Book Write-Up: A Man Attested by God, by J.R. Daniel Kirk

J.R. Daniel Kirk.  A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.  Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2016.  See here to purchase the book.

In A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, New Testament scholar J.R. Daniel Kirk argues against the idea that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) regard Jesus as pre-existent and as God incarnate.  For Kirk, the synoptics portray Jesus as God’s human representative and the Messiah; the Gospel of Luke portrays Jesus as a new Adam, and the Gospel of Matthew sees him as a new Israel.  According to Kirk, Jesus as such things has divine prerogatives: Jesus rules as God’s representative, Jesus has authority over water and nature, and Jesus can forgive sins.  Still, for Kirk, Jesus in the synoptics is what Kirk calls an idealized human figure, a concept that existed in Second Temple Judaism.  This differs from seeing Jesus in the synoptics as pre-existent, God incarnate, or ontologically divine.

Kirk makes a variety of arguments in support of his position.  Kirk argues that there is no evidence that the synoptics viewed Jesus as pre-existent or as God incarnate.  Not only do the synoptics appear to treat Jesus and God as two separate entities, but, when people in the synoptics saw Jesus’ miracles, they concluded that he was the Messiah, not God incarnate.  This was not surprising, according to Kirk, since there were Jewish legends about Solomon, a king from David’s line, being an exorcist, plus there was a belief, rooted in Hebrew prophetic writings, that miracles would accompany the Messianic era.  Kirk surveys the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature and sees there the concept of human beings (i.e., Adam, Davidic kings, Israel, priests, prophets, etc.) representing God on earth, and even having certain divine prerogatives and privileges, without themselves being ontologically divine.  For Kirk, the synoptic Gospels’ depiction of Jesus reflects this concept.

Kirk engages scholars who believe differently, specifically Richard Bauckham, C. Kavin Rowe, Richard B. Hays, Larry Hurtado, Simon B. Gathercole, Daniel Boyarin, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis.  Kirk also responds to objections.  Against the idea that Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is God because Mark 1:3 applies to Jesus Isaiah 40:3, which was about God, Kirk notes incidents in which Qumran documents apply Scriptures about God to human beings.  Some argue that Jesus’ authority over the waters echoes God’s authority over the waters in the Hebrew Bible, but Kirk responds that God’s representatives in the Hebrew Bible (i.e., Moses, prophets, and the Davidic king in certain Psalms) are also depicted or said to have authority over waters.  Against the argument that Jesus in the synoptics is God because he forgave sins, which detractors in the synoptics regarded as blasphemy because only God could forgive sins, Kirk notes that Jesus in the synoptics delegated to his disciples the authority to forgive sins, meaning it was a divine prerogative shared by God’s human representatives.

Another question that has been asked is why Jesus’ claim to be the Christ, the Son of God, and the Son of Man was considered by the high priest to be blasphemy in Matthew 26:65 and Mark 14:64.  It may have been deemed politically subversive to claim to be the Messiah, but blasphemous?  Jesus must have been claiming to be God in that case, some think!  Kirk was rather terse in engaging this question head-on.  Kirk’s discussion of blasphemy focused mostly on the ironic use of the concept of blasphemy in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.  But, on page 330, Kirk states regarding Jesus’ claim before the high priest to be Son of Man: “Inasmuch as this title constitutes a claim to exercising divine authority on earth, it is a source of opposition from Jewish leaders who see this as a violation of divine prerogative and, perhaps, their own place as God’s agents on earth.”  Kirk could have developed this argument some more, perhaps by commenting on the stance of the Sadducees toward the Book of Daniel (where the Son of Man concept appears) or Messianism, or the question of whether there was diversity of opinion within Judaism about humans sharing divine prerogatives.  Still, Kirk’s argument here is plausible.

While I do have slight reservations about the book, they either do not threaten Kirk’s overall case, or Kirk addresses such potential reservations, on some level.  One reservation is that Kirk seems to focus on Second Temple Judaism as the background for the synoptics, rather than Greco-Roman culture.  Kirk focuses mostly on Second Temple Judaism, but he does occasionally talk about Greco-Roman philosophers with miraculous powers, or the Roman emperor’s status as adopted son and representative of the divine.  In the case of certain Greco-Roman philosophers, there was a belief among some that they had ontological divinity—-that Plato or Pythagoras was a son of Apollo, for example.  One can ask if this is relevant to whether Jesus in the synoptic Gospels has ontological divinity, not just a functional or representational divinity.  Kirk briefly engages this question, saying that even in this case Jesus would not be considered a pre-existent divine being, since Plato and Pythagoras were not deemed to be such.  Kirk does not thoroughly deal with this question, but this question does not overthrow the excellent questions Kirk asks about the view that the synoptic Gospels portray Jesus as pre-existent and God incarnate.

Another reservation I have is that Kirk rarely interacts with source criticism of the Gospels.  Kirk at one point (as far as I can remember) mentions Q, but his overall approach is to treat the synoptic Gospels as unified documents: Mark has his message, Luke has his message, etc.  This reservation may challenge Kirk’s tendency to interpret some passages in a synoptic Gospel in reference to other passages in that Gospel, since the two passages may be from different sources, with different ideologies.  It does not overthrow Kirk’s thesis, however.

There were times when Kirk’s exegesis helpfully clarified passages in the synoptic Gospels.  Have you ever wondered about Jesus’ statement in Mark 2:27-28 that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath because the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath?  How does Jesus being Lord of the Sabbath follow from the Sabbath being made for man?  Kirk’s response is that Jesus in Mark 2:27-28, as Messianic Son of Man, had the authoritative role that God gave to Adam, the original recipient of the Sabbath.  Kirk argues extensively that, within parts of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., P) and Second Temple Judaism, there was a notion that God gave Adam authority over creation, and that Israel and the Davidic king assumed the mantle of Adam’s authority, and that the Messiah or Israel would assume it again in the eschatological era.  For Kirk, Jesus’ statement in Mark 2:27-28 may reflect this concept.

Also noteworthy is Kirk’s discussion of Matthew 11:27 and Luke 10:22, which state that no one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son, and those to whom the Son reveals him.  Does that imply that Jesus in the synoptics is more than human?  Kirk interprets these passages in light of the Messianic secret, and also passages in the Psalms of Solomon in which the Messiah has a special knowledge of God.

The book is about 600 pages, but it is never boring.  It is more thorough on some issues than on others, yet it still addresses those other issues (i.e., the development of different Christologies in the New Testament).  It is very well-argued, and New Testament scholarship should take its arguments seriously.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley.  My review is honest.

Book Write-Up: The Earliest Christologies

James L. Papandrea.  The Earliest Christologies: Five Images of Christ in the Postapostolic Age.  Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016.  See here to purchase the book.

James L. Papandrea teaches church history at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, which is at Northwestern University.  Papandrea has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

The Earliest Christologies is about the different beliefs about Jesus and Christ after the time of the apostles.  The book focuses on the second century C.E., but it also refers to issues and personalities from the third-fourth centuries C.E., and occasionally to the New Testament.

Papandrea discusses five Christologies.  First, there was Angel Adoptionism.  Angel Adoptionism maintained that an angel inhabited and empowered the man Jesus at Jesus’ conception.  This form of Adoptionism tended to accept the virgin birth of Jesus.

Second, there was Spirit Adoptionism.  Spirit Adoptionism held that the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus at Jesus’ baptism.  This form of Adoptionism tended to reject the virgin birth.

