Was Jesus Divine?

In my last post, I began considering popular theories about why the early Christians considered Jesus to be divine. The first theory pointed to the fact that they thought of Jesus as Messiah and therefore Son of God. But I showed that, in the thought world of first-century Judaism – the world of the earliest believers in Jesus – both “Messiah” and “Son of God” were royal titles, pointing out Jesus’ divine anointing, but not his divine nature.

Perhaps the other popular theory espoused by many Christians points to the resurrection of Jesus as evidence of his deity. Here’s a version of that theory:

Theory #2: The early Christians believed Jesus was divine because of his resurrection.

According to this theory, the first Christians believed that Jesus was divine because they believed he had been raised from the dead. “Surely,” it is proposed, “human beings don’t rise from the dead. So the good news of Easter convinced the earliest Christians – as it convinces us today – that Jesus was in fact God.”

Now there is a grain of truth in this theory, as there was in the previous theory about the Messiah/Son of God. No doubt the resurrection of Jesus did figure significantly in the development of early Christian belief about Jesus’ deity. But the “resurrection therefore divine” argument is too simple to be correct, at least in its most common form.

For one thing, Jesus was not the only one to rise from the dead while he was on earth, yet we have no indication that any of the other “resurrected ones” were considered to be divine. Mark 5:21-43 tells the story of Jesus’ raising the dead daughter of the leader of a synagogue. The people were amazed, but didn’t think the girl was divine. Similarly, in John 11:1-45, Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. Many of those who observed this miracle put their faith in Jesus (11:45), but they didn’t deify Lazarus. Finally, Matthew mentions that many were raised from the dead when Jesus was killed (27:52-53). Yet, once again, nobody thought these people were divine. So, the “raised from the dead therefore God” formula doesn’t fit the context in which the first Christians came to recognize that Jesus was much more than a man. (I am aware, of course, that the resurrection of Jesus was of a different kind than the resurrections I have mentioned.)

Many Jews in the time of Jesus expected that, in God’s time, human beings would experience resurrection. Mark 12:18 notes that “Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus . . . .” The implication is that this denial of resurrection set the Sadducees apart from many of not many if not most other Jews in the time of Jesus. Notably, the Pharisees believed in resurrection beyond death.

But the Pharisees were not alone in this belief. We find the idea of resurrection among the Old Testament prophets, most notably Daniel. Daniel 12 envisions a time in the future when “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Dan 12:3). The post-biblical book of Wisdom, written a couple of centuries before Jesus, affirms that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them” (Wis 3:1). In time, “they will shine forth” and “will govern nations and rule over peoples” (Wis 3:7-8). The promise of resurrection emboldened Jewish people to die rather than abandon their faith in God. In 2 Maccabees, a man who is being tortured to death says, “One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!” (2 Macc 7:14).

So, in the eyes of the first followers of Jesus, who were Jewish, of course, the resurrection of Jesus proved that he was righteous. It vindicated his life, his ministry, his message, and even his death. But it did not, at least at first blush, demonstrate that Jesus was God. The earliest Christians confessed that “God raised” him from the dead (Acts 2:24; Rom 10:9; 1 Cor 6:14), but they did not say that Jesus raised himself, thereby showing himself to be God.

I would certainly agree, however, that apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the early followers of Jesus would never have come to the conclusion that he was God in the flesh. In fact, there really wouldn’t have been any early followers of Jesus after his crucifixion, were it not for his resurrection. So the resurrection is crucial in the overall calculus that ends with Jesus’ deity. But the flow of ideas is more complex than the simple “resurrection therefore divine” argument that sometimes shows up in Easter sermons. Jesus could have been the Messiah/Son of God, and he could even have been raised by God on the third day after his crucifixion, without being divine. These things surely point in the direction of Jesus’ specialness, even his uniqueness, but more is required to get to his divinity.

I’ll get to this “more” later in this series. But before I do, I want to examine a very popular argument among secularists that purports to explain why the earliest Christians believed Jesus to be divine. I’ll deal with this in my next post in this series.

In my last two posts in this series, I examined two theories that seek to explain why the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as divine. I found both of these to be lacking, though both point in a direction that will ultimately lead to a plausible theory.

