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This episode starts with some listener feedback about episode 98 with Dr. Michael Heiser: is his position, trinitarian, binitarian, or “Arian”? I address this, and we hear a little more from Dr. Heiser regarding Jacob’s blessing in Genesis 48:15-16.
My interview with influential scholar of early Christianity Dr. Larry Hurtado begins at 10:50. Dr. Hurtado explains the term “early high christology” and what it means when applied to his own work. He discusses various angels and men who in various ancient Jewish writings are in some way exalted and honored in God-like ways, and how these cases differ from that of Jesus. Dr. Hurtado has argued that in the early years of Christianity we suddenly see a distinctive pattern of Jesus-worship, as evidenced by the earliest books in the New Testament. Such practices don’t derive from a second or third century, Gentile Christian context, but rather from the earliest, largely Jewish Christian context.
In his view, the New Testament portrays Jesus as having “divine status.” Does this mean that they thought Jesus and his Father to be the same god? Dr. Hurtado discusses this in light of various passages in the gospel according to John, and also the statements of 1 Timothy that God is immortal. (1:17, 6:16) The New Testament, he observes, emphasizes that Jesus was a genuine human being, a man, although in his view it also presents Jesus as existing even when the world was made, in a pre-human phase of his existence. God and Jesus, in his view, are closely linked, but also distinguished in the New Testament. God exalts Jesus to divine glory, which is why we must worship Jesus, according to early Christians. Worship of Jesus, he argues, has a theocentric (God-centered) justification or basis.
He also comments briefly on James Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?, the idea that “worship” by definition can be given only to God, and whether we should start our christological thinking with fourth century or with first century sources.
Our next is the 100th (!) episode of the trinities podcast: another new interview with Dr. Hurtado, about his God in New Testament Theology.
Links for this episode:
- Dr. Michael Heiser
- Larry Hurtado’s blog
- home page @ the University of Edinburgh
- interview by St. John’s Nottingham: How Did Jesus Become a God?
- his 2014 lecture, “Paul’s Messianic Jesus“
- Dr. Hurtado’s books
- Commentary on Mark
- One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 3rd ed. (kindle)
- Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (kindle)
- How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (kindle)
- The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (kindle)
- God in New Testament Theology
- Bousset, Kyrios Christos (older edition)
- Dunn, Did The First Christians Worship Jesus? (kindle) (reviewed by Dr. Hurtado, by Barbara Buzzard)
- trinities blog posts on Dr. Hurtado on the worship of Jesus
- trinities blog post series on worship in Revelation 4-5
- Who Should Christians Worship?
- Socinus (aka 1539-1604)
- The Racovian Catechism
- Francis David (aka Ferenc Dávid, c. 1510-79)
- the controversy between Socinus and David about praying to and worshiping Jesus (more context)
- podcast 29 – Arius
- podcast 30 – The Council of Nicea
- podcast 31 – William Hasker on the “Arian” Controversy
- the new trinities Facebook group
- This week’s thinking music is “Come Away“ from the album “the wilderness i want” by Jim Rooster.
Explaining the nature of Jesus’ pre-existence is critical here since for Trinitarians Jesus wasn’t “given divine status” or “exalted by God;” he was rather “given back his divine status” and “exalted by God to his former position.” They draw a V-line from Christ’s creational participation to his incarnation to his exaltation.
Dale,
I know I’m over 50 podcasts behind but I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you so much for all the work and time you put into all of this. When I set out to study about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit over 2 years ago I came up not finding much more than the typical arguments which entailed a generally superficial depth and then closed the door on the issue. I have learned much about early church history, differing time periods and the categorical ways of thinking and organizing/conceptualizing ideas in those time periods, much about the pre-nicene Christians, histories of the Unitarians of various kinds and the Trinitarians (also of various kinds), I have overcome certain preconveived notions of Humanitarian Unitarians, “Arian” Unitarians, Subordinationists, and even Trinitarians. Thanks so much for your continued work and for gathering all of this literature and great scholarly minds into one place so the average layperson interested in theology can access it. I appreciate your time and effort and hope you will continue as long as you’re able.