Both forms of Adoptionism differentiated between the man Jesus and the spiritual “Christ” who empowered him, meaning that they did not regard Jesus as divine.  They thought that the supernatural empowered Jesus as a reward for Jesus’ piety and obedience to God’s law: Angel Adoptionism believed that God foresaw Jesus’ obedience and rewarded him at conception, whereas Spirit Adoptionism held that God rewarded Jesus later in Jesus’ life, at his baptism.  According to Papandrea, Adoptionism was primarily accepted by Jewish Christians, who were monotheistic and upheld obedience towards the Torah.

Whereas the Adoptionisms treated Jesus as a mere man who was empowered by the divine, the third and the fourth Christologies that Papandrea discusses went to the other extreme: they maintained that Jesus was fully divine, not human.  Docetic Gnosticism held that Jesus was a phantom, one who only appeared human but actually was not.  Hybrid Gnosticism, however, thought that Jesus had a body, albeit an ethereal one rather than a human one.  Both of these Christologies believed that Jesus pre-existed his coming to earth and was a deity who had an origin from other deities.  Whereas Adoptionism believed in one God and recoiled from any idea that a god could be created, which were possible reasons that it was embraced by Jewish Christians, the Gnosticisms thought that gods could be created; thus, the Gnosticisms were more consistent with paganism.  Papandrea also discusses the ethical implications of the Gnosticisms, as some Gnostics took their contempt for the flesh in a hedonistic direction (have fun, for the flesh does not matter, anyway!), and other Gnostics suppressed the flesh through asceticism.

According to Papandrea, these four Christologies largely rejected the idea the Christ suffered.  Both Adoptionisms maintained that the spiritual “Christ” left the man Jesus before Jesus died.  Although there were some Hybrid Gnosticisms that accepted that Christ suffered, many thought that Christ shed his body and escaped suffering.  Papandrea also states that these four Christologies largely rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The fifth Christology that Papandrea discusses is the one that most Christians today embrace: Logos Christology.  According to this view, Jesus pre-existed his coming to earth and was the divine Logos, the son of God the Father.  God the Logos became incarnate in Jesus, who was fully human and fully divine during his lifetime, and who remained so even after his resurrection.  For Papandrea, this position was the position of the apostles, and it was the majority, mainstream position in second century Christianity.  At the same time, Papandrea acknowledges that it became refined and crystallized through its encounter with alternative positions.  Papandrea argues that Logos Christology is a balanced position, and he implies that it lacks the deficiencies of the other four Christologies.

Here are some thoughts about this book:

A.  While Papandrea embraces Logos Christology, he empathetically and clearly explains what was at stake for the adherents of the five positions.  He could be repetitive, but some readers can use repetition, or at least reminders.  The book is lucid.  It may be appropriate for undergraduates, albeit undergraduates who have learned basics about the New Testament and early Christianity.

B.  Papandrea distinguishes between paganism and Judaism, particularly on issues pertaining to monotheism and divinity.  While that distinction may have some validity, there may have been cases in which paganism and Judaism overlapped, even on these issues.  Papandrea demonstrates awareness of this possibility, for he does mention Jewish ideas about the logos and wisdom.  The reason that this issue is significant is that some scholars have argued that Gnosticism may have been a Jewish phenomenon, or may have existed within Judaism, whereas Papandrea appears to treat it as largely Gentile, without really engaging contrary scholarly perspectives.

C.  Is Papandrea correct that Logos Christology is the position of the New Testament?  On the one hand, Papandrea asserts this, without really demonstrating it.  Granted, something like Logos Christology exists in the Gospel of John and in Paul’s writings, but what about the New Testament writings that do not explicitly depict Jesus as pre-existing, or the passages that may imply that Jesus became the Son of God at his resurrection?  Papandrea in one place disputes that the Gospel of Mark has Adoptionism, but he does not really offer support for his position.  On the other hand, Papandrea does well to argue, or to refer to the possibility, that some of the New Testament writings (i.e., I John, Hebrews) actually argue against non-Logos Christologies.

While there may be some forms of Adoptionism in New Testament writings, the New Testament appears to differ, overall, from the second century positions of Angel Adoptionism and Spirit Adoptionism, for the New Testament presents Jesus Christ as suffering and rising again.  That may add support to Papandrea’s view that Angel Adoptionism and Spirit Adoptionism were stray positions, untrue to the mainstream.  (Robert M. Price has a different view, however, contending that there are traces of docetism in the New Testament, and even traces of the view that Jesus did not even die.)

D.  Papandrea argues that the second century church fathers regarded Jesus as God, and as eternally existing.  Bart Ehrman seems to present a different picture in How Jesus Became God, but, even in Papandrea’s book, there are some indications that things may be more complex than Papandrea’s narrative would imply.  On page 100, Papandrea states that “all of the apologists and theologians before Novatian had assumed that the ‘begetting’ (or generation) of the Son from the Father was an event that took place at some point in eternity before creation.”  Specifically, the view was that the Son existed as a thought in the mind of the Father, until the Father spoke the Son as a word, thereby begetting the Son.  Papandrea still believes that these theologians and apologists regarded the Son as eternal, for he says that they believed that the Son had eternally existed prior to his being begotten, but he existed in the Father’s mind.  On page 120, however, Papandrea says that Theophilus of Antioch (second century) believed that the Son was a thought in the Father’s mind until he was begotten, and that his successors concluded from this that the Son did not actually exist prior to the time that he was begotten: that the Son had not always existed, but rather came into existence at a certain point.  Should not this cast at least some question on the notion that the apologists and theologians before Novatian necessarily assumed that the Son had eternally existed, prior to his being begotten?

E.  One may think that I am saying that Papandrea retrojects Nicene Christology onto the New Testament and second century C.E. Christianity.  That would not be entirely accurate, though.  Papandrea acknowledges some messiness: he notes that there were second century Christians who tended to conflate Christ with the Holy Spirit, for example.  Papandrea also discusses the Christology of the Shepherd of Hermas, in his chapter on Angel Adoptionism.  The Shepherd of Hermas did enjoy some popularity within early Christianity (though it also had it critics), and one may inquire if that casts some question on, or at least should qualify, Papandrea’s overall picture: of the apostles holding and passing down some “orthodox” position (however rudimentary), which became mainstream, and some teachers strayed from that.

F.  Was Logos Christology the mainstream, majority position in the second century C.E., or at least the position held by most bishops and theologians, as Papandrea states on page 85, referring to Tertullian’s Prescription Against Heretics 1?  There may be something to Papandrea’s narrative, even though (as I said above) there may be factors that should qualify it.  Perhaps there was a majority Christian teaching, and some within the church held that they could uncover esoteric secrets underneath that teaching, secrets that would be accessible to the few.  The esotericism of Gnosticism may go against it being the majority position.  Still, did that majority position advocate a particular Christology?

G.  A question that I had in reading this book: if Logos Christology was so perfect and covered all of the bases, addressing the inadequacies of the other positions, and Logos Christology came first, then how did those other Christologies even arise?  Were they raising concerns that had already been successfully answered?  Papandrea may say that Logos Christology existed prior to the other positions, but in a rudimentary form, and it was primarily in contrast with the other positions that its implications became clearer.  Or perhaps one could say that Logos Christology existed first, but people still found it to be unsatisfactory: some still had a problem with God becoming flesh, or with a man being divine, so they developed alternative Christologies.