Today I want to examine a common theory that seeks to explain the early Christian deification of Jesus without depending on the miracle of the resurrection. This theory, popular in college religion courses, claims that the earliest Christians, as faithful Jewish monotheists, hailed Jesus as an inspired teacher and/or as Israel’s Messiah, but not as a divine being. Yet as Christianity spread into the Roman world, the original, authentic Christianity underwent a transformation. Under the influence of Greco-Roman religion and culture, in which the line between the human and the divine was frequently crossed, the fully human Jesus began to be divinized. Soon, like Hercules or Julius Caesar, Jesus was considered to be a god. Thus the authentic early Christianity, with a human Jesus, was hijacked by the divinizing tendencies of the Greco-Roman world.

This theory is not an implausible one. There actually was a fine and permeable line between divinity and humanity in the Greek and Roman worlds. Consider the myth of Hercules, for example (in Greek, Herakles). His father was a god (Zeus) while his mother (Alcmene) was a human being. Hercules lived as a sort of god-man, with superior strength and other abilities. After his death he became a full-on god. In basic outline, this story sounds rather like early Christian belief about Jesus.

Yet it wasn’t just mythical humans who became gods in the Roman world. The Caesars were also accorded this honor. Julius, for example, was recognized as a god after he was murdered in 44 B.C. His immediate successors (Augustus, Tiberius) were also divinized, but only after their deaths, at least in principle. Augustus was certainly more than willing to hint at his divinity during his earthly life. Toward the middle of the first century A.D., the Roman Emperors began to be recognized as gods even before their deaths. By the end of the first century, the Emperor Domitian left no room for speculation, calling himself “Lord” and “God” and requiring others to do the same. Those who would not pay him due homage, like the Christians, for example, were executed.

Into this milieu the early Christians proclaimed Jesus as one sent by God to bring salvation to the world. It’s not impossible to imagine that, in competition with gods like Hercules (who had a temple near the Roman Forum) and human heroes like the divinized Julius Caesar (who had a temple in the Roman Forum), Jesus also came to be thought of as divine. Moreover, this process of deification coincided with the movement of Christianity away from Judaism and toward paganism. So the Jewish commitment to monotheism was lost along the way, and, voilà, Jesus became divine.

As I’ve said, this theory has merit. But the question is: Does it fit the facts of early Christianity? As we examine the original sources that show us what the earliest Christians in fact believed about Jesus, does the “divinization under the influence of Greco-Roman culture theory” hold up? Or is another theory more plausible historically? These questions will guide the next steps in this series.

Sometime in the mid-50s A.D., the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the church in Corinth. He concluded this epistle in the following way:

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord. Our Lord, come! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with all of you in Christ Jesus (1 Cor 16:21-24).

This passage this reads smoothly in English. But if you were to read the original Greek, you’d stumble upon a mystery. What you’d find is this:

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord. Marana tha. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with all of you in Christ Jesus

No matter how well you knew Greek, you would not be able to understand the words, marana tha because, though they appear in Greek letters, they aren’t Greek words.

In fact, marana tha are Aramaic words. They mean “Our Lord, come!” or possibly, “Our Lord is coming”. The use of the prayer “Our Lord, come!” in Revelation 22:20 (in Greek) and in the Didache 10:6 (in Aramaic) points to the prayerful use of the Aramaic phrase in 1 Corinthians 16:20. Aramaic was the language spoken commonly in the eastern Roman Empire, in lands such as Judea and Syria. But it was not the language of Corinth. In fact very few of the Corinthian Christians would have known what marana tha meant, unless Paul had taught them this meaning in an earlier visit to Corinth. The fact that he employs it in his letter suggests that this was in fact the case. The Corinthians knew this Aramaic phrase because Paul had taught it to them during his first visit to Corinth, which took place around A.D. 52.

So, you may be thinking, that’s all well and good. I now know something about the origin of “Our Lord, come!” in 1 Corinthians 16. But why does this matter? Whatever does this tell us about the earliest Christian belief about Jesus and his divinity? Let me explain.

First of all, the fact that marana tha are Aramaic words suggests that they came at first, not from the quill of the Apostle Paul, but rather from the life and liturgy of the Aramaic speaking church. This means that their origin can be dated, not to the mid-50′s A.D., but earlier. Marana tha comes from the 40s or 30s. In other words, this phrase preserves one of the earliest Christian prayers we have.

