tod?!: Jenseitsvorstellungen im Hellenismus, Judentum, und Christentum, ed. Michael Labahn and Manfred Lang, Arbeiten zur Bible und ihrer Geschichte 24 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2007), 201–33. 6  James R. Harrison, “Paul and the Roman Ideal of Glory in the Epistle to the Romans,” in Letter to the Romans, ed. Udo Schnelle, BETL 226 (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 329–69; idem, Paul and the Imperial Authorities at Thessalonica and Rome: A Study in the Conflict of Ideology, WUNT 1/273 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 7  Beverly R. Gaventa, “The ‘Glory of God’ in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Interpretation and the Claims of the Text: Resourcing New Testament Theology. Essays in Honor of Charles H. Talbert, ed. Jason A. Whitlark et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 29–42. 8  W. Daniel Jackson, “Glory in the Letter of Paul to the Romans: Purity, Honor, and Eschatology” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018). Jackson sees Paul’s glory language as a collision of discourses, all arriving from different points of ingress. The most promising, that of purity, is the least developed and lacks actual grounding in Paul’s glory language (see Jackson, Glory, 69–87, 104–7). 9  Christopher Southgate, Theology in a Suffering World: Glory and Longing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Nicole Chibici-Revneanu, “Gottes Herrlichkeit:

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This recent work avoids the missteps of earlier readings that appealed to Persian, magical, or mystery religion to turn δόξα into φῶς10—although talk of glory’s alleged luminosity and radiance unfortunately lingers on11—or that sought the meaning of God’s δόξα as arising, rather mystically, out of ‫’כבוד‬s ancient etymological alchemy. But, in one way or another, to one degree or another, this recent work can also be questioned for the following: not reckoning with the implications inherent in δόξα’s simultaneous participation in multiple semantic fields, which delimits δόξα’s denotation into unrelated profiles; insufficiently gauging the power of the LXX to impose upon Paul, and upon all of the early Jesus movement for that matter, a ready-made glory tradition already full of signifying power and, then, failing to track the implications of how Paul scandalously re-deployed this glory tradition with Jesus as referent; and, finally, missing the decisive way in which Paul’s convictional grammar shaped the role that such a christologically charged δόξα language played in Paul’s theological enterprise.12 Paul’s use of glory language aligned his new venture with his ancestral co-religionists of his day and, at the very same time, because his reckless use of glory was such a self-conscious deviation, both opened up a fissure between the new movement he led and his ancestral faith and simultaneously drew a big, bold line of separation between his particular brand of religion and any on offer in the Greco-Roman market of ideas. Mercurial indeed.

Impulse aus dem Johannesevangelium,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50 (2008): 75–94, which is rooted in her technical and historical Die Herrlichkeit des Verherrlichten: Das Verständnis der Doxa im Johannesevangelium, WUNT 2/231 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); Dragoş A. Giulea, “The Divine Essence, That Inaccessible Kabod Enthroned in Heaven: Nazianzen’s Oratio 28,3 and the Tradition of Apophatic Theology from Symbols to Philosophical Concepts,” Numen 57 (2010): 1–29. 10   G. A. Deissmann, “Die Hellenisierung des semitischen Monotheismus,” NJahrb 11 (1903): 165–6; G. H. Boobyer, “Thanksgiving” and the “Glory of God” in Paul (Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske, 1929), 7–12, 56, 86; Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1927), 355–60; Johannes Schneider, Doxa: Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Studie, NTF 3 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1932), 22, 179. Only in 1 Cor 15:40–43 does Paul use δόξα to mean light: καὶ σώματα ἐπουράνια, καὶ σώματα ἐπίγεια· ἀλλ᾽ ἑτέρα μὲν ἡ τῶν ἐπουρανίων δόξα, ἑτέρα δὲ ἡ τῶν ἐπιγείων. ἄλλη δόξα ἡλίου, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα σελήνης, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα ἀστέρων· ἀστὴρ γὰρ ἀστέρος διαφέρει ἐν δόξῃ. 11  E.g., Nissim Amzallag, “The Material Nature of the Radiance of YHWH and Its Theological Implications,” SJOT 29 (2015): 80–96. 12  This is the great virtue of Gaventa’s “The ‘Glory of God,’” 29–42, study in which she consciously sought to relate the theology that inhabited Paul before he wrote a letter (an apocalyptic theology) to Paul’s specific uses of the glory of God, rooted in his scriptural tradition, for the argument of Romans.

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Social Glory

Δόξα meant “opinion” in ordinary Hellenistic usage.13 It was used to refer to one person’s appraisal of another and thus, by extension, to depict socially prized opinions, i.e., “honor” or “fame.” Δοξάζω meant “to think” or “suppose” and, when placed in a social exchange, meant “to esteem another” or, passively, “to be held in honor.” It comes as no surprise that Paul employed δόξα and δοξάζω with exactly these senses. When he unpacks the social status of head hair length between the genders (1 Cor 11:14–15), a seemingly perplexed Paul asks, “Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him (ἀτιμία αὐτῷ ἐστιν), but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride (γυνὴ δὲ ἐὰν κομᾷ δόξα αὐτῇ ἐστιν)?” The obviously larger questions about gender, ancient and modern, must be left to the side. This pairing of δόξα with ἀτιμία hints that, for Paul, δόξα does indeed participate in the Greco-Roman discourse of honor and shame. Paul repeatedly places the social valuation of his apostolic ministry in the context of honor and shame. Paul compares the (dis)regard in which he and his apostolic company are held with that of the Corinthian leadership. With more than a slight touch of apostolic irony, Paul declares in 1 Cor 4:10, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute (ὑμεῖς ἔνδοξοι, ἡμεῖς δὲ ἄτιμοι).” Paul ardently defends his apostolic ministry by listing the many hardships he has endured (2 Cor 6:4–11). Given both his apostolic commitments and the attendant difficulties, for Paul and his company it matters not if they be held in “honor or dishonor” (διὰ δόξης καὶ ἀτιμίας), in “ill repute or good repute” (διὰ δυσφημίας καὶ εὐφημίας). In the face of withering accusations from a fledgling congregation that he himself had founded, Paul asserts (1 Thess 2:8) that while initially among them he did not seek glory from others (οὔτε ζητοῦντες ἐξ ἀνθρώπων δόξαν). Paul’s vocational resolve arises out of the belief that God’s purposes are mysteriously unfolding, and uniquely so, in his very apostleship. Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles, and his apostolic success among the Gentiles provokes a jealously among his fellow Jews, one that enigmatically advances God’s ultimate aims. Paul’s claim about the true valuation of his ministry is tied directly to these purposes (Rom 11:13): only the uniqueness of his vocation (ἐφ’ ὅσον μὲν οὖν εἰμι ἐγὼ ἐθνῶν ἀπόστολος) encourages his particular muted form of apostolic swagger (τὴν διακονίαν μου δοξάζω). 13   H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 444; Theodor Ebert, “Opinion,” Brill’s New Pauly (Leiden: Brill, 2006); “δόξα” and “δοξάζω,” The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, ed. Franco Montanari (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

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There can be little doubt that Paul, in defense of his apostolic ministry, freely trades in the open market of honor (δόξα) and shame (ἀτιμία).14 But Paul’s social commerce transvalues δόξα as human-to-human honor or standing. What others deem honorable, Paul declares shameful; what others judge despicable, Paul cherishes. Paul’s inversion of honor and shame reveals that the truth of his apostolic ministry is no more justified by misguided secular social appraisal than it is undermined by the presence of scorned, cruciform adversity. The exact reason why Paul can, and why he then does, upend the accepted Greco-Roman hierarchy of patronage must be sought elsewhere—i.e., in the grammar of his theology, where the cross and resurrection turn all the world’s valuations upside down. But when Paul uses δόξα to describe the relationship between, and among, humans, δόξα invariably means “honor” and relates to a paradigmatic field of words common to honor and shame discourse. This use of glory language falls well within the standard deviation of Greco-Roman meanings for δόξα and does not shock in the least.15 3

Doxological Glory

Paul does raise Greco-Roman eyebrows when he brings δόξα and δοξάζω into close association with a deity, an association unattested outside of Judaism and Christianity. Put differently, δόξα and δοξάζω are never used in reference to a god, or the gods, in the Greco-Roman world. Δόξα language simply does not figure in Greek devotion to the gods.16 Nor was δόξα ever employed in the depictions of the gods in their epiphanies.17 Neither was δόξα used to speak about 14  Halvor Moxnes, “Honour and Righteousness in Romans,” JSNT 32 (1988): 61–77. Moxnes (77n15) forces all instances of δόξα in Romans into an honor/shame discourse. 15  Though James R. Harrison, “The Brothers as the ‘Glory of Christ’ (2 Cor 8:23): Paul’s Doxa Terminology in Its Ancient Benefaction Context,” NovT 52 (2010): 156–88, is convincing that the phrase should be read in the context of benefaction (and not christologically, as I was inclined to do), it should be remembered that not all glory language is created equal. 16  Simon Pulleyn, “Appendix I: Literary and Epigraphic Attestations of Some Common Words in Greek Prayers,” in Prayer in Greek Religion, OCM (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 217– 20. Jerome Neyrey’s attempt to situate the doxologies of 1 Timothy in the rhetoric of honor and shame inadvertently documents the fact that δόξα is not found in the Greco-Roman doxologies to the gods. See “‘First,’ ‘Only,’ ‘One of a Few,’ and ‘No One Else’: The Rhetoric of Uniqueness and the Doxologies in 1 Timothy,” Biblica 86 (2005): 59–87. 17  See Dieter Bremer, “Die Epiphanie Gottes in den homerischen Hymnen und Platons Gottesbegriff,” ZRGG 27 (1975): 1–21; B. C. Dietrich, “Divine Epiphanies in Homer,” Numen 30 (1983): 53–79; Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God, LEC (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 54–6; H. S. Versnel, “What Did Ancient Man See When He Saw a God? Some Reflections on Greco-Roman Epiphany,” in Effigies Dei: Essays on the History of Religions,

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either the resurrection or the apotheosis of a god (or a human).18 And yet Paul was destined to do all three: to use δόξα to express reverence to a god; to use δόξα to characterize an appearance of a god; and to use δόξα to describe the telos of both a god and human beings. Not only did he boldly tie δόξα to θεός in these wholly unprecedented ways, he did so with reference to a particular god, the god of Israel. While such drastic semantic deviation from the Hellenistic sensibilities of his day not only may reveal something about Paul’s own theological imagination, it most certainly underscores his enduring allegiance to his own ancestral faith and that faith’s formative power. Paul’s use of δόξα shows where Paul’s feet were planted, and his God and glory language colormarks the movement he led as distinct from any of the available Hellenistic or Roman cultural, philosophical, or religious options. One construction employs εἰς + an accusative form of δόξα + a genitive of θεός or αὐτος: ἐπερίσσευσεν εἰς τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ (Rom 3:7) καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς προσελάβετο ὑμᾶς εἰς δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 15:7) ἣν προώρισεν ὁ θεὸς πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων εἰς δόξαν ἡμῶν (1 Cor 2:7) πάντα εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ ποιεῖτε (1 Cor 10:31) τὴν εὐχαριστίαν περισσεύσῃ εἰς τὴν δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ (2 Cor 4:15) διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς δόξαν καὶ ἔπαινον θεοῦ (Phil 1:11) ἐξομολογήσηται ὅτι κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός (Phil 2:11). A second pattern employs a form of δὶδωμι + δόξα in the accusative:19 ed. D. van der Plas, SHR 51 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 43–55; Georgia Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Light terminology— along with size (typically the gods were depicted as much larger than the average human) and smell (a sweet fragrance often accompanied a god’s appearance)—were used to describe the gods. See especially Sarah Iles Johnston, “Fiat Lux, Fiat Ritus: Divine Light and Late Antique Defense of Ritual,” in The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5–24; eadem, “Homo Fictor Deorum Est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinity Spells,” in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 406–21. David Litwa’s Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), and its careful sifting of Greek epiphanies, reveals that δόξα played no role. 18  Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 333–44. See Appendix 1 for a listing of the words used for deification; Δόξα and δοξάζω are not among them: ἀποθεόω/ἀποθειόω—θεοποιέω/θεοποιΐα/θεοποίησις/θεοποιός, ἐκθεόω/ἐκθειόω/ἐκθέωσις/ ἐκθεωτικός—θεόω/θέωσις—ἀποθειάζω/ ἐκθειάζω. 19  Cf. Acts 12:23; 1 Pet 1:7; Rev 4:9; 11:13; 14:7; 16:9; 19:7; 2 Clem. 17:7.

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δοὺς δόξαν τῷ θεῷ (Rom 4:20). A third pattern employs δόξα in the nominative case + an understood form of ἐίμι + θεός in the dative case, functioning as the indirect object:20 τῷ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνα. ἀμήν (Rom 11:36) θεῷ, διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ᾧ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν (Rom 16:27) ᾧ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν (Gal 1:5) τῷ δὲ θεῷ καὶ πατρὶ ἡμῶν ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν (Phil 4:20). While implied by the noun constructions, Paul’s use of the δοξάζω + θεός in the accusative explicitly invokes action:21 θεὸν ἐδόξασαν (Rom 1:21) δοξάζητε τὸν θεὸν καὶ πατέρα (Rom 15:6) δοξάσαι τὸν θεόν (Rom 15:9) δοξάσατε δὴ τὸν θεὸv (1 Cor 6:20) δοξάζοντες τὸν θεὸν (2 Cor 9:13) ἐδόξαζον … θεόν (Gal 1:24). The repetition of the compact, closely circumscribed syntactic patterns suggests a relationship between literary rhetoric (specifically epistolary openings, transitions, and closings) and liturgical life (doxologies): δόξα and δοξάζω, in both liturgy and letter, describe, elicit, exemplify, and command the worship of God, the one true god, the god of the fathers. But the doxological use of glory also carries with it hard-edged sociology. By effectively translating the theocentric focus of the churches’ doxologies to his epistles, Paul’s doxological use of glory aligns his theological commitments with those of his inherited faith by underlining his, and the early Jesus movement’s, unwavering commitment

20  Cf. Eph 3:21: αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ εἰς πάσας τὰς γενεὰς τοῦ αἰῶνος τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν; 1 Tim 1:17: Τῷ δὲ βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων, ἀφθάρτῳ ἀοράτῳ μόνῳ θεῷ, τιμὴ καὶ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν; 2 Tim 4:18: ᾧ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν. Cf. Heb 13:21; 1 Pet 4:11; 2 Pet 3:18; Jude 25; Rev 1:6; 5:13; 7:12; 19:1; 1 Clem. 20:12; 32:4; 38:4; 43:6; 45:7; 50:7; 58:2; 61:3; 2 Clem. 20:5; Mart. Pol. 20:2; 21:2; 22:1; Did. 8:2; 9:2, 3; 10:2, 4, 5; Diogn. 12.9. 21  Cf. Acts 12:23; 1 Pet 1:7; 4:11; Rev 4:7; 4:9; 11:13; 19:7; 1 Clem. 32:4; 58:2; 2 Clem. 17:7; Mart. Pol. 20:2; Did. 8:2; 9:4; 10:5.

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to monotheism.22 These glory doxologies represent a language of belonging that binds the early Jesus movement to ancestral co-religionists. It would not be an overstatement, either, to claim that glory doxologies became one of the distinguishing features of Christianity in the centuries following Paul.23 Though none of the Pauline glory doxologies are directed to any deity other than the god of Israel, a small crack in the monotheistic wall appears when Paul identifies Jesus as the warrant (Rom 15:7: Phil 2:11) or the means (Rom 16:27; Phil 1:11) for ascribing glory to God. That small fissure may well represent deeper, more far-reaching foundational issues—and thus it simply should not be dismissed or ignored—as the references to time (εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνα) and the solemnizing ἀμήν imply. Such references show that Paul places his doxological use of glory within the eschatological arc of the church’s worship,24 worship that occurred in the name of Jesus and began to feature the reverencing of Jesus as God.25 Most notable though, the very form of a liturgical doxology determines, even restricts, the denotation of Paul’s doxological use of δόξα and δοξάζω. Whenever Paul employs glory language to characterize the commerce that travels from humans to the divine, δόξα always means “praise” and δοξάζω always means “glorify” (as in worship). A sharp distinction must be drawn between Paul’s uses of glory language to characterize human-to-human relationships and his use of glory to characterize human-to-divine relationship: in the former, glory means honor/esteem, whereas in the latter, glory means praise/worship. Glory as praise and glory as honor represent two different semantic universes, each with its own center of gravity, and the meanings of δόξα and δοξάζω from one 22  Cf. Jude 25; 1 Clem. 58:2; 61:3. In some texts, Jesus replaces God as the object of the doxology: 2 Pet 3:18; Ign. Eph. 2:2; Ign. Smyrn. 1:1; Ign. Pol. 8:2; Mart. Pol. 22:3, anticipating later trinitarian developments. 23  See especially Mauritius Steinheimer, Die Δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ in der Römischen Liturgie, MTS 4 (München: Karl Zink, 1951) who clearly and conclusively distinguishes between the liturgical use of δόξα and the secular use of the Latin gloria. Steinheimer’s volume is absent from Harrison’s otherwise comprehensive use (and command) of the secondary literature. 24  Heb 13:21; 1 Pet 1:7; 4:11; 2 Pet 3:18; Jude 25; Rev 1:6; 5:13; 7:12; 1 Clem. 20:12; 32:4; 38:4; 43:6, 7; 50:7; 58:2; 61:3; 65:2; 2 Clem. 20:5; Mart. Pol. 14:3; 20:2; 21:2; 22:3; Did. 8:2; 9:2, 3; 10:2, 4, 5; Diogn. 12.9. 25   David E. Aune, The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity, NovTSup 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1972); Martin Hengel, “Christology and New Testament Chronology: A Problem in the History of Earliest Christianity,” Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 30–47; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 127–51.

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should not be mapped onto the other without unambiguous and sufficient warrant.26 4

Theological Glory

Paul’s ascription of δόξα to God represents one level of semantic departure and theological innovation. His unequivocal characterization of God with glory is of a different semantic and theological magnitude altogether. Paul boldly and freely couples δόξα with θεός in a formal construct: ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου θεοῦ (Rom 1:23) ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 3:23) καυχώμεθα ἐπ᾽ ἐλπίδι τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 5:2) ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός (Rom 6:4) ἵνα γνωρίσῃ τὸν πλοῦτον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (Rom 9:23) ὁ Χριστὸς προσελάβετο ὑμᾶς εἰς δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 15:7) γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ [Ἰησοῦ] Χριστοῦ (2 Cor 4:6) θεοῦ τοῦ καλοῦντος ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ βασιλείαν καὶ δόξαν (1 Thess 2:12). The range of δόξα’s meaning in the cultural lexicon of Paul’s day simply cannot account for the fact of these singular theocentric constructions, let alone tolerably construe the specific semantic freight they bear. Paul’s Hellenistic cultural lexicon stands equally mute about their possible origin—just how and why did Paul come to employ this linguistic curiosity in the first place? Nothing in Paul’s Greco-Roman culture could have led him to make such claims and, thus, this is one of those rare times in which a curious detour in the history of religion occurs at the mundane cross streets of lexigraphy and semantics.27 26  Gaventa, “The ‘Glory of God,’” 38, attempts to relate the message of Romans (in general) and ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ (in specific) to its many doxologies—and there may indeed be a relationship, but just not a direct one. There is no passage in Paul where he gives δόξα because of δόξα. Cf. Eph 1:12, 14: εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης αὐτοῦ; Ps 20:6: μεγάλη ἡ δόξα αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ σωτηρίῳ σου, δόξαν καὶ μεγαλοπρέπειαν ἐπιθήσεις ἐπ᾽ αὐτόν ἤτω ἡ δόξα κυρίου εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα; Ps 103(104):31: ὅτι μεγάλη ἡ δόξα κυρίου; Ps 137(138):5: ἡ δόξα τοῦ Λιβάνου ἐδόθη αὐτῇsa; Ps 35:2: Εὐλογημένη ἡ δόξα κυρίου ἐκ τοῦ τόπου αὐτοῦ. This noted, it may be that Paul exploits the distinct semantic profiles of glory to God and glory of God for rhetorical effect. Romans 15:7 may be just such an example. Still, the point stands: there must be a warrant to interweave the two profiles. 27  Cf. Jerome Neyrey, “Lost in Translation: Did It Matter if Christians ‘Thanked’ God or ‘Gave God Glory’?” CBQ 71 (2009): 1–23, who claims, “The meaning of words resides in the cultural use of them, not in lexica” (1).

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Exactly what ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ conveys in these texts can, for the moment, be left to the side as an open question; but what the phrase most certainly does not denote can be stated conclusively. To take but one vivid example, consider Romans 6:4: God most certainly did not raise Jesus out of the dead by mere “opinion,” or “esteem,” or “fame,” or “boasting.”28 While Paul’s god can meaningfully be depicted as a Roman benefactor who grants honor, recognizing God’s patronage can in no way make any sense of δόξα in Paul’s declaration that Jesus was raised διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός. Nothing in Paul’s non-Jewish culture prepares for the singular and apocalyptic assertion that ἡ δόξα τοῦ πατρός has forever reversed the powers that govern the cosmos and human destiny. Nor, as will be discovered, can any of the secular senses and uses of δόξα track the theological telemetry that ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ plays in Paul’s claims about the relationship of God and the risen Jesus (2 Cor 4:6) or the implications such claims foster in Christian identity (Rom 5:2), community formation (Rom 15:7), and boundary marking (1 Thess 2:12). If Paul’s doxological (glory to God) and theological (glory of God) δόξα language represent a seismic semantic transformation—bearing, quite possibly, equally far-reaching theological, communal, and social implications—then questions really do turn on what ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ denotes and, importantly, on just what prompted Paul to employ the phrase as he did. That the early Jesus movement, both before and contemporaneous with Paul, used glory language in ways very similar to Paul does crack open the door to the theory that Paul simply cribbed his glory language from his apostolic colleagues. But neither Paul nor his sisters and brothers who gladly adhered to this Jesus movement can rightly claim to be the innovators of record for originating God and glory language. That honor, that particular δόξα, belongs to the LXX and its many

28  Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 398– 9, must strain, contort, and, ultimately, look the other way to avoid saying the obvious, namely, that διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός is a reference to God’s divine presence. But twist and turn he does. Although he recognizes the confessional nature of the passage, Jewett singles out διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός as a linguistic anomaly (although he need only turn a page or two in to find ὁ θεὸς τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὁ πατὴρ τῆς δόξης at Eph 1:17), not recognizing the long-standing glory tradition informing its use. And, then, without ever indicating what the phrase means, Jewett states: “Once again, Paul makes clear that there is no room for boasting in human glory, even with regard to the most marvelous of ethical achievements, except to boast in God whose glory is therein manifest.” While I admit that I have trouble understanding Jewett here, I am fairly sure that what is at stake in Rom 6:4 is not honor and shame. The phrase is not about human boasting. It is about God’s presence.

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ancient anonymous translators, in what is regularly described as “the most extraordinary semantic evolution” in all of the Bible.29 It was the LXX that first introduced δόξα to God’s ‫—כבוד‬and the resulting marriage stuck. Of the forty-three times where ‫ כבוד‬stands in a construct relationship with God in the Hebrew Bible, all forty-three are translated by ἡ δόξα κυρίου/θεοῦ. Of the thirty-three times when ‫ כבוד‬is used in conjunction with a possessive pronoun, when God is the referent, all thirty-three are translated by δόξα. In other words, the translators used a word that had absolutely nothing to do with deities in Hellenistic Greek and exclusively used it as the translation choice de jure for a word enduringly wedded to Israel’s god.30 The totalizing capacity of monotheism inscribed inside the ‫ כבוד‬tradition makes 29  Ceslas Spicq, “δόξα, δοξάζω, συνδοξάζω,” Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, ed. and trans. James D. Ernest, 3 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), 1:364. 30  See the extraordinarily concise (but helpful) presentation of the translation evidence in A. Haire Forster, “The Meaning of Δόξα in the Greek Bible,” ATR 12 (1929): 311–6. His conclusion, though, that the “question of the meaning of δόξα becomes essentially therefore the question of the meaning of kabod” should give pause, as the translation correspondences are much more troubled than his sentence lets on (Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology, 142). Forster’s comment could stand if qualified in this way: “The question of the meaning of δόξα becomes essentially therefore the question of the meaning of kabod, when kabod refers to divine presence.” What is not to be doubted, though, is that the relationship between ‫ כבוד‬and δόξα remains something of a puzzle. The proposed solutions to the mystery of why δόξα was chosen to translate ‫ כבוד‬range from (i) arbitrary and mechanical, on the one hand, to (ii) reasonable and polemical, on the other. For the most recent discussion, see Jörg Frey, “The Use of δόξα in Paul and John as Shaped by the Septuagint,” in The Reception of Septuagint Words in Jewish-Hellenistic and Christian Literature, ed. Eberhard Bons, Ralph Brucker, and Jan Joosten, WUNT 2/367 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 85–104. Frey suggests that when the translators (of the Pentateuch) first met ‫( כבוד‬as “honor”) they selected δόξα (as “honor”) to translate. From there on out it was mechanical. Despite Frey’s scholarly shrug when he describes the choice as “arbitrary,” I persist in thinking there existed some strange logic to this particular Ratzel: (i) following Helmut Kittel, Die Herrlichkeit Gottes: Studien zu Geschichte und Wesen eines neutestamentlichen Begriffs, BZNW 16 (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1934), 33–68 (and Frey), the semantic overlap between ‫ כבוד‬and δόξα as “honor” is the beginning point of the explanation (but not its end); (ii) then, following F. Decreus, “Doxa-Kabod: Schematische Transposite of struktuurgelijkheid?,” Sacris Erudiri: Jarrboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen 22 (1974/1975): 117–85, both words possess a deep structural similarity (both had subjective and objective fields of meaning) that made the coupling sensible; and then, finally, (iii) the choice of δόξα effectively distinguished the epiphanies of the Greek gods from the one true god’s revelation to Israel. On this last point, see especially Christine Mohrmann, Epiphania (Nijmegen/Utrecht: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1953), 6–8; eadem, “Note sur doxa,” in Sprachgeschichte und Wortbedeutung: Festschrift Albert Debrunner (Bem: Francke, 1954), 321–8; eadem, “Linguistic Problems in the Early Christian Church,” VC 11 (1957): 11–36. I do find it astounding that the choice of δόξα for ‫ כבוד‬is a kind of Homeric dog that didn’t bark: that is, the translation choice of δόξα for ‫ כבוד‬is uniformly embraced by the LXX

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the LXX’s choice of δόξα a particularly rich example of “staying Jewish” while “going Greek.”31 The translators thus effectively midwifed a tightly circumscribed tradition about Israel’s god to their Greek translations. The LXX preserved, and even extended,32 the technical meaning of ‫ כבוד‬as divine presence—in particular, as visible divine presence:33 ὄψεσθε τὴν δόξαν κυρίου (Exod 16:7) ἡ δόξα κυρίου ὤφθη ἐν νεφέλῃ (Exod 16:10) τὸ δὲ εἶδος τῆς δόξης κυρίου ὡσεὶ πῦρ φλέγον (Exod 24:17) Δεῖξόν μοι τὴν σεαυτοῦ δόξαν (Exod 33:18) ὀφθήσεται ἐν ὑμῖν δόξα κυρίου (Lev 9:6) ὤφθη ἡ δόξα κυρίου παντὶ τῷ λαῷ (Lev 9:23) καὶ τὴν δόξαν κυρίου εἶδεν (Num 12:8) ἡ δόξα κυρίου ὤφθη ἐν νεφέλῃ (Num 14:10) οἱ ὁρῶντες τὴν δόξαν μου καὶ τὰ σημεῖα (Num 14:22) ὤφθη ἡ δόξα κυρίου πάσῃ τῇ συναγωγῇ (Num 16:19) ὤφθη ἡ δόξα κυρίου (Num 17:7 [16:42]) ὤφθη ἡ δόξα κυρίου πρὸς αὐτούς (Num 20:6) ἔδειξεν ἡμῖν κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ (Deut 5:24) ὀφθῆναι τὴν δόξαν σου (Ps 16[17]:15) τοῦ ἰδεῖν τὴν δύναμίν σου καὶ τὴν δόξαν σου (Ps 62[63]:3) ὀφθήσεται ἐν τῇ δόξῃ αὐτοῦ (Ps 101:17 [102:16]) εἴδοσαν πάντες οἱ λαοὶ τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ (Ps 96[97]:6) ἵνα μὴ ἴδῃ τὴν δόξαν κυρίου (Isa 26:10) ὁ λαός μου ὄψεται τὴν δόξαν κυρίου (Isa 35:2) ὀφθήσεται ἡ δόξα κυρίου (Isa 40:5) ἡ δόξα αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ σὲ ὀφθήσεται (Isa 60:2) ὄψονται τὴν δόξαν μου (Isa 66:18) ἑωράκασιν τὴν δόξαν μου (Isa 66:19) ἡ δόξα, ἣν εἶδον ἐπὶ τοῦ ποταμοῦ τοῦ Χοβαρ (Ezek 3:23). translators, without the slightest registration of any objections. It is as if everyone were “in” on the secret. 31  See Tessa Rajak, Translation as Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 32   L. H. Brockington, “The Greek Translator of Isaiah and His Interest in DOXA,” VT 1 (1951): 23–32. 33  See especially Thomas Wagner, Gottes Herrlichkeit: Bedeutung und Verwendung des Begriffs kābôd im Alten Testament, VTSup 151 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Wagner’s careful excavation of the tradition (e.g., he detects three [!] layers to the glory tradition in P alone) into three distinct profiles (those of the priestly tradition, Isaiah, and Ezekiel) confirms, without any qualification, the meaning of ‫ כבוד‬as divine presence.

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ἡ δόξα κυρίου is not only said to appear; ἡ δόξα κυρίου is depicted as moving, following along in the very tracks first laid down by God’s ‫כבוד‬. Glory descends and ascends, comes and goes, arrives, dwells, hovers above, and fills. ἀναβαίνω/ καταβαίνω/ ἐπιβαίνω

κατέβη ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐπὶ τὸ ὄρος τὸ Σινα (Exod 24:16) ἑώρων καταβαῖνον τὸ πῦρ, καὶ ἡ δόξα κυρίου ἐπὶ τὸν οἶκον (2 Chr 7:3) δόξα θεοῦ τοῦ Ισραηλ ἀνέβη ἀπὸ τῶν χερουβιν (Ezek 9:3) δόξα κυρίου … ἐπέβη ἐπὶ τὰ χερουβιν (Ezek 10:18) ἀνέβη ἡ δόξα κυρίου ἐκ μέσης τῆς πόλεως (Ezek 11:23)

ἐρχομαι/ παρέρχομαι/ εἰσέρχομαι/ ἐκέρχομαι

παρέλθῃ μου ἡ δόξα (Exod 33:22) ᾿Εγὼ παρελεύσομαι πρότερός σου τῇ δόξῃ μου (Exod 33:19) ἐξῆλθεν δόξα κυρίου ἀπὸ τοῦ οἴκου καὶ ἐπέβη ἐπὶ τὰ χερουβιν (Ezek 10:18) δόξα θεοῦ Ισραηλ ἤρχετο (Ezek 43:2) δόξα κυρίου εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸν οἶκον (Ezek 43:4)

ἀνατέλλω

ἡ δόξα κυρίου ἐπὶ σὲ ἀνατέταλκεν (Isa 60:1)

κατασκηνόω

τόπον σκηνώματος δόξης σου (Ps 25[26]:8) τοῦ κατασκηνῶσαι δόξαν ἐν τῇ γῇ ἡμῶν (Ps 84:10 [85:9])

ἐπὶ

ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν ἡ δόξα σου (Ps 56[57]:6) ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν ἡ δόξα σου (Ps 56[57]:12) ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν ἡ δόξα σου (Ps 107[108]:6) ἐπὶ τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἡ δόξα αὐτοῦ (Ps 112[113]:4) ἐκεῖ ἦν δόξα κυρίου θεοῦ Ισραηλ κατὰ τὴν ὅρασιν (Ezek 8:4) δόξα θεοῦ Ισραηλ ἦν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶν ὑπεράνω (Ezek 10:19) ἡ δόξα θεοῦ Ισραηλ ἐπ᾽ αὐτὰ ὑπεράνω αὐτῶν (Ezek 11:22)

πληρόω

δόξης κυρίου ἐπλήσθη ἡ σκηνή (Exod 40:34) δόξης κυρίου ἐπλήσθη ἡ σκηνή (Exod 40:35) ἐμπλήσει ἡ δόξα κυρίου πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν (Num 14:21) ἔπλησεν δόξα κυρίου τὸν οἶκον (1 Kgs 8:11) ὁ οἶκος ἐνεπλήσθη νεφέλης δόξης κυρίου (2 Chr 5:13) ἐνέπλησεν δόξα κυρίου τὸν οἶκον τοῦ θεοῦ (2 Chr 5:14) δόξα κυρίου ἔπλησεν τὸν οἶκον (2 Chr 7:1) ἔπλησεν δόξα κυρίου τὸν οἶκον (2 Chr 7:2) πληρωθήσεται τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ πᾶσα ἡ γῆ (Ps 71[72]:19)

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πλήρης ὁ οἶκος τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (Isa 6:1) πλήρης πᾶσα ἡ γῆ τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (Isa 6:3) ἡ αὐλὴ ἐπλήσθη τοῦ φέγγους τῆς δόξης κυρίου (Ezek 10:4b) πλήρης δόξης κυρίου ὁ οἶκο (Ezek 43:5) πλήρης δόξης ὁ οἶκος κυρίου (Ezek 44:4) ὅτι πλησθήσεται ἡ γῆ τοῦ γνῶναι τὴν δόξαν κυρίου (Hab 2:14) Movement terminology relates ἡ δόξα κυρίου to places where God is depicted as present—i.e., Mount Sinai; the tabernacle; the temple; objects of the temple (chiefly the cherubim); the court of the temple and the city that houses the temple, Jerusalem; and even the whole earth. Movement also ties ἡ δόξα κυρίου to a restricted class of people who are thought to be closely associated with God’s presence—Moses, the priests, Solomon, and the prophets. The closely circumscribed group of people function as legitimized, sacred mediators because of their proximity to ἡ δόξα κυρίου. Appearance terminology also links ἡ δόξα κυρίου to places where God’s presence is expected—e.g., in a cloud, Mount Sinai, tent, and temple. But, by contrast, ἡ δόξα κυρίου does not appear in the places where God is thought to be, but only at their periphery. Further, ἡ δόξα κυρίου appears to many more people than just the divinely approved few, including the whole assembly or congregation, all the children of Israel, others outside of Israel, and, more generally, all flesh. Hebrew could negate ‫כבוד‬, as in ‫ֹבוד‬ ֙ ‫י־כ‬ ָ ‫ ִ ֽא‬, “Where glory?” or, better, “No glory” (1 Sam 4:21). The LXX captures the grief inherent in the loss of God’s presence with the interjection Οὐαὶ βαρχαβωθ, a perfectly apt nomen for a mother to pass to her child (1 Sam 4:22), given that the ark’s capture by the Philistines signaled God’s presence was no longer with the people (ἀπῴκισται δόξα Ισραηλ). The LXX of Hosea, again echoing the ark’s exile as a sign of the loss of God’s presence, God’s very δόξα, sees a reversal of fortunes ahead for Israel when the people shall again celebrate God’s momentarily exiled presence (ἐπιχαροῦνται ἐπὶ τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ ὅτι μετῳκίσθη ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ). For Ezekiel, ἡ δόξα κυρίου begins a systematic withdrawal because of the people’s sin—from the cherubim (9:3; 10:4), to the threshold of the temple (10:18), and finally to the east gate of the city, departing to rest upon the Mount of Olives (10:19; 11:22, 23). God abandons the temple as a sign of judgment when ἡ δόξα κυρίου is exiled. The systematic withdrawal from the temple and the city, in larger context, indicates the absence should be related to God’s presence.34 If ἡ δόξα κυρίου signs divine

34   A. Joseph Everson, “Ezekiel and the Glory of the Lord Tradition,” in Sin, Salvation, and the Spirit, ed. D. Durken (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1979), 163–76.

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presence, then, equally, God’s absence is signed by the departure, disappearance, or deprivation of ἡ δόξα κυρίου. Only twice does the tradition pause to parse the appearance of ἡ δόξα κυρίου. Exodus (24:7) reports that the sight of God’s glory (τὸ δὲ εἶδος τῆς δόξης κυρίου) was as a fire (ὡσεὶ πῦρ φλέγον). Ezekiel’s inaugural throne vision (1:28) likens (ὡς, ὁμοιώματος) the vision of God’s anthropomorphically configured glory (ἡ ὅρασις ὁμοιώματος δόξης κυρίου) to the brightness of a rainbow, tucked inside a cloud on a rainy day (ἐν τῇ νεφέλῃ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ὑετοῦ, οὕτως ἡ στάσις τοῦ φέγγους κυκλόθεν). With a characteristic reserve appropriate to visionary texts, both Exodus and Ezekiel employ a simile (x is like y), and not denotation (x is y): God’s glory is only like a fire and like a glistening rainbow. The known is used to describe the unknown and mysterious. Such language of approximation should caution against an all-too-easy equation of ἡ δόξα κυρίου with luminosity or radiance. The LXX never links ἡ δόξα κυρίου with Adam. There’s not even a whisper between Adam and glory in the LXX. In fact, for the LXX there is no association between δόξα and the primal scenes of Genesis 1–3 whatsoever. What is true for the LXX is equally true for Paul. Paul never links Adam and glory. Not once. While Paul does refer to Adam (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:22, 45–50), and does so to draw both parallels and contrasts to Jesus, he never measures Adam for a suit of glory nor splits the Adam of Christ by glory. That the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, and the Rabbis do link Adam and glory has no direct bearing on Paul—unless, of course, there is trace evidence that Paul was borrowing, which there is not.35 Paul never uses δόξα to figure Adam before 35  See Bar 4:16; 2 Bar. 54:13–16; CD III, 20; 1QS IV, 23; 1QH XVII, 15; 4Q504 fr. 8 recto; T. Ab. 11:8–9; LAE 12:1; Apoc. Mos. 21:2, 6; 39:2; cf. 4QpPsa 1–10 III, 2 (= 4QI71); 1 En. 89:44–45. For a maximalist reading of the Adam glory tradition and its influence, see Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). However, there simply is no evidence that the robust mythical and philosophical traditions about Adam had any influence on Paul at all. See especially the measured and judicious analysis of Pheme Perkins, “Adam and Christ in the Pauline Epistles,” in Celebrating Paul: Festschrift in Honor of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, O.P., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., ed. Peter Spitaler, CBQMS 48 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2011), 128–51, especially 130 (and n9), 147–49. See also John R. Levison, Portraits of Adam in Early Judaism: From Sirach to Baruch, JSPSS 1 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), who rightly warns of the dangers of using the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocalypse of Moses without sufficient warrant. So, also, Harrison, Paul and the Imperial Authorities, 239: “Given the strength and ubiquity of this tradition in Second Temple Judaism, it is surprising that Paul bypasses any mention of Adam’s original glory in Romans, concentrating instead on the reign of sin and death inaugurated through his disobedience (Rom. 5:12–21).” Given the rabbinic imaging of Adam in response to Christian pictures of Jesus, which admittedly came much later, it is a real

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transgression. Paul never affirms that Adam possesses glory, either his own or God’s. Nor does Paul ever characterize Adam’s transgression as a loss of δόξα. An Adam glory story—Adam lost glory, Jesus wins it back—simply does not hold Paul’s theology in its narrative grip.36 Paul does directly link Adam with ἐικών and, possibly, with μορφή. But δόξα, ἐικών, and μορφή, while participating in the same paradigmatic field of words, are not interchangeable equivalents.37 To assert confidently a Pauline Adam glory story is to invent a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon that did not exist. It is as mistaken to force δόξα (in general) and ἡ δόξα κυρίου (in particular) into an invented Adam story as it is to reduce the meaning of ἡ δόξα κυρίου to luminosity. While no LXX evidence can be adduced to support δόξα’s supposed ties to Adam, glory does bear a demonstrable close association with ancient theophany, a storm god’s mighty arrival upon the clouds and the subsequent violent reaction of nature.38 Distant echoes of Canaanite poetry can be heard in Psalm 28[29],39 and especially the declaration that ὁ θεὸς τῆς δόξης ἐβρόντησεν (‫ל־ה ָּכ ֹ֥בוד ִה ְר ִ ֑עים‬ ַ ‫) ֵ ֽא‬, a declaration announcing God’s victory over that most ancient of foes, watery chaos (Ps 28[29]:3). Isaiah repeatedly employs glory in theophanic passages to depict God’s mighty arrival: αὶ ἐν Ιερουσαλημ καὶ ἐνώπιον τῶν πρεσβυτέρων δοξασθήσεται (Isa 24:23) καὶ ὁ λαός μου ὄψεται τὴν δόξαν κυρίου καὶ τὸ ὕψος τοῦ θεοῦ (Isa 35:2)

question as to how far back this tendency can be pressed. That is, in what sense can the Greek Life of Adam and Eve be seen as a precursor to Paul—or does it bask in the glory of Paul’s interpretation? On the larger question of Jewish responses to Christian theology, see Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 36  It is hard to overestimate the inordinate influence of Jacob Jervell’s Imago Dei: Gen. 1,26 im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und bei Paulus, FRLANT 76 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960). 37  Markus Bockmuehl, “‘The Form of God’ (Phil. 2:6): Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism,” JTS 48 (1997): 1–23, rightly warns of willy-nilly semantic and thus theological substitution. 38  Cf. Deut 33; Ps 68; Judg 5; Hab 3. On the Gattung of theophany, see Claus Westermann, In Praise of God in the Psalms (Atlanta: John Knox, 1965), 93–101; Frank Schnutenhaus, “Das Kommen und Erscheinen Gottes im Alten Testament,” ZAW 76 (1964): 121; Artur Weiser, Psalms: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 38–43 (especially 38n2), 197–204, 259–65; Jörg Jeremias, Theophanie: Die Geschichte einer alttestamentlichen Gattung, 2nd ed., WMANT 10 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1977), 16–24. 39   Frank M. Cross, “Notes on a Canaanite Psalm in the Old Testament,” BASOR 117 (1950): 19–21.

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καὶ ὀφθήσεται ἡ δόξα κυρίου, καὶ ὄψεται πᾶσα σὰρξ τὸ σωτήριον τοῦ θεοῦ· ὅτι κύριος ἐλάλησεν (Isa 40:5).40 It is the persistence of the theophanic Gattung featuring God’s mighty arrival that lodges spatial and optical aspects deep within the psyche of the glory tradition and thus shapes the priestly, royal, and prophetic depictions of glory as visible and mobile divine presence. In theophany, the stethoscope of form criticism detects the first pulse of glory as divine presence—but not its last, as echoes of ancient theophany lived on and can be heard even in Paul’s use of δόξα. Construing δόξα as divine presence, derived from an established and identifiable glory tradition read right out of the LXX, makes plausible sense of Paul’s ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ texts. God’s presence can be exchanged for images (ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου θεοῦ); one can be deprived of God’s presence (ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ); the hope of God’s presence can elicit confidence (καυχώμεθα ἐπ᾽ ἐλπίδι τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ); God’s presence can raise Jesus out of the grave (ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός); God’s presence can be known (ἵνα γνωρίσῃ τὸν πλοῦτον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ); Christ can receive believers into God’s presence (ὁ Χριστὸς προσελάβετο ὑμᾶς εἰς δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ); the knowledge of God’s presence can be discovered in the risen Jesus (γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ [Ἰησοῦ] Χριστοῦ); and in salvation believers can enjoy God’s presence (θεοῦ τοῦ καλοῦντος ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ βασιλείαν καὶ δόξαν). The plausible escalates to the intentional each time Paul specifically footnotes the LXX’s glory tradition in full, glorious bibliographic detail. Three times Paul consciously and explicitly cites the LXX to define ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ as divine presence, and he does so, each time, in the considerable light cast by the glory tradition the LXX enshrines. The net effect of Paul’s copious documentation is that all wistful appeals to dreamt-up Adam parallels, to honor/shame discourse, to Roman patronage, ideals, or power to explain ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ as anything other than divine presence are all interpretive sins that fall well short of the mark. Paul’s most intensive and extensive exegesis of the LXX’s glory tradition occurs in 2 Corinthians 3 where he provides a sustained reading of Exodus 34.

40  On the persistence of the ancient theophanic form in these passages, see Eric Nels Ortlund, Theophany and Choaskampf: The Interpretation of Theophanic Imagery in the Baal Epic, Isaiah, and the Twelve, GUS 5 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2010).

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Exodus 34:29–35 LXX

2 Corinthians 3:7–11

ὡς δὲ κατέβαινεν Μωυσῆς ἐκ τοῦ ὄρους, καὶ αἱ δύο πλάκες ἐπὶ τῶν χειρῶν Μωυσῆ· καταβαίνοντος δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐκ τοῦ ὄρους Μωυσῆς οὐκ ᾔδει ὅτι δεδόξασται ἡ ὄψις τοῦ χρώματος τοῦ προσώπου αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ λαλεῖν αὐτὸν αὐτῷ. καὶ εἶδεν Ααρων καὶ πάντες οἱ πρεσβύτεροι Ισραηλ τὸν Μωυσῆν καὶ ἦν δεδοξασμένη ἡ ὄψις τοῦ χρώματος τοῦ προσώπου αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν ἐγγίσαι αὐτοῦ. καὶ ἐκάλεσεν αὐτοὺς Μωυσῆς, καὶ ἐπεστράφησαν πρὸς αὐτὸν Ααρων καὶ πάντες οἱ ἄρχοντες τῆς συναγωγῆς, καὶ ἐλάλησεν αὐτοῖς Μωυσῆς. καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα προσῆλθον πρὸς αὐτὸν πάντες οἱ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ, καὶ ἐνετείλατο αὐτοῖς πάντα, ὅσα ἐλάλησεν κύριος πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ ὄρει Σινα. καὶ ἐπειδὴ κατέπαυσεν λαλῶν πρὸς αὐτούς, ἐπέθηκεν ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ κάλυμμα. ἡνίκα δ᾽ ἂν εἰσεπορεύετο Μωυσῆς ἔναντι κυρίου λαλεῖν αὐτῷ, περιῃρεῖτο τὸ κάλυμμα ἕως τοῦ ἐκπορεύεσθαι. καὶ ἐξελθὼν ἐλάλει πᾶσιν τοῖς υἱοῖς Ισραηλ ὅσα ἐνετείλατο αὐτῷ κύριος, καὶ εἶδον οἱ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ τὸ πρόσωπον Μωυσῆ ὅτι δεδόξασται, καὶ περιέθηκεν Μωυσῆς κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὸ πρόσωπον ἑαυτοῦ, ἕως ἂν εἰσέλθῃ συλλαλεῖν αὐτῷ.

Εἰ δὲ ἡ διακονία τοῦ θανάτου ἐν γράμμασιν ἐντετυπωμένη λίθοις ἐγενήθη ἐν δόξῃ, ὥστε μὴ δύνασθαι ἀτενίσαι τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον Μωϋσέως διὰ τὴν δόξαν τοῦ προσώπου αὐτοῦ τὴν καταργουμένην, πῶς οὐχὶ μᾶλλον ἡ διακονία τοῦ πνεύματος ἔσται ἐν δόξῃ; εἰ γὰρ τῇ διακονίᾳ τῆς κατακρίσεως δόξα, πολλῷ μᾶλλον περισσεύει ἡ διακονία τῆς δικαιοσύνης δόξῃ. καὶ γὰρ οὐ δεδόξασται τὸ δεδοξασμένον ἐν τούτῳ τῷ μέρει εἵνεκεν τῆς ὑπερβαλλούσης δόξης. εἰ γὰρ τὸ καταργούμενον διὰ δόξης, πολλῷ μᾶλλον τὸ μένον ἐν δόξῃ.

The appeal of Paul’s opponents to a scriptural quarry and a mystical tradition that he himself values forces him to argue from the lesser to the greater (qal wahomer), and this despite Paul’s enduring appreciation for the deep analogical correspondences between two of the revelations of God’s δόξα, one at Sinai to Moses and one to him. Paul concedes that Moses’s reception of the law was attended, and thus legitimized, ἐν δόξῃ (2 Cor 3:7, 9, 11). Paul counters that a revelation of God’s δόξα also attended, and thus legitimized, his stewardship of the gospel (2 Cor 3:8, 9, 11). While comparable, Paul distinguishes between the two revelations of δόξα. The new covenant wrought by resurrection abounds excessively in glory (περισσεύει ἡ διακονία τῆς δικαιοσύνης δόξῃ) precisely because the resurrection (appearance) of Jesus (to Paul) consists in a revelation of final, eschatological δόξα.41 That which once had glory (τὸ δεδοξασμένον) has 41  See especially Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 122–153. Hays conclusively establishes Paul’s contrast between the two covenants, one in stone and one on hearts, does not include a denegration of the

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come to have no glory (οὐ δεδόξασται) at all, because of the glory that surpasses it (ὑπερβαλλούσης δόξης). The christophanic δόξα that legitimizes Paul’s apostleship is not tied to that which is subject to apocalyptic decay, unlike the δόξα that attended the Mosaic revelation (τὸ καταργούμενον). Without gainsaying Moses as a—or even as his—venerable archetype and trope, Paul, no doubt authorized by his own experience of divine presence, claims both the superiority and eschatological singularity of the revelation of God’s δόξα in the risen Jesus. In doing so, Paul explicitly and specifically cites the LXX’s glory tradition to define δόξα as God’s presence. Paul in Romans 1, yet again, directly cites the LXX, this time Psalm 105 and Jeremiah 2, to invoke ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ as God’s presence: Romans 1:23

Psalm 105(106):18–20 καὶ ἐξεκαύθη πῦρ ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ αὐτῶν, φλὸξ κατέφλεξεν ἁμαρτωλούς. καὶ ἐποίησαν μόσχον ἐν Χωρηβ καὶ προσεκύνησαν τῷ γλυπτῷ· καὶ ἠλλάξαντο τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν ἐν ὁμοιώματι

καὶ ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου θεοῦ ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου μόσχου ἔσθοντος χόρτον. καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων καὶ ἑρπετῶν

Jeremiah 2:11 εἰ ἀλλάξονται ἔθνη θεοὺς αὐτῶν; καὶ οὗτοι οὔκ εἰσιν θεοί. ὁ δὲ λαός μου ἠλλάξατο τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, ἐξ ἧς οὐκ ὠφεληθήσονται

While each is intriguingly idiosyncratic, all three texts point to human failure and futility. All three connect this failure and futility to a decisive and specific moment in the past. And all three interpret the decisive, specific moment of failure and futility as the loss of God’s divine presence, δόξα. Remarkably, all three texts depend on a fourth, uncited one, Exodus 32, which does not mention glory at all. Despite the oddity that glory plays no direct role in Israel’s making and worshiping of the golden calf, all three texts isolate this event as glory which appeaed to Moses. Neither Exodus nor Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the fading of glory. Indeed, the veil placed over Moses’s face was precisely because the glory did not fade away. What Hays’s patient exegesis reveals is that it was the covenant (not the glory) which was nullified. That noted, still, Paul’s linking of glory with resurrection (see below) does open the door to a contrast between the two analogous revelations of divine presence.

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Israel’s active forfeiture of God’s δόξα, and Paul in Romans 1:23 specifically footnotes the LXX’s reading of the event as Israel’s loss of divine presence to establish his own claim about humanity’s loss of the same. Paul’s overt citation of the LXX at 1:23 introduces ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ into the argument of Romans, and ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ at 1:23 forms the first of several strategic mile markers in Paul’s Roman road of glory. Israel’s poor bargain in Exodus 32, which Paul takes as deformatively symptomatic of all, marches inevitably to his πάντες γὰρ ἥμαρτον καὶ ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ (3:23). Long (and wrongly) straitjacketed by an invented Adam and glory tradition,42 Paul’s statement here is not about Adam’s glory, but about God’s, and, specifically, about humanity’s divestiture of God’s glory due to sin. Genesis 1–3 is not onstage (or even lurking in the shadows); the spotlights follow the dramatic portrayals of Israel’s heartrending forfeiture of God’s divine presence in the making of a golden calf in Exodus and Psalms, the exile of the ark in 1 Samuel and Hosea, and, above all, the parabolic departure of God’s glory in Ezekiel.43 Paul universalizes Israel’s experience: all have sinned and, thus, are tragically being deprived of ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ.44 But Paul soon sounds a different note of glory. God’s own initiative (συνίστησιν δὲ τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ἀγάπην εἰς ἡμᾶς ὁ θεός) and decisive action in and through Christ (ἔτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὄντων ἡμῶν Χριστὸς ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἀπέθανεν) means that δικαιωθέντες ἐκ πίστεως (5:2) can now presently exult in the hope of God’s glory (καυχώμεθα ἐπ᾽ ἐλπίδι τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ). This reversal of fortune—that what was exchanged, and thus deprived, is now celebrated and anticipated—occurred because of ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός (Rom 6:4), a singularly decisive act that makes new life possible (οὕτως καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς περιπατήσωμεν). Paul admits that an unrelenting θλῖψις still marks this life. But this present suffering pales in comparison to the future apocalypse of glory (τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι) upon which all hope is set (Rom 8:18). In Romans 8 Paul has enacted an important and critical referential shift from his use of glory in Romans 1, 3, 5, and 6 to that of Romans 8. Paul in Romans 8 refers to the glory of the risen Jesus, the first and only

42  See Jackson, Glory, 10n20 for an impressive (and exhaustive if not also exhausting) listing of all Adam adopters. 43  See Grindheim, “A Theology of Glory,” 458–9 for a similar argument, but using Deut 4:15– 18 as the pivot text. 44  Following the translation of ὑστεροῦνται (and wise commentary) of Leander E. Keck, Romans, ANTC (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 106–7. See, further, Wally V. Cirafesi, “‘To Fall Short’ or ‘To Lack’? Reconsidering the Meaning and Translation of ‘ΥΣΤΕΡΕΩ in Romans 3:23,” ExpT 123 (2012): 429–34. Cf. 1 Kgs 8:11: καὶ οὐκ ἠδύναντο οἱ ἱερεῖς στῆναι λειτουργεῖν ἀπὸ προσώπου τῆς νεφέλης, ὅτι ἔπλησεν δόξα κυρίου τὸν οἶκον; Jude 24: Τῷ δὲ δυναμένῳ φυλάξαι ὑμᾶς ἀπταίστους καὶ στῆσαι κατενώπιον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ ἀμώμους ἐν ἀγαλλιάσει; Pr Man 5: ὅτι ἄστεκτος ἡ μεγαλοπρέπεια τῆς δόξης σου.

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reference to Jesus’s glory in Romans.45 The mysterious relationship of present suffering to future glory mimes the enigmatic way God’s purposes regarding Israel make known τὸν πλοῦτον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (Rom 9:23) and how Christ, in the end, will himself welcome all εἰς δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom 15:7).46 Only in two canonical texts does glory play such a central and compelling literary role: Ezekiel and Romans. While discernibly distinctive glory theologies fund the Pentateuch, Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Fourth Gospel, only for Ezekiel and Romans can it be said that a full-on glory theology helps structure narration.47 The grand sweep of ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ across the vast expanse of Romans represents a theo-logic that drives the letter’s very architecture.48 Romans 9 reveals just how central the LXX’s ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ tradition was to Paul’s theological grammar and to the shape and argument of Romans. In his lament for his ethnic sisters and brothers (οἵτινές εἰσιν Ἰσραηλῖται), Paul enumerates Israel’s privileges—the markers that identify and distinguish them as God’s people (Rom 9:4–5): ὧν I

II

ὧν καὶ ἐξ ὧν ὁ ὢν

καὶ καὶ καὶ καὶ καὶ

ἡ υἱοθεσία ἡ δόξα αἱ δαιθῆκαι ἡ νομοθεσία ἡ λατρεία αἱ ἐπαγγελίαι ----------------οἱ πατέρες ὁ Χριστὸς θεὸς

τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ἐπὶ πάντων49 εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν

45  This shift means that any rendering of glory in Romans must account for how and why and, then, the implications of Paul’s identification of Jesus as the glory of God. Romans 8 opens the door and welcomes 2 Cor 3–4 to the conversation. 46  Gaventa, “The ‘Glory of God,’” 39, rightly construes this verse both apocalyptically and christologically. 47  On Ezekiel, above all, see Pieter de Vries The Kabôd of YHWH in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to the Book of Ezekiel, SSN 65 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), who documents the strategic role ‫ כבוד‬plays in Ezekiel’s literary architecture, and, on Romans, see Gaventa, “The ‘Glory of God,’” 29–42, who rightly sees that glory is essential to the narration of Romans. 48  Indeed, glory in Romans is almost entirely theocentric (rather than anthropocentric or christocentric). Any attempt to explain the glory of God in Romans must also pay careful attention to Paul’s glory Christology in 1 and 2 Corinthians. Leander Keck’s law of parsimony, which he applies to salvation and Christology, may equally have something to say about Christology and theology—and possibly Romans and the Corinthian correspondence. 49  While I do not take ὁ ὢν θεὸς ἐπὶ πάντων as grammatically appositional to ὁ Χριστὸς, I do think that Paul thought of Jesus as divine.

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The repetition of ὧν and καὶ, the oscillation between singular and plural subjects and their chiastic arrangement (υἱοθεσία and νομοθεσία; δόξα and λατρεία; δαθῆκαι and ἐπαγγελίαι), as well as the strophic structure itself, all signal the passage’s poetic character. The backbone of this poetic act, though, is a list, a highly idiosyncratic and curated list of Paul’s own invention.50 From the encyclopedia of Israel’s storied past Paul curiously selects and names only six markers of Israel’s identity—but these six signs are already brimming full and need no commentary. Though finite in number, the six signs collectively invoke Israel’s infinite uniqueness. Paul then adds two more items to the list. The first to be expected, “the fathers” (οἱ πατέρες), while the second is as bold as it is unexpected, “the Christ” (ὁ Χριστὸς). But what shocks and disrupts the arc of the otherwise traditional (and accepted) is Paul’s addition “according to the flesh” (τὸ κατὰ σάρκα). The jarring specificity recalls the confession of Romans 1:3 (περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα) and reveals that existing ideas about a messiah did not govern a reading of Jesus, but, rather, the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection gave definition to the office of the Christ.51 The juxtaposition of these two new items forces a reconsideration of the list’s organizing principle and, through addition, fashions an entirely new figure.52 In so doing Paul himself creates one, particular narrative sequence 50  Lists order the otherwise disordered, and they do so through hermeneutical insistence. A naked list cries out for the imposition of that which organizes. Indeed, making a list, any list, sets the hermeneutical stakes very high. See especially Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (New York: Rizzoli, 2009). Eco observes that the making of lists marks the beginning of culture and is an attempt to harness the infinite and manage death. The list Paul makes here appears, at first blush, to be practical (finite, referential, and unalterable) but, upon closer inspection, is poetic (infinite, boundless). The arraying of θεὸς is transformative by making the list into epic. Paul’s list is not compelling for its referential quality but because it points toward what is not present and not comprehensible. See further Deborah Schiffrin, “Making a List,” Discourse Processes 17 (1994): 377–406 and Susan Mancino, “Infinity of Lists. Philosophy of Communication and Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists: The Interplay of the Poetic and Pragmatic,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 25 (2017): 139–50. Both the fact and content of this list of Israel’s storied past are unique Pauline contributions. Cf. Jer 13:11 LXX: ὅτι καθάπερ κολλᾶται τὸ περίζωμα περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, οὕτως ἐκόλλησα πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν τὸν οἶκον τοῦ Ισραηλ καὶ πᾶν οἶκον Ιουδα τοῦ γενέσθαι μοι εἰς λαὸν ὀνομαστὸν καὶ εἰς καύχημα καὶ εἰς δόξαν, καὶ οὐκ εἰσήκουσάν μου. 51  As Nils Dahl, “The Messiahship of Jesus in Paul,” in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine, ed. Donald H. Juel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 17, rightly adduces: “The name ‘Christ’ does not receive its content through a previously fixed conception of messiahship but rather from the person and work of Jesus Christ.” 52  Not only does the inclusion of ὁ Χριστὸς force reinterpretation, it also constitutes a minimal plot by implying cause and effect over time. Cf. Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Jesus in 1 Cor 15:3–8.

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out of many possible ones53 and thereby demonstrates that he no more inherited a singular story about Adam, Abraham, Israel, the temple, and God’s return to Zion (into which the Christ is now neatly cut to fit) than he did borrow one about the emperors and their quest for a golden age (which the Christ now simply emulates).54 While the list, at least initially, reads left to right, with the introduction of ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα the list demands to be read backwards.55 The hermeneutical key to the entire list is discovered only at its end. It is θεὸς who stands over all (ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων) and who is, as such, the source of all the list comprises and all the list suggests. After all, it is God who has been with Israel every step of the way, orchestrating and saving, and the list traces the sweep of God’s purposes—the very point of Romans 9–11, the arc of ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ across Romans, and Romans itself. The glory (ἡ δόξα), the list’s second member, is thus none other than God’s glory. Here the singular (ἡ δόξα), as a fully inscribed symbol, signs God and the many appearances of God’s δόξα— and, indeed, all appearances of God.56 God repeatedly revealed his δόξα to Israel, as Paul well knows from reading his Greek scriptures, and Paul places the revelation of God’s glory at the very center of God’s purposes for Israel and 53  So, rightly, Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 150–1. 54  I here side with N. T. Wright’s claim in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) that Paul was indeed a narrative theologian and not merely a scriptural one, as Francis Watson asserts in “Is Paul a Covenantal Theologian?” in The Unrelenting God: God’s Action in Scripture. Essays in Honor of Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ed. David J. Downs and Matthew L. Skinner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 102–18. However, I do not think that Paul either inherited or depended upon a single story—Paul created and then imposed narratives based upon the cross and resurrection. But neither do I think that Paul borrowed from the imperial cult to figure Jesus, as argued by Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, ed. Carey C. Newman et al., JSJ 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 234–57 and James R. Harrison, “Augustan Rome and the Body of Christ: A Comparison of the Social Vision of the Res Gestae and Paul’s letter to the Romans,” HTR 106 (2013): 1–36. True, Romans, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians share a language with the imperial cult. But Paul built a very different building out of the bricks fired in a Roman kiln. Indeed, Paul’s use of the language of the Julian-Claudian imperium is only to subvert it with his message of the resurrection of Jesus. 55  See Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Exegesis and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). 56  The use of articular ἡ δόξα as a title is as rare in Greek (cf. Herm. Vis. 1.3.3) as the use of ‫ הכבוד‬is in Hebrew. See Carol A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition, HSS 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 312, commenting on ‫ הכבוד‬as a title for God in 4Q405 20 II.

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the world.57 Paul’s use of δόξα here does not denote honor/esteem (what humans give to each other); nor does δόξα denote praise/worship (what humans give to God). ἡ δόξα signs God’s repeatedly revealed divine presence to Israel (what God graciously gives to humans). God, glory, Christ. Paul arrays the δόξα with the θεὸς; and he does the same with the δόξα and the Χριστὸς. The first pairing reflects his inherited theological scruples; the other pairing challenges them. The list, and its cryptic entanglements of glory, Christ, and God, hints at Paul’s willingness to breach his monotheism only because it has been remade. 5

Christological Glory

Paul’s rhetorical training enabled him to marshal δόξα in ways common among his Greco-Roman colleagues. But it was Paul’s specific religious commitments that led him to employ δόξα in a manner remarkably uncharacteristic of his Hellenistic upbringing and environment. Unlike any of his secular, cultural contemporaries, the apostle to the nations used glory language doxologically (in his reverencing the one true god of Israel) and theologically (to denote this one true god’s divine presence). But Paul did not invent such God and glory language out of thin air; he simply took a deep breath and inhaled his scriptural tradition, a tradition upon which, at least at this one point, he consciously, repeatedly, and demonstrably depended. Neither Paul nor his colleagues in the early days of the Jesus movement originated God and δόξα language; the LXX, in its choice of δόξα to translate ‫כבוד‬, bequeathed to Paul, and indeed to all successive generations, the whole of the glory tradition as a glorious inheritance. But neither Paul’s contemporaneous cultural context nor his inherited 57  Each of the various summaries of glory in Paul struggle to define the phenomenon of glory in Paul through listing, comparison, and classification. See, for example, Freiherrn von Gall, Die Herrlichkeit Gottes: Eine Biblisch-Theologische Untersuchung (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1900), 96–102; Heinrich Schlier, “Doxa bei Paulus als heilsgeschichtlicher Begriff,” in Studiorum Paulinorum Congressus Internationalis Catholicus 1961, 2 vols., AnBib 17–18 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963), 1:45–56; Gerhard Kittel, “δόξα,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976), 2:233–7, 242– 53; Otto Kuss, Der Römerbrief, 2 vols. (Regensburg: Pustet, 1978), 2:609–19; H. Hegermann, “δόξα,” Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. H. Balz and G. Schneider, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 1:344–8. But cf. Jarl Fossum, “glory,” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995; 2nd rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), who instead explains diachronic, geneological development (rather than providing synchronic classification).

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religious tradition, nor, even, the LXX can account for another feature of Paul’s calculated rhetoric, namely, his scandalous identification of the risen Jesus as ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ. The identification of the risen Jesus as God’s glory, a true Pauline invention, stands at the very first level of his interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus and carries with it far-reaching implications for the identity and social location of the communities of faith that Paul founded and nurtured. And Paul makes such a scandalous declaration fully aware that Israel’s god had declared, ἐγὼ κύριος ὁ θεός, τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ ὄνομα· τὴν δόξαν μου ἑτέρῳ οὐ δώσω. And again: ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ ποιήσω σοι, ὅτι τὸ ἐμὸν ὄνομα βεβηλοῦται, καὶ τὴν δόξαν μου ἑτέρῳ οὐ δώσω.58 Isaiah’s careful work to safeguard God by glory makes Paul’s identification of Jesus as God through glory a remarkable theological innovation. While the LXX overwhelmingly speaks of the ἡ δόξα τοῦ κυρίου, Paul expresses a curious reserve in his preference for ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ instead. There are two significant exceptions, both of which reveal Paul’s christological use of glory language. In defense of his apostolic conduct in 2 Corinthians 3–4 Paul does employ ἡ δόξα τοῦ κυρίου, and he does so in close proximity with ἡ δόξα τοῦ Χριστοῦ and ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ: τὴν δόξαν κυρίου κατοπτριζόμενοι (2 Cor 3:18) εἰς τὸ μὴ αὐγάσαι τὸν φωτισμὸν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τῆς δόξης τοῦ Χριστοῦ (2 Cor 4:4) γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ [Ἰησοῦ] Χριστοῦ (2 Cor 4:6). Paul uses κύριος five other times in 2 Corinthians 3:4–4:16, and each time he does so with the risen Jesus as the referent.59 The epicenter of Paul’s preaching, announcing Jesus Christ as the Lord (κηρύσσομεν ἀλλ᾽ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν κύριον), makes clear that when someone turns to the Lord (ἐπιστρέψῃ πρὸς κύριον) they are turning to the risen Jesus. Jesus, as the risen Lord, is Spirit (ὁ δὲ κύριος τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστιν), shares Spirit (καθάπερ ἀπὸ κυρίου πνεύματος), and, through Spirit, creates eschatological liberty (οὗ δὲ τὸ πνεῦμα κυρίου, ἐλευθερία). Thus, to behold the glory of the Lord (τὴν δόξαν κυρίου κατοπτριζόμενοι) is to behold God’s presence in the risen Jesus.60 58  Isa 42:8; 48:11 LXX. 59   David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT 2/47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 155–7. 60  The debate over whether κατοπτριζόμενοι means “reflect” or “behold” resolves when it is recognized that the glory tradition emphasizes “seeing” the glory of God. Here, seeing is noetic; seeing means discovering. For an alternative reading, one more characteristic of John than of Paul, see N. T. Wright, “Reflected Glory: 2 Corinthians 3:18,” in The Glory of

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Paul here brazenly—but not without justification—and intentionally transfers the LXX’s meaning of ἡ δόξα τοῦ κυρίου as divine presence directly to the risen Jesus. That the referent of τὴν δόξαν κυρίου is none other than the risen Jesus is confirmed when Paul says, plainly and unequivocally, what has been at the heart of the matter all along: the knowledge of ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ is discovered ἐν προσώπῳ [Ἰησοῦ] Χριστοῦ (2 Cor 4:6).61 The risen Jesus is the god of Israel’s divine presence. There can hardly be a clearer instance of Paul’s conviction that the risen Jesus shares God’s divine identity than this claim, and Paul does so despite the unequivocal and repeated warnings of his scriptural tradition about making such a claim, along with Isaiah’s unambiguous declaration that glory belongs to God and God alone.62 Paul hints at how he came to this scandalous conclusion when he characterizes the gospel he preaches as consisting in the glory of Christ (εὐαγγελίου τῆς δόξης τοῦ Χριστοῦ). The gospel, the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus, both is the glory of Christ and that which reveals the glory of Christ. What drives these two theological convictions—i.e., that Jesus is the glory of God and that the gospel is the glory of Jesus—is nothing other than Paul’s interpretation of the resurrection itself as glory. Paul directly links Jesus’s resurrection with glory when he declares (Rom 6:4) that Jesus was raised through glory (ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός), an event that Paul takes (1 Cor 15:42–43) as paradigmatic for the future resurrection of all (Οὕτως καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν…. ἐγείρεται ἐν δόξῃ).63 It is Paul’s interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus as a revelation of God’s glory that leads him to identify Jesus as the glory of God; and it is Paul’s interpretation of the resurrection as the glory of God in Jesus that leads him to identify his gospel, featuring the resurrection of Jesus, as the glory of Christ. Paul’s claims about the glory of Jesus and the glory of his gospel are both predicated upon his reading of resurrected Jesus as a revelation of divine glory. Glory thus becomes one of the ways in Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird, ed. Lincoln Hurst (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 139–50. 61  Cf. Heb 1:3: ὃς ὢν ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης καὶ χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ; Jas 2:1: τὴν πίστιν τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τῆς δόξη. 62  That this text (Isa 42:8) and this identification (Jesus is God’s glory) was singled out in Justin (Dial. 54–65) is a commentary on how theology and sociology fall together. On Justin’s exegesis of Isa 42, see Larry W. Hurtado, “The Binitarian Pattern of Earliest Christian Devotion and Early Doctrinal Development,” in The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer: Trinity, Christology, and Liturgical Theology, ed. Bryan D. Spinks (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 23–50. Hurtado sees in Justin’s exegesis the possibility of an early tradition of christological readings of Isaiah. 63  Cf. Col 1:11; Acts 3:20; Heb 2:7–9; 1 Pet 1:21; Pol. Phil. 2:1.

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which Paul came to express the significance of what God had accomplished in the resurrection of the crucified Messiah, Jesus.64 If Jesus is the glory of God (as Paul affirms), and if the gospel is the glory of Christ (as Paul affirms), and if both of these claims depend on reading the resurrection as glory (as Paul indeed predicates), then the questions become how and why Paul came to interpret the resurrection as (a revelation of God’s) glory (in Jesus). While also confirming his interpretation of Jesus’s resurrection as revelation of glory, Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:8 takes the additional step by hinting at what, exactly, encouraged him to interpret the resurrection as δόξα. Paul here entitles the risen Jesus ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης (τὸν κύριον τῆς δόξης). In context, Paul mounts an argument (1 Cor 2:1–16) in which he contrasts the wisdom of humanity (σοφίᾳ ἀνθρώπων) with the power of God (δυνάμει θεοῦ). Paul does indeed preach a wisdom, but not a worldly wisdom, not a wisdom that conforms to this age and its rulers (σοφίαν δὲ οὐ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου οὐδὲ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου), both of which are suffering eschatological decay (τῶν καταργουμένω). Paul, instead, preaches God’s wisdom (θεοῦ σοφίαν), God’s hidden and mysterious wisdom (ἐν μυστηρίῳ τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην), one veiled from the powers of this age and from those who align themselves with those powers. ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης forms the nexus between Paul and his opponents. By entitling Jesus ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης Paul flagrantly mocks his opponents and their appeals, for had the powers of this present age known the true identity of Jesus (ἣν οὐδεὶς τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου ἔγνωκεν) as ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης then they would not have engineered the crucifixion (ἐσταύρωσαν). What the powers had not fathomed, even if they had been capable of performing such an apocalyptic calculus, was just how the Messiah of crucifixion was equally the Lord of resurrection, ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης. The title ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης occurs repeatedly in the throne visions of Enoch and joins the choir of Enoch’s five other glory titles to sing a veritable Hallelujah chorus of glory.65 First Enoch’s cavalcade of heavenly ascents into the throne room permitted an unmediated, mystical vision of God, and there the seer saw glory. But, remarkably, a second heavenly anthropomorphic figure shared God’s throne of glory, the “Elect One/Son of Man.”66 And 1 Enoch 64   J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 65  “Lord of Glory” ( ): 1 En. 14:20; 22:14; 25:3; 27:3, 5; 36:4; 40:3; 63:2; 83:8 (cf. Barn. 1:9). “Glory of the Lord of Spirits”: 1 En. 40:1; 41:7. “Great Glory”: 1 En. 14:16; 65:12; 102:3. “King of Glory”: 1 En. 81:3 (cf. 91:13). “God of Glory”: 1 En. 25:7. “God of Eternal Glory”: 1 En. 45:3. 66  1 En. 45:1–3; 55:3–4; 61:8; 62:29. For a discussion of God’s throne and divine identity, see Richard Bauckham Jesus and the God of Israel, 152–81.

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is not alone in its visions of glory. Glory forms part of the characteristic field of signifiers used to describe what a seer sees in a throne vision—glory, God’s glory, a throne of glory, and other, mysterious heavenly beings clothed in glory.67 These throne visions all bear the lasting imprint of Ezekiel’s throne theophany, in which the prophet reported a vision of God’s throne and God’s human-like form upon that throne, which Ezekiel identifies as God’s glory. Indeed, a river of visionary mysticism flows from Ezekiel 1 through Daniel 7,68 the throne visions of Second Temple Jewish apocalypses,69 the Sabbath Songs of Qumran, and the Gospel of Thomas70 right to the Hekhalot and Merkabah—a river that sweeps glory, God’s glory, throne of glory, and the glory of other agents right along in its strong currents. Paul wades neck deep into that very river. Indeed, it may be fair to say that Paul was baptized in that river, as he repeatedly appeals to his own mystical, throne-visionary experience of the risen Jesus as formative for his apostolic life—and does so in the very language of the LXX glory tradition:71 οὐκ εἰμὶ ἀπόστολος; οὐχὶ Ἰησοῦν τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν ἑόρακα; (1 Cor 9:1) παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον, ὅτι Χριστὸς ἀπέθανεν … καὶ ὅτι ἐτάφη καὶ ὅτι ἐγήγερται … καὶ ὅτι ὤφθη Κηφᾷ εἶτα τοῖς δώδεκα … ἔπειτα ὤφθη ἐπάνω πεντακοσίοις ἀδελφοῖς ἐφάπαξ … ἔπειτα ὤφθη Ἰακώβῳ εἶτα τοῖς ἀποστόλοις πᾶσιν … ἔσχατον δὲ πάντων ὡσπερεὶ τῷ ἐκτρώματι ὤφθη κἀμοί (1 Cor 15:3–8)

67  See, above all, Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 17–40 (for a discussion of divine agency) and 41–50 (for a discussion of divine attributes as divine agents). For a discussion of glory and divine agency in Second Temple Jewish apocalypses, see Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology, 83–92. 68   Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, AGJU 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 78–88. 69  Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology, 92–104. 70   April D. DeConick, Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas, VCSup 33 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 99–125. 71  Conclusively, Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). On the larger question of whether Paul is rightly considered a mystic, see Gerd Theissen, “Paulus und die Mystik: Der eine und einzige Gott unde die Transformation des Menschen,” ZTK 110 (2013): 263–90. Theissen, using the etic analytical categories of purification, illumination, and union with the absolute, shows how Paul deftly employs mysticism to influence his congregations. Indeed, as Theissen shows, mysticism constitutes part of Paul’s espistolary strategy.

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ὅτε δὲ εὐδόκησεν [ὁ θεὸς] ὁ ἀφορίσας με ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου καὶ καλέσας διὰ τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί, ἵνα εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτὸν ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν…. (Gal 1:15–16) The phrases Ἰησοῦν τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν ἑόρακα, [Χριστὸς] ὤφθη κἀμοί, and ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί all identify Paul’s christophany as the ground of his apostleship.72 They also place Paul’s interpretation of his christophany (his experience of the resurrected Jesus) squarely in the prophetic call/throne vision tradition.73 Indeed, because Paul understood his resurrection experience of Jesus as a throne vision it is only natural that Paul would appropriate the title ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης for the risen Jesus. Paul emphasizes that the gospel, the message about the death and resurrection of Jesus (and thus Jesus’s divine identity), is the revelation of the previously hidden mystery now vouchsafed to him and, as such, provides the key to unlocking the door to all of God’s purposes—the very same theological perspective expressed by Paul in the reference to ἡ δόξα in Romans 9:4.74 In his christophany Paul discovered the resurrected Jesus as τὸν κύριον τῆς δόξης, God’s divine presence. Paul’s christophany revealed that ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης, Jesus, was ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ. The morphology of glory inextricably ties to a specific Gattungsgeschichte. Theophany, in which God’s glory thunders over chaos, merges with the classic 72   Richard B. Hays, “Galatians,” NIB (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 11:215–6, contests the reading of ἀποκαλύψαι ἐν ἐμοί as a revelation to/in Paul and, instead, mounts a compelling case for understanding the phrase to refer to a “transformative” apocalyptic event that does not so much refer to the reception of his gospel as much as its proclamation. While it is common to see Isa 49 behind Gal 1:15, Gal 1:16 contains still another allusion to Isa 49. See Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology, 205–6 for the argument that ἀποκαλύψαι ἐν ἐμοί of Gal 1:16 echoes ἐν σοὶ δοξασθήσομαι of Isa 49:3 and refers to Paul’s reception of his gospel in his christophany. 73  It is curious that Acts 9, 22, and 26 style Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus like a Greek epiphany when Acts also so clearly draws upon the throne vision tradition in the story of Stephen’s stoning (at which he has Paul present): ὑπάρχων δὲ πλήρης πνεύματος ἁγίου ἀτενίσας εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν εἶδεν δόξαν θεοῦ καὶ Ἰησοῦν ἑστῶτα ἐκ δεξιῶν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ εἶπεν, Ἰδοὺ θεωρῶ τοὺς οὐρανοὺς διηνοιγμένους καὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκ δεξιῶν ἑστῶτα τοῦ θεοῦ (Acts 7:55–56). On Acts 9, 22, and 26 as epiphany, see Jan N. Bremmer, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Heliodorus in the Temple and Paul on the Road to Damascus,” in Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible, and the Ancient Near East, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 215–33. 74  Rom 9:4 and 1 Cor 2:8 are textual and theological doppelgängers. Romans gives a theocentric reading of God’s glory from above, while 1 Corinthians gives a christocentric reading of glory from below. Both texts, Romans and 1 Corinthians, however, center on God’s inscrutable purposes, the odd twists and turns in those purposes, and the way that glory has attended each of those turns.

