More of Philip Jenkins’ reflections…….

Of Demons Laying Traps

A Psalm 91 reference here would also contextualize Jesus’s foes quite powerfully. At the time, this was the main text for use in spiritual warfare and demon-fighting, and was used thus at Qumran. The hunter, or fowler, was the Devil, or a demon. So in this reading, the Pharisees were demonic. That reading is reflected in another (mis)translation, where is our Psalm 91.6 talks about “the plague that destroys at midday.” But the Septuagint renders this as “the noonday demon,” daimoniou. The whole Septuagint version of Psalm 91 is highly demonic in a way the Hebrew just is not, and nor are our modern versions.

Matthew 22.15 has a close verbal echo in 12.14, when again the Pharisees plot together against Jesus, in this case to destroy him rather than to trap him. That earlier line in chapter 12 comes immediately before a heated row with the Pharisees about casting out demons, daimonia, invoking Beelzebub, and other appropriately diabolical themes (12.22-29). That in turn leads into a passage about good and bad words, by which one many be condemned or acquitted (12.33-37). The whole passage offers a neat parallel and prefiguring of the chapter 22 episode I have discussed, and at every point, the Septuagint’s Psalm 91 is lurking in the background.

That is one small and specific example, but issues like this run throughout the New Testament. If you don’t refer to the Septuagint, for instance, then the Epistle to the Romans can sound like a horrible mishmash of half-remembered misquotations from the Old Testament. But in fact, it’s anything but that. Once you realize how thoroughly acquainted Paul was with the Septuagint, things make a lot more sense.

How We Lost the Septuagint, and Why It Matters

It also helps to recall what that Septuagint actually is. We usually speak of it as a flawed or tendentious version of a pristine Hebrew original, and I have done something like that here. But the standard Masoretic Hebrew text did not emerge in final form until much later, and did not achieve canonical status for centuries. The Septuagint reflects rival Hebrew readings that were quite standard at the time of the translation, and which are, for instance, often reflected at Qumran. The Septuagint is way more respectable than we often think, and it is a real shame that we have lost it in mainstream usage.

In the sixteenth century, Christian churches rediscovered Hebrew, and they rapidly applied that skill to reading the Old Testament. That event created an unbridgeable linguistic gulf between all later Christian generations and the world of the New Testament and the Church Fathers. If we know the Old Testament in a reliable translation from the Hebrew, like the NIV, that is a treasure to have, but often, the readings we find there are simply not the ones that the early Church knew. The problem for modern readers is that our modern Old Testament translations are just too accurate to let us understand the church’s earliest thinking.

So if we do have to choose an Old Testament version to use as background for studying the New Testament, if we absolutely must choose between a scholarly rendering of the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the error-prone Septuagint … Then, to adapt the title of a film I love dearly: Let The Wrong One In.

Of Asps, and Even More Asps

On a trivia note, I offer a quick story of “those wacky translators at work.” As part of my Psalm 91 wok, I have been looking at Isaiah 11.8, which is part of one of the most famous passages in the Hebrew Bible, portraying the peace and harmony of the messianic age. In the NIV, verse 8 reads as follows: “The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.” In the Hebrew, there are two not too common words for types of venomous snake, respectively pethen, and the more obscure tsepha’. There is a lot of debate about exactly what each refers to, but the point is that there are two different very dangerous snakes, which are juxtaposed in poetic balance. This is the classic parallelism that we so often find throughout the psalms.

Now move forward to (probably) Alexandria around 200 BC, where a translator was working on the Greek translation. He decided easily enough that the first beast was an asp. He then sat long and hard looking at his sources and tried to work out what a tsepha’ might look like, the only minimum requirement being that it has to be something, anything, except an asp, so as not to duplicate the word. Parallelism had to be preserved. At some point, he concluded, “It’s just a snake. I have a lot of work to do.” The Septuagint as we have it thus reads “And the young child shall put his hand over the hole of the aspidon, asp, and on the lair of the offspring of aspidon, asps.” Sometimes, you can tell when translators have just had a long day.