Second, the fact that Paul actually taught these Aramaic words in a letter to the Greek-speaking Corinthians suggests that they weren’t some incidental phrase Paul picked up somewhere in his early days as a Christian. Rather, they were important enough and used enough in the earliest church that Paul actually passed them on in their original tongue. This situation would be somewhat like that of the Hebrew words amen and hallelujah, which we know in the original language because they have played such a crucial part in Christian worship.

So, the phrase marana tha is both very old and very important. But what does it show us about the earliest Christian understanding of Jesus?

First, it’s quite clear from the context in 1 Corinthians 16 (and elsewhere), that the “Lord” being addressed as “Our Lord” (marana) is Jesus in particular, not God (the Father). Jesus is the one the early Christians are asking to come.

Second, consider the fact that the earliest Christians, most of whom were Jews, were calling out to Jesus as if in prayer. Not only did they believe that he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, but they also believed that he could hear their requests. So, as they worshiped the one true God, they also prayed to Jesus. This is quite a surprising development when you consider that it happened within a monotheistic Jewish context.

Third, the word “Lord” in Aramaic (mar) had a variety of meanings. It could be used as a term of respect for a human being. But it was also the word used by Aramaic-speaking Jews when they spoke to the LORD God. During his earthly life, Jesus was sometimes addressed as “lord” by people who meant simply to show respect to him as an honorable human being (for example, Matthew 8:6). But, after Jesus’ resurrection, the Christian use of “Lord” began to change. We see this illustrated powerfully in the story of “doubting Thomas.” When he finally realizes that Jesus is truly risen, Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). While Thomas is not espousing Trinitarian theology here, his language suggests an association between Jesus and God that is striking.

So when the earliest Christians, who still maintained their Jewish identity and central belief in one God, spoke in prayer to Jesus, calling him “Lord,” this indicates that they thought of Jesus in most exalted terms. Though it would be going beyond the evidence to conclude that the earliest, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish Christians believed that Jesus was somehow “fully God,” in the language of the fourth-century Nicene Creed, they were clearly moving in that direction. (In fact, it may well be that some of those who prayed to Jesus with marana tha did indeed think of him as God, while others did not. Early Christianity showed considerable theological diversity, which is one reason I entitled this series Was Jesus Divine? Early Christian Perspectives, not The Early Christian Perspective.)

We have seen that two small words in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians turn out to reveal quite a bit about the earliest Christian belief in Jesus. They show that some of the first Christians prayed to Jesus, as if to God, and referred to him with a title they used for God. These words also show us that the phrase “Our Lord, come!” was important enough and used so commonly among some of the earliest Christians that Paul taught the Corinthians both the Aramaic words and their meaning. Clearly, therefore, many of the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as far more than simply an inspired, human teacher of wisdom. He was someone to whom they prayed as if they were praying to God.

In my next post in this series I’ll consider another piece of early Christian evidence that confirms and develops what we have seen in this post.

In my last post I examined one of the very oldest bits of evidence for early Christian belief about Jesus. As you may recall, the original Greek text of 1 Corinthians 16:22 contains the Aramaic phrase, marana tha, which means, “Our Lord, come!” This shows that some of the very earliest Christians actually prayed to Jesus after his death and resurrection, even addressing him as “Lord,” a term used for God himself. So, though we can’t tell exactly what the first followers of Jesus believed about him, they surely held him to be much more than a man. In some way they related to Jesus as if he were God himself.

Another very early piece of early Christian belief confirms and expands upon this conclusion. In his letter to the Philippians, written during the mid- to late-50′s A.D., the Apostle Paul speaks of Christ in quite exalted language:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death–
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:5-11).

Notice that Christ, prior to becoming human, was in the form of God and possessed equality with God. Then, in light of his obedient death, God exalted him and gave him the very name of God so that all creation might bow before him and worship him as Lord. Clearly Jesus is no longer in the “merely human” category.