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call narrative,75 in which God confronts a chosen servant, resulting in Moses’s call in which his experience of God’s glory legitimized him.76 Moses’s call, in turn, wielded a powerful influence upon the prophetic call narratives of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the servant of Isaiah, as well as upon the mother-of-all-throne visions, Ezekiel.77 Ezekiel’s anthropomorphic description of God’s enthroned glory spawned throne vision after throne vision after throne vision in which seer after seer after seer peered into the heavens and saw God—and glory.78 But, true to apocalyptic forms, the seers also saw a second figure, God’s chief vizier, equally draped, clothed, and bearing glory, a figure who disclosed new, previously hidden, secrets about God’s plans. Tracing the history of form— from theophany, to prophetic call, to throne vision—contextualizes glory’s morphology from cosmic and cataclysmic power to vanquish (in theophany) to visual and mobile divine presence to sanction and legitimize (calls) to mystical and noetic divine presence to disclose apocalyptic mystery (throne visions). Echoes of glory, tracing the full arc of this colorful and variegated traditionhistory, can be heard in Paul’s interpretation of his own experience of the risen Jesus, his christophany. Paul employs Moses’s experience of glory to reveal the eschatological superiority of his christophany; Paul construes his christophany as a prophetic call in which the prophet is confronted by God’s glory; and, in his throne visionary encounter with the Lord of glory in his christophany, Paul is vouchsafed the mystery of God’s purposes fashioned in the cross and resurrection. It is no wonder, then, that Paul identifies the risen Jesus as the glory of God, the resurrection as a manifestation of God’s glory, or the gospel featuring the death and resurrection of Jesus as the glory of Christ. The glory Isaiah said was God’s and God’s alone was now, according to Paul, Christ’s and Christ’s alone. Or was it?

75  Norman Habel, “The Form and Significance of Call Narratives,” ZAW 77 (1965): 297–323. 76  Claus Westermann, “Die Herrlichkeit Gottes in der Priesterschrift,” in Wort-Gebot-Glaube: Walter Eichrodt zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. H. J. Stoebe, ATANT 59 (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1970), 227–49. 77  Ernst Jenni, “Jesajas Berufung in der neueren Forschung,” BZ 15 (1959): 321–39; Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2 vols., Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979, 1983), 1:97–100. 78  Matthew Black, “Throne-Theophany Prophetic Commission and the ‘Son of Man’: A Study in Tradition-History,” in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity. Essays in Honor of William David Davis, ed. R. Hamerton-Kelly, SJLA 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 57–73; Christopher Rowland, “The Vision of God in Apocalyptic Literature,” JSJ 10 (1979): 137–54; Gilles Quispel, “Ezekiel 1:26 in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosis,” VC 34 (1980): 1–13; and Jarl Fossum, “Jewish-Christian Christology and Jewish Mysticism,” VC 37 (1983): 260–87.

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Physiomorphic Glory

If Paul scandalously and brazenly transfers God’s glory to Jesus, then, having summoned an equal amount of apostolic audacity, he next transfers the glory of God, discovered in the resurrected Jesus, onto and into those who are named by the name of this risen Jesus. Paul democratizes divine glory upon all who give their allegiance to the one true god through Jesus. Paul employs a range of sociomorphic metaphors to portray salvation by change in social relations—master/slave, father/son, judge/accused, friend/ enemy.79 Paul also employs a range of physiomorphic metaphors to portray salvation by means of organic images—growth/decay, life/death, division/ union, changes in shape, often involving mirrors or reflected vision.80 In Paul’s soteriological grammar, sociomorphic language exclusively describes the changes wrought in the singular, initial experience of salvation, whereas the physiomorphic register depicts the iterative process of spiritual transformation, transformation inaugurated in the initial experience of salvation but that spans the entire biography of the believer. Sociomorphic metaphors describe how one “gets in,” while physiomorphic metaphors can depict how one gets in but primarily depict how one “stays in.”81 Sociomorphic language tracks the transfer from the old to the new, while physiomorphic language primarily traces the path of transformative progress for those within the new. As one of his physiomorphic metaphors, Paul’s glory language thus does double duty by referring to both the initial experience of salvation and, then, subsequent experiences that constitute the life of the believer. Paul employs δόξα language to describe how God, through the risen Jesus, both transfers and transforms, how believers both get in and stay in. Paul urges his congregation in Thessalonica εἰς τὸ περιπατεῖν ὑμᾶς ἀξίως τοῦ θεοῦ (a physiomorphic metaphor of movement to indicate the iterative experiences that are the new norm) τοῦ καλοῦντος ὑμᾶς (a sociomorphic metaphor 79  For a listing of salvation terminology in Paul, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Paul and His Theology: A Brief Sketch, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 59–71. 80  On the use of sociomorphic and physiomorphic categories to read Paul, see Gerd Theissen, “Soteriologische Symbolik in den paulinischen Schriften: Ein strukturalistischer Beitrag,” KD 20 (1974): 282–304. Beker, Paul the Apostle, 256–60; Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 183–9; and Carey C. Newman, “Narrative Cross, Apocalyptic Resurrection: Ephesians and Reading Paul,” in One God, One People, One Future: Essays in Honour of N. T. Wright, ed. John Anthony Dunne and Eric Lewellen (London: SPCK, 2018), 493–512 (especially 498–500). 81  I here use the catagories of E. P. Sanders Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 4–10.

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to indicate that dramatically new relationship has been established) εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ βασιλείαν καὶ δόξαν (1 Thess 2:12). Implied is Paul’s conviction that a false kingdom and king currently enslave humanity, and that God, as the authentic king, transfers the subjects to a new domain. Through apposition, Paul here links ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ with ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ to indicate how God’s effectual calling, the initial sociomorphic change in the relationship, inaugurates future (resurrection) glory. Paul’s syntactical juxtaposition of ἐλευθερίαν τῆς δόξης with δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς in Romans 8:21 equally demonstrates how Paul employs physiomorphic terms to point to the moment when a new sociomorphic relationship is established as τῶν τέκνων τοῦ θεοῦ. When Paul in Romans 8:28 strings together several sociomorphic terms (προώρισεν, ἐκάλεσεν, and ἐδικαίωσεν), and then one physiomorphic term (ἐδόξασεν), he does so to refer to the singular, initial saving experience, as his repetition of the aorist tense demonstrates. The change in relationship (to mark out ahead of time, to be called, to be rectified) begins, equally, a process of transformation (to be glorified). Paul can thus employ glory language to describe the process of transference from one domain to another, from one kingdom to another, from x to y. Carried along in the cargo hold of this freighted use of glory are twinned foundational convictions: the risen Jesus is the glory of God, and his resurrection is the revelation of that glory. While both convictions are startling in and of themselves, what is new and most staggering is that Paul’s use of glory language to refer to the initial experience of salvation means that all believers, and not just the risen Jesus, now participate in God’s glory and God’s divine nature. Christosis, the process of becoming like Christ through participation in Christ, already implicit in Paul’s use of glory language to depict initial transfer, becomes explicit in Paul’s use of glory language to depict the iterative biography of transformation. Paul’s warning to the Philippians concerning false teachers and teaching (Phil 3:1–19) reaches its rhetorical climax in his dogged affirmation of hope (Phil 3:20–21): ἡμῶν γὰρ τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει, ἐξ οὗ καὶ σωτῆρα ἀπεκδεχόμεθα κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα. The αὐτοῦ should be construed possessively (that is, σώματι τῆς δόξης belongs to Jesus), while δόξης should be construed objectively (that is, Jesus’s body is a body characterized by glory, eschatological divine presence). The resurrected Jesus, therefore, already possesses a body of glory, an eschatological,

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transformed body, and Jesus’s fully transformed, resurrected body models and then figures the bodies of those who belong to him. They, too, will undergo a final act of transformation (μετασχηματίσει) into full conformity (σύμμορφον) with the eschatological δόξα of the risen Jesus. The final moment of this transformative act occurs exactly as the first, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα. The resurrection of Jesus by God’s own power inaugurates the process of transformation for those who belong to God through Christ. For Paul, δόξαtic-christosis begins with conversion and ends at Parousia.82 Romans 8:17–18 reveals both Paul’s glory Christology (Jesus is the glory of God) and his δόξαtic-christosis (the transformation of believers into the glory of Jesus). Paul does not consider ἄξια τὰ παθήματα τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ πρὸς τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι εἰς ἡμᾶς. But this expected apocalypse is not one featuring God’s glory of 6:4, 5:2, 3:23, or 1:23. The τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι εἰς ἡμᾶς is none other than Christ’s glory of 8:17: εἰ δὲ τέκνα, καὶ κληρονόμοι· κληρονόμοι μὲν θεοῦ, συγκληρονόμοι δὲ Χριστοῦ, εἴπερ συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν· Λογίζομαι γὰρ ὅτι οὐκ ἄξια τὰ παθήματα τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ πρὸς τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι εἰς ἡμᾶς· Paul here enacts two astounding referential shifts—one from God to Christ and one from Christ to that of the believer: Jesus now bears God’s glory, and believers now bear Jesus’s glory. They do so through christosis, a life of transformative mimesis, in specific the mimetic and participatory experiences of cross (συμπάσχομεν) and resurrection (συνδοξασθῶμεν). Jesus’s suffering (on the cross) and his experience of glory (resurrection) patterns the participation of all who are constitutively aligned with him.83 But Paul expresses an eschatological reserve both here and in Philippians. He speaks of deferred δόξα—δόξα yet to be revealed, δόξα yet to be experienced. But Paul abandons any such reluctance in 2 Corinthians 3:18: ἡμεῖς δὲ πάντες ἀνακεκαλυμμένῳ προσώπῳ τὴν δόξαν κυρίου κατοπτριζόμενοι τὴν αὐτὴν εἰκόνα μεταμορφούμεθα ἀπὸ δόξης εἰς δόξαν καθάπερ ἀπὸ κυρίου πνεύματος. 82  Col 1:27: ὅ ἐστιν Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν, ἡ ἐλπὶς τῆς δόξης; 1 Pet 4:13: ἀλλὰ καθὸ κοινωνεῖτε τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασιν, χαίρετε, ἵνα καὶ ἐν τῇ ἀποκαλύψει τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ χαρῆτε ἀγαλλιώμενοι. 83  Grant Macaskill, Union with Christ in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 240–1.

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Paul affirms that δόξαtic-christosis has already commenced.84 Beholding the glory of Jesus (τὴν δόξαν κυρίου κατοπτριζόμενοι) triggers the process of transformation (μεταμορφούμεθα) into that very same image (τὴν αὐτὴν εἰκόνα) of glory, a metamorphic process stretching ἀπὸ δόξης εἰς δόξαν. It is an open question whether the ἀπὸ/εἰς designates conversion to present or conversion to future.85 Either way, Paul here depicts the ongoing life of the believer—growth in the glory of God in Christ—as something presently and iteratively experienced, not something reserved exclusively for the future.86 Paul portrays the ongoing life of the believer as δόξαtic-christosis, a sharing of and a transformation into glory, God’s divine presence in the risen Jesus. This transformation occurs through participation in the risen Jesus. Participation in glory begins with singular incorporation, while growth in glory occurs through the mimetic repetition of the nodal events of Jesus’s life, the cross and resurrection. But a christophormic-theosis envelops Paul’s doxatic-christosis.87 That is, Jesus, as the glory of God, democratizes participation in divine identity. Here Paul’s glory language flirts with apotheosis and dances in and out of the shadows of deification. In the end, Paul’s autochristographic biography drives both his doxatic-christosis and his christophormic-theosis: Paul’s own experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus in his christophany figures his own life as an apostle and gives rise to his theology of glory. Given Paul’s boldness, it is probably important to point out what Paul does not say. Paul never once predicates glory as a marker of, or for, the pre-existent Jesus. Neither does Paul ever link glory with Jesus’s incarnation. Nor does Paul 84  1 Peter betrays the same δόξαtic-christosis: first Jesus, then believers. Cf. 1 Pet 1:11: τὰ εἰς Χριστὸν παθήματα καὶ τὰς μετὰ ταῦτα δόξας with 1 Pet 5:1: μάρτυς τῶν τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθημάτων, ὁ καὶ τῆς μελλούσης ἀποκαλύπτεσθαι δόξης κοινωνός. 85  Jan Lambrecht, “From Glory to Glory (2 Corinthians 3,18): A Reply to Paul B. Duff,” ETL 85 (2009): 143–6. 86  Paul was not alone in embracing an ethics of glory. Because God has called believers “by his own glory” (2 Pet 1:3; cf. 1 Clem. 59:2), believers should “make every effort” to cultivate the virtues appropriate to glory (2 Pet 1:5–9). The Christian life includes the noetic disciplines of “seeing” (Barn. 11:5), “knowing” (Herm. Vis. 3.11.1; Herm. Mand. 12.4.2), “understanding” (Herm. Mand. 12.4.2), “remembering” (Herm. Vis. 3.9.5), and “meditating” (1 Clem. 27:7) upon God’s glory. Those who follow Jesus are to “live in a manner that is worthy of his commandment and glory” (Pol. Phil. 5:1). 87  Michael Gorman, almost single-handedly, has revived the role of Paul’s language of participation and, then, bravely connected it to theosis. See his Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015); and “Cruciform or Resurrectiform: Paul’s Paradoxical Practice of Participation in Christ,” Ex Auditu 33 (2017): 60–83.

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use glory to describe any aspect of Jesus’s life (his baptism, his transfiguration, his crucifixion)—while the Fourth Gospel does all of this and more. For John, glory ties to Jesus’s pre-existence, incarnation, miracles, suffering, and resurrection, while for Paul it does not.88 For Paul, δόξα is quintessentially christological because it is quintessentially resurrection. For Paul, δόξα begins with resurrection and ends with the ends of resurrection. The ties of glory between God and Jesus and, then, between Jesus and Christ followers Paul lashes with the bindings of resurrection. For Paul, the glory of God is God’s presence, but glory is eschatological divine presence: an eschatological divine presence inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus; an eschatological divine presence Paul discovered in his christophany, his own experience of Jesus’s resurrection, which then constitutes his gospel as a message of glory, of divine presence, a message about the resurrection of Jesus; an eschatological divine presence shared by all who follow Jesus because, having heard and believed the gospel, they now participate in a life of glory, the life of God in Jesus, through initial incorporation into glory and, then, through iterative transformative experiences of glory; an eschatological divine presence so fully realized in Jesus’s resurrection that all who participate in Jesus will someday enjoy that exact same full realization of glory. This, for Paul, is glory. Glory, for Paul, is not mere praise, or radiance, or honor, or fame, or fortune, or patronage, or Adam’s lost overcoat. Glory is God’s eschatological presence realized in Jesus’s resurrection—an apocalypse of divine presence that disrupts all that has gone before, that raises the dead, and that forever changes the lives of those who participate in glory. 7

Christian Glory

There was indeed a time when Christians were Jews—and then there came a time when they were not.89 There was a time when Christians were 88  John’s theology of glory is far more complex, nuanced, and subtle than Paul’s. See George B. Caird, “Glory of God in the Fourth Gospel: An Exercise in Biblical Semantics,” NTS 15 (1969): 265–77; Frey, “The Use of δόξα in Paul and John,” 85–104; Chibici-Revneanu, “Gottes Herrlichkeit,” 75–94; eadem, Die Herrlichkeit des Verherrlichten; and Athanasios Despotis, “From Conversion according to Paul and “John” to Theosis in the Greek Patristic Tradition,” HBT 38 (2016): 88–109. 89  Paula Fredriksen, When Christians were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). It may be that Fredriksen is able to sustain her utterly Jewish portrait of early Christianity only by avoiding the thorny issue of an early high Christology. That is, depicting the early movement as an eschatological community arranged around the Messiah anticipating his eschatological advent is only possible by ignoring the fact

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indistinguishable from the other religious options of the day—and then there was a time when they became recognizably distinct. It’s the messy middle that matters most in the study of Christian origins,90 especially when the very categories for analysis, e.g., monotheism, conversion, Christian, are themselves so troubled.91 There’s scant early evidence that his glory language incited his ancestral coreligionists to de-pledge Paul, and his fraternity of Jesus followers, from the people of God. Indeed, there’s scant early evidence of any kind about what was so dangerously transgressive about this new, woolly brand of faith. It is equally that this same community was hailing Jesus as the Lord, i.e., God, already in their eschatologically inspired worship. 90  Metaphors abound in the attempt to grapple with the complex relationship of first-century Judaism and emerging Christianity—e.g., rival siblings, a parent and child, parting friends, or related strangers. See Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways (London/Philadelphia; SCM/Trinity, 1991); Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Despite the ability of such metaphors to capture the plurality and ambiguity of both Jewish and Christian communities in the first two centuries of the common era, the major questions still persist: when did the break occur and for what reason(s)? 91  See especially Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins whose Time Has Come to Go,” SR 35 (2006): 231–46. Fredriksen problematizes the uses of conversion and Christian when discussing Paul. I persist in their use in the discussion which follows, but I do so advisedly and cautiously. The use of social scientific models of conversion to address the question of whether Paul was a convert or not is plagued by two major difficulties: (i) it is impossible to operationalize any theoretical model since all that is left of Paul is a literary deposit; and (ii), ironically as Segal, Paul the Convert, 285, notes, most sociologists employ an idealized and romanticized image of Paul (derived mainly from Acts and William James, and not from his letters) as the archetype of a dramatic conversion. These limitations noted, the social-rhetorical theoretical model to measure conversion of David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Convert as a Social Type,” in Sociological Theory, ed. R. Collins (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983), 259– 89; eidem, “The Sociology of Conversion,” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984): 167–90 does have (limited) utility in assessing the example of Paul. Snow and Machalek point to the transformation of a convert’s “universe of discourse,” the change of “broad interpretive framework” that organizes life and experience. Snow and Machalek index the change in discourse universe in four ways: biographical reconstruction, adoption of a master attribution scheme, suspension of analogical reasoning (in favor of iconic), and embracement of a master/convert role. Paul did construct a new biography; Paul did adopt and espouse a new master attribution scheme (organized around the risen Jesus); Paul did suspend analogical in favor of an apocalyptic epistemology; Paul did embrace his (new) role as light to the nations. While Snow and Machalek’s model has been criticized— for example, see Henri Gooren, “Reassessing Conventional Approaches to Conversion: Toward a New Synthesis,” JSSR 46 (2007): 337–53—such an etic model does provide a measure of control for determining how best to describe Paul: a convert or just a prophet?

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difficult to say, with precision, just what it was that made the Jesus followers so odious to their Roman neighbors. That is not to say, though, that the first century is a history-of-religions Middle Earth without a map. The early Jesus movement did provoke reaction, from both pagans and from their ancestral co-religionists92—and this despite Paul’s resolute commitment that the god who raised Jesus was the god of the fathers and that the performance of his apostolic mission to the nations was a fully scriptural endeavor.93 Yet, something new was clearly afoot with Paul. Paul preached a new message featuring the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul’s new message insisted a new (and quite different) pattern of religion from what had prevailed in his ancestral faith. Paul replaced election and law, wholesale, with a new twofold sequence of getting in (entrance) and staying in (maintenance), and thereby made faith language front and center.94 Paul inscribed his new message and new pattern of faith inside two new symbols. Paul replaced circumcision and food laws with baptism (entrance) and eucharist (maintenance). Paul also led his movement to engage in new worship, to offer veneration to Jesus as God, and, in so doing, to ascribe to Jesus sacred texts previously reserved only for God. In fact, Paul enacted a new strategy for interpreting his sacred texts, i.e., to read backwards, by using the death and resurrection of Jesus as a totalizing hermeneutical lens. Paul also required his adherents to embrace a new way of 92   Alan F. Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977) remains the best frame for understanding the development of emergence of three distinct religions. See especially Claudia Setzer, Jewish Responses to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30–15 C.E. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1994); eadem, “’You Invent a Christ!’: Christological Claims as Points of Jewish-Christian Dispute,” USQR 44 (1991): 315–28. But see Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2016) who points to Christianity as the first transnational, non-ethnic religion. 93  The degree to which Jews before Paul actively sought to include gentiles in Judaism is still debated. See especially Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 288–341. But the real question turns on whether Paul’s theological and missional enterprise represents something already entailed inside his ancestral religion. Paula Fredriksen, “How Jewish is God? Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology,” JBL 137 (2018): 193–212, presents the strongest case, to my mind, that Paul was playing a Jewish game on a Jewish board, even if he was using some new and quite interesting game pieces. I, however, respectfully demur. I think Paul was playing a new game, with new pieces, on an inherited Jewish board. Paul’s theological enterprise was transfromatively disruptive by being trangressively transformative. 94  See especially Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 176–211. While, as Morgan shows, faith language was not foreign to Judaism, Paul’s use of it to mark entrance into the Jesus movement was novel.

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life—a life of participatory transformation. Indeed, something new, and quite distinctive, was afoot, something transformatively transgressive.95 Monotheism was especially important in a missionary context. It certainly helped sort out differences between the early Jesus movement, led by Paul, and the pagan world.96 Paul’s congratulations to the Thessalonian congregation for having “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and real God” (1 Thess 1:9; cf. Gal 1:6) isolates monotheism as a key theological marker for their new communal identity. To the Corinthians Paul affirms that “‘there is no God but one,’” even if paganism offered many idols and lords (1 Cor 8:4–5). The recitation of the creed “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6) located his congregations; the conversion from many gods to one mega-god mirrored the communal shift from paganism to their newly found faith. Paul also used glory language—as a specific, even intensified, expression of his monotheistic commitments—to mark communal distinctions between the larger Hellenistic world and his fledgling congregations.97 The special revelation made known only to believers—that is, the identity of the ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης—formed part of the church’s language of belonging. Paul’s congregations were a tight-knit group possessing unique and special information not available to those outside the community, and this special, apocalyptic information made the wall between those on the inside and those on the outside both high 95  Something even E. P. Sanders, “Patterns of Religion in Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Holistic Method of Comparison,” HTR 55 (1973): 455–78, notes (475): “Yet taken as a whole, the view that Paul kept the traditional Jewish pattern of religion and only made substitutions for some of the elements seems unsatisfactory.” And, again, idem, Comparing Judaism and Christianity: Common Judaism, Paul, and the Inner and the Outer in Ancient Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 238: “Did Paul’s churches constitute a social reality that was distinct from Judaism? The answer, of course, is yes. Paul’s churches had a new condition of entry (faith in Christ), a new ritual of entry (Baptism), a somewhat different code of behavior (“the whole law,” which, however, did not actually include all of it), and a new community of worship (neither the synagogue, the Jewish temple, nor pagan shrines). These new social institutions were neither Jewish nor Greek; religiously, the members were in the awkward position of being nothing that the world could readily categorize.” Cf. Eph 2:15–16; 1 Pet 2:19; Diogn. 1:1; Clement of Alexandria Strom. VI 5:41; Aristides Apol. 2, 16. 96  Grant, Gods and the One God, 45–53. 97  I here freely adapt Claudia Setzer’s sociology of resurrection (condenses worldview, draws boundaries, and constructs communities) to my analysis of Paul’s glory language. See her “Resurrection of the Dead as Symbol and Strategy,” JAAR 69 (2001): 65–101; eadem, Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community and Self-Definition (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

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and long.98 Such boundary lines are further reinforced by insider/outsider imagery. By assigning the “rulers of this age” the responsibility for Jesus’s death, Paul demonstrates a negative view of the society at large and distances those who do know the identity of the ὁ κύριος τῆς δόξης from those who do not. As important as it was to distinguish the movement Paul led from paganism (and it was), the redefinition of Jewish monotheism undertaken by Paul related, first and foremost, to a struggle between the early followers of Jesus and their ancestral co-religionists. Paul is again very specific. At first blush the identification of Jesus as ἡ δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ would seemingly reinforce the early Jesus movement’s embeddedness in an inherited ancient tradition. In point of fact, though, the identification worked the opposite. In discussing the relationship between his ancestral co-religionists and the group he led, Paul says that a veil remains over the face of those who read the shared sacred texts without the knowledge of Jesus as God’s glory (2 Cor 3:15). Paul emphasizes that his (former) co-religionists are blinded to the truth of glory. The emphasis upon ignorance underscores the social distance of his congregations from their ancient moorings. But when someone “turns to the Lord” (ἐπιστρέψῃ πρὸς κύριον, 2 Cor 3:16), an obviously new and additional step Paul introduces to his pattern of religion—that is, when someone discovers Jesus as the Lord—the veil of ignorance is removed. Paul identifies this moment of conversion, this movement from one (existing) community to that of a brand new and distinct movement, as beholding the “glory of the Lord” (τὴν δόξαν κυρίου κατοπτριζόμϵνοι, 2 Cor 3:18) or discovering “the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). Paul’s glory Christology thus created, and then reinforced, boundary lines between his inherited religion and his fledgling churches. With his ancestral faith in view, Paul redefines community identity in terms of a robust glory Christology—Jesus is divine presence, God’s glory, a claim that opens a “giant social fissure” between Paul and his (former) co-religionists.99 Paul’s glory Christology also proved an effective means of creating cohesion within his communities. Paul’s use of glory mapped his converts’ progress toward final, and shared, eschatological transformation. Conversion only began the process of communal commitments. While Paul’s congregations needed to stress differences between themselves and the outside world, be it ancestral or pagan, they also needed to produce cohesiveness within. Biographical reconstruction became one of the many ways in which Paul helped his communities do just that. By telling and retelling both their own particular stories 98  Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 91–2. 99  Segal, Paul the Convert, 55.

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and the story of the founder figure, Paul’s congregations could emphasize the sociomorphic demands of conversion (the necessity of re-socialization) and the physiomorphic implications of transformation (the necessity of being one with Christ). Second Corinthians 3:18 suggests that doxatic-christosis is the pattern for new life in the new community. Transformation into glory is transformation into the eschatological divine presence, i.e., the resurrected Jesus, and transformation into each other—a key aspect of millenarian groups.100 Unity within the community is achieved through this metamorphosis: everyone can and must be changed. Paul insisted upon a pattern of transformational mysticism, expressed in part by a doxatic-christosis, a mystical praxis that closed the gap between his adherents by their common participation in the divine life of God in Christ. Paul used something that was uniquely Israel’s, the glory, to mark the boundaries between the new movement that he led and the faith community of his former co-religionists. Identifying Jesus as the glory of God either outright breached, or dangerously and recklessly flirted with breaching, what was permissible. It was one thing to report a heavenly journey in which a seer saw glory—be it God’s, a throne’s, or an angel’s. It was altogether something new to say that a recently crucified Jewish prophet, who was also being hailed as both the Christ and the Lord, is the glory of God, God’s divine presence. And, yet, this is exactly what Paul did. Paul used his discovery of the glory of God in the face of Jesus to show exactly where his old faith ended and his new faith began. Paul built a brand-new movement from stone hewn from the quarry of his ancestral faith. I submit that Paul’s identification of Jesus as the glory of God was one of the ways in which he, and those he led, were in the process of becoming self-consciously Christian, a faith community distinct from pagans and his ancestral co-religionists. If the choice of δόξα to translate ‫ כבוד‬was “staying Jewish” while “going Greek,” then Paul’s choice to identify the risen Jesus as the glory of Israel’s god was “becoming Christian” by “transgressing monotheism.” In doing so Paul, and the Christian communities he founded, did not care one whit about the δόξα others held of them; they prized the δόξα that formed, bounded, and nourished them.

100  Theissen, “Soteriologische Symbolik in den paulinischen Schriften,” 295, emphasizes that unity sits at the core of physiomorphic language.

Chapter 7

Confessing the Cosmic Christ (1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15–20) Richard Bauckham The theme of the cosmic Christ (by which I mean the inclusion of Christ in the relationship of God to all things, not only at his exaltation but already in the divine work of creation) is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Christology of the New Testament, though Christology itself—the divine identity of the man Jesus of Nazareth—is such a remarkable phenomenon that perhaps we should not be too surprised to find that it includes cosmic Christology. Cosmic Christology is not confined to one strand of early Christian theological development, but is evidenced as early as 1 Corinthians and is then found in Colossians, Hebrews, the Gospel of John, and the Book of Revelation.1 I have selected just two of these texts—1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15–20— for treatment here, partly because they both occur in the Pauline corpus, and partly because I have new ideas to offer for the interpretation of these already much studied texts. 1

The Cosmic Christ in 1 Corinthians 8:6 ἡμῖν εἷς θεὸς ὁ πατήρ, ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς αὐτόν, καὶ εἷς κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς δι’ αὐτοῦ.2 For us [there is] one God, the Father, from whom [are] all things and we for him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom [are] all things and we through him.

1  Heb 1:1–3, 10–12; John 1:1–10; Rev 3:14. 2  I have omitted from this quotation the word ἀλλ᾽ at the beginning of the verse. If the rest of the verse represents a traditional formulation that Paul here quotes, obviously serves to connect the traditional unit to its preceding context and would not have been part of the unit itself. © RICHARD BAUCKHAM, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_008

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In the context Paul wishes to distinguish Christian faith from pagan polytheism, and so it is highly appropriate that he cites what many now recognize as a Christian version of the Shema. I have argued this in detail elsewhere,3 and it has been widely accepted in arguments that discuss its implications in a variety of ways.4 The Shema (Deut 6:4: “Hear O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one”) was by this date treated as the fundamental Jewish confession of faith in the God of Israel as the one and only true God. It was recited daily by many Jews,5 including very likely Paul himself. It was also widely cited in abbreviated forms such as “God is one.”6 Paul’s Christian version is a highly concise formula, with carefully composed parallelism and no verbs. It was surely not formulated especially for this context, but must have been a traditional formulation, though quite plausibly devised by Paul himself. Lines 1 and 3 (dividing the text according to the four-line arrangement I have used above) paraphrase the Shema. Paul has taken all the words of the Shema (YHWH, our God, one) and distributed them between the Father and 3  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 27–29, 210–18. Earlier arguments to this effect include Douglas R. de Lacey, “‘One Lord’ in Pauline Christology,” in Christ the Lord: Studies in Christology Presented to Donald Guthrie, ed. Harold H. Rowdon (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1982), 191–203; Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 97–98; N. T. Wright, “Monotheism, Christology and Ethics: 1 Corinthians 8,” in idem, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 120–36. 4  Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007), 16–17, 89–94, 562–64, 599–601; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Milton Keynes: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 210–218; Erik Waaler, The Shema and the First Commandment in First Corinthians: An Intertextual Approach to Paul’s Re-reading of Deuteronomy, WUNT 2/253 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 262–446; Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, WUNT 2/323 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 76–94; David Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy, WUNT 2/284 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 138–40; Suzanne Nicholson, Dynamic Oneness: The Significance and Flexibility of Paul’s One-God Language (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2010), 35–70; Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, vol. 1 of Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade, 2015), 32–56. A connexion with the Shema is denied by Ronald Cox, By the Same Word: Creation and Salvation in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, BZNW 145 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 145. 5  This has recently been contested, but I have argued it with important new evidence in Richard Bauckham, “The Shema and 1 Corinthians 8.6 Again,” in One God, One People, One Future: Essays in Honour of N. T. Wright, eds. John Anthony Dunne and Eric Lewellen (London: SPCK, 2018), 86–111, especially 93–102. The recitation of the Shema consisted of the whole of Deut 6:4–9 and several other texts (which seem to have varied). 6  Bauckham, “The Shema,” 87–93, 102–08 (a collection of texts that echo the Shema).

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Jesus Christ. The Father is the one God, Jesus the one Lord.7 This cannot mean that Jesus Christ has been added to the God confessed in the Shema,8 for in that case the formula would be in serious conflict with Jewish monotheism. Rather, both the one God, the Father, and the one Lord, Jesus Christ, are included within the identity of the God confessed in the Shema. This is christological monotheism. 1.1 Numerical Composition In order now to develop the argument beyond my earlier discussions, I will introduce the notion of numerical composition, which has an important role to play in this essay. Recently, many scholars have been rather slowly becoming aware of the extent to which ancient writers (at least within the tradition of the Hebrew Bible and early Christian literature)9 deployed numerical patterning and gematria to embed meaning in their literary texts.10 The principal 7  The word “our” in the Shema is represented by the initial “for us” (ἡμῖν) in the formulation of 1 Cor 8:6. 8  This is the view of James F. McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 39–42, followed by James D. G. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (London: SPCK; Louisville: WJK, 2010), 108–09. Dunn here appears to reverse his earlier view in Christology in the Making: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: SCM Press, 1980), 180. Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 33–38, argues against McGrath’s position. 9  To my knowledge, the topic has not yet been much explored outside the Jewish and Christian traditions in antiquity. 10  E.g. Robert Gordis, “The Heptad as an Element of Biblical and Rabbinic Style,” JBL 62 (1943): 17–26; A. G. Wright, “Numerical Patterns in the Book of Wisdom,” CBQ 29 (1967): 524–38; John J. Davis, Biblical Numerology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968); Patrick W. Skehan, Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom CBQMS 1 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1971), 9–45, 67–77; A. G. Wright, “The Riddle of the Sphinx Revisited: Numerical Patterns in the Book of Qoheleth,” CBQ 42 (1980): 38–51; A. G. Wright, “Additional Numerical Patterns in Qoheleth,” CBQ 45 (1983): 32–43; J. Smit Sibinga, “Zur Kompositionstechnik des Lukas in Lk. 15:11–32,” in Tradition and Re-Interpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature Essays in Honour of Jürgen C. H. Lebram, eds. Jan Willem van Henten. Henke Jan de Jonge and J. W. Wesselius SPB 36 (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 97–113; Maarten J. J. Menken, “The Position of σπλαγχνίζεσθαι and σπλάγχνα in the Gospel of Luke,” NovT 30 (1988): 107– 14; Herbert Rand, “Numerological Structure in Biblical Literature,” JBQ 20 (1991): 50–56; Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 29–37, 384–407; Casper J. Labuschagne, Numerical Secrets of the Bible: Rediscovering the Bible Codes (North Richland Hills, Texas: BIBAL, 2000; repr. with subtitle Introduction to Biblical Arithmology, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2013); François Bovon, “Names and Numbers in Early Christianity,” NTS 47 (2001): 267–88; Richard Bauckham, “The 153 Fish and the Unity of the Fourth Gospel,” Neot 36 (2002): 77–88, repr. in slightly revised form in Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative,

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forms of numerical patterning are the calculated allocation of specific numbers of words to sections of text and the use of certain words a specific number of times within a section of text. Gematria is the technique that attributes a numerical value to a word, depending on the fact that letters of the alphabet, in Hebrew and Greek, can stand for numbers. The study of numerical composition in ancient Hebrew literature has been developed most extensively in the case of the Psalms, where several scholars have now demonstrated conclusively that numerical composition is a ubiquitous feature of the way psalms are structured and encode meaning.11 These studies of the Psalms will be especially relevant when we consider Colossians 1:15–20 below. Crispin Fletcher-Louis has recently explained the numerical composition of 1 Corinthians 8:6, with a result that strongly confirms my explanation of it as a Christian version of the Shema intended to express christological monotheism.12 He points out that each of the two parts of the text consists of thirteen words, making a total of twenty-six. He then recalls that the numerical value of the Hebrew divine Name, the Tetragrammaton, is twenty-six (‫ = י‬10 + ‫ה‬ History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 271–84; Jeremy Corley, “A Numerical Structure in Sirach 44:1–50:24,” CBQ 69 (2007): 43–63 (includes a survey of earlier studies of numerical patterns in the Hebrew Bible); Mikeal C. Parsons, “Exegesis ‘By the Numbers’: Numerology and the New Testament,” PRSt 35 (2008): 25–43; Herbert Migsch, “Siebenerfiguren im Jeremiabuch,” BN 153 (2012): 53–62; Israel Knohl, “Sacred Architecture: The Numerical Dimensions of Biblical Poems,” VT 62 (2012): 189–97; John J. Davies, “Heptadic Verbal Patterns in the Solomon Narrative of 1 Kings 1–11,” TynBul 63 (2012): 21–34; Todd D. Still, “(Im)Perfection: Reading Philippians 3.5–6 in Light of the Number Seven,” NTS 60 (2014): 139–48; Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 39–56. There are also many studies of what he calls “logotechnical analysis,” covering much of the Hebrew Bible on Casper Labuschagne’s website: “Casper Labuschagne’s Homepage,” https://www .labuschagne.nl. Maarten J. J. Menken, Numerical Literary Techniques in John: The Fourth Evangelist’s Use of Numbers of Words and Syllables, NovTSup 55 (Leiden: Brill, 1985) is unfortunately largely unconvincing, because he finds few examples of sections of exactly equivalent lengths, but there are some valuable observations. 11  Jacob Bazak, “Numerical Devices in Biblical Poetry,” VT 38 (1988): 333–37; Jan P. Fokkelman, The Psalms in Form: The Hebrew Psalter in Its Poetic Shape (Leiden: Deo, 2002); Pieter van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes in Biblical Hebrew Poetry with Special Reference to the First Book of the Psalter (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Casper J. Labuschagne, “Significant Compositional Techniques in the Psalms: Evidence for the Use of Number as an Organizing Principle,” VT 59 (2009): 583–605; Pieter van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes in Biblical Hebrew Poetry II: Psalms 42–89 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Pieter van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes in Biblical Hebrew Poetry III: Psalms 90–150 and Psalm 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Casper J. Labuschagne, “Numerical Features of the Psalms and Other Selected Texts: A Logotechnical Quantitative Structural Analysis,” https://www.labuschagne.nl/psalms.htm. 12  Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 39–49. For the possible numerical structure of the Shema itself in the Hebrew of Deut 6:4, see Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 53–54.

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= 5 + ‫ = ו‬6 + ‫ = ה‬5), a fact that would have been well known to a learned Jew such as Paul.13 Moreover, the numerical value of the word “one” in Hebrew (‫)אחד‬, the climactic word of the Shema, is thirteen (‫ = א‬1 + ‫ = ח‬8 + ‫ = ד‬4).14 So, in Paul’s Christian Shema, each of the two parts, consisting of thirteen words each, corresponds to the word “one” in the Shema, designating the one God and the one Lord, and the two parts together, consisting of twenty-six words, correspond to the divine Name that names the divine identity of the one God of Israel. As Fletcher-Louis aptly puts it, the “13 + 13 = 26 word structure confirms all the other reasons for thinking that Jesus Christ is firmly placed inside the Shema; within, that is, the identity of the one God.”15 A possible objection to this hypothesis is the fact that the word-count of 13 + 13 words depends on counting the word ἡμῖν as the first word of the unit. However, the word functions in the context to contrast Christian faith in one God (“for us there is one God …”) with belief in the many gods and many lords to whom Paul refers in the preceding verse. It may be that the traditional formulation began with the word ἔστιν, for which Paul has here substituted ἡμῖν. On the other hand, the Shema itself speaks of “YHWH our God,” and so it may be that the traditional formulation Paul quotes did begin, “For us there is one God …,” and so fitted the context of 1 Corinthians 8:6 without the need for modification. 1.2 Prepositional Theology This highly ingenious numerical composition depends not only on the words of the Shema as explicated in lines one and three of the formulation in 1 Corinthians, but also on lines two and four. Here I will introduce a second feature of theological composition that will be important for the whole of this essay. We could call this prepositional theology. Each of these two lines refers in turn to “all things” (τὰ πάντα) and to “we” (ἡμεῖς), i.e. Christian believers. Their relationship to God the Father and to the Lord Jesus Christ is indicated by prepositional phrases, which differ. All things are “from” the Father (ἐξ οὗ) but “through” Jesus Christ (δι’ οὗ). Doubtless this refers to creation, and “we” are presumably included, as creatures, in the “all things.” But “we” also stand in a soteriological relationship to both the Father and Jesus Christ, which similarly 13  As has been shown especially by Labuschagne and van der Lugt, the number 26, as the numerical value of the divine Name, is very widely used as a structuring device in the Hebrew Bible. E.g. see Labuschagne, Numerical Secrets, 88–94; van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 508–36. 14  For the use of 13 as a structuring principle in the Psalms, see van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I. 85–86; van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 534–36. 15  Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 47.

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differs: “we” are “for” the Father (εἰς αὐτόν) but “through” Jesus Christ (δι’ αὐτοῦ). So it appears that Jesus Christ is the agent of God in both creation and redemption, whereas God the Father is both the efficient cause of creation, the one by whom everything was created, and also the final cause of creation and salvation, the goal of the redemption of believers. Behind this differentiated use of prepositions for the relationship of creation to God lies what Gregory Sterling calls the “prepositional metaphysics” of ancient philosophy, in which Greek and Latin prepositions were used to distinguish different kinds of causation (using the term “cause” in a broad sense, as in Aristotle’s definition of four types of cause).16 But there were differences as to how precisely the various prepositions should be used, especially between the Stoic and Middle Platonic schools of thought. For example, the preposition ἐκ, which appears in our text (“God the Father, from whom are all things”), was said by Platonists and some Stoics to designate the material cause, i.e. the matter out of which something is made, whereas for God as the agent by whom things were made the appropriate preposition is ὑπο.17 This is also what Philo of Alexandria, himself a Middle Platonist, states. Philo also agrees with some Middle Platonists who said that the preposition διά with the genitive case refers to the instrumental cause, through which or with which something is made. He casts both the Logos and Wisdom in this role as the instrumental cause through which God creates.18 Various New Testament texts use prepositions with τὰ πάντα (or equivalent terms meaning “the universe”) to define the relationship of God and/or Christ to all things, especially with reference to the act of creation (see Table 1). The table shows that the usage is not consistent, just as it was not in non-Christian writers. However, what is especially noteworthy in our present context is that, while ἐκ is used exclusively of God’s relationship to all things, διά with the genitive, while often used with reference to Christ, can also be used with reference to God. Especially important for comparison with 1 Corinthians 8:6 is another Pauline text: Romans 11:36. Here Paul is referring only to God. He says, “from him and through him and to him [are] all things” (ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα). All three of the prepositions (ἐκ, διά and εἰς) that refer to God and Christ in 1 Corinthians 8:6 here refer only to God. It is important to notice 16   Gregory E. Sterling, “Prepositional Metaphysics in Jewish Wisdom Speculation and Early Christian Liturgical Texts,” in Wisdom and Logos: Studies in Jewish Thought in Honor of David Winston, eds. David T. Runia and Gregory E. Sterling, SPhiloA 9 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 219–38. 17  Sterling, “Prepositional Metaphysics,” 222–25. 18  Sterling, “Prepositional Metaphysics,” 226–29.

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“All Things” + Preposition + God/Christ

ἐκ Rom 11:36 Θ 1 Cor 8:6 Θ 1 Cor 11:12 Θ Col 1:15–20 Heb 1:2 Heb 2:10 John 1:3 John 1:10

ἐν

Χ (3)

δια + gen

δια + acc

εἰς

Θ Χ

Θ Θ

Χ (2) Χ Θ Χ Χ*

Χ (2) Θ

Θ = God, Χ = Christ * indicates a term other than τὰ πάντα but equivalent to it (e.g. ὁ κόσμος).

that the use of precisely these three prepositions with “all things” occurs only in Romans 11:36 and 1 Corinthians 8:6. That the formula in Romans 11:36 is the traditional one that Paul has adapted for a christological use in the Christian Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6 is surely very probable. It is probably a formula Paul derived from Hellenistic Jewish use, perhaps in synagogues, and, just as in 1 Corinthians 8:6 he divides the Shema between God and Christ, so he also divides this formula between God and Christ, allotting two of the prepositions (ἐκ and εἰς) to God and one (διά) to Christ. So, while it is not insignificant that he chooses διά as the preposition he applies to Christ, it does not mean that Christ is regarded as an agent of God other than God. His role in the creation of all things is contained within the unique identity of the one God. If Romans 11:36 contains a Jewish formula dependent on the kind of philosophical metaphysics of prepositions we have sketched, it is not surprising that it puts God in the role of the instrumental cause of all things (διά) as well as the efficient cause and the final cause. For Jewish monotheism it was axiomatic that God was the sole creator of all things, and it was unthinkable that any being other than God himself could even assist him in the work of creation.19 If Wisdom, understood as God’s own wisdom, is cast in this role of instrumental cause, the point is precisely that God needed no one else to assist him. His own 19  Isa 44:24; Sir 42:21; 4 Ezra 3:4; 6:6; Josephus, C. Ap. 2.192; Philo, Opif. 23. Even Philo’s exegesis of Gen 1:26 in Opif. 72–75 is only a minor qualification of this conviction: he insists that God acted alone in the creation of all things except humanity.

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wisdom was the only instrument he required.20 The inclusion of διά along with the other two prepositions in Romans 11:36 is explicable as insistence on this very point. God was his own instrumental cause in his work of creating and sustaining all things. There was no room for some other assistance. With this background the fact that Paul applies διά to Christ in 1 Corinthians 8:6, while applying the other two prepositions to God the Father, is entirely consistent with his inclusion of Jesus Christ within the Shema. Finally, we should note that, while the phrase “all things” (τὰ πάντα) was at home in the “prepositional metaphysics” we have noticed in non-Jewish use,21 it was also thoroughly characteristic of Jewish usage in a wide range of Second Temple period writings. It belongs to Jewish monotheistic rhetoric. Again and again God is said to have created all things and to be the sovereign ruler over all things.22 This is what defines him as the one and only true God, distinguished from all other reality, which was created by him and is subject to his rule. There are only God and all things. This is a binary distinction that allows for no ambiguous semi-divine beings.23 So when Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:6 says that all things are from the one God, for the one God, and through the one Lord, the one Lord belongs to the same unique divine identity as the one God. 1.3 Conclusion on 1 Corinthians 8:6 It has often been claimed that in the Pauline corpus the cosmic Christ is absent from the authentic letters of Paul and found only in the deutero-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians. 1 Corinthians 8:6 has been taken to refer to Christ only as mediator of redemption. In fact, not only is Christ there the agent of the creation of all things, the whole cosmos, but also he is given that role in a Christian version of the Shema, as indicative of his place within the identity of the one and only God. This is no passing reference whose importance can be played down. Paul has here made the cosmic Christ integral to a carefully formulated confession of Christian faith in God. That means that the much 20  2 Enoch 33:4. 21  The best examples are Ps-Aristotle, Mund. 6; Marcus Aurelius, Medit. 4:3; Asclepius 34. Cf. also Aristides, Orat. 7, 29. 22  God created “all things”: Isa 44:24; Jer 10:16; 51:19 (LXX 28:19); Wis 1:14; 9:1; 11:24; 2 Macc 1:24; 7:23; 3 Macc 2:3; 4 Macc 11:5; Sir 18:1 (GK); 23:20; 24:8; 43:33; Jub. 2:31; 11:17; 12:4, 19; 17:3; 22:4, 27; 1 Enoch 9:5; 84:3; 1QH 8:16; Ap. Abr. 7:10; Sib. Or. 3:20; Let. Arist. 16; Philo, Opif. 28; Spec. Leg. 1.20; Josephus, War 5.218. God rules “all things”: 1 Chron 29:11, 12; LXX Esth 4:17b, 17c, 17z; 8:12r, 12t (= Add Esth 13:9, 11; 14:19; 16:18, 21); Wis 5:13; 6:7; 8:3; 12:16; 15:1; 3 Macc 5:28; Sir 18:3 (GKII); 1 Enoch 9:5; 84:3; 1QapGen 20:13; Let. Arist. 16; Aristobulus, frg. 2:10; Sib. Or. 3:42; Sib. Or. 5:277, 499; Sib. Or. frg. 1:17; Philo, Conf. 170; Opif. 56, 75; Josephus, Ant. 10.263; Ag. Ap. 2.294. 23  Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 7–17.

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fuller reflection on Jesus Christ’s relationship to the whole cosmos that we find in Colossians need not in itself throw any doubt on the Pauline authenticity of that letter, though, of course, the issue of the authorship of Colossians involves other factors too. 2

The Cosmic Christ in Colossians 1:15–20

In the history of scholarship on this passage, which has often been called a Christ hymn, four literary issues have been much debated. The first is whether this passage is a pre-existing composition that has been incorporated in the letter. Secondly, for those who think it is an independent composition there is the issue of the original text of this source. There have been many different attempts to reconstruct the original form by removing the additions and adaptations supposed to have been made by the author of Colossians. Thirdly, there are differing views on the way the structure of the passage should be understood, often closely connected with the attempt to reconstruct a more original form of it. Finally, it is a question whether the passage can properly be called poetry. Since it is agreed that it is not written in metrical verse and so is not poetry in the proper Greek sense, alternative proposals are that it should be classified as a prose hymn or as elevated prose.24 2.1 Numerical Composition and Parallelism These debates can now be significantly advanced by recognizing that, as in 1 Corinthians 8:6, there are important aspects of numerical composition in this passage. Indeed, as we might expect in a much longer passage, there are considerably more elements of numerical composition in it than there are in 1 Corinthians 8:6. As we shall see, these features are quite similar to those to be found in some of the biblical Psalms, suggesting the author owes much more to the tradition of Jewish religious poetry than to that of Greek prose hymnody. I think this justifies referring to this passage as a hymn.

24  For recent surveys of scholarship on these issues, see Vincent A. Pizzuto, A Cosmic Leap of Faith: An Authorial, Structural, and Theological Investigation of the Cosmic Christology in Col 1:15–20, CBET 41 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 97–205; Matthew G. Gordley, The Colossian Hymn in Context: An Exegesis in Light of Jewish and Graeco-Roman Hymnic Conventions, WUNT 2/228 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 3–26; Matthew G. Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 118–23.

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It is widely recognized that the hymn has two main parts, whose subjects are respectively creation and new creation.25 The matter has been complicated by the fact that the first nine words of v. 18 (καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ἐκκλησίας) ostensibly refer to the church and therefore belong in the second part of the hymn, but the words that follow (ὅς ἐστιν ἀρχή, πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν) make a close parallel to the beginning of the hymn (1:15). It has therefore often been argued that the words τῆς ἐκκλησίας were added by the author of Colossians to a phrase that originally referred to Christ as the head of his body the universe and so belongs to the first section of the hymn. What has not been noticed is that, if we work with the text as we have it and place the division between the two sections where the subject-matter evidently requires, between v. 17 and v. 18, then there are precisely 55 words in each of the two parts.26 The number itself is unlikely to be arbitrary, because 55 is a triangular number, a species of number which the ancients regarded as special.27 In fact, almost all the numbers between 100 and 1,000 in the New Testament are triangular numbers: 120, 153, 276, and 666.28 Moreover, 55 is a doubly triangular number, since its triangular root (10) is also a triangular number, the triangle of four. Among the triangular numbers that appear in the New Testament, 120 and 666 are also doubly triangular, but not many such numbers exist: there are only six of them up to and including 666.29 So ancient people would have regarded 55 as a rather special number. We shall discuss the significance of the number further below. First, we consider its significance for the structure of the hymn. The facts that the passage falls into two symmetrical halves, each having the same number of words, and that this division corresponds to the distinction of meaning between the two 25  Some scholars find three distinct sections. 26  I omit the second occurrence of the phrase δι᾽αὐτοῦ in v. 20, for which the weight of manuscript support is equally divided between inclusion and omission. NA28 places the phrase within square brackets, indicating that textual critics are divided as to its authenticity. As Dunn writes, “It could have been included by scribal reflex in view of the repeated use of the phrase in 1:16 and 20 or omitted by accident (the scribe’s eye skipping directly from the immediately preceding αὐτοῦ) or design (because it is so awkward for the sense) (James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, NIGTC [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996], 83 n. 4). In my view, it is grammatically so awkward it is difficult to consider it original and easier to ascribe it to scribal error. While some commentators defend it as original, the fact that English translations usually ignore it reflects the fact that it is impossible to give it a satisfactory sense. 27  A triangular number is the sum of a series of successive numbers. Thus 10 is the “triangle” of 4 because it is the sum of all the numbers up to 4 (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10). On triangular numbers, see Bauckham, The Climax, 390–94. 28  Acts 1:15; John 21:11; Acts 27:37; Rev 13:18. An exception is 144 (square of 12) (Rev 21:17). 29  21, 55, 120, 231, 406, 666.

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parts of the passage, should warn us against attempting to reconstruct a more original form of the hymn. Comparing the two halves, we can also see that they are designed in close parallelism with each other (see Table 2). The key to the design is to recognize that there are both sequential and concentric parallels. There are three words or phrases (printed in bold, labeled A, B, C) in the first strophe that recur in the same order in the second strophe (A1, B1 and C1). But there are also three phrases (printed in bold italics,, labeled A, B, C) in the first strophe that recur in opposite order in the second strophe (C1, B1, A1). It is noteworthy that the first of these phrases, which in the first strophe appears as “in heaven and on earth,” recurs in the last line of the second strophe in reverse order as “on earth and in heaven,” creating an obvious inclusio. All of these parallelisms, both sequential and concentric, enhance the meaning of the passage, since all of them are parallels between who Christ is and what he does in creation (the first strophe) and who he is and what he does in the new creation (the second strophe). Table 2

Parallelism and structure

A B C

15 ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως, 16 ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, τὰ ὁρατὰ καὶ τὰ ἀόρατα, εἴτε θρόνοι εἴτε κυριότητες εἴτε ἀρχαὶ εἴτε ἐξουσίαι· τὰ πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν ἔκτισται· 17 καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν, 18 καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ἐκκλησίας· ὅς ἐστιν ἀρχή, πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, ἵνα γένηται ἐν πᾶσιν αὐτὸς πρωτεύων, 19 ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ εὐδόκησεν πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα κατοικῆσαι 20 καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ ἀποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα εἰς αὐτόν, εἰρηνοποιήσας διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ σταυροῦ αὐτοῦ, εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς εἴτε τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς

A

B C C1 A1 B1 C1

B1 A1

Bold indicates sequential parallels. Bold Italic indicates concentric parallels.

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The recognition of concentric, as well as sequential parallels, makes it possible to see how v. 17 and v. 18 fit into the overall structure without postulating that τῆς ἐκκλησίας is a secondary addition. They form the centre of the set of concentric parallels. There may be a parallelism of meaning between them, if we take the idea of the universe as a body to be implicit in v. 17b.30 All things hold together in him, like the parts of a body, while, as the head of his body, the church, he also holds together that body. In both cases he is the principle of unity. The 55 × 2 structure is not the only element of numerical composition in this hymn. In Table 3 we can track the repetition throughout the passage of two key terms: “all” and “he.” With reference to the whole of creation, the Greek word πᾶς (or in the plural πάντα) occurs seven times, the Jewish symbolic number of completeness. The symbolic use of the number seven occurs throughout both testaments, but its particularly lavish use in Genesis 1, both structurally and in the number of occurrences of specific words,31 is especially relevant in this case, as we shall see. In the hymn there is an eighth occurrence of the word in the phrase πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα (“the whole fullness” [of deity]). Thus, appropriately, the whole multiplicity of creation is indicated by the seven occurrences of “all,” while the uniqueness of the one God is indicated by the single appearance of the word with reference to deity. The other recurring word is the pronoun αὐτός, which occurs eleven times and in all eleven cases refers to Jesus Christ,32 who is never actually named within the passage.33 Fifty-five (the number of words in each strophe) is 11 × 5, while the pronoun αὐτός, in all its declined forms, has five letters. So, fifty-five is the sum of all the letters of the eleven occurrences of the pronoun that refers to Jesus Christ. This numerical structure corresponds to the intense christological concentration of the hymn, which focuses on the relationship of all things to Jesus Christ, while God the Father remains only implicitly related to all things through him. Whether the number eleven as such has any specific significance we shall consider in the next section. 30  On Stoic and Platonist ideas of the cosmos as body, see George H. van Kooten, Cosmic Christology in Paul and the Pauline School: Colossians and Ephesians in the Context of Graeco-Roman Cosmology, WUNT 2/171 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 17–52. 31   William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37. 32  Some commentators read εἰς αὐτόν in 1:20 as εἰς αὑτόν (= ἑαυτόν, the reflexive pronoun, cf. 2 Cor 5:19), referring to God rather than Christ (e.g. Robert McLaren Wilson, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2005], 154, but, as Dunn points out, “that would break the triple parallel of ‘in him,’ ‘through him,’ ‘to him’” (1:16, 19–20) (Dunn, The Epistles, 83 n. 3). 33  Seven of these are in the prepositional phrases with ἐν, δια and εἰς.

Confessing the Cosmic Christ Table 3

151

Repetition of key terms

15 ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως, 16 ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, τὰ ὁρατὰ καὶ τὰ ἀόρατα, εἴτε θρόνοι εἴτε κυριότητες εἴτε ἀρχαὶ εἴτε ἐξουσίαι· τὰ πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν ἔκτισται· 17 καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν, 18 καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ἐκκλησίας· ὅς ἐστιν ἀρχή, πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, ἵνα γένηται ἐν πᾶσιν αὐτὸς πρωτεύων, 19 ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ εὐδόκησεν πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα κατοικῆσαι 20 καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ ἀποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα εἰς αὐτόν, εἰρηνοποιήσας διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ σταυροῦ αὐτοῦ, εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς εἴτε τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· πᾶς, πάντα referring to all creation: 7 times πᾶς referring to God: once αὐτός referring to Jesus Christ: 11 times

2.2 Structural and Numerical Resemblances to Psalms The most characteristic and ubiquitous feature of Hebrew poetry is the parallelism (of various types) between two or three lines of a single verse unit. This kind of parallelism is not to be found in the Colossians hymn.34 But the structural and numerical features of the hymn that we have discussed closely resemble some other features of the biblical Psalms. Division into sections containing an identical number of words is a structural feature of many of the Psalms.35 Some, like the Colossians hymn, comprise two sections of equal length (Pss 6, 12, 20, 40:1–12,36 79, 91, 121), while others contain two such sections within a wider structure (Pss 29, 48, 60, 65, 73, 34   Christopher R. Seitz, Colossians, BTCB (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014), 92–93, argues that it is, but in my view unconvincingly. 35  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 457–60. 36  Van der Lugt treats 40:1–12 (Heb 2–13) as a complete psalm.

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118, 122, 137).37 In order to illustrate this phenomenon of two sections of equal length as well as the phenomenon of parallelism between the two sections, I have chosen the example of Psalm 20 (see Table 4).38 This psalm comprises two sections of thirty-three words each. (Note that thirty-three is a multiple of eleven, as is fifty-five, the number of words in each half of the Colossians hymn). Like the Colossians hymn, there are both sequential parallels between the two sections and also concentric parallels.39 In view of the number thirty-three (3 × 11), it is probably significant that the word “answer” (‫ )ענה‬occurs three times, marking it out as the key word of the psalm, which is evident also from the fact that it is part of the inclusio formed by the first and last lines of the psalm, as well as featuring in the sequential parallelism between the first and second sections of the psalm. The significance of eleven, the other divisor of thirty-three, we shall discuss shortly. The phenomenon of a word that recurs a significant number of times throughout a poem can be illustrated from other psalms also, though it is a relatively uncommon feature.40 An example that is so prominent as to be hard to miss is the fact that the phrase “the voice of YHWH” occurs seven times in Psalm 28, all within the central of the three sections of the psalm (vv. 3–9).41 In Psalm 92 the divine Name occurs seven times, and the central instance of these seven occurs in v. 8 (Heb 9), which is the mathematical centre of the psalm.42 In Psalm 84, the name YHWH and the designation Elohim each occurs seven times, and the central example of each occurs, both together, in v. 8 (Heb 9).43 There are seven occurrences of the divine Name in Psalm 99 and in Psalm 109. In both Psalms 148 and 150, the verb “to praise” (‫ )הלל‬occurs eleven times.44 37  These lists are from the table in van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 458. What I call “sections” here, van der Lugt calls “cantos.” He reserves the term “strophe” for smaller units within a canto, whereas I have used this term for the two sections of the Colossians hymn. To avoid confusion, I do not use the terms “canto” or “strophe” with reference to the Psalms. 38  The table is based on the analysis of the psalm in van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 226–231, but does not incorporate all the elements of his analysis. I use the terms “sequential” and “concentric” for the phenomena van der Lugt calls “linear” and “symmetric.” 39  In a few cases specific words function as both sequential and concentric parallels and so are printed twice. 40  van der Lugt rarely draws attention to it. 41  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 298. 42  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes III, 41. There are 26 words before the four words of this verse and 26 words after it. 26 is the numerical value of the divine Name YHWH. 43  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 420. 44  In both cases I discount, as a liturgical addition, the phrase “Hallelu-Yah” (‫)הללו יה‬, which opens and closes both psalms.

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Psalm 20

2 ‫ֹלהי יַ ֲע ֽקֹב׃‬ ֵ֬ ‫ַ ֽי ַענְ ָ ֣ך ֭ ְיהוָ ה ְּב ֣ ֹיום ָצ ָ ֑רה ְ ֝י ַׂשּגֶ ְב ָ֗ך ֵ ׁ֤שם׀ ֱא‬ 3 ‫ח־עזְ ְרָך֥ ִמ ֑ ּקֹ ֶד ׁש ו ִ֝מ ִּצֹּי֗ ון יִ ְס ָע ֶ ֽדּךָ ׃‬ ֶ ‫יִ ְׁש ַ ֽל‬ 4 ‫ֹעול ְתָך֖ יְ ַד ְּׁש ֶנ֣ה ֶ ֽס ָלה׃‬ ָ ְ‫ל־מנְ ח ֶ ֹ֑תָך ו‬ ִ ‫יִ זְ ּ ֹ֥כר ָּכ‬ 5 ‫ל־ע ָצ ְתָך֥ יְ ַמ ֵ ּֽלא׃‬ ֲ ‫ן־לָך֥ ִכ ְל ָב ֶבָ֑ך ְ ֽו ָכ‬ ְ ‫יִ ֶּֽת‬

6 ‫ֹלותיָך׃‬ ֽ ֶ ‫ל־מ ְׁש ֲא‬ ִ ‫הו֗ה ָּכ‬ ָ ‫א ְי‬ ֝ ‫ישו ָּע ֶ֗ת ָך ו ְּב ׁ ֵשֽם־ ֱאל ֵֹה ֥ינ ּו נִ ְד ֹּ֑גל יְ ַמ ֵ ּ֥ל‬ ֤ ׁ ‫נְ ַרּנְ ָנ֤ה׀ ִּ ֘ב‬

7 ‫הו֗ה ְמ ִׁ֫ש ֥יֹח ֭ו יַעֲ נֵה ּו ִמ ְּׁש ֵ ֣מי ָק ְד ׁ ֑שֹו ִ֝בגְ ֻב ֹ֗רות ֵ ֣י ׁ ַשע יְ ִמיֹנֽ ו׃‬ ָ ְ‫ֹוש ַ֥יע׀ י‬ ִׁ ‫ַע ָ ּ֤תה יָ ַ ֗ד ְע ִּתי ִ ּ֤כי ה‬ 8 ‫הו֖ה ֱאל ֵֹ֣הינ ּו נַזְ ִּ ֽכיר׃‬ ָ ְ‫ּסּוסים וַ ֲא ַ֓נ ְחנּו׀ ְּב ׁ ֵשם־י‬ ֑ ִ ‫ֵ ֣א ֶּלה ָ֭ב ֶר ֶכב וְ ֵ ֣א ֶּלה ַב‬ 9 ‫ֹעודד׃‬ ֽ ָ ‫ֵ֭ה ָּמה ָּכ ְר ֣עּו וְ נָ ָ ֑פלּו וַ ֲא ַנ ְ֥חנּו ַ ֗֝ק ְמנּו וַ ּנִ ְת‬ 10 ‫־ק ְר ֵ ֽאנּו׃‬ ָ ‫ֹוש ָ֑יעה ַ֝ה ֶּ֗מ ֶלְך יַעֲ ֵנ֥נ ּו ְביֹום‬ ִׁ ‫הו֥ה ה‬ ָ ְ‫י‬ The Lord answer you in the day of trouble! The name of the God of Jacob protect you! May he send you help from the sanctuary, and give you support from Zion. May he remember all your offerings, and regard with favour your burnt sacrifices. [Selah] May he grant you your heart’s desire, and fulfill all your plans. May we shout for joy over your victory, and in the name of our God set up our banners. May the LORD fulfill all your petitions. Now I know that the Lord will give victory to his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heaven with mighty deeds he will give victory by his right hand. Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but we boast in the name of the LORD our God. They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright. Give victory to the king, O LORD; answer us in the day when we call. Sequential parallels are in bold, concentric parallels are italicized. There are 33 (3 × 11) words in each of the two strophes. The verb ‫( ענה‬to answer) occurs 3 times, which may explain the 33 (3 × 11) words structure.

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We return to the significance of the number 11. There is no doubt that this number is one of the numbers that play a key role in structural aspects of the Psalms (along with 7, 13, 17 and 26).45 The number of words in a discrete section or in parallel sections is frequently a multiple of 11. For example, Psalm 150 consists of two sections, comprising respectively 11 and 22 words.46 The two sections of Psalm 23 comprise respectively 33 and 22 words.47 There are several psalms whose total number of words is a multiple of 11: Psalms 42–4348 (187 [17 × 11] words), 59 (143 [13 × 11] words), 60 (88 words), 62 (110 words), 63 (88 words), 70 (44 words).49 The divine oracle in the central section of Psalm 89 (vv. 19–37 [Heb 20–38]) is made up of 121 (11 × 11) words.50 We have already noticed that Psalm 20 consists of two sections of 33 words each. Psalm 112 comprises 77 words and is also an acrostic psalm, whose 22 cola begin with each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.51 Psalm 103, which has 22 verse lines, contains 11 occurrences of the divine Name. Psalm 78 has 77 verse lines and 528 (48 × 11) words.52 Psalm 58 has 22 verse lines and 22 cola. In Psalm 118 the divine Name occurs 22 times, and in Psalm 25 11 times. Study of van der Lugt’s analyses will easily yield other examples, especially cases where the structuring role of this number is more minor. The examples given here are more than sufficient to show that the division of the Colossian hymn into two sections of 55 words each and the occurrence within it of 11 instances of the pronoun αὐτός (referring to Jesus Christ) belong to the same tradition of numerical composition in Jewish religious poetry.

45  Labuschagne, “Significant Compositional Techniques,” 588–91; van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 86; van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 7; van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes III, 7; cf. Labuschagne. Numerical Secrets, 70–73 (not on Psalms). 46  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes III, 574. 47  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes I, 254. 48  These two psalms are universally agreed to form a single unit. 49  Psalm 77 has 77 words if the title is included (the redactor who added the title may well have intended this). 50  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 471. The calculation omits the introduction in v 19a (20a) and counts only the words of divine speech. The other passage of divine speech in this psalm (vv. 3–4 [4–5]) comprises 14 (7 × 2) words. 51  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes III, 245. 52  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 355–56.

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Labuschagne53 and van der Lugt54 consider that the number eleven signifies fullness or fulfillment (both meanings of the Hebrew root ‫)מלא‬.55 This certainly seems to make sense of the way it functions in the Psalter.56 We have already considered Psalm 20 as an example of numerical composition. It has 33 words in each of its two sections. It also contains two occurrences of the verb ‫ מלא‬in phrases that express the psalm’s key idea, the plea that God will answer the prayer of the king: “May he … fulfill all your plans” (20:4 [Heb 5]); “May the YHWH fulfill all your petitions” (20:5 [Heb 6]). In Psalm 23 the number could emphasize the fullness of the divine blessing the psalmist celebrates (including “my cup overflows” [v. 5]). Psalm 103, which contains 11 occurrences of the divine Name, is another psalm that celebrates the fullness of God’s blessing, including a word (‫שבע‬, in the Hiphil “to satisfy, fill up”) that refers explicitly to fullness (v. 5). Words meaning “to be filled” and “to be sated” feature in Psalm 78 (vv. 29–30). In the divine speech at the centre of Psalm 89, which has 121 (11 × 11) words, the number expresses God’s fulfillment of his covenant promises to David (see especially vv. 28–37 [27–36]). Other psalms in which the number 11 plays a structural role are prayers for God to fulfill his covenant promises to the righteous (Pss 25, 60, 62). Psalm 150, the last in the Psalter, with its 33 words, including 11 occurrences of the verb “to praise” (‫)הלל‬, is entirely a call to the fulsome praise of God by “everything that breathes.” That some of these psalms contain specific words that express fullness is an important clue to the significance of the number eleven in the Colossians hymn. It means that the eleven occurrences of the pronoun αὐτός (referring to Jesus Christ) should be related to the word πλήρωμα (“fullness”) in the clause: 53  Labuschagne, “Significant Compositional Techniques,” 588. Labuschagne, Numerical Secrets, 70, explains it as “the sum of 4 as the number of extensiveness and 7 as the number of fullness.” This may be correct, but I would prefer to call 7 the number of completeness, distinguished from fullness. 4 is the number of the earth (which has 4 corners and 4 winds) and therefore perhaps of extensiveness. 54  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes III, 7. He connects this significance with the fact that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet (and therefore the number 22 plays a structural role in acrostic psalms): “The use of the alphabet is a rhetorical device expressing the idea of completeness, fullness, or totality.” However, if the number 22 therefore indicates significance, surely the number 11 would indicate incompleteness. I do not think the significance of the number 11 can be plausibly related to the number of letters of the alphabet. 55  To “fulfill” a word (1 Kgs 2:27; 2 Chron 36:21; cf. 1 Kgs 1:14) or plan (Ps 20:4 [Heb 5]) or petition (Ps 20:5 [Heb 6]) is a rare meaning of the Piel. 56  Labuschagne, Numerical Secrets, 70, also points out that Gen 1:28, which contains the divine command to humans to “fill the earth,” has 22 words and 88 letters.

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“in him the whole fullness [of deity] was pleased to dwell.” Moreover, the particular importance of this word within the hymn is confirmed by yet another numerical feature. In the fifty-five words of the second strophe of the hymn the central position (what van der Lugt calls “the mathematical centre”57) is occupied by the three words πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα. The number of words on either side of this centre is twenty-six (26 + 3 + 26 = 55), which is the numerical value of the divine Name YHWH (we already encountered this common gematria in 1 Cor 8:6). There is an impressive parallel here with the structure of Psalm 23, which has twenty-six words on either side of the three central words “you are with me.” In Psalm 23 this pattern indicates that it is YHWH who is with the psalmist.58 Similarly in the Colossians hymn the twenty-six words on either side of the three central words “the whole fullness” indicate that it is the fullness of YHWH that was pleased to dwell in Jesus Christ. Thus, the numerical patterns relate the words πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα both to the eleven occurrences of the pronoun αὐτός and to the divine Name YHWH. The features of numerical composition that the author of the Colossians hymn has taken up from the Psalms are not mere games with numbers. They are designed to enhance and to multiply meaning in the way that other poetic devices, more familiar to us, aim to do. They serve to pack more meaning into a concise text than would be possible in a prose text of equivalent length. The same is true of the parallelism between the two strophes that we have also observed. The hymn emerges from this study as a text composed with exquisitely elaborate care. It is unlikely to have been composed merely for its use in Colossians. An author who modelled his or her work on the poetic conventions of the Psalms presumably expected it to be put to the same sort of uses as the Psalms were. So at this point it is worth recalling that among early Christians the Psalms were not only sung in worship (Col 3:16; Eph 5:19), but also treated as inspired scripture from which exegetes could draw rich christological meaning (as we see throughout the New Testament, but especially in Hebrews). 2.3 A Christological Reading of Genesis 1:1–2:1 The hymn is best understood as a christological reading of the creation account in Genesis 1, followed by a corresponding account of new creation in the second strophe (which draws also on two key texts in the Psalms). In this respect it closely resembles the Prologue to the Gospel of John. Both authors 57  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 505–51. 58  van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 514, 526–27. For other examples of psalms in which the mathematical centre is enclosed on both sides by passages that each comprise 26 words or cola, see van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes II, 527–31.

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looked for the pre-existent Christ in the text of Genesis 1. The Gospel author identified him with the creative Word, which, although it is not explicit in the vocabulary of Genesis, is implicit in the repeated statement that at each stage of his creative work God spoke. The author of the Colossians hymn takes a different approach, treating two actual words in Genesis 1 as references to Christ. These are ἀρχή (“beginning”), used at the very beginning of Genesis 1, and εἰκών (“image”), which occurs twice in Genesis 1:26–27. Given its place in Genesis 1:1, we might have expected the author of the hymn to have placed the word ἀρχή in the first strophe. The reason he has not done so is that he is creating a parallel between the beginning of creation and the beginning of new creation. By taking the word ἀρχή from the opening phrase of Genesis and using it to refer to the risen Christ as the beginning of the new creation, the author has tied the two strophes closely together. The two christological terms from Genesis 1, ἀρχή and εἰκών, are highlighted as key terms and placed in parallel by means of the two parallel relative clauses ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν and ὅς ἐστιν ἀρχή. Sometimes the term εἰκών (used in the Genesis account of the creation of humanity) has been taken to indicate a Second Adam Christology,59 but the fact that it occurs at the beginning of the first strophe, not the second, shows that this is not the case.60 It is not in his humanity—or, at least, not only in his humanity—but already in his preexistence that Christ is the image of the invisible God. The author is reading the phrase “in the image of God” (‫ ;בצלם אלהים‬κατ᾽εἰκόνα θεοῦ) in Genesis 1:27 in a way similar to Philo’s reading. Philo identified the image of God with the Logos. The first humans were not themselves the image of God, but created according to (κατα) the image of God, i.e. on the model of the Logos who is the uncreated Image (Leg. 3.96; Plant. 19–20; Fug. 101; Spec. 1.81, 171; 3.83). For the author of the hymn, the pre-existent one is “the image of the invisible God” in the sense that he is an exact copy of God (a point that Heb 1:3 makes with two different, but equivalent, metaphors).61 Philo also provides a kind of precedent for the understanding of ἀρχή in Genesis 1:1 as a sort of title for the pre-existent Christ. Philo applies it as a title to the Logos (Conf. 146) or to Wisdom (Leg. 1.43). There is no need to refer to Proverbs 8:22, where the term applies to Wisdom as herself “the beginning of 59  E.g. Wright, “Poetry,” 114–16. 60  Moreover, the ὅτι clause in v. 16 (“for in him all things were created”) probably explains how Christ can be considered “the image of the invisible God” as well as “the firstborn over all creation.” 61  Accordingly, Colossians 3:10 does not say that believers are the image of God, but that they are “being renewed according to the image (κατ᾽εἰκόνα) of the one who created them.”

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his [God’s] way.” Even when Philo calls Wisdom “beginning” he is not alluding to Proverbs 8:22 but to Genesis 1:1, as is clear from his statement that Moses called Wisdom “beginning” and “image” (Leg. 1.43).62 Reference to Genesis 1:1 explains more of the text of Colossians than Proverbs 8:22 could, because this reading of the Genesis text, which says that God created ‫בראשית‬/ἐν ἀρχῇ, explains the unusual use of the preposition ἐν with reference to Christ in the Colossians hymn: “all things were created in him (ἐν αὐτῷ)” (v. 16). Moreover, Genesis 1 can explain the hymn’s application of both “image” and “beginning” to Christ, whereas Prov 8:22 can explain only the latter.63 The parallels with Philo, in the cases of both “the image” and “the beginning,” do not show that the author of the hymn identified the pre-existent Christ with Philo’s Logos or with the figure of divine Wisdom, who sometimes in Philo approximates to the role of the Logos, but that the author of the hymn found the pre-existent Christ in Genesis 1 by means of the same kind of exegesis as Philo used to find the Logos there. As in the case of the Prologue to John, it is routinely claimed that the Colossians hymn embodies a Wisdom Christology,64 but in neither case does the text really warrant that. The alleged Wisdom features are mostly explicable from Genesis 1, to which both texts unmistakably allude, and, even were there some secondary allusions to Wisdom texts, they would be scant basis for supposing that readers would have read either the Prologue to John or 62  Philo quotes Prov 8:22 in Ebr. 31, where he makes no connexion with Genesis 1 or the Logos. 63  Wis 7:26 calls Wisdom “an image of his [God’s] goodness” (εἰκὼν τῆς ἀγαθότητος αὐτοῦ). This is one of three metaphors (with some resemblance to Heb 1:3), but it does not call Wisdom the image of God or allude to Genesis 1. There does not seem to be any allusion to Wis 7:26 in Philo. This text is the only relevant occurrence of the word εἰκών in passages about divine Wisdom. 64  One of the most extensive recent presentations of this view is Christopher A. Beetham, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul to the Colossians, BibInt 96 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 113–141, who argues that the hymn is dependent on Prov 8:22 “in its first century C.E. interpretive development” (italics original) and frequently cites Philo as though he is part of this interpretative development. He makes scarcely any reference to Genesis 1 (cf. 126 on Philo) and fails to see how decisive it is both for Philo and for the Colossians hymn. Already the influential article of C. F. Burney, “Christ as the APXH of Creation (Prov. viii 22, Col. i 15–18, Rev, iii 14),” JTS 27 (1925): 160–77, focused on Prov 8:22 as the key text for understanding Col 1:15–18 and paid little attention to Genesis 1. For a comprehensive argument against Wisdom Christology in Paul, see Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 595–630; and against Wisdom as the background to the Colossians hymn, see also Sean M. McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 175–79.

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the Colossians hymn as identifying Christ with Wisdom. What the Colossians hymn manifestly does is identify Christ with the Beginning and the Image of God of which Genesis 1 speaks. An interesting further point of possible correspondence with Philo is the fact that εἰκών and ἀρχή (as well as πρωτότοκος, which we have not yet discussed) are anarthrous, which suggests that they are being treated as names.65 When Philo applies such terms to the Logos or Wisdom, not only are they anarthrous, but also he explicitly calls them names (Leg. 1.43; Conf. 146). On the other hand, since the author of the hymn was clearly closely acquainted with the Psalms in Hebrew (as the numerical composition shows), it is also possible that the anarthrous usage reflects the frequent omission of the article in Hebrew poetic style. The author of the hymn has done more than take two key christological terms from Genesis 1. The beginning of the ὅτι clause in v. 16 is a paraphrase of the opening seven words of Genesis: ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς. (That this is not dependent on the LXX is suggested by the fact that the LXX uses ποιεῖν throughout Gen 1:1–2:3, making no distinction between the two Hebrew verbs ‫ ברא‬and ‫עשה‬, whereas κτίζειν could be seen as a more appropriate rendering of ‫ ברא‬in Gen 1:1.) Three adaptations of Genesis 1:1 have been made: (a) ἐν αὐτῷ renders ‫ בראשית‬in a way that anticipates the christological interpretation of this phrase in the second strophe; (b) the divine passive ἐκτίσθη (cf. ἔκτισται at the end of the verse) makes the agency of God himself in creation implicit in order to stress instead the agency of the pre-existent Christ, through whom God created (cf. similarly John 1:2); (c) the paraphrase of “the heavens and the earth” as “all things in the heavens and the earth” makes clear, if there were any doubt, that everything without exception was created through Christ (cf. the similar emphasis in John 1:3: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”) (It is worth noting that the word “all,” which occurs seven times with reference to creation in the Colossians hymn, is also frequent in Gen 1:1–2:3, occurring 17 times in MT, 19 times in LXX.) Of these three modifications of Genesis 1, two (b and c) are in fact made in the Genesis account itself, when it sums up the work of creation: “Thus were finished the heavens and the earth and all their host” (2:1). This verse, at the 65   J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1884), 157, comments that the “word ἀρχή, … being absolute in itself, does not require the definite article.” But he neglects the parallel with εἰκών.

