Larry Hurtado on early Christians’ worship of Jesus

@Dave:

I agree that Jesus is not worshiped at Philippians 2, at least not in the hard, modern sense of the word. I was merely laying out what I consider the *logical* possibilities, an approach I was inspired to take because Dale is a logician:-) I think that options 1 and 2 are highly unlikely, and this leaves options 3 and 4. I lean towards #4 for both historical and biblical reasons.

Sean

It all goes back to our human frailty!
People see what they want to see!
People don’t see what they don’t want to see

Mental gymnastics becomes ‘eisegesis’ !

And we have people like Richard Bauckham telling us to embrace a ‘higher Christology’ based on these gymnastics.!

I enjoy your posts !

Every blessing
John

Sean
I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Clearly one has to ask ‘in what sense’ is Christ being worshipped.”?
As Dale suggests above, it is probably as God’s divine agent

My mind keeps reverting to 1 Corinthians 15 vs 24-29
“then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to his God and Father, when he………
….When everything is subjected to him , then the Son himself shall be subjected to to the one who subjcted everything to him, so that God may be all in all”

Surely this puts the matter into perspective?
Every Blessing
John

While I would never seek to minimize the import of the treatment Jesus received in the NT in contexts of ceremonial exaltation, I think the attempt to use these situations to support God as Trinity are sorely misguided. To honor the agent is to honor the principal he represents, whereas to dishonor the agent is to dishonor the principal. Philippians 2 clearly provides the clue to understanding all accounts involving the exaltation of Jesus: The honor, glory, reverence, obeisance/worship (PROSKUNEW) he received was “to the glory of God the Father”.

A number of commentators have noted that both God and the King were given PROSEKUNHSAN jointly at 1 Chron 29:20. I’d say that it’s difficult to justify the assumption that this act of obeisance did not include the element of worship. If you read the entire account in the LXX, the words PROSEKUNHSAN TON KURION KAI TON BASILEA (bowed to/worshiped the Lord and the King) come at the very end of a rich, reverential prayer, and the prostration seems (to me) to constitute a sort of “Amen” gesture.

As I see it, there are four ways to interpret this account, logically speaking:

(1) Assume that PROSEKUNHSAN here did not involve worship, but merely constituted a bowing before God and the King;

(2) Assume that the prostration was done in the context of worship so that both God and the King are “worshiped” equally;

(3) Assume both God and the King received “worship”, but that God is worshiped as the principal and the king as his representative in ruling authority over the people (I think that the Amplified Bible even has wording that suggests this), so that there is an important distinction clarifying why this is appropriate;

(4) Assume that that while the single act of PROSEKUNHSAN was offered to both, the obeisance was intended as worship toward God but only reverential respect toward the King.

IMO, for whatever it’s worth, 1 and 2 are less likely, which leaves 3 and 4 as real possibilities. Whichever of these two views one chooses, I think the same could easily apply to the obeisance/worship offered in Revelation. Jesus deserves greater honor than the earthly King because he secured the salvation of man which rescued us from sin and death, so his ceremony had to be more richly textured in its expressions of exaltation towards God’s agent. If you think about it, under the circumstances and in context, it would strike one as quite inappropriate for God to have said to the Son/lamb: They’re about to worship me now, so you have to go sit over there to avoid impropriety;-)

Hi John,

Thank you for your comments. Thom Stark had a website up for a while with a series called “Oh My Godman”, and he made some interesting observations regarding Paul’s use of Isa at Philippians 2.

He did a very nice job drawing out the similarities between Jesus and Cyrus. They are both referred to as “Messiah”; God gave Cyrus a “name” (though unstated) that seems to have signified conferred authority; both Cyrus and Jesus are “worshiped/given obeisance” (Cyrus receives ????????????? in the LXX); and the people bow before Cyrus and pray. Interestingly, the bowing before Cyrus in recognition of his role as God’s “anointed one” appears (to me) to be the initial fulfillment of Isa 45:23! Paul probably viewed Isa 45 as messianic, and that’s probably why he applied verse 23 to Jesus.

BTW, I agree that Adam Christology is at work as well, which is why I favor your rendering of Philippians 2:6 over the popular alternative.

~Sean

Hi Dale,

I have to agree with you about Hurtado, who is not only an extremely thoughtful religious historian, but he has a gift for expressing himself with flair, elegance, and clarity. Even when I disagree with what he says I often can’t help but enjoy the way he says it.

A certain irony has impressed itself on my own mind, though, in that while many orthodox believers I’ve conversed with seem to rush to embrace his conclusions because they believe that it puts the old argument that the Trinity emerged via syncretism to rest once and for all, they fail to notice the rather conspicuous lacunae that his historical model seems to create. I’ll try and unpack this, and maybe you can comment and let me know what you think.