-Aaron
At 41:38, Hurtado asks and answers a key question on the foundation of Jesus-worship:
[Q] “What is your basis for reverencing Jesus” – directed to Paul or some other Early Christian.
[A] “Because God requires it” – the probable answer would be.
I fully agree, and, of course, this answer is fully in keeping with Phil 2:9-11.
The evident consequence, though, is that the worship of the resurrected, ascended and exalted Jesus has nothing whatsoever to do with his “metaphysical status” and/or his “pre-existence”.
As it happens, though, Jesus, truly man (because of his maternal heritage), is also truly God, NOT because he is the “second person of the trinity” (a political play on words), NOT because he is “eternally generated by the Father” (an Origenian clever trick conveniently recycled in the doctrine of the “trinity”, BUT because he truly is the “one-begotten” of the Father, the Incarnated Word of the Father, conceived by the power of the Father’s Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Unfortunately, there came Justin Martyr, who had probably read Philo, and messed everything up …
Hurtado is certainly a very fine historian of early Christianity. Ultimately, though, his only significant contribution is this: the Jesus-worship started very early, and was fully established within 20 years of Jesus’ death (and resurrection). It was a “mutation” within Judaism, and owes nothing to Gentile contributions. Hurtado deliberately avoids to speak in terms of “trinity”, but repeatedly claims that the NT texts, in particular the Gospel of John, while they speak of Jesus as human and mortal, also speak (?) of his “pre-existence”.
I am more and more convinced that, until we fully debunk this phoney idea of (personal) “pre-existence”, we will never sort out the “trinity”.
“Ultimately, though, his only significant contribution is this: the
Jesus-worship started very early, and was fully established within 20
years of Jesus’ death (and resurrection).”
Strange to see “only” used this way of Hurtado’s work with its implied minimization, because that contribution was a *huge* paradigm changer.
Pingback: New Hurtado Podcasts | Larry Hurtado's Blog
Dale,
These are all very good! I’m surprised that you find the time to put all of these things together, being that you do your own studies for your job I’m guessing.
I understand that this is probably a staggering question, being that there’s a great extent to the content, but have you ever thought of doing an episode on Philo of Alexandria and how his views relate to early Christian thought?
I was proposed this not too long ago and have been looking into it. I found what I thought was very Tertullian-like in some of his writings as I found them translated online, but I didn’t look through all of them, especially not thoroughly.
However, the reason I am curious is because, like with various other early Jewish or Christian theology, there is misrepresentation going on. The substance of the talks was primarily on parallels between Philo’s writings and those of the New Testament, also related to the targums or interpretations.
The person I was discussing these things with saw kind of eye-to-eye with me on how “word of the LORD” was treated in the targums, although I don’t necessarily relate this to Philo. Philo seems to take the stance that all that was created was thought out by God first before creating it, and this he said one might properly call the logos (or Reason) of God, being that it was in His mind. He in another writing calls this God’s firstborn son, and although parallels to this were tried to be made by some I saw online with the Bible, the term “firstborn” is used differently:
For one, Philo considers all the things of creation as God’s children, and calls God a father for this reason (and not specifically for fathering us or for being the father of Jesus), and, like Tertullian, relates this to the light in the beginning, and also the wisdom. His reasons for doing this are philosophical more than Biblical, but it looks like he comes to the same conclusions as others might based on the Bible.
In any case, what I’m saying is that there are parallels that are trying to be forced and those kinds of assertions can be dangerous when untrue. I was curious as to whether or not you were planning to do a podcast on this subject Philo, being that it seems there is sometimes a tendency for people to kind of think that John was referring to Philo’s works in order to accommodate Greeks, or something like that. Though it’s not about Trinity theory, it is related in the minds of these peoples to Trinitarianism, and what’s startling to me is that, if they were truly related, it would kind of undermine Trinitarianism, being that it is contrary to it, and would probably be as- or more-Unitarian than either Tertullian or Justin, and it looks as though Justin and/or Tertullian had possibly derived some of their ideas of God from Philo and tried to apply them to the Bible. For instance, we see the Son of God in the Bible as being a son after or upon his birth in all instances, but for the earlier Christian philosophers, it seems that Jesus was “son” when he was begotten before he was born. I can see no reason nor justification for this in the Bible *at all*, and that is what leads me to believe that they may have been influenced by him, having been philosophers themselves, using some of his types of arguments (with their shortcomings) in their works.