I was on the last leg of my last lecture tour of Australia in the summer of 2019, flying cross country from Perth to Sydney to give some lectures at MacQuarrie University in the ancient history department.  My friend Prof. Alanna Nobbs, just retired from MacQuarrie had informed me that I would be collected at the Sydney airport by ‘Edwin’.  Now Edwin at the time was over 90 years of age. In fact, he was born in 1928, and is only two years younger than my mother!  And I’m no spring chicken, as we say in N.C.  This was a great honor, but also a surprise to be chauffeured by perhaps the greatest Christian ancient historian of the last one hundred years.  Of course if you know Edwin at all, you will know that kudos like that embarrass the man, who did his training at Cambridge before I was even born (and I’m 69)!   But Edwin is still as keen in his intellect and study of ancient Roman and Christian history as a man one third his age should be.  And he is still producing seminal essays of various sorts.   As we were riding to MacQuarrie, Edwin proceeded to tell me about a forthcoming book ‘that may have some considerable bearing on how we evaluate St. Paul and earliest Christianity’. I am pleased to tell you not only that he was absolutely right, but that the volume has now emerged in print thanks to our friends at Wipf and Stock/Cascade.  It is entitled On This Rock: When Culture Disrupted the Roman Community, (ed. A.D. MacDonald; Cascade, 2020, 280 pages).   This volume is the successor to the volume which emerged last year entitled Paul and the Conflict of Cultures, and in truth both volumes are essential reading if one wishes to understand the impact of early Christianity, and particularly Gentile Christianity of the Pauline sort, on the Roman Empire.  There are now some seven or so volumes in Judge’s series of collected essays, and all of them are invaluable.

I want to just emphasis some of the major points that Judge makes here and elsewhere, and/or some of the implications of his points: 1) outsiders in general did not know exactly what to make of early Christianity. On the one hand it did not appear to be what we would call a ‘religion’, as it did not involve priests, temples, and sacrifices at all.  It was not about ritual performances to appease the gods and keep society in good standing with the gods. Indeed, it appeared to Greco-Roman people to be the opposite of religion not only because it didn’t do what ancient religions did, but also because it refused to participate in public festivals, sacrifices and the like which were the religious glue thought to hold society together and keep it stable. Christians were labelled ‘atheists’ for refusing to recognize or honor the traditional gods; 2) whereas Judaism at least before A.D. 70 did have a temple, priests, and sacrifices and did appear to be a ‘religion’ with good claims to antiquity and as a result were allowed to not worship the traditional gods or the emperor, but rather to pray for the emperor, this ‘exceptionalism’ could not apply to Christianity which did not have any of the trademarks of an ancient religion. To the contrary, it appeared to be some kind of philosophy or theosophy, because it was all about beliefs and behaviors, dogmas and doctrines and these latter are what drove the movement and explained its distinctive attempts to evangelize the world. When it became clear that the vast majority of the adherents of this movement were gentiles who should indeed be doing their civic duty and not undermining the religious underpinnings of the state and society, that’s when troubles and persecution, prosecution, and even some executions began to happen.  Christians were heretics, atheists, and the gods could not have been pleased with them. They were seditious, and their leader Christ had been executed by a Roman governor for high treason. Had this movement simply been, or been seen as, a sect of Judaism these developments would have been unlikely to have happened. Even after 70 A.D. Jews still maintained their ‘exceptional’ status by paying a tax to the government instead a temple tax to the Temple in Jerusalem. The money went to maintain the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in Rome (and perhaps elsewhere);   3)   The language used to describe this new community of followers of Jesus was in some regards like the language used to describe the Empire (the Empire is the ‘body’ of the Emperor—  cf. 1 Cor. 12 on the Christian community), but there was also odd language, using the metaphor of a building, or an assembly of people whose only sacrifices were those of prayers and praises, or of themselves as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12).  4) While not knowing exactly what to make of Christians, enough alarm bells went off for the more astute pagans, especially the philosophers, to realize that they were a threat to the very fabric of Roman society.  How so?  There was not secular/sacred divide in ancient society.  ‘Religion’ was an essential part of what made society what it was.  It was a corporate thing, not a matter of private opinions or personal beliefs.  While the earliest Christians were pacifists and believed in paying taxes, nevertheless, in other ways they were seen as compromising some of the very things at the heart of the ancient society, not least the notion that nature, and human authorities are ‘divine’ in themselves, or suffused with the divine, rather than creations of an independent Deity.   Religion was not a matter of ‘individual conscience’ and furthermore the ancients didn’t believe in the concept of dramatic change or conversion. They found that notion upsetting.  They believed persons were born into a specific ethnic group etc. and their identity was determined from birth by where they came from, who their father was, and what gender they were.  Furthermore, a religion had claims to authority and allegiance based on its antiquity.  The Christian movement, unless they co-opted the antiquity of Judaism, had no such claims.  In the Greco-Roman world they were not looking for something new in religion, by and large.  Indeed, if it was new and had no claims to antiquity it could hardly be ‘true’ or worth pledging allegiance to. There was a reason Josephus wrote massive volumes about ‘the Antiquities of the Jews’, even claiming folk like Plato owed something to Moses!   In light of all this, it is right to ask how in the world a ‘new’ theology and movement could possibly have changed the Greco-Roman world within four centuries without an army, or a violent transition of some sort.  Especially how could this happen when the essential proclamation of this new group was about a crucified Jewish manual worker who was thereafter raised from the dead?  Crucified messiah was an oxymoron to Jews (God would never let that happen to his anointed one) and an absurdity to Gentiles (crucifixion being the most shameful way to die, and actual bodily resurrection was a ridiculous idea– one unlike the immortality of the soul).   How did this proclamation turn the Empire upside down and lead to Christian emperors?   You will need to read Judge’s careful analysis all the way up to Constantine and beyond to see how that actually happened.