H.  An interesting feature of Papandrea’s book is that it discussed how some of the non-Logos Christologies changed in response to developments.  When John 1 became more accepted, for example, people who denied Jesus’ pre-existence had to deal with that, since John 1 presents Jesus as pre-existent.  Some of them went the route of saying that Christ in John 1 pre-existed in the Father’s mind as a plan, but not as an actual person.

I.  I have read books that cover the Arian controversy, but, from this book, I learned that there may have been Adoptionist aspects to Arian’s thought.

J.  Although, in this review, I have criticized Papandrea for not always supporting his points, there were many instances in which he did.  For instance, against scholars who question whether Gnosticism had both ascetic and hedonistic tendencies, Papandrea offered a compelling defense that it did.  Papandrea also discussed the significance of that within the historical and cultural context.

This book is slender, but it has a lot of information.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

The Struggling Jesus and Word of Faith Christology

A couple of comments about Christology stood out to me recently.  This post is not entirely about the debate in the theology-blogosphere about whether God the Son is eternally subordinate to God the Father, in a functional sense.  But it will intersect with that debate, somewhat.  This post concerns Word of Faith Christology, or, more accurately, the Christology of some within the Word of Faith movement.

I was listening to a sermon online that was given at a church that I have attended occasionally.  The church can probably be associated with the prosperity Gospel and the Word of Faith movement.  At the same time, it does not just preach that believers can prosper financially or influence reality by speaking words of faith out loud, for it also talks about God’s broader work in the world.  The church talks about other topics besides how God can bless me, me, me.

The preacher is going through the Book of Ezra.  In Ezra 4, adversaries of the returning Jewish exiles approach the Jewish leaders and offer to help the returning Jews to rebuild the Temple.  The Jewish leaders reply as follows:

“Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the LORD God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us” (v 3, KJV).

The lesson that the preacher got out of this passage was that the Jewish leaders were being a bit presumptuous.  We will build, they say?  Apart from God, they can do nothing!

The preacher then talked about Jesus.  Jesus on the cross prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 KJV).  Why did Jesus ask his Father to forgive the people who were putting him to death?  Why didn’t Jesus forgive them himself?  According to the preacher, Jesus was not making the same mistake that the returning Jewish exiles made in Ezra 4.  Jesus realized that he by himself could do nothing.  He by himself could not forgive those who were putting him to death, for, according to the preacher, Jesus was struggling with resentment and unforgiveness.  Jesus, in light of his own limitations, was leaving forgiveness to God, the only one who could forgive.

How orthodox that view is, well, that is a good question!  Christians believe that Jesus never sinned (II Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 9:28).  Could Jesus experience resentment and feelings of unforgiveness, without technically sinning?  On the one hand, such feelings would arguably go against love, which is part of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22).  Forgiveness of sins was also a significant aspect of Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus exhorted his disciples to forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22; Luke 17:4 mentions the criterion of repentance to receive forgiveness).  On the other hand, if Jesus had any feelings of resentment and unforgiveness, perhaps they could count as righteous indignation, which is arguably not sinful.  God often expresses that kind of frustration in the Old Testament.

There is also the issue of Jesus being God, even when he was a human.  Jesus had to depend on God because he by himself could do nothing, the preacher says?  But Jesus was God!  And yet, as seems fairly clear in the current Trinitarian controversy in the theological-blogosophere, orthodox Christianity seems at least to acknowledge the possibility that the situation with the incarnate Christ is not entirely the same as the situation with God the Son before he came to earth.  That is because the incarnate Christ had a human nature along with a divine nature, whereas the preincarnate Christ only had a divine nature.  Many who deny that God the Son was eternally subordinate to God the Father in function would say that such a concept of subordination posits two contrary wills between the Father and the Son, and that would be incorrect because the Father and the Son are united in their will: if the Son has to consciously obey and submit to the Father, does not that imply that the Son technically has a will that runs contrary to the Father’s will, and that the Son needs to subordinate that contrary will in obedience to the Father?  That cannot be, they say!  At the same time, those who deny eternal functional subordination on the part of the Son still have to deal with biblical passages about the Son submitting to the Father in obedience (Matthew 26:42; John 5:30; I Corinthians 11:3; Hebrews 5:8).  The route that they often take is to say that the Son, as a human being, submitted to the Father.  The Son did not submit to his Father before coming to earth, according to them, for the Son and the Father were united in will at that time.  But they maintain that the Son did submit to the Father in obedience after coming to earth and taking on human nature: Christ’s human nature adds something significant to the equation.  This, many of them say, is the orthodox Christian position.

That said, would such a position be consistent, on some level, with what the preacher was talking about in his sermon?  Jesus, in his human nature, had to depend on the Father because he was inadequate in himself to do anything.  Jesus still had a divine nature, though, but there are Christians who say that Jesus gave up certain divine privileges in being a human: those divine capacities were still present, but Jesus was not using them.  I cannot be too dogmatic here, however, for I would not be surprised if Christians would tell me that what the preacher said was unorthodox and that the church fathers would be appalled at his comments.

Now for the other comment on Christology!  I was home alone for the past few days, so I watched some things on television that I do not ordinarily watch, because they are not exactly the cup of tea of others in the household.  I was watching Joyce Meyer.  She has been associated with the Word of Faith movement, and, indeed, she has spoken about the importance of words and speaking words of faith out loud.

Joyce was talking about how Jesus at his trial did not say a word.  She said that this long puzzled her, but then it dawned on her why Jesus remained silent: Jesus was in a trying time and did not want to give the enemy (Satan) a foothold by speaking words of complaint and bitterness.  That reminded me of what that preacher said in that sermon that I heard.  Of course, there are other explanations for why Jesus was silent at his trial.  Jesus had a mission to die for our sins, so he did not fight his execution.  I Peter 2:23 states: “Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (KJV).  Can this intersect, at least somewhat, with what Joyce was saying?

In terms of Christian living, what the preacher and Joyce said resonates with me.  I recognize my own limitations: I by myself cannot forgive, and thus I need to rely on God’s power and activity.  Or, at least, there are some days when it is easier for me to think good, loving, peaceful, forgiving, and compassionate thoughts, and some days when that looks like an impossibility.  Jesus in John 15:5 says, “without me ye can do nothing” (KJV).  And, in reference to what Joyce was saying, I may be simmering on the inside, but I have to watch what I say in those situations.  Often, it may be better for me to say nothing.  To speak in such a situation could disrupt my own peace and the peace of others (which is not to dismiss the appropriateness of confrontation, in certain situations).

But was Jesus on earth in the same boat that I, and many others, are in, in such cases?  Is it unorthodox or heretical to suggest that?  Jesus had a walk with God.  As a human, he showed us how to walk with God.  Did Jesus struggle, like we do?  Hebrews 4:15: “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (KJV).

Book Write-Up: Reordering the Trinity, by Rodrick K. Durst

Rodrick K. Durst.  Reordering the Trinity: Six Movements of God in the New Testament.  Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2015.  See here to purchase the book.

Is the Trinity in the New Testament?  We do see New Testament references that mention the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all together.  Sometimes, that occurs within a formula.  An example that many Trinitarian apologists like to cite is Matthew 28:19, in which Jesus commands his disciples to baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Many Christians are accustomed to ordering the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as Matthew 28:19 does.  The Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed do this: they discuss the Father, then the Son, and then the Holy Spirit.  But there are places in the New Testament that choose not to follow that particular order.  II Corinthians 13:14, for instance, states: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all” (KJV).  This passage orders the Trinity as Son, Father, and Holy Spirit.