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conclusion to the account of the work of the six days, forms an inclusio with 1:1, an inclusio that the Colossians hymn imitates when it concludes: εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς εἴτε τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. The concentric parallelism is highlighted by the fact that, in comparison with v. 16, the two terms “heavens” and “earth” reappear in reverse order. But whereas in Genesis the inclusio brackets the work of creation, in the Colossians hymn it brackets the themes of both strophes: creation and new creation. The scope of reconciliation is as wide as the scope of creation. Comparing the hymn with Genesis 1 is one way of appreciating the immense christological concentration of the hymn. Throughout Genesis 1 God is the subject of all the many verbs of creation. In Colossians the God who is called “invisible” in the first phrase is literally invisible throughout the rest of the first strophe, where the verbs of creation are all passive. All things were created—implicitly by God but explicitly in, through and for Christ. Again, this resembles the beginning of the Prologue to John. “Firstborn” and the Contribution of Psalm 89:27 (MT 89:26) (LXX 88:28) The Genesis creation account does not explain the word πρωτότοκος, which occurs twice in the hymn, in parallel positions in the two strophes. Commentators are generally agreed that the word indicates more than temporal priority. Temporal priority is included: in the first strophe Christ is said to be “before all things” (πρὸ πάντων), while in the second strophe “firstborn from the dead” (ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν) means that he was the first to be raised from the dead (cf. 1 Cor 15:20; Acts 26:23). But this temporal priority, in the case of resurrection, gives him pre-eminence in all things (ἵνα γένηται ἐν πᾶσιν αὐτὸς πρωτεύων), a thought that resembles Romans 14:9: “For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living (ἵνα καὶ νεκρῶν καὶ ζώντων κυριεύςῃ).” A similar phrase in Revelation 1:5 (πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν) can be seen from its context also to refer to a position of pre-eminence over the dead. In the first strophe, the phrase πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως does not mean that he was the first creature to be “born” or created, but that he has the status of “firstborn” in authority over the whole creation. The word πρωτότοκος reflects the unique position of authority possessed by the firstborn son in the Jewish tradition.66 We should note that in Ps 89:27 (26), God says that he “will make [literally, give] him [David] the firstborn.” It is a status to which David is appointed, not one that attaches to him automatically because of some kind of temporal priority, which in this context is probably not implied at all. 2.4

66  Gen 27:29, 37; Deut 21:15–17.

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It is commonly supposed that in v. 15 there is an allusion to Wisdom as God’s “firstborn.” But for three reasons this may be questioned: (1) The word πρωτότοκος is not used of Wisdom in Jewish literature, although Philo uses the synonym πρωτόγονος for the Logos as God’s firstborn son (Conf. 146; Somn. 1.125; Agr. 51).67 It may not be impossible that in this description of the Logos Philo is dependent on Proverbs 8:25 LXX, where Wisdom (ἡ σοφία) says that God “begets me” (γεννᾷ με), but when he explicitly discusses Proverbs 8:22 he makes much of the femaleness of Wisdom, who is not the elder sister but the mother of her beloved son, the sensible world (Ebr. 30–31). (2) Wisdom is said to have existed prior to creation (Prov 8:22–25; Wis 9:9) and can be said to have been created before all other things (Sir 1:4; cf. 1:9), but this temporal priority is not associated with a status of supreme authority over creation. Philo does strongly associate the status of πρωτόγονος with authority, but, again, this is with reference to the Logos (Conf. 146; Somn. 1.125; Agr. 51). Although there is overlap between what Philo says of the Logos and what he says of Wisdom, we cannot assume that anything he says of the Logos could have been said of Wisdom. Wisdom in Philo is a much less developed figure than the Logos. (3) More relevant than anything said in Jewish literature about Wisdom, is the fact that in one of the only three passages in which Philo calls the Logos as God’s “firstborn” (πρωτόγονος) he also calls the Logos God’s “invisible image” (ἀειδοῦς εἰκόνος) and “the eldest-born image of God” (θεοῦ εἰκὼν … ὁ πρεσβὐτατος) (Conf. 147), as well as the eldest-born angel who rules over the angels (Conf. 146). In Colossians 1:16 the title πρωτότοκος follows the title εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου. We have already seen that the latter is closer to what Philo says of the pre-existent Logos than to anything said in Jewish literature about Wisdom. Plausibly, therefore, Colossians 1:16 reflects an interpretation of Genesis 1:26 in which God’s pre-existent image was understood to be his “firstborn,” prior to all creation and preeminent over it.68 We can be more confident about the source of the title πρωτότοκος in the second strophe of the hymn. This is partly because there is a close parallel in Revelation 1:5: “the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the 67  In Her. 117–119, Philo comes close to applying the word πρωτότοκος to the Logos, but this is because it is in his quotation from Exod 13:1 LXX. 68  In the only place in the Pauline literature other than Colossians 1:16, 18 where Christ is called πρωτότοκος, there is also a close connexion with the word εἰκών and it is implied that he is the image of God (Rom 8:29: “to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many siblings”).

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earth” (ὁ πρωτὀτοκος τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ὁ ἄρχων τῶν Βασιλέων τῆς γῆς). The fact that πρωτὀτοκος is here linked with ὁ ἄρχων τῶν Βασιλέων τῆς γῆς makes this an unambiguous allusion to Psalm 89:27(Heb 26).69 Revelation 1:5 and Colossians 1:18 are evidence of an early Christian reading of this Psalm verse. ‫ף־אנִ י‬ ָ ‫ֶא ְּתנֵ הּו ְּבֹכור ַא‬ ‫י־א ֶרץ‬ ָ ‫ֶע ְלֹיון ְל ַמ ְל ֵכ‬

I will also make him the firstborn, very high in relation to the kings of the earth. κἀγὼ πρωτότοκον θήσομαι αὐτόν, ὑψηλὸν παρὰ τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν τῆς γῆς. And I will make him firstborn very high in relation to the kings of the earth. Two points about the text should be noted. Firstly, it does not say that David is God’s firstborn or that the other kings are also sons of God. Rather God appoints David to the rank of firstborn. Secondly, in spite of the fact that most English translations read “the highest of the kings of the earth,” ‫ עליון‬is not a superlative (as the common English translation of this word in other contexts— “Most High”—might suggest). David is not the highest of the category of kings of the earth. He is simply “very high” or “on high” in relation to them, exalted and pre-eminent over them.70 So the LXX correctly renders ὑψηλόν rather than ὕψιστος (which can be understood as superlative or elative when it renders ‫)עליון‬. To early Christian exegetes, who read this as a messianic psalm,71 the word ‫ עליון‬must have seemed extremely significant. This is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where it refers to a human individual. Twice it refers to Israel as placed by God “very high above all the nations” (Deut 26:19; 28:1). It is sometimes used to refer to the upper part of a location. In all other cases and very frequently it is a divine title, referring to God as supreme over all powers and

69  The connexion with Ps 89 is further demonstrated by the preceding words of Rev 1:5: ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός, cf. Ps 89(88):37(38) LXX (ὁ μάρτυς πιστός). 70  John Goldingay, Psalms: Volume 2: Psalms 42–89 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 679, translates: “on high in relation to the kings of the earth.” 71  Note the quotation of Ps 89:26 (Heb 27) in Heb 1:6.

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all creation.72 So here it could easily suggest that the Messiah is appointed to the same exalted status, ruling over the kings of the earth, that YHWH himself has.73 It would be straightforward for early Christian exegetes to read this verse as referring to God’s exaltation of the risen Jesus Christ to a position of supremacy over the world, seated on the right hand of God on his heavenly throne.74 This is why “the firstborn” becomes, in both Colossians and Revelation, “the firstborn from the dead.” Such an interpretation would be encouraged also by Psalm 89:25(Heb 26) (“I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers”), which suggests that God shares with the Messiah his uniquely divine power over the sea, a divine prerogative that is evoked with reference to Jesus in Mark 4:41. It is now possible to see how in the Colossians hymn, the term πρωτὀτοκος, alluding to Psalm 89:27, could be christologically unpacked as: “firstborn from the dead, so that he might become in all things preeminent” (v. 18). To be “preeminent” in all things is God’s own relationship to the whole of creation as ‫עליון‬, the Most High. Exalted to the throne of God, it is shared by Jesus Christ. The thought is very close to the other great christological hymn in the Pauline literature, where a different scriptural source (Isa 45:22–23) and different terminology evoke the same theme (Phil 2:9–11). 2.5 The Contribution of Psalm 68:16 (MT 68:17) (LXX 67:17) The next clause of the Colossians hymn (v. 19a: ἐν αὐτῷ εὐδόκησεν πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα κατοικῆσαι) is virtually a quotation from Psalm 68:16 (Heb 17): ‫ֹלהים ְל ִׁש ְבֹּתו‬ ִ ‫ָה ָהר ָח ַמד ֱא‬ ‫ָלנֶ ַצח יִ ְׁשּכֹן ַאף־יְ הוָ ה‬

the mountain that God desired for his abode, where YHWH will reside forever.

72  On this divine title in early Jewish literature, see Richard Bauckham, “The ‘Most High’ God and the Nature of Early Jewish Monotheism,” in Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 107–26. 73  The Jerusalem Bible (1966) translates this verse: “And I shall make him my first-born, the Most High for kings on earth.” In a footnote “Most High” is explained as a “divine title here applied to God’s anointed king.” For the argument that, in the psalm, David is set over the kings of the earth as God is set over the heavenly powers, see Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51–100, WBC 20 (Dallas, Texas: Word, 1990), 423 (citing T. N. D. Mettinger). 74  For this as fundamental to early Christology, see Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 172–81.

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τὸ ὅρος, ὃ εὐδόκησεν ὁ θεὸς κατοικεῖν ἐν αὐτῷ; καὶ γὰρ ὁ κύριος κατασκηνώσει εἰς τέλος. the mountain on which God was pleased to dwell; for the Lord will encamp [there] forever. In view of the exact correspondence of four words of the hymn with the LXX of Psalm 67:17,75 it is extraordinary that most commentators do not recognize the allusion.76 They therefore miss the image the hymn is here evoking, which is Jesus as the new temple in which God is present (cf. John 1:14: yet another parallel with the Johannine prologue).77 Recognizing this image also explains the much debated words πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα. They echo the language of the Hebrew Bible when it says that the cloud, representing the divine presence, or the glory of YHWH “filled” the temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11; 2 Chron 5:13–14; 7:1–2; Ezek 10:4; 43:5; 44:4; cf. Isa 6:1, where LXX has “the house was full of his glory”; also Sir 36:19 [Heb]). In that case πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα functions as a periphrasis for God in his presence among his people, very like the “Shekinah” in later Jewish literature.78 It is worth noting that πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα in the Colossians him does not mean that the whole of God’s being dwells in Christ, but that Christ is filled with the divine presence, as the temple was.79 It is noteworthy that the phrase ἐν αὐτῷ turns out to be actually derived from Psalm 67:17 LXX. There it refers to the mountain (understood as Mount Zion) 75  The change from the present infinitive κατοικεῖν to the aorist κατοικῆσαι emphasizes that God took up residence in Christ. 76  E.g. Dunn, The Epistles, 99–102 (he refers to Ps 68:16 only to illustrate the use of the verb εὐδοκεὶν with God as subject). 77  Recognition of this image has probably been inhibited by the view that the “mountain” in Ps 68:16 is mount Sinai rather than mount Zion (cf. Eduard Schweizer, The Letter of Paul to the Colossians, trans. Andrew Chester [London: SPCK, 1982], 77). This is the predominant view in rabbinic literature (see Beetham, Echoes of Scripture, 150), but there is no evidence of how the verse was understood in the late Second Temple period. The close parallel with Ps 132:13–14 would strongly favour the identification of the mountain as Mount Zion. For Zion as the original sense in the psalm, see Goldingay, Psalms, 324; Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51–100, WBC 20 (Dallas, TX: Word, 1990), 181. 78  Cf. Pizzuto, A Cosmic Leap, 228: “Col 1:19 and 2:10–11 reflect a notion of a Shekinah-theology found in Ps 67:17(LXX),” but although he quotes the Greek text of this verse, with its obviously close verbal relationship to Col 1:19 he fails to see that the hymn actually alludes to it. It is also strange that he gives the Greek text of Ps 67:17(LXX), but for its translation gives the English translation of v. 18 (229 n.63)! 79  In this paragraph, I largely agree with Beetham, Echoes of Scripture, 152–55, but I dissent from his assertion that πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα means that “all of God was pleased to dwell bodily in Christ” (153).

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on which the temple stood, but the Colossians hymn appropriates it as referring to the new temple, Jesus. So, it appears that two of the three occurrences of ἐν αὐτῷ in the hymn (vv. 16, 19) are exegetically based in scriptural texts (Gen 1:1; Ps 68:16 [67:17]). The author of the hymn, a skilled and subtle exegete, alert to the significance of prepositions relating to Christ, will certainly have noticed the coincidence of prepositions between Genesis 1:1 (ἐν ἀρχῇ) and this psalm (ἐν αὐτῷ). Christological reading of Psalm 68 (67) is also attested in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 (Ps 67:36 LXX) and Ephesians 4:8 (Ps 67:19 LXX). The latter is of special interest here because of the close relationship between Colossians and Ephesians. Verse 19 (English 18) of the psalm is in close proximity to the verse of the psalm that is echoed in the Colossians hymn and also contains a key reference to height: “You ascended to the heights” (‫למרום‬, εἰς ὕψος), which Ephesians interprets as the exaltation of Christ, just as the Colossians hymn does v. 17 (16). Moreover, both verses belong to the central section of the psalm (vv. 16–21 [English 15–20]),80 which the author of the Colossians hymn, well acquainted with the ways in which psalms are structured, would have recognized as containing the key topic of the psalm. Similarly, Psalm 89:26 (English 27), the verse of that psalm to which the Colossians hymn refers, is one of the two central verses of that psalm (vv. 25–26 [English 26–27]). These verses to which the hymn gives a christological reading are not simply plucked out of their context without regard to it. They are recognized as significant because of the central place they occupy in these psalms. 2.6 Prepositions and Christological Monotheism The hymn’s christological concentration is apparent in the prepositional phrases with τὰ πάντα. Unlike 1 Corinthians 8:6, all of them refer to Christ, none to God. Referring again to the pattern of usage across the New Testament (see Table 1), we can see that Colossians is unique in using the preposition ἐν in these phrases and unique in using εἰς with reference to Christ rather than to God. The use of ἐν is usually said to reflect a Stoic theology in which the world is understood to be spatially surrounded by God, but, in view of our argument above, it is more plausibly a literal echo of Genesis 1:1, not expressing any particular metaphysic. The meaning may not be much different from διά, but it enhances the emphasis on Christ’s agency in creation, while εἰς serves to include him more extensively in God’s relationship to the world. But ἐκ is not used. The divine passives show that the source or efficient cause of creation is God the Father, and this pattern is also maintained in the parallel statement about 80  Excluding the title, there are 14 verses on either side of this section.

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reconciliation in the second strophe: the Pleroma is the subject who reconciles all things through Christ and to or for Christ. This is christological monotheism. Christ, pre-existent and incarnate, participates in the uniquely divine activities of creating all things and reconciling all things. Α feature of the hymn that further underlines the inclusion of Christ in the divine identity is the extended catalogue of the heavenly powers in v. 16: “whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.” Probably all of these are instances of the “invisible things.” The point is that even over these exalted heavenly powers (cf. Eph 1:21) the pre-existent Christ is preeminent as the firstborn, and they were created through him. Unlike them, he belongs on the divine side of the monotheistic distinction between Creator and creation. This reference to the powers is parallel to the insistence in Jewish literature that all “the host of heaven” were created by the one God (Neh 9:6) and therefore should not be worshipped as gods. In my view, the same point is intended by the distinction between Christ and angels on which the first chapter of Hebrews insists.81 We can compare also the exaltation of Christ “far above” all the heavenly powers in Ephesians 1:21, and the obeisance to the exalted Christ by all creatures, including those in the heavens, in Philippians 2:10, but whereas these passages refer to the exalted Christ, the Colossians hymn take his pre-eminence back to his role in the creation of all things. Since there is no longer any reason to think that this part of the hymn is an adaptation of an original hymn, designed to relate the hymn to the concerns of the letter, we can recognize that the extended reference to the heavenly powers belongs integrally to the christological intent of the hymn. Christ’s divine pre-eminence is evidenced especially by his relationship to these highest of all created entities. 2.7 The Hymn and the Letter The very elaborately composed hymn in Colossians 1:15–20 cannot have been composed solely for inclusion in the letter to the Colossians. It must have preexisted the letter. It is very plausible (especially in the light of Col 3:16) that it was composed for use in worship and was already known to the Christians at Colossae. A notable feature of the main part of the letter, following the hymn

81  See Richard Bauckham, “Monotheism and Christology in Hebrews 1,” in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, eds. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North, JSNTSS 263 (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 167–85. Cf. also the exaltation of Christ “far above” all the heavenly powers in Eph 1:21, and the obeisance to the exalted Christ by all creatures, including those in the heavens, in Phil 2:10.

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(1:21–3:17), is the way it frequently takes up words and themes from the hymn. These are the main instances (others are more debatable82): 1:22 1:23 1:24 2:9 2:10 2:10 2:15 2:19 3:10 3:11 3:15 3:15

ἀποκατηλλάγητε (in NT used only in Col 1:20, 21 and Eph 2:16) ἐν πάσῃ κτίσει τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ κατοικεῖ πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος σωματικῶς ὅς ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ πάσης ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐξουσίας τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ἐξουσίας τὴν κεφαλήν, ἐξ οὗ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα κατ’ εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος τὰ πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν Χριστός ἡ εἰρήνη τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι

The word πᾶς occurs 19 times in 2:21–3:17. These references back to the hymn serve to apply what it says in completely universal terms to the particularity of the Christians at Colossae and the issues that concern them. Some themes from the hymn are developed further and in new ways. In particular, the idea of Christ’s subjugation of the heavenly powers (2:15) is a fresh development, and the idea of Christ as the head of the body is developed through the metaphor of growth (2:19). This pattern of reference back to the hymn and development of its themes treats the hymn rather as though it were scripture. The section 2:21–3:17 might almost be called a commentary on the hymn. An important clue to this treatment of the hymn lies in the reference to “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” (ψαλμοῖς, ὕμνοις, ᾠδαῖς πνευματικαῖς) (3:16). Commentators are surprisingly cautious about relating this directly to the hymn in 1:15–20,83 but surely, if the 82  See Gordley, The Colossian Hymn, 265–66, for 25 possible allusions to the hymn in the rest of Colossians. On p. 267, he shows that if all these allusions are real, “there is very little in the hymn that is not taken up later in the epistle.” 83  E.g. Marianne Meye Thompson, Colossians and Philemon, Two Horizons NT Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 86: “Scholars have sometimes speculated with the ‘hymns’ in view might be the sort of hymn to Christ we have in Col 1:15–20; but while this is suggestive there is no definite proof of the theory.” This comment is limited to considering whether the Colossians hymn is the sort of hymn intended by the word ὕμνοις. She does not ask whether that hymn belongs in any of the three categories. Which of the three categories it belongs to is debatable, but that it belongs in one of the three categories is extremely likely. Cf. Gordley, The Colossian Hymn, 268: “If 3:16 is not a direct reference to the hymn, the hymn at least forms a first-hand illustration and formulation of exactly

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latter was a hymn already known to the Colossian Christians, it must be included. We need not decide to which of the three categories it belongs, especially since the adjective πνευματικαῖς probably applies to all three.84 The key question is the meaning of πνευματικαῖς. The word πνευματικός has a considerable range of meanings in the Pauline corpus, but I suggest that in this context the most obvious meaning is “inspired by the Spirit.” (This is probably its meaning also in Col 1:9.) Dunn says that the adjective “whether referring to all three items or only the last, almost certainly denotes or at least includes songs sung under immediate inspiration of the Spirit.” He appeals to the “close parallel” in 1 Corinthians 14:15 (ψαλὠ τῷ πνεύματι),85 which refers to singing in tongues. But in that context τῷ πνεύματι, contrasted with τῷ νοΐ, probably refers to the human spirit.86 In Colossians 3:16, there is no need to think of spontaneous inspiration of songs composed actually while singing. Rather, just as the biblical Psalms were believed to have been composed under the inspiration of the Spirit, so (at least some) early Christian hymns were too. Colossians 1:15–20 and Philippians 2:6–11, both compositions in the tradition of Jewish religious poetry and modeled to some extent on the biblical Psalms, would be examples of Spirit-inspired hymns that could be treated to some degree like scriptural texts. Alongside the biblical Psalms, which in the early Christian movement were widely interpreted (and doubtless also sung) as poems about Jesus Christ, there were also christological hymns composed by early Christian poets inspired like David by the Spirit. 3 Conclusion These two passages from the Pauline corpus are both pre-formed literary units that have been incorporated in the respective letters. They are of different genres, one a confession of faith, the other a hymn, but both are cited as authoritative texts that function with something like scriptural authority in the arguments of the respective letters. One is a Christian version of the Shema, the other a hymn that resembles the biblical Psalms in many of its poetic techniques. Both employ numerical composition and prepositional theology. Both which message about Christ should be indwelling them through their teaching, admonishing and singing.” 84  According to Greek grammar such an adjective, qualifying all three nouns, should agree in gender with the last noun in the list. 85  Dunn, The Epistles, 239. 86   Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000), 1111–13.

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are notable for their cosmic Christology, which is integral to the first but much more developed in the second. 1 Corinthians 8:6, as a Christian version of the Shema, incorporates Jesus Christ within the Shema’s definition of the one Lord God of Israel. This is indicated not only on the surface level, by the way that the words of the Shema are apportioned to God the Father and to Jesus Christ, but also by means of numerical composition. Each of the two sections consists of thirteen words, the numerical value of the Hebrew word “one,” as used in the Shema and duplicated in this Christian version, while the twenty-six words of the complete unit correspond to the numerical value of the divine Name. Not only does Jesus Christ himself bear the divine Name, but also he is included in the unique divine identity of the God who is so named. This version of the Shema also expands it by specifying the relationship of the one God and the one Lord to the whole of creation (“all things”). It adapts a Jewish confessional statement that uses three prepositions to specify God’s relationship to all things—as effective cause, final cause and instrumental cause. Just as the words of the Shema are apportioned to God and Jesus Christ, so the prepositions are apportioned to them. In this way Jesus Christ is included in the unique divine activity of creation as the instrumental cause or agent through whom God created all things. This is an expression of christological monotheism in which Jesus Christ is given a cosmic role within the whole of God’s relationship to the whole cosmos. 1 Corinthians 8:6 could be called quasi-poetic in view of its concise expression in which parallelism and numerical composition serve to embed concentrated meaning. Colossians 1:15–20 is truly a poem or hymn within the Jewish tradition of religious poetry represented above all by the biblical Psalms. The discovery of its elaborate numerical composition, using techniques that are found in the Psalms, solves at a stroke the controversies about the structure and the original form of the hymn. It is structured in two sections, each of fifty-five words, and the text that we have must be the form in which it was originally composed. The two sections concern respectively creation and new creation (or reconciliation), both depicted as the activity of God through Jesus Christ. By comparison with 1 Corinthians 8:6, the hymn is more christologically concentrated, in the sense that, while God is implicit as the ultimate source of both creation and reconciliation, Jesus Christ is the explicit agent and goal throughout. The seven prepositional phrases with “all things” all express the relationship of Jesus Christ to the whole cosmos and by comparison with 1 Corinthians 8:6 expand the range of prepositions used to express this, thus extending the range of the inclusion of Jesus Christ within the divine relationship to all things.

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The two strophes are closely related to each other, emphasizing that creation and reconciliation are two phases of the single purpose of God for the whole cosmos, which is accomplished equally and throughout by Jesus Christ. He is pre-eminent over all created things, both because they were all without exception created in and through him and because, in incarnation, death and resurrection, he renewed the whole creation. In terms of poetic techniques, the relationship between creation and new creation is emphasized by the parallelism, both sequential and concentric, between the two strophes. Features of numerical composition are designed to embed the relationships of Jesus Christ both to all things, created and redeemed, and to God. The pronoun αὐτός, which always refers to Jesus Christ, occurs eleven times across the whole hymn. These eleven occurrences of αὐτός (five letters in all declined forms) comprise fifty-five letters, corresponding to the fifty-five words in each of the two strophes of the hymn, indicating the way that Jesus Christ pervades the whole course of creation and new creation. But the eleven occurrences of the pronoun also encode Christ’s relationship to God, since in the Psalms eleven is the symbolic number of fullness. This relates Jesus Christ to the phrase “the whole fullness” (πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα), which describes the incarnate Christ as full of the divine presence. The importance of this phrase is assured by the fact that it occurs at the mathematical centre of the second strophe. Within that strophe it is enclosed on each side by twentysix words. This number is the numerical value of the divine Name, indicating that “the whole fullness” indwelling Jesus Christ is the presence of YHWH. Though otherwise only implicit in the divine passives of the hymn, God is intensively present in this key phrase that defines Jesus Christ’s relationship to God. Even more important than the numerical composition and prepositional theology for understanding the meaning of the hymn is its exegetical character. Like the first part of the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the Colossians hymn is a christological reading of the Genesis creation account (1:1–2:1). This has been obscured in the scholarly tradition by the claim that the figure of Wisdom provides the model for the hymn’s depiction of Christ’s relationship to creation. In fact, Genesis 1 explains more of the hymn than Wisdom can, and once we recognize the extent of the relationship to Genesis 1, appeal to Wisdom becomes redundant, as is the case also with the Johannine Prologue. If there are allusions to Wisdom, they are minor and would not have enabled readers/hearers to recognize Wisdom as the model for this account of the cosmic Christ. Some of the ways that the author of the hymn has found Christ in Genesis parallel the ways that Philo found the Logos in Genesis, showing not that Christ is identified with the Philonic Logos but that the two authors

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employed similar hermeneutical techniques. The allusions in question (especially the words εἰκὼν and ἀρχή) would have pointed readers to Genesis, not to Philo’s Logos. It is notable that, differently from Philo, the author of the hymn puts some of his allusions to Genesis into the second strophe of the hymn, finding in Genesis a model for the new creation as well as an account of the original creation. The inclusio between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:1 is imitated by the hymn as an inclusio that encompasses both creation and reconciliation. However, the reading of Genesis 1 accounts, as we might expect, for less of the second strophe than of the first. The second strophe includes elements of Christian language that do not reflect biblical exegesis (“the body, the church,” “reconcile,” “making peace through the blood of his cross”) but an important part is played by exegesis of two texts from the Psalms. The importance of these texts has been missed by previous commentators (who have merely mentioned the first and ignored the second). The word πρωτότοκος (“firstborn’) alludes to one of the two central verses of the Davidic (and so messianic) Psalm 89 (88). Early Christians would have read this text as not merely giving David a place of pre-eminence among earthly rulers, but as exalting the Messiah to the status of the Most High God, just as Psalm 110:1 was widely understood to do. This explains why, as the “firstborn from the dead,” the Christ of the hymn becomes “in all things pre-eminent.” The second key allusion is to Psalm 68:16 (67:17), which similarly occupies a central position in this long psalm and would have been seen as the focus of its meaning. The hymn’s words “in which … was pleased to dwell” are quoted from this verse of the Psalm, where they refer to God’s dwelling on Mount Zion. So, the hymn understands the presence of “the whole fullness” in Christ to resemble the divine presence that “filled” the temple. Finally, this essay has broached the issue of the relationship of the hymn to the letter. The way the main section of the letter following the hymn refers back to the words and themes of the hymn, as well as developing some of its themes further, applying the hymn to the specific circumstances of the Colossian Christians, resembles the way a Jewish or Christian exegete might expound a passage of scripture. The key to this use of the hymn may lie in the letter’s own reference to “spiritual songs” (3:16), i.e. hymns inspired by the Spirit. It may be that the hymn, like the Psalms of David, was understood to be an inspired composition.

Chapter 8

One God, One Lord in the Epistle of James Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr 1 Introduction In recent research on the Epistle of James, the longstanding ban on theology has been suspended, as has the prohibition to seek structure and coherence of argument or to look for a consistent intention in the letter.1 The Christology of James, however, still is a rather neglected feature in the quest for the letter’s theological profile. Most scholars point to the theocentric focus of the letter, mentioning along the way that Jesus is named only twice and that the Holy Spirit is missing entirely. (Indeed, this was already a decisive argument for Martin Luther in his critical assessment of the letter as a whole).2 There is, as far as I know, only a handful of more thorough studies on Christological passages in James, some of which are already a bit dated.3 Even in Larry Hurtado’s work on the early evidence for veneration of Jesus Christ, the Epistle of James occurs only very infrequently, indeed, is absent almost entirely.4 This comes as a surprise, because the title of his seminal book One God, One Lord could be taken as an allusion to the prescript of the Epistle 1  See K.-W. Niebuhr, “‘A New Perspective on James’? Neuere Forschungen zum Jakobusbrief,” TLZ 129 (2004): 1019–1044; M. Konradt, “Theologie in der ‘strohernen Epistel,’ Ein Literaturbericht zu neueren Ansätzen in der Exegese des Jakobusbriefes,” VuF 44 (1999): 54–78. 2  See K.-W. Niebuhr, “Gerechtigkeit und Rechtfertigung bei Matthäus und Jakobus. Eine Herausforderung für gegenwärtige lutherische Hermeneutik in globalen Kontexten,” TLZ 140 (2015): 1329–1348; English translation “Justice and Justification in Matthew and James: A Challenge for Lutheran Hermeneutics Today,” Vox Scripturae 25 (2017): 521–546. 3  See F. Mußner, “‘Direkte’ und ‘indirekte’ Christologie im Jakobusbrief,” Catholica 24 (1970): 111–117; U. Luck, “Die Theologie des Jakobusbriefes,” ZThK 81 (1984): 1–30; M. Karrer, “Christus der Herr und die Welt als Stätte der Prüfung. Zur Theologie des Jakobusbriefes,” KuD 35 (1989): 166–187; C. Burchard, “Zu einigen christologischen Stellen des Jakobusbriefes,” in Anfänge der Christologie, Festschrift F. Hahn, ed. C. Breytenbach and C. Gerber (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 353–368. The most extensive survey of Christology in James is H. Frankemölle, Der Brief des Jakobus, ÖTBK 17/2 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus; Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1994), 376–387. Cf. also S. Wenger, Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios. Eine exegetische Studie über das Gottesbild im Jakobusbrief, AThANT 100 (Zürich: TVZ, 2011), 50–64. 4  In Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), there are only three references to James: 2:7 (at p. 202), 5:13 (at p. 147), 5:14 (at p. 200 n. 89).

© KARL-WILHELM NIEBUHR, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_009

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of James, where the author presents himself to his audience as “James, the slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In this paper, I try to turn over the argument when searching for the exact relationship between propositions dealing with God and with Jesus Christ in the letter. Most studies on Christology in James try to subordinate the few references to Jesus Christ in 1:1 and 2:1 to statements in the letter about God which occur much more frequently (thus following a so-called theocentric approach).5 However, I wonder whether this approach can do justice to the very first occurrence of references to both God and Jesus Christ in the letter prescript. If the author relates himself as well as his audience right from the beginning to “God and the Lord Jesus Christ” without indicating any hierarchy between the two terms, then one could also understand the predication “Jesus Christ” as defining more specifically what he and they think and believe about God. In this understanding, the Christological predication of Jesus would have a defining role for the faith in God the author shares with his readers. One would have to speak of Christocentric theology rather than of theocentric Christology. My argument begins with brief exegetical analyses of the two explicitly christological verses, 1:1 and 2:1. Then I present a brief survey of all other occurrences of κύριος and θεός in the letter. Finally, by way of conclusion, I try to draw a sketch of Christocentric theology in the Epistle of James as one example of the variety of theisms in early Christianity. 2

The Letter Prescript as Foundation for a Christocentric Theology in James

In his prescript, the writer introduces himself to his audience as “James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1).6 For members of these early Christian congregations, it had to be clear from the outset not only that it is James the brother of Jesus who was writing here,7 but also that this James 5  See, e.g., D. C. Allison, The Epistle of James, ICC (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 89: “James is theocentric, not christocentric.” 6  For a recent interpretation of the letter prescript see R. Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” in Muted Voices of the New Testament: Readings in the Catholic Epistles, ed. K. M. Hockey, M. N. Pierce, and F. Watson, LNTS 565 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 101–120. 7  Pace R. Metzner, “Der Lehrer Jakobus: Überlegungen zur Verfasserfrage des Jakobusbriefes,” ZNW 104 (2013): 238–67; idem, Der Brief des Jakobus, ThHK 14 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017), 3–13, who argues that the author was an otherwise completely unknown Christian teacher called James somewhere in the early second century. Against this

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situates himself in an appropriate relation to the Lord Jesus Christ. This applies to all ancient readers we know about, notwithstanding modern historicalcritical identifications of the author that are still highly controversial.8 The predication of Jesus as the Lord in the prescript of the letter implies one of the core elements of early Christian confessions. Calling Jesus “Lord” and “Anointed” presupposes the faith in Jesus Christ as risen from the dead and returning soon to judge heaven and earth.9 Thus the self-introduction of James in the prescript of the letter implies that its author belongs to the community of early Christ venerators, whatever the particular date and provenance of the letter. However, with regard to the interpretation of the prescript as an expression of beliefs uniting the author and his audience, there is still more to say. The phrase Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος shows particular marks of a well-elaborated formulation. It is a hyperbaton, changing the normal word order between noun and genitive clause. The expression qualifies the self-predication of the author as δοῦλος. A chain of four genitive endings shapes the view of the written words and qualifies the sound of the text when read aloud. “James, the slave” thus forms an inclusio around the full theological and Christological confession: “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” But the question remains: who is (or are) the referent(s) of this expression? Obviously, the connection between θεός and κύριος Ἰησοὺς Χριστός is so close that any sharp separation between both would not do justice to the intentions of the author. James does not want to introduce himself as “the servant of two lords,” but as the slave of the one God of Israel and, at the same moment, as a Christian teacher (cf. 3:1ff.)10 who wants to orient his audience and their way of life to view, see K.-W. Niebuhr, “James,” in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, vol. 1: From Paul to Josephus: Literary Receptions of Jesus in the First Century CE, ed. H. Bond, C. Keith, and J. Schröter (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) 259–275, at 263 n. 24. 8  For my own view on these questions, see K.-W. Niebuhr, “Der erinnerte Jesus bei Jakobus. Ein Beitrag zur Einleitung in einen umstrittenen Brief,” in Spurensuche zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Festschrift U. Schnelle, ed. M. Labahn, FRLANT 271 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 307–329 at 326–329. For more recent discussion on authorship, cf. Allison, The Epistle of James, 3–32; S. McKnight, The Letter of James, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 13–38. 9  See Wenger, Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios, 53–64. In one of the very few recent studies on Christology in James, M. A. Jackson-McCabe, “The Messiah Jesus in the Mythic World of James,” JBL 122 (2003): 701–730, accentuates the meaning of Χριστός on the background of ancient Jewish Messianic expectations. Cf. also J. Assaël and É. Cuviller, “Quelques éléments de christologie dans l’épître de Jacques,” RHPR 90 (2010): 321–341. 10  See K.-W. Niebuhr, “Jakobus als Lehrer. Eine Skizze nach dem Jakobusbrief,” in Religion und Bildung—interdisziplinär, Festschrift M. Wermke, ed. T. Heller (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018), 89–102.

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Jesus Christ, the risen Lord and Messiah. Thus, the expression θεὸς καὶ κύριος Ἰησοὺς Χριστός is to be understood as one single term referring to the one and only God the congregation believes in, for this God, according to their faith, has defined himself by acting in the “Jesus event.” Moreover, the address to his audience as ταῖς δώδεκα φυλαῖς ταῖς ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ also implies a theological qualification of its own. As everyone acquainted with the scriptures of Israel would have been aware, the concept of Israel consisting of twelve tribes was an idea of the biblical past and, perhaps, of expectations for the future, but not for the present time of history.11 Therefore, the term “twelve tribes in the diaspora,” pronounced by a “slave of the Lord,” would potentially awake eschatological overtones at least in a community attuned to biblical promises and expectations based on holy scripture, even though the perspective of the future return to the holy land is nowhere made explicit in the letter.12 To conclude this section, then: The belief in the one God of Israel and the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ establish the initial point and the theological basis for the whole letter. This implies that the author and the addressees agree in their basic theological convictions that the God of Israel by selfidentification is “united” with Jesus the Messiah (who died on the cross and was raised from the dead, as any “Christian” reader would have known). The Christological confession in the prescript of James implies the Easter confession. It lays the ground for every following theological and paraenetic argument. The Christological definition of God in the prescript controls all further occurrences of God and Lord in the letter. 3

The Admonition against Partiality and Its Christological Basis (2:1)

The admonition to the audience not to show partiality in their community life opens the main argumentative section of the letter (2:1–5:6).13 The address to ἀδελφοί μου is based on “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ of glory.” This phrase has been the subject of controversial debates. Solutions range from different conjunctions of the elements πίστιν, τοῦ κυρίου, and τῆς δόξης to theories of a later 11  Here see Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” 104–108. 12  Pace Jackson-McCabe, “The Messiah Jesus,” 712–714, 724–728. On James as a diaspora letter, see K.-W. Niebuhr, “Der Jakobusbrief im Licht frühjüdischer Diasporabriefe,” NTS 44 (1998): 420–443. 13  According to Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” 115, the only two cases where the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” and “Lord” occur are strategically placed.

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interpolation of ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, to text-critical proposals for the emendation of the whole clause.14 For my own interpretation, the argumentative context and the semantic coherence of the section comprising James 2:1–7 are decisive. The paragraph holds together by the semantic opposition of honour and shame (δόξα vs. αἰσχύνη):15 1 2 3 5 6 7

δόξα κύριος δόξα ἀνὴρ χρυσοδακτύλιος ἐν ἐσθῆτι λαμπρᾷ φοροῦντα τὴν ἐσθῆτα τὴν λαμπρὰν κάθου ὧδε καλῶς πλουσίους κληρονόμους τῆς βασιλείας οἱ πλούσιοι τὸ καλὸν ὄνομα

[αἰσχύνη] προσωπολημψία πτωχὸς ἐν ῥυπαρᾷ ἐσθῆτι τῷ πτωχῷ στῆθι ἢ κάθου ἐκεῖ ὑπὸ τὸ ὑποπόδιόν μου τοὺς πτωχοὺς ἠτιμάσατε τὸν πτωχόν καταδυναστεύουσιν

Several verbs pointing to polemical traditions of prophetic and wisdom texts from the Bible emphasize the conventional semantic opposition between honour and shame.16 They underline the paraenetic intention of the paragraph that opens the main argument of the letter, namely to exhibit and to strengthen the internal coherence between faith and works. The most striking semantic innovation occurs in v. 5, when the term πτωχός is close to θεός, ἐκλέγεσθαι, κληρονομεῖν, and βασιλεία, which words usually all belong to the side of honour, not shame. The decisive change of meaning comes with the term πίστις: 5 Oὐχ ὁ θεὸς ἐξελέξατο τοὺς πτωχοὺς τῷ κόσμῳ πλουσίους ἐν πίστει καὶ κληρονόμους τῆς βασιλείας ἧς ἐπηγγείλατο τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν αὐτόν; 14  See the brief overview in Allison, Epistle of James, 382–384; and J. S. Kloppenborg, “Judaeans or Judaean Christians in James?” in Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean: Jews, Christians, and Others, Festschrift S. G. Wilson, ed. Z. A. Crook and P. A. Harland (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2007), 113–135 at 126–133. 15  Cf. in the New Testament Phil 3:19: ἡ δόξα ἐν τῇ αἰσχύνῃ αὐτῶν. 16  For 2:6 ἠτιμάσατε τὸν πτωχόν, cf. Prov 14:21.

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This means that the faith of the recipients has directed them to a new understanding of the semantic and social order in their community.17 This faith, however, is defined by and directed to “God and the Lord Jesus Christ,” as is clear from the beginning of the letter18 and remains as a guide to interpretation through its opening section.19 If this is the case, and therefore the Christological contents of the faith are well grounded in the argument of the letter, then there is no need any longer to expel the clause ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ from the text by literary-critical or text-critical arguments. However, there remains the grammatical difficulty of how exactly to link the genitive τῆς δόξης with any of the other elements preceding the phrase in Jas 2:1. Does it refer to πίστις, to κύριος, or to Ἰησοὺς Χριστός?20 As usual in koine Greek, genitive constructions are open to a multitude of interpretations to capture the exact meaning of the case and the connections between the linguistic elements. There are no parallels in ancient Jewish or Christian Greek literature for the term τῆς δόξης modifying Ἰησοὺς Χριστός.21 The phrase κύριος τῆς δόξης, on the other hand, frequently occurs in contemporary literature, even in the New Testament with regard to Jesus.22 Yet, this is not enough to justify a textual emendation of ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ without any linguistic or manuscript evidence. The main argument against such a hypothesis is the implausibility of a native Greek-speaking interpolator producing a wording which is impossible from a grammatical point of view. From a rhetorical point of view, however, the chain of seven words with genitive endings (without a καί or any other conjunctions) is striking. Moreover, the verse is closely held together by the semantic opposition between προσωπολημψία and δόξα, forming an inclusio for the sentence. This opposition creates the semantic structure for the whole paragraph, as shown above. By taking into account the semantic structure of the verse and the paraenetic intention of the argument23 we may say that the faith of the addressees and the Christological predication of Jesus as Lord and Messiah are inserted into a 17  Cf. ὑμεῖς in vv. 1, 6, 7; διεκρίθητε ἐν ἑαυτοῖς in v. 4; ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί in v. 1, 5. 18  Cf. πίστις in 1:1, 3, 6. 19  Cf. 1:13–18 (on which see below). For the meaning of faith in James, see K.-W. Niebuhr, “Glaube im Stresstest. Πίστις im Jakobusbrief,” in Glaube. Das Verständnis des Glaubens im frühen Christentum und in seiner jüdischen und hellenistisch-römischen Umwelt, ed. J. Frey, B. Schliesser, and N. Ueberschaer, WUNT 373 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 473–501. 20  A new proposal for a translation is offered by J. Assaël and É. Cuviller, “À propos de la traduction et de l’interprétation de Jaques 2.1,” NTS 57 (2011): 145–151. 21  For evidence, see C. Burchard, Der Jakobusbrief, HNT 15/1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 97f. 22  Cf. 1 Cor 2:8: τὸν κύριον τῆς δόξης ἐσταύρωσαν. 23  See the address ἀδελφοί μου and the imperative form of the verb ἔχετε.

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traditional predication of God as “Lord of glory.” In any case, the predication of Jesus Christ as Lord of glory carries weight rhetorically, being in the final position, even if the formulation is odd-looking grammatically. The paraenetic argument in Jas 2:1–7 is thus grounded in the faith that unites author and addressees. As regards contents, this faith includes the confession of Jesus Christ as the Lord (v. 1). It consists of core elements of biblical and Jewish convictions about God electing the poor and judging the rich (v. 5). It comprises the expectation that the faithful will inherit the eschatological kingdom (v. 5), and it relies on the “event” (or experience, possibly at baptism) that “the honourable name … was invoked over them” (v. 7).24 Interpreted this way, the exhortation in Jas 2:1 may attest a particular variety of “binitarian” (or, as Larry Hurtado has latterly proposed, “dyadic”)25 theology in early Christianity. 4

The Terms κύριος and θεός in James

To separate strictly either Christological or theological understandings of the terms κύριος and θεός in James would not do justice to the intentions of the letter. This is what I shall now demonstrate by a brief survey of all further occurrences of the two terms in the letter.26 1:5–8 αἰτείτω παρὰ τοῦ διδόντος θεοῦ πᾶσιν ἁπλῶς καὶ μὴ ὀνειδίζοντος μὴ γὰρ οἰέσθω ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖνος ὅτι λήμψεταί τι παρὰ τοῦ κυρίου The term ὁ διδὼν θεός is constructed by a participle defining the agency of God, like similar predications of God in biblical and ancient Jewish as well as New Testament texts.27 God is the one who typically gives, as, for example, in Jas 1:17: He is “the father of lights” who gives every good gift and every perfect donation. The term κύριος forms the closure of a bipartite antithetic statement on the right attitude to God. The congregation is called to encounter God in 24  For Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” 110–113, the term “to call on the name of the Lord” corresponds to “regular Christian usage” (112). In this context, “James refers to the persecution of messianic Jews on account of their confession of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. In other words, James’s addressees are exclusively messianic Jews” (113). 25  See L. W. Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion: The Context and Character of Christological Faith, Library of Early Christology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017), and the review by J. F. McGrath in RBL 05/2019. 26  The term κύριος occurs 14 times in the letter: 1:1, 7; 2:1; 3:9; 4:10, 15; 5:4, 7, 8, 10, 11 (bis), 14, 15; the term θεός occurs only slightly more often (16 times): 1:1, 5, 13 (bis), 20, 27; 2:5, 19, 23 (bis); 3:9; 4:4 (bis), 6, 7, 8. 27  On which see the seminal study by G. Delling, “Partizipiale Gottesprädikationen in den Briefen des Neuen Testaments,” StTh 17 (1963): 1–59.

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an attitude of openness for his good gifts, not of anxiousness or doubting. The semantic opposition between both positions is expressed by the verbs αἰτεῖν vs. λαμβάνειν. Moreover, the reason for this distinction is expressed by another semantic opposition, between faith and doubts: αἰτείτω δὲ ἐν πίστει, μηδὲν διακρινόμενος (v. 6). The two expressions pointing to God not only form an inclusio for this well constructed passage, but are, from a semantic point of view, paradigmatically synonymous: .

5 τις ὑμῶν αἰτείτω παρὰ τοῦ διδόντος θεοῦ 7 ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖνος [οὐ] λήμψεταί τι παρὰ τοῦ κυρίου By this construction, κύριος not only stands as a synonym for θεός, but the pivotal call to faith (αἰτείτω ἐν πίστει) positioned in the centre of the passage determines both terms. This faith, however, in the Letter of James refers to “faith in God and the Lord Jesus Christ,” which arises evidently from the letter opening.28 Thus, the tested faith of the congregations under circumstances of affliction and temptation becomes the religious basis for their request to God to receive wisdom. This faith, at the same time, is the theological reason for their assuredness that the Lord will answer their pleas. Their trust in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ” defines to whom their requests apply. μηδεὶς πειραζόμενος λεγέτω ὅτι ἀπὸ θεοῦ πειράζομαι· ὁ γὰρ θεὸς ἀπείραστός ἐστιν κακῶν, πειράζει δὲ αὐτὸς οὐδένα Again, we find a carefully formed, rhetorically pointed statement. Four occurrences of the root πειρ- are particularly striking. The inclusio of μηδείς and οὐδένα holds together the bipartite admonition. One may also find chiastic structures in the wording, shaped by the combination of the negative pronouns μηδείς/οὐδείς, the term θεός, and the root πειρ-: 1:13

μηδεὶς πειραζόμενος ἀπὸ θεοῦ πειράζομαι ὁ γὰρ θεὸς ἀπείραστός πειράζει … οὐδένα Semantic links connect the verse to the preceding context, in particular to vv. 5–8 by the term θεός29 and to vv. 2–3 by the root πειρ-. In 1:2–3, testing and affliction refers to Christian faith in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In 1:5–8, 28  Cf. 1:1, 3, 12; 2:1. 29  Cf. also the link to v. 12 by the passivum divinum ἐπηγγείλατο.

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as we have seen, θεός and κύριος are not distinguished strictly from each other from a text-pragmatic point of view. In addition, the beatitude in v. 12 opens an eschatological perspective for those who retain their (Christian!) faith during temptations.30 Therefore, by its careful, rhetorically pointed formulation as well as by its close connectedness to the context, the admonition to hang on to God who does not tempt the believers but presents them with good gifts relies on the Christian faith that controls the letter opening. 1:17 πᾶσα δόσις ἀγαθή … καταβαῖνον ἀπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς τῶν φώτων The term πατήρ used for God occurs also in 1:27 and 3:9. In 1:17, the phrase πατὴρ τῶν φώτων closely refers to v. 18 where the writer reminds his audience of the centre of their religious identity.31 They are (re-)born (ἀπεκύησεν ἡμᾶς) from God by the word of truth (λόγῳ ἀληθείας) to become firstlings in his (new) creation (ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν αὐτοῦ κτισμάτων). Although every single phrase in this tight formulation may have its origins in biblical and Jewish texts and conceptions, we cannot understand the whole sentence and its context without referring to the new understanding Christians have developed out of their confession that this God has re-defined himself with regard to their Lord Jesus Christ.32 1:20 ὀργὴ … ἀνδρὸς δικαιοσύνην θεοῦ οὐκ ἐργάζεται This verse also belongs to the section that expresses the centre of faith and religious identity that unites the author and his audience. Even though the verse is part of the paraenetic section (1:19–27) where the author outlines his deductions from a right understanding of faith, the argument is closely connected to the preceding and following statements. They refer to a specifically “Christian” faith (without using this terminology, of course) that forms their convictions

30  On which see K.-W. Niebuhr, “Die Seligpreisungen in der Bergpredigt nach Matthäus und im Brief des Jakobus. Zugänge zum Menschenbild Jesu?” in Neutestamentliche Exegese im Dialog. Hermeneutik—Wirkungsgeschichte—Matthäusevangelium, Festschrift U. Luz, ed. P. Lampe, M. Mayordomo, and M. Sato (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), 275–296. 31  On which see M. Konradt, Christliche Existenz nach dem Jakobusbrief. Eine Studie zu seiner soteriologischen und ethischen Konzeption, StUNT 22 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 41–100. 32  See my interpretation in K.-W. Niebuhr, “Jakobus und Paulus über das Innere des Menschen und den Ursprung seiner ethischen Entscheidungen,” NTS 62 (2016): 1–30 at 6–11.

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about God.33 Therefore, the Christological and soteriological foundations of their faith also form the basis for the paraenetic admonition. Although the term δικαιοσύνη is not used here in a Pauline sense, it points to an eschatological and soteriological understanding of the “Christian” way of life as deployed further in the following section on faith and works (cf. 2:14–26). 1:27 θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ θεῷ καὶ πατρὶ αὕτη ἐστίν … Here again, God is called “father,” as in 1:17 and 3:9. However, this does not mean that all Christological implications disappear. As Paul, for example, indicates in 1 Cor 8:6, precisely this predication of God as father was open to being continued by an explicitly Christological confession. Without any doubt, the concept of “God the father” has its roots in biblical and Jewish religious as well as in Greek philosophical traditions.34 Yet, this tradition-historical background does not exclude but discloses its application in explicitly Christian contexts, too, as, for example, in the Letter of James. 2:5 ὁ θεὸς ἐξελέξατο τοὺς πτωχοὺς τῷ κόσμῳ πλουσίους ἐν πίστει We have already seen that several terms determine the Christological, soteriological, and eschatological character of the whole section.35 Based on the letter opening, all of these terms are open to implications resulting from the trust of the recipients in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ,” especially if they are explicitly linked to their faith (e.g., πτωχοὺς … πλουσίους ἐν πίστει). This refers, in particular, to the phrase κληρονόμοι τῆς βασιλείας, which opens an eschatological perspective if read as part of a promise expressed by “James, slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1). By this reference, I do not mean that the author here makes use of specific logia from the Jesus tradition.36 Obviously, he does not want to quote his “older brother,” but he points his audience to God who elects the poor according to the testimony of the Bible and to their own (Jewish) religious convictions. Nevertheless, those who direct their faith to “God and the Lord Jesus Christ” need not exclude Jesus from their trust in God when they come across such a promise from the mouth of James.

33  See the phrases λόγος ἀληθείας, ἀπαρχή … τῶν αὐτοῦ κτισμάτων, v. 18; ἔμφυτος λόγος … δυνάμενος σῶσαι τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν, v. 21; νόμος τέλειος … τῆς ἐλευθερίας, v. 25. 34  See Wenger, Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios, 72–86. 35  See v. 1: πίστις, δόξα; v. 5: ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί, κληρονόμοι τῆς βασιλείας, ἐπηγγείλατο; v. 6: τὸ καλὸν ὄνομα τὸ ἐπικληθὲν ἐφ’ ὑμᾶς. 36  E.g., Matt 5:3//Luke 6:20. For a more thorough discussion on James and the Jesus tradition see my “Der erinnerte Jesus bei Jakobus,” 311–320.

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2:19 σὺ πιστεύεις ὅτι εἷς θεός ἐστιν; This verse belongs to a digression on the close relationship between faith and works, and is inserted into the main argument on the testing of faith in the life of the community of the believers (2:1–3:12). The leading thought of the main argument is the unity of hearing and doing, faith and deeds. The first argumentative step (2:14–20) leads to the conclusion that faith without works is useless (v. 20).37 The dialogical (“diatribal”) formulation in v. 19 gives a last, rhetorically pointed reason for this conclusion. Even the core of the confession of Israel, the Shema Israel, would be idle38 if not connected to right doing, to a way of life according to the will of God. The only possible and compelling conclusion for those who believe in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ,” therefore, is that their own “Christian” faith would likewise be idle if not followed by works. Implications with regard to their community life are given abundantly in the preceding and the following contexts.39 2:23 ἐπίστευσεν δὲ Ἀβραὰμ τῷ θεῷ … φίλος θεοῦ ἐκλήθη The reference to Abraham as a biblical model for true faith accompanied by works is part of the digression to the main argument, as well. As part of this argument, it refers to the faith of the addressees, that is, their faith in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”40 The connection to faith is highlighted by the phrase “thus the scripture was fulfilled that says …” (καὶ ἐπληρώθη ἡ γραφὴ ἡ λέγουσα). This quotation formula has no parallels in any other contemporary Jewish Greek texts. It obviously presupposes an interpretation of the figure of Abraham as part of the scripture read and interpreted from the perspective of an eschatologically oriented faith. In the case of the Letter of James, this apparently was the “Christian” faith. εὐλογοῦμεν τὸν κύριον καὶ πατέρα … καταρώμεθα τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τοὺς καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν θεοῦ γεγονότας· Here, the predication πατήρ refers to κύριος, not to θεός, as in 1:27. Nonetheless, the verbs εὐλογεῖν and καταρᾶσθαι, used in the first person plural, point to forms of religious practice in the communities of the letter recipients.41 We may ask, 3:9

37  See v. 26: “faith without works is dead.” 38  The term ἀργός (= ἀ-εργός) means “without any work.” 39  See 1:27; 2:2–4, 6, 8–9, 15–16; 4:1–4, 11; 5:13–16. 40  Even if the majority or entirety of the addressees are born Israelites! On the debate about the letter recipients, see Allison, The Epistle of James, 32–50; Kloppenborg, “Judaeans or Judaean Christians in James?,” 113–126. 41  Cf. εὐλογία καὶ κατάρα in 3:10.

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therefore, what do we know about worship in these congregations? After all, there are several hints of religious practices in the letter. In 2:2 the place (or only the event?) of their meetings is mentioned: the synagogue. In 1:27 they are taught about the true service (θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ θεῷ καὶ πατρί). In 2:7 the author reminds them of the moment when “the excellent name” was “invoked over” them (τὸ καλὸν ὄνομα τὸ ἐπικληθὲν ἐφ’ ὑμᾶς). Most notably, in 5:13–16 several forms of religious life in the communities appear. The addressees shall be praying and singing psalms (προσευχέσθω, ψαλλέτω, v. 13). They shall call the elders of the congregation to pray over a sick person and to anoint him or her “in the name of the Lord” (προσευξάσθωσαν ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ἀλείψαντες ἐλαίῳ ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι [τοῦ] κυρίου, v. 14). Their prayer of faith (ἡ εὐχὴ τῆς πίστεως, v. 15) will save the sick. They are called to confess their sins one another and to pray for each other (ἐξομολογεῖσθε οὖν ἀλλήλοις τὰς ἁμαρτίας καὶ εὔχεσθε ὑπὲρ ἀλλήλων, v. 16). They trust in the power of the petition of the righteous (δέησις δικαίου, v. 16). Again, there is no explicit indication in the text whether all such religious activities are directed either to God or to Jesus. However, as I have pointed out already, this would be the wrong question. For those who believe in “God and the Lord Jesus Christ,” there can be no “either/or,” no separation between the two, or better: no split inside the one and only God in Jesus Christ. However we want to explain the religious practice mentioned here, this passage seems to be the most apparent evidence for a particular form of Christ veneration in the letter. 4:4–10 … οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἡ φιλία τοῦ κόσμου ἔχθρα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν; … φίλος εἶναι τοῦ κόσμου, ἐχθρὸς τοῦ θεοῦ … Ὁ θεὸς ὑπερηφάνοις ἀντιτάσσεται, ταπεινοῖς δὲ δίδωσιν χάριν. ὑποτάγητε οὖν τῷ θεῷ· ἀντίστητε δὲ τῷ διαβόλῳ ἐγγίσατε τῷ θεῷ, καὶ ἐγγιεῖ ὑμῖν ταπεινώθητε ἐνώπιον κυρίου, καὶ ὑψώσει ὑμᾶς The whole passage is full of antithetical terms, concepts, and values.42 The cause for such a harsh exhortation, apparently influenced by polemical prophetic language, is news of quarrels in the congregations. Such conflicts jeopardize, in the eyes of the author, the religious identity of the community. Their community should be full of gentleness and wisdom (3:13), just and peaceful (3:18), but in fact, there is war and fighting among them (4:1). The portrait of the ideal congregation as pictured in 3:13–18 derives its contours 42  Namely: κόσμος vs. θεός, θεός vs. διάβολος, ταπεινοί vs. ὑπερήφανοι, ἀντιτάσσεται, ἀντίστητε.

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from godly wisdom, received from above. It appears at its best in perfect moral and religious conduct (καλῆς ἀναστροφῆς τὰ ἔργα … ἐν πραΰτητι σοφίας, 3:13) as deployed in a catalogue of virtues (3:17). In contrast, if in their conduct the congregations exhibit “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” they testify against the truth (ψεύδεσθε κατὰ τῆς ἀληθείας, 3:14). Understood in this context, the harsh contrasts and the fierce polemic in 4:4–10 likewise receive their severity not only from prophetic or paraenetic traditions, but from an orientation to the ideal “Christian” community distinguished by faith and works. Again, the orientation to moral and religious values of biblical and early Jewish tradition and the self-understanding as eschatological community of Christ believers are not contradictory. They belong together. 4:15 Ἐὰν ὁ κύριος θέλῃ, καὶ ζήσομεν … Those addressed here are still members of the congregations as is indicated by several formulations in the second person plural in the near context.43 That is to say, they belong to the community that directs its trust to “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The paraenetic focus of the admonition in 4:15 points to God’s rule over the life and the deeds of the members of the congregations. This insight excludes any boasting and arrogance (v. 16). Such an admonition, based on trust in the Lord and his rule over life and death, of course, is not specifically “Christian.” Nevertheless, members of Christian congregations may, perhaps, notice with particular attention the announcement that “if the Lord wishes, we will live …” 5:4 αἱ βοαὶ τῶν θερισάντων εἰς τὰ ὦτα κυρίου Σαβαὼθ εἰσελήλυθαν The formulation clearly alludes to biblical phrases.44 The same refers to the context which is full of allusions to prophetic and wisdom literature. More important, however, are references to the coming eschatological judgment that highlight and intensify the admonitions. Whether the addressees of these admonitions belong to the congregations of the addressees or whether they are outsiders is highly controversial. However, this does not make any difference with regard to the theological weight of the accusations against the rich. They are pointed to the “last days” (ἐν ἐσχάταις ἡμέραις, 3:3), or to the “day of slaughter” (ἐν ἡμέρᾳ σφαγῆς, 3:5) when their wealth will be destroyed and their behaviour against the righteous poor will be judged. Thereby, the advent of the Lord is already in view. 43  ἐπίστασθε, v. 14, ἀντὶ τοῦ λέγειν ὑμᾶς, v. 15, καυχᾶσθε, v. 16. 44  Cf. Isa 5:9 LXX; Ps 17:7 LXX.

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5:7–8 μακροθυμήσατε οὖν, ἀδελφοί, ἕως τῆς παρουσίας τοῦ κυρίου … μακροθυμήσατε … ὅτι ἡ παρουσία τοῦ κυρίου ἤγγικεν Now, the author clearly addresses the members of the Christian congregations (ἀδελφοί, v. 7). Their hearts shall be strengthened in view of the coming of the Lord. The term ἡ παρουσία τοῦ κυρίου in early Christian literature is unambiguously filled by the expectation of the return of Jesus Christ.45 Therefore, it is hardly conceivable that Jesus here should not be in view.46 This implies that the judge coming soon to execute the eschatological tribulation47 is nobody else than Jesus Christ, as well. Moreover, in the perfect forms ἤγγικεν and ἕστηκεν we may find allusions to the Jesus tradition.48 However, more important for our argument are the christological implications of the expressions in Jas 5:7–9. For the readers of the letter as for its author, the Lord coming soon to judge the rich as well as the poor inside and outside the congregations is none other than “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” 5:10–11 ὑπόδειγμα λάβετε … τοὺς προφήτας, οἳ ἐλάλησαν ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου τὴν ὑπομονὴν Ἰὼβ ἠκούσατε, καὶ τὸ τέλος κυρίου εἴδετε, ὅτι πολύσπλαγχνός ἐστιν ὁ κύριος καὶ οἰκτίρμων. Again, the formulations are full of references to biblical figures and texts (the prophets, Job, God as compassionate and merciful).49 All of these biblicalsounding phrases, however, here point to the recipients of the letter who shall form their own faith according to the model (ὑπόδειγμα) of Job and the biblical prophets.50 Once more, they are addressed as ἀδελφοί and pointed to the prophetic sense of scripture. The prophets spoke ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου, and those who read scripture from the perspective of their faith not only know of the

45  See Wenger, Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios, 64–71. 46  See Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” 116–118. For Bauckham, the term κύριος in Jas 5:7–8, 14, 15 “a Christian reader would almost inevitably understand as referring to Jesus” (116). 47  Cf. 5:9: ἰδοὺ ὁ κριτὴς πρὸ τῶν θυρῶν ἕστηκεν. 48  Cf. Mark 1:15: ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ; Mark 13:29: γινώσκετε ὅτι ἐγγύς ἐστιν ἐπὶ θύραις; Mark 13:35: οὐκ οἴδατε γὰρ πότε ὁ κύριος τῆς οἰκίας ἔρχεται. 49  See R. Foster, The Significance of Exemplars for the Interpretation of the Letter of James, WUNT II/376 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 50  On Elijah in 5:17, see M. Kamell Kovalishyn, “The Prayer of Elijah in James 5: An Example of Intertextuality,” JBL 137 (2018): 1027–1045. For Job as a biblical model of endurance in James, see N. Ellis, The Hermeneutics of Divine Testing: Cosmic Trials and Biblical Interpretation in the Epistle of James and Other Jewish Literature, WUNT II/396 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 185–236.

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endurance of Job, but of the τέλος κυρίου as well. Therefore, when they read about the κύριος in the letter, they will have in mind “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” 5:14–15 καὶ προσευξάσθωσαν ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ἀλείψαντες ἐλαίῳ ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι [τοῦ]51 κυρίου· καὶ ἡ εὐχὴ τῆς πίστεως σώσει τὸν κάμνοντα, καὶ ἐγερεῖ αὐτὸν ὁ κύριος· Here again, several forms of religious practice in the congregations appear.52 If such religious practices were grounded in the faith of the members of the congregations, we may assume that they directed their prayers and confessions to the Lord who is none other than “God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In the name of that Lord they shall anoint the sick asking him to save them (5:14) and he will raise them (5:15). The prophets spoke in his name (5:10), and he will return to judge the rich (5:7f), because he is attentive to the suffering of the poor (5:4). The future of the pious is in his hands (4:15) and he raises the humble (4:10). He is the one they will praise (3:9) and their faith is directed to him (2:1), because he presents his believers with all what they need (1:7). Thus, throughout the letter it is always “God and the Lord Jesus Christ” to whom the view of the audience is directed. 5 Conclusion Taking together all references in the Epistle of James, the portrait of “God and the Lord Jesus Christ” seems to display a rather fully developed Christology. 51  See Bauckham, “Messianic Jewish Identity in James,” 116–119, who, referring to the use of the definite article here, argues that “in 5.10, the phrase ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου follows the practice of the Septuagint, where κυρίου substitutes for the Tetragrammaton, but in 5.14, where the name is that of the Lord Jesus, ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ κυρίου is what one would otherwise expect. In one case, speaking of the biblical prophets, James echoes the phrase as it is in the Septuagint, but in the other, speaking of the Christian practice of healing in the name of Jesus, he echoes specifically Christian language” (118–119). In our discussion at the symposium in Edinburgh, we discussed the text-critical evidence for arthrous or anarthrous use of the terms κύριος and θεός. I have checked the evidence in James according to the Editio Critica Maior, but without significant results. The arthrous and the anarthrous use with κύριος as well as with θεός change very often at different places and in different manuscripts, but I cannot find any rule for this. 52  Cf. προσεύχεσθαι, ψάλλειν, ἀλείφειν ἐλαίῳ ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου, ἡ εὐχὴ τῆς πίστεως, ἐξομολογεῖσθαι ἀλλήλοις τὰς ἁμαρτίας, εὔχεσθαι ὑπὲρ ἀλλήλων, δέησις, and the discussion above on 3:9.

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This Christology is shaped not only by two short occurrences of the name of Jesus in relation to the terms κύριος and Χριστός. It needs to include several more expressions about God, the Lord, “Father of Lights,” the eschatological judge, the one who raises the poor and sick and who elects, calls, and strengthens those who pray to him. It has become clear, at least, that not only with regard to the semantic contents of the term κύριος, but with regard to many other passages as well, we cannot sharply separate between “purely” theological and Christological meanings. Strikingly enough, however, there remain several lacunae in the portrait of Jesus, if compared to Pauline Christology. Soteriological consequences of the death of Jesus nowhere appear. The particular manner of Jesus’s death is never mentioned and his resurrection only derives from the confession of Jesus as the Lord. I also cannot see, for my part, any particular emphasis on a specifically “messianic” role of Jesus. On the other hand, his eschatological role receives more weight if we consider not only the two references to the παρουσία but also other passages dealing with the eschatological judgment. The “apocalyptic worldview” ascertained in the letter affects its portrait of Jesus, if Jesus’s dignity as the Lord includes his role as eschatological judge. However, as for the biblical view of God, it also applies to the portrait of Jesus, the Lord, in James that he is compassionate and merciful (5:11). Moreover, the fulfilment of the biblical promises to the poor, the little ones, the oppressed, as expressed in the letter, is also part of his ministry.53 One of the most striking consequences of this interpretation is that references to religious practice in the letter deserve more attention as evidence for early Christian Christ-devotion. If we cannot sharply distinguish between God and Jesus Christ as recipients of the requests, prayers, and perhaps also complaints of the believers, then every reference to such practices in the letter may testify to possible forms of Christ-veneration as well. With regard to Christological “titles,” we cannot confine our view to terms like κύριος and Χριστός. Interpreted in their contexts, these terms prove to be only part of more detailed arguments that are grounded in the main intention of the letter as well as in its theological foundation. The term πίστις is often an indication of this theological basis. However, as such, πίστις is defined christologically right from the letter opening; the confession of Jesus Christ has to be borne in mind at any place where faith occurs. Finally, next to the term κύριος, the idea of God’s glory (δόξα) also belongs to the christological/theological worldview of the letter. Both terms are pivotal 53  Cf. 1:12; 2:5; 4:6, 10.

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for any biblical and Jewish understanding of God, as Larry Hurtado has consistently taught us in his formidable scholarly work. The Letter of James may perhaps be added to the picture painted by Hurtado. For according to James the brother of the Lord, as he was received by the readers of his letter, their faith in Jesus, the Lord and Messiah, is included in their belief in God, the “Lord of glory.”

Chapter 9

Between Jewish Monotheism and Proto-Trinitarian Relations: The Making and Character of Johannine Christology Jörg Frey Johannine Christology is a tricky field of scholarship. Here, we encounter not only the problems of christological expressions and the questions of their background and the steady challenge of the differences between John and the Synoptics. There are also the various methodological approaches to reading John, in particular if we cannot avoid considering the issues of historical developments, of the “making” of John’s Christology.1 What is at stake is not only an appropriate interpretation of the text as it is, but also the questions whether or not we can isolate pre-Johannine sources or strata and reconstruct early-Johannine christological views. In this regard, scholarship has become much more cautious, compared with the classical 20th-century approaches, from Wellhausen and Bultmann to Becker and Fortna. The bold assumptions of earlier scholars, postulating various pre-Johannine sources and layers have rightly been questioned, and most exegetes agree today that the first and foremost task of exegesis is to unfold the meaning of the text as it is. But historical research also has to ask for the path of Johannine Christology, not only for its definite textual form or ‘teaching’. If the aim is to present not only an ahistorical or dogmatic view, we have to consider how Johannine Christology could emerge, on what background, in which context, and with which implications. And if the final form of Johannine Christology presents Jesus, “the son of Joseph from Nazareth” (John 1:45) as a divine being, “the Son” who is “one” with the Father (John 10:30) and can be called “God” (theos = John 1:1–2, 18; 20:28) or even “the true God” (1 John 5:20), we have to ask how such a remarkable development could happen, or, with Larry Hurtado’s well-phrased book title, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?2 Within the line of research

1  Thus the term used by James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: SCM, 1980). 2  Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

© JÖRG FREY, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_010

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of the “new history-of-religions school,”3 initiated by Martin Hengel4 and particularly represented by Hurtado,5 which aims at explaining the origins and early growth of Christology from Jewish roots, the question can be phrased more precisely: How did the Jewish Jesus become a God? And—to be clear— not a “Gentile God,”6 but “a Jewish God.”7 But the use of this term immediately creates the question how this “Jewish God” is related to the “one” God, how the “God” Jesus Christ can be understood within the concept of Jewish monotheism. In the present paper, I will (1) briefly recall some aspects from the history of research with a focus on recent attempts of interpreting Johannine Christology within a Jewish framework. From there, we can ask (2) which criteria of “divinity” can help us to understand the developments and what this might mean 3  The phrase “a new history-of-religions school” first occurred on the cover text of the American 1988 edition of Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord. Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), and was then programmatically adopted by Jarl Fossum, “The New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule: The Quest for Jewish Christology,” Society of Biblical Literature 1991 Seminar Papers, SBLSP 30 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 638–46. See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 11; cf. also Jörg Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive: Larry W. Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ und die Herausbildung der frühen Christologie,” in: Reflections on Early Christian History and Religion—Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey, AJEC 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 117–68. 4  Cf. Martin Hengel, Studien zur Christologie: Kleine Schriften IV, ed. Claus-Jürgen Thornton; WUNT 201 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); a part of the studies is translated in idem, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). The work goes back to Hengel’s Tübingen inaugural lecture from 1973 on the title “Son of God” in which Hengel phrased his fundamental critique of the history-of-religions school and its reception in the school of Rudolf Bultmann. See Martin Hengel, Der Sohn Gottes: Die Entstehung der Christologie und die jüdisch-hellenistische Religionsgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975; reprinted in idem, Studien zur Christologie, 74–145), ET: The Son of God: The Origins of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976). On Hengel’s contribution to New Testament Christology see Roland Deines, “Martin Hengel—Ein Leben für die Christologie,” ThBeitr 37 (2006): 287–300; idem, “Martin Hengel—A Life in the Service of Christology,” TynBul 58 (2007): 25–42; idem, “Der irdische Jesus als Messias und Gottessohn: Zu den christologischen Aufsätzen Martin Hengels,” ThBeitr 40 (2009): 349–51. 5  Cf. the comprehensive work: Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, furthermore the collection of essays: idem, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion: The Context and Character of Christological Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017). See also the foundational investigation: idem, One God, One Lord. 6  Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991). 7  Gabriele Boccaccini, “How Jesus Became Uncreated,” in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Nayman and Eibert Tigchelaar, JSJSup 175 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1:185–208 (208).

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with regard to the “borders” of Judaism that were or were not crossed. Then, we have to discuss briefly (3) some of the elements of Johannine “high” Christology and their Jewish background, in particular the idea of the logos, before finally (4) interpreting Johannine Christology, as given in the title, “between Jewish Monotheism and Proto-Trinitarian Relations.” 1

Perspectives from the History of Research

Since the beginning of modern scholarship, Johannine theology and Christology has been explained mostly from non-Jewish, Hellenistic, or Gnostic influences. The reference to the logos in John 1:1 has inspired scholars since about 1800 to link the gospel with Platonism, Philonic Alexandrinism,8 or Gnostic mythology.9 In history-of-religions research, John was either considered a very late development of Christian thought that had stripped off the initial Jewish veneer10 or an independent line of thought rooted in a particular syncretistic religious milieu.11 But generally, the view of Jesus as a divine being was considered incompatible with the Palestinian-Jewish “religion of Jesus”12 or even as going a step beyond the boundaries of Judaism—at least of “normative” Judaism. 8  Thus the earliest critics at the beginning of the 19th century, see Jörg Frey, “Auf der Suche nach dem Kontext des vierten Evangeliums: Zur religions- und traditionsgeschichtlichen Einordnung,” in Die Herrlichkeit des Gekreuzigten: Studien zu den johanneischen Schriften 1, ed. Juliane Schlegel, WUNT 307 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 46–87 (52–54). 9  Thus, in particular Rudolf Bultmann, “Der religionsgeschichtliche Hintergrund des Prologs zum Johannesevangelium,” in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. E. Dinkler (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967), 10–35; and idem, “Die Bedeutung der neuerschlossenen mandäischen und manichäischen Quellen für das Verständnis des Johannesevangelium,” in ibid., 55–104. Cf. Frey, “Auf der Suche nach dem Kontext des vierten Evangeliums,” 59–62; idem, Die johanneische Eschatologie 1: Ihre Probleme im Spiegel der Forschung seit Reimarus, WUNT 96 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 129–41. 10  Thus in particular Ferdinand Christian Baur and his school; cf. Frey, “Auf der Suche nach dem Kontext des vierten Evangeliums,” 54–56. 11  Thus Bultmann, see the titles mentioned in note 9. 12  Thus the separation between Palestinian-Jewish and Hellenistic religion, even within the Jesus movement, in the history-of-religions school, e.g. in Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Die Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus, FRLANT 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913), 2nd ed. 1921; ET: Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans., J. E. Steely (Nashville: Abdingdon, 1970). The background of Bousset’s constructions was the general view of liberal Protestantism that the Christian dogma was a product of the Hellenization of Christianity (cf. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte 1: Die Entstehung des kirchlichen Dogmas, 4th ed. [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1909]).

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In this framework, particularly when presupposing John’s independence from the Synoptics, scholars in the second half of the 20th century tried to isolate earlier layers of thought within the Johannine text with a “lower” and still more Jewish concept of Christology and distinguish them from the later layers. Scholars assuming a pre-Johannine Grundschrift speculated about a Jewish-Christian prophet Christology,13 or about earlier concepts of a miracle worker in the style of Hellenistic “divine men.”14 Others tried to describe an early-Johannine sending Christology, which could appear still more Jewish when the Prologue was left aside.15 Even the title “Son of Man” was considered a mere expression of Jesus’s humanity in order to link the Son-of-Man sayings with their Synoptic parallels.16 The focus was, therefore, on supposedly earlier and “lower” aspects of Christology, whereas the expressions of “high” Christology were interpreted not only as a later development but mostly as a transgression of Jewish monotheism resulting from non-Jewish17 or, at least, “heterodox” influences on the Johannine communities. The precise sequence of events could be imagined differently. Whereas Raymond E. Brown assumed the influence of a templecritical group of “heterodox” Jews and Samaritans that triggered the conflict with the synagogual “orthodoxy,”18 J. Louis Martyn located the development of

13  Thus Georg Richter, Studien zum Johannesevangelium, ed. Josef Hainz, BU 13 (Regensburg: Pustet, 1977). The turn towards a view of Jesus as divine was considered an influence of dualistic or gnosticizing teaching about redemption, according to which Jesus was, then, seen as a heavenly savior, the Son of God. Cf. also Wayne A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology, NovTSup 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1967). 14  Thus the alleged Christology of the Semeia source in Jürgen Becker, Das Evangelium nach Johannes: Kapitel 1–10, ÖTBK 4/1, 3rd ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher and Echter, 1993), 134–43. 15  Jan A. Bühner, Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2/2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977) who explains the proto-Johannine image of Jesus from the alleged concept of an apocalyptic prophet, i.e. a prophet who draws on a visionary heavenly calling and is, thus, considered sent by God. See ibid., 402. 16  Thus Francis J. Moloney, The Johannine Son of Man, 2nd ed., Biblioteca di Scienze Religiose 14 (Rome: LAS, 1978), and in particular Robert Rhea, The Johannine Son of Man, AThANT 76 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1990). 17  Thus in Becker’s assumption of a dualistic or even gnostic influence on the community or the evangelist. 18  Thus in Raymond E. Brown’s five stage model of the development of the Johannine tradition; cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1979), 173.