While I agree with Edwin on about 98% of all he says in these matters, a few of his comments I must disagree with: 1) various of the NT writers, including Paul, Luke, and the author of Hebrews do indeed use the ancient art of persuasion, rhetoric, in their compositions. I have demonstrated this at length in my NT commentaries. And it is the lack of recognizing this that has led to misreadings of important texts like Rom. 7.7-25, which is not a description of the Christian’s struggles with sin. It is a Christian evaluation of pre-Christian states, as Rom. 7.5-6, and Rom. 8.1-5 makes abundantly clear. Being a new creature in Christ affects one’s holiness and capacity to deal with sin.   2) It is simply not true that women did not play important roles of teaching, prophecy, preaching etc. in the Pauline communities (see e.g. Acts 18.24-26, 1 Cor. 11). Texts like 1 Cor. 14.33b-36 and 1 Tim. 2.8-15 are problem solving texts, and do not reflect a general prohibition of women teaching men or women. This continued to be true right up to and beyond the time of Constantine, as Judge himself chronicles on pp. 110-11.

This last paragraph does not in any way take away from the enormous contributions Judge has made and continues to make to our understanding of the social history of earliest Christianity. Indeed, his work has made it clear that while there is much value in using modern social scientific theories like social identity theory to better understand the NT, the latter is not as important as straightforward study of ancient social history and the original social contexts in which the Christian movement came and came to change the ancient world.

Reflection on 2 Cor.  12.7-10 where Paul asks God two remove his thorn in the flesh, and God says no, my power is made perfect in your weakness, my grace is sufficient for you, Peter Gomes in the ‘Good Book’ says this… “We learn first that the thorn is sent to Paul in the form of a messenger from Satan. The source of his trouble, whatever it is, is not God. The moral of the affliction, however is that he should not boast or brag– the affliction is an exercise in humility, the purpose of which is to give glory not to Paul but to Christ.  This is not suffering for suffering’s sake; it is suffering for Christ’s sake so that Paul and all who see and learn from him might learn the strength that Christ supplies. We learn as well that God’s role is not to relief suffering or to spare us from it, but enable us to bear and endure it so that even our suffering is redemptive for ourselves and others.  Thus, God will not interfere despite the three appeals of the apostle. Why not? So that Paul will learn that he can rely upon Christ when he needs him, that is, in his weakness. The sufferings, the persecutions, the calamities, the insults and hardships, all of these are not ends in themselves  but means to a greater end, the demonstration that Christ gets us through such things. The only way out of suffering is through it and only Christ can get is through. Knowing this, Paul is now able to demonstrate this as an act of faith, not in the redemptive power of suffering, but in the redemptive powers of the redeemer to help him through his weakness. ‘For when I am weak then I am strong.’ In other words, when I can no longer rely upon myself to solve the problem or to overcome the weakness, when I acknowledge that in my weakness I cannot ‘go it alone’, then I am strengthened and empowered by the one who gives me strength. To be strong in this sense is to acknowledge the fact of my weakness and the source of my strength.”– Gomes ‘The Good Book’ pp.218-19.