Is that significant?  Are New Testament authors trying to get across a specific point when they order the Trinity as they do?  Rodrick Durst thinks so.  For him, the Father-Son-Holy Spirit often occurs in the context of God sending God’s people for mission.  The order of Son-Spirit-Father often relates to salvation.  The order of Son-Father-Spirit often concerns God indwelling believers.  The order of Spirit-Father-Son often pertains to sanctification and the believer’s standing in God.  The order of Father-Spirit-Son often relates to God shaping us in spiritual formation.  And the order of Spirit-Son-Father often concerns God uniting believers in the church.  Durst does not just consider formulas that mention the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (in whatever order), but also New Testament passages that discuss them and their work.

Notwithstanding this categorization, Durst seems to recognize, on some level, that things are not that neat.  So many of these topics overlap with each other, and one can probably tie all sorts of passages in the New Testament to these topics.  At times, as Durst notes, the conversation about the three persons in New Testament passages appears to go on: a New Testament reference may refer to the three persons, then mention one of the persons again a couple of times, not following a strict threefold pattern.  Perhaps Durst should have appreciated more than he did the difficulty of categorizing the New Testament references to the three persons; to his credit, however, he does grade each New Testament reference according to how well it supports the categorization in which he is tempted to place it, and a number of references do not get an “A”!

Durst discusses related issues, as well.  For one, he is responding to people who do not believe that the Trinity is spiritually practical for believers.  He points to Kant and Schleiermacher as two thinkers who had a dismissive attitude towards the Trinity.  For Durst, the Trinity is spiritually practical, and the numerous passages in the New Testament about it demonstrate that to be the case. Durst not only discusses the passages one-by-one, but he also includes sample sermons on how to apply the concepts that he discusses.
Second, Durst is responding to those who believe that the Trinity is not a doctrine in the New Testament but was developed after the time of the New Testament.  For Durst, the Trinity is in the New Testament, for the New Testament often mentions the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (in whatever order) together.  Durst argues that the doctrine of the Trinity may even go back to Jesus himself, and that it actually accords with aspects of the Hebrew Bible.  Durst does acknowledge that there has been historical development in the conceptualization of the Trinity, however, and he includes a chapter about patristic attitudes towards the Godhead and the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century C.E.

Regarding Durst’s categorization of the various orderings of the Trinity in the New Testament, I doubt that the orders can be neatly or rigidly categorized.  At the same time, I do believe that, in a number of cases (not necessarily all), the New Testament authors use the order that they use for a reason.  If the Son is mentioned first, then something is being emphasized about the Son.

Sharing my religious and academic background may place my following critiques in context.  I grew up in a non-Trinitarian denomination, an offshoot of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God.  Armstrongism was binitarian: it believed that the Father and the Son were God, but that the Holy Spirit was God’s power, not a person within the Godhead.  One argument that Armstrongites made is that there are many places in the New Testament that appear binitarian: Paul introduces some of his letters by mentioning the Father and the Son, for example, but he does not mention the Holy Spirit.

When I started studying the New Testament academically (which is not to say that it is my field of study, but that I took classes in it), I encountered the view that the New Testament contains various Christologies, that not every New Testament author conceived of Jesus as God before he came to earth.  Some did not present Jesus as pre-existing his earthly life.  Some thought that Jesus became divine at his resurrection.  There are New Testament scholars today, such as Bart Ehrman, who argue for Christological diversity in the New Testament.

My liberal academic background in religious studies also frowned on treating the Hebrew Bible as a Christian document.  Saying that the Trinity or Jesus is in the Hebrew Bible was considered a projection of Christian ideas onto the Hebrew Bible, not an approach that was faithful to the Hebrew Bible’s original messages and meanings.

In light of all that, here are some questions and critiques:

A.  Durst does well to note that there are New Testament references that mention the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all together.  At the same time, he should have addressed why there are binitarian passages in the New Testament: passages that mention the Father and the Son, but not the Holy Spirit.  Why, for example, does Paul sometimes fail to mention the Holy Spirit in introducing his letters?

B.  Although the New Testament mentions the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together, does that mean that it always assumes a Nicene view of the Trinity in those cases—-a Christology in which Jesus was God before he came to earth, or a conceptualization of the Holy Spirit as a person?  A New Testament reference may mention the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but that does not necessarily mean that it believes that the Son pre-existed; it could think that Jesus became the Son at his birth, his baptism, or his resurrection.

C.  Durst’s argument that the Hebrew Bible is consistent with the Trinity is thoughtful and rigorous, but not entirely convincing.  Durst makes a big deal about the Hebrew Bible using a plural word, Elohim, for God, but Judges 16:23-24 uses elohim for the pagan god Dagon, while using a singular verb to describe what Dagon was allegedly doing.  Were the Philistines seeing Dagon as a plural deity?  I have my doubts: perhaps the plural is used to highlight the majesty of the deity.  Moreover, Durst says some things that, in my opinion, can account for elements of the Hebrew Bible better than the Trinity can.  A number of Christians say that the angel of the LORD in the Hebrew Bible was Jesus, one reason being that the angel speaks for God and interacts with people as God.  Durst states, however, that there was an ancient belief that messengers represented the person sending them, and that the messengers speaking was the same as their senders speaking.  If that is the case, does one have to resort to the Trinity to explain the angel of the LORD’s activity in the Hebrew Bible?  Finally, Durst should have explored more deeply whether Second Temple Judaism conceived of God in a plural manner, since that helped form the historical context of the historical Jesus, and Durst seems to want to argue that Jesus teaching the Trinity was consistent with his Jewish heritage.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book from Kregel Academic, in exchange for an honest review.

Triablogue: Steve Hays on Answered and Unanswered Prayer, and the Question of Whether Jesus Could Sin

Answered and Unanswered Prayer:  http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/09/when-cats-away-mice-will-play.html

“Could Jesus Sin?”: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/09/could-jesus-sin.html

Book Write-Up: How Jesus Became God, by Bart Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman.  How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.  New York: HarperOne, 2014.  See here to buy the book.

How did Jesus, a Jew from a monotheistic culture, come to be seen by his followers as God?  Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar who was once a conservative Christian and became an agnostic, tackles this question in How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.  

Ehrman argues that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who may have believed that he would soon become the Messianic king of Israel.  Jesus envisioned a heavenly figure known as the “Son of Man” (who appears in I Enoch) coming to earth soon, overthrowing evil and establishing Paradise, and setting up Jesus as the king of Israel.  After Jesus was put to death by the Romans, thereby shattering his disciples’ hopes that he would be the Messiah in any conventional sense of the term, some of Jesus’ disciples saw visions that convinced them was Jesus was still alive.  As that belief gained steam, early followers of Jesus concluded that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status after Jesus’ death, meaning that Jesus was still the Messiah, but that he was enthroned in heaven and would return to earth.  According to Ehrman, there was also an early view that Jesus had pre-existed his time on earth, that he was an angel who became a human being, then was exalted to a divine status.  For Ehrman, these ideas about Jesus are understandable in light of Greco-Roman, and also Jewish, ideas about divinity.  Both Gentile and Jewish culture contained the idea that a man could become divine, and that a god or an angel could assume a human form (which Ehrman acknowledges is different from an incarnation).  Within Hellenistic Jewish literature, there is the notion that an aspect of God could be personal, or that God had a divine intermediary (a logos, or wisdom), and Ehrman contends that these themes could be relevant to how Jesus came to be conceptualized.  Ehrman also explores Christology after the time of the New Testament, as he goes through Justin Martyr, Novatian, Tertullian, and others.  In Ehrman’s picture, views once considered acceptable (i.e., the idea that Jesus was exalted to a divine status after his death, and the view that the pre-existent Jesus had a beginning and was subordinate to God the Father) came to be considered heresy within Christianity.