At the latest, this passage was written about 25 years after the death of Jesus – a testimony to early Christian belief. Yet many respectable scholars believe that Paul did not actually compose this text, but borrowed it from an earlier piece of Christian liturgy. The peculiar linguistic form of this passage, combined with its use of language that is unusual for Paul, combined with its “confessional” quality, have persuaded many New Testament scholars that Paul employed a hymn that had been written earlier than Philippians. Just how much earlier we can’t tell. But, once again, we have in Paul’s letters, which are themselves the earliest Christian documents available to us, a piece of tradition which quite possibly goes back to an earlier stage of Christian history. Of course even if Paul composed the hymn in Philippians 2:5-11, it still counts as early Christian belief about Jesus.

This is all the more striking when you compare this text from Philippians with passages from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. In Philippians 2:9-11, God gave Jesus “the name that is above every name” so that every tongue might confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Compare this with Isaiah 42:5-8:

Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you; . . .
I am the LORD, that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to idols.

Yet in Philippians 2, the Lord shares his glory with Christ, even giving him the name of Lord.

Three chapters later, in Isaiah 45:21-23, we read this:

Declare and present your case;
let them take counsel together!
Who told this long ago?
Who declared it of old?
Was it not I, the LORD?
There is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
there is no one besides me.
Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
By myself I have sworn,
from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness
a word that shall not return:
“To me every knee shall bow,
every tongue shall swear.”

Yet Philippians 2, obviously echoing Isaiah 45, claims that every knee shall bow to Jesus, and every tongue will confess that he is Lord.

Notice, however, that Philippians 2 doesn’t confuse Jesus Christ with God, who in the later language of Christian theology, is identified as God the Father. The Father exalts the Son and is glorified when all creation confesses Jesus to be Lord. So, though we don’t have well-developed Trinitarian theology here, we certain have the seeds from which grew the Christian confession of one God in three persons.

Finally, we need to remember that the Apostle Paul was a faithful, monotheistic Jew. Part of what is so striking about the hymn in Philippians 2 is that it is quite intentionally an application of Isaiah to Jesus. Passages in Isaiah once reserved for God alone have been applied to Jesus, who receives the name of Lord and who shares in divine worship. The use of Isaiah here suggests that the recognition of Jesus as God happened among faithful, Scripture-honoring Jews who saw in Jesus an incarnation of their God.

Moreover, what is most stunning about Philippians 2:5-11 is that the death of Jesus, even a scandalous death on the cross, contributes to his being regarded as God, rather than taking away from it. The one who died so ignominiously is the one who receives the worship of all creation as if he were God, and this worship is somehow a result of his humiliating death. Now that’s a paradox well worth further consideration.

In my next post in this series I’ll begin to look at another theological insight that contributed to early Christian exaltation of Jesus as God.

One of the classic Jewish affirmations appears in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:4-5, NIV). This is often called the Shema, Hebrew for the imperative “hear.” The Shema stood at the center of Jewish faith and worship in the time of Jesus, even as it does today. It affirmed the oneness of God, as well as the fact that this one God was also the Israel’s own LORD, the One who had revealed himself as Yahweh.

The Apostle Paul, having grown up in a committed Jewish family, would have heard the Shema countless times. Though the larger pagan world of his upbringing was filled with other so-called “gods,” Paul and his fellow Jews affirmed that theirs was the only true God, an affirmation that sometimes led to persecution of Jews, even occasional martyrdom. Yet no faithful Jew would abandon the belief in one God, the LORD, who was worthy to be loved with heart, soul, and strength. Jesus himself affirmed the importance of the Shema when he asked which commandment was the greatest: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:29-30).

When he accepted Jesus as God’s Messiah, Paul continued to see himself as a faithful Jew. Yet his understanding of God began to change. Not only did he see the grace of God more clearly, but also he saw greater complexity in God’s own unique nature. This is evident in a passage from his first letter to the Corinthians, in a discussion focused on the question of whether or not Christians should eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. Here he writes:

Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth–as in fact there are many gods and many lords–yet for us 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 8:5-6).

Here, in Paul’s confession of one God, is a distinct echo of the Shema. Surely when a Jewish man wrote “yet for us there is one God,” the Shema was ringing in his ears. Unlike the pagans for whom there are many “gods,” for Paul and the Christians in Corinth there is “one god, the Father.” This is the God who created all things, and who gives us our purpose in living.

