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<\/span>As mentioned previously, Nick Norelli posted a very detailed and, from my perspective, very fair and\u00a0useful review<\/a> of my book,\u00a0The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=jamefmcgrshom-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=025203418X\")
<\/i>. There have been more positive reviews that did not leave me feeling as satisfied with the level of engagement as Nick\u2019s did.<\/div>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/ws.amazon.com\/widgets\/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=025203418X&tag=jamefmcgrshom-20\")
<\/a>I am sure that no one will be surprised that I do not entirely agree with Nick\u2019s criticisms at every point. And so I wish to respond to some of the points he made, more to clarify and nuance my understanding in response to Nick\u2019s criticisms than anything else.<\/div>\nThat I occasionally expressed myself in ways that were perhaps hyperbolic I acknowledge. In bringing funeral stele and other epigraphic data into consideration, I did\u00a0take it too much for\u00a0granted\u00a0that one can extrapolate from such evidence to draw conclusions about popular piety. In fact, doing so is not at all unproblematic. But this can also be said about textual evidence, and probably to an even larger extent. Texts were largely produced by and for a literate elite, and it has often been suggested that emphases in texts may reflect the attempts of this elite to counter popular and prevailing thoughts, rather than giving expression to what most people thought. And so I think the issue is less whether I drew conclusions from epigraphic evidence that are too broad and sweeping, but how if at all we can tell<\/i>. <\/p>\n
This point may also\u00a0be applied\u00a0to Nick\u2019s criticism that I drew on texts from outside of the period my study focused on, in particular 3 Enoch. As already mentioned, it is hard to know which texts if any reflect widely held views. And so I thought it significant that a figure other than God was viewed as able to bear the divine name and serve as God\u2019s agent in a range of texts running from Deuteronomy through Apocalypse of Abraham and the New Testament into not only Rabbinic tradition but also Samaritan literature. The evidence from before, close to, and significantly later than the time of the emergence of Christianity suggests to me that we are dealing with a phenomenon that was widespread both geographically and temporally. The point was not to draw on 3 Enoch as though it already existed in New Testament times, but to use it and other texts to show the extent and scope of the tradition of having an exalted agent bear the divine name. <\/p>\n
Nick wrote that I gave \u201ctoo much weight to devotional practices at the rhetorical level<\/i>\u201c, by which I presume he means\u00a0that I paid more attention to what was said<\/i> regarding devotional practices rather than to the practices themselves. I certainly warn (p.17) that the rhetoric of monotheism on its own tells us very little. And in the case of earliest<\/em> Christianity, all we have are texts, some of which depict or describe devotional practices. But it is only later that we can recover evidence of buildings, art, liturgical paraphernalia and so on from Christians \u2013 the very sort of evidence I tried to highlight in discussing Jewish<\/i> monotheism in the pre-Christian era when it was available. And so there definitely are issues here, but I feel they have more to do with the surviving evidence than a methodological misstep on my part. And while it is certainly possible that Christians burst forth in praise and song, and only later sought to offer theological justification for their practices, there seems to be enough continuity between Jewish and Christian language and practices of worship that it would be surprising if a redefinition of monotheism came about inadvertently, if it came about at all in this period. And so looking at what is said<\/em> may not be inappropriate. But if we would ideally look elsewhere, at what they did<\/em>, then we find that we do not have the evidence we would need to discuss what Christians did, apart from what they wrote<\/i> about what they did.<\/p>\n One point at which Nick\u2019s assessment of my argument seems to me off target is when he emphasizes that I \u201cpart company\u201d from Lionel North, inasmuch as I do not acknowledge that, in the post-70 period, a more diverse array of forms of worship became acceptable substitutes for blood sacrifice. On the one hand, I do not believe that I ever denied that this is the case with respect to non-Christian Judaism. On the other hand, it seems to me that in Christianity it was not that non-bloody sacrifices became acceptable in the wake of the temple\u2019s destruction, but rather\u2019s Jesus\u2019 blood sacrifice<\/i> was understood to offer everything that temple sacrifice could and more. And so Christians accepted this once-for-all blood sacrifice offered to God by Christ, rather than substituting other forms of worship for animal sacrifice. And this is precisely one of the features that makes it problematic to look at the earliest Christian worship expecting it to clarify Christians\u2019 relationship to monotheism. If there is anything resembling a \u201cparting of the ways\u201d over worship in this period, it may have as much if not more to do with these contrasting ways of coping with the loss of the temple, than with the object<\/i> of worship. And to the extent that the sacrificial death of Christ provided this for Christians, this was an offering of Christ made to God, and so does not provide any sort of sacrificial offering to Jesus<\/em> that might have clearly indicated his inclusion alongside God as recipient of this sort of sacrifice. Again, it is clear that having Jesus offer sacrifice to himself would make little sense. My point is that the sacrificial view of Jesus\u2019 death by its very nature is unable to indicate an inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity as recipient of worship. And so if there is evidence to be found for such a move on the part of early Christians, it would have to be sought elsewhere, expressed by other means.