This book has been critiqued and analyzed numerous times in the blogosphere and in print, and my write-up here will not be a thorough critique, though I will say that I find Ehrman’s scenario to be plausible and sensible.  While I have read a number of reviews of the book, I am glad that I finally read the book itself.  Ehrman is a gifted writer, who is able to make scholarly debates accessible to a popular audience.  I myself have academic training, but, as a reader, I appreciate when someone is able to summarize issues and phrase them in an accessible, friendly, lucid, conversational, and enjoyable (yet not corny) manner, while still providing documentation from primary sources.  Ehrman’s personal stories certainly enhanced the enjoyability of the book for me as a reader, for they showed how Ehrman’s research fit into his journey, particularly his journey in relation to religion.  The book also provided me with useful information about conceptions of divinity in the Greco-Roman world.  I have read about this topic in non-popular scholarly works, but Ehrman summarized the issues very lucidly, while giving examples of what he was discussing.

The book is not just related to Jesus’ divinity and monotheism, for Ehrman also participates in debates about whether Jesus’ resurrection is historically authentic.  In my opinion, Ehrman’s best argument with regard to this issue is his argument that all sorts of people—-even groups—-have seen visions, and that some Christian apologists are overreaching when they claim that early Christian visions of the risen Jesus demonstrate the truth of Christianity.  Regarding Ehrman’s argument that Jesus after his crucifixion probably was not buried, I refer readers to Greg Monette’s post about this subject, which critiques Ehrman’s argument through appeal to primary sources.  When Ehrman addresses the question of whether historians can say that Jesus rose from the dead, his discussion is a mixed bag.  Ehrman does well to make the point that saying that Jesus’ resurrection is not subject to historical investigation is not the same as saying that it did not happen; on the other hand, he seems to believe that historians should prefer naturalistic explanations as more likely than supernatural ones.  Personally, I would say that the farthest even believing scholars can go, from a historical standpoint, is to argue that Jesus’ tomb was empty, that the disciples saw visions that convinced them that Jesus rose from the dead, and that certain naturalistic ways to account for this fall short; I agree with Ehrman that going further and saying that Jesus rose from the dead is faith, not history.  In terms of what historians can say about this issue, I think that they would do well to say that it is a mystery.

Ehrman also makes points that are relevant to the question of whether the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony.  Ehrman believes that there are some things in the synoptic Gospels that probably go back to the historical Jesus, and he endorses the conventional scholarly criteria of authenticity as ways to discern this.  At the same time, Ehrman also thinks that, after people saw visions of the risen Jesus, they started telling stories, and stories got invented and exaggerated, resulting in the oral tradition that is behind the Gospels, which (according to Ehrman) were written decades after the time of Jesus by anonymous people, not the people to whom they are ascribed.  (As Ehrman asks, would Aramaic-speaking Galileans produce the refined Greek works that the Gospels are?)  On eyewitness testimony, Erhman refers to non-Christian claims to eyewitness testimony: viewings of Romulus ascending to heaven; the claim that Apollonius’ miracles were attested by an eyewitness; and sightings of UFOs.

Moreover, while scholar Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the Gospels telling certain people’s names is an act of referring to them as eyewitnesses, Ehrman refers to an article by Bruce Metzger (whom conservative scholars love to quote or appeal to on other issues), “Names for the Nameless,” which was in Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, volume 1, pages 79-99.  Ehrman summarizes the article as follows: “Here he showed all the traditions of people who were unnamed in the New Testament receiving names later; for example, the wise men are named in later traditions, as are priests serving in the Sanhedrin when they condemned Jesus and the two robbers who were crucified with him” (page 155).  (See my post here about how Bauckham addresses this sort of issue.)  Ehrman here is not directly responding to Bauckham, but rather Ehrman is seeking to account for the development of the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, especially since an arguably earlier tradition said that the Jewish leaders as a group buried him (Acts 13:28-29); for Ehrman, we may be seeing the literary practice of naming a character.  While Ehrman in this book does not explicitly interact with Bauckham, Ehrman’s points may be relevant to Bauckham’s argument, and I am looking forward to Ehrman’s coming book that more explicitly tackles the question of whether the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony.

I’ll stop here.

Book Write-Up: The Christology of Hegel

James Yerkes.  The Christology of Hegel.  Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a nineteenth century German philosopher.  James Yerkes’ The Christology of Hegel is about Hegel’s view of Jesus Christ, and how that fit into Hegel’s larger religious, historical, philosophical, and political ideas.

Yerkes’ book, as I understood it, presented a lot of tensions.  Here are some of them:

1.  Hegel believed that a spirit, God, was moving history forward to a time of freedom and rationality.  He treated German Protestantism as an exemplar of where history should lead.  Yet, Hegel was not always so optimistic.  At times, he did not regard German Protestantism as the ultimate culmination of historical progress, thinking there was a yet future stage.  Hegel looked at Germany and saw problems like factionalism.  Yet, in the midst of these problems, he clung to the idea that God is close to human beings, and he regarded Jesus’ incarnation as an exemplar or a precursor to that.

2.  Hegel believed that Jesus was an essential part of historical progress.  Jesus needed to be here and do what he did for humanity to arrive at where it needed to be.  For Hegel, Jesus promoted authentic morality and embodied God’s presence with humanity.  Yet, my impression is that Hegel also had some problems with Jesus.  For one, Jesus was from a Jewish culture, and Hegel did not have a high opinion of Judaism, believing that it promoted alienation within the human race (i.e., God chooses a people who are separate from others).  Second, Jesus had apocalyptic and world-denying ideas, and Hegel thought this was why Christianity encouraged separation and systemic fragmentation rather than unity.

3.  On the one hand, Hegel emphasized the importance of the incarnation, which is God becoming man.  On the other hand, Yerkes interprets Hegel’s Christology as being rather adoptionistic: that Jesus was a man who was particularly in tune with the divine, and so God decided to make this man Jesus into the Christ.

4.  On the one hand, Hegel championed reason.  He did not care for Shleiermacher’s subjective, feelings-oriented approach to religion.  He hoped that reason could sift between the universal and normative aspects of Christianity and what was merely historical and cultural.  He believed in people doing what was right out of a free recognition that it was the reasonable thing to do, and he supported political systems that would allow that.  He regarded the religion of his time as slavish adherence to doctrines and laws, without much authenticity.

On the other hand, Hegel valued the cultural expressions of religion (i.e., church, doctrines, practices, etc.).  He believed that fed people in a way that mere philosophy could not.  He wanted to unite his people, and culture was a way to do so.  He was against human autonomy because that could amount to each person doing what was right in his own eyes.

5.  On the one hand, Hegel believed that we can know about God rationally.  He disagreed with Immanuel Kant's idea (or an idea attributed to Kant) that we cannot know anything about God through reason.  For Hegel, we can see that we are finite, and thus we can draw the conclusion that there is an infinite.  On the other hand, Hegel thought that people could believe in God as a result of illumination from the Spirit.  