Consider two historical facts side-by-side:

1) The early Christian movement used the Hebrew Scriptures to contextualize, understand, and defend its view of Christ, who came to be seen as the fulfillment of OT prophesy.

2) The acceptance of Trinitarianism renders the view of God as understood by Jews in light of the Hebrew Scriptures to be heretical (or at the very least, erroneous).

Regarding #2, notice what Gregory of Nyssa had to say:

“For, in personality, the Spirit is one thing and the Word another, and yet again that from which the Word and Spirit is, another. But when you have gained the conception of what the distinction is in these, the oneness, again, of the nature admits not division, so that the supremacy of the one First Cause is not split and cut up into differing Godships, neither does the statement harmonize with the Jewish dogma, but the truth passes in the mean between these conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is useful in it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the acceptance of the Word, and by the belief in the Spirit; while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the nature abrogating this imagination of plurality.”

Found here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/205/2050223.htm

So we have two historical features in tension, (a) Christianity arose as a sect within Judaism, and (b) the later trinitarian concept of God was incompatible with the very Judaism from which it emerged. Now, if the converts who formed the incipient church heard something similar to what Trinitarians hear when encountering the early teachings about Christ, and if they had similar assumptions to that of modern Trinitarians — e.g. (a) the notion that there are two strict categories of gods, “true” [the One God] and “false” [condemned/idolatrous], and (b) that the application of QEOS to Jesus necessarily meant that he was “true deity as to his nature”, etc. — then they would have needed the leaders of the new movement to make sense of those teachings, which would have been paradoxical and potentially dangerous under those sorts of assumptions.

When orthodox Christians hear the expressions “Jesus is God” and “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus”, they aren’t overly troubled, because they have a conceptual grid into which such seemingly paradoxical statements can be placed to avoid cognitive dissonance. But the early church didn’t have such a conceptual grid, and so such statements would have caused concern and controversy. Yet there is no compelling evidence that this was a point of concern to the early Christians. Notice what both James Dunn and Maurice Casey observe vis a vis Christ devotion:

“The silence on this score cannot be because we have no means of knowing what Jewish reaction to earliest Christian theology was at this stage; on the contrary, we can see well enough from the literature of first generation Christianity that Paul’s understanding of the law was a sore bone of contention for those who valued their Jewish heritage highly. Had Paul’s christology been equally, or more contentious at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul’s own letters. The absence of such indicators points in the other direction: that Paul’s christology and the devotional language of the earliest Christian worship did not cause any offense to monotheistic Jews. So far as both Paul and his fellow Jews were concerned, early Christian devotion to Jesus still lay within the bounds of the Jewish understanding of God in his dealings with his world and people.” (The Partings of the Ways, 1st edition),
pp. 205, 206

“The disputes extant in Acts and the epistles are about halakhah rather than christology, and if there had been a general perception among Jewish members of the communities that other Christians were hailing Jesus as fully God, there would have been disputes severe enough for us to hear about them.” (From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God), p. 115

So, in my opinion, this creates a problem vis a vis expectation:

1) If the early church believed that applying the term QEOS to Jesus and including him as a central figure in the context of cultic religious devotion meant that he is in some sense the one God of the Bible ontologically, then there unavoidably would have been concern, controversy, discussion, and disputes about this. Such concern and disputes would not only have occurred between the early converts and their opponents, but it would have existed among the new converts themselves, who would have been desperately driven to resolve the cognitive dissonance they would have been experiencing while engaging in the constellation of cultic religious practices that were part of the emerging community’s religious life. (Did you catch the echoes of Hurtado in that last sentence? [grin]).

2) That discussion, once begun, would have raised issues that would have been a major stumbling block for many, and would have naturally evolved very quickly into the types of disputes that arose in later centuries. Full doctrinal delineation by the Apostles would have ultimately been required, and this very
early in the life of the new movement.

The absence of discussion, dispute, concern, and controversy over Christ as “G-god”, along with the absence of concomitant doctrinal delineation by the NT writers, is perhaps the clearest evidence there is that (a) the arbitrary assertion that there are only the one true God and false gods is unfounded from a biblical perspective (this is a common assertion from the Evangelical camp), (b) the arguments put forth by the majority of grammarians over the significance of verses like John 1:1c are gravely flawed, and, most importantly, (c) Trinitarianism is not in harmony with early Christian thinking or teaching from the standpoint of history and historical probability in light of reasonable expectation.

~Kaz