BEN: I appreciate your emphasis on how the church from time to time has domesticated the Spirit, making it rather like Mr. Rogers, rather than a dangerous dynamo. Hard sayings like Mk. 3.29 and par. Warn us against such a misreading. Of course. the BIG question is what is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? What counts as that terrible eternal sin that won’t be forgiven?

JACK: My mentor, Jerry Hawthorne, once gave this simple definition: attributing to Satan what is God’s by right. To some extent, this is correct, but the issue is much, much, much more complicated than that! (He was speaking to a college sophomore, and probably not the brightest one, at that!) I hope you won’t mind if I refer your readers to a chapter in An Unconventional God, “Spirit and the Threat of Blasphemy” on pages 98-114? I do this because each gospel author grappled with this saying and came to a different interpretation. There is no single definition. Most troubling and challenging for Christians is what Luke does with this saying: he sets it alongside a saying about witness and persecution. According to Mark and Matthew, enemies blaspheme the Holy Spirit; according to Luke, believers do. Frightening! In the end, there is no single definition.

This may have been the hardest chapter of the book to write. I think it is clear—clearer than anything I’ve read on the topic—so I would urge your readers to study that chapter.

BEN: The distinction between Jesus being controlled by Satan and so being ek-stasis, and by contrast being in control of demons through the power of Satan is helpful. I had never looked at the story in Mk. 3 that way, but you are right that these two accusations contradict one another. You take blasphemy of the Spirit, at least in Mark to be “less about false charges against Jesus…than about the inability of his opponents to acknowledge the true source of Jesus’ power” (p. 106), his miracles his Spirit-inspired teaching etc. I agree that the audience realizes that there really are only two options in evaluating Jesus— either he’s an inspired agent of God doing great things, or he’s an agent of Satan. There is no innocuous suggestion, ‘well he’s just a misguided teacher or sage, or a figure like Simon Magus, a power-hungry narcissist. No, the suggestions are more extreme. I do think Jesus really provoked such opposite views… and one is surprised it didn’t get him killed sooner rather than later. Jesus was a danger to the status quo in various ways. The problem of course is, that many today read the harsh criticism of Jesus in the Gospels as later Christian-imposed anti-Semitism. I don’t really agree. How would you respond to the accusation that the Gospel writers were biased against Jews and it shows in the way they handle the Gospel traditions?

JACK: I’d begin by saying the gospel writers were Jews. If they were biased against Jews, it was as Jews. It’s like right-wing evangelical Christians and left-wing liberal Christians. We fight tooth and nail, but, in the end, Jesus rose from the dead, and that binds us together (sometimes it binds us together like a bad lump of cheese rumbling in our stomach, giving us indigestion, but bound we are!). I think one of the most damaging things Christians have done is to read the Christian-Jewish divide back into the gospels and life of Jesus.

One of the most influential articles I’ve read in this respect is Krister Stendahl’s “Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (or was that a book?). Stendahl argued that Lutherans read Luther’s experience into the apostle Paul’s and turned Pauline theology into a battle between works and grace. Stendahl argued that Paul was not converted from one religion to another but called to be a prophet to the nations. Stendahl may be right: Christians too readily read our own agenda into the text.

In the end, the gospels were Jewish compositions written within Jewish communities to Jewish recipients. Even if the recipients were Gentile, as in the possible case of Luke’s gospel, the authors still wrote from the perspective of the Old Testament. Just think of the birth narratives in Luke’s gospel, whose Greek mirrors the Septuagint, or Jesus’ first sermon. Where? In a synagogue? And what? Isaiah 61.

So I’d answer your question by saying that the gospel writers, especially Matthew, may have accentuated the tension between Jesus and his Jewish opponents, but Matthew did not invent them. I agree with you. It is surprising Jesus died somewhat on his in terms and not long before.