This was my impression after reading Yerkes’ book, and I may have missed some nuances.  Yerkes was a clear author in terms of his prose, clearer than many who write about philosophy.  But I am unclear as to how Hegel held all these tensions together, assuming I am correct in saying there are tensions in the first place.

Book Write-Up: The Origin of Christology

C.F.D. Moule.  The Origin of Christology.  Cambridge University Press, 1977, 1978.

Christology has recently been a prominent issue within the biblioblogosphere, due to Bart Ehrman’s new book and the responses to it.  I’ve been wanting to read Moule’s The Origin of Christology for some time, since Derek Leman’s Daily D’var mentioned it a while back, and the book looked interesting to me.  Moule’s book was not quite what I expected.

Ordinarily, Christology debates revolve around whether the New Testament maintains that Jesus was God.  Some say that all of it does.  Some say that different books in the New Testament have different ideas.  Christology debates also look at such issues as whether Jesus in the New Testament pre-existed his earthly life.

On some level, Moule participates in this debate.  He argues against the idea that a high Christology (one that regards Jesus as divine) was an importation of Greco-Roman religious ideas, which occurred due to Paul (or even occurred later than Paul) and had nothing to do with the historical Jesus.  Moule argues instead that, in some sense, what Paul thought about Jesus goes back to the historical Jesus.

Unlike many discussions of Christology, Moule does not focus much on such issues as Jesus’ pre-existence.  Rather, Moule’s focus is on the communal Christ.  In Paul’s writings, believers are said to be in Christ, or part of Christ’s body, and so, in a sense, Christ is a communal being (though Moule does not deny that Jesus was also a historical individual).  Moule compares Paul’s Christ to “the omnipresent deity ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’—-to quote the tag from Acts 17:28 which is generally traced to Epimenides” (page 95).  Moule contends that Paul and early Christians concluded from their experience after Jesus’ resurrection that Jesus was more than a man, that Jesus was a being who encompassed them, and in whom they were participating.  That would lead to the idea that Jesus was pre-existent, and maybe even God.

While Moule in one place appears to trace the early Christian belief in the communal Christ to early Christians themselves, Moule also seems to maintain that, on some level, it was consistent with the message and ministry of the historical Jesus.  Jesus claimed to be the Son of Man, and Moule believes that Jesus’ understanding of this term coincided with how the Book of Daniel used it: to refer to Jewish martyrs, which is communal, rather than a specific individual.  Jesus, therefore, exemplified Jewish martyrdom, which occurred to other Jews as well.  Jesus’ status of Son of God was closely associated with his baptism, which has a communal dimension.  I do not think that Moule draws a clear line from Jesus’ own self-conception in the synoptic Gospels to Paul’s conception of Jesus as a communal being.  Moule does well, however, to highlight that Jesus may have had some communal conception of his life and mission, and that Paul had this view as well, even if Paul expressed it differently.

Moule also argues that Paul’s presentation of Jesus as Lord may have come from Judaism rather than Greco-Roman ideas, for the Aramaic term mar (which Moule claims means lord, or something similar) can sometimes go beyond being a mere polite address.

Near the end of the book, Moule has a discussion with another scholar about the relevance of the communal Christ to the relationship between Christianity and other religions.  I vaguely understood this debate.  Moule may have been arguing that Christ encompasses all people, and thus Moule favors an inclusivist view of Christianity or Christ, whereas the other scholar was noting that Paul himself excludes people from Christ’s body—-the Jews who did not believe in Christ, for example.  This made me wonder how exactly Moule was defining the communal Christ: as the body of believers in Christ (the church), as the people of Israel (for they appear to be relevant to Jesus’ self-understanding, in Moule’s scenario), as the entire world (Jesus, after all, is the second Adam, for Paul), or all of the above?

I apologize for any misunderstandings of this book.

Not a Massive Reconstruction Project

I appreciated something that Bart Ehrman said on pages 98-99 of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament:

"I have observed that the anti-adoptionist changes of the text occur sporadically throughout the tradition, not at all with the kind of consistency for which one might have hoped.  Given the character of our evidence, however, the uneven distribution and irregular attestation are not surprising.  The scribes of our surviving manuscripts more commonly preserved theological variations than created them, and none of these scribes appears to have made a concerted effort to adopt such readings with rigorous consistency.  Almost certainly there was no attempt to create an anti-adoptionistic recension of the New Testament.  Indeed, the Christians of the proto-orthodox camp did not, on one level, need to change their texts; they believed that the texts, in whatever form they came, already attested their christological views.  Most of the debates over Christology, then, centered on the correct interpretation of the texts rather than on their wording.  But to some degree the debates did impact the physical dimensions of the manuscripts, as scribes periodically----if not rigorously----modified the words of the New Testament to make them more serviceable for the orthodox cause, effecting thereby the orthodox corruption of Scripture."

Ehrman's overall argument in this book is that proto-orthodox Christian scribes in some cases altered the text of New Testament writings to conform passages to proto-orthodox ideas.  That may sound to some people like a conspiracy theory.  Some may even conclude that Ehrman is arguing that we can't trust the New Testament in our Bibles because we don't have the original text with us, and subsequent copies reflect alterations designed to serve the cause of the proto-orthodox in Christological debates.

Well, I've not read everything that Ehrman has ever written, so I don't know offhand how extreme he gets.  But what he says on pages 98-99 of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture strikes me as quite reasonable and level-headed.  In that passage, I don't see some large-scale conspiracy to make the entire New Testament conform to proto-orthodoxy, as if certain ideas in the originals have been completely suppressed.  I also don't see a hyper-skepticism about scholars' ability to make conclusions about what the original text may have said.  Rather, what Ehrman is suggesting is that there were cases in which scribes altered the text----adding a word here, taking away a word there, changing this little phrase----out of a concern that a given passage was problematic for proto-orthodoxy.  They weren't taking a sledge-hammer to the text and undertaking massive reconstruction of it.  Actually, Ehrman acknowledges that the scribes were quite conservative in terms of their copying and transmission of the text, and so there were readings that they preserved that were arguably problematic in terms of proto-orthodox positions (though the scribes may not have seen them as overly problematic).  But Ehrman's point is that, on some occasions, scribes changed the wording of the text----changing a text that said that Joseph was Jesus' father, making the text explicitly say that Jesus was God, etc.  I agree with Ehrman that this occurred.

(UPDATE: Later in the book, however, Ehrman discusses what he considers to be larger interpolations of verses or units.)

Does that mean that the New Testament originally did not contain a belief in Jesus' divinity, until later scribes came along and conformed the text to that doctrine?  I can't make that blanket statement, and my impression is that Ehrman does not believe that, as well.  Ehrman seems to acknowledge that the Gospel of John has a high Christology, although he does not appear to think that the same can be said for (say) the Gospel of Luke.

Bart Ehrman on Luke 3:22 and Anti-Adoptionism

In this post, I will talk about Bart Ehrman's discussion of Luke 3:22 in his book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament.

The context of Luke 3:22 is Jesus' baptism by John.  The King James Version for that verse reads: "And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased."  Ehrman's argument is that "in you I am well pleased" is actually an attempt to theologically correct an earlier reading: "today I have begotten you."  Why was this attempt made, according to Ehrman?  Essentially, there were adoptionists who believed that Jesus became the Son of God and Christ at his baptism, when God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit.  But there were Christians who disagreed with the adoptionists, believing instead that Jesus was God's son before his baptism.  The Christian scribes who believed that Jesus was God's son prior to his baptism changed the text to read "in you I am well pleased" instead of "today I have begotten you," since the latter reading implied that Jesus became God's son when he was baptized.  The change made Luke 3:22 say that God was acknowledging Jesus as his son, not making Jesus into his son at that time.