But then Paul adds something radically new in the history of Judaism. Not only is there one God, but also “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” As we have seen in my last two posts, once again Jesus is called “Lord.” The context makes it clear that Paul was not using this word merely in reference to a human worthy of respect. The Lord Jesus is the one “through whom are all things and through whom we exist,” not exactly something that would be said of a human being.

In 1 Corinthians 8, the relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father is extraordinarily intertwined. Jesus not only receives God’s unique name of Lord, but also he is the agent through whom God created all things and all people. Thus Jesus has begun to take on the attributes of God’s Wisdom as portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures and other ancient Jewish writings. In Proverbs, for example, as God creates the universe, Wisdom speaks in this way: “When [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always” (Prov 8:29-30). God created, but Wisdom was the master worker. In 1 Corinthians 8, all things come from God, but all things come through Jesus Christ the Lord.

This passage reveals that the early Christian confession of Jesus as Lord did not, in the minds of the early Christians, mean they had abandoned Jewish monotheism in favor of pagan polytheism. They still affirmed the existence of one God. Yet somehow this one God now includes the one Lord, Jesus Christ.

A critic would say that this is folly, that one God can’t include the one Lord, Jesus Christ. The early Christians would say that this is part of the mysterious nature of God. Later on, theologians would attempt to explain this mystery in more systematic terms, affirming that the one God exists in three persons (including the Holy Spirit). We can see the seeds of this Trinitarian theology in texts like 1 Corinthians 8. Though these seeds are of the tiny, mustard seed variety, nevertheless they show the beginning of Christian reflection on the nature of God and Christ, that which led to full-blown Trinitarianism in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

So far in this series we’ve seen that the earliest Christians addressed and referred to the risen Jesus as Lord, applying to him a name reserved for the God of Israel. They prayed to him (1 Corinthians 16:22). They envisioned his worship and no doubt worshiped him themselves (Phil 2:9-11). They related to him as if to God. Therefore, the idea that the divinization of Jesus was a late development apart from genuine Christianity fails to fit the evidence. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that some of the very earliest Christians regarded Jesus as far more than merely human. Moreover, this theological development happened, not under the influence of pagan polytheism, but while Christianity was still growing in the cradle of Judaism.

Why? Why did the earliest Christians, many of whom were faithful Jewish monotheists, regard Jesus as divine? What motivated them to regard the human Messiah as far more than human? I’ll seek to answer these questions in my next posts.

So far in this series we’ve looked at historical evidence that shows that some of the earliest Christian spoke of Jesus as Lord, applying to him the very name of Israel’s God. To their Lord they prayed and offered worship. Why? Why did faithful, monotheistic Jews begin to believe that Jesus, the human Messiah, was also in some sense the one true God?

Since all of this happened early within Christian history, and since it happened even among the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, who were, for the most part, devoted Jews, the “divinization under the influence of Greco-Roman paganism” theory doesn’t explain the facts. Moreover, in one of the early Christian texts that speaks of Jesus as the divine Lord (1 Corinthians 8:5-6), there is a clear rejection of pagan polytheism. Christians didn’t think that Jesus was one god among many, but that he was, in some sense a personification of the one true God, the Lord who revealed himself to Israel. So if the “pagan influence” theory fails to account for the early Christian belief in the deity of Jesus, what else might explain this startling theological development?

I would answer this question, in part, by pointing to the implications of salvation through Jesus Christ. The early Christians believed that God’s salvation had come through Jesus, preeminently through his death and resurrection. Acts of the Apostles, for example, describes Peter as proclaiming to the leaders of the Jews: “This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’ There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11-12). Similarly, in what might be the earliest of all extant Christian writings, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle writes, “For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:8). The good news about what God has done in Jesus is, according to Paul, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16).From the fact that God’s salvation came through Jesus, the early Christians came to view Jesus as more than merely an agent of divine salvation. He began to be regarded as the Savior, the one who accomplished what God alone could do. Consider, for example, the following New Testament passages:

Luke 2:11: “. . .  to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
Philippians 3:20: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
1 John 4:13-14 “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world.”