BEN: I realize your focus is on the relationship between the Spirit and Jesus, and I agree the Spirit is rambunctious—driving Jesus into the wilderness for the testing, but staying with or in Jesus through the testing, and he passes the tests in a way that Adam and Israel did not, and Job mostly did not, though Job repents in the end and covers his mouth. What really surprised me about this chapter is no focus on the temptations themselves. These are temptations that distinguish Jesus from any predecessors. He is being tested as the unique, indeed divine (and as was later understood, pre-existent) Son of God, not as the suffering servant, not as the messianic king per se, not as Israel. I’ve known people who could turn bread into stones, but mere mortals who are sane are not tempted to turn stones into bread, to throw themselves off the pinnacle of the temple etc. No, Satan is trying to get Jesus to push the God button, which he indeed has as the divine Son of God. Jesus resists this temptation using the resources we have as humans the Word of God, and though it is not emphasized here, the Spirit of God. Had Jesus given way to those special temptations he would have obliterated his identity with us, as sadly we have no God button to get out of such situations. We don’t even have an easy button. Jesus remains an example of how to endure such trials and temptations because he resisted the Devil using the same resources we have. Likewise, the temptation the garden to avoid the cross, to avoid drinking the cup of God’s wrath on behalf of a ransom to be provided for many is not a normal temptation for mere mortals. It is one that only a unique God-man would face. Why did you not spend some time focusing on the temptations themselves?

JACK: Good question. Thanks for it. Let me treat the gospels separately.

Mark

Mark’s gospel has the Holy Spirit throw Jesus out, like a demon or money-changers in the temple, into the desert. The Greek word is ekballein, as in exit+ballistic missile. The Spirit does not accompany Jesus during the testing, according to Mark’s gospel. To say that the Spirit is present is misleading.

Matthew and Luke

You already put your finger on this when you wrote, “though it is not emphasized here, the Spirit of God.” The presence of the Spirit is not emphasized with respect to the specific temptations. I think far more key here is the overarching presence of the Holy Spirit rather than the specific prompting of the Spirit. I definitely think Isaiah 63:7-14 lies behind this text: the Holy Spirit guided Israel to the promised land. I hope readers will look at this entire chapter of An Unconventional God, since I find the backdrop of Isaiah 63 just riveting! It is the general presence of the Holy Spirit, the same presence that accompanied Israel, which is so essential to the temptation scene. That presence, of course, is the foundation for Jesus’ ability to resist the devil’s subtle seductions.

BEN: Your study of Jesus as Spirit-filled teacher is important, and it is interesting that Mark early on quotes Jesus as saying that his main mission was not to come and heal people all over the place, but rather to proclaim the Good News. He went to teach, but he stayed to heal where there was need and his miracles were largely acts of compassion, not demonstrations trying to wow people into believing in him. He was wary of people seeking signs and wonders, and rightly so. One of your interesting insights is comparing Lk. 10.21 to the way his mother is characterized in Lk. 1.47. Whereas Lk. 10.21 refers to Jesus rejoicing in the Spirit (Spirit with the definite article) this is not true in Lk. 1.47 where you suggest Mary in her own spirit is rejoicing. Just so, and I think this is a fundamental point for Luke. Whereas God’s spirit is working on figures before Jesus comes along and they respond variously, Jesus is the first person to have the Holy Spirit dwell within him. Would you agree? Why or why not?

JACK: I don’t think I’d agree. But why? First, in the Old Testament, people are already filled with the Spirit (e.g., Exodus 28:3; 35:31-36:3). I devote a chapter of A Boundless God to Spirit-filling in the Old Testament. Second, in some Jewish authors outside of the gospels, like Philo Judaeus, the Spirit is said to fill people. So Israelite and early Jewish literature makes claims to filling with the Spirit before the gospels do. Third, I do not think the definite article is necessary to describe filling with the Spirit. It is promised that John the Baptist will be filled with (the) Spirit (Luke 1:15). Zechariah (Luke 1:67) and Elizabeth (1:41) are filled with (the) Spirit, so that they praise or prophesy. The idiom, “filled with (the) Spirit,” especially when followed by praise or prophecy, is different in this respect from ek pneumatos hagiou in Matthew 1:18 and 20, which can be interpreted to mean either “from a holy Spirit” or “from the Holy Spirit.”