I noticed the article you posted from Philip Jenkins on Philo, but it didn’t seem very detailed. I don’t think Philip Jenkins was 100% accurate in saying that the Logos to Philo was the craftsman, being that when Philo talks about the world being created by means of the Logos, he speaks of it as though God first thought it out as the Logos, and that the Logos was actually ALL of creation, only in thought. That the thought was the first thing which was made by God (although to him not exactly created, but not exactly uncreated either), he seems to differ from Tertullian in that he didn’t seem to think of the Logos as a kind of “substance” coming from God’s “substance”, but rather treats it as an aspect of God which would have been extended into the world. He speaks of the Logos as though it were a being at times, which is kind of confusing, but I’m wondering (since I didn’t read all of his stuff by far) if he doesn’t treat the Logos in somewhat of the same way as the targums: that it is God as we know or experience Him in a second-hand sense, e.g. by His words or messages. For instance, in targum Jonathan in Isaiah 6:1, it says, “In the year in which King Uzziah was smitten with the leprosy the prophet said, I saw the glory of the Lord sitting upon His throne, high, and lifted up unto the highest heavens, and the temple was filled with the brightness of His glory.” Is that there speaking of God’s glory as another person, of speaking of God in “immanence” in the sense that, since God can’t be seen (according to Exodus), and since Isaiah says he saw God, and it says His glory filled the temple; is that why it says, “I saw the glory of the Lord sitting upon His throne”? If not, the glory of the glory filled the temple, which is kind of redundant. In the same way, people are treating the Word of God as though it were a person in the Old Testament or in the targums (although in the targums I can and have proved that it’s synonymous with spoken words, as in Isaiah 1:10), and then saying that this person the Word of God spoke all things into existence (by His word — the Word’s word).
To me, this just screams a misunderstanding, and is only another log on the fire of the concerns I have that I’m wondering if I would hear about in any upcoming podcasts relating to Philo.
If so, that’s cool; and if not, that’s also cool — I was just wondering! 🙂
I think Dr. Hurtado is exactly right about the problems with retrojecting later theological CATEGORIES into a time period when they simply didn’t exist. Preexistence isn’t a WORD that was used in the New Testament, but the WORD and the CATEGORY are different things, and John clearly presents Jesus as existing prior to his birth. The Greek notion of ousia, on the other hand, is a conceptual category that doesn’t appear anywhere to have been in circulation in conceptualizing Jesus and his mission in the New Testament. As Hurtado points out, the Semitic concept of personhood is related to function, not ontology. This is a big part of my doctoral dissertation, and one of the reasons Richard Bauckham’s notion of “divine identity” is presentistic and, in my opinion, misses the mark.
I have to disagree with a few things, though. I don’t think Hurtado is right in characterizing Dunn’s argument as Jesus not being worshipped as a separate deity. That seems to me to impose a Nicene lens on an argument that Dunn seems to me to be repeatedly trying to distinguish from the standard Nicene reading of Jesus’ worship in the New Testament. I read Dunn as insisting Jesus was given bits and pieces of worship, but it was not unfettered or on par with the worship given to God. In other words, it was a lesser kind of worship, not a full kind of worship aiming through Jesus at God. He was getting the JV worship to God’s varsity worship. Dunn points out that while Jesus receives this and that form of worship, the Greek latreuo (or latreuein), which is the technical term for “cultic worship,” is never used in reference to any worship directed at Jesus. It is exclusively used in reference to God, which problematizes, in my opinion, Hurtado’s frequent reference to Jesus being the recipient of “cultic worship” normally reserved exclusively for God. In reality, cultic worship throughout the New Testament, according to the standard Greek use of the terms, is still exclusively reserved for God and not Jesus.