Christians, who are so used to regarding Jesus as Savior, might easily miss the scandalous element in this confession. But a careful look at the Old Testament underscores the scandal. Rarely do the Hebrew Scriptures refer to human beings as agents of divine salvation. In the vast majority of texts, God and God alone is the true Savior. For example, through Isaiah God says:

When you go through deep waters and great trouble, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown! When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you. For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. . . . I am the LORD, and there is no other Savior (Isaiah 43:2-3, 11 NLT).

Or consider the opening of Psalm 62:

I wait quietly before God,
for my salvation comes from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress where I will never be shaken (Psalm 62:1-2, NLT)

So, the earliest Christians, most of whom would have been familiar with these and many other Old Testament passages that proclaim God as the only Savior, nevertheless assigned the title of Savior to Jesus. Yet if Jesus was the Savior, and God alone was the Savior, what did this imply about Jesus himself?

In my next post I’ll try to answer this question by examining another New Testament passage that weaves together the notion of Jesus as Savior with the idea of his divinity.

In last Friday’s post I began to answer the question of why the earliest Christians came to regard Jesus as divine. I showed how belief that divine salvation came through Jesus led to confessing Jesus as the Savior. Then, given the consistent testimony of the Old Testament to the effect that God alone is Savior, the move from Savior to divine Lord was obvious, however scandalous.

Consider one additional New Testament text that connects Jesus as Savior to Jesus as God. This one comes from the so-called “Infancy Narrative” in Matthew’s gospel. Joseph had just found out that his fiancée, Mary, was pregnant, though he had not been sexually intimate with her. So he resolved to break their engagement. But while he was sleeping, an angel appeared to him in a dream. The angel said:

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” (Matthew 1:20-23).

Joseph was to name Mary’s son “Jesus.” Why? Because “he will save his people from their sins.” There is a play on words here easily missed in English. Jesus’ actual name in Aramaic was Yeshua, or in Hebrew, Joshua. This name means, in either Semitic language, “The LORD is salvation.” So Mary’s son will be called “The LORD is salvation.” Given the fact that Yeshua/Joshua was a popular name in the time of Jesus, we cannot conclude that Jesus’ bearing of this name identified him as divine. Yet, the angel said to Joseph that Jesus himself would save Israel from their sins. From this one can produce a nifty syllogism:

Major premise: The LORD is salvation.
Minor premise: Jesus will save his people from their sins.
Therefore: Jesus is the LORD.

Of course the angel made this conclusion clear by adding a line from Isaiah 7:14: “‘Look the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’” Jesus will fulfill the promise of Isaiah. He will be, not only the Savior, but the One who is Emmanuel: God with us. Notice that Jesus is not one god among many, but in some way the presence of the one true God.

I began my last post with a question: Why did the earliest Christians come to regard Jesus as divine? Part of the answer is now apparent. The deity of Jesus was an extrapolation from his role as Savior. Because they experienced salvation through Jesus, and because they believed that God alone was the Savior, the early Christians concluded that Jesus was indeed Emmanuel, God with us.

When I use the language of “extrapolation” and “conclusion,” I don’t mean to suggest that the earliest Christians sat down together and worked out logical syllogisms to prove the deity of Jesus. Faith is far more fluid and experiential than this, of course. Moreover, I believe that the Holy Spirit was active among the earliest Christians, teaching and guiding them into all truth (John 15:26; 16:13). But when you probe beneath the early Christian confessions to their theological foundation, you find that salvation through Christ was part of what led to the belief that he was the Savior, which then led the faithful Jewish followers of Jesus to the unprecedented conclusion that he was also, in some measure, the one true LORD.

Centuries later, Christian theologians continued to define the nature of Jesus in light of his role as Savior. If Jesus were to save us, they argued, then he had to be fully human. Only in this way could he bear the penalty for human sin. Yet if he were merely human, then he wouldn’t be able to break the power of sin. So he must also be fully God. Thus, the logic of the earliest Christians, from salvation in Jesus to Jesus as divine Savior, set the stage for later and more systematic examinations of Jesus’ unique nature as one who is fully God and fully human.

In my next post in this series I’ll examine another avenue of reflection that guided the early followers of Jesus to the conclusion that he shared in God’s own nature.