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the highest christological claims after the expulsion from the Synagogue, that is, as a reaction to the split and in a more strongly Gentile context.19 All these considerations still presupposed that there was a “normative” type of Judaism or at least some commonly accepted borders between still “Jewish acceptable” and “certainly no-longer-Jewish.” These views have all been questioned when the Dead Sea discoveries forced us to see the plurality of Judaism(s) before 70 CE (and even beyond), not only in the diaspora, but also in the homeland. There was actually no authority that could decide about still-Jewish and no-longer-Jewish, and even the processes mirrored in the Johannine term ἀποσυνάγωγος (John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2) cannot be considered a general “excommunication” but only reflects local conflicts between (some) groups of Jesus followers and synagogual communities.20 But in spite of such conflicts on Scriptural interpretation, Christology, and the separation between the Johannine communities and the local synagogue, etc., the Johannine writings can still be considered “within Judaism” or at least “within” Jewish discourses on the Scriptures, messianism, etc.21 The scholarly counter-movement against the influential views of the historyof-religions school and the Bultmann school is linked with the name of Martin Hengel. From his fundamental insight that Palestinian Judaism had close connections with Hellenism since the 3rd century BCE, he concluded that it is impossible to separate Palestinian, Hellenistic-Jewish, and Hellenistic-Gentile “Christianity” as successive strata or to explain certain aspects of Christology only from a later Hellenistic or pagan influence. He could demonstrate, instead, that not only the central christological titles such as “Christos,” “Kyrios,” and “Son of God”22 but also the concept of the preexistence of a Messianic figure23 were shaped not in a later “Hellenistic” context but early and against the background of a completely Jewish linguistic and conceptual matrix. 19  J . Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 3rd ed., (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 129ff. See the discussion in Jörg Frey, “‘The Jews’ in the Gospel of John and the ‘Parting of the Ways’” in The Glory of the Crucified One: Theology and Christology in the Gospel of John, trans. Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), 39–72 (68–81). 20  See the discussion in Frey, “‘The Jews’ in the Gospel of John,” 39–72. 21  See Richard Bauckham, “Messianism according to the Gospel of John,” in Challenging Perspectives on the Gospel of John, ed. John Lierman, WUNT 2/219 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 34–68. 22  Hengel, The Son of God. 23  Cf. in particular the work by Gottfried Schimanowski, Weisheit und Messias: Die jüdischen Voraussetzungen der urchristlichen Präexistenzchristologie, WUNT 2/17 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981); Martin Hengel, “Präexistenz bei Paulus,” in idem, Paulus und Jakobus: Kleine Schriften 3, WUNT 141 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 262–301.

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In his programmatic response to the history-of-religions school, Larry Hurtado could demonstrate that very early after the Easter events Jesus was venerated and addressed by his followers in a manner that surpassed any kind of interaction with angels or other superhuman mediator figures. Thus, Hurtado could make the case for the development of an early “high” Christology from completely Jewish roots. But while his argument is primarily focused on the early decades, on Paul and the early Jesus tradition,24 where it is, in my view, widely convincing, the questions are more difficult with regard to the later periods of Christology and to the second century. If the Gospel of John is the latest of the canonical gospels, John’s Christology is not an “early high Christology,” but a later form that differs from the “early high Christology” of the maranatha and the pre-Pauline formulas. It is a further developed, but also even higher form of viewing Jesus that goes beyond what scholars could establish as the early veneration of Jesus as a divine being, especially due to the fact that Jesus is now explicitly and programmatically called “God” and “one” with the Father. It is clear that the foundational christological titles used in John (e.g., “Messiah,” “Son of Man,” and also “Son of God”25) are based on Jewish traditions, but what about the even more elevated aspects of Johannine Christology? Can the “I-am-sayings” or the talk about Jesus as the eternal logos, monogenes, and theos also be explained from Jewish sources and from a Jewish context? Where are the borders, and when are they crossed? What is it that makes the difference between early high Christology and Johannine high or even higher Christology? And who decides when the borders are crossed, who can decide that a given term or concept is “non-Jewish” or “no-more-Jewish”? In the chapter on John in his opus magnum, Hurtado wisely suggests that the Johannine Christology was sharpened by controversies in the history of the community but that those controversies resulted from earlier assertions about Jesus.26 Hurtado cautions against a too simplistic idea of (foreign, pagan) “influence” and points to the fact that the reshaping of categories based on certain experiences is always a complex process.27 Hurtado rightly states that John’s use and reshaping of Wisdom concepts that form the background of the idea of Jesus’s preexistence goes beyond what 24  Cf. Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive.” 25  On the background of this title, cf. in particular Hengel, The Son of God. 26  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 350–52 and 425–26. With this mediating position of Hurtado, who is here mostly dependent on American scholarship from Brown to Meeks, including the view of a mostly independent development of the Johannine tradition, the questions are not resolved: Does “sharpened by conflict” mean foreign influence? 27  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 367.

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had been said about Lady Wisdom or even Philo’s Logos, most strongly in the double statement that “the Word was God” and that this same Word “became flesh” (1:1c, 14a).28 For explanation, he stresses the often-underestimated category of the “name” of God.29 In John, it is this name which is given to Jesus and revealed by him to his followers, it is this name in which he performs his deeds, and it is—ultimately—the name of God which is implied in Jesus’s I-am-sayings. Thus, Hurtado concludes that earlier assertions about the eschatological dignity of Jesus’s name (e.g., in Philippians 2:9–11) could lead to the view that the name and the glory and authority linked with it had already been given to Jesus authorizing his ministry. Thus, Hurtado’s general concept of divinity expressed by “worship,” and developed by the combination of traditional concepts and their experience-based transformation is confirmed also for the Johannine Christology, in which views of an earlier high Christology are adopted and sharpened. The latest and most fruitful contribution to the debate has been made by the Enoch Seminar meeting on Johannine Christology, whose contributions are published in the volume Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism.30 The majority of contributions now cease to place John only “in the echo chamber of the ‘Johannine Community’” but rather link the Gospel with the variety of Jewish messianic expectations (and their reception in the earlier Jesus movement).31 The seminar wisely avoids false alternatives between the Jewishness and the distinctiveness of John’s (image of) Jesus. In understanding John’s Christology as “a variant of first-century Jewish messianism,” not as a “document that marked the parting of the ways,” the seminar made an important step towards a “Jewish” understanding of John. Adopting a modern view of Second Temple Judaism, acknowledging much more Jewish diversity than earlier research could see, the editors can also state: “The ‘Jewish’ John is no less ‘Christian’” and 28  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 367. 29  Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 381–92, particularly drawing on Jarl Fossum, “In the Beginning was the Name,” in The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, NTOA 30 (Freiburg Schweiz: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 109–34. Cf. more recently the work of Hurtado’s PhD student Joshua J. F. Coutts, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, WUNT 2/447 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). 30  Benjamin Reynolds and Gabriele Boccaccini, eds., Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: Royal, Prophetic, and Divine Messiahs, AJEC 106 (Leiden: Brill, 2018); see in particular the introduction by Benjamin Reynolds. “Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: An Introduction,” in ibid., 3–9. 31  Cf. Reynolds, “Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism,” 5.

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“the ‘Christian’ John is and remains ‘Jewish’.”32 The earlier criteria that were considered to point to a clear separation or a definitive “Parting of the Ways” do not work anymore, in particular due to the more recent insights into the varieties of Jewish messianic hopes, including “high” and even divine eschatological agents or figures.33 Although John is not necessarily directly dependent on early Jewish literature for its messianism,34 the Fourth Gospel is still part of a vivid debate on Messianic expectations, titles, and the dignity of Jesus. Thus, the Gospel must also be considered a Jewish “Messiah text,”35 and its distinctive elements of Johannine Christology can also be considered part of a Jewish discourse, regardless of whether the Johannine author and his community were still part of the local synagogue or—as most scholars suppose—already distinct from the synagogue. 2

The Question of Criteria: What Constitutes the Divinity of Jesus in the Johannine Concept?

In two thought-provoking articles in the Collins-Festschrift, and in the Enoch Seminar volume, Gabriele Boccaccini has reopened the question of the appropriate criteria of assessing the making and especially the later stages of high Christology. What does in fact make Jesus “a God.” He points to some weaknesses in Hurtado’s concept of veneration or worship, as there are some Jewish texts, especially in the Parables of Enoch, where “the Son of Man also will be worshiped, without implying his identity with God.”36 He further adopts the 32  All quotations from the editors’ “Preface,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism, ix–x (ix). “Being ‘Jewish’ in the first century did not mean to conform a monolithic model but to engage in a common debate, where the categories inherited from the past were creatively played and continuously given new (sometimes unexpected) developments.” Cf. also Reynolds, “Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: An Introduction,” ibid., 3–9. 33  Cf. Daniel Boyarin, “How Enoch Can Teach Us About Jesus,” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 51–76. Cf. also the doctoral dissertation by my PhD student Ruben Bühner (to be published in WUNT 2nd series, 2020–21). 34  Cf. Adele Reinhartz, “And the Word Was God: John’s Christology and Jesus’s Discourse in Jewish Context,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism, 69, 91. 35  The term was introduced in recent studies by Matthew Novenson, see his The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); cf. Reynolds, “Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism,” 5. 36  Boccaccini, “How Jesus Became Uncreated,” 186; cf. also idem, “From Jewish Prophet to Jewish God: How John Made the Divine Jesus Uncreated,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism, 335–57.

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observation that the category of “divinity” is somewhat unclear since not only in the Greco-Roman world but also within Judaism there are various levels of “divinity,” if divinity is understood as the supramundane power also shared by angels, demons, or exalted patriarchs.37 He states that “the concept of monotheism in antiquity was … more complicated than one would commonly imagine.”38 Boccaccini thus suggests that the decisive line of separation was not between venerated or not venerated, nor between “divine” or “non-divine” but rather between created and uncreated. The issue is, thus, not merely that the majority of Johannine christological expressions are deeply rooted in various biblical and early Jewish traditions, creatively adopting them, nor simply that the Johannine Jesus is depicted with divine authority and claims but that the Johannine Jesus is identical with the eternal and divine Logos, as “God.” He is uncreated (in contrast with other divine figures in the tradition), and he can be called “the true God” (1 John 5:20) next to “the only true God” (John 17:3). Thus, the Johannine Jesus is “a Jewish God,” “one with the Father” and still distinguished from that “only true God” without the consequence that the result is “two Gods” or “two powers in heaven.”39 Of course, there are still other ways of explaining the Johannine view from more non-Jewish influences. The most recent attempt to get along with the logical paradox of incarnation in clear and rational terms, but in a more pagan, philosophical context, was undertaken by Troels Engberg-Pedersen.40 His philosophical reading of John, striving for utmost clarity, identifies the Logos from the Prologue with the Spirit through which Jesus is then baptized, so that, in his reading, the Logos-Spirit is united with the human person Jesus of Nazareth in a (spiritual) baptism. However, such an adoptionist reading causes a number of problems:41 An identification between the logos and the Spirit is not suggested in the Johannine text, and in particular the view of Jesus’s preexistence goes beyond the idea of the preexistence of the Logos: The one whom the Father loved before the foundation of the world (John 17:24) is the whole Jesus, not only a part of the composite person, the Spirit, or the Logos.

37  Boccaccini, “How Jesus Became Uncreated,” 186–88. 38  Boccaccini, “How Jesus Became Uncreated,” 188. 39  Cf. the book title by Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977; repr. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). 40  Troels Engberg-Pedersen, John and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 41  Jörg Frey, review of John and Philosophy, by Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Early Christianity 10 (2019): 225–36.

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Furthermore, John is less interested in philosophically explaining how the person of Jesus was composed but rather how this Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth (1:45), can be the unique and valid revealer of God (1:18). The perspective taken in the Fourth Gospel and also suggested to its readers is not the perspective of the “making” of Jesus from two “natures” but rather the issue how this Jesus could be authorized to be the unique revealer of the one God (cf. 1:18). Here, the Prologue already gives a decisive hint: When John 1:14 interprets the relatively abstract phrase “the word became flesh” immediately thereafter by a more visual image, wherein the biblical motif of the Shekinah, the dwelling of the divine glory within the earthly sanctuary is called to mind by referring to the earthly Jesus as a temple where the divine glory was (and is) present and visible for the eyes of faith.42 In any case, the problem of John’s distinctively high Christology is not present just in the Prologue where the idea of the Logos plays a prominent role, but the fact that these ideas expressed in the prologue are also shared in the narrative of the Gospel, especially in Jesus’s I-am-sayings and in the Farewell Prayer: How can John state that Jesus—not only in his eschatological parousia but already in his earthly existence—“was” God, was given the Divine Name, and was bestowed with his Glory? What is the logical and onto-logical status of that claim? And how can such a claim be explained (and justified) within the context of contemporary Jewish discourses—at least in a reading that avoids false alternatives between Jewish and Greco-Roman or philosophical thought.43 3

The Making of Johannine Christology: Jewish Tradition and Johannine Developments

For my own reading of the Fourth Gospel,44 I presuppose the whole Johannine text, including the Prologue45 which functions as an instruction for reading the whole Gospel. In view of the uncertainty of all source reconstructions, I think 42  See, on the understanding of the Shekinah in John, Jörg Frey, “The Incarnation of Jesus and the Dwelling of God in Jesus Christ,” in The Glory of the Crucified One, 261–84; idem, “God’s Dwelling on Earth: ‘Shekhina-Theology’ in Revelation 21 and in the Gospel of John,” in John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic, ed. Christopher Rowland and Catrin Williams, (London: T&T Clark, 2013), 79–103. 43  A Jewish understanding of the Logos, for example, should not be imagined as being totally unaware of the Stoic or Greek-religious aspects of the term. 44  See for overview Jörg Frey, “Approaches to the Interpretation of John,” in The Glory of the Crucified One, 3–36. 45  Whether John 21 is an appendix or an editorial afterword (as I suppose) is not too relevant for the issues to be discussed in this paper.

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that we are not able to isolate pre-Johannine layers behind the text with a sufficient degree of certainty. So the reconstruction of layers or stages of Johannine thought, possibly representing a lower Christology is impossible. We cannot get back to a stage with a still unbroken relationship with the synagogue, even though the text actually points to (locally varied) processes of conflict and separation. At the point of the composition of the Gospel, that separation is, in my view, already completed but still shapes the memory of a considerable part of the addressees and also the discourses. I also assume that the Johannine thought world did not evolve in a sectarian circle secluded from the surrounding world but in a circle of communities with a proper tradition but also in contact with other (Jewish and) Jesus-related traditions, most probably (but not only) the Gospel of Mark.46 Thus, the meaning of John’s Christology or his “memory of Jesus”47 can best be interpreted on the background of Jewish messianic texts and discourses as well as on the basis of an earlier Jesus tradition, most clearly in comparison with Mark. 3.1 The Adoption of Jewish Messianism in John’s Christology Despite the distinctiveness of John’s high Christology, there is an overwhelming number of aspects and elements in John’s Christology that draw on Jewish messianic texts or discourses.48 The references start right from the beginning: The Prologue is opened with a clearly discernible reference to the beginning of the Jewish Scriptures (Gen 1:1). It is then full of further links to various scriptural discourses (the creation, the revelation on Mt. Sinai, wisdom traditions) and exegetical traditions, so that from the very beginning the reader’s expectation is shaped in the sense that the narrative thus opened is closely interwoven with biblical tradition, related to Moses (1:17), and is an exegesis of the biblical God (1:18). But there are not merely references to the Scriptures: The beginning of the narrative in 1:19 links John and his testimony to various figures which were all part of contemporaneous Jewish discourses on eschatological expectations: 46  See the argument in Jörg Frey, “Johannes und die Synoptiker,” in Die Herrlichkeit des Gekreuzigten: Studien zu den johanneischen Schriften 1, ed. Juliane Schlegel, WUNT 307 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 239–94; idem, Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel: Tradition and Narration (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), 64–77. 47  See Jörg Frey, “The Gospel of John as a Narrative Memory of Jesus,” in Memory and Memories in Early Christianity: Proceedings of the International Conference held at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne ( June 2–3, 2016), ed. Simon Butticaz and Enrico Norelli, WUNT 398 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 261–84. 48  See the helpful article by Richard Bauckham, “Messianism according to the Gospel of John,” 34–68, and most recently the list in Benjamin Reynolds, “The Gospel of John’s Christology as Evidence for Early Jewish Messianic Expectations: Challenges and Possibilities,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism, 13–42, 20f.

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the Messiah, the returning Elijah, and “the prophet” (like Moses). With these three references, John probably wants to adopt the entirety of Jewish Messianic discourses, particularly since in the earlier Jesus tradition these three figures are all more or less connected with Jesus or John the Baptist. Thus, from the very beginning, John seems to adopt quite deliberately a large variety of Jewish discussions and hopes. Interestingly, John is the only gospel that uses not only the Greek form ὁ Χριστός but also the transcribed Aramaic form ὁ Μεσσίας (1:41; 4:25), which is then translated for the readers (1:41). Here, John deliberately adopts the Aramaic, Palestinian-Jewish tradition, thus anchoring his “Christology” in that tradition as a “Messianology,” a talk about “the Messiah” Jesus who has to be made known first to Israel (1:31–33), long before “Greeks” (12:20–22) can approach him. This “Messiah” is immediately interpreted as “the one of whom Moses and the prophets wrote” (1:45). One of the first disciples (who are, of course, all Jews and possibly linked with John the Baptist’s movement), Nathanael, is called “truly an Israelite” and shaped in allusion to the Jacob tradition as an exemplary figure for “Israelites” who believe in Jesus. Accordingly, his confession in 1:49 addresses Jesus (in this sequence) as the “King of Israel” and the “Son of God,” thus strongly shaping the image of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. Thus, in John’s first chapter—which is to a certain degree a panopticum of Christological titles49—these two “messianic” titles appear almost as a climax, next to the title “the Son of Man.” Further chapters in John adopt the idea of “the prophet” as king (6:14–15); discourses about the origin of the Messiah (7:27), his Davidic descent and connection with Bethlehem (7:40–44; cf. 7:52; 9:17), and the expectation that the Messiah will do signs (7:31; 10:41), or that he will remain forever (12:34). Such discourses are mostly addressed by the crowd or Jewish contemporaries who are often implicitly characterized as misunderstanding, but in spite of that, the adoption of those aspects locates Jesus and the debate about his identity and authority within contemporary Jewish discourses. Furthermore, all these debates are presented as debates over the Scriptures of Israel, using methods of scriptural interpretation quite well known from other Jewish texts. The debate about Jesus’s messiahship is completely presented as a debate about the Scriptures and their understanding, drawing on messianic discourses of contemporary Judaism.

49  Cf. also: the coming one (v. 26–27), the lamb of God (v. 29, 35), the elect of God (v. 34), and the Son of Man (v. 51).

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3.2 The Expressions of the Distinctive Johannine View on Jesus There is no need to further discuss the titles “Messiah” or “Christos”50 and “the prophet”51 here. Their background and shape is so clearly linked not only with the biblical tradition but also with a number of contemporary Jewish discourses, and it is quite clear that, in John’s view, Jesus is “the Messiah,” “King of Israel,” “Son of God,” a or even the “prophet” (4:19; 9:17), and the one who was to come into the world, albeit none of those figures in the manner the crowds expected. So all these “titles” are still insufficient and their use, including that of the title “Messiah” (7:40, 52), reveals misunderstandings, although naming Jesus “the Messiah” is never “corrected” in John. If the designation “the Messiah” is linked with the title “Son of God,” the addition is actually a confirmation and, in some respect, an intensification or elevation, but certainly not a negation. 3.2.1 Son of God and “the Son” The distinctiveness of John’s Christology is more clearly visible in the use of the predication “the Son.” Calling Jesus “the Son of God” is not new in John. This title was known in the Johannine community tradition, it is already used in the (pre-)Pauline sending formulas (Gal 4:4; Rom 8:3) which are adopted and play a significant role in John (John 3:16–7; 1 John 4:9–10), and also in Mark (Mark 1:1; etc.). The title is traditionally linked with the Messianic expectation.52 Accordingly, it is introduced in John 1:49 together with the term “King of Israel” and, then, connected with “Christos” (11:27; 20:31). But already in his use of the “Son of God” title, John is keen to stress the uniqueness of Jesus’s sonship, linking the title with the term μονογενης (3:16, 18). In 3:17, the absolute form “the Son” is also used as a continuation of “the only-begotten Son” (3:16; cf. 3:18; 1 John 5:12–13). As Jesus is the only-begotten “Son” with a unique relationship with the “Father,” his sonship differs from the sonship and daughtership of the disciples as “children of God” (cf. 20:17). Semantically, there is no difference between the traditional term “the Son of God” and the absolute “the Son.” In its Johannine use, the traditional title “Son of God” clearly implies more than mere messiahship: It distinguishes Jesus from all other humans and assigns him to the side of God. In John 3:35, the unique relationship between the Father and the Son is presented as the ultimate source of Jesus’s authority. Thus, the use of “the Son” is 50  See Jörg Frey, “Jesus as the Image of God in the Gospel of John,” in The Glory of the Crucified One, 285–312 (296–98); idem, Theology and History, 31–35. 51  See Frey, “Jesus as the Image of God in the Gospel of John,” 298–99; idem, Theology and History, 30–31. 52  2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7; 89:26–27; 4QMidrEschata III, 10–12; 4 Ezra 7:28–29; 13:32, 37, 52; 14:9; and 1 En. 105:2.

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strongly determined by the relationship with the Father: As “the Son,” Jesus is loved by the Father (3:35; 5:20; 10:17; 15:9; 17:23–24, 26), both work together in unity (5:21–22), they are even presented in mutual “interiority” (10:38; 14:11), the Father is (only) visible in the Son (14:9) who is, thus, the true and unique image of the Father. Thus, in the Johannine use of the traditional term “Son of God” and his application of it to Jesus as “the Son,” the term has now become an expression of his unique unity with the Father (10:30) and his divinity. But the use of the term and its implications are still justified in debate with contemporary Judaism and with reference to the Scriptures, and herein the Gospel probably mirrors actual conflicts between the Johannine community and its Jewish contemporaries: Jesus’s opponents adduce the fact that the Johannine Jesus calls himself “God’s Son” as an evidence of blasphemy worthy of the death penalty (19:7). In John 10, instead, the evangelist presents a daring exegesis of Psalm 82 LXX with Jesus concluding from the fact that in this Psalm God can call the Israelites “gods,” that his self-designation “God’s Son” cannot be illegitimate or blasphemy (10:36). 3.2.2 The “Son of Man” There is a similar tendency regarding the Johannine use of the title “Son of Man”: In the New Testament, with two exceptions (John 12:34; Acts 7:56), this title is only used in the sayings of Jesus, but never as a “free” christological title. This suggests that its use originates in the Aramaic language of the earthly Jesus,53 albeit probably not as an already “defined” messianic title, but rather as an enigmatic self-designation.54 In the Synoptics, the term is used with regard to Jesus’s impending suffering (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:45 and parallels; also Mark 9:12b), his present authority (Mark 2:10, 28; Luke 11:29–30) and humility (Luke 7:33–4; 9:58), and, in an eschatological dimension, the coming of the Son of Man “on the clouds,” in the parousia (Mark 13:26; 14:61–62; Luke 17:22, 24, 26, 30, etc.). It has been debated whether or not Jesus and the Son of Man are straightforwardly identified, but some sayings (Luke 12:8; cf. 22:30) suggest at least a very close tie between the two figures: The reaction of the Son of Man in the eschatological judgment is dependent on the reaction of humans to the earthly Jesus.

53  Cf. Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, vol. 1 of Geschichte des frühen Christentums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 526–28. 54  Cf. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, 530–31. Volker Hampel, Menschensohn und historischer Jesus (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1990), 371, views the title as a self-designation as a Messias designatus.

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The Synoptic use of the term is most probably developed from the tradition of the one “like a ‘son of man’” in Daniel 7. While in Daniel the term is somewhat unclear and possibly not yet linked with an individual figure, various Jewish textual traditions show that it could be developed into the designation of an eschatological, messianic, or judicial figure, thus, e.g., in the Parables of Enoch, or also in 4 Ezra 13 where there is also a clear connection with designations such as “Messiah” (4 Ezra 7:28–29; cf. 13:37–38) and “Son of God” (4 Ezra 13:32, 37, 52).55 In John, the term “Son of Man,” which is exactly the same as in the Synoptics, is also exclusively related to Jesus. “Son of Man” is also linked and identified with “Messiah” (12:32–34; cf. 1:41, 51). Some elements from the sayings about Jesus’s impending suffering are also adopted in the Johannine Son of Man sayings (cf. John 3:14–15; 8:28; 12:23). In John 5:27, the different linguistic form without definite articles exactly matches Dan 7:13 LXX, so that the reference to Dan 7 is particularly obvious in this passage. Compared with the Synoptic tradition, there is a notable change in usage. In John, “Son of Man” is now more strongly connected with Jesus’s heavenly origin, pointing to “the earthly Jesus who has his actual home in heaven.”56 The change can be explained from John’s christological views rather than from a different background or milieu or a special tradition of Son of Man sayings. The title is introduced in John 1:51 as the last and climactic title in the series of titles in chapter 1, where the Son of Man is presented as a figure closely connected with the heavenly angels. Furthermore, in view of the Jacob story from Genesis 28, Jesus as “the Son of Man” takes the place of Jacob or, rather, the place of the earthly sanctuary, the place of God’s presence on earth. In 3:13 and 6:12 “the Son of Man” is the one who has descended from heaven and is thus authorized to reveal heavenly things. In other sayings, the title is connected with Jesus’s “exaltation” and “glorification” (3:14; 8:28; 12:23, 32, 34; 13:31–32), and in John 5:27, Jesus’s authority to enact judgment and to give divine life is explained by the reference, “because he is (the) Son of Man” (υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου cf. Dan 7:13 LXX). As such he is the authorized agent of God, the one in whom humans encounter God himself. Thus, the Son of Man title is also a very clear expression of high Christology, and some interpreters have even linked the use

55  Cf. Boyarin, “How Enoch Can Teach Us About Jesus,” 51–76. 56  Thus Rudolf Schnackenburg, “‘Der Vater, der mich gesandt hat’: Zur johanneischen Christologie,” in Anfänge der Christologie: Festschrift für Ferdinand Hahn zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Henning Paulsen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 275–92 (284).

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of “Son of Man” in the body of the gospel with the use of the title ὁ λόγος in the Prologue. 3.2.3 “The Logos” Things are different with regard to the title λόγος57 which had never been a messianic title in early Judaism. The term is used in the Scriptures, rendering the Hebrew dābār, with a wide variety of meanings. Among those meanings, it was predominately used of God’s word spoken to the prophets, in the revelation of the Torah, or in the creation (cf. Ps 33:6) or redemption (Isa 55:10– 11). Although there are merely cautious “beginnings of hypostatization”58 in the Hebrew Bible, the notion of God’s word as a powerful, even personified force is further developed in the Septuagint,59 particularly in the works from Hellenistic Judaism that were originally authored in Greek. Wisdom 9:1 presents the λόγος as an agent of God’s creation and Wis 16:12 as a healer of all people. Wisdom 18:15 even depicts the λόγος like a heavenly warrior or angel of revenge.60 Such a language points to a certain readiness “to attribute to the spoken word an existence and activity of its own.”61 Wisdom of Solomon also shows a certain conflation of God’s Wisdom (σοφία) and God’s λόγος: In Wis 9:1–2, they are both mediators of the creation. Wisdom is said to be almighty (παντοδύναμοϛ: Wis 7:23), as is the λόγος (18:15) and Wisdom sits by the divine throne (9:4) from where his λόγος comes (18:15). Such an analogy of Wisdom and Logos is prepared in earlier wisdom traditions:62 Proverbs 8:22–31 presents Lady Wisdom as a pre-existent being (8:23) close to God (8:30). Here, Wisdom is a quasi-personal figure, a hypostasis 57  Cf. Jörg Frey, “Between Torah and Stoa: How Could Readers Have Understood the Johannine Logos,” in The Prologue of the Gospel of John: Its Literary, Theological, and Philosophical Contexts, ed. Jan G. van der Watt, R. Alan Culpepper, and Udo Schnelle, WUNT 359 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 189–234. 58  Werner H. Schmidt et al., “‫ דבר‬dābhār,” TDOT, 3:84–125 (121). 59  “In the Septuagint, logos often took on a more dynamic meaning than it originally had in Greek” (Thomas Tobin, “Logos,” ABD 4:348–56, here 350). 60  This mythological image is probably due to the reading of Hab 3:5 LXX where the Hebrew ‫ =( ֶּד ֶבר‬pestilence) is read in a variant punctuation as ‫ ָּד ָבר‬and thus rendered by λόγος. Cf. Joachim Jeremias, “Zum Logos-Problem,” ZNW 59 (1968): 92–95. Further influences might be from the Egyptian Hermes-Thot tradition, see Burton L. Mack, Logos und Sophia: Untersuchungen zur Weisheitstheologie im hellenistischen Judentum, StUNT 10 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), 101–6. On the destructive power of the word, cf. also Isa 11:4 and then PsSol 17:24, 37. 61  C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 264. 62  The following passage adopts some aspects and phrases from Frey, “Between Torah and Stoa.”

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that has “an independent existence in the presence of God.”63 This is adopted in Sirach 24:3 where Wisdom claims to have come forth from the mouth of God (i.e., to be the Word of God), is pre-existent (Sir 24:9), of heavenly origin (24:4), sent into the world (24:8), and dwells in Zion (24:10, 12). Hypostatic Wisdom, the Word of the Torah, and the function as collaborator of the creation of the world are conflated here. Like Wisdom, the λόγος is also linked with the creation (Wis 9:1–2; cf. 7:22), and like her (Prov 8:27, 30; Sir 24:4), the λόγος is said to be close to God or even on a heavenly throne (LXX Ps 118:89; Wis 18:15). Thus, aspects of the personified wisdom, her connection with life (Wis 8:13; LXX Ps 118:25, 107) and light (Bar 4:2; LXX Ps 118:105) and her being sent to humankind, (Wis 9:10; cf. John 1:10f.), or even her “tabernacling” among individuals in Zion (Sir 24:8; cf. John 1:14b) could thus be transferred to the λόγος. In Philo, the idea of the λόγος “found its full flowering in Hellenistic Jewish literature.”64 Philo shows, more than Wisdom, that this idea of the λόγος could also merge with the Stoic concept of the λόγος as the principle of rationality that pervades the universe (Heres 88; Fuga 110) or fit into the philosophical pattern of an intermediate figure found in Middle Platonism.65 Philo can identify λόγος and σοφία (cf. Leg. 1.65; Her. 191; Somn. 2.242–245), both are considered the image of God (Conf. 146), are linked with “the beginning” (Conf. 146; Ebr. 30–32; Virt. 61–63), and are considered the instrument of creation (Cher. 127; Det. 54). But both are also deemed to be not uncreated but created (Ebr. 31; Leg. 3.175). The λόγος is called the “firstborn” (πρωτότοκος) of all beings so that God can be called his Father (and Wisdom even his mother).66 But, like Wisdom, the λόγος can also be said to have been created. He is not clearly uncreated but still a mediator figure. In spite of those very close analogies, there is a marked difference between the adoption of the Logos in Philo and in the Johannine prologue: 63  C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to John, 2nd ed., (London: SPCK, 1978), 153. 64  Thomas Tobin, “The Prologue of John in Hellenistic Jewish Speculation,” CBQ 52 (1990): 256f. 65  Tobin, ABD 4.350. For further comparison, see the survey in C. H. Dodd, Interpretation, 65–74; more thoroughly Hans-Friedrich Weiss, Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie des hellenistischen und palästinischen Judentums, TU 97 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), and Mack, Logos und Sophia, 108–79; with regard to the Johannine prologue see the discussion in Tobin, “The Prologue of John”; Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer, “Der Logos und die Schöpfung: Streiflichter bei Philo (Op 20–25) und im Johannesprolog (Joh 1:1–18),” in Kontexte des Johannesevangeliums, ed. Jörg Frey and Udo Schnelle, WUNT 175 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 295–319; Folker Siegert, “Der Logos, ‚älterer Sohn‛ des Schöpfers und ‚zweiter Gott‛: Philons Logos und der Johannesprolog,” in ibid., 277–94. 66  Fuga 108f.; cf. Leonhardt-Balzer, “Der Logos und die Schöpfung,” 298.

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Philo’s adoption of the Logos is guided by his (Middle-Platonic) view of God as a perfect, transcendent being: In order to consider how the transcendent God could act in creation and history, the notion of λόγος is adopted from Jewish-Hellenistic wisdom tradition to function as an intermediate reality between God and the material world. Later (Valentinian or Platonizing) interpreters of the Johannine prologue in the second century (e.g. Heracleon or Ptolemaios) face similar problems and thus insert modifications which are absent from the Gospel of John.67 Philo can demonstrate how far a very educated Hellenistic Jew could develop the idea of the Logos. This may be important for our view of the Fourth Gospel, but the concerns of the Evangelist and the Johannine prologue differ from those of Philo, and in spite of some terminological affinities, there are important differences: Thus it is clear that “in Philo, the Logos is never fully personal, certainly never incarnate, and never the object of faith and love.”68 The same is true, by the way, with regard to the notion of the ‫ממרא דייי‬ (“Memra of the Lord”) in the Palestinian Targumim69 which is similarly considered a hypostatic figure,70 to which the creation can be attributed.71 As the Logos in Philo, the Memra is not fully personal, can never incarnate, and although the mention of the Memra can replace the divine name, the Memra is never called “God,” not even a “second God” (as is Philo’s Logos). 67  See Jörg Frey, “The Johannine Prologue and the References to the Creation of the World in its Second Century Receptions,” in Les judaïsmes dans tous leurs états aux Ier–IIIe siècles (Les Judéeens des synagogues, les chrétiens et les rabbins): Actes du colloque de Lausanne 12–14 décembre 2012, ed. Claire Clivaz, Simon Claude Mimouni, and Bernard Pouderon, Judaïsme ancien et origines du christianisme 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 221–44. 68  Thus rightly John McHugh, John 1–4, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2009), 94. 69  Cf. basically Martin McNamara, “Logos of the Fourth Gospel and Memra of the Palestinian Targum (Exod 12:42),” in Targum and New Testament: Collected Essays, WUNT 279 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 439–43; idem, Targum and Testament Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 154–66; further Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and John Ronning, The Jewish Targums and John’s Logos Theology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010). 70  Point of departure is the exegesis of Ps 33:6; cf. Mekhilta R. Jishmael Beschallach 10, seed. Cf. S. Horovitz and I. A. Rabin, Mechilta d’Rabbi Ismael cum variis lectionibus et adnotationibus, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1960), 150. For the Rabbis, see Hans Bietenhard, “Logos-Theologie im Rabbinat: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Wort Gottes im rabbinischen Schrifttum,” ANRW 2.19.2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 580–618. 71  Tg. Neof. Gen 1:3, 5, 6; in 1:1 it may be dropped out, see A. Díez-Macho, ed., Genesis, vol. 1 of Neophyti I: Targum Palestinense, ms de la biblioteca vaticana (Madrid–Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigacioines Científicas, 1968), 2–3. Cf. also McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited, 164.

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Thus, when the Johannine prologue not only connects the earthly Jesus with the idea of a hypostatic Logos, but programmatically opens the whole work with the reference to Gen 1:1 LXX and the term ὁ λόγος, it does not adopt the Philonic thought-world, but, more strongly, aspects of the wisdom tradition and earlier Jewish interpretations of the creation, in which light, life, and the divine word are habitually connected.72 However, some kind of philosophical awareness cannot be excluded. We should avoid narrowing the horizon of the Johannine author(s) and community to a mere biblical or encapsulated Jewish worldview. Instead, the strong dependence on Jewish sources and discourses does not preclude an awareness that the term ὁ λόγος, in a creational or cosmological context, deliberately resonates with various philosophical ideas of the broader world. Neither diaspora Judaism nor the circles of Jesus followers in the late first century were in a sectarian corner, cut off from the intellectual climate of their world. Thus, we should rather consider that the evangelist consciously opens his gospel using a term that could resonate with various philosophical and cosmological ideas and thus also address readers acquainted with Stoic or Platonic reasoning or with Greek (e.g., Hermetic) religious views.73 In Greek religion, there are also ways of speaking about the Logos as a Divine figure (or about certain gods, in particular Hermes) as Logos,74 and the Stoic views of the Logos as a divine ingredient of the cosmos, a mediator between macrocosmos and microcosmos, or a figure that could be accepted or also rejected by humans (cf. John 1:10–11) are not so far away from the beginning of the prologue. Only with the mention of the incarnation, the assumption of full humanity, are the philosophical readers left behind, or forced to accept that this kind of Logos is different from what they knew. With the opening in John 1:1, the Gospel has a quasi-“biblical” beginning but when addressing the beginning of the world it also resonates with contemporary philosophical ideas, notably without subscribing to either one of the leading philosophical systems. Whereas John uses the absolute term ὁ λόγος only in the Prologue, there is some correspondence between the Prologue and the narrative corpus: In his extended discourses, Jesus pronounces (John 3:34) and represents the word of God, he acts as the embodied word, and in particular the two paradoxical aspects of the Logos, his divinity and his earthly reality as the incarnate one, are continued with regard to Jesus who is called “the son of Joseph from Nazareth” 72  Cf. Masanobu Endo, Creation and Christology: A Study on the Johannine Prologue in the Light of Early Jewish Creation Accounts, WUNT 2/149 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). 73  See Frey, “Between Torah and Stoa,” 203–9. 74  See Frey, “Between Torah and Stoa,” 209.

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(1:41) and depicted as the “Son of Man” surrounded by heavenly angels (1:51), a still vulnerable human who has to die and, at the same time, the one “from above”: Although the Johannine narrative lacks the christological title ὁ λόγος, the distinct aspects linked with the Logos in the prologue are continued with regard to the earthly, incarnate, Jesus. 3.2.4 The Logos Uncreated, Only-Begotten, and “God” As stated above, John is aware of the various philosophical resonances of the term, but he does not subscribe to either the Stoic or the Platonic worldview. In John, there is no dualism between the immaterial and the material world, as in Philo. On the contrary, the Johannine Prologue is concerned with keeping these two together. This has important implications. In John, it is the divine logos, “God,” who cooperated in the creation of the world, and who also was—as the very same logos—in the (created, material) world (1:10), among “his own” (1:11), and even “became (human, mortal) flesh” (1:14). Here, the logos not only mediates between the transcendent and the material realm, he was or rather is part of both realms. The incarnate does not cease to be the divine but reveals the divine, even the invisible God, among humans (1:18). This is evidenced already in 1:9–11, but is most clearly seen when the incarnation of the Logos is stated in 1:14. Whereas in Philo, within a Middle-Platonic framework, the Logos as “firstborn” (πρωτότοκος) or the “eldest” (πρεσβύτατος) of all beings could be considered created, functioning as a divine agent and a mediator between the transcendent God and the material world, things are different in John. Here, without the framework of a Platonic dualism between the immaterial and the material, the Logos as mediator of the created world (1:3) is not a part of the created world itself but is instead assigned to the side of the creator. This implies that Logos is not only divine in the sense in which in Greco-Roman thought numerous superhuman figures could be called divine as having a share in some kind of divinity. He is not merely the first one of God’s creatures, as is Wisdom in Prov 8:22, but—in the line of the further “elevation” of Wisdom in the wisdom tradition—the logos in John is “uncreated.” Use of the λόγος in the Prologue, therefore, combines the term which is most prominently used in Philo with the development of the wisdom tradition, including aspects which are absent from Philo. In the wisdom tradition, Lady Wisdom is a hypostatic being “in the beginning,” “before the world” (Prov 8:23; πρὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος; ἐν ἀρχῇ), or preexistent (Sir 24:9), close to God (Prov 8:30; ἤμην παρ᾽ αὐτῷ) or even sharing God’s throne (Wis 9:4), almighty (Wis 7:23: παντοδύναμοϛ) and cooperating in his creation (Prov 8:30; Wis 7:22). Having come forth from God’s mouth (Sir 24:3), Wisdom

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can easily be identified with God’s Word in creation and in the Torah; having come from heaven and been sent into the world (Sir 24:4, 8), it can easily be interpreted as a heavenly being (in analogy with, e.g., the Son of Man). With the term λόγος, already conflated with σοφία in Wisdom of Solomon (cf. Wis 9:1–2), the idea is not only more open to being linked with a male figure (Jesus) but also open to resonate with the wider framework of philosophical and cosmological reflection. In adoption of the developments of the Jewish wisdom tradition, the Johannine Logos can ultimately be considered a figure beyond creation, before the foundation of the world, “born” or “begotten,” and thus uncreated. This is important for the interpretation of the θεός predication that characterizes the Logos in 1:1c, together with the temporal relation ἐν ἀρχῇ (John 1:1 BGT) and the “local” orientation πρὸς τὸν θεόν.75 Here, the Logos is not only considered “preexistent,” in the very beginning, being (cf. the imperfect in 1:1–2) “before” the creation which is, then, introduced with a “narrative” aorist in John 1:3,76 but also completely oriented towards God, the creator of the universe. This goes further than what is said about Wisdom and her close relationship with God, or about the Logos in Philo. As θεός, the Johannine Logos is even more than what is expressed by the predication δεύτερος θεός in Philo. His divinity is not merely a share in the divine nature; it is divinity in the sense that the Logos clearly belongs to the realm of the creator, uncreated. He is divine in the sense that he is uncreated. This is confirmed by the further designations of the Logos in the Prologue. Whereas in Philo, the Logos can be called “firstborn” (Fug. 108–9), notably with Wisdom as its mother, the Prologue uses the term “only-begotten” μονογενής (1:14, 18) which is more open to describe a relationship with a father, not a mother, but also focuses on the uniqueness of the relationship between the Logos and God, or Jesus and the Father. We can see here that the Johannine move to use the term Logos within the context of the developments of the Jewish wisdom tradition is still a move within Jewish lines of thought. The preexistence and co-creatorship of Wisdom and even her throne-companionship with God is not rooted in pagan religious traditions. Thus, if these traditions lie behind the Johannine depiction of the 75  On the interpretation of the three first stichoi in John 1:1a–c see Michael Theobald, Die Fleischwerdung des Logos: Studien zum Verhältnis des Johannesprolog zum Corpu des Evangeliums, NTA 20 (Munich: Aschendorff, 1988), 217–24. 76  ἐγένετο; cf. ἐποίησεν in Gen 1:1 LXX. See Jörg Frey, Das johanneische Zeitverständnis, vol. 2 of Die johanneische Eschatologie, WUNT 110 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 156–58; on the interplay between imperfect and aorist in the passages about Jesus’s preexistence, see 91–92.

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Logos as preexistent and divine, or even as being uncreated, the same is true for the Johannine Logos as the most innovative element of Johannine Christology. Johannine Christology marks the path from the Jewish Messiah (of Israel and for the world) to a Jewish, not Gentile, God.77 3.2.5 The Logos Incarnate and the Understanding of Incarnation If this divine, uncreated Logos is, then, said to have incarnated, become “flesh,” weak and mortal humanity (1:14), the challenge could not be greater. Incarnation has been the trickiest knot in Johannine Christology, and there have been many attempts at dissolving the paradox or diminishing the contrast. In history-of-religions scholarship, the σὰρξ ἐγένετο was often understood according to Greco-Roman concepts of the epiphany of gods who simply appear in human shape or undergo a metamorphosis which implies a mere temporal, and not real, change. While such paradigms cannot be ruled out in other early Christian confession formulas, from Phil 2:6–11 until 1 Tim 3:16, the clear wording in John 1:14 calls for a different understanding that implies a real and permanent change. It is, furthermore, decisive to understand the meaning of John 1:14 against the background of the Wisdom traditions mentioned above, i.e., the idea of the sending of Wisdom into Israel and the world and her tabernacling or continuous presence in Zion, as is most clearly prefigured in Sir 24.78 But while neither Lady Wisdom nor the Divine Word or the Logos in Philo could ultimately incarnate or be considered identical with a real human being, this is the challenging claim in John 1:14. John also goes beyond what had been said in earlier New Testament traditions, such as the hymn in Philippians 2: If the Logos became flesh, this is more than the temporal abandoning of the divine μορφή or the deliberately or obediently chosen humility of a being from the divine realm. In the Johannine term of σὰρξ ἐγένετο, the contrast is marked more sharply, it is no less than the contrast between the Logos, an uncreated being, the only-begotten and God (cf. 1:18) and the really human, earthly Jesus, having a father and a mother and ultimately dying the most humiliating death of a criminal on the cross. A greater tension can hardly be imagined, and it is quite conceivable that interpreters from antiquity until the present have sought paths of diminishing that tension, either by a less distinctive understanding of the divinity of the Logos with respect to the earthly Jesus or by a reduction of his humanity in 77  Cf. Boccaccini, “How Jesus Became Uncreated;” idem, “From Jewish Prophet to Jewish God.” 78  See Jörg Frey, “The Incarnation of the Logos and the Dwelling of God in Jesus Christ,” in The Glory of the Crucified One, 261–84 (275–77).

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various forms of “docetic” interpretations. Both interpretations are, in my view, excluded, because the paradox erected in 1:14 is also confirmed in the narrative of John 1:19–20:30 (or 21:25). In the series of christological titles in John 1, Jesus is not only called the “coming one” (1:26–27), the “Messiah” (1:41), about whom Moses and the prophets have given testimony (1:45), “King of Israel,” “Son of God” (1:49), and ultimately “the Son of Man” (1:51) but also the one who was “pre-existent” before the Baptizer (1:30; cf. 1:15) and “Joseph’s son from Nazareth” (1:45). John’s readers are expected to find the paradox already expressed in the Prologue, the tension between Jesus’s divinity and his true and full humanity, also in the gospel narrative.79 The Johannine narrative exposes (or, makes visible) the invisible God in the story of the earthly Jesus, who is characterized as the incarnate divine Logos in whom the “glory” of God (in adoption of the biblical Shekinah motif; cf. 1:14b) can be seen—at least for the eyes of faith. In spite of Jesus’s vulnerable earthly existence (which is not questioned in John), his divinity is continuously stated throughout the gospel until the last confession of Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” in 20:28, so that the God-predication forms an inclusio around the whole Gospel. Jesus’s divine dignity is confirmed in the Johannine discourses in the characterization of his eschatological authority, which is linked with the tradition of the “Son of Man” (5:27; cf. Dan 7:13). Furthermore, his divine dignity is claimed in various expressions of his descent “from above” or “from heaven” or his being “from above,” and it is most clearly expressed in his self-presentation in the I-am-Sayings, adopting the divine self-presentation from the Scriptures.80 Although previously only said of God himself, Jesus acts as the eschatological judge and the giver of life (5:22–23, 26–27), he bears life in himself, and gives the Holy Spirit (cf. 3:34; 20:22). Being still related to the way and the ministry of the earthly Jesus, as a fully human being, Johannine Christology is consistent in claiming that this earthly Jesus, the Messiah and King of Israel, who died on the cross, was actually a divine being, uncreated, and “God,” so that in his words, acts, and passion, he uniquely represents and reveals the one God of Israel, the God of the Scriptures.

79  The Johannine text also precludes the adoptionist solution suggested by Engberg-Pedersen that at Jesus’s (spiritual) baptism, the human Jesus was united with the divine Spirit (see idem, John and Philosophy). This is particularly incompatible with the sayings about Jesus’s preexistence from 1:15, 30 until 17:24, which are all related to the beginning of the Prologue (cf. Frey, review of John and Philosophy (by Engberg-Pedersen), 234–35). 80  Cf. Frey, Theology and History, 49–52.

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3.3 Backgrounds and Motifs of the Transformation For understanding the claim and the challenging paradox involved, we must briefly consider some further aspects behind the Johannine development and transformation of earlier traditions. 3.3.1

Challenge, Conflict, and the Character of the Narrative as a Post-Easter Memory First, the fourth evangelist is quite conscious of the offensiveness of his claims about Jesus, at least for the majority of contemporary Jews.81 This is not only mirrored in the bold argument from Scripture (Ps 81:6 LXX) used to justify the claims of Jesus’s divinity (10:34–36), but also by the hints to actual conflicts when Jewish contemporaries are quoted saying that Jesus “made himself God’s Son” (19:7) or “makes himself God” by calling God his Father (5:18), that Jesus actually was a transgressor and sinner (9:24), and that those following such a transgressor also transgress the borders of their community (9:22, 34). It is commonly accepted that these passages mirror debates about the Johannine Christology in the time of the Johannine community, rather than debates and claims actually made during the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry. Although some interpreters still want to defend the historical accuracy of John in his narratives and even in parts of his discourses,82 the overwhelming evidence points to the conclusion that the gospel narrative is shaped from the perspective of a later community and that the later memory of the ministry of Jesus, and his debates with his contemporaries and his words to his disciples is shaped not only by the christological insights but also by the conflicts of the community up to the time of the composition of the Gospel.83 The Gospel as a whole is written from the temporal and theological perspective of the postEaster community, or more precisely of its author and his time. Challenges and conflicts, but also theological insights and phrases of his time are inserted into the narrative of Jesus’s earthly ministry and used to interpret it in the light of the christological insights gained and as the foundational story that can instruct the present readers. There is even reason to assume that the evangelist was aware of that transformation of the tradition and that the perspective he presupposes was inaccessible to the contemporaries of Jesus. This is evident in the narrative asides after the cleansing of the Temple and after Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem (John 2:22; 12:16), wherein it is stated that the disciples of Jesus did not understand what Jesus meant (here: in his Temple saying; cf. 2:20–21) or what happened to 81  Cf. Frey, Theology and History, 23–27. 82  See the critical discussion of those attempts in Frey, Theology and History, 59–142. 83  Cf. Frey, “The Gospel of John as a Narrative Memory of Jesus.”

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Jesus (in the Messianic proclamation as king at his entry and the quotation of psalms; cf. 12:12–15). It was only after his resurrection or exaltation that they remembered and (as we can conclude) understood the meaning of Jesus’s words, actions, fate, and the Scriptures. These sayings lead to the conclusion that the evangelist was well aware that the insights he presents in his narrative and in Jesus’s words were the result of a post-Easter process of deepened understanding in the light of the Scriptures, inspired by the teaching activity of the Spirit. This means that the actual author of the Johannine views about Jesus is the Holy Spirit who taught the disciples in the post-Easter period and is active in the community, authorizing the Johannine preaching and, ultimately, also the composition of the Fourth Gospel.84 3.3.2 Reading Backwards: The Internal Logic of Johannine Christology The insight that the Johannine christological views are rooted in the Paschal perspective, in the view that Jesus was actually “glorified” in the event of his (death and) resurrection, has consequences for the interpretation of Johannine Christology. The question is, which is the appropriate reading direction: from the beginning to the end, or from the end to the beginning? Whereas the traditional dogmatic reading goes from the beginning to the end, from the divine glory through incarnation and death to the resurrection and ascension, i.e., from protology to eschatology, the inner logic of the Fourth Gospel suggests a reading from eschatology to protology, from the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection, understood as glorification and eschatological fulfilment (19:30), back to the idea of his divine dignity, preexistence, and primordial glory. The protological dimension, as presented in the Johannine prologue, is a consequence of eschatology. It is developed in order to affirm and ensure Jesus’s function as the eschatological savior and giver of eternal life. This is in correspondence with the historical development of christological thought. Regardless of how Jesus was viewed by his contemporary disciples during his lifetime, in the early post-Easter period, soteriological thought departed from the interpretation of his resurrection and death. The earliest confession formulas are focused on those events. Christological thought developed from the perception and early Messianic interpretation of Jesus’s ministry and the Paschal belief in his exaltation to divine glory toward the view that his ministry was already prefigured and prepared by earlier events such as the prodigies at his birth. Pushing the origins of the Gospel message back from the beginning of Jesus’s ministry (Mark) to his birth (Matthew and Luke), to the earlier history of Israel (Matthew’s genealogy) or humanity (Luke’s genealogy), 84  Cf. Frey, Theology and History, 146–151.

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or even to the creation of the world and beyond (John) is the path of the development of Christology within the first century CE. Why does the Fourth Gospel anchor the message of eschatological salvation in the protological past? In my view, this is due to the interest in the confirmation of the eschatological validity of salvation and life given in Jesus and through his death. Only if these events, and with them Jesus’s whole ministry, are not merely an episode within the changeable history, their remaining and eschatological validity can be affirmed. Therefore, Johannine reasoning anchors the sending of Jesus in God’s love—for the Son (John 3:35) and for the world (John 3:16). God’s love is mentioned as the ultimate reason for the Son’s way into death, and conversely, the self-dedication of the Son for the forgiveness of sins can be interpreted as the ultimate proof of God’s love (cf. 1 John 4:9–10). The message of salvation is, thus, ultimately anchored in a realm beyond the uncertainties of history. It is also independent of human actions, further conduct, or even a further divine judgment, but is firmly assured, as it is rooted in the eternal, premundane love of God or in the loving unity of the Father and the Son (John 17:24; cf. 3:35). This is the reason why John, unlike the other canonical gospels, addresses the creation or even a time beyond. Unlike many of its interpreters in the second century, the Fourth Gospel shows no further interest in cosmological or philosophical speculation. Instead, protology is expressed exclusively in the interest of soteriology and eschatology, providing confirmation of salvation to a community in distress. This is also the ultimate reason why Jesus is connected with the idea of the uncreated and divine Logos. For ensuring the reality and eschatological validity of salvation, Jesus had to become a Jewish God. This means, however, that the distinctively Johannine high Christology is a final consequence from the earlier christological and soteriological claims, e.g., the claim expressed in Luke 12:8 that the figure of Jesus and the reaction of humans to Jesus is decisive in the eschatological judgment (by the “Son of Man”). Such a claim calls for a reflection on the eschatological authorization of Jesus. How can we understand that this particular figure is decisive with regard to the eschatological fate of humans? Christological reflection provides the answer with various “titles” such as “Messiah” or “Son of Man.” In the Johannine development, the eschatological authorization is anchored not merely at a certain point in history, Jesus’s resurrection, his baptism, birth, or “incarnation,” but in the very beginning, in the primordial divine reality. There is not an insurmountable ditch but rather a consequential line of reasoning between the claims of the earliest Jesus tradition and Johannine high Christology.85 85  See Jörg Frey, “Continuity and Discontinuity between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’: The Possibilities of an Implicit Christology,” RCT 36 (2011): 69–98.

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3.3.3 Johannine Christology and the Teaching of the Spirit-Paraclete However, according to Johannine reasoning, the insight into Jesus’s divine dignity was taught by the Spirit-Paraclete. Only the teaching and “remembering” (John 14:26; 16:13–15) activity of the Spirit could lead the disciples in the postEaster era to a new remembrance of the Jesus story and to the understanding of the Scriptures, of Jesus’s fate, his words and deeds, and—ultimately—his divine dignity. But if the insight into the divine dignity of Jesus and the unity between the Father and the Son are taught by the Spirit, this figure also enters the “binitarian” relationship between God and Jesus. As a teacher, “advocate” (= παράκλητος), and replacement of the earthly Jesus among his disciples, the Spirit-Paraclete assumes a strongly personal shape. It (or should we now say “he,” or even “she”?) is a distinct acting subject, not merely a creative power or a divine fluidum. The Spirit is closely linked with God and Jesus, but distinct from both of them. Thus, the Spirit-Paraclete acts and teaches as a quasi-personal subject, although it is stressed that the Spirit does not act or teach “of his own” (16:13–15), that is: in an illegitimate manner, but only in close relation with and thus authorization from the exalted Jesus. I have discussed elsewhere how the Spirit “could become a person”86 in the Jesus tradition, thus adopting elements that remain absent with regard to the divine Spirit in the Hebrew Bible, and also remain absent from the idea of the messianic spirit that empowered Jesus or from the spirit as the power of resurrection (cf. Rom 1:3–4). The conceptualization of the Spirit as a personal “hypostasis” starts already in Paul and can also be found, although somewhat differently, in Luke. The reason for this development is that the spirit and its work is increasingly paralleled with the work of the exalted Christ. In Paul we can observe how “personal” elements of the Spirit are “borrowed” from Christ: God has sent the Spirit (Gal 4:6), as he had sent his Son (Gal 4:4). The Spirit dwells in the believers (Rom 8:9, 11) as Christ dwells in them (Rom 8:10; Gal 2:22). The Spirit represents those who believe and pray in God’s realm, as also the exalted Christ represents them and intercedes for them (Rom 8:34; cf. 1 John 2:1).87 The Spirit “liberates” (Rom 8:2), as did Christ (Gal 5:1), he gives gifts of grace, “as he wills” (1 Cor 12:11), just as God himself gives them according to his will (1 Cor 12:6). The Spirit is said to have an intention (Rom 8:6, 27), he “searches” all things (1 Cor 2:10), he bears witness (Rom 8:16), helps in human weakness (Rom 8:26), teaches (1 Cor 2:13), leads humans (Rom 8:14), 86  Jörg Frey, “How Did the Spirit Become a Person?” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, Ekstasis 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 243–371. 87  It is striking that Paul articulates these parallels in relatively narrow textual units, esp. Gal 4 and Rom 8. This means that the correspondences are not accidental but deliberate and programmatic.

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and enables to pray (Gal 4:6; Rom 8:15)—all this is phrased in analogy to acts of the exalted Jesus or God. Furthermore, the presence of the exalted Christ is mediated through the Spirit (cf. Rom 15:19), thus God’s Spirit is also Christ’s Spirit (Rom 8:9): What had been assigned to God is now also assigned to the exalted Christ, so that the acting of God, of the exalted Christ, and of the Spirit are considered to be an interrelated nexus. Unlike John, Paul cannot yet say the Spirit was sent or given through Christ. It is still God alone who gives the Spirit (1 Cor 6:19; 2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Gal 4:6; 1 Thess 4:8), but the Spirit is also “the Spirit of his Son” (Gal 4:6), “the Spirit of (Jesus) Christ” (Rom 8:9; Phil 1:19), or “the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18). The phrase ὁ δὲ κύριος τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστιν (2 Cor 3:17a) could even suggest an identification between the exalted Christ and the Spirit, but the continuation “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” still marks a “subordination” of the Spirit under Christ and a distinction between the two. The close correlation of the works of Christ and the Spirit is not without effect on the concept of the relation between God and Christ, or the Father and the Son: The Spirit is no longer simply an apersonal divine power but on the basis of its relation with Christ, the Spirit has developed the profile of a discretely acting and speaking subject, so that it is at least tentatively conceptualized in personal categories. Thus already in Pauline thought, the texture of the “binitarian monotheism” is widened by a personalization of the Spirit.88 This is further developed in John where the personal aspects of the Spirit are expressed much more clearly. The Spirit shall be with the disciples in the period of Jesus’s absence, so that they will not be lonely or lost (as “orphans”; cf. John 14:18). He teaches the disciples as Jesus taught them and leads them as he led them, thus in a certain manner “replacing” the incarnate Jesus. The “personal” features of the Spirit are largely phrased in analogy to the person of Jesus, the exalted and the earthly one. Even the term “the Paraclete” (ὁ παράκλητος) was (probably) first coined for the heavenly Christ who helps the believers as a heavenly intercessor in the realm of the Father (1 John 2:1),89 and the fact that the Spirit-Paraclete is introduced in the Gospel as the “other Paraclete” (John 88  Thus Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 839– 42: “Paul’s understanding of God was functionally trinitarian” (ibid., 839). Cf. also Hans Hübner, Die Theologie des Paulus und ihre neutestamentliche Wirkungsgeschichte, vol. 2 of Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 346: “Kennt auch Paulus, überhaupt das Neue Testament nicht das Dogma der Trinität, so ist doch das, was dieses Dogma später einmal auslegen wird, in der Theologie des Paulus schon wurzelhaft und substantiell angelegt.” 89  Cf. Jörg Frey, Die eschatologische Verkündigung in den johanneischen Texten, vol. 3 of Die johanneische Eschatologie, WUNT 117 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 159–64.

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14:16) points to an original concept according to which the “first” paraclete is Jesus himself. According to the first two Paraclete sayings,90 the Holy Spirit is sent by God upon the request of the departed Jesus (John 14:16–17, 26). According to the other three sayings, the Spirit is considered the gift of Jesus himself, after his departure and death (John 15:26; 16:7–11) which is the precondition for the coming of the Spirit. This is also confirmed in the Easter narrative, where the Spirit is given to the disciples by the risen one (John 20:22–23). It is even a sign of Jesus’s divine dignity and dignity as creator that he himself is the giver of the life-giving Spirit, as God had breathed into the figure of clay to bring it to life (Gen 2:7 LXX).91 Jesus is the one upon whom the Spirit rests (John 1:32f.), and in John 3:34 it is said that the one whom God has sent and who pronounces God’s words (i.e., Jesus) “gives the Spirit without limitation” (John 3:34).92 As the giver of the Spirit, Jesus takes the place that was held by God alone in the tradition. Thus, pneumatology confirms and corresponds to the Gospel’s high Christology. The legacy of the work of the Spirit is also most strongly derived from Jesus: He promises the coming of the Spirit after his departure, and the Spirit is said to remind others of Jesus’s words and deeds. The last one of the five Paraclete sayings, John 16:13–15, possibly reacts to the suspicion that the Spirit might act in an unauthorized manner, stressing the fact that everything the Spirit does or proclaims is taken from the realm of Jesus, i.e., closely related to him, and authorized through his relation with Jesus.93 So the whole teaching activity of the Spirit can be summarized as glorifying Jesus. He gives testimony and enables the disciples to give testimony about Jesus. He not only empowers them but represents the exalted Jesus and makes him present within the disciples’ proclamation of the gospel. In a distinct manner John depicts the Holy Spirit as a divine figure with personal traits. The Spirit is not simply a mode of Jesus’s “spiritual” coming. The Paraclete sayings clearly distinguish between Jesus and the Spirit-Paraclete and also between both and God the Father: The Father shall give the Spirit-Paraclete on Jesus’s request (John 14:16). He will send the Spirit in Jesus’s name (John 90  For a more thorough interpretation of the paraclete sayings, see Frey, Theology and History, 177–86. 91  The creation of faith in the disciples on Easter day is thus put into analogy with the creation of the human being, and Jesus appears in analogy with the creator (cf. also John 1:3). 92  In John 3:34b, the grammatical subject is the subject of the verb λαλεῖ in 3:34a, i.e., the one whom God has sent, Jesus. Thus (in contrast with some Bible translations), according to John 3:34 it is not God, but precisely Jesus who is the giver of the Spirit. 93  Cf. Frey, Theology and History, 144–45.

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14:26). Or Jesus will send the Spirit-Paraclete from (the realm of) the Father (John 15:26). He will take from what belongs to Jesus, but everything that the Father has also belongs to Jesus (cf. John 16:14–15). The Spirit-Paraclete, the exalted Christ, and God the Father are clearly distinguished and correlated. Thus, the Spirit enters the “binitarian” relationship between the Father and the Son, widening the bipolar relationship into a network of three divine figures who are distinguished but closely related. Of course, the Johannine view is still far away from the later Trinitarian doctrine, as developed in the third and fourth century, based on Greek ontological terms. But the Johannine statements on the Spirit provide the most important scriptural basis for the later view of the Holy Spirit as a divine person in specific correlation with, and distinction from, the Father and the Son. In John, the personality of the Holy Spirit and the precisely reflected coordination of Spirit, Son, and Father are developed in a manner that became normative later on in the development of the Christian doctrine. So John could provide at least the scriptural basis for dismissing some of the options of relating Father, Son, and Spirit in the early church: Excluded is not only the idea of three divine figures (“tri-theism”), but also the idea of a strict “monarchianism” of the Father over against the Son and the Spirit and the “modalism” of the three hypostases as mere modes of appearance of the one deity behind the three. Quite soon, the Gospel of John served as the “canon” for the understanding of the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit as well as for the construction of the later Trinitarian teaching and the decisive Christian image of the Holy Spirit as a divine “person.” Thus, the Johannine conception of God reflects a “prototrinitarian” theology. 4

Concluding Reflections: Between “Jewish” Binitarian Monotheism and “Christian” Proto-Trinitarian Theology

How can we finally evaluate such bold thinking? Where can we assign it? Is it still Jewish or definitely no longer Jewish? Has Johannine thought abandoned the monotheistic creed which is so significant and distinctive for the biblical and Jewish tradition and also for the early Jesus movement? We cannot discuss here how far the later dogmatic development of Trinitarian theology and the Christian dogmatic tradition still keep the monotheistic foundations—albeit in highly subtle philosophical terms and distinctions—or rather abandoned it, as critics in antiquity and modernity have inferred. Our focus is only on the Johannine thought-world, its claims, and its inner logic.

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a) With regard to Christology, John marks the climactic point of the canonical Gospels, the “highest” Christology in which Jesus is explicitly presented as “God” and “one with the Father.” He is not merely presented as a divine being that can be venerated and addressed in prayer, but in an even more elevated manner as uncreated and definitely belonging to the side of the creator. But as this concept is completely developed from ideas of the Hellenistic Jewish wisdom tradition and in its view of the creation in a marked contrast with the cosmological patterns of contemporary philosophy, the Johannine concept can still be considered a developed form of Jewish “binitarian monotheism,” and if Jesus is presented as “God,” he is a Jewish, not a Gentile God. The unity with the Father stated in 10:30, deliberately with the neuter and the plural verb (ἕν ἐσμεν, not εἷς), is not understood as a simple fusion of two figures into one, but as an inseparably close relationship, described by the metaphor of love (3:35; 17:24), and as being rooted in the premundane realm of the creator.94 In Jesus’s word, most prominently in the I-am-sayings, God’s word is spoken, and his “I am” is ultimately authorized not by Jesus alone but by the Father and Jesus in their unity (thus 8:16, referring to 8:12). Of course, the relationship between the Father and the Son is irreversible, as the Son (or monogenes) departs from and is dependent on the Father. But it is questionable whether this can be aptly called “subordination.” At least in the history of interpretation, “subordinationism” usually implied that the Son was created at a certain point in time95 or that Jesus’s divinity is of a lesser degree than that of the Father. In John, it is stated that the Son is given divine authority and the possession of life in himself, but this is only to stress that he has it actually and legitimately. The Son has full divine authority not only to reveal the Father (1:18; 3:13 etc.) but also to do his proper works of giving life and enacting judgment, and since that judgment or the gift of life happens at present in the encounter with Jesus (3:18; 5:25), it is valid eternally. So the assertion that “the Father is greater than I” (14:28)96 rather aims at confirming the authority of Jesus and the inseparable relationship with the Father, it is not aimed at his “subordination.”

94  We should rather not use the term ‘eternity’ here, as this implies an Aristotelian understanding of infinite time or a Platonic understanding of timelessness. 95  Thus the famous slogan at the beginnings of the Arian controversy that there was a time in which the Son was not yet, before he was created. 96  On this, cf. C. K. Barrett, “‘The Father is Greater than I’ (John 14:28): Subordinationist Christology in the New Testament,” in Essays on John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 19–36.

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b) Things are somewhat different with regard to the Spirit. With the Spirit viewed as a divine personal figure, there is a third player on the field who is ultimately considered the author of the Johannine views about Christ, his divinity and his unity with the Father. The Spirit is clearly distinguished from the Father and from Jesus, but also closely related to both of them. He is considered a personal subject, not merely a power or fluidum, and he dwells among or even within humans (14:16–17; cf. 20:22), as God and Jesus are said to dwell within humans (14:21). Thus, the Spirit is clearly considered divine, but it is not said that the Spirit was “in the beginning” (as was the Logos).97 The Spirit is not said to be “one” with the Father, nor even “one” with Jesus. Thus, the Spirit is more clearly subordinate to the Father and also to Jesus. Furthermore, his personal shape is actually borrowed from the person of the incarnate and exalted Jesus. Consequently, the Spirit in John is a personal divine figure, but not (yet) on the same level with the Father and Jesus. In John, the Spirit is not said to be “God” in the same sense in which Jesus is called “God.” Of course, the developed view of the divine Spirit affects the “binitarian monotheism” of Jesus and the Father or God and the Logos. It strengthens the relational aspects and develops the bipolar relationship into a tripolar one. Duality is transferred into sociality. There is no “mystical” fusion between those personal figures. The views that the Spirit is only the mode of the presence of the exalted Jesus or that Jesus was only the mode of the appearance of the Father are ruled out in such a tripolar relationship. This is the reason why John could provide the scriptural basis for later Christianity to rule out a number of options of determining the relationship between the Father and the Son or the Father, the Son, and the Spirit: Neither a mere “modalism” nor a “ditheism” or “tritheism” could be considered appropriate in view of the Johannine texts. John, therefore, contributes considerably to the later construction of the Trinitarian doctrine, although the Gospel is still far away from such an elaborate doctrine and in particular from the philosophical terms used in the third and fourth century to discuss and “solve” the problems of the mutual relationship between the three. John is still far away from the Nicene creed and from later Trinitarianism, but—as the most important source for that later reflection—we can call John’s way of relating God, Jesus, and the Spirit a “proto-trinitarian theology.” c) Is this still Jewish? I hesitate, although I can still not see any impact of pagan polytheistic views. John’s proto-trinitarian network is still a developed form of the binitarian monotheism developed in the earlier Jesus movement. 97  Only later interpreters could link this with the “breathing” spirit of the creation story (Gen 1:2 LXX).

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However, as the most decisive move toward the personality of the Spirit is inspired from the view of the exalted Christ and his presence in the community of Jesus followers, there is an element that might rather be called “Christian.” Thus, John’s theology is located between a still Jewish “binitarian monotheism” and a “Christian” proto-trinitarian view. It might be both, Jewish and Christian, and thus demonstrates that drawing fixed borderlines between “Judaism” and emerging “Christianity” at this point is still impossible. On the other hand, the conflict with fellow Jews is clearly visible in the text of the Fourth Gospel, and this conflict most probably points back to actual conflicts in the context of the communities related to the author. The conflict is clearly about the nature and dignity of Jesus, not about the views of the Spirit. While John’s Jewish contemporaries consider the Johannine high Christology an undue and blasphemous claim, or—phrased with regard to Jesus—a blasphemous usurpation, John still refers to scriptural and Jewish exegetic arguments, quoting Psalm 82 LXX or referring to the authority of the “Son of Man” in Daniel 7 (John 5:27) for the claim that Jesus actually is the Son of God or the one in whom God’s own glory is present. Thus, the traditions, the argument, and also the resulting view can still be considered Jewish, but it is also conceivable that contemporary synagogue Jews in their majority rejected those bold views. But we can also see that the shape of Johannine Christology cannot be simply explained as a reaction to the hostility of contemporary synagogues. Instead, it follows a proper logic, departing from the claims about Jesus and his messianic or eschatological function in the earlier Jesus tradition. Contrary to the views of the earlier history-of-religions school, there is no gap or ditch between the earlier claims about Jesus’s eschatologically decisive function and the bold views of the Johannine prologue, but instead there exists a coherent development from Jesus and the messianic and eschatological views of his earliest followers to the fully developed form of Johannine Christology.

Chapter 10

God and Christ in the Earlier Martyr Acts Jan N. Bremmer From his earliest publications until his final books and blogging,1 Larry Hurtado has shown a profound interest in the devotion of the earliest Christians to God and Christ, whereby, instead of concentrating on early Christian Christology, he has focused on the devotional practices of those earliest Christians. His important argument is that we can typically identify two figures as recipients of devotion: God and Jesus, a combination that he persuasively considers a unique ‘mutation’ of traditional Jewish devotional practices. It is this “dyadic” view of early Christianity that interests me in my contribution. Hurtado has concentrated on the earliest forms of Christianity and their corporate practices. But what about the individual early Christians in the first centuries after the death of Jesus? Did they also express a belief in God and Jesus, and can we find expressions of their devotion to this dyad? The question immediately raises important problems. First, what about the step from corporate to individual worship? It is one thing to participate in a community, another to internalise its values and ideas and practise these also outside the community. Can we indeed assume that all early Christians had internalised the corporate practices and were, outside the gatherings of the Christian community, also individually devoted to God and Christ? And if so, which qualities or characteristics of God and Christ did they foreground? Second, where do we look for evidence for individual ideas? It is one of the problems of the study of early Christianity that we have very little information about individual conversions. And what we have is clearly aimed at an

1  L. W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988; 3d ed. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015); Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999); Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Hurtado, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Hurtado, God in New Testament Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010); Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion: The Context and Character of Christological Faith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017); Hurtado, Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice (Bellingham: Lexham, 2018).

© JAN N. BREMMER, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_011

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intellectual audience and mediated by the values and ideals of that audience.2 Third, how do these ideas about God and Christ compare to contemporary pagan ideas about their gods? Does such a comparison perhaps tell us something about one of the reasons why Christianity eventually displaced the traditional Greco-Roman ideas about the gods? Given the paucity of evidence about individual beliefs of the early Christians, we have to mine every possible source of information. For this contribution, I will therefore concentrate on a source that has not yet been used in this context. Over the course of time, early Christianity preserved a number of accounts of the trials of its members, which are nowadays, anachronistically, called Acta martyrum. In these accounts, we find a variety of Christians (free and slave, old and young, male and female), who are interrogated by Roman judges and who make certain statements about God and Christ during this questioning. It is the aim of my contribution to take a closer look at those Acta in order to see what these tell us about individual beliefs in God and Christ. Naturally, an investigation into all the Acta would transcend the allotted space. That is why I will limit myself to those Acta that derive from the long second century, when Christian theology was in its infant stages and the Scriptures were still in the process of becoming authoritative. Such a project is not without difficulties. The early Acta have been transmitted to us in several different ways, which have left their imprints on the texts. As these texts have no known author, no one ever felt the need to preserve them as precisely as possible, as, for example, was the case with the works of Plato. We should also take into account the fact that their transmission is largely due to their usage in the liturgy, which had the unfortunate effect that the original beginnings of these Acta and the details about the arrests were often omitted and are now not recoverable for us.3 On the other hand, we must not ask from these texts more than they can possibly give. They are brief reports of trials of Christians, not verbatim accounts. We should compare them with modern reports of trials in the newspapers or television bulletins. These, too,

2  Cf. J. Engberg, “Human and Divine Agency in Conversion in Apologetic Writings of the Second Century: To ‘Dance with Angels,’” in Conversion and Initiation in Antiquity: Shifting Identities—Creating Change, ed. B. S. Bøgh (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 77–101; J. N. Bremmer, Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity, WUNT 379 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 181–96. 3  F. Dolbeau, “Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea 2010,” REAug 57 (2011): 402: “Les légendiers étaient destinés à une lecture faite en assemblée où l’habitude était de commencer in medias res: en hagiographie latine, des centaines de cas pourraient ainsi illustrer la disparition des prologues ou leur préservation dans un nombre infime de témoins.”

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concentrate on what are seen, at the time, as the most important elements, not faithful recordings of every detail. Although most early texts have disappeared, several descriptions of martyrdoms have survived that go back to the actual court reports, the so-called acta, which have also given their name to the modern genre. These reports were available for inspection, as is demonstrated by a letter sent to Cyprian by his fellow bishops: “As a good and true teacher you preceded us in declaring in the records of the official proceedings of the proconsul (apud acta proconsulis) what we, your pupils, treading in your footsteps ought to say before the governor” (Cyprian, Ep. 77.2.1).4 A more recently discovered letter of Augustine shows that he, too, could still read original transcripts, which he calls gesta forensia or publica gesta. In fact, he clearly preferred these unadorned protocols to the later so-called “epic passions.”5 On the other hand, not all Acta go back to, or are based on, trial records. Initially, the accounts of martyrdoms constituted a heterogeneous corpus of texts. For example, the Martyrdom of Polycarp is a letter from the congregation of Smyrna to the one in Philomelium, the Letter of Lyons and Vienne is, as it says, also a letter from one congregation to another; and the Passion of Perpetua is a combination of a diary, a report of a dream, and editorial comments. Given this variety of origins, we should thus refrain from considering these early reports as an already clearly defined genre. Yet they share a kind of (what I have called)6 martyrological discourse by usually containing the confession: “I am a Christian,” which was sufficient to condemn the Christian martyr to

4  Cf. Vita Cypriani 11.1: “et quid sacerdos Dei proconsule interrogante responderit, sunt acta quae referant”; note also the interesting case of Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria in Eusebius, HE 7.11.3–11. For the accessibility of the legal archives, see B. Anagnostou-Canas, “La documentation judiciaire pénale dans l’Égypte romaine,” Mélanges de L’École française de Rome— Antiquité 112 (2000): 753–79; P. van Minnen, “Saving History? Egyptian Hagiography in its Space and Time,” in The Encroaching Desert: Egyptian Hagiography and the Medieval West (Church History and Religious Culture 86), ed. J. Dijkstra and M. van Dijk (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 57–91, here 60–62; T. D. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 54–66; S. R. Huebner, “Soter, Sotas, and Dioscorus before the Governor: the First Authentic Court Record of a Roman Trial of Christians?” JLA 12 (2019): 2–24. 5  Augustine, Epistulae*. 29.1, 2, ed. J. Divjak, Lettres 1*–29* (Paris: Institut d’Ètudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 414–17, to be read with the commentary by Y. Duval, ibid., 573–80; C. Lepelley, “Les réticences de saint Augustin face aux légendes hagiographiques d’après la lettre Divjak 29*,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown, ed. Ph. Rousseau and M. Papoutsakis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 147–58. 6  J. N. Bremmer, “From Heroes to Saints and from Martyrological to Hagiographical Discourse,” in Sakralität und Heldentum, ed. F. Heinzer, J. Leonhard and R. von den Hoff (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2017), 35–66, here 47–54.

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death and thus was often the climax of the report of their trials.7 Second, and closely related to the first point, both the martyrs and the authors of the reports of their executions styled them(selves) followers, sometimes even imitators, of Christ.8 The Lyonese martyr Blandina, for example, seemed to hang in the form of a cross when executed (M. Lugd. 1.41). Third, persistence until the end was considered a victory over the Devil. Thus, the opponent, usually the Roman judge, was seen as his manifestation.9 Taking these considerations into account, let us now turn to the actual Acta. I will start with what is traditionally considered the oldest account. 1

The Martyrdom of Polycarp10

As the prologue tells us, the Martyrdom of Polycarp is a letter written to the church in Philomelium (modern Akşehir) in southern Phrygia, of which the exact location has only been ascertained in more recent decades.11 It was a small town, and this should be taken into account in the discussion of its 7  For a full collection of passages, see Bremmer, Maidens, Magic and Martyrs, 9 n 30; add P. Rossano, “Le témoignage de nom Chrétien dans les Actes des Martyrs du IIe siècle,” in Le Témoignage, ed. E. Castelli (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1972), 331–40. 8  M. Pellegrino, Ricerche patristiche (1938–1980), 2 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1982), 1:385–703 passim; I. Kinnard, “Imitatio Christi in Christian Martyrdom and Asceticism: A Critical Dialogue,” in Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and Comparative Perspectives, ed. O. Freiberger, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 131–50; C. R. Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 49–76. The theme remains important in the later “passions épiques”: M. Taveirne, “Das Martyrium als imitatio Christi: Die literarische Gestaltung der spätantiken Märtyrerakten und passionen nach der Passion Christi,” ZAC 18 (2014): 167–203; S. Fialon, Mens immobilis. Recherches sur le corpus latin des actes et des passions d’Afrique romaine (IIe–VIe siècles) (Paris: Institut d’Ètudes Augustiniennes, 2018), 276–83. 9  See, for example, Mart. Polycarpi 3.1; Mart. Lugduni 1.5, 6 etc.; Passio Perpetuae 10.14; Passio Lucii et Montani 6.4–5; Passio Fructuosi 7.2. 10  I follow the text of B. Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana. Studies on Martyrdom and Persecution in Early Christianity. Collected Essays, ed. Johan Leemans (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), 3–22. 11  See, most recently, K. Belke and N. Mersich, Phrygien und Pisidien: Tabula Imperii Byzantini 7 (Vienna: VÖAW, 1990), 359–61; C. Breytenbach and C. Zimmermann, Early Christianity in Lycaonia and Adjacent Areas: From Paul to Amphilochius (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 314–22; add H. Malay, “A Copy of the Letter of Antiochos III to Zeuxis (209 B.C.),” in Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch, ed. H. Heftner and K. Tomaschitz (Vienna: Eigenverlag der Herausgeber, 2004), 407–13 (cf. SEG 54.1237).