I would also argue that Hurtado seems to be assuming that the practice follows the belief, but it is usually the case with ritual innovation that the theological rationale for rituals follows after the practice itself. A practice is introduced or borrowed for one reason or another, and it takes a community some time to figure out what kind of conceptual models underlie it. Sometimes an authority asserts a single theological rationale, but sometimes you get competing theories. Instead of insisting that, whatever the mechanisms, Jesus was suddenly outright worshipped and so must have followed on the heels of a real-life resurrection of someone identified with God, I think a much more interesting and critical question is how these ritual practices developed. Instead of just assuming the underlying motivations, we should see what we can learn from trying to piece the evidence together. Does it not make just as much sense to frame devotion to Jesus as an expansion of that limited worship Hurtado repeatedly acknowledges was offered to these divine agents and intermediaries? He insists there was this mutation, but why not a mutation of that attested form of devotion?
Dan,
Although it’s true that “the word and the category are different things” (as you say), it really doesn’t help. For example, any Trinitarian would simply claim that the “category” of the Trinity doctrine is taught by the biblical writers even though the “word” Trinity is not found in scripture.
I think it’s a bit presumptuous to claim that “John clearly taught Jesus existed before his birth” because there isn’t even any reference to the “birth” of Jesus in the 4th Gospel. Moreover, “preexistence” is only an interpretation of the writer’s use of other language. Without a word for “preexistence”, we have to leave the rest of the language open to other interpretations.
“I think it’s a bit presumptuous to claim that “John clearly taught Jesus existed before his birth”
You must not understand what “presumptuous” means;-)
Maybe “presumptuous” is not appropriate, but what matters is that the claim that “John clearly taught Jesus existed before his birth” is the result of vast misunderstanding.
Good episode.
As for Arians worshipping two gods… one big and one small… is that really what they did? I’m still reading about them, but wasn’t it more of a case of Jesus being god-like… by God’s own hand… but still not being A god? As someone else put it, keep in mind that what we know about Arius and his followers comes almost completely from his enemies that wanted him destroyed (and hunted down and destroyed any of his writings and doctrines that they could find).
I think Arius simply applied QEOS (=god) to Jesus in a different sense from how he applied it to God the father, which was a well-established practice going all the way back to the Pentateuch, and possibly earlier.
Des,
Yes, that’s true. There are no writings preserved from Arius himself, so all the presumptive talk about what he supposedly believed is rather useless. I think it’s compelling for some people to call themselves “Arian” in order to try to identify with someone in the early church who was thought to be opposed to the Trinity doctrine.
Well, I more or less identify myself that way, if someone wants to nail down what I believe. I’m keeping my mind open, and may yet change it, but I say that I’m Arian-ish until I read something that sways me, since I think the Socianians are probably wrong about Jesus being “promoted” to Son status and not being pre-existent. So “Arian” seems a nice quick way to sum up what I think at the moment. It’s strictly for convenience purposes. BTW, know who else identified himself as a kind of modern Arian? Gary Gygax, the Dungeons and Dragons inventor.
Des,
Yes, the labels are convenient to help people to identify others with a summary view. I don’t like being associated with “Socinius” because I know little or nothing about him. I’m just trying to use the resources I have available in this generation to take a fresh look at all of the evidence. I think we can do much better than either Arias or Socinius.
People use the terms Arian and Socinian in order to distinguish the Christologies of Unitarian Subordinationists who believe in a pre-incarnate Jesus and ones who don’t, I get why People have reservations using the Language becuase of Association With individuals but unfortunately there is no way around it.
Hi Dale,
Thanks for engaging another interesting guest. Unfortunately, I got the impression that Dr. Hurtado was using the “I’m just a historian” approach to skirting the theological issues that you were asking him about. Like Dr. Heiser, it seemed like Hurtado was unable to assert a firm position of his own.
He also seemed inconsistent with regard to his comments about “language.” For example, in the beginning of the interview, he claims that “we have to refrain from discussing Christology in the later theological language of the Church Fathers”, but then he spoke at length about how “preexistence” is clear in the Gospel of John.
I’m hoping the next podcast with Dr. Hurtado will have less “scholar speak” and a more theological substance. I would like to know what he actually believes about the things you asked.
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