One of the most influential theological movements in ancient Judaism was what scholars call The Wisdom Tradition. Beginning many centuries before Christ, faithful Jews began to pass along popular wisdom, such as we find in the biblical book of Proverbs. Throughout this book we find wise sayings of the sort popularized in America by Ben Franklin. For example, we find such pragmatic advice as:

Do not quarrel with anyone without cause,
when no harm has been done to you (Prov 3:30)
Do not enter the path of the wicked,
and do not walk in the way of the evildoers (Prov 4:14).
A slack hand causes poverty,
but the hand of the diligent makes rich (Prov 10:4).

But there was another strand woven through the fabric of the Wisdom Tradition, a more theological and reflective fiber. Some of the Jewish sages, besides passing on practical guidance, began to meditate on the very nature of wisdom, which for them meant divine wisdom. These meditations were enshrined in poetry narrated by God’s wisdom who was pictured as a female companion of God. In Proverbs 8, for example, we read:

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice? . . .
“To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
acquire intelligence, you who lack it. . . .
Take my instruction instead of silver,
and knowledge rather than choice gold; . . .
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago. . . .
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle of the face of the deep, . . .
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always. . . .” (Prov 8:1, 4-5, 10, 22, 27, 29-30)

Of course the monotheistic Jews who penned and read these lines didn’t picture Wisdom literally as a female god separate from the Lord. But in the creative freedom of their poetry, they waxed eloquent about the feminine glory of God’s wisdom. The Hebrew word for wisdom, chokhmah, is a female noun, much as in Spanish (la sabiduría) or French (la sagesse).

In post-biblical Wisdom Tradition, Wisdom was increasingly pictured as a female consort of the Lord. We see this, for example, in books from the Old Testament Apocrypha, including the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Ben-Sira (known also as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus). The Jewish sages believed, moreover, that Wisdom had come to dwell in Israel in the form of the Mosaic law or the temple. Thus the universal Wisdom of God found a place within the tradition and revelation of Jewish religion and theology.

The earliest Christians, along with other first-century Jews, were influenced by the Wisdom Tradition. You can see this clearly, for example, in the New Testament letter of James, whose advice giving sayings often sound a lot like those in Proverbs. Also, some of the sayings of Jesus contain distinct echoes of Jewish wisdom. One of the most striking of these echoes is found in Matthew 11:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heaven burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:28-30)

Now compare this with a couple passages from the pre-Christian Jewish book of Sirach.

Come to [wisdom] will all your soul,
and keep her ways with all your might.
Search out and seek, and she will become known to you;
and when you get hold of her, do not let her go.
For at last you will find the rest she gives,
and she will be changed into joy for you.
Then her fetters will become for you a strong defense,
and her collar a glorious robe.
Her yoke is a golden ornament,
and her bonds a purple cord. (Sir 6:26-30)

Another chapter of Sirach pictures Wisdom as speaking for herself:

Come to me, you who desire me,
and eat your fill of my fruits.
For the memory of me is sweeter than honey,
and the possession of me sweeter than the honeycomb.
Those who eat of me will hunger for more,
and those who drink of me will thirst for more. (Sir 24:19-21)

Sirach goes on to identify Wisdom as “the law that Moses commanded us” (24:23), a point to which I’ll return later. The words of Wisdom in Sirach 24:19-21 are reminiscent, not only of Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11:28 to “Come to me,” but also of his offer of living water to the Samaritan woman in John 4, not to mention his language in John 6, where he speaks of eating and drinking his flesh and blood. Like personified Wisdom, Jesus says, “Whoever eats me will live because of me” (John 6:57).

Surely it was no accident that Jesus echoed the invitation of divine Wisdom. His multifaceted offer in Matthew 11 – Come to me; I will give you rest; Take my yoke; Learn from me; My yoke is easy – is an intentional imitation of Wisdom. By using this language, Jesus was saying, in a sense, “What God’s Wisdom offers, I offer. What divine Wisdom provides, I provide.” So, though he did not say directly, “I am the incarnation of divine Wisdom,” his language pointed suggestively in this direction. Jesus wasn’t the traditional Jewish wisdom teacher who rhapsodized about God’s supreme Wisdom. Rather, he spoke as if he himself were Wisdom in the flesh.

In my next post in this series I’ll continue to pursue ways in which the connection of Jesus with divine Wisdom underscored early Christian belief in his divinity.