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authenticity. It is hard to imagine that a forger in the third or fourth century would choose this town instead of one of the larger cities, such as Ephesus or Pergamum; typically, the reference is dropped in the Armenian translation.12 The location in Phrygia is especially interesting, as the account actually mentions a Phrygian, Quintus, who had started as a voluntary martyr but who had got cold feet and had sacrificed when confronted with the wild animals (M. Pol. 4), clearly an admonishment to others not to become voluntary martyrs.13 In any case, it hardly requires that we look for a connection with Montanism, as has often happened.14 As the letter shows an intimate acquaintance with Smyrnaean institutions and vocabulary,15 it seems reasonable to accept that it was written in Smyrna itself. Moreover, it was available in Smyrna before the martyrdom of Pionius under Decius in AD 250, which repeatedly quotes or alludes to our account,16 and it even seems to have been familiar to the author of the Letter of Lyon and Vienne of about AD 177 (§ 4).17 It is a different matter, however, if the letter was composed straight after the execution of Polycarp, of which the time seems to have been ca. AD 157, although the precise date is impossible to establish.18

12  Cf. O. Zwierlein, Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Polycarpianum, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 1:53. 13  C. Butterweck, “Martyriumssucht” in der Alten Kirche? Studien zur Darstellung und Deutung frühchristlicher Martyrien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995); J.-L. Voisin, “Prosopographie des morts volontaires chrétiens (en particulier chez Eusèbe de Césarée),” in Prosopographie et histoire religieuse, ed. M.-F. Baslez and F. Prévot (Paris: De Boccard, 2005), 351–62; A. R. Birley, “Voluntary Martyrs in the Early Church: Heroes or Heretics?” Cristianesimo nella Storia 27 (2006): 99–127; A. Dearn, “Voluntary Martyrdom and the Donatist Schism,” Studia Patristica 39 (2006): 27–32; G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 153–200 (the chapter was composed in the 1950s, but never published; the notes have been well updated); C. Moss, “The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern,” Church History 81 (2012): 531– 51, who is contested by P. Middleton, “Early Christian Voluntary Martyrdom: A Statement for the Defence,” JTS 64 (2013): 556–73. 14  Cf. Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 121–30 (“The Martyrium of Polycarp and the Outbreak of Montanism”). 15  J. den Boeft and J. N. Bremmer, “Notiunculae Martyrologicae IV,” VC 45 (1991): 105–22; W. Ameling, “Smyrna von der Offenbarung bis zum Martyrium des Pionius—Marktplatz oder Kampfplatz der Religionen?” in Juden—Heiden—Christen? Religiöse Inklusion und Exklusion in Kleinasien bis Decius ed. S. Alkier and H. Leppin (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 391–432 at 414–20. 16  See the detailed study by J. M. Kozlowski, “Pionius Polycarpi Imitator: References to Martyrium Polycarpi in Martyrium Pionii,” Science et Esprit 67 (2015): 417–34. 17  Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 60. 18  Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 56–60; Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 367–78.

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Its theologised contents suggest a certain time lapse between the news of Polycarp’s death, the request for more information and the composition of the letter. We also need not exclude the possibility of some embellishments in the course of the transmission, perhaps to make the commemoration more attractive. But in any case, none of these supposed embellishments are clearly dated to the third century.19 Otto Zwierlein has tried to reconstruct an Urfassung of the Martyrdom on the basis of an Armenian translation,20 but this has not been accepted by subsequent students of the Martyrdom.21 My own view is that we have a coherent text that is based on an eyewitness, be it the author himself or others, but theologically enriched and literarily embellished, and influenced by its liturgical usage at the beginning, in the middle (Ch. 14)22 and end of the report, which we therefore will not take into consideration. In any case, too little attention has been paid to Chapter 19.1, where we read: “This, then, about the blessed Polycarp, who, with those of Philadelphia was the twelfth that was martyred in Smyrna. Yet he alone is remembered by all men, so that he is even everywhere spoken of by the pagans.” It seems to me impossible that soon after the execution of the twelve they already could be mentioned as being forgotten. Surely, these words suggest that the text was written at some distance from the actual facts. Perhaps the church in Philomelium asked for an account about Polycarp at a somewhat later date during a different persecution, possibly that under Marcus Aurelius.23 However this may be, these words seem to refer back, as a kind of ring composition, to the beginning where the letter starts with telling that it was written ‘as to what relates to the martyrs, and especially to the blessed Polycarp’ (1.1: τὰ κατὰ τοὺς μαρτυρήσαντας καὶ τὸν μακάριον Πολύκαρπον). And indeed, we hear first some details about the other martyrs, of whom one is mentioned by name, after which the author proceeds with Polycarp.

19  C  . R. Moss, “On the Dating of Polycarp: Rethinking the Place of the Martyrdom of Polycarp in the History of Christianity,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 539–74 at 573–74. 20  Zwierlein, Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi, 1.2–4 (history of the text), 14 (stemma) and 15–44 (synopsis of the various textual traditions). 21  Cf. H. R. Seeliger and W. Wischmeyer, Märtyrerliteratur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 28– 30; É. Rebillard, Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 86–87; Christoph Markschies, “Martyrium als Imitation des leidenden Christus—Beobachtungen zum Polykarp-Martyrium und seiner Vorgeschichte,” in For Example: Martyrdom and Imitation in Early Christian Texts and Art, ed. A. Bettenworth and M. Formisano (Munich: Fink, 2020), 99–122. 22  G. Buschmann, Das Martyrium des Polykarp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 226–90; Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 67. 23  P. Keresztes, “Marcus Aurelius a Persecutor?” HTR 61 (1968): 321–41.

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Another important indication of a later date is the fact that it was written “in accordance with the Gospel” (1.1). And indeed, as has often been seen, the text contains some allusions to the Passion narratives.24 If the account was indeed written immediately after the events and in this form, it would have been the first Christian writing that extensively used a Gospel. Such a detailed usage is hardly credible at such an early date when the Gospels had not yet become authoritative,25 and is an important indication for a date of our version in the later second century. It is much harder to say which Gospel the author means. The most plausible one is that of Matthew, as various authors have argued, but this is hardly certain.26 Enough of preliminary questions. Let us now turn to the text.27 The first thing we hear of is that all the things that had passed were shown to the community by the Lord (ὁ κύριος) “from above” (1.1). The reference presupposes the location of Jesus in heaven and, perhaps, the ascension. We hear again of heaven when Polycarp enters the amphitheatre and “a voice from heaven said: ‘be strong, Polycarp and be a man.’ Nobody saw who was speaking, but those of us who were present did hear the voice” (9.1). Interestingly, once again we hear of heaven, but it is not specified who speaks: Jesus or God. And indeed, how little the text sometimes differentiates between these two can be seen when one looks at the preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. In the preface, we have “the church of God,” and then the doxology (which, of course, is often one of the most often altered places in a text). In Chapter 1, we hear of the “Lord” (κύριος) who clearly is Christ. In Chapter 2, the martyrs are said to have suffered according to “the will of God,” surely God himself given the epithet exousia, but a bit later we hear of the martyrs’ “love for the Master” (φιλοδέσποτον), which suggests Christ, although he is very rarely called a δεσπότης,28 a term as good as always reserved for God (see below § 8.4). In any case, it is typical of an 24  Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 62–66, 131–45; a maximalist view, Moss, “On the Dating,” 551–52; Seeliger and Wischmeyer, Märtyrerliteratur, 29. 25  Somewhat surprisingly, there is no reference to the Martyrdom of Polycarp in Gospels and Gospel Traditions in the Second Century: Experiments in Reception, ed. J. Schröter et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). 26  E. Massaux, The Influence of the Gospel of Saint Matthew on Christian Literature before Saint Irenaeus (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 53–54; R. Metzner, Die Rezeption des Matthäusevangeliums im 1. Petrusbrief (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 268–71. For the popularity of this Gospel, see also G. Rinaldi, Biblia Gentium (Rome: Libreria Sacre Scritture, 1989), 422–91; C. G. Pardee, Scribal Harmonization in the Synoptic Gospels (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 433. 27  I use the text as constituted by Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 3–22, who persuasively argues against interpolations and for the unity of the text, cf. ibidem, 50–55, 134–36. 28  Cf. Buschmann, Das Martyrium des Polykarp, 96: “in christlichen Kontext seltenen Begriff.”

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intellectual author not to suggest an epiphany but just to mention a voice, as was the case with Paul before Damascus.29 Heaven is also mentioned when Polycarp says “Away with the atheists,” “having looked up to heaven” (9.2, cf. 14.1). When the governor asks him to curse Christ, Polycarp answers: “For eightysix years I have been his slave, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my emperor and saviour?” (9.3). The reference to his slavery (δουλεύω) undoubtedly refers to the expression “slave of Christ” or “to be a slave” in many early Christian writings, starting already in Paul’s oldest letter, 1 Thessalonians (1:9). This self-designation of Jesus’ followers as his “slaves,” even though nowadays often euphemistically translated as “servants,” has its counterpart in the frequent designation of Jesus as kyrios, “Lord,” as we already saw above (1.1) and will discuss in our Conclusions (§ 8.4). The words, then, look like an authentic saying of the old Polycarp, who stresses here his close connection with Christ. Regarding the characterisations “emperor” and “savior” (9.3), especially the latter one is a familiar Christological title,30 but the title “king” is not unusual either in early Christian literature,31 although seemingly much less familiar later. It is therefore perhaps going too far to see it as a sign of personal piety. Kings were of course familiar to the Roman governor, as probably were kingly gods and saving gods.32 But given Polycarp’s perilous situation, these words must have sounded challenging to the judge, as the Greek basileus was also the term for the emperor, who also regularly received the epithet “saviour,” as had been the case with the Hellenistic kings. When the governor persists, Polycarp answers: “I am a Christian” (10.1) and here the term “Christian” still seems to have also something of its original meaning as “follower of Christ” after his

29  Cf. J. N. Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 229–33. 30  See, especially, H. Linssen, “ΘΕΟΣ ΣΩΤΗΡ? Eintwicklung und Verbreitung einer liturgischen Formelgruppe,” JLW 8 (1928): 1–75; C. Böttrich, “‘Gott und Retter’: Gottesprädikationen in christologischen Titeln,” NZST 42 (2000): 217–36; M. Karrer, “Jesus, der Retter (Sôtêr): zur Aufnahme eines hellenistischen Prädikats im Neuen Testament,” ZNW 93 (2002): 153–76; F. Jung, Soter: Studien zur Rezeption eines hellenistischen Ehrentitels im Neuen Testament (Münster: Aschendorff, 2002). 31  Matthew 25.34, 40; Rev. 1.5, 17.14, 19.6; Polycarp, Phil. 12.3; C. Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 271–89. 32  N. Belayche, “‘Au(x) dieu(x) qui règne(nt) sur …’ Basileia divine et fonctionnement du polythéisme dans l’Anatolie impériale,” in Pouvoir et religion dans le monde romain. En hommage à Jean-Pierre Martin, ed. A. Vigourt et al. (Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), 257– 69; Th. S. F. Jim, “Can Soteira be Named? The Problem of the Bare Trans-divine Epithet,” ZPE 195 (2015): 63–74.

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earlier response, the more so as the term “Christian” was still rare in the second century.33 On the other hand, it is somewhat surprising that Polycarp tells the governor that if he wants “to learn about the meaning of Christianity (10.1: τὸν τοῦ Χριστιανισμοῦ μαθεῖν λόγον)” he should “set a day and listen.” Interestingly, the expression “to set a day” is the Greek translation of the Roman legal term diem dicere and shows that the upper-class Polycarp was acquainted with the Roman legal system.34 It also shows that Christianity was more than just worship to him. Apparently, if necessary, Polycarp could present a more intellectual idea of early Christianity as a kind of philosophical system. After he is condemned to death and bound to the stake, Polycarp pronounces a long prayer (14), which is generally seen as inspired by Eucharistic and liturgical traditions and not a faithful report of Polycarp’s words, although not necessarily an interpolation.35 This is the last that we actually hear of Polycarp, and we therefore now turn to the martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius. 2

The Martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius

This brief account derives from the Second Apology of Justin Martyr (2 Ap. 2). A date in the later 150s is established by the mention in Justin’s Apologies of Q. Lollius Urbicus (PIR2 L 327), who presided over the trial and was praefectus urbi from about 146 to 160,36 and of Felix, the prefect of Egypt from 150 to 154.37 For our purpose, the account has not much to offer, as it is virtually completely written by Justin Martyr with few direct quotations. As with Polycarp (§ 1), we see that both Ptolemaeus and Lucius confess to be a Christian (11–12 and 17–18), but Justin is somewhat unclear as to what exactly Ptolemaeus says. It seems that he confesses to be a Christian without using that term, which was still an outsiders’ qualification in most of the second century, as Justin says that he “confessed to the instruction in divine virtue” (13). Lucius, too, seems 33  B. van der Lans and J. N. Bremmer, “Tacitus and the Persecution of the Christians: An Invention of Tradition?” Eirene 53 (2017): 299–31, here 317–22. 34  A. Bryen, “Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Procedure,” Class. Ant. 33 (2014): 243– 80, here 258. 35  Buschmann, Das Martyrium des Polykarp, 258–90, but see Dehandschutter, Polycar­ piana, 67. 36  For him and his role during the trial, see S. Ruciński, Praefectus Urbi: Le Gardien de l’ordre public à Rome sous le Haut-Empire romain (Poznań: Contact, 2009), 141–48; K. Wojciech, Die Stadtpräfektur im Prinzipat (Bonn: Rudolph Habelt, 2010), 291–96 (with thanks to Janico Albrecht). 37  P IR2 M 723; M. Nuti, “Le attività e le attestazioni di un prefetto d’Egitto: Lucius Munatius Felix,” Papyrotheke 1 (2010): 67–77.

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to avoid the name and just to confirm that he is one of the Christians (18), but that is the only thing we can say for our purpose. 3

The Martyrdom of Justin and His Companions

The trial and execution of Justin Martyr himself took place ca. 165 AD (Chronicon Paschale, p. 482 Dindorf), as the presiding judge of the trial, the praefectus urbi Q Iunius Rusticus, was in office from 163–168 (PIR2 J 814). The Acts have been handed down in three different versions (A, B, and C), but A is generally accepted to be the oldest and probably written soon after the trial.38 As the praefectus will have pronounced the judgment in Latin,39 the Martyrdom may have been (partially?) translated from Latin. In the account, the prefect interrogates a small group of Christians, of whom Justin is evidently the most important and intellectually the most impressive member. After being asked by the prefect which doctrines he follows, Justin answers that he has committed himself to the “true doctrines of the Christians” (2.3).40 As with Polycarp, we can see that he tries to occupy the philosophical high ground, but also that Christianity is presented as a kind of philosophical system, even though the term “Christianity” is not yet used by Justin: Ὅπερ εὐσεβοῦμεν εἰς τὸν τῶν Χριστιανῶν θεόν, ὃν ἡγούμεθα ἕνα τούτων ἐξ ἀρχῆς δημιουργὸν τῆς τοῦ παντὸς κόσμου ποιήσεως, καὶ θεοῦ παῖδα Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, ὃς καὶ προκεκήρυκται ὑπὸ τῶν προφητῶν μέλλων παραγίνεσθαι τῷ γένει τῶν ἀνθρώπων σωτηρίας κῆρυξ καὶ διδάσκαλος καλῶν μαθημάτων. μικρὰ δὲ νομίζω λέγειν πρὸς τὴν αὐτοῦ θεότητα προφητικήν τινα δύναμιν ὁμολογῶν, ὅτι προκεκήρυκται περὶ τούτου ὃν ἔφην νῦν υἱὸν θεοῦ ὄντα. ἴσθι γὰρ ὅτι ἄνωθεν προεῖπον οἱ προφῆται περὶ τῆς τούτου ἐν ἀνθρώποις γενομένης παρουσίας. That is what we piously hold regarding the God of the Christians, whom alone we hold to be the craftsman of the creation of the whole world from the beginning, and regarding the son of God, Jesus Christ, who was

38  J . Ulrich, “What do We Know About Justin’s ‘School’ in Rome?” ZAC 16 (2012): 62–74 dates recension A to shortly after 200 but without any convincing argument. 39  R. Haensch, “Typisch römisch? Die Gerichtsprotokolle der in Aegyptus und den übrigen östlichen Provinzen tätigen Vertreter Roms. Das Zeugnis von Papyri und Inschriften,” in Monumentum et instrumentum inscriptum, ed. H. Börm et al. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008), 117–25. 40  A. Hayes, Justin Against Marcion: Defining the Christian Philosophy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017).

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also foretold by the prophets as one who was to come down to mankind as herald of salvation and teacher of fine doctrines. But I would be saying too little about his godhead by proclaiming in him a certain prophetic power, viz. it was prophesied concerning him whom I now said to be the son of God. For you must know that of old the prophets foretold regarding him his appearance among men (2.5–7). In this statement, Justin clearly wants to stress two aspects of emerging Christianity: first, the fact that Jesus had been foretold by the prophets (this idea is important for Justin, as he returns to it several times in his writings);41 and second, the fact that God is the creator of this world. The Greek word used, δημιουργόν, evidently has a Platonic ring and suggests the Timaeus. Justin probably used it on purpose in his exchange with the judge, as Eusebius (HE 7.11.8) mentions that Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, informed his fellow bishop Germanicus in a letter that, when interrogated by the Roman governor Aemilianus, he declared that the Christians worship “the one God and the Maker of all” (τὸν ἕνα θεὸν καὶ δημιουργὸν τῶν ἁπάντων). Justin and Dionysius may well have thought to raise the level of conversation by using philosophical language. In any case, they employed a motif from Greek and Roman philosophy, which ever since Xenophanes had been used to compensate for the invisibility of the gods or god by pointing to their works.42 It is also clear that this aspect of God was very important for the early Christians. God’s creatorship is a recurrent argument or statement of the martyrs and occurs in many of the Acta.43 It often has an apologetic tone, stressing the superiority of the Christian God above those of the Greeks and Romans 41  Justin Martyr, 1Apol. 31.1 and 7, 52.1 and 3, 56.1, 58.1, 61.13; 2Apol. 7.5; Dial. 106.1; O. Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr’s Proof-Text Tradition: Text-Type, Provenance, Theological Profile (Leiden: Brill, 1987). 42  See the learned discussion of this development by T. Korteweg, “The Reality of the Invisible,” in Studies in Hellenistic Religions, ed. M. J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 50–102. 43  Apollonius 2; Fructuosus 2.3–4; Pionius 8.3, 9.6, 16.3, 19.8 and 11; Cyprian 1.2; Lucius and Montanus 19.5; Julius 2.3; Agape 5.2; Dasius 7,2; Euplus B 2.5–6; Crispina 1.7, 2.3; Phileas 3,4 (L) and 6 (G); A. G. Hamman, Études patristiques (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), 331–39, 342–48; J. den Boeft and J. N. Bremmer, “Notiunculae Martyrologicae IV,” VC 45 (1991): 112–13 and N. Kelley, “Philosophy as Training for Death: Reading the Ancient Christian Martyr Acts as Spiritual Exercises,” Church History 75 (2006): 739–43, to be added to J. M. Kozlowski, “Unum Deum colo qui fecit terram et mare et omnia quae in eis sunt: the Formula of Creation and its Functions in the Acts of the Christian Martyrs,” Vetera Christianorum 54 (2017): 99–110; for its background, see Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 345–83.

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who are no more than deaf and mute stones. Here it seems to be part of a brief summary of the Christian faith,44 but perhaps also directed, eventually, against Marcion’s and the Gnostic rejection of the creator God. As we do not hear of a reaction of the judge, this absence seems to suggest an abbreviated report of the trial. However this may be, after the judge has inquired about his meeting place, he asks Justin if he admits to be a Christian. And so he does (3). We may perhaps suppose that for him this confession was more than just a formality. From his Second Apology we know that Christ was important to him: “We worship and love, after God, the Word since for our sakes he became a human being so that becoming a partaker of our sins, he might also perform the healing” (13.4).45 After Justin, the other Christians from the group arrested with him, also confirm that they are Christians: Chariton, Charito, Euelpistus, Hierax, Paeon and Liberianus. Rather strikingly, all these names are Greek, except for the last one, pointing to a Greek background of the group around Justin, perhaps because he was teaching in Greek. Interestingly, two of this group state that they received their faith from their parents, which shows the early conversions to Christianity, and two mention that they came from Asia Minor, from Cappadocia and Phrygia, a good illustration of the early penetration of Christianity into the heartland of Asia Minor. 4

The Martyrs of Lyon

The description of the martyrdom of the Christians in Lyon and Vienne is a letter to the churches in Asia and Phrygia, which was plausibly written in 177 or soon after. The best text is by Seeliger and Wischmeyer, but the modern editions are not without problems, as various scholars have pointed out, and some editing by Eusebius is not improbable.46 As before, I am interested in what 44  Cf. W. Kinzig, Faith in Formulae, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1:200–02. 45  Justin, 2 Apol. 13.4: λόγον μετὰ τὸν θεὸν προσκυνοῦμεν καὶ ἀγαπῶμεν, ἐπειδὴ καὶ δι’ ἡμᾶς ἄνθρωπος γέγονεν, ὅπως καὶ τῶν παθῶν τῶν ἡμετέρων συμμέτοχος γενόμενος καὶ ἴασιν ποιήσηται. 46  Text and commentary: Seeliger and Wischmeyer, Märtyrerliteratur, 47–86. Editing: this was already considered a possibility by A. Harnack, Theologische Literaturzeitung 3 (1913): 74; see also W. A. Löhr, “Der Brief der Gemeinden von Lyon und Vienne,” in Oecumenica et patristica: Festschrift für Wilhelm Schneemelcher zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. D. Papandreou et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1989), 135–45, to be read with the discussion by Dehandschutter, Polycarpiana, 239 n 6; Moss, The Other Christs, 189 and Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 104–06; J. Corke-Webster, “A Literary Historian: Eusebius of Caesarea and the Martyrs of Lyons and Palestine,” Studia Patristica 66 (2013): 191–202. In general: J. E. Hafner, “Religiöser Alltag der Christen in Lyon und seine Unterbrechung,”

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individual martyrs were supposed to have said and thus will not enter into a discussion of the discursive parts but look at the dialogues. It is clear from many passages in this account that for the author of the Letter the martyrdom is a true imitatio Christi. As he says about the young Vettius Epagathus:47 “He was and is a true disciple of Christ, following the Lamb wherever he leads” (Rev 14:4; 1:10). It is not surprising therefore that we hear that several martyrs confess their faith with “I am a Christian,” such as Blandina (1.19), Sanctus, who refuses to give any other answer to the questions put to him and answers in Latin (1.20, 39), Biblis (1.26), Alexander (1.50) and Pothinus. The latter, the ninety-year old bishop of Lyon, when asked by the judge who the god of the Christians is, answers, “if you are worthy, you will know” (1.31). The same refusal is related of Attalus, who, when asked about the name of his God, answers in Latin, “God has no name as men have” (1.52). The reason for the refusal is not immediately clear, but it seems that the judge and the crowd have no idea of the importance of Christ for his believers and are just intrigued what kind of god the Christians are worshiping. As the Letter quotes some people saying, “Where is their god and what use was their cult (θρησκεία) to them, which they preferred even to their own lives?” (1.60), it appears that the non-Christians had not much knowledge of the Christian movement and thought Christianity to be like one of the newer cults coming from the East. In the end, the Letter does not give us much information regarding individual beliefs, but the idea that martyrdom is an imitation of Christ, and that Christ has an intimate relationship with the martyrs is a constant theme in this Letter, probably more than in any other early Christian document, and clearly presents the idea to the recipients that such a devotion is exemplary and to be followed. 5

The Passion of the Scillitan Martyrs

We come closer to the original words of the martyrs in a report about a court hearing on 17 July, AD 180 in Carthage regarding a group of Christians from a in Religiöser Alltag in der Spätantike, ed. P. Eich and E. Faber (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 225–42. 47  Cf. M. Provenzano, “Vettius Epagathus, ‘le paraclet des chrétiens’ dans la Lettre des martyrs de Lyon et Vienne (Eusèbe, H. E., V, 1. 3–2. 8),” Revue des sciences religieuses 89 (2015): 345–71; for his social status, see also J. den Boeft and J. N. Bremmer, “Notiunculae Martyrologicae V,” VC 49 (1995): 146–64 at 154–55, to be added to A. Weiss, Soziale Elite und Christentum. Studien zu ordo-Angehörigen unter den frühen Christen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 201.

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small town in present-day Tunisia. The account notes the date and the names of the martyrs but then starts in medias res by letting the proconsul Saturninus ask a number of questions to Speratus, evidently the leader of the group. When he tells him to swear by the Genius of the emperor,48 Speratus answers: I do not recognise the empire of this world. Rather I serve that God whom no man has seen, nor can see, with these bodily eyes. I have not stolen and on any purchase I pay the tax for I recognise my lord, the king of kings and emperor of all nations. (6)49 Presumably, Speratus stresses the invisibility of God in reaction to the many visible statues of gods everywhere, not least those of the emperor.50 It may also be that he wants to show to the governor that he is an educated man, as the latter would hardly have believed in seeing gods personally. In the contemporary Greek novels, it is always the less educated or socially inferior who believe in a real epiphany.51 We also note the term servio, which will have struck the governor as rather odd, as “to serve” or “to be a slave” of the gods was not part of Roman religion but, as we have already seen (§ 1), typical of the early Christians. The dialogue between the governor and the Christians seems to have been reduced to the absolute minimum,52 as we suddenly hear another of the Christians, Cittinus, say: “We have no one else to fear but our Lord God who 48  The Genius is not easy to define, but see D. Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West, vol. ii-1 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 375–86; see also S. Antolini and S. M. Marengo, “Dediche servili al genius dei padroni,” in Esclaves et maîtres dans le monde romain, ed. M. Dondin-Payre and N. Tran (Rome: École française de Rome, 2017), 129–40 (add: CIL VIII.27943; AE 1902.223). 49  P. Scill. 6: Speratus dixit: “Ego imperium huius seculi non cognosco; sed magis illi deo servio, quem nemo hominum vidit nec videre his oculis carnalibus potest. Furtum non feci; sed siquid emero teloneum reddo; quia cognosco dominum meum, regem regum et imperatorem omnium gentium.” 50  A. T. Hansen, The Image of the Invisible God (London: SCM Press, 1982); M. M. Thompson, “‘God’s Voice You Have Never Heard, God’s Form You Have Never Seen’: the Characterization of God in the Gospel of John,” Semeia 63 (1993): 177–204; H. L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: the Earliest Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 51  T. Hägg, Parthenope. Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004), 141–55; Hägg, “Epiphany in the Greek Novels: the Employment of a Metaphor,” Eranos 100 (2002): 146. 52  For the problem of the transmission of the text, see, most recently, Fialon, Mens immobilis, 40–43.

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is in the heavens.”53 This reaction may also have surprised the governor: was there a plurality of heavens (caelis)? It probably was the first time that he heard this typically Christian Latin idiom.54 In any case, it is clear that for Cittinus, as for the other early Christians, God is not present on earth, like a divine emperor, but resides in heaven.55 After the men, we now hear the first woman, Donata, who elaborates on Cittinus’s testimony by stating: “Pay honour to Caesar insofar as he is Caesar, but it is God we fear” (9). It is not easy to see exactly what the “fear” means here and what these early Christians understood by it, but it is clear that the Old Testament fear of God is a recurrent theme in the books of the later New Testament.56 Subsequently, we hear of the confession “I am a Christian” from Vestia, Secunda (9), albeit somewhat obscurely, and Speratus himself (10). After having rejected the offer of a time for consideration, Speratus repeats his confession “and with him all the others agreed” (13). The author concludes his account with “And straightaway they were beheaded for the name of Christ. Amen” (17). It is not that we hear much about Christ in this account, but the last words suggest that we should not separate the name Christianus from Christ himself.57 By proclaiming being Christianae/i, these martyrs also proclaimed their attachment to Christ. 6

The Martyrdom of Apollonius

The Martyrdom of Apollonius has been much discussed, but a recent study by Geert Roskam has made a plausible case that the Greek version, except for its beginning and end, dates from the period of Apollonius’ death, even though a redactor made some changes in the text.58 The exact year cannot be deter53  P . Scill. 8: Nos non habemus alium quem timeamus nisi dominum Deum nostrum qui est in caelis. A reference to Gen 24:7? 54  For the Latin expression, see G. Meershoek, Le latin biblique d’après Saint Jérôme: aspects linguistiques de la rencontre entre la Bible et le monde classique (Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1966), 182–87; P. Burton, The Old Latin Gospels: a study of their texts and language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115. 55  J. B. Russell, A History of Heaven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); C. McDannell and B. Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 56  Luke 1:50; 18:2; 23:40; Acts 2:43; 9:31; 10.2, 22; 24.25; 1 Pet 3:2; Heb 12:28–29; Phil 2:12; Rev 14:7; R. H. Pfeiffer, “The Fear of God,” Israel Exploration Journal 5 (1955): 41–48. 57  Cf. Bremmer, Maidens, Magic and Martyrs, 3–12. 58  G. Roskam, “A Christian Intellectual at Trial: the case of Apollonius of Rome,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 52 (2009): 22–43, with detailed bibliography; add the correspondence about Apollonius between Mommsen and Harnack, S. Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997) 651, 660–67, 704, 982, 985; P. Lampe, From

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mined, but it seems likely that the martyr was executed sometime between AD 183 and 185. After an evidently later added beginning, the trial starts with by-now familiar elements. First, Apollonius confesses that he is a Christian (2) and, secondly, presumably in explanation of his following of Christ, that he worships and fears “the god who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them” (2). It is the same formula that we first found in abbreviated form in the trial against Justin (§ 3) and which is based on Psalm 146:5–6: “the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” However, Apollonius goes further. Being asked to swear by the Genius of the emperor, he tells his judge that he follows the “solemn and clear precepts” he has learned “from the Word of God, who knows all the thoughts of men” (6), an allusion to the Psalms (93.11), although this is not recognised in recent editions. These precepts clearly forbid to swear.59 Consequently, he will not swear by the Genius but would be happy to swear by “him who is truly God who is before the ages,60 whom the hands of men did not make, but rather he himself appointed a man from men to rule over the earth.” Apollonius stresses the fact that the emperor is a mere mortal compared to God, but he also states that God is not made by the hands of men, that is, he is unlike the many statues of the pagan gods—a theme that is popular in Christian apologetics of the second century.61 It would transcend the space of this contribution to take a look at all the passages in which God is mentioned. Let me limit myself to a few more examples. When declining to sacrifice, Apollonius mentions “God who is Lord of heaven and earth and of all that breathes” (8), and when the Christians are praying, which they do daily according to him, they pray to “God who dwells in the heavens” (9) for Commodus who only rules because of the “invincible God who comprehends all things.” It is noteworthy that the combination “invincible god” does not occur elsewhere in Greek and seems to suggest a Latin Vorlage. In a second hearing, Apollonius argues: “I serve (λατρεύω)62 God in the heavens, and him alone I venerate” (15), after which he launches into a long tirade Paul to Valentinus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 321–29; E. R. Urciuoli, Servire due padroni. Una genealogia dell’uomo politico cristiano (50–313 e.v.) (Brescia: Editrice Morcelliana, 2018), 190–93. 59  Cf. Matt 5:37; Jas 5:12. 60  We find the same expression in Justin Martyr, Dial. 48.1, although there used by Trypho of Jesus. 61  Cf. J. N. Bremmer, “God against the Gods: Early Christians and the Worship of Statues,” in Götterbilder der mittleren und späten Kaiserzeit, eds. D. Boschung and A. Schaefer (Munich: Fink, 2015), 139–58. 62  The term is more or less equivalent to δουλεύω in these contexts of “serving God (god).”

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against idolatry. When Perennis mentions that the senate has decreed that there be no Christians, Apollonius continues with a discourse about death, in which he mentions God’s final judgment (25), but also that “we do not find it hard to die for the true God, for it is through God that we are what we are” (27). After some further dialogues, Apollonius gives a detailed exposition of what Jesus Christ means for him. It is interesting to see that in this dialogue with the Roman magistrate, Apollonius basically sketches Christ as the teacher of “the God of all things” but above all as the teacher of a disciplined life. He also mentions typically Christian ideas, such as Jesus Christ being the saviour, the immortality of the soul, the last judgement and the resurrection (36–37). Apollonius’ words have no effect and the judge, somewhat regretfully, notes that he had hoped that Apollonius would venerate the gods (43). The latter replies that he had hoped that Perennis now would worship “the God who is the maker of all things,” (44) but this was obviously not going to be, and Apollonius is condemned to be beheaded. The thanking of God and the proclamation of the Trinity will derive from the liturgical usage of these Acts and do not concern us here. 7

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas

We will conclude our survey with the Passion of Perpetua, whose date of 203 is still part of the long second century. This fascinating Passio is a composition of various authors, but here I am interested only in Perpetua, undoubtedly the protagonist of the writing.63 Her own diary leaves little to guess about her ideas. Right at the beginning of her text, she recounts a meeting with her father, in which she tells him: “I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian” (3.2). There can be no doubt, then, about her allegiance. But how did she see God and Christ? In fact, she seems to be the only early Christian whose mental life we can discover through a vision that gives us some insight in the ways that some early Christians must have imagined God and Christ as persons. Perpetua tells us that in her first vision she climbed upon a dangerous ladder, but was preceded by her spiritual leader Saturus, who says to her when he had arrived at the top of the ladder: 63  For the text, translation and a variety of studies, see J. N. Bremmer and M. Formisano (eds), Perpetua’s Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For the problems surrounding the composition and the contents, see J. N. Bremmer, “Perpetua und Felicitas,” in RAC 27 (2016): 178–90, and for a running commentary on most of the texts, see Bremmer, Maidens, Magic and Martyrs, 349–454.

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“Perpetua, I am here for you. But careful! Don’t let the serpent bite you!” “In the name of Jesus Christ,” I said, “he will not hurt me.” And down there at the foot the ladder, as if he were afraid of me, the serpent stuck his head out slowly and I, as if stepping on the first rung of the ladder, stepped on his head. And so I started climbing. Then I saw a wide open space, a garden, and in the middle of it a greyhaired man sitting down. He was dressed like a shepherd, tall, milking some sheep. People dressed in white were standing around him, thousands and thousands of them. 9. Raising his head, he looked over at me and said, “Welcome, child.” And he called me over and gave me a mouthful or so of the cheese that he was milking. I cupped my hands and took and ate it. And the people standing around all said, “Amen.” (6–10). Then I woke up with the sound of their voice in my ears, and I was still chewing on something sweet.64 It is interesting to see that in this vision the images of Christ and God seem to merge into one, but they derive from seemingly three different sources. The height of the “grey-haired man” recurs in the fourth vision of Perpetua where the agônothêtes/God is of quidam mirae magnitudinis (10.8), just as in Marianus (7.3, 6) James sees Christ in a vision as a very tall (inenarrabili et satis ampla magnitudine) young man. Such height is a typical topos of supernatural figures in pagan and Christian visions and epiphanies and may well be part of Perpetua’s pagan heritage.65 On the other hand, the white hair of Christ/God derives from Revelation 1:14 where the voice that spoke to John is said to belong to a man, like the Son of Man, whose “head and his hairs were white like wool,” which clearly comes from Daniel’s description of God: “his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool” (ESV).66 The milking shepherd 64  I quote from the new translation by J. Farrell and C. Williams in Perpetua’s Passions, 14–23. 65  See the many parallels collected by U. Körtner and M. Leutzsch, Papiasfragmente. Hirt des Hermas (Darmstadt: WBG, 1998), 479–80, nn. 194, 486, and 299 (by Leutzsch). In general: H. Cancik, “Grösse und Kolossalität als religiöse und aesthetische Kategorien. Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung am Beispiel von Statius, Silvae I 1: Ecus maximus Domitiani Imperator,” Visible Religion 7 (1990): 51–68, repr. in his Verse und Sachen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 224–48. 66  For the influence of Revelation on the Passio, see R. Petraglio, “Des influences de l’Apocalypse dans la Passio Perpetuae 11–13,” in L’Apocalypse de Jean. Traditions exégétiques et iconographiques. IIIe–XIIIe siècles, eds. R. Petraglio et al. (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 15–29; A. P. Orbán, “The Afterlife in the Visions of the Passio SS. Perpetuae et Felicitatis,” in Fructus Centesimus. Mélanges offerts à G. J. M. Bartelink, eds. A. A. R. Bastiaensen et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 269–77; T. J. Heffernan, “History becomes Heilsgeschichte: the Principle of the Paradigm in the Early Christian Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis,”

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suggests the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd.67 In fact, we know that in Perpetua’s time in Carthage the glass chalice of the Eucharist was ornamented with a picture of God/Christ as the Good Shepherd.68 Rather surprisingly, Christ/God is seen as an old man, but in the same Passio Saturus sees God as “a kind of white-haired man who had snowy hair but a youthful face” (12.3: quasi hominem canum, niveos habentem capillos et vultu iuvenili). One gets the impression that for Perpetua God and Christ were perhaps not very different. God/Christ’s greeting to Perpetua, “Welcome child (teknon),” is surprisingly affectionate. Speakers other than parents who use teknon “are usually in some sense in loco parentis for the addressees: tutors, old nurses, friends of their parents etc. The interaction in which the address is embedded is almost always a friendly one.” Moreover, “when used by people other than parents it is generally addressed to adults.”69 The analysis fits our text well, since the address clearly confirms the close relationship between Perpetua and Christ/God. We feel the same relationship when after her athletic fight with the Egyptian Perpetua accepts the prize with a kiss (osculatus est me) and the words “Daughter, peace be with you” from the agônothêtes/God (10.13). Roman grammarians distinguished between several kinds of kisses. The osculum was a kiss of friendship and affection.70 This kiss thus sealed the affection between Christ/God and the future martyr. 8 Conclusions With Perpetua, we have reached the end of our investigation. What can we conclude regarding the relationship of the martyrs with Christ and God? I would like to make the following observations: in Interpreting Texts from the Middle Ages, eds. U. Goebel and D. Lee (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1994), 119–38; P. Habermehl, Perpetua und der Ägypter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 91–93; A. Merkt, “Gewalt-verarbeitung und Konfliktbewältigung im Medium des Visionsberichtes: Die Passio Perpetuae und die Apokalypse des Johannes,” in Ancient Christian Interpretations of “Violent Texts” in the Apocalypse, eds. J. Verheyden et al. (Göttingen, 2011), 63–93. 67  For God/Christ as Good Shepherd, see J. Engeman, “Hirt,” in RAC 15 (1991): 577–607. 68  Tertullian, De pudicitia 7.1, 10.12: pastor, quem in calice depingis; V. Buchheit, “Tertullian und die Anfänge der christlichen Kunst,” Römische Quartalschrift 69 (1974): 133–42. 69  E. Dickey, Greek Forms of Address: from Herodotus to Lucian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 68. 70  P. Moreau, “Osculum, basium, suavium,” Rev. Philol. 52 (1978): 87–97; P. Flury, “Osculum und osculari: Beobachtungen zum Vocabular des Kusses im Lateinischen,” in Scire litteras: Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben, eds. S. Krämer and M. Bernhard (Munich: BADW, 1988), 149–57.

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1. We have to be very careful with our material. It comes from specific occasions, which perhaps cannot be generalised for every Christian at the time. Moreover, the content of our material is also selective. So we cannot be certain to what extent the opinions we find in these texts were widely shared among the second-century Christians. 2. Even so, it seems clear that the various texts enable us to say something about the ways these particular Christians conceptualised and preached God and Christ, even though they perhaps did not always differentiate between them in a way we would expect.71 I will start with the former. It is striking that the Christians seem to stress two important aspects of God. First, he is not here on earth, but in heaven (§§ 1, 4–6), and, secondly, he is the creator of heaven and earth (§§ 3 and 6). Both ideas seem to have been formulated from an apologetic point of view, as they are clearly directed against the ruler cult with its gods on earth and against the idea of divinities who are away on the Olympus and do not really care about the world. At the same time, it is the creation that shows God’s might and validates his existence, given his invisibility. Most interesting, it seems to me, is the description of God in the visions of Perpetua. We really have no idea how the ordinary early Christians imagined God in person. Yet Perpetua’s visions seem to suggest that at least several of them had made themselves some ideas as to what God did look like: tall, older, and white-haired, but with a youthful face—perhaps not that different from many popular ideas today, but unlike the contemporary pagan gods. 3. Regarding Christ, one may first wonder if these early Christians differentiated between Jesus and Christ, as we do not hear of Jesus alone but only of Jesus Christ and Christ. These latter terms may well fit the earlier Christians, who outside the Gospels seem to have had little interest in the narratives about the “historical Jesus,”72 but they also reflect an observation of Harnack that in the course of the second century the simple name of Jesus increasingly became replaced by “Christ” or “Jesus Christ.”73 On the other hand, Christ is very important for these Christians. Their martyrdom is a kind of imitation of Christ as in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (17) and the Letter of Lyon and Vienne (1.30, 2.2) or a display of discipleship (1.10), but it is striking that we find this notion only in

71  See also H. Löhr, “Die Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochien,” in Die Apostolischen Väter, ed. W. Pratscher (Göttingen: UTB, 2009), 104–29, here 124 (Jesus called God); Hurtado, Texts and Artefacts, 64–80 for a reflection of this phenomenon in the manuscripts of Acts of the Apostles. 72  Cf. M. Vinzent, Offener Anfang: Die Entstehung des Christentums im 2. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 2019). 73  A. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 vols. (Freiburg: Mohr, 1894), 1:175.

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the earlier Greek martyr Acts and not in the later Latin ones.74 The author of the Martyrdom of Polycarp distinguishes sharply between the martyrs who are “disciples and imitators of the Lord” and the other Christians who “reverence (Christ) as the Son of God,” who suffered for the sinners and thus saved them (17). In other words, there is a clear status difference for the author, with the martyrs being closer to Christ than those who did not die for him. Yet it is not only that martyrs follow Christ and the others reverence him. There is even a close relationship felt between the martyrs and Christ, which seems to assume mystical contours. When the Lyonese martyr Sanctus is cruelly tortured, “Christ suffering in him achieved great deeds of glory” (M. Lugd. 1.23). And when Felicitas, labouring in the pains of childbirth, is asked how she would endure the terrors of the arena, she answers, “then there will be another one in me who will suffer for me, just as I shall be suffering for him” (Perpetua 15).75 Somewhat differently, the editor of Perpetua comments that the martyrs, when scourged, were “quite gratified to experience something of our Lord’s sufferings” (18.9). 4. It is remarkable that from the very beginning of emergent Christianity we find the notion that the believer is the “slave of Christ.” We find the characterisation “slave” already many times in the Letters of Paul (and Pseudo-Paul), who calls himself a “slave of Christ” in Romans (1:1; 14:18; 16:18; note also 7:6 for its absolute usage), 1 Corinthians (7:22, but note also 2 Cor 4:5), Galatians (1:19), Ephesians (6:6–7), Philippians (1:1), Colossians (1:7, 3:24, 4:12), 1 Thessalonians (1:9) and Revelation (1:1), but the expression also occurs in James (1:1), 2 Peter (1:1) and Jude (1:1). Afterwards, or sometimes contemporaneously, the expression often occurs in Justin Martyr, the Apocryphal Acts and other early Christian writings.76 The “status” of slave is not to be separated, though, from 74  Note also Ignatius (whom I date to the later second century), Smyrn. 4: Christ empowers me. 75  The presence of Christ in the martyr can also be found in Tertullian, Pud., 22.6 and in Augustine, cf. J. den Boeft, “Martyres sunt homines fuerunt,” in Fructus Centesimus. Mélanges G. J. M. Bartelink, eds. A. A. R. Bastiaensen et al. (Steenbrugge: Kluwer, 1989), 115–24, here 120; see also S. L. Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 63–92. 76  1 Clem 45.7, 60.2; Ignatius, Magn. 2 and passim; Polycarp, Phil. 6.3; Acts of John 43, 45, 75; Mart. Lugd. 1.3; Acts of Peter, Mart. 30, 41, etc.; Clement of Alexandria, Strom 4.8.65.2; cf. Bremmer, Maidens, Magic and Martyrs, 5–6. Note that the earlier inscriptions in Lycaonia have “slave of God,” whereas “slave of Christ” seems to be later, cf. Breytenbach and Zimmermann, Early Christianity in Lycaonia, 24–26. For later occurrences, see U. Ehmig, “Servus dei und verwandte Formulierungen in lateinischen Inschriften,” and R. Haensch, “Bescheidenheit ist eine Zier: Der Gebrauch der Demutsformel ‘δοῦλος ̣ θεοῦ’ in den Kirchenbauinschriften der spätantiken Patriarchate Antiochia und Jerusalem,” in

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the titles kyrios and despotês. These are traditional in Greek vocabulary, but their use to glorify gods is new and typical of the Hellenistic and Roman period. In the Levant, kyrios was originally used as a devotional recognition of the leadership of a divinity over a local area or sanctuary,77 and it is clear that this was not the usage of the early Christians. They adopted a Jewish usage, of which the exact origin is still debated. As the latest investigation concludes: “the precise interplay between Jewish, broader Semitic, and possible Egyptian influence must remain uncertain.”78 In any case, for the Christians the kyrios and despotȇs was a kind of super-Master, who totally owned them.79 Still, there seems to be a difference in usage. As far as I can see, Christ is usually called kyrios,80 whereas God is much more often called despotês.81 In a wider perspective, this total devotion of the Christ believer must have been something unusual in the polytheist world of the Roman Empire. Recent discussions, as exemplified by Jan Assmann, have concentrated on the notions of truth and violence connected with monotheism. Yet this “devotional” side of Christian monotheism deserves more attention than it has received so far. When we compare this personal devotion to that of the surrounding pagan world, we should notice that the terminology of “slave/master” was extremely rare in the classical period but became more normal in the Hellenistic Period, although in the Anatolian, Thracian and Semitic world rather than the Greek homeland and Rome.82 We must differentiate, however, between a local divine A. B. Kuhn, Social Status and Prestige in the Graeco-Roman World (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2015), 303–14, 315–39, respectively. 77  N. Belayche, “Kyrios and Despotes: Addresses to Deities and Religious Experiences,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, eds. V. Gasparini et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 87–115. 78  R. Parker, Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures and Transformations, Sather Classical Lectures 72 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 139–41; for the Jewish background see Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 167–232, who over accentuates the Egyptian influence. 79  Acts 4:29; 20:19; Rom 12:11, 16:18; Justin, 1Apol. 40; Acts of John 37, 51, 108; Acts of Paul XII.3, 4, ed. Rordorf et al.; in general, Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ. 80  W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913); Bousset, Kyrios Christos: a History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013). 81  God: Acts 4:24 (interesting because also praising God as the creator of heaven and earth); Justin Martyr, passim; Diognetus 8.7; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., Fragment 25; Protev. Jacob. 17; Acts of Andrew, Mart. 1; Acts of John 11; Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters, 290–312. Christ: Jude 4:1 (Jesus Christ). 82  Fundamental: H. W. Pleket, “Religious History as the History of Mentality: the ‘believer’ as Servant of the Deity in the Greek World,” in Faith, Hope, and Worship, ed. H. S. Versnel

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master-slave relationship, which was conditioned by local circumstances of, for example, a temple state, and the personal choice of converts to more or less universal gods such as Sarapis and Christ.83 Naturally, this raises the question from where Paul derived his expression. The background seems clear: the expression “slave of God” goes back to Hebrew ebed Jhwh, which the Septuagint translates as δοῦλος θεοῦ or δοῦλος κυρίου.84 It is remarkable, though, that in the books of the New Testament, except for Revelation, the expression “slave of God” is less frequent, sometimes occurs in an OT context, and is virtually absent from emerging Christianity.85 This absence fits the fact that also Philo and Josephus avoided the expression as much as possible in their voluminous works.86 Apparently, the expression was too loaded to use, and this should be taken into account in its analysis. Does this perhaps mean that in general in the New Testament the expression implies the humanity of Christ? In any case, the early Christians focused their religious emotions more on Christ than on God. And the fact that they were prepared to die for this relationship is one of the characteristics that distinguish them from other cults with a “master-slave” relationship. 5. This personal devotion also distinguished the early Christians from their pagan neighbours in general. It is remarkable how little attention the gods receive in the major publications on Roman religion of the last decade. There is no lemma “gods” in the index of Jörg Rüpke’s Companion to Roman Religion (Oxford, 2007), although there is a lemma “goats,” neither is there in Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (Berkeley, 2008), nor is there a chapter “Gods” in Rüpke’s recent Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (Princeton, 2018).87 I (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 152–92. Master: T. Ritti, “Antonino Pio, ‘padrone della terra e del mare’: una nuova iscrizione onoraria da Hierapolis di Frigia,” Annali di archeologia e di Storia Antica 9/10 (2002–03): 271–82. 83  Contra H. S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 291. 84  Cf. Josh 24:30; 1 Kings 14:41 LXX; 23:10 LXX; 26:19 LXX; 2 Kings 7:5–25:27 LXX; 3 Kings 3:7; 8:23–30 LXX; 4 Kings 18:12 LXX; Ps 26:9 LXX; 78:10 LXX; 79:5 LXX; 85:2 LXX; 88:4–21, 51 LXX; 104:26–42 LXX; Isa 42:19; 48:20; 49:3–5; Jer 7:25; 26:27; Dan 3:35; Am 3:7; Jon 1:9 (with thanks to Jens Schröter); J. P. Floss, Jahweh dienen—Götter dienen (Cologne: Hanstein, 1975). 85  Cf. Lk 2:29; Acts 4:29; 16:17; Titus 1:1; 1 Pet 2:16; Rev 1:1; 2:20; 7:3; 10:7; 11:18; 15:3; 19:2–5; 22:3– 6. However, “slave of God” does occur in Christian Anatolian inscriptions: S. Mitchell, Anatolia, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2:119; ICG 363. 86  As noted by A. Hilhorst, “‘Servir Dieu’ dans la terminologie du judaïsme hellénistique et des premières générations chrétiennes de langue grecque,” in Bastiaensen et al., Fructus Centesimus, 177–92, here 180. Curiously, though, in later antiquity the name Theodoulos became much more popular than the rare and only late attested Christodoulos. 87  See my discussion: “Jörg Rüpke’s Pantheon,” Religion in the Roman Empire 4 (2018): 107–12. The absence may also be part of a wider tendency of ignoring the gods by historians of

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take this to be symbolic of the place that gods occupy in the emotional economy of the Roman higher classes, the only ones of which we have any evidence, even though our sources rarely tell us anything about their religious ideas.88 To quote one of the best experts of Roman religion today: “In no case did they regard their gods as absolute masters requiring from mortals a complete and perpetual submission. Roman gods were seen as patroni, as powerful persons who protected and helped their clientes, according to a model of social relations shared by all Romans. The contradiction with the Christian way of seeing things is total. This conception was valid for all cults, those that people have assumed were new as well as ancestral ones, public cults as well as private.”89 The model Scheid refers to does not imply an emotional tie between worshipper and divinity, but it does imply that the worshipers had to keep their gods happy with rituals, sacrifices in particular. And indeed, a dialogue between the spokesman of the Scillitan martyrs (§ 5) and their judge is revealing in this respect: Speratus said: ‘We have never done wrong; we have never lent ourselves to wickedness; we have never uttered a curse, but when abused, we have given thanks, for we hold our emperor in honour.’ The proconsul Saturninus said: ‘We too are religious, and our religion is honest and straight (simplex): we swear by the Genius of our lord the emperor and we offer sacrifices for his health, as you also ought to do’.90 The judge says nothing about belief; neither does he argue for the importance of the gods. Apparently, the Genius of the emperor and sacrifices are the main religion, cf. I. S. Gilhus, “What Became of Superhuman Beings? Companions and Field Guides in the Study of Religion,” in Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion, eds. P. Antes et al. (Sheffield: Equinox, 2016), 375–87. 88  For exceptions, see J. Rives, “The Piety of a Persecutor,” JECS 4 (1996): 1–25; W. Ameling, “Pliny: the Piety of a Persecutor,” in Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity. Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer, eds. J. Dijkstra (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 271–99; J. Scheid, “Die Träger der paganen Kulte im Imperium Romanum,” in Prosopographie des Römischen Kaiserreichs: Ertrag und Perspektiven, eds. W. Eck and M. Heil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 95–108. 89  J. Scheid, The Gods, the State, and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome, trans. C. Ando (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 139. 90  P. Scill. 3: Speratus dixit: “Numquam malefecimus, iniquitati nullam operam praebuimus; numquam malediximus, sed male accepti gratias egimus; propter quod imperatorem nostrum observamus.” [3] Saturninus proconsul dixit: “Et nos religiosi sumus, et simplex est religio nostra, et iuramus per genium domini nostri imperatoris, et pro salute eius supplicamus, quod et vos quoque facere debetis.”

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tenets of his religion. Gods are not even mentioned. Yet the Roman elites were not alone in this attitude towards the gods. Epicurean philosophy, atheism lite, was rather popular among the Greek elites of Asia Minor, and its followers could publicly demonstrate their ideas in inscriptions, such as the famous one of Diogenes of Oenoanda.91 Consequently, here was an area where an idea of different divine affordances had a possibility of making converts.92 6. Our discussion does have some wider implications. James Rives has recently argued that we should see the difference between Greco-Roman religion and Christianity as a contrast between orthopraxy and orthodoxy, between a religion characterised by practices and one characterised by verbal discourse.93 Of course, Rives is too good a scholar not to stress that this distinction is rather schematic. Undoubtedly, it is true that verbal discourse and the prioritising of beliefs over practice mark early Christianity in comparison with contemporary religions, and, we may add, this prioritising is also the cause of the many divergent views in early Christianity.94 In fact, it is striking to what extent early Christianity was a literate religion.95 There was no authoritative Greek or Roman “holy book,”96 even though books did play a role in various rituals and, later, in magic.97 However, in the emerging Jesus movement, let91  P  . Scholz, “Gute und in jeder Hinsicht vortreffliche Männer. Überlegungen zur Funktion und Bedeutung der paideia für die städtischen Führungsschichten im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien,” in Eck and Heil, Prosopographie des Römischen Kaiserreichs, 155–85, here 170–73. 92  I would thus disagree with J. Rüpke, Religiöse Transformatrionen im Römischen Reich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 28 that the idea of a different type of god is not one of the important changes in the course of the Roman Empire. On the contrary, I do see this as one of the fundamental changes in this period. 93  J. Rives, “Sacrifice and ‘Religion’: Modelling Religious Change in the Roman Empire,” Religions 10 (2019). 94  Cf. L. W. Hurtado, “Interactive Diversity: a Proposed Model of Christian Origins,” JTS 64 (2013): 445–62; B. Schliesser, “Vom Jordan an den Tiber. Wie die Jesusbewegung in den Städten des Römischen Reichs ankam,” ZThK 116 (2019): 1–45. It is one of the merits of H. Leppin, Die frühen Christen von den Anfängen bis Konstantin (Munich: Beck, 2018) that he takes this diversity into full account. 95  As such, it is a striking example of what Rüpke, Religiöse Transformationen im Römischen Reich, 48–49 calls the process of “Intellektualisierung” in the Roman Empire. 96  For the expression, see J. N. Bremmer, “From Holy Books to Holy Bible: an Itinerary from Ancient Greece to Modern Islam via Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism, ed. M. Popović (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 327–60. 97  J. N. Bremmer, “From Books with Magic to Magical Books in Ancient Greece and Rome,” in The Materiality of Magic, eds. D. Boschung and J. N. Bremmer (Munich: Fink, 2015), 241–69; N. Belayche, “Content and, or, Context? Subversive Writing in Greek and Roman Religions,” in Scriptures, Sacred Traditions and Strategies of Religious Subversion, eds. M. Blidstein et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 13–29.

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ters and books became central and, gradually, authoritative.98 First Clement already speaks of “sacred books” (43.1), “sacred scriptures” (53.1) and “the holy word” (56.3), but these still refer to the Old Testament. In the 180s, however, future martyrs appear before the Roman judge with ‘books and letters of Paul, a righteous man’ (P. Scill. 12). Thus, it is not strange that the pagan Lucian was struck by the prominence of books in Peregrinus’ performance during the latter’s Christian period.99 In fact, among the aims of the Great Persecution was not only the destruction of churches and the depriving of Christians of their civic rights, but also, as Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 8.2.4 = Mart. Pal. 1) mentions regarding Diocletian’s edict: “An imperial letter was everywhere promulgated, ordering … the destruction by fire of the Scriptures.”100 Nicole Belayche suggests that “the ban on cult places and books, including scriptures in that case, correspond to two basic conditions for the Roman cult: a consecrated place for the ritual (which may be just an altar) and books for guiding the ceremony. Thus, banning these indispensable tools was a way to disrupt the normal planning of the Christian cult in Roman eyes, independently from the content of the books used.”101 This is certainly true, but also somewhat one-sided. In the Martyrdom of Agape, Eirene, and Chione, dating to the Diocletian persecution, the judge asks these young women from Thessalonica: “Do you have in your possession any biographies,102 parchments, or books of the impious Christians?” (4.2).103 It is clear that any

98  Most recently, T. Nicklas, “Das Christentum der Spätantike: Religion von ‘Büchern,’ nicht (nur) von Texten. Zu einem Aspekt der ‘Materialität von Kommunikation,’” Sacra Scripta 5 (2007): 192–206; P. Parsons, “A People of the Book?” in I papiri letterari Cristiani, eds. G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (Florence: Istituto Papirologico, 2011), 47–57; J. S. Kloppenborg, “Literate Media in Early Christian Groups: The Creation of a Christian Book Culture,” JECS 22 (2014): 21–59; U. Schnelle, “Das frühe Christentum und die Bildung,” NTS 61 (2015): 113–43; L. W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods. Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 105–41, 235–52 (notes). 99  Cf. J. N. Bremmer, “Lucian on Peregrinus and Alexander of Abonuteichos: A Sceptical View of Two Religious Entrepeneurs,” in Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, eds. R. Gordon et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 47–76 and “Marcion and Peregrinus,” Studia Patristica 99 (2018): 75–85. 100  Cf. D. Rohmann, Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 27–31. 101  Belayche, “Content and, or, Context?” 23. 102  For the term used, ὑπομνήματα, see M. Hinterberger, “Byzantine Hagiography and its Literary Genres: Some Critical Observations,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography II, ed. S. Efthymiadis (Farnham: Routledge, 2014), 25–60, here 36. 103  See also J. Coogan, “Divine Truth, Presence, and Power: Christian Books in Roman North Africa,” Journal of Late Antiquity 11 (2018): 375–95.

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Christian writing in private possession is his aim, not only books used in cultic meetings. Yet to focus only on verbal discourse as the main opposite of pagan religion neglects the important factor of emotions. Recently, the expanding field of the study of emotions has also reached the classical world, but until now studies have mainly concentrated on Greco-Roman literature and epigraphy,104 and hardly at all on the early Christian world. Obviously, I cannot start analysing this subject here. Yet when we see the attachment of these martyrs to Christ and the emotional descriptions of their interrogations, tortures, and deaths in some of the martyr Acts, it is clear that emotions must have played an important role in early Christianity. The frequent oral and epistolary communications will have created a new “emotional community” with its new “emotional regime.” The Acts, thus, were, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz’s famous definition of religion, models of and models for ways to love Christ and to speak about God. They offer a window, albeit not a transparent one, into a new world which eventually would lead to the demise of the old religion.105 104  For this research, see most recently A. Chaniotis, ed., Unveiling Emotions. Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013); E. Sanders and M. Johncock, eds., Emotion and Persuasion in Classical Antiquity (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2016); D. Cairns and D. P. Nelis, eds., Emotions in the Classical World: Methods, Approaches, and Directions (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2017); J. N. Bremmer, “Epilogue: Final Considerations and Questions Regarding Visual and Textual Emotions,” in Reading Emotions in Ancient Visual Culture, eds. H. von Ehrenheim and M. Prusac (Rome: Swedish Institute in Rome, 2019), forthcoming. 105  For comments, I am most grateful to the audience in Edinburgh and the research group “The Demise of Religions,” especially Laura Feldt and Michael Stausberg, at the Center for Advanced Study, Oslo, in which inspiring environment this paper was written, and to Matthew Novenson for his kind and skilful correction of my English.

Chapter 11

Gnosis and the Tragedies of Wisdom: Sophia’s Story Pheme Perkins ἀπαύγασμα γάρ ἐστιν φωτὸς ἀϊδίου καὶ ἔσοπτρον ἀκηλίδωτον τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ ἐνεργείας καὶ εἰκὼν τῆς ἀγαθότητος αὐτοῦ (Wis 7:26)

∵ At the pinnacle of her glory, the figure of Wisdom, who plays in God’s presence even as creation is being spun out (Prov 8:22–31)1 or comes forth from the mouth of the Most High (Sir 24:1–6), is the “other being” par excellence. In her, the divine presence extends from the heavens to the abyss even as human beings confront the “dark side” of Wisdom in a vast cosmos where they cannot grasp God’s providential ordering (Job 28:20–28). In his discussion of the Wisdom framing to the Christology of John’s gospel, John Ashton draws out this basic polarity between Wisdom as accessible presence and Wisdom as hidden or remote, only given to human beings in moments of revelation.2 Has the Janus-faced Wisdom already begun to drift away from the scenario of competing invitations to banquet with Dame Wisdom or Dame Folly from Proverbs 9 to a dialectic rendition of divine presence or absence?3 Even in the imaginative expansion of the spatial characteristics of “all existing things” characteristic of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Wisdom’s mediating function could be reshaped with features transposed from the pervasive intelligent 1  Perhaps even engaging humans as playmates, Roland E. Murphy suggests (Proverbs, WBC 22 [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998], 53); but Wisdom appears a more distant figure in Sirach 24 as her reach stretches from the highest heaven to the depths of the sea (so John Ashton, Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 13). 2  Ashton, Studying, 7–14. 3  One which literary critic Mark Edmundson sees as foundational to the depictions of God and humanity in the Hebrew Bible: “The existence of Yahweh in his supreme otherness is an ongoing statement about the limitations (and the inadequacy) of mankind. Men and women are made in his image, but he far exceeds them in every other way. Yahweh is not just different from men in degree but in kind” (Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015], 25).

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pneuma of Stoic cosmology.4 With its new coloration affirming that God created humankind for immortality and as the image of his own eternity (ἐπ᾽ ἀφθαρσίᾳ καὶ εἰκόνα τῆς ἰδίας ἀϊδιότητος, Wis 2:23), Wisdom of Solomon suggests that the human soul—or perhaps only the soul of the wise person5—is an image of God’s own being.6 1

Fractured Being and Philosophical Speculation

However, the familiar Platonic division between the real existence of eternal forms in the noetic realm and their imaging in the material, sense-perceptible one creates another fissure between God and (some) other beings. Why or how does the soul whose proper home is contemplating the intelligible things become associated with the body, and in doing so even forget reality? Opinions offered by middle Platonists incorporate both positive and negative responses. On the positive side, their descent was necessary to make the number of living beings in the sensible world equal to those in the intelligible. Or it enabled the gods to reveal themselves. On the negative side, the soul was compelled either out of love for the body or as a consequence of some sinful wantonness (akolasia). Plotinus will later develop an account of the tolma (“audacity, excessive boldness”) that swept the soul outside the Intellect (Enn. 4.8.5).7 At this point we have the strains of speculative DNA that could mutate into the tragic Wisdom figure in various (Sethian) gnostic and Valentinian ­narratives.8 As an illustration of the apparent mutation in this speculative 4  As in Wis 8:1, reflecting the continuous inward/outward motion of the pneuma which holds all things together; this Stoic image appears in Philo and can be associated with soul stretched throughout the cosmos in Plato, Timaeus 34B (David Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, AB 43 [Garden City: Doubleday, 1979], 189–190; referring to Philo, Mos. 1.112; Mut. 22; Plant. 9; Migr. 181; Conf. 186). 5  So Philo in QG 1.16; Opif. 154; Conf. 149; Winston, Wisdom, 30. 6  Winston, Wisdom, 29. 7  Winston, Wisdom, 26–28. 8  Scholars remain uncertain as to what shorthand classification to use in referring to that group of writings which employ a singular cosmological account, mythic recasting of Genesis with Christ as heavenly Savior, and quasi-philosophical hermeneutic but are not associated with Valentinian schools. The mytheme that ties the present “enlightened” or “spiritual” humanity with a heavenly “seed of Seth” that underlies the designation “Sethian” remains a useful designation, though perhaps misleading as it often appears to be a secondary expansion, and in any case unlike “Valentinian” does not appropriately represent the “founding teacher— school” relationships of antiquity. See discussion in D. Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 19–51. Brakke points to comments in Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria which indicate that there were

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code, Philo’s interpretation of the “heavens” created on the fourth day uses word play to mark ouranos as the boundary (horos) between the intelligible and sensible worlds that is at the same time, first and most honored of visible things: εἶτ᾽ εὐθέως οὐρανὸν προσεῖπεν αὐτὸν εὐθυβόλως καὶ πάνυ κυρίως, ἤτοι διότι πάντων ὅρος ἢ διότι πρῶτος τῶν ὁρατῶν ἐγένετο. ὀνομάζει δὲ καὶ ἡμέραν μετὰ τὴν γένεσιν αὐτοῦ δευτέραν, ὅλον ἡμέρας διάστημα καὶ μέτρον ἀνατιθεὶς οὐρανῷ διὰ τὴν ἐν αἰσθητοῖς ἀξίωσίν τε καὶ τιμήν (Philo, Opif. 37).9 In the Valentinian Sophia tale, this “boundary” has mutated from a veil or cover intended to hide the ugly product of Wisdom’s audacious attempt at creation to an ontological structure that protects the intelligible, divine aeons or even plays a soteriological role in restoring the fissure that Sophia’s fall had caused.10 But both Philo and Plotinus protested the speculative habit of transferring metaphysics into myth. Philo repeatedly declares the superiority of Moses’ account of how the world (intelligible and sensible) came to be over that doxographical class of opinions that are ingeniously concocted myths (Opif. 1–2; 157; 170).11 Plotinus contends with students in his own circles who were groups who used “gnostic” terminology as a self-designation, and that it differentiated them from Valentinians. On the Valentinian schools, see Ismo Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the Valentinians, NHMS 60 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). One may rightly object to the heresiological freight associated with the patristic designation “gnostic,” which other scholars insist does not define a clearly identifiable cluster of religious or philosophical groups in antiquity (e.g., Roelof van den Broek, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 8–12). Michael Williams continues to advocate for abolishing the category along with the numerous typologies of gnostic thought that are rampant in the literature (Michael A. Williams, “On Ancient ‘Gnosticism’ as a Problematic Category,” in The Gnostic World, ed. Garry W. Trompf [London: Routledge, 2019], 100–117). 9  “Then he immediately named it heaven, an apposite and highly appropriate title either because it has a boundary (horos) of all things or because it came into existence as first of the visible things. After its genesis he also names the day second, devoting the entire extension and measure of a day to heaven on account of its high value and honour in sense-perceptible reality” (trans. David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria. On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses [Leiden: Brill, 2001]). Runia points out the roots of this interpretation in a Platonic etymology at Plato, Rep. 509d; cf. Philo, Mos. 2.194; QG 4.57. 10  E.g., Tri. Trac. 75.13; 76.33; 82.12. See Louis Painchaud and Einar Thomassen, Le Traité Tripartite (NH I,5), BCNH 19 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989), 372–373. The soteriological function of the Boundary is even more clearly articulated in the Valentinian Exposition (Val. Exp. 25–28), in which it is necessary to isolate the Father from the aeons that emanated from him (see Einar Thomassen, “Valentinian Exposition: Introduction,” in Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures [New York: HarperCollins, 2007], 664). 11  And an even more extended protest against comparing the “Tower of Babel” with Homeric myths in Conf. 2–15 (see Runia, Creation of the Cosmos, 101–102; 376; 396–397).

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reading treatises which we now possess in the Coptic translations found at Nag Hammadi.12 Arthur Henry Armstrong, the preeminent English translator of Plotinus, both defends and expands the latter’s vigorous rejection of this speculative intrusion into philosophical Platonism (Enn. 3.8; 5.8; 5.5, and 2.9).13 Contrary to the variations on the mytheme of a soul which must be awakened by the summons of revelation and return to a lost home or counterpart in the divine, Armstrong insists that, for Plotinus, “because of his well-known doctrine that the true, higher self does not descend but remains an eternal inhabitant of the intelligible world, and his assurance, based on experience, that he can live on that higher level in this world and this body … Heaven for Plotinus is here and now.”14 In fact, for Armstrong whatever intrusions of philosophical systematization surface in gnostic texts are so thoroughly distorted by a foreign contextualization as to be a completely different species—not just a GMO crop.15 2

Seeking the Rootstock of Tragic Wisdom

This dispute underscores the hermeneutical problems confronting our treatment of the wide corpus of writings either expounding or refuting gnostic and Valentinian teachings. Out of what plant stock do they emerge? Is the revision of biblical stories a sectarian Jewish development or an anti-Christian gesture? To address the topic of our seminar, “God and other beings,” one would have 12  Z  ostrianos, Allogenes, Marsanes, part of a group of treatises that represent a metaphysical recasting of established mythemes and structuring elements from the earlier “Sethian” traditions (so John Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, BCNH 9 [Leuven: Peeters, 2001], 292–301). Zostrianos strikingly incorporates sections of anti-Arian works by Victorinus (see Michel Tardieu, “Recherches sur la formation de l’Apocalypse de Zostrien et les sources de Marius Victorinus,” in Res Orientales IX [Bures-sur-Yvette: Groupe pour l’É tude de la Civilisation du Moyen-Orient, 1996], 7–114). 13  A. H. Armstrong, “Gnosis and Greek Philosophy,” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas, ed. Barbara Aland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 85–124. 14  Armstrong, “Gnosis and Greek Philosophy,” 115. The “higher” individual soul is always in the Intellect, only its “logos” might be said to suffer forgetfulness from having entered the material world (ibid., 119). 15  Armstrong, “Gnosis and Greek Philosophy,” 101. He also challenges academic habits of alleging “influence” without methodological control. The claim only applies to a context in which a person’s mind has been formed to a major extent by familiarity with the major works or thinkers, and guided in the appropriation by competent instructors (ibid., 100). For a more moderate view of the relationship between Plotinus and this Platonizing Sethianism, see Francis Lacroix and Jean-Marc Narbonne, “Plotinus and the Gnostics,” in Trompf, Gnostic World, 208–216.

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to determine whether the issue was the “god” figure in the biblical narrative, designated “Yaldabaoth,” recast as either malevolent or foolish, clearly opposed to spiritually enlightened human creatures, and in some variants of the mythic stories doomed to fiery destruction along with all the material world over which he presides.16 If “God” is the higher divine source from whom everything in the divine world has derived, then God is the source of that eternal being, and complete luminosity that constitutes “existence”—but in various systems remaining distinct from the aeons17—then the question is how do “other beings” participate in or come to “know” the undifferentiated One. As our honoree, Larry Hurtado, put it so succinctly, “In these Valentinian mythic schemes we have to look carefully even to find Jesus in the crowd that makes up the plērōma of numerous divine beings! Moreover, the curious distinction between ‘Jesus’ and the ‘Christ’ obviously contrasts with the more familiar insistence in the writings favored in proto-orthodox circles that the human, historic Jesus is himself the divine Son and the paramount divine revelation.”18 Valentinian teachers would have insisted that they held the key to that “human”—though perhaps not “historic” if by that one means an individual embedded in the socio-cultural matrix of first century Judaism—situation of that revelation. And with particular appeal to the Johannine tradition it is discovered in the passion and resurrection.19 In what appears to be a homiletic discourse to Christians who are not (yet) Valentinian initiates,20 the Gospel of Truth intones the gospel of Jesus, who is the guide and teacher, contending with the “wise in their own eyes” and confirming that knowledge of the Father possessed by the “little children.”21 It is the innate hostility to revelation that played out in the crucifixion. Contrary to the intent of the human actors, the cross provides the fruit/knowledge of the Father, which had been lost in 16  In a fiery confrontation with Faith Wisdom, as in Orig. World 125.32–126.35. This eschatological return is not entirely undifferentiated like the Stoic conflagration, as there are some who “have not become perfect in the unbegotten Father” and will belong to lesser “kingdoms of the immortals according to their natures (Orig. World 127.7–17). 17  E.g., “Father whose name cannot be named,” “unknown Father” (Great Invisible Spirit 40.12–41.7). 18  Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 526. 19  Other gnostic revelations defer the timing of gnosis to post-resurrection dialogues between the Savior and a select group of (or, in a few instances, all) disciples. For a survey of this genre, see Pheme Perkins, The Gnostic Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1980). 20  So Harold Attridge, “The Gospel of Truth as an Exoteric Text,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, ed. Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986), 239–255. 21  Gos. Truth 19.17–33; an echo of Matt 11:25–27//Luke 10:21–22.

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Paradise (Gos. Truth 18.11–19.17). What might be construed as simply an invitation to a larger community of Christ-believers by recasting familiar tropes, had much deeper significance in Valentinian circles. Einar Thomassen has provided a detailed analysis of Valentinian sources that confirms a patristic reference to distinct “eastern” and “western” schools that disagree over the nature of the body that the Savior takes on. For the “eastern” type, a real joining to flesh will also require that the Savior experience salvation.22 Thus it was probably easier for a second- or third-century Valentinian to locate the flashes of the “Christ” or “divine Son” in both the welter of “other beings” that emanate from the Father and the “Jesus” of gospel narrative than it is for us or for their patristic opponents, because their perceptions had been sharpened by a pedagogy of oral instruction and ritual.23 However the growing authority of written gospels in second- and thirdcentury Christianity is not the only base for revisionist, esoteric readings. Valentinian teachers clearly draw from a widespread counter-reading of Genesis that has transformed “the God [who] saw that it was kalos (good, beautiful)” into an arrogant, boastful, and ignorant demiurge who rules over what is decidedly not kalos because its fabricator has no secure vision of the divine forms.24 Quite the contrary impulse drives this mythic variant on creation to the motivation of Philo’s adaptation in which the “intelligible world” that God first creates exists to provide the “beautiful paradigm” for the sensible world (Opif. 16).25 Gerard Luttikuizen mines the philosophical ore to be found in the Apocryphon of John and related samplings of the “gnostic genesis” to support the hypothesis that this account presumes an intellectual formation in a Platonism with some Aristotelean and neo-Pythagorean add-ins.26 But that 22  Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 30–64. 23  On concern for ritual efficacy rather than doctrine as the critical element in the heresiological polemic, see Pheme Perkins, “Ritual and Orthodoxy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual, ed. Risto Uro et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 503–519. On the importance of ritual to “instruction” in Valentinian circles, see Risto Uro, “The Bridal Chamber and Other Mysteries: Ritual System and Ritual Transmission in the Valentinian Movement,” in Sacred Marriages: The Divine Human Sexual Metaphor from Sumer to Early Christianity, ed. Martti Nissinen and Risto Uro (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 457–486. 24  See Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions, NHMS 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 17–107. 25  It belongs to God’s divine nature to anticipate the requirements of the sensible, material creation. Runia points out that for Philo, God is the creator of both the intelligible and the sensible realms (Philo, Abr. 88; Runia, Creation of the Cosmos, 138–139). 26  Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions, 29: “The true God, the Invisible Spirit, is conceptualized as a fully transcendent meta-cosmic entity. He is not he creator and ruler of the lower world … The anthropology of Ap. John runs parallel with this dual theology … the human

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mining effort hardly explains what its multiple variations in gnostic sources and further revisions by Valentinian teachers show to be a well-formed and widespread myth.27 No philosophical stream could cut a canyon as deep as the one which exists between the “unknown Father” and the material world of human experience presumed in gnostic mythopoetics. And worse from the Jewish or Christian point of view, Wisdom, the power by which God’s presence stretches from the heavens to the abyss, is faulted for the entire material cosmos as well as the divided and passion-scarred human soul.28 Luttikhuizen acknowledges this shocking paradox in describing the Sophia narrative as “a prehistoric tragedy” which conducts us from eternal, spiritual perfection to “the demonically ruled sublunary world.”29 The psychic impulses inaugurated by Sophia’s tragic falling away from her position at the lowest end of aeonic reality that came forth from the Father that pass on to her misshapen offspring and through his creative agency to humankind are not the end of the story.30 When Sophia confronts the consequences of her actions, soul is consubstantial with the cosmic Gods, which enables them to control the passions of the soul.” 27  Brakke suggests that this gnostic myth is the combination of “Jewish Scriptures, Platonist mythological speculation, and (it seems) revelatory meditations on the structure of the human mind … [They] assume that their teachings also had a therapeutic purpose: to reconnect the human intellect with the source of its being and to ameliorate its condition of attachment to the body and its passions” (Brakke, Gnostics, 52–53). 28  Brakke, Gnostics, 58. On the incompatibility of this gnostic Wisdom figure and her Jewish counterpart in Wisdom, see Bert J. Lietaert Peerbolte, “The Wisdom of Solomon and the Gnostic Sophia,” in The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian, and Gnostic Essays in Honour of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, ed. A. Hilhorst and G. H. van Kooten, AJEC 59 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 97–114. 29  Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions, 45: “In spite of her spiritual nature as one of God’s eternal aeons, Sophia was deluded by psychic impulses,” especially the prounikon within Sophia (BG 37.11; also NHC III 15.3, and the variant known to Irenaeus, Haer. 1.30.3). Attributing sexual passion to Sophia was omitted in the long version of Ap. John, which focuses instead on the embryological metaphor of her attempt to generate a likeness of herself without the concurrence of her male partner (NHC II 9.25–35). 30  Michael A. Williams rejects interpretations of Wisdom’s descent from the Pleroma, loss of “light” to the creator, move to a mid-realm, and eventual reintegration as “tragic” in the Sethian variants (Ap. John; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.29) by insisting that such details as the epithet prounikos, which in comedy can designate youthful rashness, or boldness, and the verbs which refer to Ialdabaoth’s possession of light-power that the Archon then moves away from his mother with, as well as echoes of necessary patterns derived from the heavenly world all retain the positive valence of divine Wisdom operating throughout creation. He points out that even in these versions (lower) Wisdom is said to act “with innocence” (akakia). See Michael A. Williams, “‘Wisdom, Our Innocent Sister’: Reflections on a Mytheme,” in Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity, ed. Ulla Tervahauta, Ivan Miroshnikov, Outi Lehtipuu, and Ismo Dunderberg, VCSup 144 (Leiden: Brill, 2017),

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she repents. So the second act in her story involves a complex process of repentance, recovery of that “light-substance” stolen by her offspring, and the eventual return to the Pleroma. An “undercover” operation endows humanity (Adam) with a stronger intelligence than the creator god and his minions (Ap. John NHC II 20.3–4; BG 52.8–11). The mythic problem going forward is how to extract the spiritual power that has become completely separated from its divine origins and imprisoned in materiality.31 Even the spirit within the human has been replaced by a counterfeit—or almost. Some remnant of their origins must remain.32 3

Withdrawing Wisdom from Creation: A Tragic Harmartia?