Ehrman offers text-critical grounds for his view that "today I have begotten you" was an earlier reading than "in you I am well pleased."  In the second-third centuries C.E., Ehrman argues, "today I have begotten you" was the predominant (maybe even the only) reading.  Ehrman mentions such names as Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others, but I'll quote Justin Martyr.  Justin says the following in Dialogue with Trypho 88, when discussing Jesus' baptism:

"but then the Holy Ghost, and for man's sake, as I formerly stated, lighted on Him in the form of a dove, and there came at the same instant from the heavens a voice, which was uttered also by David when he spoke, personating Christ, what the Father would say to Him: 'You are My Son: this day have I begotten You;' [the Father] saying that His generation would take place for men, at the time when they would become acquainted with Him: 'You are My Son; this day have I begotten you.'"  See here.

Notice that Justin not only presents God saying "this day have I begotten you" at Jesus' baptism, but Justin also tries to interpret that in a non-adoptionistic fashion, applying it to the regeneration of Christians rather than to God begetting Jesus as God's son when Jesus was baptized.  There is good reason to believe that "today I have begotten you" was the predominant reading of Luke 3:22 in Justin's time, and that it was later changed to "in you I am well pleased."

There are other arguments that Ehrman makes for "today I have begotten you" in Luke 3:22 being the earlier reading.  First, up to the sixth century, this particular reading is broadly attested, occurring in "witnesses as far-flung as Asia Minor, Palestine, Alexandria, North Africa, Rome, Gaul, and Spain" (page 63).  You may recall that the book, Reinventing Jesus, which criticizes Ehrman, says that broad attestation is a strong ground for authenticity when it comes to text critcism.  Second, changing "today I have begotten you" to "in you I am well pleased" may have been (at least in part) an attempt to harmonize Luke 3:22 with Mark 1:11, where we have "in whom I am well pleased.  There were Christian scribes who tried to harmonize the Gospels, as Reinventing Jesus acknowledges.  Third, within Luke-Acts, there seems to be a salient notion that something significant happened to Jesus at his baptism----that God anointed Jesus and endowed him with power (cp, Luke 3:22 with 4:1, 14; Acts 10:37-38).  According to Ehrman, what happened in Luke 3:22 was "an election formula, in which a king is actually chosen by God upon his anointing" (page 67).  Ehrman offers other arguments for the priority of "today I have begotten you" in Luke 3:22, as well.

One might ask if "today I have begotten you" in Luke 3:22 contradicts Luke's virgin birth story, in which Jesus is born as the Christ (Luke 2:11).  If that is the case, wouldn't "in you I am well pleased" be the reading that makes more sense within Luke's Gospel?  Ehrman's response to that appears to be that Luke contradicts himself, or at least appears to do so.  On page 65, Ehrman states:

"According to Luke's infancy narrative, Jesus was born the Christ (2:11).  But in at least one of the speeches of Acts he is understood to have become the Christ at his baptism (10:37-38; possibly 4:27); whereas in another Luke explicitly states that he became Christ at his resurrection (2:36).  It may be that in yet another speech (3:20) Jesus is thought to be the Christ only in his parousia.  Similarly 'inconsistent' are Luke's predications of the titles Lord and Savior to Jesus.  Thus, Jesus is born the Lord in Luke 2:11, and in Luke 10:1 he is designated Lord while living; but in Acts 2:36 he is said to have been become Lord at his resurrection.  So too, in Luke 2:11 he is born Savior, and in Acts 13:23-24 he is designated Savior while living; but according to Acts 5:31 he is said to have been made Savior at the resurrection.  Nor does the title Son of God...escape this seemingly erratic kind of treatment: Jesus is born the Son of God in Luke 1:32-35, descended Son of God according to the genealogy of 3:23-28, and declared to be Son of God while living (e.g., Luke 8:28; 9:35); but Acts 13:33 states that he became the Son of God at his resurrection."

What Ehrman says reminds me of John Meier's claim that we see a grab-bag sort of Christology in the Gospels: that there were different ideas about who Jesus was, and the Gospel writers grabbed from these diverse ideas in their own depictions of Jesus (see here), incorporating low and high Christologies.  Perhaps one could also do source criticism with Luke-Acts to explain its diversity: some have posited that Jesus' birth story in the Gospel of Luke was pre-Lukan (see here), and that the speeches within Acts are earlier than Luke's Gospel.

It's interesting to me how Paul himself appears to have diverse Christologies in his writings: Paul may arguably be saying in Romans 1:4 that Jesus was appointed to be the Son of God at his resurrection, yet Paul says in Romans 8:3 that God sent his son in the likeness of sinful flesh, which seems to imply that Jesus was God's Son long before God raised Jesus from the dead.  Ehrman, like many scholars, holds that Paul in Romans 1:4 is drawing from an earlier source, while adding a little of his own two-cents.  For some reason, Paul has no problem including an allusion that appears to contradict what he says elsewhere.  Perhaps Paul had his own way of explaining away Romans 1:4 to himself so that it would cohere with his stance, and thus (like many Christian fundamentalists) he did not acknowledge a contradiction.  But, according to Ehrman, there were later scribes who would have issues with how Romans 1:4 was phrased!

Knitter on Jesus Being the Only Way

In my latest reading of Paul Knitter's No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions, I read Chapter IX, "How Is Jesus Unique? Toward a Theocentric Christology".

Knitter's overall view seems to be that God can be manifest in other religions, not just Christianity.  And he understands such doctrines as the incarnation and Jesus' resurrection in ways that downplay the uniqueness of Jesus.  For Knitter, maybe Jesus was not the only time that God became close to creation and thereby offered grace to people.  Perhaps the empty tomb stories express the early Christians' conviction that God had somehow touched them after the death of Jesus and that the cause of Jesus was going forward, and even non-Christian religions have felt this sort of divine grace after the death of their own leaders.  At the same time, Knitter does not go in the direction of claiming that all religions are saying the same thing, or that truth is relative, for he believes that Christianity makes truth-claims that can somehow edify people in non-Christian religions.  What he may mean by this is that Christians can testify to others about how God has interacted with them, even as others testify to Christians about their own interactions with the divine.

One point that Knitter makes is that Christology was in flux in the days of early Christianity, as Jesus evolved from being regarded as an eschatological prophet to being seen as pre-existent wisdom.  In the process, early Christians drew from their cultures, both Jewish and also Greco-Roman.  Knitter appears to believe that Christology today should likewise change in response to the existence of religious pluralism.

But what about those Bible passages about Jesus being the only way, or the only mediator between God and humanity, or the only name under heaven that is given among people by which we might be saved?  Knitter proposes different ways to understand this exclusivist language: to see it as characteristic of a classical or Jewish eschatological mindset that held that there was only one truth, or to regard it as a way for early Christianity----a small religion----to survive in the vast world of religions.  While this approach may presume that Christianity was exclusivist in its early days due to its historical context and should change with the times, Knitter at one point seems to argue that his conception of Jesus may actually be faithful to what the biblical text actually says.  Knitter contends that the exclusivist language in the New Testament is devotional (as when a husband tells his wife that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, even though he may realize that, literally-speaking, there are prettier women out there), that it presents Jesus as reliable rather than as the one and only path to God, that one can understand the text to say that Jesus is a (not the) son of God, and that "only-begotten" can mean firstborn, which means that Jesus----like Israel, which is called God's firstborn----is an important part of God's plan.