[N.B.  Here I, BW3, would add that it seems to me that the language about filling particularly in the OT, and also sometimes in the NT refers to being inspired by the Spirit, or empowered by the Spirit to say or do something. I don’t think it is claim that the Holy Spirit indwelt them, so here I think there is a real difference in our interpretation of the meaning of those OT texts]

BEN: I like your emphasis on the ideas that the Spirit entered Jesus or remained on Jesus. I would suggest the Gospel writers are suggesting he is the first person in Biblical history to have the continuous presence and power of the Spirit in his life. From a Biblical theological point of view, it is important to add that Jesus doesn’t begin his ministry before this happens, not least because he is going to draw on the very same resources, God’s Word and God’s Spirit, that will be bequeathed to his disciples who will perform the same sort of preaching and miracles. In other words, Jesus’ miracles and ministry are not manifestations of his divine nature, but rather are making clear he is drawing on the same resources his disciples will later draw on. This is the divine condescension of the begotten Son. In the Incarnation (see Phil. 2) he puts the omnis on hold (e.g. omnipotence, omniscence) so he could live a fully human life subject to the normal limitations of being human—limitations of time, space, knowledge, power, and mortality. Notice I did not say sin, as that is not a normal limitation. God did not create us as sinners. So, for instance, Jesus says he casts out demons by the Spirit of God, not by his divine nature. Jesus remained the only begotten Son in the Incarnation, but he limited himself, drawing on the same resources believers have to do the work of ministry and to resist temptation etc. Does this make sense to you? How would you respond?

JACK: Perfect sense. I completely, absolutely agree with you. On this one, there is no “on the other hand!” It is precisely the point Jerry Hawthorne made in The Presence and The Power: The Significance of the Holy Spirit in the Life and Ministry of Jesus. I talked about Jerry earlier. Jerry contended that Jesus did what he did, not so much by dint of his divinity as his experience of the Holy Spirit. By the way, Jerry took a lot of grief from his evangelical readers for saying this. He was right, of course, but some evangelicals have difficulty accepting scripture, I think, when it cuts against the grain of a dearly-held doctrine, such as the divinity of Jesus.

BEN: In your study of Jesus’s temptations I understand the reason for comparing it to the story of Adam and Israel— Jesus is Adam gone right, and Israel gone right. But I wonder if you considered comparing it to the story of Job and his testing? After all, Job is God’s righteous one, and he is powerfully tested.

JACK: I didn’t, even if I should have. Perhaps the absence of a reference to the Spirit at the front of Job caused me to overlook this text, while the recurrence of the same Greek verb to describe the expulsion of Adam from Eden and Jesus from the Jordan prompted me to focus on the Adam and Eve story.

By the way, there is a good bit of Tom (N.T.) Wright lying behind my Adam-Jesus take on the temptation. When I was at Cambridge, way back in 1978-80, Tom was a young chaplain,

who was willing to take me under his wing. The ideas I heard in tutorials (brilliant even back then) I would later read in massive tomes.

C. Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, (Eerdmans, 2015, 336 pages).

There are not many doctoral dissertations that move the needle dramatically in a new positive direction in the huge field of Pauline studies. But Chris Tilling’s Paul’s Divine Christology (which originally appeared in print in the WUNT series of J.C.B. Mohr in 2012) is the exception to all such evaluations of the work of budding NT scholars. While it is true that one of the main criteria for evaluating a doctoral thesis is ‘does it make a contribution to the discussion of X’, sometimes with the addition of the word ‘fresh’ before contribution, it is very hard to accomplish something like that in the well-trod roads of Pauline studies, where one is more apt to hear the Qoheleth dictum: ‘there is nothing new under the sun here’. But again, Tilling’s work does set the discussion of whether or not Paul had a ‘divine’ Christology on new footing.
This study accomplishes this impressive feat by: 1) placing the discussion on a broader footing, namely taking into account all the evidence from the capital Paulines about the Christ relationship of Paul and his converts, not just the evidence of cultic worship of Christ or the discussion of Christ’s pre-existence. The study involves detailed contextual exegesis, especially of 1 Cor. 8-10, not just cherry picking of titles or ideas; and 2) making clear that Paul talks about Christian relationship to Christ in the same way that Israel’s relationship to YHWH had always been envisioned and discussed, and 3) getting beyond the rehash of discussing the titles of Christ, once more with feeling.

The net effect of this is that yes indeed there can be found plentiful evidence of an early high Christology in the earliest documents in the NT, Paul’s letters, evidence, as R. Bauckham would put it, that Christ was viewed by Paul as part of the divine identity, and he did not see this as a violation of Jewish monotheism. Indeed, he could include Jesus as Lord within an expanded version of the Shema in 1 Cor. 8, without blinking or fearing huge pushback from fellow apostles such as Peter and others. This comports well with the fact that after Paul’s meetings with the pillar apostles in Jerusalem they had agreed on the essence of the Gospels for both Jews and Gentiles, while they may not have fully agreed about what that meant in regard to the ongoing relationship between Jewish Jesus followers and the keeping of the Mosaic covenant (see Gal. 1-2).