Though Sophia’s tragedy is also humanity’s in the Apocryphon of John, other passages which refer to this myth—as in any classical use of a familiar mytheme—modify details. Her fall from the divine into its opposite evidently posed intellectual hurdles that some narrations evaded. For example, in the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (Gos. Eg. NHC III 56.22–25), the fourth “light” to which Wisdom belongs, Eleleth, issues a command, “Let someone rule over chaos and Hades,” apparently a dispatch that enables Wisdom to inaugurate the series of events which will produce the lower world. She is operating according to divine plan, not some flaw or faulty passion.33 In response to Sakla’s boast that nothing exists apart from him, through the will of the Father, Repentance descends from the aeons to inaugurate the process of redemption for the human being created in the image of that voice of divine (NHC III 58.25–59.9). In another work, the narrator tries to have it both ways: declaring that Wisdom is “the innocent one” by having the demon-creator appear without a link to her passion, and yet retaining the Repentance trope in which the

253–290. However, while I would agree that the “innocence” trope will be played out in other variants of Sophia’s story, as we shall see, it is the constellation of three factors—the inaccessibility of Wisdom to human intelligence, the rashness of the (sexually) inexperienced young female, and (legal) innocence—that gives this story its tragic overtones. 31  Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions, 52. Luttikhuizen treats this section of the tragedy as exemplifying the “combat myth” between two powers (ibid., 45). 32  Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions, 57. 33  Brakke, Gnostics, 58. Williams notes a connection between Wisdom’s innocence and the divine plan that is played out through the drama of salvation concluding with First Thought establishing the crucified Jesus “in the houses of his Father” in Three Forms 50.12–15 (Williams, “Wisdom,” 279–280).

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aeons forgive and act to restore the loss suffered by the “Epinoia of light” by establishing another order in reality.34 Another variation on this approach to the Repentance trope introduces an superior figuration of the biblical god to rule an intermediate level above the lower world. Upon hearing the voice of Life, daughter of Faith Wisdom, rebuke Sakla and cast him to the depth of the Abyss with the fiery angel of her breath, one offspring, Sabaoth, repents, condemns his father, and despises his mother, matter. Sophia establishes him in his own kingdom in the eighth heaven with Life as wife and advisor (Nat. Rulers 95.13–96.1). Through this device Wisdom’s ordering power extends into the material realm, though hardly to its abyss. Origin of the World contains an expanded version of Sabaoth’s repentance and installation in an eighth region with Life alongside (103.32–105.20).35 Pistis Sophia responds to Sabaoth’s praise by endowing him with light, effectively establishing Sabaoth’s position as “lord of the powers” (104.3–10). And in a further modification to the standard scenario of the Apocryphon of John, Sabaoth’s consort Life, assisted by another infusion of light from her mother Wisdom, creates a human being and Instructor to undo the ignorant human produced by Yaldabaoth and his powers (112.25–114.4). Thus the “souls” of these humans have a tie to the heavenly world that is not bound to that bodily prison created for it (114.17–24). Luttikhuizen cautions against assuming that fourth-century readers would have been measuring their mythic recitals of Apocryphon of John against the Genesis text.36 Nor were they necessarily engaged in learned debate with philosophical cosmologies. For those fourth-century readers of the Nag Hammadi codices, the pressing existential question was more likely to have been: How do these exiled or partially dimmed sparks of divine light negotiate their way in a world controlled by powers hostile to the “Unknown Father”? Although the mythic variant in Nat. Rulers and Orig. World has bifurcated the Genesis-type creator god into a hostile lower demiurge and a repentant Sabaoth who is assisted by Wisdom and her daughter, that modification might be seen as a partial retrieval of Wisdom’s life-giving association with the material cosmos rather than intensifying the separation between the world and the divine pleroma by adding the Sabaoth realm.

34  T  hree Forms 39.15–40.4; Brakke, Gnostics, 59; Paul-Hubert Poirier, La Pensée Première à la Triple Forme (NH XIII,1), BCNH 32 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 263–264. 35  Louis Painchaud, L’É crit sans Titre. Traité sur l’Origine du Monde (NH II,5 et XIII,2 et Brit. Lib. Or. 4926 [1]), BCNH 21 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 300–321. 36  Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions, 166–167.

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The neo-Platonizing second wave of (Sethian) gnostic speculation represented in Zostrianos, Marsanes, Allogenes, and Three Steles of Seth shifted its speculative energy from the exegesis of Genesis and variations of established mythemes to ascending from the world of matter and images to the divine. The disjunction between the divine, intelligible world and its material reflection is so sharply drawn in these treatises that Plotinus lashed out against students in his circles who were reading them. Such teaching, he insists, cannot claim any genetic ties to Plato despite claims made by some of its advocates (Enn. 2.6, 17). But as Turner’s detailed analyses of these Nag Hammadi tractates indicates, teachers in this Sethian tradition made a consistent and thorough effort to recast the entities from the mythologized version of divine emanations and Sophia’s fall into formal, metaphysical patterns that are at least recognizable to neo-Platonists.37 The soul’s task is one of mystical ascent through the assimilation in successively higher ontological levels of being until it reaches the God-self that is the source of All. Various ritual acts, magical incantations, revelatory mediators, and withdrawal into the self are essential to the process. Some knowledge of the transcendent can be achieved through the intellect, but the highest form evokes an apophatic theology of non-knowing.38 More important for our study, this move away from mythic repetition marks the end to the tragedy of Sophia’s deficiency. The highest feminine Barbelo aeon is “masculinized” as “Intellect of the Invisible Spirit,” which could never descend from its ontological position.39 4

Wisdom Divided in Valentinian Sources: Healing Her Emotions

Philo’s treatment of heaven as the “boundary” in God’s intelligible creation differs ontologically from the Valentinian horos. In Sophia’s story, that feature protects the stability of the aeons from the disorienting effect of passions. Ismo Dunderberg argues that an expanded emphasis on Wisdom’s emotional turmoil and its healing in Valentinian accounts owes an intellectual debt to Stoic teaching on emotions.40 Valentinian narrators extend the number of potential afflictions and the range of emotional turmoil suffered by Wisdom well 37  Turner, Sethian Gnosticism, 499–744. 38  Turner, Sethian Gnosticism, 688. 39  Turner, Sethian Gnosticism, 754–756. 40  Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 95–118; more briefly idem, Gnostic Morality Revisited, WUNT 347 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 117–135.

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beyond both the inherited gnostic myth and standard classifications found in Stoic philosophers.41 And even more strikingly, the Valentinian account moves emotion into the divine world itself. Ignorance is not limited to the material realm. Wisdom’s desire to reach the unknowable Father expresses a longing born of love (ἀγάπη, Irenaeus, Haer. 1.2.2). The flaw that mars this desire to know God, that is audacity (τόλμη), was in her nature, which would have been dissolved by coming too close to the divine source of the All had the Boundary not been established to prevent just such a disaster.42 However the “passion” must be excised from the Pleroma (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.2.4–5). Once that tumor of passion has been removed, Sophia is restored to her partner. In addition, the Father adds yet another aeon pair to his design, Christ and the Holy Spirit. So in this version, the “tragic flaw” is not charged to Wisdom but lies buried deeper in the design. The soteriological repairs to both the world of the aeons and to that part of Sophia ejected from the Pleroma are presented by Valentinian exegetes as the esoteric truth of the Christ story.43 Achamoth/Wisdom, with the excess passions removed from the Pleroma, retains a mediating function once the Christ/Paraclete has stabilized her in the Midst. That process required transformation of a powerful incorporeal passion into an incorporeal matter capable of compounding. Once freed of that disorder, Achamoth/Wisdom’s joy at seeing the light (angels) with the Savior spurs the emergence of both the psychic and material realms. Achamoth herself retains an image of the Father, which the demiurgic ruler of the material world lacks (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.4.5–5.5).44 Without the Savior’s activity at all levels of the cosmogonic process, nothing outside the first “boundary” separating 41  Cf. Irenaeus, Haer. 1.2.2–3; 1.4.1; Hippolytus, Ref. 6.32.5; Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 124. 42  Thomassen suggests a psychological reading of this Sophia account in which her passion actually begins above in the region of the Mind (with Monogenes and Truth): “Thus the ‘passion’ represents a psychological interpretation of the separation which is inherent as an unresolved threat from the very beginning in the notion of the unity of the Father and the Son … The passion of Sophia is not an individual caprice, but describes a structural necessity arising from the lack of mediation between the initial terms of the system” (Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 199–200). 43  For example, the cross represents that “boundary” which separates Sophia’s passions from the intelligible. Enlightened readers will recognize that reference in the Savior “giving up the Spirit” (John 19:30). For Valentinians the restorative, strengthening effects of the cross also code for the ritual transformation experienced in baptism (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.21.3; Tri. Trac. 128.24–30; Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 281–289, 313). Apparently the sacramental praxis of groups represented in these passages did not include a separate “bridal chamber” ritual, but referred its imagery for the soul’s reunion with its aeonic twin to baptism (Thomassen, Traité Tripartite, 444). 44  In the cosmological metaphysics that is shaped to match the familiar creation drama with the added philosophical theory of excised emotions, the Demiurge’s ignorant boasting

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Father and aeons or the second “boundary” dividing the divine from the psychic and material could exist. The intellectual commitment to monism is undisputable; sustaining that principle through repeated species divisions is dizzying.45 Even the lower Sophia (Achamoth) has not fallen completely. As Dunderberg points out, Stoic philosophers might be just as easily offended by Valentinian discussion of the negative emotions and matter as Plotinus was by treatment of the material world among the Platonizing gnostics in his circles. Dunderberg credits Valentinian teachers with producing a new speculative synthesis contained within a mythic framework.46 With all the twists of soteriological activity that even present divided manifestations of the Savior, Valentinian investment in Stoic apatheia appears only partial.47 That observation returns to the hermeneutical problematic of gnostic mythopoesis: Is it genetic crossbreading, grafting onto wild rootstock, or constructing some serviceable piece of furniture out of second-hand pieces initially created by different craftsmen from different types of wood? Valentinian sources exhibit sufficient control of Stoic technical vocabulary to rule out amateurism or philosophic ineptitude as an explanation for such theoretical modulations.48 So they must reflect different epistemological commitments.

represents the content of his elemental nature since he cannot know spiritual reality (ἀτονώτερον αὐτὸν ὑπάρχοντα πρὸς τὸ γινώσκειν τινὰ πνευματικὰ [Irenaeus, Haer. 1.5.4]). 45  Not to mention the disorienting turn to having a material universe created from those passions which in a Stoic emotional calculus must be extracted from the soul in order to avoid suffering confusion (Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 127). 46  “Thus if we assume that Valentinians were familiar with Stoic teaching about emotions, we should also see how bold they were in bringing together these theories with elements of physical theory, all discussed in a mythic framework” (Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 127). 47  Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 126. 48  Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 135; idem, Beyond Gnosticism, 17–18; contra John Dillon. See Dillon’s description of Valentinian gnosis in the section of his history of middle Platonism titled “The Spread of Platonist Influence: The ‘Platonic Underworld,’” in John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (London: Duckworth, 1977), 384–389. Dillon acknowledges the Valentinian commitment to monism, but protests “the riotous proliferation of entities and levels of being … hypostatizations of mere abstractions, the male aeons being epithets such as ‘ageless,’ ‘motionless,’ or ‘only begotten,’ and the female being abstract nouns such as ‘Unity,’ ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and, last but not least, ‘Wisdom’ (sophia)” (ibid., 385).

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Conclusion: God, Wisdom, and (Too) Many Other Beings

Taming the expansive proliferation of entities might be looking for a primal pattern that can be indefinitely reflected in multiple levels of being or played out in diverse mythic and/or scriptural traditions.49 For example, Thomassen isolates a primitive scheme linking the Father with the spiritual seed of “the enlightened,” which often appears as the “body” that the Savior brings into the world:50 The Father ↓ His image = Primal Man = the Son = the Pleroma ↓ The spiritual seed = the inner man But this pattern hardly embraces all beings. Valentinian teachers employed a hybrid comprising the Platonic intelligible world grafted onto the radically remodeled Jewish figures of Wisdom and the monotheistic Creator of the visible universe with his angelic hosts. Using that tradition provided a substructure for the psychic and material world which did not need to share the eternity of its divine model.51 Another innovative metaphysical move led Valentinian teachers to strengthen ties between the two halves of the system by introducing elements of Wisdom’s passion into the intelligible world as the longing to grasp the unknowable Father. Timely interventions by the Savior ensure that she, like the human soul, is never entirely turned away from God even in her divided state. Valentinian exegetes focused their attention on the Christ story represented in the gospels and Paul. They are not interested in creative re-readings of 49  Even suggested by the image in Tri. Trac. 104.18–30: “Now the whole establishment and organization of the images, likenesses, and imitations has come into being for the sake of those who need nourishment, instruction, and form, so that their smallness may gradually grow, as through the instruction provided by the image of a mirror. That in fact is why he created the human last, after having prepared and provided for him the things he created for his sake” (trans. Thomassen in Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 86). 50  Along with additional mythemes that may be differently articulated but are common across sources from various schools of Valentinianism: the Savior and his angels show the Pleroma to a fallen aeon; the fallen aeon emits spiritual seed as an image of what was shown; the Savior/Logos or the (fallen) Sophia puts that seed into the first human. The basic pattern may derive from Valentinus himself (see Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 441). 51  The ultimate erasure of the psychic and material also distinguishes those lower levels of reality from their Stoic counterparts (Dunderberg, Gnostic Morality, 134).

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Genesis. Ordinarily when those Genesis-related tropes from gnostic mythologizing make an appearance in Valentinian sources, the god who forms Adam’s material and psychic being is less hostile than what one is used to finding in other gnostic versions.52 In this recasting the “tragedy” of Sophia so that she is no longer attempting an illicit act of spontaneous female generation that could only result in ugly formlessness but acting out of desire to know the Father, extraction of light from his unfortunate mother no longer belongs to the mythological repertoire. That shift in orientation and tone permits a more positive version of Wisdom’s role in mediating something of the divine to the lower world. But even the Valentinian Wisdom figure has little of the energetic brilliance of her Jewish counterpart. It is hardly a surprise, then, to find the female Wisdom replaced by the Word in the Tripartite Tractate, which also makes a tighter connection between “the Church (Valentinian),” the Pleroma, and the Son (Tri. Trac. 57.33–58.18).53 At every point in the story, this Wisdom marks situations that are defective, only partial reflections,54 or crying out for the Savior. She does not facilitate the mystical ascent to the divine rolled out in the Platonizing (Sethian) gnostic treatises. And though Sophia and Jesus are mentioned in a fragment on creation in the Valentinian Exposition,55 only the Son is the spring which brings forth the revelation of the ineffable God (Val. Exp. 23–25). And it is the Son who is the agent of divine grace and the soul’s exit from the world in the liturgical prayers appended to this text. Restored to the Pleroma, Sophia will be just one among the angelic pairs. Jesus receives the Christ as his counterpart (Val. Exp. 39.28–39).

52  Since it is typical of Valentinian versions of the creation of the human being to underline the hidden, preparatory actions of the Savior (and Wisdom) that are really behind the process (cf. Tri. Trac. 104.30–105.35; Thomassen, Traité Tripartite, 103–106). 53  Thomassen, Traité Tripartite, 286–287. Sophia’s story also slid out of the repertoire of other (Sethian) gnostic mythography. It does not appear in Turner’s catalogue of Sethian doctrines and mythologoumena in Catherine Barry, Wolf-Peter Funk, Paul-Hubert Poirier, and John D. Turner, Zostrien (NH VIII,1), BCNH 24 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 134–135. 54  See, for example, Turner’s description of Sophia’s relationship to creation in Zostr. 9.16– 10.5: “From her position just above the fixed stars … Sophia illumines preexisting matter and serves the archon of creation as his model for creating the world. While Plato’s demiurge looks above to the ideal forms contained in the ‘truly living being’ (Tim. 39e), the archons of creation can only look downward to their faint reflection in the matter illumined by Sophia” (in Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 550 n. 21). On Plotinus’ use of Zostrianos in refuting Gnostics, see Turner, Zostrien, 513. 55  Along with Sophia’s fall and repentance (XI, 31.1–36.18).

Chapter 12

The One God Is No Simple Matter April D. DeConick Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons opens Against Heresies with the proclamation that he intends to expose and neutralize Christians who claim to have knowledge (gnosis) of the God who founded and adorned the universe, and that the revelation of the knowledge of this God is something so excellent and so sublime that the God who created the heaven and the earth pales in comparison: “They also overthrow the faith of many people, by drawing them away (from the true faith), revealing knowledge from the one who founded and arranged the entirety, as if they had something loftier and more excellent to show off than the God who made the heaven and the earth and everything in them” (πολλοὺς ἀνατρέπουσιν, ἀπάγοντες αὐτοὺς προφάσει γνώσεως ἀπὸ τοῦ τόδε τὸ πᾶν συστησαμένου καὶ κεκοσμηκότος, ὡς ὑψηλότερόν τι καὶ μεῖζον ἔχοντες ἐπιδεῖξαι τοῦ τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πεποιηκότος Θεοῦ).*1 At the most basic level, this passage highlights the fact that Gnostics in antiquity worshipped a supreme transcendent God and not the cosmic deity Yhwh.2 Yet this is not how scholars have typically cast Gnostic theology. Instead scholars have concluded in publication after publication that Gnostics are dualists and polytheists, in contrast to monotheists.3 On one level this artificial framing is disturbing because it has more to do with the politics of modern heresiology than the reality of ancient theology. Monotheism is categorical language meant to distinguish between true and false Gods, liquidate the Gods of other people, and reinforce exclusive

* This essay is dedicated to Prof. Dr. F. L. (Lautaro) Roig Lanzillotta on the occasion of his inaugural lecture as Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at the University of Groningen, April 9, 2019. Had my own presentation of this essay at the “God and Other Beings” conference at the University of Edinburgh not overlapped with his inaugural, I would have been in attendance. 1  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.1. 2  April D. DeConick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 3  E.g., A. H. Armstrong, “Dualism: Platonic, Gnostic, and Christian,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed. R. T. Wallis and J. Bregman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 33–54; Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 70.

© APRIL D. DECONICK, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004438088_013

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ecclesiastical authority.4 On another level this framing is unfortunate because it limits what we can see. Monotheism and polytheism make a dichotomy that constrains the evidence to either-or boxes. This has left us scrambling to explain the excluded middle, a vast amount of evidence in Gnostic sources revolving around the ancient conversation about the One God (τὸ ἑν or εἷς θεός). This framing is complicated further by the fact that people today, scholars included, take for granted that the biblical God is the transcendent God, that classical theism was intrinsic to emergent Christianity, that Yhwh was always understood as Justin describes him: “the maker and father of everything” (ὁ ποιητὴς τῶν ὅλων καὶ πατήρ), who is “uncreated” (ἀγέννητος) and “ineffable” (ἄρρητος), who is “not a spot in a region in the whole world” (ὁ τόπω̦ τε ἀχώρητος καὶ τῷ κόσμῳ ὅλῳ), “above whom there is no other God” (ὑπὲρ ὃν ἄλλος θεὸς οὐκ ἔστι).5 But this absolute merger between the creator God Yhwh and the transcendent God of the philosophers was not assumed in antiquity by Christians before the Apologists made the case. Instead, theology was highly disputed among the early Christians and for good reason. It was no easy task to make the national God of Israel relevant to non-Jews. 1

Yhwh and the One God

Paul is the first person in emergent Christianity to try to make the national God of Israel relevant to non-Jews. His discussion establishes the theological terrain for the next two generations of Christians. Paul’s theological innovations do not arise from intensive study of the Jewish scriptures, nor any formal Pharisaic or Greek schooling. Nor was Paul steeped in Philo. Paul’s theological innovations were set in motion by his acute ecstatic experience of Jesus as the manifestation of Yhwh.6 This tremendous experience (when Paul knew Jesus as his Lord) simply did not match his expectations for Yhwh’s Kavod.7 Metatron maybe. But Jesus? No way. Nonetheless he was convinced that he

4  Cf. Jan Assmann, Die mosaiche Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus (Munich: Hanser, 2003); and discussion in Christoph Markschies, “The Price of Monotheism: Some New Observations on a Current Debate About Late Antiquity,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100–111. 5  Justin Martyr, Apol. 8; Dial. 56; 127; 2 Apol. 6. 6  Gal 1:11–12; 2 Cor 12:1–4; Acts 9:1–5, 22:4–16, 26:9–18. Cf. Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 43–71. 7  Phil 3:8.

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had been chosen by God, even before he was born, to receive this profound revelation and to share this knowledge with non-Jews.8 Paul is at a loss to put this new theology into words for a population of people who were not Jews, people who were not part of Yhwh’s nation, except perhaps in Israel’s eschatological dream. Paul was equally disturbed to try to explain this new theology to Jews who understood Yhwh in privileged terms, as the national God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Paul negotiates this contested territory by asking Jews and non-Jews to reconsider Yhwh as a God who transcends their nation.9 He thinks that his ancestors and fellow Jews have misunderstood the universal Creator in national terms. To demonstrate this line of reasoning, he flips the traditional Jewish interpretation of the story of Abraham. Rather than a story authorizing Yhwh’s election of Israel, the Abraham narrative is read as a story about a commitment that God made to anyone who would be faithful to him, Jew or non-Jew. Paul argues that God’s blessings were not limited to those who observed the Mosaic law and belonged to the Mosaic covenant, interventions that he said were put into place long after Abraham.10 Paul similarly turns the tables in his transgressive reading of the story about Sarah and Hagar. Traditionally, the Jews had claimed to be Sarah’s offspring, but Paul says otherwise. He argues that Hagar represents the Jews who are enslaved to the Mosaic law. The Jews are Hagar’s children not Sarah’s. The Gentile followers of Christ, are the heirs of God’s promise made to the wife of Abraham and freewoman Sarah.11 Paul’s flipped reading of the Jewish scriptures confirmed for him that his experience of Yhwh disclosed the mystery of a universal creator God that Jews and Gentiles shared.12 The universalization of Yhwh not only universalized the Jewish God, but also the exclusivity of his worship, even as it worked to incorporate the exalted status of Jesus, his Son, into this worship.13 While Paul believed that both Jews and Gentiles shared the same God as the creator of the world, Paul had to account for the historical reality that Yhwh had been perceived as the God of Israel for as long as could be remembered and previously had had nothing to do with Jesus. Paul explains this by cloaking the universal God in mystery, as a God that was both unsought and unknown prior to the advent of Jesus by Jews and non-Jews alike. This mysterious God 8  Gal 1:1, 15–16. 9  Rom 15:7–13. 10  Rom 4:2–16; Gal 3:29; Eph 1:3–6, 3:6; Rom 8:28–30, 33, 11:5–6; cf. 2 Cor 1:12; Col 3:12. 11  Gal 4:23. 12  Rom 1:16–32. 13  Cf. Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 44–75.

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lives in a distant heaven. He is the Father of Jesus, who in turn came to earth in his Father’s stead, as his Father’s manifestation.14 Paul’s God is elevated above creation and all the powers and forces that have come to dominate the cosmos and enslave the human spirit. He is the God of love and grace, the God that makes no distinction between Jew and non-Jew.15 The will of this God is that the dividing wall between Jews and non-Jews break down, the law end, and a single, unified humanity emerge as his dwelling place.16 Paul saw his job to be an apostle of the unknown God, to go public to the non-Jews with “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” in order to fill converts with goodness and gnosis.17 The God that Paul presents in his letters would not have been unfamiliar to non-Jews in antiquity. In fact, Yhwh looks very much like the One God, the maker and ruler of the universe that Greek philosophers had imagined and popularized for centuries. The One God in antiquity has been receiving attention lately, in large part due to the publication of the book Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, edited by Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (1999). The book came out of a conference held at Oxford University on “pagan forms of monotheism in antiquity.”18 The purpose of the conference was to challenge the uncontested opinion (held since the Apologists) that Christianity, in the tradition of Jewish monotheism, succeeded in replacing polytheism in the Greco-Roman world. The scholars attending this conference argued instead that monotheism was not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity, but also arose independently among educated pagans so that it was widespread by late antiquity. The pagan idea that a single supreme God lay behind the universe cohered conceptually with Christian monotheism, likely even influencing it. Christianity attracted converts, not because monotheism replaced polytheism, but because monotheistic pagans were attracted to another monotheistic movement.19 This is an exciting and grander thesis compared to older treatments of this same subject, such as Robert M. Grant’s Gods and the One God, which did little more than reiterate and reinscribe the rhetoric of the Apologists.20 Yet in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, the authors all struggle to explain 14  Phil 2:6–11; Col 4:15–16. 15  Rom 4:16; 2 Cor 13:11; Eph 3:4; Col 1:6. 16  Eph 2:14–22. 17  Rom 11:33, 15:14; Eph 3:3. 18  Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 1. 19  Athanassiadi and Frede, Pagan Monotheism, 1. 20  Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God, LEC (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986).

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(sometimes apologetically) why we should consider the ancient Greek idea that One God exists who is superior to all the rest of the Gods to be monotheism. John Dillon, in his treatment of Gnostic theology, tries to work around the issue by distinguishing between hard and soft monotheism. Hard monotheism characterizes Judaism and Islam, religions devoted to the supreme and only God with no competition, not even from an angel. Soft monotheism is exemplified by the intellectualized version of Greek religion popular from the fifth century bce onwards. In this case, Zeus is the supreme cosmic intellect and the rest of the Olympic pantheon exists as his subordinates. Christian and Gnostic systems, Dillon thinks, fall somewhere in between, with Gnostic systems being more monistic than mainstream Christian ones.21 Aware of the definitional problems swamping monotheism, Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen held their own conference on pagan monotheism in the Roman Empire at the University of Exeter in 1996. The redefinition of monotheism, in fact, was one of the explicit research questions that Mitchell identified in this project, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.22 Two edited collections were produced following this event. One collection contains papers about pagan monotheism in the first three centuries of the Roman Empire.23 The second collection of papers addresses the monotheistic cultural soup in which fourth and fifth century pagans and Christians were steeped.24 The introduction to the first collection opens by redefining monotheism as “belief in the powers of a unique, supreme divinity, although now necessarily to the exclusion of all other gods.”25 The second collection assumes as much, suggesting that henotheism (the worship of one God without denying the existence of other Gods) can be understood to (roughly) correspond to monotheism.26 The one paper that articulates best that monotheism (or henotheism as its substitute) is not a suitable category to describe piety in late antiquity was written by Angelos Chaniotis. He proposes the term “megatheism” as a replacement. He argues that this term is a better designation for the expression of late antique piety, which was based on personal experience of a particular God as superior (ἄριστος, μέγιστος, κύδιστος)

21  John Dillon, “Monotheism in the Gnostic Tradition,” in Pagan Monotheism, 69–71. 22  Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 23  Mitchell and Van Nuffelen, One God. 24  Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, eds., Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity, ISACR 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 25  Mitchell and Van Nuffelen, Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians, 1. 26  Mitchell and Van Nuffelen, Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians, 6–7.

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to other Gods in a highly competitive religious world.27 While this move is very insightful because it does not try to force pagans to convert to monotheism (or smash monotheism to liberate pagans), it is not theoretically complex enough to account for the extensive conversation in antiquity about the One God, which involved speculations about a transcendent deity. This discussion involved more than people choosing to worship the cosmic God they thought was the greatest (sometimes a different God for different occasions). While all these edited volumes contain learned studies that try to work around the traditional definition of monotheism as the belief in an exclusive single God, their attempts to redefine monotheism remind me of the thesis put forward by John Peter Kenney twenty years earlier. Kenney suggested partitioning monotheism, so that “exclusive” monotheism (traditional monotheism) refers to the belief in a single deity, while “inclusive” monotheism refers to the belief in a single deity or unity behind the cosmos, a deity or unity that is superior to all others (traditional henotheism). He did so in order to classify classical transcendentalism as Hellenic monotheism and argue that philosophical monotheism was not a progressive emancipation from polytheism but a concurrent development of two different types of monotheism, one Hellenic and the other Abrahamic. Both are related in their use of accepted sources in classical metaphysics and in their parallel efforts to talk about monotheism philosophically.28 Instead of allowing all of ancient theology to be defined top-down by the number of Gods worshipped (an approach which has served to devalue polytheism and make monotheism the standard or the ideal), I suggest that we work up from the sources themselves to develop new heuristic language that identifies major innovations in ancient theology: what they are, what they might mean, and how they might be described. The first theological innovation was spurred by Greek philosophers who wanted to identify the source of life, whatever it was that initiated the processes of creation. The headline for Greek philosophers from the Presocratics through the Hellenistic period could easily have read, “Which principle is the primordial one?”29 They identified several possibilities including the intellect (νοῦς), mind (φρήν), intelligence (φρόνησις), wisdom (σοφόν), and reason 27  Angelos Chaniotis, “Megatheism: The Search for the Almighty God and the Competition of Cults,” in One God, 112–140. 28  Cf. John Peter Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1991), xxiv, 156. 29  Cf. Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), although he presents this fascination as a “monotheistic tendency” in Greek philosophy.

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(λόγος). Their speculations had an unintended consequence. Their inquiry put to question the Greeks’ long-standing devotion to a variety of local and regional Gods. Justification was immediate. Instead of rejecting the Gods, most philosophers simply identified the primal cause of life with one of the traditional Gods in the pantheon. I identify this innovation as hypertheism (from ὑπερ, meaning the God above or over other Gods). Hypertheism is the belief in a superior God who created and rules the universe. Zeus is the God who most commonly is identified as the Master Mind God steering the universe with his thunderbolt, and the other Gods are cast as his subordinates attending his will (e.g., in the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus [535–475 bce], the Platonist Xenocrates [369–314 bce], and the Stoic Cleanthes [330–230 bce]) , although Parmenides [c. 515 bce] favored Aphrodite).30 Zeus the cosmic God was so popular that he is hailed expansively in the Orphic hymns.31 He also is hailed as “Theos Hypsistos” (God the Highest), in over a hundred dedications recovered at religious sites across the Mediterranean.32 There are hundreds more dedications to “Hypsistos” without reference to Zeus. It is contested in scholarship whether these inscriptions to the Highest God represent some kind of cult of pagan Judaizers (as Stephen Mitchell advocates) or represent the elevation of a God like Zeus to a supreme position of devotion (as argued by Nicole Belayche).33 While the identity of these worshippers is not established, it is clear that these inscriptions are evidence of that hypertheism was alive at the popular level of devotion. Zeus as the cosmic God was so extensive in antiquity that John Dillon describes the phenomenon as “the intellectualized version of traditional Greek religion, religion to which most educated Greeks seem to have adhered from the fifth century bc on, according to which Zeus represents something like a supreme cosmic intellect.”34 Even some Platonists made this identification, 30  Cf. M. L. West, “Towards Monotheism,” in Pagan Monotheism, 21–40; Michael Frede, “The Case for Pagan Monotheism,” in One God, 53–81. 31  Martin P. Nilsson, “The High God and the Mediator,” HTR 56 (1963): 101–120; M. Herrero de Jáuregui, “Orphic God(s): Theogonies and Hymns as Vehicles of Monotheism,” in Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians, 77–100. 32  Stephen Mitchell, “Further Thoughts on the Cult of Theos Hypsistos,” in One God, 167. 33  Stephen Mitchell, “The Cult of Theos Hypsistos,” in Pagan Monotheism, 81–148; idem, “Further Thoughts”; Nicole Belayche, “Hypsistos: A Way of Exalting the Gods in Graeco-Roman Polytheism,” in The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. J. A. North and S. R. F. Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 139–174; cf. Robert Parker, Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures, and Transformations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). See further Matthew V. Novenson’s essay in the present volume. 34  Dillon, “Monotheism in the Gnostic Tradition,” 69.

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like Xenocrates (369–314 bce) who identifies the One God as the Intellect (νοῦς) living outside the heaven, and yet still is perceived to be the Father God Zeus involved in demiurgic activities.35 Dillon understands this view of the Platonists as a further rationalization of old Greek mythology, “finding a place for the gods of traditional religion, as aspects or manifestations of the supreme cosmic, or supra-cosmic, intellect.”36 Philo of Alexandria represents this Platonic trend, but in his case he identifies the supra-cosmic Intellect with the cosmic deity of Israel, Yhwh, instead of Zeus.37 Such a trend is observed when Philo, for instance, writes, “The Cause of all is not in the thick darkness, nor locally in any place at all, but high above both place and time. For he has made all things subject to himself, surrounded by nothing. Yet he transcends everything. Transcendent and outside what he has created, nonetheless he has filled the universe with himself” (οὐ γάρ γεγονότα πάντα ὑποζεύξας ἑαυτῷ περιέχεται μὲν ὑπ᾽ οὐδενός, ἐπιβέβηκε δὲ πᾶσιν. ἐπιβεβηκὼς δὲ καὶ ἔξω τοῦ δημιουργηθέντος ὢν οὐδὲν ἧττον πεπλήρωκε τὸν κόσμον ἑαυτοῦ).38 Philo resists describing God in the anthropomorphic terms so frequent in the Jewish scriptures. Instead he leaves God’s nature mysterious so that we can only know that he exists (“He Who Is”: Exod 3:14), not what he is. God is eternal, unchanging, beyond time and space, though working within time and space through his principle powers Goodness and Sovereignty. Philo links God to Mind and also the soul of the world.39 His transcendence is cap-

35  Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 193–194. 36  Dillon, “Monotheism in the Gnostic Tradition,” 69. 37  The transcendent theology of Philo has a long history of analysis within scholarship, pointing to the intersection of Philo and Platonism. On this see John Dillon, “The Transcendence of God in Philo: Some Possible Sources,” Center for Hermeneutical Studies 16 (1975): 1–8; idem, The Middle Platonists 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, rev ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 135–183; Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition, BJS 69 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984); Jaap Mansfeld, “Compatible Alternatives: Middle Platonist Theology and the Xenophanes Reception,” in Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. R. van den Broek, T. Baarda, and J. Mansfeld, EPRO 112 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 92–117; David Winston, “Philo’s Conception of the Divine Nature,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), 21–42; Peter Frick, Divine Providence in Philo of Alexandria, TSAJ 77 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 25–43. Cf. John Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and the Transcendent Absolute,” Symbolae Osloenses 48 (1973): 77–86. 38  Philo, Post. 14 (translation mine; Greek text Colson and Whitaker in LCL). 39  On the relationship between God, the world, and the soul in other contemporary authors, see Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, “Plutarch and the Sleeping and Waking Soul,” in Immagini letterarie e iconografia nelle opere di Plutarco, ed. S. Amendola, G. Pace, and P. Volpe Cacciatore (Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 2017), 209–222.

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tured in Philo’s insistence that God is the Monad or even above the Monad. God is the source of all goodness. He is Creator and Ruler of the world.40 2

Intimations of Transcendence

The discussion of the primal cause of life brought with it the language of transcendence. This language started not with Plato, but with the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras (510–428 bce), who was the first philosopher to postulate that Mind (νοῦς) has control over the universe it brought into being.41 According to Anaxagoras, Mind is infinite, autonomous, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and not mixed with anything.42 Its infinity is incomprehensible to the human mind.43 Many say that Anaxagoras identified Mind with God.44 Anaxagoras’ transcendent Mind appears to have been an intervention in the history of philosophical theories about the primal cause of creation. Anaxagoras went beyond his predecessors Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Empedocles when he realized that the order of nature alone could not explain creation. There had to be intrusion of a higher order to release matter’s potentiality. According to Anaxagoras, this higher order was a rational influence that is not part of nature. His theorizing abstracted and detached the principle of rationality from nature and initiated the discussion of Being that is the cause of the order in nature.45 Plato’s ontological distinction between the perceptible world and the intelligible world of ideas allowed for the transcendent God to gain more prominence and eventually become detached from the cosmic God in the theories of Middle Platonists like Eudorus (first century bce) who distinguished a higher One God from the traditional Platonic Monad and Dyad. Eudorus’ Platonism, however, heavily relies on a revival of Pythagorean speculations about a unitary first principle, speculations fronted in the Neopythagorean pseudepigrapha composed from the third to the first centuries bce (i.e. Ps.-Brotinus, Ps.-Archytas).46 These Neopythagorean developments, which postulate a

40  Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, 57–59. 41  Plutarch, Pericles 4 (A15); Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.14.2 (A57). 42  Simplicius, In Phys. 156.14–157.4 (fr. B12). 43  Augustine, Ep. 118.4. 44  Cicero, Acad. 2.118 (A49); SE 9.6; Lactantius, Inst. div. 1.5.18; Augustine, De civ. Dei 8.2. 45  Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 93. 46  Eudorus apud Simplicius, In Phys. 181.7–30; Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 34–35.

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supreme One superior to the Monad and Dyad, can be contrasted with early Pythagorean dualism where the primal Monad gives rise to the Dyad.47 Four passages in Plato become central to later conversations about the transcendent God. The first is Republic 509b where Plato suggests that the world of ideas is hierarchical, with the idea of the Good at the pinnacle. Not only is it higher than the rest of the ideas, but the other ideas depend on the Good for their being and essence. The Good is located above being (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας). The second passage is from Parmenides where Plato describes in Pythagorean style the transcendent principle as the One. The One is not many. It has no parts or shape. It has no beginning or middle or end. It is unlimited, timeless, and eternal. It is not contained or containable. It is neither in motion nor at rest. It does not partake of being. It is nameless. It is not the object of human perception. It is nowhere.48 This passage, for instance, becomes very important to Moderatus (c. 150 ce) who reads it through the Neopythagorean lenses established in the pseudepigraphic writings attributed to Brotinos and Archytas. Moderatus puts the primary One above Being and any entity, separate from a second One which is intelligible Being.49 The third passage occurs in the Phaedrus where Plato develops the allegory of the soul as a charioteer driving a chariot.50 In this story, Plato envisions Zeus and the rest of the Gods traveling the circuit of the heavens in their chariots. In his description, he stratifies the heavens, so that the Gods travel within the inner heavens until they reach the summit. Then they stand outside of heaven. From this perspective, they can see into a heaven above the heavens, a place beyond the traditional cosmos, which is identified by Plato as reality and truth. This is where Being can be found as colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind. The fourth passage is located in the Timaeus as part of Plato’s description of the demiurge as perfect, unchangeable, immutable, living being, and the author of perfection, beauty, and goodness. Plato says that the demiurge is the eternal God and best cause, “the maker and father of all (τὸν ποιητὴν καὶ πατέρα τοῦδε τοῦ παντός)” who cannot be known because his nature is unfathomable.51 While this passage was usually understood to refer to a single entity, some later

47  Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 35–36. 48  Plato, Parmenides 137c4–142a8. 49  Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 37–38. 50  Plato, Phaedrus 246a–254e. 51  Plato, Tim. 28c; and cf. Tim. 29a; 30b; 34ab. On the reception of this sentence, see Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, “Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, and the Reception of Plato’s Theology,” in Plutarch and the New Testament, ed. Rainer Hirsch-Luipold (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

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interpreters took the reference to “the father and maker of all” to refer to two entities, the father and the demiurge.52 This interpretative trend is very visible in Numenius (c. 150–200 ce), for instance, who distinguishes between the first “father” (πατήρ), the second “maker” (ποιήτης), and the third “product” (ποίημα).53 Numenius combined this interpretation of the Timaeus passage with a nod to the Republic so that the Father is the Good, who is so transcendent that he rides mounted on Being (ἐποχούμενον ἐπὶ τῇ οὐσίᾳ) and is Being itself (αὐτοόν).54 He is the demiurge of Being to be distinguished from the Maker who is the demiurge of Becoming.55 This type of interpretation of Plato further encouraged the elevation of the primal God above creation, for instance, with Albinous (c. 150 CE) who likewise separates the first God from the demiurge, elevating the first God (whom he calls first Mind) to the station that is the cause of the demiurgic activity of second Mind.56 The first Mind is considered to be so perfect that his thinking of the ideas (the whole of intelligible reality) involves self-contemplation and the will to voluntarily reproduce itself.57 This means that by contemplating himself, he thinks what he really is, which are the ideas he thinks.58 Being and intellection are located on a level that transcends the demiurge and his activities.59 Albinous, in fact, makes a distinction between the transcendent and the celestial Gods, between the God above the heavens (ὑπερουράνιος) who is so superior that he does not possess virtue, and the God in the heavens (ἐπουράνιος).60 Accordingly, the active intellect, which is involved in demiurgic activities, has no will of its own but comes into being when roused to contemplate the first God whose very self and ideas are the exemplars for the active Mind’s production.61 52  Jan Opsomer, “Demiurges in Early Imperial Platonism,” in Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch: Götterbilder–Gottesbilder–Weltbilder, ed. Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 54 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 51–99. 53  Proclus, In. Tim. 1.304.13–16. Cf. Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, “Valentinian Protology and the Philosophical Debate regarding the First Principles,” in Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity, ed. Jacques van Ruiten and G. H. van Kooten (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 358–386. 54  Numenius, Frg. 2.16, 17.7–8. 55  Numenius, Frg. 16.8–9. 56  Albinous, Didaskalikos 164.16–18; Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 76. 57  Albinous, Didaskalikos 164.26–27; Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 78–81. 58  A. H. Armstrong, “The Background of the Doctrine ‘That the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect,’” Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 5 (1960): 393–425 at 404. 59  Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 77–78. 60  Albinus, Theaetetus 181.43–45. See John Dillon, Alcinous: The Handbook of Platonism, Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), xxiii. 61  Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 83.

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Elevating the first God to these heights led Albinous to expound a negative theology about the first God calling him ineffable, immobile, unmoving, neither genus, nor species, nor bad, nor good, nor indifferent. In fact, Albinous thinks that no attribute is proper for him. Epithets like Divinity, Substantiality, Truth, Father, and the Good are only placeholders that name but do not describe a transcendent God that is beyond definition.62 In this way, Albinous’ first God becomes more and more abstract. That said, this kind of negative theology (which Gnostic thinkers also favored) did not suggest transcendence that is unconnected to humanity. Negative theology does not derive from the impulse to divide and separate, but the opposite: to open up a path for seekers to conceive of a God who cannot be rationally or conceptually represented, or embodied in language.63 Such discussions of the transcendent God as we find in Albinous do not involve Plato alone, but also Aristotle who posited the wholly transcendent Unmoved Mover as the final cause of the First Heaven, by which he means that the First Heaven is the consequence of the Unmoved Mover, its telos.64 The Unmoved Mover as the final cause is the spur which enables efficient causes or agents to become active by rousing in them the desire to be like the Unmoved Mover, making it possible for them to engender others like them. The Unmoved Mover is Mind as it perpetually thinks about itself (αὐτὸν νοεῖ).65 It is self-reflective and unchangeable because it only contemplates itself.66 The Unmoved Mover is located outside the universe, and because of this extreme location it does not even know about the universe. It is separated from the universe by its own perfection. Its final causality is only a byproduct of its own existence, a consequence that benefits the universe without the Unmoved Mover’s knowledge.67 While the philosophers speculated about the transcendent God employing eclectic hermeneutics that creolized and augmented their readings about Plato’s Good and the world of ideas with Aristotle’s self-thinking Intellect and the Neopythagorean One, they did not worship this God as something separate from the traditional Gods. A case in point is Plutarch of Chaeroneia (ca. 45–125 CE) who posited a supreme God, the One Good, as real Being, eternal, unchanging, non-composite, and uncontaminated. Yet this God is held up 62  Albinus, Didaskalikos 164.31; Kenney, Mystical Monotheism, 83–84. 63  Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition, Plato to Eriugena (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 324. 64  Cf. Dillon, Alcinous, 101–111. 65  Aristotle, Met. 1074b34–35; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 169. 66  Aristotle, Met. 1074b25–26; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 170–171. 67  Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 171.

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to be Apollo, the God to whom Plutarch was a dedicated priest.68 Philosophical speculation like this never amounted to another religion, but only a flex and proof of the religion that was already there.69 The transcendent One God never replaced the traditional Gods, but instead philosophically justified them because, in these metaphysical schemes, all divine beings (and their abilities to be causes of good or virtue) are understood to be the immanent activity of the first principle, the One God.70 3

Gnostic Transcendentalism

Because philosophical speculation only amounted to justification and proof of the religion that was already there, this means that we hit upon something new, something innovative, with the emergence of Gnostic spirituality and its ability to foster new religious movements that worship the transcendent One God apart from the traditional Gods, a theism I call transtheism.71 Various Gnostic texts describe a transcendent God, but two exemplars with suffice. The first is from the Sethian Apocryphon of John (NHC II 1) whose author writes about this majestically. The transcendent God of worship is “the invisible Spirit” who is “more than a God,” since there is nothing “above him” and “he does not [exist] in something inferior [to him, since everything] exists in him.” He is eternal, total perfection, complete, illimitable, unsearchable, immeasurable light, invisible, ineffable, unnameable, pure mind, life-giving. He is far superior to our perceptions of perfection, blessedness, and divinity. He is not someone we can count among any other beings, he is so far superior. He is goodness, mercy, and grace, the font of our redemption.72 The second exemplar is from the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate (NHC I,5), which opens with several pages of rich description of the transcendent God. He is said to have existed before anything came into being. He is like the number one, the one who is only himself. He is the Father, like a root with tree, branches, and fruit. No one is a God to him, nor a father. He is unbegotten and uncreated, without beginning and without end. He is unalterable, immutable, and “unattainable in his greatness, inscrutable in his wisdom, incomprehensible in 68  Dillon, Middle Platonists, 199. 69  George Boys-Stones, “Providence and Religion in Middle Platonism,” in Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion, ed. Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 318. 70   Boys-Stones, “Providence and Religion,” 332. 71  DeConick, Gnostic New Age. 72  Apoc. John NHC II 1,2.34–4.10.

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his power, and unfathomable in his sweetness.” He alone is “good,” “the perfect complete one,” filled with offspring, virtue, and everything of value.73 While most scholars have wanted to talk about Gnostic theology in terms of Platonic systems or Platonizing tendencies, such conversations do not usually take into consideration the fact that Gnostic systems are highly countercultural, so that they are not interpreting and transferring Plato into a new context, but flipping him to expose the deficiencies of received philosophical knowledge.74 The tendency of Gnostic groups like the Ophians and the Sethians to read Plato against philosophical conventions is something that disturbed not only Celsus but also Plotinus, yet we hardly acknowledge this.75 As scholars, we tend to assume that appropriation of Plato by an author must mean that the author is Platonic or aligned with the tradition in some way. And yet religious people can be observed appropriating scriptures and other authoritative writings in order to correct or critique conventional knowledge by flipping it and revealing what no one has ever seen before, a technique I call “flip-and-reveal.”76 Gnostics in antiquity were not aligned with conventional readings of Plato, but broke with them by insisting that the demiurge was not only separated from the primal God, but operating in opposition or ignorance of him. This understanding of Plato was understood to be a misreading of Plato according to ancient philosophers like Celsus who says that “it is because certain Christians [viz. Ophians] have misunderstood sayings of Plato that they boast of a God who is above the heavens and place him higher than the heaven in which the Jews believe.”77 This elevation of the supreme God broke the conventional chain of immanence from the primal God to the demiurge and his creation, so that the lesser divinities, the Gods of traditional religion (including Yhwh), became demons and apostates. Traditional religion is not justified by Gnostic systems, but demolished in favor of transtheism, the worship of the God Beyond All Gods. Gnostic systems are not perennial systems in the sense that the same God is thought to be behind all Gods. They are perennial systems 73  Trip. Tract. NHC I,5 51.7–57.8. 74  On Plato and Gnosticism, see the overview with references by John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi 6 (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 10–54. On Gnostic counterculturalism, see April D. DeConick, “The Countercultural Gnostic,” Gnosis 1 (2016): 7–35. 75  Cf. Origen, Cels. 6.19; Plotinus, Ennead 2.9.6, 9. However, see Zeke Mazur, “Forbidden Knowledge: Cognitive Transgression and ‘Ascent Above Intellect’ in the Debate Between Plotinus and the Gnostics,” Gnosis 1 (2016): 86–109, where he recognizes this dynamic. 76  April D. DeConick, “The Sociology of Gnostic Spirituality,” Gnosis 4 (2019): 9–66. 77  Origen, Cels. 6.19.

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in the sense that a supreme God exists who is the source of everything. But they are critical of those which have tried to capture and worship the supreme God in the bodies, idols, and narratives of the Gods of traditional religions. This is not only a grave error, but a demonic trick, they say. Greek philosophy does not explain fully the emergence of Gnostic spirituality with its attention to the worship of the transcendent God. In fact, I suspect that philosophical language and concepts are being used to explain and justify religious mythology about a transcendent God of worship. In other words, philosophical language meets Gnostic mythology to defend and rationalize the mythology, just as philosophy had been meeting Homer for centuries to defend and rationalize Zeus and the rest of the Greek pantheon. This is why the blending of philosophy and mythology in Gnostic sources looks like a coat of many colors. Who is the transcendent God according to Gnostic mythology? The Naassenes worshipped in sanctuaries dedicated to a serpentine God according to (Ps.-)Hippolytus.78 The Naassenes identified this snake with water, the primary substance out of which they believed everything came into being. Because of this identification, (Ps.-)Hippolytus is of the opinion that they are just like the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletos who taught that water is the primal principle. The Naassene mythology, however, has nothing to do with Thales. This serpentine God lives in the moist essence of the primordial universe as a hermaphrodite Man they call Adamas. Apart from this Man, nothing came into existence, whether immortal or mortal. He is described as good, containing the beauty of everything in himself, and bestowing loveliness on everything that is related to him, language that may reveal a creolization of Platonic philosophical language and mythology. This primal Man is the source of all life, which flows from him like a river with three currents: the noetic, the psychic, and the physical. This river and its currents flow from Adamas’ transcendent realm down into the realm of Chaos. In the Naassene myth, the primal Man has a son known as Perfect Man and the Son of Man. He is a microcosmic version of the primal Man, containing within himself the noetic, psychic, and physical currents of the primal river. Eventually he incarnates as Jesus, born of Mary, but first he serves as a template for the creation of Adam, the first human being, molded out of clay by the fiery solar demiurge Esaldaeus and the other Lords of Chaos. Variants and pieces of this myth are alluded to throughout the corpus of Gnostic sources, suggesting that the Naassene myth is trumpeting some well-known ancient story about the first God and the origin of life. Consider 78  (Ps.-)Hippolytus, Ref. 5.9.11–13.

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Valentinian and Sethian assumptions that the primal Godhead is hermaphrodite. Sethian sources clearly present this figure as a hermaphrodite Man, whether the invisible Spirit as the Father of everything or the Mother Barbelo as the virgin Male. The self-generated Son, too, is a hermaphrodite called the Perfect Man.79 In most Valentinian sources, the hermaphroditism of the primal God is presented as syzygitism, as a union of male and female counterparts. In these cases, the presentation of the hermaphrodite has shifted to accommodate Valentinus’ theology of sacred marriage, yet the hermaphroditism remains true in Marcus’ teaching. According to Marcus, the inconceivable Father is hermaphrodite. By his will he brings forth life when he opens his mouth and speaks.80 The serpentine nature of the primal God, writhing in the waters of life, is also present in various Gnostic sources.81 Consider the description of the primal God of the Sethians, who lives in the water from which springs life.82 But even more interesting is the fact that the mythology of the primal serpent is known to the Sethians, too, but it has been realigned as a commentary on the first verses of Genesis, followed by the scriptural story of the serpent in Eden. Accordingly, the serpent is propelled from the water as the first-begotten principle, as the wind (identified with spirit and nous), which is said to cause all generation.83 The Ophians also identify the snake with nous (they point to the coiled physiology of the brain as proof) from which three substances spring: pneumatic and psychic elements along with negative material like oblivion, wickedness, jealousy, and death.84 The Peratics teach that ultimate reality is a fountain spewing forth three streams of existence (transcendent Being as the Father, the Good as it generates itself and manifests as other divinities, and creation). They think that Christ, the Son, is the serpent Draco who guards the entrance to the transcendent sphere, controlling the flow of existence from the transcendent realm into the cosmos and back again.85 The serpent is placed in this peculiar cosmic location because the Peratics have read the Gospel of John and understand the reference to the Son of Man being lifted up like Moses lifted up the serpent to refer to the Draco constellation which they think functions

79  Cf. Apoc. John NHC II 1,2.34–9.11. 80  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.14.1. 81  For details on Gnosticism and serpentine gods, see Attilio Mastrocinque, From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism, STAC 24 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). 82  Apoc. John NHC II 1,4.10–26. 83  (Ps.-)Hippolytus, Ref. 5.19.14–19. 84  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.30.5. 85  (Ps.-)Hippolytus, Ref. 5.17–19.

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as the door to the transcendent world. Thus Jesus said, “I am the door.”86 In the Corpus Hermeticum, the elements of this primordial myth also can be found. The origin of the universe is seen in the watery depths of darkness, coiling sinuously like a snake and producing a wailing roar and a cry like fire.87 What is going on with this mythology, that associates the primal transcendent God with a serpent coiled in water, creation with the cry of a loud voice, and hermaphroditism? The only mythology that has it all is Egyptian, a subtext that has been understudied although not unrecognized in previous scholarly literature.88 It can be located in the oldest layer of Egyptian religion (ca. 2400–2300 bce) associated with the chief deity of Heliopolis, Atum, a selfgenerated God who comes into existence as a conscious and active being by writhing around in the primal ocean as a snake encircled in his own coils, or standing up on a mound and roaring.89 Atum is called Kheprer, which means “The One Who Comes into Being,” manifesting himself in the cosmos every morning as the ascendant Rê, the rising sun. In the Book of the Dead 17, Atum declares, “I am Atum in rising up. I am the Only One. I came into existence in Nun. I am Rê in his rising in the beginning … I am the Great God who came into existence by himself.” Once Atum exists, he begins to feel alone. He experiences the erotic, the desire for others, and has an erection. “I am the one who came into being as Atum,” he says. “It was in Heliopolis that my penis became erect. I grasped hold of it and came to orgasm. Thus it was that the siblings, Shu and Tefnut, were born.”90 How does this birth occur? The ancient Egyptians pictured Atum as a hermaphrodite, the “father of fathers” and the “mother of mothers.” He creates through a process of autogenesis, where he masturbates and then spits out his children from his mouth in a great exhalation or roar. His offspring are differentiations of himself, a male (Shu, air) and female (Tefnut, moisture) couple, followed by their children Geb (earth) and Nut (sky), followed by their children 86  John 10:7. 87  Corp. herm. 1.4. 88  Cf. M. E. Amélineau, Essai sur le gnosticisme égyptien: ses développements et son origine égyptienne, Annales du muse Guimet 14 (Paris: Ministère de l’instruction publique, 1887); C. J. Bleeker, “The Egyptian Background of Gnosticism,” in Le origine dello Gnosticismso: Colloquio di Messina, ed. Ugo Bianchi, Supplements to Numen 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 229–237; L. Kákosy, “Gnosis und ägyptische Religion,” in Le origine dello Gnosticismso, 240–244; Michel Tardieu, Trois mythes gnostique: Adam, Eros, et les animaux d’Égypte dans un écrit de Nag Hammadi (II,5) (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1974); Douglas M. Parrott, “Gnosticism and Egyptian Religion,” NovT 29 (1987): 73–93. 89  Cf. Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans. John Baines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 177. 90  Pyramid Texts 1248.

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Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. Together these eight Gods and Atum form the Ennead. This is the beginning of creation, initialized by Atum, the primordial God. He is a single self-created God responsible for life, which flows from his mouth (spit: the Gods) and his eyes (tears: humans) like an inundation of the Nile. Atum is associated with the sun God, Rê, as his morning and evening manifestations. The Egyptians created a symbol for this primal God, the snake circling back on itself with its tail in its mouth.91 The earliest representation of it is found on the outside wall of the second gilded shrine of Tutankhamun.92 It was called “tail-in-mouth” in this early period, and in the Greco-Roman period it was called the Ouroboros or “tail-swallower.” The complete circle of the serpent with its tail in its mouth represents the primal God in his creative act, a perpetual erotic activity in which the One becomes the Many. It signals visually the eternal becoming of the One God, whose masturbatory actions initiate the existence of everything. This theology of Atum’s transcendence paved the way for Akhenaten’s experimentation with monotheism, when he established the exclusive worship of Aten, the solar disk, as the sole God of Egypt (1348–1336 bce). Initially, Aten was a variant of the solar God, Amun, whom Akhenaten had been worshipping at Thebes. Amun, known by the epithet, “The Hidden One,” was considered the creator God among the Theban Eight or Ogdoad. But once Aten became an exclusive during Akhenaten’s reforms, Amun became a competitor God and measures were taken to systematically suppress his worship. During Akhenaten’s reign, Aten, the solar disk, becomes not only the sun God, but the life-giving illumination of the sun. He was elevated to the status of a universal deity, a transcendent creator God, depicted as a solar disk with rays extending into hands. After Akhenaten’s death, the exclusive worship of Aten was abandoned, but the concept of a supreme single transcendent God was not. This explicit transcendent theology of Aten (which already had been implicit in descriptions of Atum) was cannibalized by the priests of Amun, whose worship quickly outpaced the rest of the Gods. In Thebes, the sun God Amun rose to the position of King of the Gods, the supreme liege of the original Ogdoad or council of eight Gods. He is depicted as a ram-headed man or donned in a plumed headdress. He comes to be known as “Lord over time and eternity,” “the sole one at the beginning,” the “primeval God without his like,” and the “greatest of the great 91  Cf. Hornung, Conceptions of God, 178. 92  A. Piankoff, The Shrines of Tut-Ankh-Amon, Egyptian Religious Texts and Representations 2 (New York: Bollingen, 1955), pl. 48.

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ones.”93 He came to be described like Atum, as the “Self-created One,” coming into being when he emerged from the waters of Chaos and stood on a mound. He is the “father of the fathers of all Gods.”94 His primordial utterances bring into being all the other Gods, and he creates everything that is created, even individual humans in their individuality.95 The promotion of the idea that reality is the result of the will of a hidden transcendent God was popularized after Akhenaten’s death at Thebes, Heliopolis, and Memphis. Gods traditionally associated with creation like Atum, Amun, and Ptah were reimagined as the sole universal primal God before creation, the supreme God who created the Gods, the universe, and everything in it, and who perpetually sustains life.96 Limited types of pantheism (all deities are aspects of God) and henotheism (worship of one God among many) rather than monotheism came into vogue. The traditional plurality of deities was reframed as aspects, names, or manifestations of the transcendent supreme God.97 This allowed for the worship of single supreme Gods to emerge as forms of popular personal piety from the Ramesside times (1292–1069 bce) down to the Greco-Roman period.98 Gnostic spirituality with its focus on the worship of the transcendent God is an innovation that could not have emerged in the absence of the Egyptian fascination with Atum and other solar deities who took over his transcendent attributes and mythology in popular imagination and devotion. This does not mean that Gnostic spirituality did not interact with Greek philosophy too, only that the rise of Gnostic spirituality as Greek philosophy does not explain fully the mythology of the transcendent God as it is found in a wide array of Gnostic sources. In previous publications, I have argued that the Gnostic is a cognitive category or mental frame that people used in antiquity to define an emergent spirituality with distinctive features that included the worship of a transcendent God (who is not the biblical God), the use of initiatory practices to achieve gnosis or knowledge of the transcendent God, the belief in personal divine immanence, and a countercultural orientation that challenged the conventional scriptural interpretations, traditional religious authorities, and normative

93  Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 190. 94  Hornung, Conceptions of God, 147. 95  Assmann, Search for God, 195–197. 96  Assmann, Search for God, 174. 97  Assmann, Search for God, 237. Cf. Hornung, Conceptions of God, 128. 98  Assmann, Search for God, 12–13.

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worldviews.99 I have suggested previously that Gnostic spirituality is an innovative metaphysical orientation that first emerged within the religious pilgrimage or tourist context of Egypt in the late first century bce or early first century ce, when Greeks, Romans, and Jews traveled to Egyptian temple sites and paid priests for various other worldly services, including instruction about the ancient Gods and philosophies of arcane Egypt.100 The composition of subsequent Gnostic mythologies suggests that within this environment, some of these pilgrims believed that they had come to know the hermaphrodite God Before All Gods, whom the Egyptians knew as Atum, whose name means “The Complete One” (from tem, “to be completed in number,” such as the sum total).101 The Gnostic sources do not refer to him by his name Atum. Instead they refer to the transcendent God as the Pleroma (τὸ πλήρωμα), which literally translates, “the full number, or sum of numbers.”102 This expression, with reference to the Godhead, is rendered in English translation, generically as “Fullness” or “Totality.” But given that Atum bears a name in Egyptian that is equivalent in meaning to Pleroma in Greek, it may be that τὸ πλήρωμα is the name for the Gnostic transcendent God who like Atum is the sum of everything, the “One who made himself into millions.” The Greek, Roman, and Jewish pilgrims understood the God they came to know in their Egyptian sojourn in transcendent terms, an understanding that made the pilgrims call into question the Gods of their own traditions, the origins of the cosmos, and their own human status as created beings. Although the old primal Egyptian God Before All Gods is embedded in Gnostic theology, I am not positing some singular origin in Egyptian religion. Only that this God from Egypt is blended with other theologies and philosophies in our Gnostic

99  A  pril D. DeConick, “Crafting Gnosis: Gnostic Spirituality in the Ancient New Age,” in Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Antique World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, ed. Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus, NHMS 82 (Leiden: Brill), 285–305; eadem, Gnostic New Age; eadem, “Countercultural Gnostic.” 100  DeConick, Gnostic New Age, 52–75. Cf. Heliodorus, Aethiopica 2.27; Strabo, Geography 17.1.29; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 3.6, 8.3, 8.87, 9.35; Iamblicus, On the Mysteries of Egypt 1.1–2; Lucian, Philopseudes 33–34; Chaeremon, frag. 10 = Porphyry, De abstinentia 4.6; Ps.-Clem. Recognitions 1.5. For academic discussions of Egyptian priests and tourism, see David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217–218; Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 153 (Leiden: Brill 2005), 185–284. 101  Rudolf Anthes, “Egyptian Theology in the Third Millennium B.C.,” JNES 18 (1959): 177; and cf. idem, “Atum, Nefertem, und die Kosmogonien von Heliopolis: ein Versuch,” ZÄS 82 (1957): 2 for other options. 102  B LS 1420a.

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sources, and these blends are dependent on the different contexts in which Gnostic spirituality migrates and engages. To imagine its earliest emergence must involve interaction with Egyptian theology. This impulse to reconsider and then reimagine their own religious heritage in light of their experiences and existential knowledge of the transcendent God of Egypt was one of the many factors that resulted in the emergence of an innovative form of spirituality that came to be known as Gnostic.103 The sociology of Gnostic spirituality is a complicated matter involving religiously dissatisfied and religiously “homeless” populations, dislocated people with religiously migratory tendencies who seek existential answers in the margins of conventional religions and beyond them.104 Yet it is the experience of the transcendent God that everything Gnostic revolves around, not the demiurge as scholars such as Michael Williams have claimed.105 Gnostic literature presents this God as different from the Gods of all the other religions, yet connected immanently to human beings through his spirit. Ancient Gnostics were transcendentalists. This form of spirituality challenged the existing religious paradigms in antiquity that understood humans to be subservient to the Gods and required their obedience.106 Instead, Gnostic spirituality upset the balance, understanding human beings to be more than mortal creations of the Gods. There was a God Beyond Them All who they believed was immanently connected to humans through his spirit, and this God alone should be worshipped. While philosophers like Eudorus, Alcinous, and Numenius posit a separate transcendent deity, the existence of this deity only supported the old religious cult practices.107 For Gnostic thinkers, the existence of this deity made all other Gods pale in comparison. Gnostics build systems of worship that were focused on awakening the spirit shared by God and human through proper cultic practices and return it to the ultimate source of existence, the primal God, who transcends 103  For more details, see DeConick, “Crafting Gnosis”; eadem, Gnostic New Age; eadem, “Countercultural Gnostic.” 104  DeConick, “Sociology of Gnostic Spirituality.” The category “homeless” is coined by Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973), 184–189, to talk about the change in the function of religion in modernity and its shift to private do-it-yourself spaces. 105  This definition of the Gnostic is most succinctly made by Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 52, who suggests that it revolves around “biblical demiurgical traditions.” 106  For a more detailed comparison between servant, covenant, ecstastic, and Gnostic spiritualities, see DeConick, Gnostic New Age, 19–76. 107   Boys-Stones, “Providence and Religion.” Even Plutarch, whose theology resonates with Gnostic sources, was a priest dedicated to Apollo (Dillon, Middle Platonists, 186).

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all Gods and all religions. This God can only be known, Gnostics argue, through direct person contact (gnosis), when devotees see or unite with him in sometimes profound experiences of transcendence such as we find described in the Discourse on the Ogdoad and Ennead (NHC VI,6), Allogenes (NHC XI,3), Zostrianos (VIII,1), and Tripartite Tractate (NHC I,5). This innovative spirituality knew no religious boundaries. We might compare its ability to transcend traditional religious affiliations to a similar trend among those today who consider themselves spiritual-but-not-religious, although ancient Gnostic spirituality did not produce a flight from religion, but a reengagement with conventional religions that flipped the old religions and generated new religious movements that often presented themselves as reform or protest movements. So identities fluctuate and collide. We can see this kind of identity flux in the statement made by the followers of Basilides, who described themselves as “no longer Jews, and not yet Christians” (Et Iudaeos quidem iam non esse dicunt, Christianos autem nondum).108 Or in Irenaeus’ identification of Marcus and his friends as people who “separate from the church” (ἀφίστανται τῆς Ἐκκλησίας/absistunt ab Ecclesia), and who preach a “religion” (θεοσέβεια/religionis) different from his own, yet one with uncomfortable similarities that make distinguishing the Marcus’ church from Irenaeus’ problematic for newcomers.109 Gnostic spirituality not only had the ability to transcend conventional religious affiliations but also was extremely adaptable, able to engage and appropriate wisdom spanning the ancient gamut of knowledge, including Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, astrology, magic, and medicine, that is, everything but the kitchen sink. Gnostic spirituality was so attractive that it was not long before it went viral, engaging and flipping conventional religions in ways that reformatted them and turned them inside out. Initially it burned two pathways, one pagan (which produced Hermeticism) and one biblical (which produced Sethianism, Simonianism, and a wide variety of Christian movements).110 In this way, among some Christians, the transcendent God of Egypt became the universal God of worship. In Gnostic Christian movements, the national God of Israel became the One God’s opponent or adversary. He was recognized as the Father of Jesus, his son, who descended from the transcendent world into the cosmos to save us all from Yhwh’s power. 108  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.24.6 (text Rousseau and Doutreleau in Sources chrétiennes). 109  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.16.3 (text Rousseau and Doutreleau); cf. Irenaeus, Haer. 1.28.1. On the similarities between apostolic catholicism and Valentinianism, see April D. DeConick, “Deviant Christians: Romanization and Esoterization as Social Strategies for Survival Among Early Christians,” Gnosis 3 (2018): 135–176 at 156–158. 110  DeConick, Gnostic New Age, 79–104.

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Marcionite Xenotheism

Christian Gnostic movements were not the only Christian movements to worship a transcendent God. The other movement is Marcion’s church, which, because of this similarity, has been confused with Gnostic Christian movements since the first heresiologists took up their pens to write against him. While Marcion (ca. 85–160 ce) advocated for the worship of a transcendent God, he does not seem to be familiar with Egyptian religion nor was he building on Gnostic spirituality, nor was he a devoted Platonist or Neo-Pythagorean or Aristotelian. While Marcion likely was aware of the larger philosophical context for the discussion of a theology of transcendence and perhaps also the Gnostic conversation on the subject, Marcion himself was a Bible scholar and a radical Paulinist, not a philosopher or a Gnostic.111 His theology of transcendence is based squarely on his reading of the Bible and Paul.112 By studying Jewish scriptures and comparing the God of the Jewish scriptures to the God he knew about from Paul’s letters and a short version of the Gospel of Luke, he deduced the existence of a transcendent God and wrote about it in his Antitheses.113 While Marcion argued for the worship of a transcendent God, Marcion’s supreme God was not the transcendent primal origin of life. The supreme God of Marcion was a completely separate God, an Alien God, who lived in an entirely different world unrelated to ours. Because of this, Marcion’s God is not transcendent in the same way that the One God is transcendent in popular imagination and in Gnostic sources. Marcion determined that there was not one God in these scriptures, but two Gods, a position that Irenaeus attributes also to Cerdo, Marcion’s (alleged) teacher.114 Yhwh is the creator of this universe and selected the Jews as his chosen people. He is a God of Law and justice.115 Marcion calls this God “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and also “Cosmocrator,” which may be a reference to Ephesians 6:12 where Paul says

111  Cf. Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 324–337. 112   R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity. An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century, AAR Academy Series 46 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 185–208. 113  For the opinion that Marcionite Luke may have been an older version of the Gospel of Luke, see Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Jason D. BeDuhn, The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon (Salem: Polebridge, 2013). 114  Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27.1; 2.30.9; 4.2.2; 3.12.12. 115  Irenaeus, Haer. 3.25.2–5; 5.4.1; Tertullian, Marc. 1.6; 1.25.3; 2.5.2, 21–24.

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that our battle is against the world rulers of darkness (πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου).116 The God that Jesus announced, however, was a God previously unknown, living enclosed in another location, an invisible spiritual world that is his own domain. He is a God defined by his alienness (ἀλλότριος and ξένος).117 He is a stranger to our cosmos separated from us by an infinite distance.118 At the same time, humanity and the cosmos are alien to him.119 Marcion’s understanding of Ephesians 2:11–13 likely influenced the way that Marcion came to understand this “other” God.120 Ontologically Yhwh is not derived from the alien God, nor does the alien God have any connection to the created order.121 The alien God’s transcendence is total. Marcion defines this alien God as the God of love and mercy who, when witnessing our suffering, came to our rescue by sending his son to liberate us.122 Tertullian encapsulates the character of Marcion’s God, as a God who swoops down upon “an alien world” snatching away human beings from their Creator and making them impious, ungrateful, undutiful, and worthless to their Lord.123 Marcion and his followers were criticized for confessing “another” God who is “greater” than the biblical Creator, one who has done greater works than the Creator.124 This teaching allowed Marcion and his followers to speak out against the Creator as their God or outright deny him as an envious and jealous God, such as he is described in Deuteronomy 4:24 and Genesis 3:22.125 Marcion also expressed real concern that the God in the Jewish scriptures punishes children for the sins of their parents and that he himself says that he creates evils, and kills as well as enlivens.126 This position put Marcion in opposition to Greek philosophers who argued that the One God was either the cosmic

116  Cf. Judith M. Lieu, “‘As Much My Apostle as Christ Is Mine’: The Dispute Over Paul Between Tertullian and Marcion,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 55. 117  Cf. Origen, Cels. 6.53. 118  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.33.2; Tertullian, Marc. 1.11.1; 2.3.2; 4.9.6; Celsus in Origen, Cels. 6.52–53; Adam. 84.10, 20; 86.7–8; 88.18–27; 90.19, 24, 29; 92.5–10, 21, 23; 94.2; 98.1–2, 5, 7; 104.6; 178.16; 240.7; Ephrem, CH 34–36; PR 1.44.20–49.3. 119  Tertullian, Marc. 1.11.1. 120  Tertullian, Marc. 5.17.12–14; Epiphanius, Pan. 42.12.3. 121  Hoffmann, Marcion, 207. 122  Irenaeus, Haer. 2.1.1; 4.8.1; Tertullian, Marc. 1.15; Epiphanius, Pan. 42.7.3–6. 123  Tertullian, Marc. 2.3.2; Celsus shares a similar description: Origen, Cels. 6.53. 124  Justin, Apol. 26.5. 125  Justin, Apol. 26; 58. On jealousy and envy, see Tertullian, Marc. 1.28.1; 2.25.4; 2.29.3; 3.23.7; 4.21.10; 4.25.2–3; 4.27.8; 4.39.18; 4.42.2; 5.5.8; 5.7.13; 5.16.6. 126  Exod 20:5; Isa 45:7; Deut 32:39; Tertullian, Marc. 1.2.2; 1.16.4; 2.14.1; 2.15.1; 4.1.10; 4.27.8.

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demiurge, or a second closely related entity whose activities were good.127 That said, Marcion was not the first to notice how emotive Yhwh is, and how problematic these emotions are for exegetes like Philo who wished to converge the One God with Yhwh, or like Plutarch who wished to do the same with the Greek Gods.128 Marcion posited that this alien God was the only “good” God, intervening in human history out of the blue. Even the biblical Creator was ignorant of the existence of Jesus’ Father before Jesus showed up in Judaea.129 Jesus’ Father did not have any prior credentials except that he was “good,” and this essential nature determines his actions when he decided to intervene in the affairs of another God’s world.130 Marcion’s description of Jesus’ Father as “good” is a reference to the alien God’s inescapable act to save what was not his own, because the essential nature of this “good” God is “mild,” “peaceful,” and “compassionate.”131 These are meant to contrast the Creator God’s retributive nature.132 Whether Marcion also felt the alien God’s “good” nature was Platonic is possible. Adolf Harnack argued long ago that Marcion’s theology of alienness was an innovation in religious history.133 I have to agree. There is no other thinker before him who boasted the worship of a God who had no connection to this world, a God who was utterly transcendent and utterly good. Marcion’s system reflects a third innovative pattern of theology about a supreme God. Among the philosophers and Philo, hypertheism emerges. Among Gnostic thinkers, we get transtheism. With Marcion comes xenotheism. 5 Holotheism The Apologists were in the thick of this theological discourse. In their own theological musings, they engaged Plato and other philosophers who discussed the transcendent One God. They were acutely aware of the transtheistic and 127  Tertullian, Marc. 4.1.2; cf. Plato, Tim. 29E–30A; Plutarch, De Anim. 1014A–B; Celsus in Origen, Cels. 8.21. 128  Cf. Philo, Leg. Alleg. 1.26; 3.56; 3.72; Deus Immut. 23; Sacr. 95–96; Deus 53–56; Mut. 54; Plant. 70; Plutarch, On the Delays of Divine Vengeance 550c, 551a, 556d–e. See Winston, “Philo’s Conception of the Divine Nature.” 129  Tertullian, Marc. 1.11.9; 2.28.1. 130  Irenaeus, Haer. 2.1.2. 131  Tertullian, Marc. 1.17.1, 22–26. 132  Tertullian, Marc. 4.15.5; 4.16.10. 133  Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007 [1924]), 81.

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xenotheistic solutions that Gnostic and Marcionite groups idealized and the hypertheistic solutions popular among pagans and Jews like Philo.134 And yet they were not satisfied with these theological solutions. Instead, the Apologists develop a new vision of Yhwh as the supreme creator and ruler of the world, but disconnected from his national ties to the Jews. Among the Apologists, Yhwh becomes the God who crosses national boundaries. No longer is Yhwh the national God of the Jews, but the exclusive creator and ruler of the world. He is made out to be a God who is beyond national identities, the God of the whole world and all its peoples. For this reason, I refer to this theological innovation as holotheism (from the Greek ὅλος, meaning whole, entire, and complete). Holotheism was a theological innovation built on the framework that structured hypertheism. Second-century Apologists innovate the old framework by arguing that the biblical Creator is both good and transcendent, a solution similar to Philo’s hypertheism. Rather than develop transtheistic or xenotheistic options, the Apologists, like Philo, link Plato’s transcendent Good with the biblical Creator God.135 Justin (ca. 100–165 ce) describes the Christian God who created and rules the world as “the cause of all discerned by the mind, having no color, no form, no greatness, … beyond all essence, unutterable and inexplicable, but alone honorable and good.”136 Aristides (ca. 120–160 CE) thinks that the Biblical Creator God is uncreated, without beginning or end, without name, without form, without gender, and without emotion, [that he] is unknowable.137 Athenagoras (ca. 133–190 ce) similarly says that “[God is] one, unbegotten and eternal and invisible and impassible and incomprehensible and infinite, apprehended by the mind and reason alone, surrounded by light and beauty and spirit and inexpressible power.” This is the same God who ordered and holds together everything that exists through his Word.138 Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 ce) understands the biblical God to be equivalent to God, the oldest among intellectual ideas, “the timeless and unoriginated First Principle, … the remoter Cause, the Father of the universe, the most ancient and most beneficent of all, ineffable.”139 The Apologists follow the theological formula that Philo used, relying on popular Hellenistic theology that identified the transcendent God of philosophy with the mythology and identity of a superior cosmic creator God, but in 134  Interestingly, Josephus understood Anaxagoras’ portrayal of God to be similar to the portrayal of God in the Jewish scriptures: Josephus, Contra Ap. 2.18. 135  John Whittaker, “ΕΠΕΚΕΙΝΑ ΝΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΟΥΣΙΑΣ,” VC 23 (1969): 91–104. 136  Justin, Dial. 1.4. 137  Aristides, Apol. 1. 138  Athenagoras, Leg. 13.2. See also Tatian, Orat. 5.3; Athenagoras, Leg. 10.5. 139  Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 7.1.