<\/p>\n As far as the accusation that I \u201cdismiss\u201d evidence from Esther and Philo regarding prostration before figures other than God, I sincerely do not feel that my discussion of these texts represents \u201cdismissal.\u201d\u00a0I encourage readers to search for \u201cEsther\u201d in the online preview of my book on Google\/Amazon, to see what I consider to be brief but relevant treatments of that text. As for Daniel, Nick\u2019s review fails to mention that the refusal of Jews to bow before statues and human beings is combined with an instance of the king\u00a0falling on his face\u00a0before Daniel, paying him hommage,\u00a0and even commanding that offerings\u00a0(using technical terminology for\u00a0meal offerings and soothing-smelling incense) be presented to him, without Daniel correcting him (2:46<\/a>). The book also\u00a0depicts Daniel bowing before an angel without the angel correcting him (10:15<\/a>). And so if anything, the Book of Daniel illustrates well my point that Jewish scruples are not adequately summarized in terms of a blanket rejection of prostration before anyone other than God.\u00a0I would further suggest, as I do in my book,\u00a0that the distinction between the cases is centered on whether the would-be recipient of prostration and other forms of \u201cworship\u201d was an agent of the one God of Israel, or understood to be competing<\/i> with that God for honor.<\/p>\n Nick also suggests that I do not respond directly enough to Hurtado\u2019s points regarding the lack of evidence for controversy about Christology in Paul\u2019s letters. This is certainly true, and that is largely because I encountered Hurtado\u2019s publications about this only after the manuscript was completed. But it seems to me that Hurtado\u2019s point \u2013 that these are letters to Christians and so do not engage non-Christian Jews directly \u2013 fails to adequately account for the lack of controversy, as James Dunn also argues. It does not seem to me that allegiance to one God alone was any less a matter of Torah observance than circumcision. And so the fact that Paul addresses the latter but not the former still seems to me to suggest that the exalted status he attributed to Jesus was controversial only because it was a claim about Jesus, a crucified Messiah whom non-Christian Jews did not accept as such, and not because of any alleged change to the configuration of Jewish monotheism. <\/p>\n But in closing, let me agree with Nick\u2019s point about the book\u2019s length. I am fully aware of the book\u2019s short<\/i>comings (pun intended) in this regard. This book emerged out of an attempt to explore the broader sweep of the New Testament in relation to my understanding of the Gospel of John, its Christology, and its development of earlier tradition,\u00a0as set forth in my doctoral dissertation,\u00a0John\u2019s Apologetic Christology: Legitimation and Development in Johannine Christology<\/i><\/a>. It began as explorations of side issues that had to be largely set to one side during my doctoral research, and which I continued to reflect on in the years immediately after finishing my PhD, a period in my life which\u00a0found me teaching in Romania, in the Romanian language, and without access to all the books I might have wished to have at my disposal, and then returning to the United States for a year of adjuncting and then the start of a new job at Butler. It was only during my time at Butler that I was able to start to really turn these loose ends into a book, and I decided that at that stage it was better to publish and get critical feedback and begin conversations, than to wait until such time as I managed to produce a work the length of some other major studies of Christology \u2013 such as James Dunn\u2019s\u00a0Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation<\/i><\/a> Finally, let me thank Nick once again for his review. If the future finds me returning to writing about the subject of monotheism and Christology, I\u00a0trust that both my thinking and\u00a0my writing\u00a0will be found to have benefitted from his critical feedback, and so I am extremely grateful that he took the time to offer such a thorough review. Thanks, Nick!<\/p>\n As mentioned previously, Nick Norelli posted a very detailed and, from my perspective, very fair and\u00a0useful review of my book,\u00a0The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. There have been more positive reviews that did not leave me feeling as satisfied with the level of engagement as Nick\u2019s did. I am sure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=jamefmcgrshom-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0802842577\")
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