If that were not enough, Tilling takes ample time to show that the supposed early Jewish precedents for including lesser figures within the Godhead (angels, Adam, Enoch, etc.) on closer review really aren’t precedents. For example, it is the way the relationship with the Lord of the Spirits is discussed in the Enoch literature that is analogous to the way Paul talks about the Christ relationship, not the way the relationship of the Son of Man with God is discussed in that literature, and in any case it is not clear that the relevant Enoch literature was known by Paul, not least because the crucial parts of that literature may well post-date Paul’s letters.

Methodologically, there is more to be said because Tilling is rightly wary of the whole history of ideas approach to discussing Pauline Christology, especially when it is accompanied by upward evolutionary spiral thinking (low Christology must be early, high Christology developed later). As Doug Campbell points out in his Forward, this sort of abstracting of ideas from the complex ways Paul talks about the Christ relationship had by believers is the product of post-Enlightenment ways of approach the data, something Paul himself was ignorant and innocent of. In any case, as Martin Hengel showed long ago, and before him Lightfoot, if we are actually evaluating trends in early Christian thinking it would be more plausible to think of the high Christology being early and continuing on later, for instance in the Johannine literature.

Another important methodological point is Tilling’s resistance to the strict dictum that ontology is one thing and function is another. The person of Christ should not be abstracted from his work, for in the Christ relationship he was known through his transformative work not just on the cross, but through the personal transformation of the mind and life of believers through the Holy Spirit. ‘No one can authentically confess Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit’ says Paul. One cannot eliminate the experiential side of things from the evaluation of whether or not Paul had a divine Christology. And besides, few scholars doubt that the Johannine Gospel reflects a divine Christology, and yet that Gospel also stresses the subordination of the Son to the Father, just as Paul does. The subordination discussion does not cancel out Paul’s divine Christology.

I take it for granted that Chris Tilling has demonstrated the essence of his thesis that in the capital Paulines Paul and his converts related to Christ in the same way Israel related to YHWH, and that the implicates of this are that Paul and various converts saw Christ as part of the divine identity, to use Bauckham’s language. Were Larry Hurtado, of blessed memory, still around, he would be sending Chris the coffee mug he sent me and various others as members of ‘the early high Christology club’. But Chris’s crucial insight does not fully take into account that in Paul’s letters Christ relates to God’s people in the same way the OT describes YHWH relating to Israel. To give but one example, in 1 Cor. 10, Paul makes the remarkable statement that when Israel was wandering in the wilderness their source of water turned out to be Christ (‘the rock was Christ’). A simply reading of the Pentateuch in its original language and context does not suggest such a surprising idea, rather it makes clear it was YHWH who provided sustenance and water for Israel. In short, we need the exploration of both sides of the relationship and the way Paul conceives them to support the case for Paul having a divine Christology. The actions of Christ, and the resulting Christ relationship on the part of believers provide a fuller proof that Paul indeed had a divine Christology.

BEN: One comment about p. 202—Actually, if you are dealing with the case of demonic possession, there is plenty of involuntary activity including speech and actions. So there are circumstances where the powers of darkness can make a person do things. But if you mean that for anyone who has Christ as Lord in his or her life, the Devil or demons cannot determine our behavior, then— o.k. They can pressure, persecute, manipulate, but not control our behavior. Comments?

RHYNE: I am open to correction here, but I did not expect my favorite Methodist scholar to tell me I was being too libertarian in my view of free will! Just kidding. I could probably better nuance what I am saying there. My main point is that not every point of theological disagreement can be attributed to demonic activity, and I think people who find the Devil under every rock might miss that.