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their case Yhwh is identified instead of Zeus. They asserted that this identification was a truth unknown to the philosophers at the time they wrote, as well as Jews whom the Apologists paint as blind or ignorant or worse.140 As with Philo, biblical references to God’s body or his passions were explained allegorically, so that the transcendent God’s impassibility could be maintained as they blended philosophical speculation with biblical narrative.141 The difference between Philo’s blend and the Apologists’ blend lies in the indulgence of the Christian appeal to universalism, to Paul’s move to make the national God of Israel a God who shines upon both Jew and non-Jew alike, but with no exceptional privileges for Jews.142 This move allowed the Apologists the flexibility to promote an innovative Christian theology along the culturally familiar lines of hypertheism, understood by non-Jews to suggest a God transcendent and supreme, initiating creation, but a God not necessarily alone. He could have a Son, for instance, who could also be involved in creation. Yet, in their holotheistic blend, the Creator God from the Bible was no longer the exclusive birthright of the Jews. This birthright was shifted, so that the biblical God became the God of everyone everywhere. The detachment of Yhwh from his nation was so innovative that the Apologists did not have a way to talk about it in terms we might use today. They had to do so in the ethnic language available to them, arguing that Christians were a “new race” that was “universal,” not belonging to one place or one nation.143

140  George Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the Stoics to Origen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176–202. 141  Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, 144. Cf. Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, “Christian Apologists and Greek Gods,” in The Gods of Ancient Greece, ed. J. N. Bremmer and A. Erskine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 442–464. 142  On Philo and universalism, see Katell Berthelot, Philanthrôpia Judaica: Le débat autour de la ‘misanthropie’ des lois juives dans l’Antiquité, JSJSup 76 (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Philo’s universalism is the result of his specific attempt to blend Judaism and Greek philosophy. As such, Philo still understands the Jews to be distinguished and privileged among the nations, the Mosaic Law to be superior to pagan legislation, and cultural assimilation something to be rejected. Further discussion can be found in K. Goudrian “Ethnical Strategies in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” in Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt, ed. P. Bilde, T. Engberg-Pedersen, L. Hannestad, and J. Zahle, Studies in Hellenistic Civilization 3 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1992), 79–94; John M. G. Barclay, Jews in Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer, “Jewish Worship and Universal Identity,” in Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Jörg Frey, Daniel R. Schwartz, and Stephanie Gripentrog, AGJU 71 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 29–59; Gregory E. Sterling, “‘A Law to Themselves’: Limited Universalism in Philo and Paul,” ZNW 107 (2016): 30–47. 143  Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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We can imagine that the liberation of Yhwh from national boundaries might have resulted in the construction of Yhwh as a perennial God, as a representative of all the different national high Gods in the pagan world or an amalgam of them. But that is not what we see in the writings of the Apologists. While Yhwh is loosed from national boundaries, his exclusivism is maintained, transferred from the Jews to the nations at large. This transfer is made through arguments of Christian supersession, which for the Apologists secured Christianity’s Jewish heritage. Their supersessionist position allowed them to appropriate ancient Jewish tradition as Christian. This included the appropriation of Yhwh and the transfer his exclusivism to people who were not Jews.144 Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (c. 130–202 ce), constructs the exclusive theology of the One and the Same God, Creator of heaven and earth, by alluding to Isaiah 43:10 and 44:6, passages in which Yhwh calls himself out as the first, last, and only God, the God who delivers and saves. Knowledge of him is impossible except as it is revealed through Jesus. Irenaeus argues that God’s greatness cannot be known because God the Father cannot be measured. But we can learn through the love of God that such a great God exists and that he has created us and the world. We and everything else created is contained within God. There is not some power distant from this great God that created us.145 He writes, “There is one God, who by the Word and Wisdom created and arranged all things; but this is the demiurge who has granted this world to the human race, and who, as regards his greatness, is indeed unknown to all who have been made by him (for no one has searched out his height, either among the ancients who have gone to their rest, or any of those who are now alive).”146 To think that there is another Father who can be discovered besides him is ignorance at its best.147 Irenaeus links the One God to the God who spoke to Moses from the bush. He is the God whom Daniel worshipped as Creator of the heaven and earth, the living God to be contrasted with pagan idols. According to Irenaeus’ understanding of Psalm 45:16, this One God of the patriarchs becomes the One 144  I identify this strategy as one of five strategies used by emergent catholics as hard accommodation became necessary to grow the Christian new religious movement in the Roman world: DeConick, “Deviant Christians,” 147–151. See also Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17–28; David Engels, “Historising Religion between Spiritual Continuity and Friendly Takeover: Salvation History and Religious Competition during the First Millennium AD,” in Religion and Competition in Antiquity, ed. David Engels and Peter van Nuffelen, Collection Latomus 343 (Brussels: Éditions Latomus, 2014), 237–284. 145  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.20.1. 146  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.20.4. 147  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.5.1.

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God of their children.148 The weight of Irenaeus’ argument, however, falls on the shoulders of Abraham. Irenaeus makes the national God of the Jews significant by turning to the story of Abraham, suggesting that Abraham was the one who believed that the God who spoke to him is the One God, the creator of heaven and earth. His promise to make his chosen people as numerous as the stars in heaven referred to non-Jews who take up Abraham’s faith authentically as Paul said.149 Abraham was given a promise that the One God would redeem Abraham’s descendants, if they, like their ancestor Abraham, believed that this God is “the maker of heaven and earth, the only God.”150 Clement of Alexandria encapsulates the message in his commentary on a passage from the Preaching of Peter (ca. 100–150 ce), which I quote at length: Know then that there is one God, who made the beginning of all things, and holds the power of the end. He who is invisible, who is omniscient, who is incapable of being contained, who contains all things, who needs nothing, whom all things need, and by whom all things exist, who is incomprehensible, everlasting, unmade, who made all things by the “Word of his power,” that is, according to the knowledgeable scripture, his Son. Worship this God not as the Greeks since they are carried away by ignorance, and know not God, but [in their use of idols] they sacrifice as sacrifices to mortals. Offering dead things to the dead, as to Gods, they are unthankful to God, denying his existence by these things. Neither worship as the Jews, for they, thinking that they exclusively know God, do not know him, adoring as they do angels and archangels, the month and the moon … Learn with holiness and righteousness what we pass on to you. Keep these [teachings], worshipping God in a new way, by Christ.151 Clement thinks that, in this passage, Peter is stressing the equivalence of the Christian God and the One God of the philosophers, that Christians are “not announcing another God” but only “changing the manner of the worship of God.” This permits Clement to argue that the Christian God has always been worshipped by learned reputable Greeks, even though they were not directly aware of the perfect knowledge of the Father delivered by the Son. As for the Jews, Clement sees a supersession in the Christian God’s relationship with the Jews, which he proves by quoting a condensed (and highly censored) variant 148  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.5.2. 149  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.5.2–5. 150  Irenaeus, Haer. 4.5.3. 151  Quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.5.

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of Jeremiah 31:31–32: “I will make a new covenant with you, not as I made with your fathers in Mount Horeb.”152 This allows Clement to draw the conclusion that the Christian God (who also is the One God of the philosophers and the Jews) decided to make a new covenant with Christians, superseding the prior relationships that this same God had with the Greeks and the Jews. This means that Christians worship the old One God “in a new way.” Christianity represents devotion to the One God that is new and improved and universalized, what Clement calls a “third” form of worship. Clement concludes on a note that reveals clearly this new holotheistic blend: “The one and only God was known by the Greeks in a Gentile way, by the Jews in a Jewish way, and by us in a new and spiritual way.” Holotheism is not a tradition that the Apologists inherited. It is an innovation in ancient theology that occurred within a hotly contested territory where hypertheism, transtheism, and xenotheism were equal contenders. Nor was holotheism the natural solution or inevitable progression of Christian theology. It was a theology that the Apologists consciously forged by building strong links between Yhwh the God of a new universal “race” (γένος) and the transcendent God of philosophical and religious speculation.153 This strategy helped them to successfully market their new religious movement among Romans as a religion sympathetic to popular forms of Greco-Roman hypertheism. The maintenance of Yhwh’s exclusivism resulted in the liquidation of the other regional and national Gods who lingered in the shadow of the supreme biblical Creator. The well-established polemic in Jewish literature identifying other Gods with idols is repurposed by the Apologists and becomes a weapon to promote Yhwh’s exclusivism as a “total” God beyond localities and ­ethnicities.154 According to Justin, it was not the Jews but the apostles who “cast away idols and dedicated themselves to the Unbegotten God.”155 The totalization of Yhwh’s exclusivism tangentially authorized the Christian construction of heresy and violence against potentially any outstanding voice from competing groups with different theological views. The destructive social and political dynamics of holotheism may be why the concept of a transcendent God Beyond All Gods is returning to the religious topography of America, particularly among those who affiliate with New Age and Spiritual-But-Not-Religious identities.

152  Jer 31:31–32 is also quoted in Heb 8:8–9. 153  Ep. Diog. 1.1. Cf. Buell, Why This New Race, 138–165. 154  Roig Lanzillotta, “Christian Apologists.” 155  Justin, Apol. 49.

Chapter 13

How High Can Early High Christology Be? Paula Fredriksen I have been a member of the Early High Christology Club (EHCC) for quite a few years now; and the heights of the Christology that I think are early rest primarily on my reading of Paul’s letters. Paul makes very high claims for Jesus when he designates him as a “man from heaven” (1 Cor 15:47), as someone who pre-existed in a pneumatic form (Phil 2:6), and as the one who served as God’s agent in creation (1 Cor 8:6b). Paul’s Christ is the “first-fruit” of those to have “fallen asleep” (and thus of those who are about to be transformed and raised, 1 Cor 15:20). He is God’s “son”—that is, the eschatological lord and Davidic warrior—who is about to return to defeat pagan gods and to effect that signature eschatological miracle, the resurrection of the dead (Rom 1:3–4; cf. 1 Thess 4:13–18; 1 Cor 15:20–28). Once Christ appears at the temple mount, the twelve tribes of Israel will reassemble and, together with the seventy gentile nations descended from Noah, will unite under Christ in praise of God (Rom 11:25–26, cf. the table of nations in Gen 10; 15:9–12). Lower cosmic powers, newly subject to divine universal sovereignty, will as a result of Christ’s victorious parousia praise God as well (Phil 2:6–11; cf. Rom 8:38–39). After Christ’s conquest of the cosmos, God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). That’s quite a job description, in my view. But in terms of the EHCC, I am definitely low church. This august body has a two-tiered membership, and the description given just above does not adequately express the claims of the higher tier. These scholars are committed to “Big Bang Christology.” They maintain that Paul—and before him, the post-resurrection community assembled in Jerusalem—radically “identified” Jesus with the god of Israel.1 In one interpretation, this identification is seen in the early communities’ binitarian or dyadic devotion, that is, their liturgical identification of God with the Lord Jesus Christ. Believers “call upon” Jesus as “lord” in ways that deliberately recall devotion to the Jewish high god (e.g., Rom 1  “To identify” vel sim. is a spongy term. It can mean claiming that A is the same thing as B (“He identified the statue as a ritual object”). It can mean claiming that A associates closely with B (“He identifies with his mother”). It can mean naming something properly (“She identified the man as John Doe”). Its Christological deployment, steering between the Scylla of Sabellianism and the Charybdis of ditheism, never quite settles on a clear usage.

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10:13). This liturgical “mutation” in Israel’s worship, in this argument, originated not in the gentile milieux of the Diaspora, but rather in the earliest, Jewish, Jerusalem community. Its vaulted claims for Christ, construed as a novel violation of traditional Jewish monotheism, in turn explains Paul’s both giving and, later, getting hostile responses to and from other Jews (Gal 1:13, 23; Phil 3:6; 1 Cor 15:9; 2 Cor 11:26).2 Other higher-tier scholars parse Big Bang Christology in terms of divine attributes assigned to Jesus, which, in this construction, a rigorously “monotheistic” Second-Temple Judaism had previously associated with God the father alone. This identification-through-shared-attributes sometimes focuses on God as creator. Within a strict “binary distinction that allows for no ambiguous semi-divine beings”—a supposed binary of “created” (which is everything but God) and “uncreated” (which is God alone)—Christ “belongs on the divine side of the monotheistic distinction between Creator and creation.”3 Christ’s agency in God’s activity does not distinguish him from God: rather, his creative role “is contained within the unique identity of the one God.”4 In other words, early very high Christology complicates “monotheism” but does not compromise it, because Christ, though other than God, is so intimately and radically “identified” with God. Or, perhaps, the defining term that reveals this “Christ monotheism” is kyrios, “Lord.” The favored Septuagintal translation in “YHWH texts” for “God,” “Lord” when deployed to name Jesus in paleo-Christian writings reveals the earliest movement’s radical, singular, unique identification of Jesus with God.5 Or, perhaps, the defining attribute is doxa, “glory,” the LXX’s term for kavod, which in earlier Jewish scriptures indicates God’s divine presence. In this view, Paul champions Jesus as the “eschatological divine glory” in ways utterly distinct from contemporary religious patterns whether Jewish or Greco-Roman. The Jesus movement’s “unwavering commitment to monotheism,” coupled with its 2  Larry W. Hurtado has argued tirelessly for this interpretation. His definitive opus on the topic is Lord Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 3  Richard Bauckham, “Confessing the Cosmic Christ” (chapter 7 above), 166. Bauckham has made this distinction between “created” and “uncreated” in many of his other publications: see esp. the collection of his essays in Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 4  Bauckham, “Confessing the Cosmic Christ,” 146. I confess that, if I block out what I know about later patristic Christology, I have a hard time understanding exactly what this claim in a first-century Jewish context of any sort (or even in a first-century Platonizing philosophical context, like Philo’s) is supposed to mean. 5  David B. Capes, “Jesus’s Unique Relationship with YHWH in Biblical Exegesis” (chapter 5 above), 88. An expanded presentation of his view may be found in The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).

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referral of uniquely divine attributes (in this case, “glory”) to Jesus, means that Jesus as “the glory of God,” revealed as such through his resurrection, “is the god of Israel’s divine presence…. Jesus shares God’s divine identity.”6 This “redefinition of Jewish monotheism” venerates Jesus as God, ascribing “to Jesus [those] sacred texts [that were] previously reserved only for God.”7 In short, for this new movement, Jesus is God.8 Paul in this reading really is the first Christian theologian, and what he articulates is a theological novum distinctively, even disruptively (or “transgressively”) different from preceding sorts of (“monotheistic”) Jewishness. Its transgressiveness in turn explains early Jewish resistance to the gospel, with Paul on both the giving and the receiving ends of this resistance. Nicea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE) might be centuries off over the historical horizon line but, according to the above reconstructions, these imperially-sponsored councils’ Christological points of principle were already articulated and proclaimed in Jerusalem, at Easter, among Jews, following the initial Big Bang of Jesus’ resurrection. Let’s take a closer look. 1

The Many Gods of Ancient Jewish ‘Monotheism’

Supposed Jewish “monotheism” is the intellectual keystone of higher-tier High Christology. The absolute, austere uniqueness of the Jewish god, a conviction imputed to ancient Jews, ensures both the supposed (purely?) Jewish pedigree of early very high Christology, and sets its terms: if the god of Israel is uniquely divine, and if Jesus’ first followers intimately identify Jesus with that god, then Jesus is uniquely divine too. This idea of uniqueness, of utter and absolute singularity, is in turn rhetorically hardwired into the very definition of monotheism, “the doctrine that there is only one God” (thus the OED). But “monotheism” is not a term of historical description, even for peoples whom we habitually identify as “monotheists.” The fundamental problem is not that the term is a late seventeenth-century coinage: historians routinely use modern words (“inflation,” “pandemic”) to describe ancient phenomena. The problem is that the concept that the term describes and defines— the unique existence of a single (and therefore unique) god—is itself a late 6  Carey C. Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again” (chapter 6 above), 124. For his fuller treatment of these ideas, Paul’s Glory Christology (Leiden: Brill, 1992), and the article “Glory” in NIDB 1:576–80. 7  Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 135. 8  Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 138.

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seventeenth-century idea. Its retrojection back into the Roman past distorts ancient theology more than it describes it.9 In antiquity, the highest “god” (be he pagan, Jewish, or Christian) was a member of a larger class, “gods.” The very idea of a theos hypsistos—a favorite designation for Israel’s god in the Septuagint—is itself intrinsically comparative: the god in question is the highest of all the (other) gods. Even the phrase εἷς θεὸς ἐν οὐρανῷ, “one god in heaven,” asserted superiority, not singularity.10 Antiquity’s cosmos, in short, was a god-congested place. Loyalty to (or pious enthusiasm for) one particular god, or assertion of the superiority of one’s own city’s god, was not the same as asserting that the deity in question was the only god. For those (rare) ancients who thought systematically in terms that we identify (confusingly) as “monotheist,” heaven, though heavily populated, was organized hierarchically. At the pinnacle was the “one god.” Numerous and various others ranged beneath. 9  I have weighed in against using this term to describe ancient Jews and Christians in “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins whose Time Has Come to Go,” SR 35 (2006): 231–46; I argue further in “Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish Monotheism” (forthcoming). See too the well-considered objections of J. Lionel North, “Jesus and Worship, God and Sacrifice,” in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, ed. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 186–202; and, in the same volume, the essays by William Horbury, “Jewish and Christian Monotheism in the Herodian Age,” 16–44, esp. 20–21, for many primary references in Jewish sources to “gods”; and by R. W. L. Moberley, “How Appropriate is ‘Monotheism’ as a Category for Biblical Interpretation?,” 216–34. These latter essays all assemble broad bibliographies. 10  Angelos Chaniotis, “Megatheism: The Search for the Almighty God and the Competition of Cults,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–40. See also, in the same collection, the essay by Nicole Belayche, “Deus deum … summorum maximus [Apuleius]: Ritual Expressions of Distinction in the Divine World in the Imperial Period,” 141–66, on divine hierarchy and plurality. The current scholarly vogue in ancient pagan “monotheism” expresses what earlier scholars termed “henotheism,” one god among many: see most recently Christian Gers-Uphaus, “Paganer Monotheismus anhand der θεὸς ὕψιστος- und εἷς θεός-Inschriften,” JAC 60 (2017): 5–82. Pagans who invoked theos hypsistos need not have had the LXX’s god in mind, on which Dorothea Rohde, “Die religiöse Landschaft einer Hafenstadt im Wandel,” in Juden-Christen-Heiden? Religiöse Inklusion und Exklusion in Kleinasien bis Decius, ed. Stefan Alkier and Hartmut Leppin, WUNT 400 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 197–217, esp. 210; cf. Christian Marek, “Nochmals zu den Theos Hypsistos Inschriften,” ibid., 131–48. As Marek points out, commenting on the Oenoanda inscription, Apollo—one of the Olympian gods—demotes himself to being a messenger (“angel”) vis-à-vis the highest, self-existing god, 143–44. By contrast, Clement of Alexandria considers “gods” and “angels” as two distinct and non-hierarchically arranged categories (Strom. 7.3.20.4); cf. Celsus’ ranking of these entities as the greatest god, gods, angels, daemons (which can be good or evil), and heroes (Cels. 7.68).

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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 Compounding our efforts at clarity is the fluidity of ancient vocabulary. “Gods,” “daimones,” “angels,” “stars,” “spirits,” and special humans (whether heroes or emperors—or even, as we shall see, apostles) all attested to and expressed degrees of divinity; but ancients used words inconsistently and variously when naming these entities. Apollo, for example, was unquestionably one of the Olympian high gods. But, with philosophy’s development of the idea of a “highest, uncreated god” (an idea to which we will return), Apollo referred to himself and to his Olympian colleagues as merely that god’s angeloi or “messengers.”12 For Clement of Alexandria, by contrast, “gods” and “angels” were two distinct and different species of beings, both serving as celestial spectators for heroic Christian sufferings (Strom. 7.3.20). 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 Paul forthrightly acknowledges the existence of many gods and many lords, active social agents who serve as 11  On the religious and scientific implications of this cosmic architecture, E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 6–14; on the ways that it structures second and third-century Christians theologies, Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 51–112 (Valentinus, Marcion, Justin, and Origen). For a brief first-century tour of this cosmos, 1 Cor 15:39–42; for a more orderly, fourth-century survey, Sallustius, Concerning the Gods and the Universe, ed. and trans. A. D. Nock (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966). Nock’s introduction richly repays reading. 12  “Born of itself, untaught, without a mother, unshakeable, not contained in a name, known by many names, dwelling in fire, this is god. We, his angels, are a small part of god.” Thus, the opening hexameter lines of the famous Oenoanda inscription. For text and analysis, Stephen Mitchell, “The Cult of Theos Hypsistos,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 81–148, with Greek text at p. 86. The oracle was known to Lactantius (Inst. 1.7). This philosophical definition of highest divinity as non-contingent will be carried over into the contesting systems of second-century Christian paideia. 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

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Christ’s cosmic resistance at his messianic return, and who seek to frustrate Paul’s mission in the fast-diminishing meanwhile.14 Both Celsus and Origen agree that many different divine entities exist (angels, demons, gods), though Origen disputes demonic morality (Cels. 5.2–8). As late as the fifth century, no less a light than Augustine conceded that the true difference between pagan gods and Christian demons really got down to terminology (Civ. 9.23). 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 words is Justin’s go-between god, showing up in history, as the highest, “nameless” god never would (1 Apol. 63, cf. 60). 14  Besides saying so forthrightly at 2 Cor 4:4 (the θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου) and at 1 Cor 8:5 (ὥσπερ εἰσὶν θεοὶ πολλοὶ καὶ κύριοι πολλοί), Paul in my view refers to cosmic divinities at Gal 4:8–9 (στοιχεῖα); at 1 Cor 2:8 (ἄρχοντες τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου); at 1 Cor 10:20–21 (δαίμονia); and at 1 Cor 15:24–27, a sort of messianic theomachy between the returning Christ and lower cosmic powers (ὅταν καταργήσῃ πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν, cf. Rom 8:19–21, where these entities “groan”). According to Phil 2:10, in the End, these cosmic beings wherever they are—“above the earth or upon the earth or below the earth”—will “bend knee” (in defeat? in homage?) to Christ and so to his Father; cf. Ephesians 3:10; 6:12. For the definitions of rule (archē), authority (exousia), and power (dynamis) as cosmic forces (a.k.a. “gods”) see BDAG.    In Constructing Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), building a case for Paul’s naming the Romans as Jesus’ executioners, Dale Allison refutes this reading of 1 Cor 2:8 at length, citing much supporting secondary literature (395–98, esp. 396 n. 41). While perhaps by the archontes who “crucified the lord of glory” Paul intended “Romans,” those entities to be overwhelmed by the returning victorious Christ are clearly superhuman (Phil 2:10), and the archai and dynameis named in Romans 8:38 are listed together with hostile angels. All of these beings, if encountered, might be addressed as kyrios. 15  Jesus, arguably, falls into this category for Paul. 16  On imperial divinity in the early empire, Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–49; on the sanctity and numen both of the emperor (whether pagan or Christian) and of his image, Jas Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53–87; further, Keith Hopkins, “Divine Emperors, or the Symbolic Unity of the Roman Empire,” in Conquerors

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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. Let’s take a closer look. 2

Created and Uncreated Gods

Jewish scriptures teem with other gods. As is common in ancient literatures, and as is to be expected given antiquity’s normal association of peoples and pantheons, gods struggled when their peoples did. Heaven’s politics conformed to human politics. Thus, when Israel battles Egypt, Israel’s god executes judgment on the gods of the Egyptians (Exod 12:12). When Israel prevails over the Ammonites, YHWH sends Milcom into exile (Jer 49:3). Their contesting relationship with YHWH implies the moral autonomy, thus independence, of these gods: they resist him. In Jewish texts, of course, YHWH always prevails, even when Israel does not.18 and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 197–226. Emperor worship continued under Constantine and his successors, A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 1:93 (with comments on Constantine’s personal approval of various dedicated cultural competitions and gladiatorial games under the supervision of an imperial priest); G. W. Bowersock, “Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines,” DOP 51 (1997): 1–10; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth through Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 34–39, on the cult of the Christian Roman emperor. 17  An interesting (and unusual) opportunity for clarity, however, did present itself, over an accounting question. The god Amphairaus, recipient (qua theos) of a votive inscription in the third century BCE erected by Moschos Ioudaios son of Moschion (IJO 1, BS20), was a minor deity closely associated with the healing god Aescelpius. But Amphairaus’ status was qualified by act of the Roman senate in the first century BCE. At issue was Amphairaus’ tax status. Lands dedicated to his cult could be taxed, the Senate ruled, since, having begun life as a human, Amphairaus did not fall in the category of “immortal gods,” whose tax-free status was evidently secure (Cicero, Nat. d. 3.49). See Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3–10. 18  For a full consideration of the vocabulary and polemical logic of Jewish texts coping with categorizing these superhuman powers while concerned “to assert the incomparable

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Outside of battle situations, the supremacy of Israel’s god over these lesser ones is simply asserted. YHWH presides over a divine court: “In the midst of the gods he gives judgment” (Ps 81(82):2). He appoints these lesser beings to be the gods of gentile nations (Gen 32:8). They all bow down to him (Ps 97(98):7). Though Israelite religious culture condemned the worship of visual representations of these deities, the reality of these gods themselves was assumed. In the LXX, their images received an upgrade: the nations’ idols become daimonia (lower gods, not just their images, Ps 95:5 LXX; a view repeated by Paul, 1 Cor 10:20). The larger point, however, remains: God is not the only god, not even in his own book. 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, however, 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 creation power of the high God” of Israel, see Emma Wasserman, “ ‘An Idol Is Nothing in the World’ (1 Cor 8:4): The Metaphysical Contradictions of 1 Corinthians 8:1–11:1 in the Context of Jewish Idolatry Polemics,” in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology, ed. Susan E. Myers, WUNT 2/321 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 201–27, quotation from 227; eadem, Apocalypse as Holy War. Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). If his people are defeated by another power, it is because Israel’s god is using that foreign nation to punish Israel for its sins: military defeats do not call into question God’s total sovereignty, though sometimes circumstances pounded cracks in this theodicy: see Adiel Schremer, “ ‘The Lord Has Forsaken the Land’: Radical Explanations of the Military and Political Defeat of the Jews in Tannaitic Literature,” JJS 59 (2008): 183–200. 19  For a quick orientation to this angelic throng, L. W. Hurtado, “Monotheism, Principal Angels, and the Background of Christology,” in Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. John J. Collins and Timothy H. Lim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 547–64, at 552–5. See too Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology, WUNT 2/70 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), and his essay, “ ‘Angels’ and ‘God’: Exploring the Limits of Early Jewish Monotheism,” in Stuckenbruck and North, Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, 45–70.

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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 opposite 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 imputation of change, philosophers posited that hylē, thus cosmos, were co-eternal with God, his divine logos perpetually organizing the whole.21 In later centuries, Christian theologians will adapt such formulations to describe the effortless 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 20  The fourth-century Neoplatonist Sallustius gives a clear explanation of this cosmology: “The cosmos must of necessity be indestructible and uncreated…. Since the cosmos exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the cosmos always exist, just as light coexists with the Sun and with fire, and shadow coexists with body” (On the Gods and the Universe 7.1). 21  In these systems, cosmos is unwilled, precisely to protect divine changelessness. Was subsequent reality, then, the result of unwilled emanation(s), a kind of natural outpouring from theos, given the nature of theos? Valentinian cosmologies split the difference, with syzygies flowing out of the high god, but Christ’s later rescue mission the historical act of one of the lower aeons.

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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, was that 22  Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 46–47. Chadwick’s appeal to the grammatical distinction between ek mē ontos and ek ouk ontos has been challenged (see, for example, John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness [London: T&T Clark, 2006], 254), but his larger point remains: if something exists before matter does, then creation is not ex nihilo. Even Origen, as we saw above, had to posit a (nonmaterial) cosmos before (material) cosmos to explain cosmos. By the time Rufinus translates Origen for the fourth-century Latin West, creatio ex nihilo was established doctrine, especially in light of the battles against Manichaean Christian cosmology. 23  Plotinus, R. T. Wallis notes, argued that “since goodness consists in form … it is precisely Matter’s lack of any form whatever that proves its identity with Absolute Evil…. Plotinus, however, is no dualist; his Matter is not an independently existing principle, but the point at which the outflow of reality from the One fades away into utter darkness. Matter’s evil is thus not a positive force … [but rather] an utter sterility, or ‘poverty, which communicates its own deficiency to the bodies based on it, and thus becomes the source of all the sensible world’s imperfections, including … the wickedness of individual souls” (Neoplatonism [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972], 49–50, with many references to Plotinus’ Enneads). 24  See esp. Frances Young, “ ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’: A Context for the Emergence of the Christian Doctrine of Creation,” SJT 44 (1991): 139–51. 25  “Creation out of nothing was not just a doctrine about the world. It was doctrine about God” (Young, “ ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’,” 150).

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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 (equality); 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. Let’s take a closer look. 3

Early (Very) High Christology

I leave to the end the significance of his earliest followers’ conviction that Jesus had been raised, which is the explanatory Big Bang that precedes the EHCC’s Big Bang Christology, its identification of Jesus with God. Let’s review, instead, the arguments, all of which interlock and reinforce each other. These are (a) a “purely Jewish” originary matrix of “strict monotheism”; (b) distinctive early devotional practices implying, indeed celebrating Christological “identification”; (c) a “strict binary distinction” between God and creation; (d) using texts or terms like kyrios or doxa, attributed to God in the LXX, as descriptive of Christ. For the study of Christian origins, purely Jewish monotheism denotes the idea of a kind of Judaism untouched by “Hellenism,” a.k.a. “paganism.” An authoritative academic source for such an idea, interestingly, is the same as 26  In his shattered masterpiece the Peri Archōn, the first Christian systematic theology, Origen distinguished between God and everything else (divine pre-existent rational beings) in terms of body and in terms of contingency: only the triune god was self-generated, and only he/they radically asomaton. In this sense, all were equally “god.” The inner dynamics of the Trinity, however, accommodated gradients of divinity, the scope for God the Father being unrestricted; for the Son, especially involved with (secondary, temporal, material) creation; for the Holy Spirit, restricted to the (true) church. In other words, Origen was brilliant enough to frame a Christology that was both radically egalitarian and subordinationist at the same time. Almost a century later, Arius, worried about Sabellianism, took Origen’s Christology in one direction (that of subordinationist contingency, which is where the scriptural language of sonship and the philosophical language of logos led him); Athanasius, innovating, in another. See Fredriksen, Sin, 100–12.

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the authoritative academic source against such an idea: Martin Hengel. In his great classic, the two-volume study Judaism and Hellenism, Hengel argued pellucidly that, three centuries after Alexander, no aspect of Jewish culture, even in the homeland, was untouched by that of Greece. Yet in his subsequent smaller study, The Son of God, Hengel urged the opposite case: the roots of early Christology, he asserted, were Jewish in ways utterly independent of Hellenistic (read “pagan”) influence.27 The theological novum of Christianity burst fully-formed from Jewish foreheads unsullied by messy ideas of divine intermediation: the Lord their God, after all, was One. The more austerely solitary the Jewish god, the more radical the intimate association of Jesus with this god. Early Very High Christology was born. 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. This is not to say that Jewish ideas about the Jewish god were not “distinctive.” Aniconic worship was certainly singular. (Christianity long ago abandoned this practice; Islam picked it up. Pagan Neoplatonists practiced it vis-à-vis the highest god through the discipline of introspection.) But Ugaritic ideas about divinity are likewise “distinctive,” or else we could not distinguish them from corresponding Akkadian ones, or later Hellenistic ones, or parallel Roman ones. YHWH is distinct from Ba’al—though they share similarities, too. Zeus is

27  M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 6–18, gives a concise review and analysis of Hengel’s two mutually exclusive positions. As Litwa nicely notes, “Christianity was born from a Jewish mother who was already Hellenized” (15). 28  For YHWH’s Canaanite backstory, see Thomas Römer, The Invention of God (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), though Römer speaks of “monotheism” as a post-exilic invention.

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not Jupiter, though similarities abound there, too.29 “Distinctive,” like hypsistos, does not mean “unique” in a way that denies or disenables comparison. The term is in fact intrinsically comparative: distinct from what or with respect to what? Of course Jewish monotheisms were distinct from pagan monotheisms, and both of these are distinct from Christian monotheisms. We can describe what we take to be their distinctions. But all of these monotheisms all share some characteristics too, and we can also identify and describe these.30 The argument about first-generation devotional practices flows into those about the referral of divine designations and attributes to Jesus. We do not in fact know what Jesus-specific practices the earliest community in Jerusalem, in the decades between April of the year 30 (?) and August of the year 70, actually kept. The best we can do is infer from Paul’s letters what the practices of his gentile assemblies (mid-century, within pagan cities) might have been; then note that there seems to have been no controversy between him and the Jerusalem community over these practices; and finally argue on that basis that their respective practices concerning devotion to Jesus may have been similar. We triangulate between material in the later Gospels, in Acts, and in Paul’s letters to try to get back to what James’ people might have done when they gathered.31 Calling on Jesus to return—Marana tha!—seems likely as a core practice, especially given the plausible priority of early Aramaic tradition. But note: “lord” in Aramaic (mar) does not function as a designation for “God” in biblical Targumim.32 Addressing Jesus as mar, in other words, goes nowhere in terms of 29  See Matthew Novenson’s essay in the present volume for an exploration of how ancient people worked with such divine similarities and differences. 30  In the late fourth century, the Manichaean theologian Faustus identified Mediterranean “monotheism”—“the belief in a single principle” that stands as the source of the cosmos— as a (wrong) way of thinking common to pagans, other Christians, and Jews (Augustine, Faust. 20.3–4).    Specifically non-dualist forms of “monotheism” are indeed “distinctive,” but “distinctive” does not mean “incomparable.” Quite the contrary: distinctions emerge only through comparison. The gold standard essay on comparison in religious studies, and specifically in Christian origins, remains Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). And see now Matthew V. Novenson, “Beyond Compare,” in The New Testament in Comparison, ed. John M. G. Barclay and Benjamin G. White (London: T&T Clark, 2020). 31  For one recent effort, see Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 94–107, 123–40, emphasizing charismatic behaviors and scriptural interpretation, rightly characterized by Jennifer Eyl as divinatory practices. (See note 34 below.) 32  I thank my colleague Steven Fassberg, professor of ancient Semitic languages at the Hebrew University, for confirming this observation. He writes: “Different targumim do

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“identifying” him with the Jewish “lord god.” If the Aramaic-speaking original community in Jerusalem is the (“purely Jewish”) source of the identification of Jesus with God, then they would have had to have been actually thinking in Greek, and with the LXX. Only kyrios will do that work; mar will not. Taking seriously that mar—an Aramaic outcropping still visible in Paul’s letters (1 Cor 16:22)—was an early term for Jesus means letting go of the divineidentification-through-kyrios argument, or at least letting go of Jerusalem as its source. What else? 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. 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.34 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. From Jewish evocations of lower pagan deities in manumission ceremonies—though in other ways, they are similar.35 From meals held in diaspora professional guilds and various associations and collegia and in synagogues—though in some ways, they are similar. 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 different things. The Peshitta regularly writes ‫מריא‬. Targum Onqelos gives ‫יוי‬, Targum Neophyti usually writes ‫ ייי‬but on occasion uses an anthropomorphism like ‫מימריה דייי‬, ‘the word of the Lord,’ or ‫איקר שכינתיה דיי‬, ‘the honor of the Shekhina of the Lord.’ Pseudo-Jonathan also writes ‫( ”ייי‬personal correspondence, 28 August 2019). 33  On which, Stuckenbruck, “ ‘Angels’ and ‘God’.” 34  See now especially Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For all we know, of course, those other communities founded and sustained by Paul’s competitors behaved in the same ways. 35  Such as the famous Pothos synagogue inscription (IJO 1, BS20), which calls upon Zeus, Gaia and Helios (a formula of legal witness).

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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.” The best a member of a diaspora ekklesia can offer, says Paul, is “rational” or “intellectual” cult (logikê latreia); and this notional offering is made not to Jesus, but to God (Rom 12:1). But such notional latreia would well describe the devotional practices of diaspora Jews utterly unaffiliated with the Jesus movement, both in Paul’s lifetime and long thereafter: Jews outside of Jerusalem, removed from the temple, in any case could “worship,” as Tacitus observed, only as a mental act (mente sola, Hist. 5.5.4). On this point precisely, Jerusalem pre-70 was different from anywhere else. Members of James’ community had ready access to the temple. Their thusia could be actual, not just notional; they could perform latreia according to ancient tradition. We might wonder, then: when James, or Peter, or John, or Paul when he was in town, or any of the other Jewish, male members of the community in Jerusalem offered at the temple, did they offer to Jesus as well as to the god of Israel? Great question. An affirmative answer would clinch the core convictions of the higher-tier EHCC.36 Unfortunately, of course, we cannot know. Surveying the surviving literature, we can say, however, that nothing indicates that this would have been the case. When Matthew’s Jesus gives directions on how to worship at the altar (thusiastêrion), he teaches only that one should make peace with his “brother” before bringing his gift; he says nothing about the offering in effect being for or to himself as well (Matt 5:23–24). Paul obviously thinks very highly of the temple and of its protocols of sacrifice: he lists them among the gifts graciously given by God to Israel (Rom 9:4–5), and he uses them as his touchstone for articulating ideas of worship, behavior and community for his own groups.37 He never says anything about sacrificing to Jesus, even mimetically through donations or good behavior: when community activities represent an “acceptable sacrifice (thusia),” its “sweet smell”—the biblical rayach nekoach of burnt offerings—ascends not to the enthroned Jesus, but to God 36  North (“Jesus and Worship”) emphasizes rightly that cult was the “ultimate criterion of deity” in ancient Mediterranean piety, thus distinguishing “devotion” (Hurtado’s favored term) from “worship” (tendered only to deities; North, 202 n. 32). By this criterion, as far as we can tell, the Jerusalem community clearly distinguished Jesus from God. 37  On Paul’s own positive orientation toward the temple, and the ways that Levitical temple protocols structure his ideas on Gentile participation in the Christ-assemblies, Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 151–154 and notes; see too Friedrich W. Horn, “Paulus und die Herodianische Tempel,” NTS 53 (2007): 184–203. On the earliest community in Jerusalem and the temple, and that of Jesus, Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 7–42.

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the Father, to whom “be glory forever and ever” (Phil 4:18–20; cf., e.g., Gen 8:21 LXX).38 And even Acts, undergirded with decades of further Christological development, has the apostles only teaching about Jesus from the temple, never offering to Jesus in the temple. Acts 21 might have provided such a narrative opportunity, has the thought ever crossed the author’s mind. Evidently it did not. These hypothetical musings about the Jerusalem community’s devotional practices are reinforced by a historical datum: for its four decades of life before the Roman destruction, the city’s religious authorities (which is to say, the chief priests) left this group pretty much alone. Nor did the priests call on the Romans to oppress the assembly on their behalf. Paul’s list of repeated woes and harassments in 2 Corinthians 11:23–26 and 12:10 finds no echo in the experience of James’ group.39 If the earliest community’s devotional practices had indeed been the source of Paul’s, and if its claims for Jesus’ exalted identity had indeed so transgressed “devout Jewish monotheism” that unaffiliated Jews responded with muscular aggression (Paul witnessing to both sides of this reaction), then the community’s decades of quiet residence in Jerusalem, under the very noses of the priests, are simply inexplicable. Whatever the source of the friction between Paul and the “men from James” in Antioch, differences over Christology was not one of them (cf. Gal 2:12). This inclines me to think that, on this issue, they were agreed. And whatever their early Christological claims may have been, these could not have been the reason for the diaspora synagogues’ abreaction—since there was no such abreaction in Jerusalem, the putative source of early high Christology both at home and abroad. Perhaps the reasons for the synagogues’ rejection, then, were not theological. Perhaps they were social, political and practical instead.40 Perhaps 38  North notes that in passages both in Paul (four places) and in other New Testament writings (fifty examples), where (virtual) “sacrifice” language is deployed, the object or entity to whom the “offering” is “pleasing” or “acceptable” is God, never Christ (“Jesus and Worship,” 199 and n. 27). 39  See Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 128–31 on Stephen, and on the “persecution” of everyone but the original disciples, in Acts. Whatever situation lay behind Ananus’ execution of James in 62 (Josephus, A.J. 20.200), it did not affect the entire community; nor did whatever James had been doing alienate or upset other non-affiliated Jerusalem Jews who, offended by Ananus’ behavior, secured his dismissal. On the evidence, things were a lot quieter for a Christ-follower in Jerusalem than in the Diaspora. 40  For a reconstruction of a practical and social impetus behind diaspora resistance to the Jesus-movement, though one that had religious dimensions, Fredriksen, Paul, 61–93; When Christians Were Jews, 144–59; Martin Goodman, “The Persecution of Paul by Diaspora Jews,” in The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Menahem Mor and Jack Pastor (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi Press, 2005), 376–87; idem, “Galatians 6:12 on Circumcision and Persecution,” in From Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen, ed. Michael L. Satlow, BJS 365 (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018), 275–80. Focusing on

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these early devotional practices were idiosyncratic (“distinctive”) but not transgressively so. Perhaps, indeed, within their first-century context, they fit. 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 creatio 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. 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. social rather than Christological reasons for such resistance may diminish the imputed transgressiveness of early Christology, but it has the virtue of ascribing a coherent motivation to all of the “persecutors” whom Paul names: synagogue authorities, Roman magistrates, urban mobs, and pagan gods. 41  Bauckham, “Confessing the Cosmic Christ,” 146. 42  On the specifically messianic usages of kyrios, Fredriksen, Paul, 134, 139–40,143–45, 168. J. Albert Harrill notes, “ ‘Lord’ was an epithet common to all deities in the ancient Mediterranean world … [and] had a regular use in the daily speech of slaves to masters, commoners to aristocrats, soldiers to commanders (Luke 7:6–8) … virtually all ancient people spoke like this to their social betters” (Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 88). Further, as Nils Dahl observed, when applied to Christ, kyrios signals not a divine status so much as a royal, Davidic one ( Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine, ed.

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Did Paul think that Jesus “was” God, as some of the present authors claim? If he did, one might wonder, why did he never just say so? Well, he does, say some of our authors, if you know how to read the letters aright. Here the “strict binary” argument recapitulates many of the aspects of the divine attribution arguments. Command of a fantastic amount of detail is required but, so go these arguments, once you see the pattern, Paul’s claim is clear. The gematria embedded in Paul’s bicameral Hebrew/Greek brain, expressed in the numerical and alphabetic formulae of chosen passages in his letters (like the “Christological shema” of 1 Cor 8:6) proclaims the identity of Jesus with God.43 Prepositional theology and numerical composition compel the conclusion. Kyrios names both God the Father and God the Son: ergo.44 Kavod, the Hebrew behind the LXX’s doxa, “glory,” stands for God’s glorious, manifest presence. Paul associates doxa with Jesus in so many ways that he in effect “scandalously and brazenly transfers God’s glory to Jesus,” having been cued by Jesus’ own glorious resurrection, all without ever compromising an “unwavering commitment to monotheism.”45 Faith, not election and Law, marks Paul’s new religious commitment (Christianity, in effect) off from his old one (Judaism).46 These arguments are fine-grained, intensely engaged both with Pauline texts and with biblical ones. The Paul who emerges through this weaving together of scriptural associations is instantly (and comfortably) recognizable theologically, proclaiming as he does the teaching of Roman imperial orthodoxy. Indeed, this Paul anticipates Luther.47 So coherent are these exegetical arguments, so finely detailed, made with such conviction—and so clearly vindicated by the subsequent developments of (especially) Protestant theology—that one has to wonder how reasonable people could disagree. Let’s take a closer look.

Donald H. Juel [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991], 20). On the divine aspects of messianic figures, Jesus included, see esp. the study by Adela Y. Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 43  Bauckham, “Confessing the Cosmic Christ,” 141–143, who nods to Fletcher-Louis. 44  Again, this argument works only in Greek, and not in Aramaic, the vernacular of the earliest community. This observation effectively severs Jerusalem as the source of Paul’s very high Christology, if that were what his Christology was. 45  Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 129, 105–106. 46  Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 135. 47  So Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, x, 59.

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Text and Context, Theology and History

It is true that an intelligible line can be traced from Paul through Nicea to Augustine to Luther and thence to Hengel and thence to the EHCC, one that resonates with the idea of a radical identification of Jesus with God. But that is not an argument about or for the first-century interpretation of a first-century text. It is an observation about the continuing importance—and, thus, about the necessary reinterpretation—of a first-century text. The history of exegesis cannot establish that a later idea existed in the first century, just because later theologians interpreted first-century texts to make their own, later case. Later interpretations of earlier texts mean nothing in terms of establishing the historical, contemporary meaning of those texts. A strong line, for example, can also be drawn from Augustine through Cyprian past Tertullian to Paul that resonates with the idea of Original Sin.48 But the clarity (and the obvious Paulinism) of that line establishes nothing in terms of what Paul would or could have thought about Original Sin—because Paul did not think about Original Sin. (And until the early 400s, not even Augustine thought with the idea of Original Sin: he had not come up with it yet.49) The rhetoric of genealogies faces forward, deploying the language of “descent” from then to now. The actual generation of genealogies, however, always moves backward, from now to then. It is thus little wonder that everything— all those theologically orthodox names, and the “Old Testament” too, via the LXX—can line up behind early very high Christology. So too with textual hermeneutics. The scholars whose work we have referenced have proved past doubting that Paul’s letters can sustain a reading in support of the intricate associative interpretations that they have proposed. Their essays have just demonstrated that that is the case. But what is the relationship of their arguments to what Paul thought? What did Paul think? And how, if not by textual hermeneutics, can we know?

48  Traced, exhaustively, by Julius Gross, Entstehungsgeschichte der Erbsündendogmas, vol. 1 (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1960). 49  As early as 392, Augustine, reading Paul, will come to an idea of mitigated free will (Fort. 22), but his full-blown construction of sexually-transmitted heritable sin has to await his encounter with Pelagius and with Julian of Eclanum in the 420s. See A. Sage, “Péché original. Naissance d’un dogme,” REAug 13 (1967): 211–48; Fredriksen, Sin, 114–34.

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Here, for the purposes of this conversation, we come to the Parting of the Ways between Judaism50 and Christianity.51 I mean by this the distinction between historical interpretation and theological interpretation, between doing history and doing theology. Theology, especially New Testament theology, is textual. It proceeds through exegesis. History, by contrast, is contextual. It requires the sympathetic and critical reconstruction of the ancient Umwelt. Such reconstruction can never be achieved by explicating the text to be interpreted. Gazing closely at a text will not get us its historical context: all that will be gained is a mirror reading.52 Doing history requires a lot of peripheral vision, the coordination and critical assessment of as vast an array of ancient contemporary evidence in as many media—papyri, amulets, inscriptions, artifacts, the writings of outsiders—as we can possibly assemble. To do history, when we read Paul, means getting outside of his letters. It also means getting outside of the LXX’s echo chamber. It means reimagining his context—not only his immediate personal religious/cultural one (a messily improvising, idiosyncratically apocalyptic, and tiny movement within late Second-Temple Judaism), but also his larger social/cultural one, the eastern Mediterranean cities of the early Roman Empire. It means, further, realistically imagining his audiences, and assessing his goals in communicating with them. It means interpreting him by imagining their context, as they lived their lives within their native religious institution, the Greco-Roman city. It means remembering that when Paul dictated his letters, he was attempting to communicate with (recently) ex-pagan gentiles. This fact, for me, fatally undermines the plausibility of the higher tier EHCC’s arguments. How could Paul reasonably hope that his ex-pagans could ever decrypt the intricate codes, 50  By which I mean Paul’s native cultural and religious context, late Second-Temple Judaism, between ca. 33 (when he received his call) and ca. 57 (when we lose sight of him). 51  By which I mean the theological content of early very high Christology, “Christological monotheism,” “dyadic devotion,” “doxatic Christosis,” which our authors forthrightly name as “Christianity”—even though the term (and I would argue, the concept) does not exist for another 50 years or so after Paul’s lifetime. On the anachronistic alchemy worked by applying this term (as the translation “church” for ekklesia) to Paul’s letters, see John W. Marshall, “Misunderstanding the New Paul: Marcion’s Transformation of the Sonderzeit Paul,” JECS 20 (2012): 1–29, esp. at 6: “Using a category of ‘Christianity’ is fundamentally erroneous when interpreting Paul. It exercises transformative influence on his writings in the same way the [later] pseudepigraphical Pastoral epistles do…. By reading Paul’s writings as instances of ‘Christianity,’ the new, but later, religion is already retrojected onto the letters, the force of Paul’s eschatological conviction is blunted, and the specificity of his address to Gentiles is effaced.” 52  On which, esp. John M. G. Barclay, “Mirror-Reading a Polemical Letter: Galatians as a Test Case,” JSNT 31 (1987): 73–93.

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dense verbal associations, delicate scriptural allusions and bilingual gematria by which he was supposedly, subtly signaling to them that Jesus was God?53 Why would he make it so hard for himself, and all but impossible for them?54 Was Paul really talking only to himself? And if he were—forgetting for the moment that letters are supposed to be about communication—could he really have worked out such intricate encryptions for himself, even if aided by Spirit, in the age before search engines and databases? It would take a miracle. These exegesis-based arguments for early very high Christology thus not only domesticate Paul’s letters for later centuries of theological doctrine. They also strain credulity once we factor in the likely scriptural knowledge base of Paul’s ex-pagan Christ-followers, who were the reason for his composing the letters in the first place. A further problem, for me, also emerges. The structure and sensibility of these arguments perforce ignore an obvious Jewish context for Paul’s euangelion—one that was fundamental, too, to the earliest community’s interpretation of their experience of the resurrection—and thereby ignore, as well, one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most courageous contributions to the study of Christian origins: the work of Albert Schweitzer.55 Resurrection in late Second-Temple traditions was linked to eschatology, “the ends of the ages,” as Paul says. But Paul—and some of Jesus’ followers before him—had already seen the “first fruit” of the dead’s resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection immediately implied and, for them, entailed the coming general resurrection. Paul expected to see the risen Christ return in his own lifetime.56 Of all the followers of messianic figures, from antiquity and later, only those of Jesus of Nazareth (so far as I know) claimed that he had been raised from the dead. That itself is an index of the intensity of their expectation of a proximate End, which, in their tradition, was when such resurrections were supposed to happen. Jesus had not been raised to re-enter quotidian life: that sort of resurrection was the stock-in-trade of celebrity Mediterranean healers, Jesus included.57 Rather—at least, according to Paul—Jesus was raised in a 53  Copyists made (and make!) mistakes all the time. They introduced changes to texts deliberately, too. And the earliest Pauline MSS that we have go back only so far as the second century. For these reasons, the gematria argument seems to me particularly fragile. 54  Assuming that none of his ancient audience was a member of the SNTS. 55  Schweitzer championed a robust apocalyptic eschatology as the chief interpretative framing for both Jesus and Paul. Before him, no less insistent, Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971; orig. pub. Göttingen, 1892). 56  Fredriksen, Paul, 133–69. 57  See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 2:773–837, for an examination à la loupe of gospel stories about Jesus raising the dead. He includes consideration of pagan achievement in this same healing subspecialty, as related by Pliny the Elder,

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pneumatic body, similar to the one that he had had before his descent into a human modality (Phil 2:6); similar to the one into which the redeemed, whether living or dead, would be transformed (1 Cor 15:52).58 This conviction, linking Jesus’ resurrection to the coming eschaton, was the Big Bang that reconvened his community in Jerusalem. And this conviction, after their reassembly, propelled some of his followers to go back on the road, to fan out from Jerusalem to Judean coastal cities and ultimately to cities throughout the Mediterranean.59 Why? What were they saying? And to whom? According to my colleagues in the EHCC, reconstructing the message through Paul’s letters, these early apostles were proclaiming a new vision of redemption, replacing old biblical ideas like election and Torah with the new idea of faith in Jesus the messiah who, they realized, on the basis of his (pneumatic) resurrection, was “included within the identity of the God confessed in the Shema,” “constitutive of God’s unique identity,” “the god of Israel’s divine presence.”60 The chief import of Jesus’ resurrection, in this reckoning, was Jesus’ theological identity. The primary work of Jesus’ resurrection is to carry this Christological message. Jesus’ enthronement, in terms of the theological action of this message, seems like his final stop. “Eschatological,” when and if invoked, gestures toward “final” as in “absolute.” No timetable is implied. Indeed, absent a first-century Jewish interpretive context for Paul’s letters, the missing timetable is hardly noticeable. There are several problems, however, with the temporal open-endedness of this construal. It seems, first, to run head-on into one of the oldest problems of New Testament scholarship: Why was Jesus Christ? Being resurrected is certainly a special dignity, but it does not qualify the man so raised to be identified as a messiah. Yet “messiah” in its Greek form, christos, obviously attached very early to Jesus.61

Apuleius, Lucian (a somewhat arch account), and Philostratus, as well as other examples from Jewish scriptures. Matt 10:8 extends this prerogative to Jesus’ disciples; Acts 9:36–40 to Peter, Acts 20:7–12 to Paul (perhaps. Eutychus might be only mostly dead). The miracle becomes somewhat more routine in later apocryphal acts. 58  On which see M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed. Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 119–71; Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 129–60. 59  Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 74–107, from miracle to mission. 60  Bauckham, “Confessing the Cosmic Christ,” 141; Capes, “Jesus’s Unique Relationship with YHWH in Biblical Exegesis,” 88; Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 124. 61  Dahl’s classic essay “The Crucified Messiah” (in Jesus the Christ, 27–47) closes the gap between Jesus’ non-messianic mission and the messianic attribution with the crucifixion itself.

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Charismatic Galilean healer-prophets, however, lack two premier qualifications for the job: lineage and military prowess, both aligned with leadership.62 Evolving traditions early on filled in precisely these gaps in Jesus of Nazareth’s resumé. Already in Romans, Paul asserted Jesus’ Davidic descent and his military might. Davidic descent, of course, comes explicitly in Romans 1:3 and 15:12, which also hymns Jesus’ conquest of foreign nations: “he rises to rule [archein] the ethnê.” But Jesus’ role as a conquering warrior appears earlier elsewhere: in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 (a cry of command, sounding celestial trumpets, the archangel’s voice); lavishly, in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 (subjecting all things, including lower cosmic rulers and powers);63 in Philippians 2:10 (celestial, terrestrial and subterranean beings kneel). His warrior role is tied to his defeat of the gods of the nations;64 and in so doing, he will also bring about the End-time resurrection of the dead. So when is the end of time? When Christ returns in his public debut as warrior, descending from heaven once again. It is at that point that his alreadydesignated role as God’s son—that is, as the Davidic messiah—will be universally broadcast, undeniable: the dead, too, will be raised (Rom 1:4; cf. 1 Thess 4:16; 1 Cor 15:23, 35, 51; Phil 3:20–21, where the transformation of the believer’s body is tied explicitly to Christ’s reappearance in power, “to subject everything to himself”). But when does Christ return? Soon, says Paul. How soon? Paul expects the parousia within his own lifetime—at least, that is what he says. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” (1 Cor 15:51). “We” are awaiting the Lord’s parousia (Phil 3:20). “We who are alive, who are left” will be caught up with and to the transformed, resurrected dead (1 Thess 4:17). History, teaches Paul, is moving quickly toward its finale: the travails before the Kingdom are “impending,” the “appointed time has grown very short,” the form of the world “passing away,” and upon Paul and his community “the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor 7:26, 29, 31; 10:11: note the past completed action of the verb, katēntēken). 62  “Messianism” has many different variations, elements, and job descriptions, which show up in different combinations to cohere with different figures: the term’s attachment to the figure of Jesus in fact attests to its flexibility. See now Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 63  Even though “messiah” does not appear in these lines, it occurs four times in the lines immediately preceding. As Novenson concludes, “The Davidic messiahship of Jesus is not the point of 1 Cor 15:20–28, but it is axiomatic for the argument” (Christ Among the Messiahs [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 146). 64  In other words, the presence—and reality, and real power—of pagan gods is hardwired into Paul’s conviction that Jesus is the eschatological Christ: it is through his defeat of these gods that Jesus manifests specifically as a warrior. No final battle, no final Davidic messiah; no opponents, no battle.

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Time’s happy ending, the establishment of God’s kingdom through the agency of his dead, raised and returning messiah, is assured. Raised and returning. Soon. How soon? Within the lifetime of Paul and of his communities. How does Paul know? Because he is already witness to two End-time miracles: the resurrection of Jesus, and the nations’ rejection of their own gods. Gentiles, through Paul’s own agency (and the agency of pneuma) are turning from their idols and turning to the exclusive worship of the god of Israel—just as Isaiah had foreseen.65 The eschatological Judaization of the nations, through Christ’s or God’s pneuma, was already in process. The ends of the ages had already arrived. Redemption would wrap up as soon as the full number of the nations came “in” (Rom 11:25). Then all Israel, too, would be saved (11:26). The higher tier EHCC’s diminuendo of apocalyptic eschatology is of a piece with its haut divinization of Christ. It cuts in two this dynamic cycle of redemption, quietly dropping the second half. Christ comes down, dies, goes back up exalted, sits on his throne, and somehow merges his identity with that of the high god. It’s not quite the whole story, but it might as well be. But as we have just seen, Paul proclaims another whole cycle of coming down and going back up, and it is only at that point that Jesus’ messianic identity, already assigned and made known to a select group of insiders charged with spreading the word (1 Cor 15:5–8), is universally made known. Christ’s own resurrection had indicated how closely the general resurrection loomed— “Nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand” (Rom 13:11–12). Christ would reappear as an eschatological warrior, and it is that reappearance, not his own resurrection, that manifests him as christos, the “son of God in power” (Rom 1:4).66 He then transforms the dead, lifts the living, subdues the cosmos and establishes the kingdom, which he hands over to his father, God, to whom he himself—as we should expect in an ancient Mediterranean family—is subjected (1 Cor 15:24, 28). Μαρáνα θá! (1 Cor 16:22). The divine identities are quite distinct—as is Paul’s exigence.67 65  On the role of an eschatological understanding of Isaiah in Paul’s letter to Rome, see the rich study by J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 66  On reading Rom 1:4 not as Christ’s own resurrection from the dead but as “the resurrection of the dead”—which is what the Greek happens to say (ἐξ aναστάσεως νεκρῶν; cf. 1 Cor 15:12–21)—see Fredriksen, Paul, 141–45; cf. Augustine, Ep. Rom. inch. 5.11. 67  There is a work-around to Paul’s urgent eschatology. Paul claimed merely that Jesus was coming back—indeed, that Christ may return at any time—but Paul did not actually say when. This anxiety about the lag in Paul’s timekeeping also characterizes scholarly resistance to seeing Jesus as meaning something millenarian when he proclaims that the Kingdom at hand. (On this resistance, see esp. Dale Allison’s works on the historical Jesus.) But John the Baptizer’s timekeeping was also off. So was that of the Teacher of

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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?

Righteousness. And of Joachim of Fiore. And of Shabbatai Zvi. And of William Miller. I fail to see why this should be so unsettling. The Pope is the only one I know of whose job description includes a clause about infallibility.    The claim that Jesus may return “at any time” is indeed logically distinct from the claim that Jesus will return “soon.” That logical distinction has the virtue of leaving history with a lot more time on its hands—and conforms, happily, to the way that things did indeed work out. But Paul does say “soon.” He uses the past perfect tense when he speaks of the ends of the ages. He says “we,” “us,” and “we the living” when he speaks of those who will witness Christ’s return. The Thessalonians got their impression that no one of their assembly would die before the parousia from someone, and that someone was Paul. He did not correct or qualify that impression so much as reassure them that things were, after all, on track. Paul measures time between “now” and “soon.” I close on this topic with a thought from Krister Stendahl: “If the text says ‘now’ in year 56 of the Common Era, where does that leave you and me? It leaves us almost 2000 years later. No kerygmatic gamesmanship can overcome this simple fact” (Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], 23). 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 fall-out 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.

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I conclude with a statement of Dale Allison’s: “To do history is not to do theology.”69 What is the difference? Theology—even historically sensitive theology—ends by expressing the traditions of its author’s religious community. And that community lives in the present, while drawing on texts, Old Testament and New Testament, bequeathed by the past. Theology is a kind of time machine, updating these texts, retrieving them from intellectual obscurity and ethical irrelevance, rendering them meaningful to the contemporary church. (Or churches: Catholics will see something different in these texts than will Protestants, Ethiopian Copts from Greek Orthodox. Different churches have different doctrines, thus different traditions of interpretation—and thus, in this way, different Bibles.) But what a text meant cannot but be different from what it, within a current community, means.70 The Renaissance is the point of origin for this vital distinction, as well as for much else: modern science, the sun-centered solar system, critical historiography, commitment to primary languages, textual criticism. And, of course, for Protestantism. Within that highly charged intellectual climate, Protestant theology legitimated itself by appeal to the (then) “new” history, a shining new criterion of legitimacy and meaning. Luther, as far as Luther was concerned, was not simply defying the Pope. He was not constructing a new theology at all. He was simply recovering what Paul actually meant. And what Paul actually meant, Luther urged, was justification by faith alone, not by the works of the Law. New Testament “Jews” and their current Catholic proxies—as well as Luther’s Jewish contemporaries—were felled in one blow. Did Sanders’ 1977 masterwork undo this historicizing theology once for all? I wish. Criteria of theological legitimacy still seem pinned to this sort of historicism: a modern theological thought is somehow not legit unless Paul (or Jesus) himself had that very same theological thought. Therefore, the historical Jesus or Paul must have thought the same thought. This is the prime reason, I think, why so many Protestant New Testament historians keep discovering a first-century Protestant Paul.71

69  Allison, Constructing Jesus, 462. 70   On this distinction, the seminal essay by Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” IDB 1:418–32. 71  “Paul replaced election and law wholesale … and thereby made faith front and center” (Newman, “God and Glory and Paul, Again,” 135).

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Churches are trans-temporal communities, stretching from Jesus and Paul to now. Identity is contiguous thanks to the ligature of theology. Theology inscribes identity.72 History unsettles it. What Paul thought, reconstructed historically, will always line up more closely with what any other first-century person thought— even if that person were an Egyptian magical adept, a devotee of Cybele, a Roman senator, or the Jewish high priest—than with whatever Augustine thought, or what Luther thought, or what current theologians think. True, what Paul said about Jesus was, in its historical context, distinctive. So too, however, were the teachings about Sarapis, once his divinity manifested to his community in Alexandria. And Paul’s claims for Christ’s divinity, further, were indeed genuinely “new,” relative to claims that were made for, say, Augustus; but they were similar, also, in some ways, to claims that were made about Augustus.73 And Paul’s claims could be new only in a first-century way, not in a fourthcentury way, or in a sixteenth-century way, or in a twenty-first-century way. Theology refamiliarizes Paul’s letters. History defamiliarizes them—and should. This is because ancient people were not modern people, and they lived in a world utterly different from ours. We should mind the gap—and respect it. 72  This identity-confirming and conferring function of theology is equally true for Jewish and Muslim communities: in any community concerned with “orthodoxy,” the foundational past is the measure of authenticity and legitimacy. For this reason, as I have written elsewhere, that past is too important to be allowed to exist (“Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,” JTS 37 [1986]: 3–34, at 34). Rabbinic Judaism, aware of and celebrating its updating of scriptural halakot, falls more into the mold of What-Would-Maimonides-Do than What-Would-Moses-Do. The Roman Catholic magisterium also acknowledges developments in doctrine, though that church’s traumatized response to radical nineteenth-century European politics saddled the Pope, in 1870, with infallibility. 73  On which, toggling nicely between imperial and New Testament materials, Peppard, Son of God.

Index of Ancient Sources Hebrew Bible Genesis 1 158n64, 159, 160, 170, 171 1–3 113, 118 1:1 157, 158, 159, 165, 199, 207, 209n76 1:1–2 300 1:1–2:1 156–60, 170, 171 1:1–2:3 159 1:2 309 1:26 145n19, 157, 161, 304 1:27 157 1:28 155n56 2:1 159 2:7 217 3:20 56 3:22 286 5:24 56 6:2 300 6:4 300 8:21 308 10 293 14 94, 98 15:9–12 293 24:7 236n53 32:8 300 32:25 53, 54 32:29 54, 63 32:31 54 33:10 53 Exodus 3:4 73, 84 3:5 81 3:14 63, 270 12:12 299 13:1 LXX 161n67 14:10 55 16:7 110 16:10 110 22:27 52 23:20–22 72 23:20–21 70, 81 23:21 62, 84

24:7 113 24:16 111 24:17 110 24:18 70 28:36–38 70, 81, 83 30:5 286n126 32 100, 117–18 33:18 110 33:19 111 33:20 62 33:22 111 34:29–35 115–16 34:34 87 40:30–31 70, 81 40:34 111 40:35 111 Leviticus 9:6 110 9:23 110 24:16 64 25 94 Numbers 12:8 110 14:10 110 14:21 111 14:22 110 17:7 110 20:6 110 Deuteronomy 4:24 286 5:25 110 6:4 27, 75, 140 12:5 63 12:11 63 26:19 162 28:1 162 32 50, 51 32:8–9 50 32:17 52 32:39 286n126 33 114n38 33:2 39

322

Index of Ancient Sources 5:13–14 164 5:14 111 7:1–2 164 7:1 111 7:2 111 7:3 111 36:21 155n55

Joshua 24:30 244n84 Judges 5 114n38 5:4–5 39 13:17–18 63 1 Samuel 4:21 112 4:22 112 1 Kgdms LXX 14:41 244n84 23:10 244n84 26:19 244n84 2 Samuel 7:14

87, 201n52

2 Kgdms LXX 7:5–25:27 244n84 1 Kings 1:14 155n55 2:27 155n55 8:10–11 164 8:11 111, 118n44 8:16 63 8:43 63 18:24 39 3 Kgdms LXX 3:37 244n84 8:23–30 244n84 2 Kings 21:7 40 23:6–7 40 4 Kgdms LXX 18:12 244n84 1 Chronicles 29:11 146n22 2 Chronicles 5:13 111

Ezra 5:11 43 5:12 43 6:9 43 6:10 43 7:12 43 7:21 43 7:23 43 Nehemiah 1:4 43 2:4 43 2:20 43 9:6 166 Esther 13:9 146n22 13:11 146n22 14:19 146n22 16:18 146n22 16:21 146n22 Esther LXX 4:17b 146n22 4:17c 146n22 4:17z 146n22 8:12r 146n22 8:12t 146n22 Job

28:20–28 249 38:6–7 50

Psalms 2:7 201n52 6 151 7 154 7:8–9 95 12 151 13 154

Index of Ancient Sources 17 154 17:7 LXX 184n44 17:15 110 18:3 20n41 18:49 87 20 151–156 20:4 155, 155n55 20:5 155, 155n55 23 154, 155, 156 23:5 155 24:1 87 26 154 26:8 111, 154 26:9 LXX 244n84 28 114 28:3–9 152 29 151 29:1 50 29:3 114 32:1–2 87 33:6 204, 206 35:2 107n26 40:1–12 151, 151n36 40:5 59 42–43 154, 154n48 45:16 290 48 151 57:6 111 57:12 111 58 154 59 154 60 151, 154, 155 62 154, 155 63 154, 155 63:3 110, 154 65 151 67:17 LXX 164, 164n78, 171 67:19 LXX 165 68 114n38 68:16 164–65, 164n77, 171 70 154 72:19 111 73 151 77 154n49 78 154 78:10 LXX 244n84 79 151 79:5 LXX 244n84

323 80:18 20n41 82:1 94 82:1, 6 95 82:2 300 82:6 (81:6 LXX) 212 83 (82 LXX) 202, 220 84 152 84:8 152 85:2 LXX 244n84 85:9 111 86:5, 7 20n41 86:8 95 88:4–21 LXX 244n84 89 171 89:3–4 154n50 89:7 50 89:19–37 154, 154n50, 155 89:25 163 89:26 162n71, 165 89:26–27 201n52 89:27 160–163, 162, 163 89:28–37 155 89:37 162n69 91 151 92 152 92:8 152 93:11 237 94:11 87 96:5 (95:5 LXX) 52, 300 96:6 110 98:7 300 99 152 99:6 20n41 102:1 110 103:5 155 104:26–42 LXX 244n84 104:31 107n26, 154, 155 105:1 20n41 106:18–20 117 106:37 52 108:6 111 109 152 110 94, 171 113:4 111, 154 116:13, 17 20n41 117:1 87 118 152, 154 119:89 (118:89 LXX) 205

324 Psalms (cont.) 119:105 (118:105 LXX) 205 121 151 122 152 124:8 63, 68n21 132:13–14 164n77 136:26 43 138:5 107n26, 152 146:5–6 237 148 152 150 152, 154, 155 Proverbs 8:22 157, 158, 158n62–64, 161, 208 8:22–25 161 8:22–31 204, 249 8:23 204, 208 8:27 205 8:30 204, 205, 208 9 249 14:21 176n16 Isaiah 1:9 87 5:9 LXX 184n44 6:1 111, 164 6:3 66, 111 12:4 20n41 24:23 114 26:10 110 28:22 87 34:27–33 63 35:2 110, 114 40:3 87 40:3–5 87 40:5 63, 110, 115 40:13 87 42 124n62 42:8 123n58, 124n62 42:19 244n84 43:10 290 44:6 76, 290 44:24 145n19, 146n22 45 92, 98 45:7 286n126 45:13 92 45:22–23 163

Index of Ancient Sources 45:23 87 45:23–24 74 48:11 LXX 123n58 48:12 76 48:20 244n84 49 127n72 49:1–2 67 49:3 127n72 49:3–5 244n84 52:6 63, 68, 77 52:11 87 55:10–11 204 60:1 111 60:1–3 46 60:2 110 61 94 61:1–2 93 61:2 93, 94, 95 62:1 95 66:18 110 66:19 110 Jeremiah 2:11 117 7:10–11 63 7:14 63 7:25 244n84 7:30 63 9:23–24 87 10:16 146n22 13:11 120n50 14:22 59 18:15 59 26:27 244n84 29:12 20n41 31:31–32 292 49:3 299 51:19 (28:19 LXX) 146n22 Ezekiel 1 69, 126 1:26–28 67, 70, 81 1:28 113 3:23 110 8:4 111 8:16 47 9:1–11 76 9:3 111, 112

325

Index of Ancient Sources 10:4 112, 164 10:4b 111 10:18 111, 112 10:19 111, 112 11:22 111, 112 11:23 111, 112 43:2 111 43:4 111 43:5 111, 164 44:4 111, 164 Daniel 2:18 43 2:19 43 2:37 43 2:44 43 3:35 244n84 5:23 43 7 66, 67, 69, 126, 203, 220 7:5 54 7:9 65, 71, 239 7:13 LXX 203, 211 9:27 42 9:28 55 10–12 51 10 53 10:13 53 10:20 51, 53 10:21 51 11:31 42 12:1 51 12:11 42 Hosea 2:16 39 5 92 5:14 92 10:5 LXX 112 Joel 2:32

20, 79, 87

Amos 3:7 244n84 Jonah 1:9 244n84

Habakkuk 1 98 1:13 89 2:2 89 2:4 89 2:14 111 3 114n38 3:3 39 3:5 LXX 204 Zephaniah 3:9 20n41 Zechariah 14:5 87 Malachi 3:20 46 New Testament Matthew 3, 228 1:23 79n56 3:3 87 5:3 181n36 5:23–24 307 5:37 237n59 6:9 78 10:8 313–314n57 11:25–27 253n21 18:5 79 18:20 79 25:34, 40 229n31 28:17 78 28:19 67n19, 78, 80 28:20 79n56 Mark 3, 6, 27, 28 1:1–3 87 1:11 28n74 1:15 185n48 2:10 202 2:18 202 4:41 163 8:31 202 9:12b 202 9:31 202

326 Mark (cont.) 10:45 202 13:26 202 13:29 185n48 13:35 185n48 14:61–62 202 Luke 3 1:50 236n56 2:29 244n85 3:4 87 4:16–22 93n16 6:20 181n36 7:6 309n42 7:33–4 202 9:58 202 10:21–22 253n21 11:29–30 202 12:8 202, 214 17:22 202 17:24 202 17:26 202 17:30 202 18:2 236n56 22:30 202 23:40 236n56 John 3, 7 1:1 209 1:1c 195, 209 1:1–2 189, 209 1:1–14 77 1:3 145, 159, 208, 209 1:9–11 208 1:10 145, 208 1:10–11 207 1:10f 205 1:11 208 1:12 77 1:14 164, 208, 209, 210, 211 1:14a 195 1:14b 205, 211 1:15 211 1:17 199 1:18 189, 198, 199, 208, 209, 210, 219 1:19 199

Index of Ancient Sources 1:19–20:30 211 1:23 87 1:26–27 200n49, 211 1:29 200n49 1:30 211 1:31­–33 200 1:32f 217 1:34 200n49 1:36 200n49 1:41 200, 203, 208, 211 1:45 189, 198, 200, 211 1:49 200, 211 1:51 200n49, 203, 208, 211 2:10 77 2:20–21 212 2:22 212 3:13 203, 219 3:14 203 3:16 201, 214 3:16–17 201 3:18 77, 201, 219 3:34 207, 211, 217 3:35 201, 202, 214, 219 4:19 201 4:25 200 5:18 212 5:20 202 5:21–22 202 5:22–23 211 5:25 219 5:26–27 211 5:27 203, 211, 220 5:43 76 6:12 203 6:14–15 200 7:27 200 7:31 200 7:40 201 7:40–44 200 7:52 200, 201 8:12 219 8:16 219 8:28 203 9:17 200, 201 9:22 193, 212 9:24 212 9:34 212

Index of Ancient Sources 10:7 279n86 10:17 202 10:25 76 10:30 189, 202, 219 10:34–36 212 10:36 202 10:38 202 10:41 200 11:27 201 12:12–15 213 12:16 212 12:20–22 200 12:23 77, 203 12:28 77 12:32–34 203 12:34 200, 202, 203 12:42 193 13:31–32 203 14:9 202 14:10–11 76 14:11 202 14:16 216–17 14:16–17 217, 220 14:18 216 14:21 220 14:26 215, 217–18 14:28 219 15:9 202 15:26 217, 218 16:2 193 16:7–11 217 16:13–15 215, 217 16:14–15 218 17:3 197 17:6 77 17:11 77 17:23–24 202 17:24 77, 197, 214, 219 17:26 202 19:7 202, 212 19:30 213, 259n43 20:17 201 20:22 211, 220 20:22­–23 217 20:28 189, 211 20:31 201 21:11 148n28 21:25 211

327 Acts 1–10 79 1:8 79 1:15 148n28 2:14–36 79 2:17–21 62n3 2:21 79 2:22–35 87 2:36 79 2:38 62n3, 79, 80 2:43 236n56 3:6 79 3:16 79 3:20 124n63 4:1–3 79 4:17–18 79 4:24 243n81 4:29 243n79, 244n85 4:30 79 5:17–21 79 5:27–42 79 5:28 79 7:55–56 127n73 7:56 202 8:12 79 8:16 80 9 127n73 9:1–5 264n6 9:14 62n3, 79 9:21 79 9:31 236n56 9:36–40 313–314n57 10:2, 22 236n56 10:48 80 12:23 104n19, 105n21 16:17 244n85 17 49 17:1 77 17:5 77 17:22–23 49 17:38 42 19:5 80 20:7–12 313–314n57 20:19 243n79 20:31 77 21 308 22 127n73 22:4–16 264n6

328 Acts (cont.) 22:16 62n3, 79 24:25 236n56 26 127n73 26:9 79 26:9–18 264n6 26:23 160 27:37 148n28 Romans 1 118 1:1 242 1:3 120, 315 1:3–4 215, 293 1:4 315, 316, 316n66 1:16–32 265n12 1:21 105 1:23 107, 115, 117, 118, 131 3 118 3:7 104 3:23 107, 115, 118, 131 4:2–16 265n10 4:7–8 87 4:16 266n15 4:20 105 5 118 5:2 107, 108, 115, 118, 131 5:8 118 5:12–21 113, 113n35 6 118 6:4 107, 108, 108n28, 115, 118, 124, 131 6–7 82 7:6 242 8 118 8:2 215 8:3 201 8:6 215 8:9 215, 216 8:10 215 8:11 215 8:14 215 8:15 216 8:16 215 8:17–18 131 8:18 118 8:21 130 8:26 215

Index of Ancient Sources 8:27 215 8:28 130 8:28–30 265n10 8:29 161n68 8:33 265n10 8:34 215 8:38 298n14 8:38–39 293 9 119 9:4–5 119–21, 127n74, 307 9:5 307 9:23 107, 115, 119 9:27, 29 87 10:9–13 20, 62n3 10:13 87, 88, 97, 293–294 11:5–6 265n10 11:13 17, 102 11:25 316 11:25–26 293 11:26 316 11:33 266n17 11:34 87 11:36 105, 144–46 12:1 307 12:11 243n79 13:11–12 316 14:1 74 14:9 160 14:11 87 14:18 242 15:6 105 15:7 106, 107n26, 107, 108, 115, 119 15:7–13 265n9 15:9 87, 105 15:11 87 15:12 315 15:14 266n17 15:17 104 15:19 216 16:7 18n32 16:18 242, 243n79 16:27 105, 106 1 Corinthians 1:2 20, 62n3, 88, 97 1:31 87 2:1–16 125

329

Index of Ancient Sources 2:7 104 2:8 125, 127n74, 177n22, 298n14 2:10 215 2:13 215 2:16 87 3:20 87 4:10 102 5:5 97 6:19 216 6:20 105 7:22 242 7:26 315 7:29 315 7:31 315 8 7 8:4–5 136 8:4–6 19, 25, 26, 27n71 8:5 298n14, 52 8:6 27, 75, 136, 139–47, 144, 147, 156, 165, 169, 181, 293 9:1 126 10:11 315 10:14–22 25 10:20 52, 300 10:20–21 298n14 10:26 87 10:31 104 11:12 145 11:14–15 102 12:6 215 12:11 215 14:15 168 15:1–11 18 15:3–8 120n52, 126 15:5–8 316 15:9 294 15:12–21 316n66 15:20 160, 293 15:20–28 293, 315n63 15:22 113 15:23 315 15:24 316 15:24–27 298n14 15:24–28 315 15:28 293, 316 15:35 315

15:39–42 297n11 15:40–43 101n10 15:42–43 124 15:45–50 113 15:47 293 15:51 315 15:52 314 16:22 306, 316 2 Corinthians 1:12 265n10 1:14 97 1:22 216 3–4 119n45 3:4–4:16 123–24 3:7–11 115–16, 116 3:7 116 3:8 116 3:9 116 3:11 116 3:15 137 3:16 87, 123, 137 3:17 123, 216 3:18 123, 131, 137, 138, 216 4:4 123, 124, 298n14 4:5 123, 242 4:6 107, 108, 115, 123, 124, 137 4:15 104 5:5 216 5:19 150n32 6:4–11 102 6:17–18 87 9:13 105 10:17 87 11:23–26 308 11:26 294 12:1–4 264n6 12:10 308 13:11 266n15 Galatians 1:1 265n8 1:5 105 1:6 136 1:11–12 264n6 1:13 294 1:15 127n72

330 Galatians (cont.) 1:15–16 127, 127n72, 265n8 1:16 127n72 1:19 242 1:23 294 1:24 105 2 18 2:11–16 18 2:12 308 2:22 215 3:16–18 19 3:29 265n10 4:4 201, 215 4:6 216 4:6 215 4:8–9 298n14 4:23 265n11 5:1 215 Ephesians 1:3–6 265n10 1:12 107n26 1:14 107n26 1:17 108n28 1:21 74, 166, 166n81 2:11–13 286 2:14–22 266n16 2:15–16 136n95 3:3 266n17 3:4 266n15 3:6 265n10 3:10 298n14 3:21 105n20 4:8 165 5:19 156 6:6–7 242 6:12 285, 298n14 Philippians 1:1 242 1:11 104, 106 1:19 216 2 210 2:6 293, 314 2:6–11 24, 168, 210, 266n14, 293 2:9 62n3 2:9–11 21, 74, 97, 98, 163, 195