I’ve been re-reading J.B. Lightfoot’s most polemical, but also in some ways his most interesting book, ‘Essays on Supernatural Religion’. It was compiled from his various responses to the anonymous broadside entitled ‘Supernatural Religion’ which attacked B.F. Westcott (Lightfoot’s colleague and friend at Cambridge) and particularly Westcott’s John commentary, advocating instead for a miracle free Christianity focusing on Christ’s ethical teachings. The compilation was released at the very end of Lightfoot’s life in 1889. I draw attention here to a quote from near the end of the Introduction of the book, which must clearly have been one of the last things Lightfoot ever penned:

“It seems to be assumed that, because the sceptical spirit has its proper function in scientific inquiry (though even here its excesses will often impede progress), therefore its exercise is equally useful and equally free from danger in the domain of [historical, including Biblical] criticism. A moment’s reflection however will show that the cases are wholly different. In whatever relates to morals and history– in short to human life in all its developments– where mathematical or scientific demonstration is impossible, and where consequently everything depends on the even balance of the judicial faculties, scepticism must be at least as fatal to the truth as credulity”. (Essays on Supernatural Religion, p, 26, emphasis added). In other words, how did ‘trust but verify’ degenerate into ‘distrust and vilify’?? Richard Bauckham has quite rightly lamented of late that “Such skepticism has become endemic in Gospel studies as a result of form criticism. Many NT scholars seem to suppose that the more skeptical of the sources they are, the more rigorously historical is their method. But this is not how historians usually work. In good historical work it is no more an epistemic virtue to be skeptical than it is to be credulous. In everyday life, we do not systematically mistrust everything anyone tells us. When someone is in a position to know what they tell us does so, we normally believe them. But we keep our critical faculties alert and raise questions if there is specific reason to doubt.” (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses 2nd edition, last chapter location 14369 on Kindle). Just so!

It is to this last sentence I draw especial attention. After spending some 40 years, a full Biblical generation, in the guild of Biblical scholars, one of the constant traits I have found in the guild is the inability to distinguish between mere skepticism, however eruditely presented, and critical thinking. What is especially odd about this phenomena is that the courtesy one regularly extends to one’s peers, hearing them out, and reserving judgment and trying to keep an open mind, is not extended to the writers of the NT and their sources.

Instead we hear remarks about how they, bless their hearts, were ‘people of their own time and couldn’t be expected to have correct modern notions about miracles or demons or divine activity in the human sphere’, or the like. This is often said without realizing that this presupposes that we now ‘know better’ than the original authors about such things, and we come from a posture and place of such intellectual superiority, that we can only pity the authors of the NT for their credulity and lack of critical thinking.

This whole condescending approach seems to be partly grounded in what I call ‘justification by doubt’. The way you establish your modern credentials as a good critical thinking scholar is by pouring scorn on the thinkers of earlier ages, being skeptical about things you have a difficulty in believing. But in fact critical thinking is one thing, and a presupposition or attitude of skepticism is another. I would suggest that we extend the same courtesy to our ancient writers as to our current peers— hearing them out, construing what they say in the most open and positive way one can, and then draw conclusions, using critical thinking. We don’t immediately assume they are wrong or right, we hear them out, and give them the same benefit of the doubt we do colleagues, even if in the end we disagree with their claims and assertions.

Especially in the so-called third quest for the historical Jesus have we had an absence of this kind of approach to the data again and again, but it has also surfaced in the way that textual criticism has been done, not to mention the method of evaluation of the ante-Nicene Church Fathers and their claims. And oddest of all— some of the most skeptical of the scholars are the very ones who protest most strongly that they are open minded folk!

This reminds me of something my old mentor, C.K. Barrett once said trying to explain the difference between Biblical scholarship in America and in the U.K. Kingsley said, and I’m paraphrasing from memory here: ‘Here in the U.K. we look over our shoulder and what see is Deutschland and its considerable critical scholarship. And we respond to that with what we take to be a more balanced approach. But in America, when many scholars look over their shoulders they see Christian fundamentalism, and they spend their careers in over-reaction to that.’ AMEN to that. It’s sad but true. I remember the repeated tales of a professor at a church related divinity school who began a class on the historical Jesus with students training for the ministry with the pronouncement ‘I don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, now let’s critically evaluate the Gospel data.’!! I’m afraid Prof. Barrett was all too accurate in the way he saw many of our ranks. It is sad when someone spends their career establishing what they are against, and not as much on what they are for. One final quote from Lightfoot is worth repeating:

“We Christians are constantly told that we must expect to have our records tested by the same standards which are applied to other writings. This is exactly what we desire, and what we do not get. It is not easy to imagine the havoc that would ensure, if the critical principles of the Tubingen school and their admirers were let loose on the classical literature of Greece and Rome.” (Essays, p. 82).

Enough said.