Index of Ancient Sources 2:10 166, 298n14, 315 2:10–11 87, 306 2:11 104, 106 2:12 236n56 3:1–19 130 3:6 294 3:8 264n7 3:19 176n25 3:20 315 3:20–21 130, 315 4:18–20 308 4:20 105 Colossians 1 7 1:6 266n15 1:7 242 1:9 168 1:11 124n63 1:15–20 139, 142, 145, 147–68, 169 1:15 148, 160 1:16 150n32, 157n60, 158, 159, 160, 161, 161n68, 165, 166 1:17 148, 150 1:18 148, 150, 162, 161n68, 163 1:19 148, 150n32, 165 1:19a 163 1:20 148n26, 150n32 1:21–3:17 167 1:22 167 1:23 167 1:24 167 1:27 131n82 2:9 167 2:10 167 2:15 167 2:19 167 2:21–3:17 167 3:10 157n61, 167 3:11 167 3:12 265n10 3:15 167 3:16 156, 166, 167, 168, 171 3:24 242 4:12 242 4:15–16 266n14

Index of Ancient Sources 1 Thessalonians 1:9 136, 229, 242 1:9–10 19 1:10 165 2:8 102 2:12 107, 108, 115, 129–30 3:13 87 4:8 216 4:13–18 19, 293 4:16 315 4:17 315 5:2 97 1 Timothy 1:17 105n20 3:16 210 2 Timothy 2:22 62n3 4:18 105n20 Titus 1:1 244n85 Hebrews 1:2 145 1:3 68n21, 78, 124n61, 157 1:4 62n3, 69n24, 78 1:6 162n69 1:10–12 88 2:7–9 124n63 2:10 145 8:8–9 292n152 12:28–29 236n56 13:21 105n20, 106n24 James 7, 172–188 1:1 242, 173, 177n18, 178n26, 179n28, 181 1:2–3 179 1:3 177n18, 179n28 1:5–8 178–179 1:6 177n18, 179 1:7 178n26, 186 1:12 179n28, 187n53 1:13 179–180

331 1:13–18 177n19 1:17 178, 180, 181 1:18 180, 181n33 1:19–27 180 1:20 180–181 1:21 181n33 1:25 181n33 1:27 180, 181, 182, 182n39, 183 2:1 173, 175, 177, 178, 179n28, 181n35, 186 2:1–7 176, 178 2:1–3:12 182 2:1–5:6 175 2:2 183 2:2–4 182n39 2:4 177n17 2:5 176, 177n17, 178, 181, 187n53 2:6 176n16, 177n17, 181n35, 182n39 2:7 78, 172n4, 177n17, 178, 183 2:8–9 182n39 2:14–20 182 2:14–26 181 2:15­–16 182n39 2:19 182 2:20 182 2:23 182 2:26 182n37 3:1ff. 174 3:3 184 3:5 184 3:9 178n26, 180, 181, 182, 186 3:10 182n41 3:13 183, 184 3:13–18 183 3:14 184 3:17 184 3:18 183 4:1 183 4:1–4 182n39 4:4–10 183, 184 4:6 187n53 4:10 178n26, 186, 187n53 4:11 182n39

332

Index of Ancient Sources

James (cont.) 4:14 184n43 4:15 178n26, 184, 186 4:16 184 5:4 178n26, 184, 186 5:7 178n26, 185, 186 5:7–8 185 5:7–9 185 5:8 178n26 5:9 185n47 5:10 178n26, 186 5:10–11 185 5:11 178n26, 187 5:12 237n59 5:13 172n4, 183 5:13–16 182n39, 183 5:14 172n4, 178n26, 183, 185n46, 186 5:14–15 186 5:15 178n26, 183, 185n46, 186 5:16 183 5:17 185n50 1 Peter 1:7 104n19, 105n21, 106n24 1:11 132n84 1:21 124n63 2:16 244n85 2:19 136n95 3:2 236n56 3:10–12 88 4:11 105n20–21, 106n24 4:13 131n82 5:1 132n84 2 Peter 1:1 242 1:3 132n86 1:5–9 132n86 3:18 105n20, 106n22–24 1 John 2:1 4:9–10 5:12–13 5:20

216 201, 214 201 189, 197

3 John 7 77 Jude 1 242 24 118n44 25 105n20, 106n22–24 Revelation 14 1:1 242, 244n85 1:5 160, 161, 162, 162n69, 229n31 1:6 105n20, 106n24 1:8 76 1:10 234 1:14 239 1:17 76 2:20 244n85 3:12 67n19, 76 4–5 71n29 4:7 105n21 4:9 104n19, 105n21 5:13 105n20, 106n24 7:2–3 76 7:2 76 7:3 244n85 7:12 105n20, 106n24 10:7 244n85 11:13 104n19, 105n21 11:18 244n85 13:18 148n28 14:1 67n19, 75, 76 14:4 234 14:7 104n19, 236n56 15:3 244n85 16:9 104n19 17:14 229n31 19:1 105n20 19:2–5 244n85 19:6 229n31 19:7 104n19, 105n21 19:11–16 75 19:12 75, 80 21:6 76 21:17 148n28 22:3–6 244n85 22:4 75, 76 22:13 76

333

Index of Ancient Sources Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha Apocalypse of Abraham 98n30 7:10 146n22 10:3 70, 98n30 10:7–8 98n30 10:8 70 11:1–2 70 11:2–3 70 11:3 70 17:1–7 98n30 18:13 71n29 19:1 71n29 20:1 71n29 Apocalypse of Moses (=Life of Adam and Eve) 12:1 113n35 21:2 113n35 21:6 113n35 39:2 113n35 Baruch 4:2 205 4:16 113n35 2 Baruch 54:13 113n35 Ben Sira 1:4 161 1:9 161 18:1 146n22 18:3 146n22 23:20 146n22 24 210 24:1–6 249 24:3 205, 208 24:4 205, 209 24:8 146n22, 205, 209 24:9 205, 208 24:10 205 24:12 205 36:19 164 42:21 145n19 43:33 146n22 50:1–21 81 50:5–7 81

50:17 81 50:21 81 1 Enoch 9:5 146n22 14:16 125n65 14:20 125n65 22:14 125n65 25:3 125n65 25:7 125n65 27:3 125n65 27:5 125n65 36:4 125n65 37–71 65, 97n29 38:2 66n14 39:7 66n14 39:9 66n14 39:14 66n14 40:1 125n65 40:3 125n65 40:4 66n14 40:6 66n14 41:2 66n14 41:7 125n65 41:8 66n14 43:4 66n14 45:1 66n14 45:1–3 125n66 45:2 66n14 45:3 66n14, 125n65 46:1 67 46:1–3 66 46:4–5 97n29 46:7 66n14 47:2 66n14 47:2c 66 48 67 48:2–3 19, 67 48:5 67 48:7 66n14 48:10 66n14 50:2 66n14 50:3 66, 66n14 53:6 66n14 55:3–4 125n66 55:4 66n14 61:3 66n14 61:8 125n66

334 1 Enoch (cont.) 61:9 66n14, 97n29 61:11 66n14 61:13 66n14 62:6 97n29 62:7 19 62:29 125n66 63:2 125n65 63:7 66n14 65:12 125n65 67:8 66, 66n14 69 68 69:13–25 69 69:14–15 67n18 69:14 68 69:16–26 67n18 69:16–25 68 69:26–29 66 69:26 68, 69 70:1–2 69 71 69 81:3 125n65 83:8 125n65 84:3 146n22 89:44–45 113n35 91:13 125n65 102:3 125n65 105:2 201n52 2 Enoch 33:4 147n20 3 Enoch 12:5 72 13:1 68n21, 72 4 Ezra 3:4 145n19 7:28–29 201n52, 203 13 203 13:32 201n52, 203 13:37 201n52, 203 13:37–28 203 13:52 201n52, 203 14:9 201n52 Jubilees 2:31 146n22

Index of Ancient Sources 11:17 146n22 12:4 146n22 12:19 146n22 17:3 146n22 22:4 146n22 27 146n22 36:7 63, 68n21 Letter of Aristeas 15–16 41 16 146n22 Life of Adam and Eve (=Apocalypse of Moses) 12:1 113n35 21:2 113n35 21:6 113n35 39:2 113n35 1 Maccabees 7:35 46n28 2 Maccabees 1:24 146n22 6:1–6 60 6:1–2 42 6:7 45 7:23 146n22 14:33 46n28 3 Maccabees 2:3 146n22 5:28 146n22 4 Maccabees 11:5 146n22 Prayer of Manasseh 2 63 2–3 68n21 5 118n44 Sibylline Oracles 3:20 146n22 3:42 146n22 5:277 146n22 5:499 146n22

335

Index of Ancient Sources Testament of Abraham 11:8–9 113n35 Wisdom of Solomon 8 1:14 146n22 2:23 250 5:13 146n22 6:7 146n22 7:22 208 7:23 204, 208 7:26 158n63 8:3 146n22 8:13 205 9:1 146n22 9:1–2 204, 209 9:4 204, 208 9:9 161 9:10 205 11:24 146n22 12:16 146n22 15:1 146n22 16:12 204 18:14–16 73 18:15 204 Dead Sea Scrolls CD, Cairo Damascus Document 3.20 113n35 15.1–4 64 1QapGen, Genesis Apocryphon 20.13 146n22 1QH, Hodayot 8.16 146n22 17.15 113n35 1QIsaa, Great Isaiah Scroll 64 1QpHab, Pesher Habakkuk 5.8–12 89–90 7.1–2 89 7.4–5 89 8.1–3 88–91, 96 8.1–8 91

1QS, Community Rule 4.23 113n35 6.27–7.2 64 4Q41, 4QDeuteronomy

50

4Q167, Pesher Hosea b frag. 2, 2–3

92–93 92

4Q171, 4QPsalms a 113n35 4Q174, Midrash on Eschatology a 3.10–12 201n52 4Q405, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice 20.2 121n56 4Q504, Words of the Luminaries frag. 8 recto 113n35 11Q13, 11QMelchizedek 19n36, 93–96 2.9 93, 95 2.10 94 2.10–11 95 2.13 95 2.14 95 2.18–20 94 Flavius Josephus Antiquities 2.275–276 64 10.263 146n22 12.2 41 20.200 308n39 Apion 2.18 288n134 2.192 145n19 2.294 146n22 War 2.128 46 5.210–211 44 5.218 146n22 Philo of Alexandria De Abrahamo 88 De aeternitate mundi 46

254n25 297

336 De agricultura 51 72, 161 De cherubim 125–127 27 127 205 De confusione linguarum 2–15 251n11 146 73, 157, 159, 161, 205 147 161 149 250n5 170 146n22 186 250n4 Quod deterius potiori insidari soleat 54 205 Quod Deus sit immutabilis 23 287n128 53–56 287n128 143 72n36 De ebrietate 30–31 161 30–32 205 31 158m62, 205 De fuga et inventione 63 72n36 101 72, 157 108–9 209 110 205 Quis rerum divinarum heres sit 88 205 117–119 161n67 191 205 Legum allegoriae 1.26 287n128 1.43 157, 158, 159 1.65 205 3.56 287n128 3.72 287n128 3.96 157 3.175 205 De migratione Abrahami 181 250n4 De vita Mosis 1.112 250n4 1.158 298 2.114–115 64 2.194 251n9 De mutatione nominum 22 250n4 54 287n128

Index of Ancient Sources De opificio mundi 1–2 251 7.27 297 16 254 23 145n19 28 146n22 37 251 56 146n22 72–75 145n19 75 146n22 154 250n5 157 251 170 251 De plantatione 9 250n4 19–20 157 70 287n128 De posteritate Caini 14 270n38 Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesin 1.16 250n5 2.62 72n38, 297 4.57 251n9 De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 9–10 298 95–96 287n128 De somniis 1.62 72n38 1.68–69 72n36 1.86 72n36 1.125 161 1.228–230 72n38 2.189 298 2.242–245 205 De specialibus legibus 1.13–14 297 1.20 146n22 1.53 52 1.81 157 1.171 157 3.83 157 3.169–178 72n36 De virtutibus 61–63 205 Other Judaica Aristobulus frag. 2

146n22

337

Index of Ancient Sources

Babylonian Talmud Yoma 77a 54

Gospel of the Egyptians (Great Invisible Spirit) 40.12–41.7 253n17 56.22–25 256 58.25–59.9 256

Babylonian Talmud Zebahim 116b 49

Gospel of Philip 54.5–8 78

Exodus Rabbah 21.5 55

Gospel of Thomas

Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 43a 56

Ezekiel the Tragedian Exāgōge 96–99 73 Genesis Rabbah 77.3 54 Mishnah Avodah Zarah 3:3 56 Sefer ha-Razim 4.61–63

306

Targum Neofiti Gen 1:3, 5, 6

206

Tosefta Soṭah 13:8 63 Nag Hammadi Allogenes

258, 284

Apocryphon of John 254n26, 255nn29– 30, 257, 275 2.34–4.10 275n72 2.34–9.11 278n79 4.10–26 278n82 BG 37.11 255n29 BG 52.8–11 256 NHC II 9.25–35 255n29 NHC II 20.3–4 256 NHC III 15.3 255n29 Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth 284

14n20, 126

Gospel of Truth 18.11–19.17 254 19.17–33 253n21 38.7–24 78 Marsanes

258

Nature of the Rulers (Hypostasis of the Archons) 257 95.13–96.1 257 Origin of the World 103.32–105.20 104.3–10 112.25–114.4 114.17–24 125.32–126.35 127.7–17

257 257 257 257 257 253n16 253n16

Steles of Seth

258

Three Forms 39.15–40.4 50.12–15

257n34 256

Tripartite Tractate 51.7–57.8 57.33–58.18 75.13 76.33 82.12 104.18–30 104.30–105.35 128.24–30

104, 275, 284 276n73 262 251n10 251n10 251n10 261n49 262n52 259n43

Valentinian Exposition 23–25 25–28

262 251n10

338

Index of Ancient Sources

Valentinian Exposition (cont.) 31.1–36.18 262n55 39.28–39 262

Acts of Lucius and Montanus 6.4–5 225n9 19.5 232n43

Zostrianos 258 8.1 284 9.16–10.5 262n54

Acts of Marianus and James 7.3, 6 239

Other Christiana

Acts of Paul 12.3, 4

243n79

Acts of Andrew 1 243n81

Acts of Peter 30 242n76 41 242n76

Acts of Crispina 1.7 232n43 2.3 232n43

Acts of Phileas 3.4 232n43 6 232n43

Acts of Cyprian 1.2 232n43

Acts of Pionius 8.3 232n43 9.6 232n43 16.3 232n43 19.8, 11 232n43

Acts of Dasius 7.2

232n43

Acts of Euplus 2.5–6 232n43 Acts of Fructuosus 2.3–4 232n43 7.2 225n9 Acts of John 11 243n81 37 243n79 43 242n76 45 242n76 51 243n79 75 242n76 108 243n79 Acts of Julius 2.3 232n43 Acts of Justin 231–233 2.3 231 2.5–7 232 3 233

Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 234–236 3 245 6 235 8 236n53 9 236 10 236 12 247 13 236 17 236 Aristides Apology 1 288n137 2 136n95 16 136n95 Ascension of Isaiah 4:14 80 7:2–4 80 8:7 80 9:5 80 10:7 80 10:14 80

339

Index of Ancient Sources Athenagoras Legatio pro Christianis 10.5 13.2

288n138 288n138

Augustine De civitate Dei 8.2 271n44 9.23 53, 298 De consensu evangelistarum 1.22.30 40 Epistulae 29.1­–2 224n5 118.4 271n43 Contra Faustum 20.3–4 305n30 Contra Fortunatum 22 311n49 Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio 5.11 316n66 Chronicon Paschale

231

1 Clement 20.12 105n20, 106n24 27.7 132n86 32.4 105n20–21, 106n24 38.4 105n20, 106n24 43.1 247 43.6 105n20, 106n24 43.7 106n24 45.7 105n20, 242n76 50.7 105n20, 106n24 53.1 247 56.3 247 58.2 105n20–21, 106n22–24 59.2 132n86 59.8 68n21 60.2 242n76 61.3 105n20, 106n22–24 65.2 106n24 2 Clement 17.7 20.5

104n19, 105n21 105n20, 106n24

Clement of Alexandria Excerpta ex Theodoto 22.4 83 22.6–7 83 26.1 83 27.1–5 83 86.2 83 Stromata 2.14.2 271n41 4.8.65.2 242n76 5.38.6–7 83 6.5 291n151 6.5.41 136n95 7.1 288n139 7.3.20.4 296n10 Pseudo-Clementina Recognitions 1.5 282n100 2.42 51 Cyprian Epistles 77.2.1 224 Dialogue of Adamantius 84.10 84.20 86.7–8 88.18–27 90.19 90.24 90.29 92.5–10 92.21 92.23 94.1 98.1–2 98.5 98.7 104.6 178.16 240.7

286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118 286n118

Didache 8.2 9.2

105n20–21, 106n24 105n20, 106n24

340

Index of Ancient Sources

Didache (cont.) 9.3 105n20 9.4 105n21 10.1 79 10.2 105n20, 106n24 10.4 105n20, 106n24 10.5 105n20–21, 106n24 Epiphanius Panarion 42.7.3–6 42.12.3

286n122 286n120

Epistle of Barbanas 1:9 125n65 11:5 132n86 Epistle to Diognetus 1.1 136n95, 292n153 8.7 243n81 12.9 105n20, 106n24 Ephrem Hymns against Heresies 34–36 Prose Refutations 1.44.20–49.3

286n118 286n118

Eusebius Historia ecclesiastica 7.11.3–11 224n4 7.11.8 232 8.2.4 247 Praeparatio evangelica 9.17 56 9.27.3–6 57 13.12 42 Firmicus Maternus De errore profanarum religionum 13.2 56 Hippolytus Refutatio 5.9.11–13 5.17–19 5.19.14–19 6.32.5

277n78 278n85 278n83 259n41

Ignatius Ephesians 2.2 106n22 3.2 90 5.1–3 90 6.1 91 Magnesians 2 242n76 6.1 91 Polycarp 8.2 106n22 Smyrneans 1.1 106n22 Trallians 3.1 91 Irenaeus Adversus Haereses 1.1 263n1 1.2.2 259 1.2.2–3 259n41 1.2.4–5 259 1.4.1 259n41 1.4.5–5.5 259 1.5.4 259–260n44 1.14.1 278n80 1.21.3 259n43 1.27.1 285n114 1.29 255n30 1.30.3 255n29 1.30.5 278n84 2.1.1 286n122 2.1.2 287n130 2.30.9 285n114 3.12.12 285n114 3.25.2–5 285n115 4.2.2 285n114 4.33.2 286n118 4.5.1 290n147 4.5.2 291n148 4.5.2–5 291n149 4.5.3 291n150 4.8.1 286n122 4.20.1 290n145 4.20.4 290n146 5.4.1 285n115 frg. 25 243n81

341

Index of Ancient Sources Justin Martyr 1 Apology 8 264n5 26 286n125 26.5 286n124 40 243n79 49 292n155 58 286n125 60 297–298n13 61 78 63 297–298n13 2 Apology 2 230 6 264n5 11–12 230 13 230 13.4 233 17–18 230 18 231 Dialogue with Trypho 1.4 288n136 48.1 237n60 54–65 124n62 56 264n5 59.1 297 61.1 297n13 75 84 127 264n5 Lactantius Institutiones divinae 1.5.18 1.7

271n44 297n12

Letter of Lyons and Vienne 224, 233–234 1.3 242n76 1.5, 6 225n9 1.10 241 1.19 234 1.20 234 1.23 242 1.26 234 1.30 241 1.31 234 1.39 234 1.41 225 1.50 234 1.52 234

1.60 234 2.2 241 Martyrdom of Agape, Eirene, and Chione 4.2 247 5.2 232n43 Martyrdom of Apollonius 236–238 2 232n43, 237 6 237 8 237 9 237 15 237 25 238 27 238 36–37 238 43 238 44 238 Martyrdom of Polycarp 224–230 1 228 1.1 227, 228, 229 2 228 3.1 225n9 4 226 9.1 228 9.2 229 9.3 229 10.1 229, 230 14 227, 230 14.1 229 17 241, 242 19.1 227 20.2 105n20–21, 106n24 21.2 105n20, 106n24 22.1 105n20 22.3 106n22–24 Odes of Solomon 8:19 82 8:22 82 23:22 82 39:7–8 82 42:20 82 Origen Contra Celsum 5.2–8

298

342 Origen (cont.) 6.19 6.52–53 6.53 7.3.20 7.68 8.21 Commentary on Romans II.10,18

Index of Ancient Sources 276n75, 276n77 286n118 286n117, 286n123 297 296n10 287n127 298

Passion of Perpetua 224, 238–240 3.2 238 6–10 239 10.8 239 10.13 240 10.14 225n9 12.3 240 15 242 18.9 242 Polycarp Philippians 2.1 124n63 5.1 132n86 6.3 242n76 12.3 229n31 Pontius Vita Cypriani 11.1

224n4

Protoevangelium of James 17 243n81 Shepherd of Hermas Visions 1.3.3 121n55 3.3.5 82 3.5.9 132n86 3.11.1 132n86 Mandates 12.4.2 132n86 Similitudes 9.14.5 68n21, 82, 83 9.16.3 83 Tatian Oratio ad Graecos 5.3

288n138

Tertullian Adversus Marcionem 1.2.2 286n126 1.6 285n115 1.11.1 286nn118–119 1.11.9 287n129 1.15 286n122 1.16.4 286n126 1.17.1 287n131 1.17.22–26 287n131 1.25.3 285n115 1.28.1 286n125 2.3.2 286n118, 286n123 2.14.1 286n126 2.15.1 286n126 2.25.4 286n125 2.28.1 287n129 2.29.3 286n125 2.5.2 285n115 2.5.21–24 285n115 3.23.7 286n125 4.1.2 287n127 4.1.10 286n126 4.15.5 287n132 4.16.10 287n132 4.21.10 286n125 4.25.2–3 286n125 4.27.8 286nn125–126 4.39.18 286n125 4.42.2 286n125 5.5.8 286n125 5.7.13 286n125 5.16.6 286n125 5.17.12–14 286n120 De pudicitia 7.1 240n68 10.12 240n68 Other Classical Aelius Aristides Orations 7 146n21 29 146n21 Alcinous Didaskalikos  273nn56–57, 274n62 Theaetetus 273n60

343

Index of Ancient Sources Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 23.1.2–3 38

Heliodorus Aethiopica 2.27

Apuleius Metamorphoses 11.2 36 11.5 37

Iamblicus On the Mysteries of Egypt 1.1–2 282n100

Aratus Phaenomena 5 42 Aristotle Metaphysics 1074b25–26 1074b34–35

274n66 274n65

282n100

Julian Against the Galileans 354 39 Lucan Pharsalia 2.593 49

Pseudo-Aristotle On the Universe 6 146n21

Lucian Philopseudes 33–34 282n100 Syrian Goddess 31–32 35

Caesar Gallic Wars 6.17.1–2 35

Lydus De mensibus 4.53 49

Cicero Academica 2.118 271n44 De natura deorum 1.83–84 34 3.49 299n17

Macrobius Saturnalia 1.18.18–21

Corpus Hermeticum 1.4

279n87

Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica 1.94.1–2 38 40.3.4 48 Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 3.6 8.3 8.87 9.35

282n100 282n100 282n100 282n100

46, 47

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4.3 146n21 Maximus of Tyre Dissertations 2.8

37, 59

Numenius Fragments 2.16 16.8–9 17.7–8

273n54 273n55 273n54

Plato Parmenides 137c4–142a8

272n48

344

Index of Ancient Sources

Phaedrus 246a–254e 272n50 Republic 509b 272 509d 251n9 Timaeus 232 28c 272n51 29a 272n51 29e–30a 287n127 30b 272n51 34ab 272n51 34b 250 39e 262n54

Sulla 9 37

Plotinus Enneads 2.6 2.9 2.9.6, 9 2.17 3.8 5.5 5.8 4.8.5

258 252 276n75 258 252 252 252 250

Plutarch De anima 1014a–b 287n127 On the Delays of Divine Vengeance 550c 287n128 551a 287n128 556d–e 287n128 Pericles 4 271n41 Quaestiones convivales 4.6 44

Porphyry De abstinentia 4.6

282n100

Proclus On Plato’s Timaeus 1.304.13–16

273n53

Pyramid Texts 1248

279n90

Simplicius On Aristotle’s Physics 156.14–157.4 181.7–30

271n42 271n46

Strabo Geography 16.2.35 48 17.1.29 282n100 Tacitus Germania 43.4 34 Histories 4.84.5 35 5.5 45 5.5.4 307 Valerius Maximus Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 1.3.3 41, 45

Index of Modern Authors Aland, Barbara 252n13 Albrecht, Janico 230n36 Alexander, Philip S. 58n57 Alkier, Stefan 226n15, 296n10 Allen, David 23 Allison, Dale C. 173n5, 174n8, 176n14, 182n40, 298n14, 316n67, 318 Amelineau, M. E. 279n88 Ameling, W.  226n15, 245n88 Amendola, S. 270n39 Amorai-Stark, Shua 57n56 Amzallag, Nissim 101n11 Anagnostou-Canas, B. 224n4 Anderson, James S. 39n18 Ando, Clifford 5n18, 34, 35, 244, 299n17 Andrade, Nathaniel 64n8 Antes, P. 245n87 Anthes, Rudolf 282n101 Antolini, S. 235n48 Armstrong, A. H. 252, 263n3, 273n58 Ashton, John 249 Assaël, J. 174n9, 177n20 Assmann, Jan 33, 42, 50, 58, 59, 243, 264n4, 281nn93–98 Athanassiadi, Polymnia 4, 40n20, 266, 297n12 Attridge, Harold 253n20 Aune, David 22, 106n25 Baarda, T. 270n37 Baden, Joel 190n7 Baines, John 279n89 Balz, H. 122n57 Barclay, John M. G. 289n142, 305n30, 312n52 Barker, Margaret  1 Barnes, T. D. 224n4 Barrett, C. K. 205n63, 219n96 Barry, Catherine 262n53 Bartelink, G. J. M. 239n66, 242n75 Baslez, M.-F. 226n13 Bastiaensen, A. A. R. 239n66, 242n75, 244n86 Bastianini, G. 247n98 Bauckham, Richard 1, 2n1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 24n59, 42n22, 61, 62n3, 71, 74nn41–42,

75n45, 78n55, 86n7, 88n8, 95, 96n25, 106n25, 125n66, 139, 140nn3–6, 141n10, 146n23, 148n27, 163nn72–74, 166n81, 173n6, 175n11, 175n13, 178n24, 185n46, 186n51, 193n21, 199n48, 294nn3–4, 309n41, 310n43, 310n47, 314n60 Bauernfeind, Otto 46n31 Baur, F. C. 191n10 Bazak, Jacob 142n11 Becker, Jürgen 192n14, 192n17 Becking, Bob 61n1, 122n57 BeDuhn, Jason D. 285n113 Beetham, Christopher A. 158n64, 164n77, 164n79 Beker, J. Christiaan 125n64, 129n80 Belayche, Nicole 229n32, 243n77, 246n97, 247, 269, 296n10 Belke, K. 225n11 Ben-Dov, Jonathan 57n55 Berchman, Robert M. 270n37 Bergen, Theodore A. 58n57 Berger, Brigitte 283n104 Berger, Peter 283n104 Berman, Samuel A. 54n47 Bernhard, M. 240n70 Berry, Donald L. 99n2 Berthelot, Katell 289n142 Bettenworth, A. 227n21 Betz, Hans Dieter 38n14 Bianchi, Ugo 279n88 Bickerman, Elias 49 Bietenhard, Hans 206n70 Bilde, P. 289n142 Bird, Michael F. 12n11 Birley, A. R. 226n13 Black, Matthew 66n13, 128n78 Blackwell, Ben C. 100n5 Blau, Ludwig 55n52 Bleeker, C. J. 279n88 Blidstein, M. 246n97 Boccaccini, Gabriele 61n2, 190n7, 195n30, 196, 197, 210n77 Bockmuehl, Markus 114n37 Boers, Hendrikus 11n8 Bøgh, B. S. 223n2

346 Bond, Helen K. 174n7 Bons, Eberhard 109n30 Boobyer, G. H.  101n10 Börm, H. 231n39 Boschung, D. 237n61, 246n97 Böttrich, C. 229n30 Bousset, Wilhelm  2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21n47, 22, 25, 30, 54, 76, 191n12, 243n80 Bovon, Francois 141n10 Bowersock, G. W. 299n16 Boyarin, Daniel 5n15, 196n33, 203n55, 206n69 Boys-Stones, George 275nn69–70, 283n107, 289n140 Bradshaw, Paul F. 20n40 Brakke, David 250n8, 255nn27–28, 256n33, 257n34 Bregman, J. 263n3 Bremer, Dieter 103n17 Bremmer, Jan N. 5n18, 7, 11n7, 104n17, 127n73, 222, 223n2, 224n6, 225n7, 226n15, 229n29, 230n33, 232n43, 234n47, 236n57, 237n61, 238n63, 242n76, 246nn96–97, 247n99, 248n104 Breytenbach, Cilliers 2n2, 23n56, 172n3, 190n3, 203n56, 225n11, 242n76, 289n141 Brockington, L. H. 110n32 Bromiley, Geoffrey W. 122n57 Brown, Raymond E. 192, 194n26 Brown, William P. 150n31 Brucker, Ralph 109n30 Bryen, A. 230n34 Buchheit, V. 240n68 Buell, Denise Kimber 289n143, 292n153 Bühner, Jan A. 192n15 Bühner, Ruben 196n33 Bultmann, Rudolf 10, 22n49, 191n9, 191n11, 193 Burchard, C.  172n3, 177n21 Burney, C. F.  158n64 Burridge, Richard 30n80 Burton, P. 236n54 Buschmann, G. 227n22, 228n28, 230n35 Butterweck, C. 226n13 Butticaz, Simon 199n47 Caird, G. B. 124n60, 133n88 Cairns, D. 248n104

Index of Modern Authors Cancik, H. 239n65 Capes, David  1, 2n1, 3n5, 7, 15, 22, 26n67, 74n41, 85, 86n6, 97nn26–27, 98n30, 123n59, 294n5, 314n60, 317n68 Carabine, Deirdre 274n63 Carrell, Peter 23 Casanova, A. 247n98 Casey, Maurice 1, 16, 190n6 Castelli, E. 225n7 Cerfaux, Lucien 86n5 Chadwick, Henry 25n64, 302n22 Chaniotis, Angelos 248n104, 268n27, 296n10 Charles, R. H. 41 Charlesworth, James H. 57, 69n22 Chester, Andrew 2n4, 24, 31, 94n22 Chibici-Revneanu, Nicole 100–­101n9, 133n88 Cirafesi, Wally V. 118n44 Clivaz, Claire 206n67 Cobb, S. L. 242n75 Cohen, Mark R. 54n48 Cohen, Shaye J. D. 38n14, 308n40 Collins, John J. 19n36, 57, 60n60, 94n19, 190n7, 196, 300n19, 310n42 Collins, R. 134n91 Colpe, Carsten 11n7 Colson, F. H. 52 Coogan, Jeremiah 247n103 Coppins, Wayne 193n19 Corke-Webster, J. 233n46 Corley, Jeremy 142n10 Corrigan, Kevin 282n99 Coutts, Joshua J. F. 76n50, 77n51, 195n29 Cox, Claude 26n67 Cox, Ronald 140n4 Cranfield, C. E. B. 99n1 Crook, Zeba A. 176n14 Cross, Frank M. 114n39 Culianu, Ioan P. 51n42 Culpepper, R. Alan 204n57 Cuviller, E. 174n9, 177n20 Dahl, Nils A. 120n51, 309n42, 314n61 Dan, Joseph 54n48 Daniels, Dwight R. 26n67 Davids, Peter H. 99n1 Davies, W. D. 128n78

Index of Modern Authors Davila, James R. 2n1, 16n28, 22n50, 24n60 Davis, Carl Judson 22n53, 94n23 Davis, John J. 141–142n10 Davis, Stephen T. 99n1 Day, John 39n16 Dearn, A. 226n13 Debrunner, Albert 109n30 DeConick, April 1, 2n1, 8, 14n20, 75n47, 126n70, 263, 275n71, 276n74, 276n76, 282nn99–100, 283nn103–106, 284nn109­–110, 290n144 Decreus, F. 109n30 Dehandschutter, B. 225n10, 226n14, 226nn17–18, 227n22, 228n24, 228n27, 230n35, 233n46 Deines, Roland 12n11, 190n4 Deissmann, Adolf 22, 101n10 de Jonge, Henk Jan 141n10 de Lacey, Douglas R. 140n3 Delling, G. 178n27 den Boeft, Jan 53n45, 226n15, 232n43, 234n47, 242n75 Despotis, Athanasios 133n88 de Ste. Croix 226n13 Dever, William G. 40n19 de Vries, Pieter 119n47 Dickey, Eleanor 240n69 Dieleman, Jacco 282n100 Dietrich, B. C.  103n17 Diez-Macho, A. 206n71 Dijkstra, J. 224n4, 245n88 Dillon, John 260n48, 267, 269n34, 270, 273n60, 274n64, 275n68, 283n107 Dinkler, E. 191n9 Divjak, J. 224n5 Dodd, C. H. 23n54, 204n61, 205n65 Dodds, E. R. 297n11 Dods, Marcus 53 Doeker, Andrea 21n46 Dolbeau, F. 223n3 Dondin-Payre, M. 235n48 Doran, Robert  60n60 Downs, David J. 121n54 Drozdek, Adam 268n29, 270n35, 271n45, 274nn65–67 Duff, Paul B.  132n85 Dunderberg, Ismo 251n8, 255n30, 258, 259n41, 260, 261n51

347 Dunn, James D. G. 1, 16, 17n30, 20n42, 134n90, 141n8, 148n26, 150n32, 164n76, 168n85, 189n1 Dunne, John Anthony 129n80, 140n5 Durken, D. 112n34 Duval, Y. 224n5 Ebenbauer, Peter 21n46 Ebert, Theodor 102n13 Eck, Werner 245n88, 246n91 Eco, Umberto 120n50 Edmundson, Mark 249n3 Efthymiadis, S. 247n102 Ego, Beate 42n23 Ehmig, U. 242n76 Ehrman, Bart 31 Eich, P. 234n46 Eidinow, Esther 275n69 Ellis, N. 185n50 Elsner, Jas 298n16 Endo, Masanobu 207n72 Engberg, J. 223n2 Engberg-Pedersen, Troels 4n11, 197, 211n79, 289n142 Engels, David 290n144 Engeman, J. 240n67 Ernest, James D. 109n29 Erskine, Andrew 5n18, 104n17, 289n141 Everson, A. Joseph 112n34 Eyl, Jennifer 305n31, 306n34 Faber, E. 234n46 Farrell, J. 239n64 Fassberg, Steven 305n32 Fee, Gordon D. 74n41, 74n43, 140n4, 158n64, 216n88 Feldman, Louis H. 135n93 Feldmeier, Reinhard 99n1 Feldt, Laura 248n105 Fialon, S. 225n8, 235n52 Finkelstein, Ari 39n15 Finney, P. C. 235n50 Fishwick, Duncan 235n48 Fitzmyer, Joseph A. 26n67, 113n35, 129n79 Fletcher-Louis, Crispin 1, 2n1, 3n5, 75n46, 81, 93, 94n20, 113n35, 140n4, 141n8, 142, 143, 310n43 Floss, J. P. 244n84 Flury, P. 240n70

348 Flusser, David 57n56 Fokkelman, Jan P. 142n11 Formisano, M. 227n21, 238n63 Forster, A. Haire 109n30 Fossum, Jarl 1, 2nn1–2, 9n2, 13, 14n20, 15, 62n4, 68n21, 69n23, 70nn27–28, 71n29, 122n57, 128n78, 190n3, 195n29 Foster, R. 185n49 Frankemölle, H. 172n3 Frankfurter, David 282n100 Frede, Michael  4, 40n20, 266, 269n30, 297n12 Fredriksen, Paula 1, 5n15, 6, 8, 17n31, 133n89, 134n91, 135n93, 293, 296n9, 297n11, 303n26, 305n31, 307n37, 308nn39–40, 309n42, 311n49, 313n56, 314n59, 316n66, 319n72 Freedman, H. 54n46 Freiberger, Oliver 225n8 Frey, Jörg 2n2, 7, 23, 24, 31, 109n30, 133n88, 177n19, 189, 190n3, 191n8, 191nn9–11, 193nn19–20, 194n24, 197n41, 198n42– 44, 199nn46–47, 201nn50–51, 204n57, 204n62, 205n65, 206n67, 207nn73–74, 209n75, 210n78, 211nn79–80, 212nn81– 83, 213n84, 214n85, 215n86, 216n89, 217n90, 217n93, 289n142 Frick, Peter 270n37 Friedrich, Gerhard 122n57 Funk, Wolf-Peter 262n53 Garcia Martinez, Florentino 89n11 Gasparini, V. 243n77 Gathercole, Simon 3 Gaventa, Beverly Roberts 100n7, 101n12, 107n26, 119n46, 119n47 Geertz, Clifford 248 Gerber, C. 172n3 Gerhards, Albert 21n46 Gers-Uphaus, Christian 296n10 Gieschen, Charles 1, 2n1, 8, 15, 23, 61, 62n4, 66n15, 69n23, 73n39, 74n42, 74n44, 75nn47–48, 76n50, 77n52, 78nn54–55, 79n57, 80n58, 81n61, 126n68 Gilhus, I. S. 245n87 Giulea, Dragos A. 101n9 Glessmer, Uwe 26n67 Goebel, U. 240n66

Index of Modern Authors Goldingay, John 162n70 Goodman, Lenn E. 270n37 Goodman, Martin 308n40 Gooren, Henri 134n91 Gordis, Robert 141n10 Gordley, Matthew G. 147n24, 167nn82–83 Gorman, Michael 99n1, 132n87 Goudrian K. 289n142 Grant, Robert M. 103n17, 136n96, 266 Graziosi, Barbara 32n2 Green, Joel B. 16n28 Gressmann, Hugo 14n24 Grindheim, Sigurd 100n4, 118n43 Gripentrog, Stephanie 289n142 Gross, Julius 311n48 Gruen, Erich S. 45n27 Gunkel, Hermann 10n4 Habel, Norman 128n75 Habermehl, P.  240n66 Haensch, R.  231n39, 242n76 Hafner, J. E. 233n46 Hägg, T. 235n51 Hahn, F. 172n3 Hainz, Josef 192n13 Hamerton-Kelly, R. 128n78 Hamilton, James M.  99n2 Hamman, A. G. 232n43 Hampel, Volker 202n54 Hanegraaf, Wouter J. 290n144 Hannah, Darrell 23 Hannestad, L. 289n142 Hansen, A. T. 235n50 Hargis, Jeffrey W. 25n64 Harland, Philip A. 176n14 Harlow, Daniel C. 19n36, 60n60 Harnack, Adolf 191n12, 233n46, 236n58, 241n73, 287 Harrill, J. Albert 309n42 Harrison, James R. 100n6, 103n15, 106n23, 113n35, 121n54 Hartman, Lars 20n39 Hayes, A. 231n40 Hayman, Peter 4n15 Hays, Richard B. 79n56, 99n1, 116–117n41, 121n55, 127n72 Hedrick, Charles W. 253n20 Heerma van Voss, M. 55n53

349

Index of Modern Authors Heffernan, T. J. 239n66 Heftner, H. 225n11 Hegermann, H. 122n57 Heil, M. 245n88, 246n91 Heilig, Christoph 193n19 Heinzer, F. 224n6 Heller, T. 174n10 Hengel, Martin 1, 2, 4, 9, 12, 13, 17, 23n56, 27, 28, 29, 30, 47n33, 106n25, 190, 193, 194n25, 202nn53–54, 304, 311 Henrichs, Albert 48n35 Herrero de Jauregui, M. 269n31 Heschel, Susannah 10n5 Hilhorst, A. 244n86, 255n28 Hill, Wesley 3 Hinterberger, M.  247n102 Hirsch-Luipold, Rainer 272n51, 273n52 Hockey, K. M. 173n6 Hodgson, Robert 253n20 Hoffmann, R. Joseph 285n112, 286n121 Holmes, Michael W. 90n12 Hopkins, Keith 298n16 Horbury, William 1, 2n1, 296n9 Horn, Friedrich W. 307n37 Hornung, Erik 279n89, 280n91, 281n94, 281n97 Horovitz, S. 206n70 Hübner, Hans 216n88 Huebner, S. R. 224n4 Hunter, A. M. 18n32 Hurst, Lincoln 124n60 Hurtado, Larry W. 1–5, 7–9, 11–12, 14n24, 15n24, 16n27, 18n34, 19–21, 24, 25nn62–63, 26n67, 28–31, 71, 72n34, 81n60, 84n62, 87n7, 94n19, 97, 98n30, 124n62, 126n67, 135n92, 140n3, 172, 178n25, 189, 190, 194–196, 222, 241n71, 243n79, 246n94, 247n98, 253, 265n13, 294n2, 300n19, 307n36, 317n68 Hvalvik, Reidar 20n40 Isaac, Ephraim 67n16 Jackson, W. Daniel 100n8, 118n42 Jackson-McCabe, Matt 17n31, 174n9, 175n12 Jacob, Haley Goranson 100n3 James, William 134n91 Jenni, Ernst 128n77

Jenott, Lance 6n20 Jeremias, Joachim 204n60 Jeremias, Jörg 114n38 Jervell, Jacob 114n36 Jewett, Robert 108n28 Jim, T. S. F. 229n32 Johncock, M. 248n104 Johnston, Sarah Iles 104n17 Jonas, Hans 252n13 Jones, A. H. M. 299n16 Joosten, Jan 109n30 Judge, Thomas A. 58n59 Juel, Donald H. 1, 22, 120n51, 310n42 Jung, F. 229n30 Jungmann, Joseph 20n40 Kakosy, L. 279n88 Kapstein, Matthew T. 104n17 Karrer, M. 172n3, 229n30 Kattan Gribetz, Sarit 6n20 Keck, Leander E. 118n44, 119n48 Kee, Howard Clark 10n3 Keith, Chris 24n59, 174n7 Kelley, N. 232n43 Kellner, Hansfried 283n104 Kendall, Daniel 99n1 Kenney, John Peter 268, 271n46, 272n47, 272n49, 273nn56–57, 273n59, 273n61, 274n62 Keresztes, P. 227n23 Kessler, H. L. 235n50 Kindt, Julia 275n69 Kinnard, I. 225n8 Kinzig, W. 233n44 Kippenberg, Hans G. 38n14 Kirk, J. R. Daniel 6n22, 31n84, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93n17, 100n3 Kittel, Gerhard 122n57 Kittel, Helmut 109n30 Klawek, Aleksy 20n40 Kloppenborg, John S. 176n14, 182n40, 247n98 Knohl, Israel 142n10 Kohler, Kaufmann 55n52 Koniaris, George Leonidas 37n11 Konradt, M. 172n1, 180n31 Korteweg, T. 232n42 Körtner, U. 239n65

350 Kovalishyn, M. Kamell 185n50 Kozlowski, J. M. 226n16, 232n43 Krämer, S. 240n70 Kreitzer, Larry J. 23n53 Kuhn, A. B. 243n76 Kümmel, Werner Georg 10n3 Kuss, Otto 122n57 Labahn, Michael 100n5, 174n8 Labuschagne, Casper J. 141nn10–11, 143n13, 154n45, 155 Lacroix, Francis 252n15 Lambrecht, Jan 132n85 Lampe, Peter 180n30, 236n58 Lane, Eugene N. 41n21 Lang, B. 236n55 Lang, Manfred 100n5 Lange, Armin 42n23 Lanzilotta, F. L. Roig 263, 270n39, 272n51, 273n53, 289n141, 292n154 LeDonne, Anthony 28n74 Lee, D. 240n66 Leemans, Johan 225n10 Lehmkühler, Karsten 10n5, 30n83 Lehrman, S. M. 55n51 Lehtipuu, Outi 255n30 Leivestad, Ragnar 11n10 Leonhard, J. 224n6 Leonhardt-Balzer, Jutta 205nn65–66, 289n142 Lepelley, C. 224n5 Leppin, Hartmut 226n15, 246n94, 296n10 Leutzsch, M. 239n65 Levison, John R. 113n35, 215n86 Lewellen, Eric 129n80, 140n5 Lewis, Gladys S. 2n1, 16n28, 22n50, 24n60 Lierman, John 193n21 Lieu, Judith 285n111, 286n116 Lightfoot, J. B. 159n65 Lightfoot, J. L. 35n7 Lim, Timothy H. 19n36, 300n19 Lincicum, David 140n4 Linssen, H. 229n30 Litwa, M. David 6n19, 29, 30, 104n17, 304n27, 314n58 Löhr, Hermut 241n71 Löhr, W. A. 233n46 Lorton, David 281n93

Index of Modern Authors Luck, U. 172n3 Lüdemann, Gerd  2n3 Lupieri, Edmondo 14n23 Luttikuizen, Gerard P. 254–257 Luz, Ulrich 180n30 Ma, John 60n60 Macaskill, Grant 131n83 Machalek, Richard 134n91 Mack, Burton L. 204n60, 205n65 MacMullen, Ramsay 299n16 Malay, H. 225n11 Malherbe, Abraham J. 20n39 Mancino, Susan 120n50 Mansfeld, Jaap 270n37 Manzi, Franco 94 Marchand, Suzanne 10, 30n83 Marcus, Ralph 41 Marek, Christian 296n10 Marengo, S. M. 235n48 Markschies, Christoph 227n21, 264n4 Marshall, John W. 312n51 Martin, Dale B. 53n44 Martin, Ralph P. 99n1 Martyn, J. Louis 192, 193n19 Mason, Eric F. 19n36, 93n18 Mason, Steve 46n30 Massaux, E. 228n26 Maston, Jason 12n11 Mastrocinque, Attilio 278n81 Mayer, Cornelius 53n45 Mayordomo, M. 180n30 Mazur, Zeke 276n75 McDannell, C. 236n55 McDonough, Sean M. 63n5, 158n64 McGrath, James 3, 141n8, 178n25 McHugh, John 206n68 McKnight, Scot 174n8 McNamara, Martin  206n69, 206n71 Meeks, Wayne A. 20n39, 58n57, 129n80, 137n98, 192n13, 194n26 Meershoek, G.  236n54 Meier, John P. 313n57 Menken, Maarten J. J. 141n10 Merkt, A. 240n66 Mersich, N. 225n11 Mettinger, T. N. D. 163n73 Metzner, R.  173n7, 228n26

351

Index of Modern Authors Meyer, Anthony 26n67, 63n5, 64nn6–8, 65nn9–10, 86n6 Meyer, Marvin 251n10, 261n49, 262n54 Michel, Otto 46n31 Middleton, Paul 226n13 Migsch, Herbert 142n10 Mimouni, Simon Claude 206n67 Miroshnikov, Ivan 255n30 Mitchell, Stephen 4, 40n20, 244n85, 264n4, 267, 269nn32–33, 296n10, 297n12 Moberley, R. W. L. 296n9 Mohrmann, Christine 109n30 Moloney, Francis J. 192n16 Mommsen, Theodor 236n58 Montanari, Franco 102n13 Mor, Menahem 308n40 Moreau, P. 240n70 Morgan, Teresa 99n1, 135n94 Moss, Candida 225n8, 226n13, 227n19, 228n24, 233n46 Moxnes, Halvor 103n14 Murphy, Roland E. 249n1 Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome 113n35 Mussies, Gerard 55, 57 Mussner, F. 172n3 Myers, Susan E. 20n40, 300n18 Naerebout, Frederick G. 32n2 Najman, Hindy 190n7 Narbonne, Jean-Marc 252n15 Nelis, D. P. 248n104 Nestle, Eberhard 42, 43n24 Neusner, Jacob 58n57 Newman, Carey C. 1, 2n1, 7, 15, 16n28, 22, 24n60, 99, 109n30, 121n54, 126n67, 126n69, 127n72, 129n80, 295nn6–8, 310nn45–46, 314n60, 318n71 Newsom, Carol A. 121n56 Neyrey, Jerome 103n16, 107n27 Nicklas, Tobias 247n98 Nicholson, Suzanne 140n4 Nickelsburg, George W. E. 65nn11–12, 67n17 Niebuhr, Karl-Wilhelm 7, 18n33, 172, 174nn7–8, 174n10, 175n12, 177n19, 180n30, 180n32, 181n36 Nilsson, Martin P. 269n31 Nissinen, Martti 254n23 Nock, A. D. 29n76, 37, 297n11

Norden, Eduard 48n35 Norelli, Enrico 199n47 North, J. A.  269n33 North, J. Lionel 296n9, 307n36, 308n38 North, Wendy E. S. 3n5, 166n81, 296n9, 300n19 Novenson, Matthew V. 8, 32, 121n53, 196n35, 248n105, 269n33, 305nn29–30, 315nn62–63 Nuti, M. 230n37 O’Collins, Gerald 99n1 Olson, Daniel C. 68n20, 69n22 Opsomer, Jan 273n52 Orban, A. P. 239n66 Orlov, Andrei A. 69n23, 70, 71, 72, 84n63 Ortlund, Eric Nels 115n40 Osborne, Robin 275n69 Owen, Paul L. 11n10 Pace, G. 270n39 Painchaud, Louis 251n10, 257n35 Papandreou, D. 233n46 Papoutsakis, M. 224n5 Pardee, C. G. 228n26 Parker, Robert 32, 34, 35, 38, 50, 58, 60, 243n78, 269n33 Parkinson, William Q. 84n62 Parrott, Douglas M. 279n88 Parsons, Mikeal C. 142n10 Parsons, P. 247n98 Pastor, Jack 308n40 Paulsen, Henning 203n56 Peerbolte, Bert J. Lietaert 255n28 Pellegrino, M. 225n8 Peppard, Michael 4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 298n16, 319n73 Perkins, Pheme 1, 2n1, 8, 113n35, 249, 253n19, 254n23 Perrin, Bernadotte 37n10 Perrin, Norman 11n8 Petraglio, R. 239n66 Petridou, Georgia 104n17 Pfeiffer, R. H. 236n56 Pfleiderer, Otto 30 Piankoff, A. 280n92 Pierce, M. N. 173n6 Pietersma, Albert 26n67

352 Pizzuto, Vincent A. 147n24, 164n78 Pleket, H. W. 243n82 Poirier, Paul-Hubert 257n34, 262n53 Popovic, Mladen 246n96 Portier-Young, Anathea 33, 42, 58 Pouderon, Bernard 206n67 Prevot, F. 226n13 Price, S. R. F. 269n33 Provenzano, M. 234n47 Prusac, M. 248n104 Pulleyn, Simon 103n16 Quispel, Gilles 128n78 Rabin, I. A. 206n70 Rajak, Tessa 110n31 Rand, Herbert 141n10  Rasimus, Tuomas 282n99 Rebenich, S. 236n58 Rebillard, E. 227n21 Reed, Annette Yoshiko 57n55 Reicke, Bo 66n13 Reinhartz, Adele 196n34 Reitzenstein, Richard 101n10 Reynolds, Benjamin E. 15n25, 61n2, 195nn30–31, 196n32, 196n35, 199n48 Rhea, Robert 192n16 Richter, Georg 192n13 Rinaldi, G. 228n26 Ritti, T. 244n82 Rives, James  245n88, 246n93 Rohde, Dorothea 296n10 Rohmann, D. 247n100 Römer, Thomas 304n28 Ronning, John 206n69 Rösel, Martin 26n67 Roskam, G. 236n58 Rossano, P. 225n7 Roth, Dieter 24n59 Rousseau, P. 224n5 Rouwhorst, Gerard 21n46 Rowdon, Harold H. 140n3 Rowland, Christopher 70n27, 71n29, 78n55, 128n78, 198n42 Rucinski, S. 230n36 Ruck-Schröder, Adelheid 84n62 Runia, David T. 27n69, 144n16, 251n9, 251n11, 254n25

Index of Modern Authors Rüpke, Jörg 244, 246n92, 246n95 Russell, J. B. 236n55 Russell, Norman 104n18 Sage, A. 311n49 Sanders, E. 248n104 Sanders, E. P. 129n81, 136n95, 318 Sanders, Seth L. 57n55 Sandnes, Karl Olav 20n40 Satlow, Michael 308n40 Sato, M. 180n30 Schaefer, A. 237n61 Schäfer, Peter 38n14, 41n21, 48n34, 54n48, 114n35 Scheid, John 245 Schiffrin, Deborah 120n50 Schimanowski, Gottfried 193n23 Schlegel, Juliane 191n8, 199n46 Schlier, Heinrich 122n57 Schliesser, Benjamin 177n19, 246n94 Schmidt, Werner H. 204n58 Schnackenburg, Rudolf 203n56 Schneider, G. 122n57 Schneider, Johannes 101n10 Schnelle, Udo 100n6, 174n8, 204n57, 205n65, 247n98 Schnutenhaus, Frank 114n38 Scholz, P. 246n91 Schremer, Adiel 300n18 Schröder, Martin 2n3 Schröter, Jens 24n57, 174n7, 228n25 Schwartz, Daniel R. 289n142 Schweitzer, Albert 313 Schweizer, Eduard 164n77 Schwemer, Anna Maria 23n56, 202nn53–54 Seeliger, H. R. 227n21, 228n24, 233n46 Segal, Alan F. 1, 6n21, 13, 15, 126n71, 134n90, 134n91, 135n92, 137n99, 197n39, 264n6 Seitz, Christopher R. 151n34 Setzer, Claudia 135n92, 136n97 Shaw, Frank 65n9 Sibinga, J. Smit 141n10 Siegert, Folker 205n65 Simon, Marcel 11n7 Sivonen, Mikko 100n3 Skarsaune, Oskar 232n41 Skehan, Patrick W. 141n10 Skinner, Matthew L.  121n54

353

Index of Modern Authors Smith, Jonathan Z. 18n35, 30, 305n30 Smith, Mark S. 4n15, 39, 43n25, 47n32, 51n41 Smith, Morton 38n14, 43n26, 46n29, 46n31 Snow, David A. 134n91 Soderlund, Sven K. 29n76 Southgate, Christopher 100n9 Spicq, Ceslas 109n29 Spinks, Bryan D. 124n62 Spitaler, Peter 113n35 Sprinkle, Preston 100n5 Staudt, Darina 27n70 Stausberg, Michael 248n105 Stead, Christopher 271n40, 289n141 Steinheimer, Mauritius 106n23 Stendahl, Krister 317n67, 318n70 Sterling, Gregory E. 27n69, 144, 289n142 Stern, Menahem 38n13, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 49 Still, Todd D. 142n10 Stoebe, H. J. 128n76 Stone, Michael E. 58n57 Stuckenbruck, Loren T. 1, 2n1, 3n5, 14, 15, 22, 23, 166n81, 296n9, 300n19, 306n33 Sullivan, Kevin 23 Sumney, Jerry L. 17n31 Talbert, Charles H. 5n18, 6n22, 100n7 Tardieu, Michel 252n12, 279n88 Tate, Marvin E. 163n73, 164n77 Taveirne, M. 225n8 Taylor, J. Glen 47n32 Tervahauta, Ulla 255n30 Thackeray, Henry St. John 44 Theissen, Gerd 126n71, 129n80, 138n100 Theobald, Michael 209n75 Thiessen, Matthew 314n58 Thiselton, Anthony C. 27n71, 168n86 Thomassen, Einar 251n8, 251n10, 254, 259nn42–43, 261, 262nn52–53 Thompson, Marianne Meye 1, 2n1, 167n82, 235n50 Tigchelaar, Eibert J. C. 89n11, 190n7 Tilling, Chris 3, 97n27, 140n4 Tobin, Thomas 204n59, 205nn64–65 Tomaschitz, K. 225n11 Tran, N. 235n48 Trompf, Garry W. 251n8, 252n15 Tropper, Amram 49n36

Turner, John D. 252n12, 258nn37–39, 262nn53–54, 276n74, 282n99 Turner, Max 16n28 Tyson, Joseph B. 285n113 Ueberschaer, N. 177n19 Ulmer, Rivka  56n54 Ulrich, J. 231n38 Urciuoli, E. R. 237n58 Uro, Risto 21n46, 254n23 van den Berg, Robbert M. 40n20 van den Broek, Roelof 51n42, 251n8, 270n37 van der Horst, Pieter W. 39n15, 48n35, 52n43, 61n1, 122n57 VanderKam, James C. 65nn11–12, 67n17, 69n22 van der Lans, B. 230n33 van der Lugt, Pieter 142n11, 143nn13–14, 151nn35–36, 152nn37–43, 154–156 van der Plas, D. 104n17 van der Toorn, Karel 61n1, 122n57 van der Watt, Jan G. 204n57 van Dijk, M. 224n4 van Henten, Jan Willem 141n10 van Kooten, George H. 7n23, 40n20, 49n37, 150n30, 255n28, 273n53 van Minnen, P. 224n4 Van Nuffelen, Peter 4, 264n4, 267, 290n144, 296n10 van Ruiten, Jacques 273n53 Verheyden, Joseph 240n66 Vermaseren, M. J. 51n42, 56n53, 232n42 Versnel, H. S. 103n17, 243n82, 244n83 Vigourt, A. 229n32 Vinzent, Markus 241n72 Voisin, J.-L. 226n13 Volpe Cacciatore, P. 270n39 von den Hoff, R. 224n6 von Ehrenheim, H. 248n104 von Gall, Freiherrn 122n57 Vos, Geerhardus 10n6 Waaler, Erik 140n4 Wagner, J. Ross 316n65 Wagner, Thomas 110n33 Wallis, R. T. 263n3, 302n23 Wasserman, Emma 5n15, 300n18

354 Wasserman, Tommy 21n45 Watson, Francis 121n54, 173n6 Weinrich, William C. 66n13 Weiser, Artur 114n38 Weiss, A. 234n47 Weiss, Hans-Friedrich 205n65 Weiss, Johannes 22, 313n55 Wenger, S. 172n3, 174n9, 181n34, 185n45 Wermke, M. 174n10 Wesselius, J. W. 141n10 West, M. L. 269n30 Westermann, Claus 114n38, 128n76 White, Benjamin G. 305n30 White, Ellen 50n40 Whitlark, Jason A. 100n7 Whittaker, John 270n37, 288n135 Wilken, Robert L. 25n64 Wilkinson, Robert J. 61n1, 78n54 Williams, Craig 239n64 Williams, Catrin 198n42 Williams, Michael A. 6n21, 251n8, 255n30, 256n33, 283 Wilson, R. McL. 150n32

Index of Modern Authors Wilson, Stephen G. 134n90, 176n14 Winston, David 250nn4–7, 270n37, 287n128 Wischmeyer, W. 227n21, 228n24, 233n46 Wissowa, Georg 34n6 Wojciech, K. 230n36 Woolf, Greg 36n8 Wrede, William 2 Wright, A. G. 141n10, 157n59 Wright, N. T. 17n30, 29n76, 85, 121n54, 123n60, 129n80, 140n3 Yarbro Collins, Adela 24, 25nn61–62, 28nn73–74, 121n54, 310n42, 317n68 Young, Frances 302nn24–25 Zahle, J. 289n142 Zeller, Dieter 25, 26, 27 Zimmerli, Walther 128n77 Zimmermann, C. 225n11, 229n31, 232n43, 242n76, 243n78, 243n81 Zizioulas, John D. 302n22 Zwierlein, O. 226n12, 227

Index of Subjects Abraham 19, 38–39, 69–71, 121, 182, 265, 268, 285, 291 Acta martyrum, Acts of the Martyrs  222–248 Adam 99–100, 113–115, 118, 121, 133, 157, 256, 262, 277 adoption 28 aeons 251, 253, 255–261, 301n21 Alexandria 52, 64, 72, 144, 224n4, 232, 270, 288, 319 Ammon 32, 53 altar 39, 46n28, 47–49, 247, 307 angel 1–2, 8, 14, 22–23, 31n85, 51–58, 62, 66, 69–74, 78, 80–81, 84, 93–96, 98, 138, 161, 166, 194, 197, 203–204, 208, 257, 259, 261–262, 267, 291, 296n10, 297–298, 300–301, 306, 309, 315, 317 angels of the nations 51–55, 300 aniconism 52, 59, 304 animals 5, 36, 48, 54, 59, 226 Apollo 35, 46, 47, 275, 283n107, 296n10, 297 apotheosis 2, 24, 104, 132 Aramaic 17, 26, 43, 65, 200, 202, 305–306, 310n44 ascent 69, 72, 111, 125, 165, 213, 228, 258, 262, 279, 307 Asherah 39 Atlas 56–57 Augustus 6, 319 Baal 39, 42–43, 60 baptism 19–20, 62, 75–76, 78–83, 126, 133, 135, 136n95, 178, 197, 214, 259n43 Barbelo 258, 278 Bible 39–40, 46, 51, 59–63, 81, 109, 141–143, 162–164, 176, 181, 204, 215, 217n92, 249n3, 285, 289, 318 biblical interpretation 89–90, 92, 95, 96, 114n35, 161, 163, 182, 193, 200, 207, 251, 255n30, 281, 296n9, 305n31, 306, 311–313, 318 Big Bang Christology 293–295, 303, 314, 317 binitarian 178, 215–216, 218–221, 293, 317n68 bishop 90–91, 224, 232, 234, 263, 290

body, bodies 80, 130–131, 148, 150, 167, 171, 250, 252, 254–255, 261, 277, 289, 297, 301–303, 314–315 Canaan, Canaanite 39, 51, 114, 304 chariot 69, 153, 272 church 21–22, 76, 82, 86, 90–91, 98, 105–106, 136–137, 148, 150, 171, 218, 225, 227–228, 233, 247, 262, 284–285, 303n26, 312n51, 318–319 circumcision 17, 38, 135 cosmic Christology 74, 128, 139–171, 294, 309–310, 314–315 cosmic deity 254–255n26, 263, 267–271, 277–278, 286–288, 293, 298, 301–302, 315 cosmology 5, 8, 32, 39, 53, 59, 150n30, 207, 209, 214, 219, 250, 257, 259n44, 297, 301–303, 309 cosmotheism 33 creatio ex nihilo 301–302, 309 creator, creation 5, 6, 8, 19, 27, 41, 49, 52, 52, 58, 63, 67–72, 75–78, 82, 139–171, 180, 196n36, 197, 199, 204–211, 214–220, 231–233, 241, 243n81, 249–262, 263–273, 276–292, 294, 297, 299–303, 309 cult 10–12, 14–16, 21–25, 29, 31n85, 33–34, 37–43, 45, 48n35, 49, 52, 59, 60n60, 79, 121n54, 234, 241, 244–248, 269, 283, 298–299, 307 culture heroes 56, 58 daemon, demon 52–54, 58, 197, 255–256, 276–277, 296n10, 298 demiurge 6, 254, 257, 259, 262n54, 270, 272–273, 276–277, 283, 287, 290, 301 despotes 243 devil 225 devotion 3–4, 11–19, 21–25, 28–31, 97, 103–104, 187, 222, 234, 243–244, 269, 281, 292–293, 303, 305–309, 312 diaspora 16, 21, 175, 193, 207, 294, 306–308 Dionysus 43–48, 59 ditheism 220, 293, 303

356 divine identity 5, 61–84, 86, 88, 99, 124, 125n66, 127, 132, 139, 143, 146, 166, 169, 294–295, 310, 314, 316 divine name 5, 26, 32, 40, 53, 61–84, 85–86, 88–89, 94–95, 97–98, 142–143, 152, 154–156, 169–170, 195, 198, 206, 253n17, 275, 281, 297–298, 301–302, 306, 310 divine sonship (see sonship) doxa (see glory) dyad 178, 222, 271–272, 293, 312n51 early high Christology 1–4, 6–8, 14, 16–17, 24, 31, 86, 93, 133n89, 192–196, 199, 293–319 early high Christology club 1, 6, 293 Egypt, Egyptian 10, 26, 33n4, 35, 37–38, 41, 48, 54–59, 204n60, 224n4, 230, 240, 243, 279–285, 289n142, 299, 319 ekklesia 26, 91, 307, 312n51 elohim 50–54, 59, 75, 94–95, 152 emperor cult, emperor worship 24, 121, 229, 235, 237, 245, 297–299 Enoch 6, 56–58, 66, 69, 125 epistemology 37, 134n91, 260 Essenes 46 euhemerism 55–58 exorcism 21, 306 experience 16, 24, 31n84, 75nn47–48, 80, 83, 104n17, 117, 126–133, 178, 194–195, 242–243, 252, 254–255, 259n43, 264, 267, 279, 283–284, 309, 313 faith 88–89, 91, 101, 104–105, 123, 134–138, 140, 143, 146, 168, 173–188, 198, 206, 211, 217n91, 233–234, 253n16, 257, 260n48, 263, 291, 310, 314, 318 father 3, 27, 45, 49, 58, 73–80, 82–87, 90­–91, 96, 98, 105, 120, 129, 135, 136, 139–146, 150, 165, 169, 178, 181, 187, 189, 194, 197, 201, 202, 205, 209–210, 212, 214–220, 251n10, 253–266, 270, 272–275, 278–279, 281, 284, 287–288, 290–291, 294, 297n13, 298n14, 303, 308–310, 316 firstborn 157n60, 160–163, 166, 171, 205, 209 gematria 141–142, 156, 310, 313 genius 235, 237, 245 gentiles 17, 18, 39, 46, 49, 52, 53, 64, 102, 135n93, 265, 312, 316

Index of Subjects gentile gods 8, 38, 39, 50–59, 210, 292, 293, 300, 316 glory 7, 15–17, 22, 30, 46, 50, 63, 67, 70, 71, 74, 77, 81, 87, 98, 99–138, 164, 175, 178, 187, 188, 195, 198, 211, 213, 221, 242, 249, 264, 294–295, 298n14, 308, 310 gnosis 249, 252, 260n48, 263, 266, 281, 284 Gnostic, Gnosticism 9n2, 11, 13, 14n20, 51n42, 77–78, 83, 191, 192n13, 233, 250–264, 267–270, 274–288 goddess 35–39, 47, 57n56 Greece, Greek 4, 7n23, 8, 15, 26–28, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 40–41, 43–45, 48–53, 56–58, 60, 63–65, 76, 85–86, 103, 104nn17–18, 109–110, 121, 127n73, 136n95, 138, 142, 144, 147, 150, 164n78, 168n84, 177, 181, 182, 198n43, 200, 204, 207, 218, 229– 230, 232–233, 235–237, 242–243, 246, 264, 266–270, 277, 281, 282, 286–289, 291–292, 304, 306, 310, 314, 316–318 hagiography 223­–224, 247n102 heaven 11, 14, 19, 28n74, 35–36, 42–43, 48, 52, 55, 59, 63, 65, 68, 70–74, 80, 82–83, 90, 93–95, 98, 125–126, 128, 149, 153, 159, 160, 163, 166, 167, 174, 192, 197, 203­–205, 208–209, 211, 216, 228–229, 236–237, 241, 243n81, 249–252, 255, 257–258, 263, 266, 270, 272–276, 290–291, 293, 296–297, 299, 315 Hebrew 26, 43, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56, 64, 65, 66, 72, 86n6, 87, 95, 112, 121n56, 142–143, 151, 154–159, 169, 204, 244, 304, 310, 317 hekhalot 126 Helios 37, 46–48, 59, 306n35 Hellenism 3–4, 12, 15, 193, 303, 304 Hellenistic Judaism 27, 57, 193, 204, 206, 304 henotheism 267, 268, 281, 296n10 Herakles 6 heresy, heretics, heresiology 13, 226n13, 251n8, 254n23, 263, 285, 292 hermaphrodite 277–279, 282 Hermetica 207, 279, 284 heroes 55, 297 hierarchy 103, 173, 272, 296, 300 high priest 44, 62, 63, 70, 81, 83, 92, 308, 319 holotheism 287–289, 292 honor/shame 100, 102, 103, 108, 115

357

Index of Subjects hyle 301, 302, 309 hypertheism 269, 287–289, 292 hypsistos (see theos hypsistos) iconography 35, 43–45, 52, 54, 56, 59, 304 idol, idolatry 45, 52–53, 56, 58–59, 136, 238, 277, 290–292, 300, 316 image of God 62, 72–73, 81, 83, 132, 157–159, 161, 198, 202, 205, 239, 249n3, 250, 256, 259, 261 immortality 5, 58, 69, 72, 238, 250, 253n16, 277, 299n17 interpretatio 32–35, 37–42, 45–46, 48–51, 53, 55–60 Isis 36–37, 56, 57, 59, 280 Islam 267, 304, 319n72 Jerusalem 18, 33, 38, 41–43, 45, 47–49, 76, 112, 212, 293–295, 303, 305–308, 310, 314 Johannine 164, 170, 189–221, 253 Judea 16, 17, 22, 25, 48, 51, 59–60, 287, 314 Jupiter 35, 40–41, 43, 45, 53, 59, 305 kavod (see glory) king 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 55, 57, 92, 94, 98, 130, 153, 155, 161, 162, 163, 200, 201, 211, 213, 229, 235, 280 kingdom 41, 130, 178, 253n16, 257, 315–316 kurios, kyrios 7, 21–22, 25–26, 85–88, 91, 96–98, 193, 229, 243, 294, 298n14, 303, 306, 309–310 law, laws 38, 41–42, 72, 89–90, 116, 135–136, 265–266, 285, 289n142, 310, 318 logos 19, 62, 144, 157–161, 170–171, 191, 194–198, 204–211, 214, 220, 252n14, 261n50, 297, 301, 303n26, 309 lord 19–20, 22n49, 26–27, 33, 41–43, 52, 62n3, 64–69, 74–75, 79–82, 87–88, 91–98, 123, 125, 128, 134n89, 136–139, 141, 143, 146, 153, 160, 164, 169, 173–175, 177–188, 206, 211, 216, 228, 229, 235, 237, 242, 245, 257, 264, 277, 280, 286, 293–294, 297–298, 304–306, 309, 315 magic 21, 38, 101, 246, 258, 284, 319 Marcion, Marcionism 8, 233, 285–289, 297, 312n51, 317

martyrs, martyrdom 7, 222–248 megatheism 267–268, 296n10 Melchizedek 6, 19, 93–98 merkavah 126 messiah 19, 28n74, 96, 120, 125, 133n89, 163, 171, 175, 177, 178n24, 188, 194, 196, 200, 201, 203, 210, 211, 214, 309, 314–316 messianism, messianic 8, 19, 25, 94, 162, 171, 174n9, 178n24, 187, 193, 195–196, 199–204, 213, 215, 221, 298, 309–310n42, 313–316 metaphysics 27n69, 38, 58, 60, 144–146, 165, 251, 252n12, 258–261, 268, 275, 282, 297, 301–302 Metatron 8, 69–72, 84, 264 minim 13 monad 271–272 monogenes 194, 219, 259n42 monotheism 2–8, 14, 27, 32, 73, 106, 109, 134, 136–138, 141–142, 145–146, 165–169, 190–191, 216, 218–221, 243, 261, 263–264, 266–269, 280–281, 294–296, 299–305, 308–312 mortality 5, 38, 42, 208, 210, 237, 245, 277, 283, 291, 297 Mosaic distinction 33, 59 Moses 38, 41, 48, 50, 52, 57–59, 62–64, 70, 73, 84, 112, 116–117, 128, 158, 199–200, 211, 251, 278, 290, 298, 319n72 mother 36–37, 56, 58–59, 67, 112, 128, 161, 205, 209, 210, 255n30, 257, 262, 278, 279, 293n1, 297n12, 304n27 mutation 2, 3, 19, 222, 250, 251, 294 mysteries, mystery cults, mystery religions  11–12, 36, 101 mysticism 68n20, 72, 101, 116, 125–126, 128, 138, 220, 242, 258, 262 Nag Hammadi 252, 257, 258 name, divine (see divine name) new religionsgeschichtliche Schule 2–3, 5, 7­–8, 9–31, 190–191 Nicea, Nicene 220, 295, 311, 317n68 numerology 141–142 Ophites, Ophians 276, 278 Oracle 7, 46, 47, 48, 154, 297n12 orientalism 10, 12, 14, 30n83

358 Orpheus 47, 57 Orphism 269 pagan, paganism 3–5, 16–18, 21, 24–26, 28, 30, 33, 39, 56n53, 135–138, 140, 193–194, 197, 209, 220, 223, 227, 237, 239, 241, 243–244, 247–248, 266–269, 284, 288–290, 293, 296, 298, 301, 303–306, 309, 312–313, 315n64 pagan monotheism 4–5, 40n20, 266–269, 296–297, 305 Palestine 11, 22, 24, 191, 193, 200, 206 pantheism 48, 281 pantheon 32–34, 38, 48–49, 60, 267, 269, 277, 299 parting of the ways 134n90, 193, 195–196, 312 Paul, Pauline, Paulinism 3, 6, 8, 15–22, 24–27, 29n76, 31n85, 49, 52, 74–75, 85–171, 181, 187, 194, 201, 215–216, 229, 242, 244, 247, 261, 264–266, 285, 289, 291, 293–298, 300–303, 305–319 persecution 178n24, 227, 247, 308–309nn39–40 philosophy 5, 7, 8, 15, 27, 48, 57, 59, 72, 73, 104, 113n35, 144, 181, 197, 198, 205, 207–209, 214, 218–220, 230–232, 246, 250–255, 259–260, 264, 266, 268–271, 274–277, 281–282, 285–294, 297, 301–304, 309, 317n68 Platonism 28, 53, 72, 144, 150n30, 191, 205–208, 219n94, 232, 250–255, 258, 260–263, 268–277, 282, 284–285, 287, 294n4, 301–304, 317n68 pleroma 166, 255–256, 259, 261–262, 282 polytheism 2, 4–6, 32–34, 48–49, 58, 220, 243, 263, 264, 266, 268 prepositional metaphysics 27, 144–146, 165, 169 pre-Socratics 268, 269, 271, 277 priest, priesthood 34, 44, 45, 57, 60, 62–63, 70, 81, 83, 92, 94, 96, 98, 112, 115, 275, 280, 282, 283n107, 298–299, 308, 319 Protestantism 13, 191n12, 310, 318 Pythagoreans 254, 271–272, 274, 284–285 queen 36–37 Qumran 19, 51, 64, 89n11, 93, 95, 126, 306

Index of Subjects rabbis 13, 49, 53, 54, 56, 63, 72, 113, 164n77, 206, 319 religionsgeschichtliche Schule 2, 10–11, 30 resurrection 31n84, 73–74, 103–104, 116–117, 120–121, 124–125, 127–133, 135–138, 160, 170, 187, 213–215, 238, 253, 293, 295, 303, 309–310, 313–316 ritual 5, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 30, 34, 43, 45–46, 59–60, 82, 84n62, 136n95, 245–247, 254, 258–259, 293n1, 296n10, 298 Rome, Roman 3–5, 8, 18, 21, 24, 25, 28, 34–35, 37–38, 40–41, 45, 50, 54, 55, 58, 64, 97, 100, 104, 108, 115, 135, 223, 225, 229–230, 232, 235, 238, 240, 243–248, 267, 282, 292, 296, 298–299, 301, 304, 308–310, 312, 319 sacrifice 39, 45, 52, 60, 153, 226, 237, 245, 291, 298, 307, 308n38 savior 192n13, 213, 229, 238, 250n8, 253n19, 254, 259, 260–262 Second Temple 11, 13–16, 18–21, 30, 44, 61–63, 65, 81, 83, 96, 113n35, 126, 146, 164, 195, 294, 306, 312–313 sect, sectarian 199, 207, 252 Septuagint 52, 64, 84, 109n30, 186n51, 204, 244, 294, 296, 301, 317 Serapis 35, 56, 57, 59, 244, 319 serpent 239, 277–280 Sethians 250–252, 255n30, 258, 262, 275–276, 278, 284 Shema 26, 75, 140–146, 168–169, 182, 310, 314 sophia (see wisdom) subordination 6, 173, 216, 219–220, 267, 269, 300, 303n26, 309 sonship 27–29, 201, 300, 303n26 statue 37, 52, 53, 59, 235, 237, 293n1 Stoic, Stoicism 144, 150n30, 165, 198n43, 205, 207–208, 250, 253n16, 258–261, 269 sun 36–37, 46–47, 56, 67–68, 279, 280, 297, 301n20, 306, 318 syncretism 191 syzygy 278, 301n21 temple 33, 40, 42–49, 59, 63, 64, 79, 83, 112, 121, 136n95, 164–165, 171, 192, 198, 212, 244, 282, 293, 307, 308

359

Index of Subjects tetragrammaton 8, 26n67, 61–65, 76, 78, 80, 83–84, 85–87, 95, 142, 186n51 theodicy 8, 300n18, 302 theos hypsistos 40, 269, 296–297, 305 throne 35, 65, 68, 70, 71, 74, 76, 113, 125–128, 138, 163, 166, 204–205, 208–209, 307, 314, 316 titans 56 Torah 17, 49, 90, 204, 205, 209, 314 translation 26n67, 33, 38–39, 42, 50, 52, 58–59, 80, 86, 109–110, 122, 138, 148n26, 162–164, 200, 217n92, 226–227, 229–231, 244, 252, 282, 294, 302n22, 307, 312n51 transtheism 275–276, 287–288, 292 trinity, trinitarianism 3, 7, 106n22, 189, 191, 216n88, 218, 220–221, 238, 301, 303n26, 317n68

vision 8, 46, 54, 66, 72, 80, 82, 113, 125–129, 192n15, 238–241, 254, 306 wine 1, 43–45 wisdom 6, 19, 64, 125, 144–146, 157–161, 170, 176, 179, 183–184, 194–195, 199, 204–210, 219, 249–262, 266, 268, 275, 284, 290 worship 2, 5, 14–15, 20–22, 25, 32, 34–41, 44–49, 51, 57, 59, 67, 78, 81, 97–98, 105–106, 117, 122, 134–136, 156, 166, 183, 195–196, 222, 232–234, 237–238, 245, 263, 265, 267–269, 274–277, 280–281, 283, 285, 287, 290–292, 294, 299n16, 300, 303–304, 306–308, 316 xenotheism 285, 287, 288, 292

uncreated 157, 190n7, 196n36, 197, 205, 208–211, 214, 219, 264, 288, 294, 297, 299, 301n20, 309 universal polytheism 32–34, 48–49, 58 unknown god 48–49, 64, 80, 113, 253n17, 255, 257, 265–266, 286, 289, 290

Yahoel 8, 62, 69–72, 84n63, 98n30 Yahweh, Yhwh 1, 6–8, 20, 22, 26, 33, 38–41, 43, 45–47, 49–52, 55n53, 59–60, 61–64, 66–67, 69–70, 72–75, 77–79, 81–89, 92–98, 140, 143, 152, 155–156, 163–164, 170, 249n3, 263–266, 270, 276, 284–290, 292, 294, 299–300, 304

Valentinus, Valentinianism 8, 77, 83, 206, 250–255, 258–262, 275, 278, 284n109, 297n11, 301n21

Zeus 32–33, 35, 37, 40–48, 50, 53, 55n53, 59–60, 267, 269, 270, 272, 277, 289, 304, 306n35