Do I buy into Knitter's arguments?  I can see his point that Christianity is in flux.  At the same time, to say that Christianity should change in response to religious pluralism makes me wonder if the truth can be so flexible, for is not truth absolute?  Regarding Knitter's views on exclusivist language in the New Testament, I'll admit that there could have been times in the ancient world when people used exclusivist language for devotional purposes, without necessarily thinking that their way was the only way (see here).  But exclusivism is such a salient feature of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament----exclusivism being the idea that the God of Israel is supreme whereas the other gods are inferior or non-existent----that I tend to take exclusivist language literally.  And, even if that language occurred in a devotional context, that doesn't preclude it from being literal.  I can say that my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world and truly believe that she is!  (Or I could if I had a wife!)  (UPDATE: On page 261, Knitter says that, even within a devotional context, early Christians could have taken Jesus' uniqueness in a metaphysical way, but he denies that "such metaphysical claims are...intrinsic to that language" and affirms that "Today, Christians can hear and use the same language with different metaphysical content.")

But I don't dismiss the possibility that God can be active in other religions.  Perhaps Christianity is wrong in its exclusivism, or Christians can accept ways to see God as active in other religions while still being faithful to Christianity: they can hold that God is using other religions to prepare people for Christianity (which they'd accept either now or in the eschaton), for example.  At the same time, I do appreciate diversity, which means that I don't want for everyone to be in the same mold but to be different and to learn from one another.

We're Going to Study...

This post is about what my church will do next for its Bible study.  I was going to do a series, but I've decided not to do so, unless you can count two posts as a series!

As I said yesterday, one curriculum that we were looking at was essentially an apologetic for the Bible: an attempt to defend the Bible's divine-inspiration from detractors.  My problem with that is that I don't think that one can prove the Bible's divine-inspiration.  Not only can evidence be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but how would one even prove that God inspired a document?  You'd first have to prove that there's a God!

Dr. Daniel Wallace appears in the documentary, and I ordered one of his books because I'd like to consider his arguments and perhaps blog through them.  But I'd prefer to do that in the privacy of my own home rather than in a group.  In terms of Bible study groups, I don't like to be beaten over the head with apologetics, but rather I prefer to encounter the Bible in its beauty.  I feel that I have more free will in the latter case, for I am given the latitude to respond to the Bible in light of the beauty of its message, rather than being forced to accept the Bible because someone presented an argument that I can't refute at the moment.  When I encounter apologetics, my mind races to find ways to refute the argument in an attempt to preserve my freedom, or I can find myself sighing Al Gore-like or rolling my eyes.  I don't want to be like that in my Bible study group, and so I'd prefer to tackle apologetics in my own personal reading----where I have the latitude to learn and grow as I wish, and to accept or reject what I want without group pressure. (That's not to say that the group pressures me or anyone else, but I'm the sort of person who likes to fit in and so I nod my head and agree in Bible study groups.  I'm not sure what I'd do if I encountered in a group something with which I fundamentally disagree, especially since I'm hesitant for other Christians to see my skeptic-side.)

Someone else in the group didn't want to do this particular study.  It's not so much because she's a skeptic like me----though she does ask plenty of excellent questions.  Rather, it's because she already accepts the Bible, and she's more interested in learning about what the Bible says and how it can help her to live a good life than she is in hearing defenses for the Bible's authority.  Even if she and I differ in our worldview, we find common ground on what we're looking for in Bible study curricula.

Another curriculum we were looking at concerned Jesus.  The description asked if Jesus was merely a man, or was more than that.  I feared that this, too, would put me into a situation in which I'd find myself sighing and rolling my eyes.  I appreciate that the documentaries interview biblical scholars and refer to primary sources from the New Testament period, but I feared that this particular curriculum would uncritically assume that Jesus is God and would not be sensitive to the complexity of Christology in the New Testament.  I was one time in a group in which we were reading the Gospel of Luke, and many of us simply assumed that Jesus went around proclaiming himself to be God.  Well, maybe there were times when he arguably did so, but I don't think that this was always obvious or was a salient element of his message, or that all of the New Testament assumes the doctrines that were later enshrined as Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy.  In my opinion, things were messier than that, and that's one reason that the New Testament is interesting to study.  We didn't discuss this curriculum much, but we decided to do something else.

We also considered a study on Isaiah 53.  The title assumed that Isaiah 53 was a prophecy about Jesus.  When I said that Jewish people have a different interpretation, my pastor said, to my surprise, that the study also looks at Jewish interpretations!  Perhaps this particular curriculum would be interesting, as long as it seeks to find something edifying in Jewish interpretations rather than arguing that they're wrong because they fail to see that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus.  Perhaps that's what the curriculum does.  Personally, though, I'm not comfortable with a study that focuses on how the Old Testament points to Christ, for I don't think it's obvious that it does.  We discussed this study a little, but we decided on something else.

We're going to study Romans.  I was afraid that the study on Romans 1 would really harp on homosexuality, but I watched the first episode of the documentary online and I saw that it didn't even mention that particular issue, focusing instead on idolatry.  Well, that offends my pluralistic sensibilities, but I can at least deal with that.  On homosexuality, it's not that I have problems hearing people express a belief that homosexuality is wrong.  I'm just uncomfortable when the issue is run into the ground----when there is no attempt to understand the perspective of homosexuals, when a political agenda is promoted, when homosexuals are demonized, etc.  But, even if the topic were to come up in the group, it would only be one session, then we'd move on to the rest of Romans, which has a lot of edifying teachings. 

Completing Hurtado's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?

I finished Larry Hurtado's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?  Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus.

After reading this book, I still have questions.  First of all, Hurtado argues that the hymn in Philippians 2----and the fact that Paul expects for his audience to regard it as authoritative----indicates that there was not controversy early on in Christianity that Jesus was divine.  If early Christianity was so uniform about Jesus being divine and pre-existent, however, why do the synoptic Gospels appear to present a different picture, as least on the issue of Jesus' pre-existence?  I tend to agree with James Dunn that we see different views on when Jesus became the Son of God within the Gospels----Matthew and Luke place the time at Jesus' birth, Mark puts it at Jesus' baptism (or so some have argued), and John says that Jesus was pre-existent.

I'm still open to the idea that even the synoptics depict Jesus as divine, though.  When Mark says that John the Baptist was preparing the way for the Lord, he may be saying that Jesus was this Lord, for, in a sense, John the Baptist is preparing the way for Jesus.  If you buy into Markan priority, Matthew appears to correct Mark to make Jesus look more divine and less human, as when Jesus in Matthew 9 does not ask who touched him after the woman with the blood-problem touches his garment and is healed, whereas Jesus in Mark 5 does inquire that.  And Jesus in the synoptics walks on water and stills the sea, things that God in the Hebrew Bible does.  But, in my opinion, the synoptics do not really present Jesus as pre-existent.  How would Hurtado deal with what appear to be different Christologies in the Gospels?  Would he even acknowledge that there are different Christologies?

Second, Hurtado argues that Jewish authorities sought to kill Jewish Christians because of the Jewish Christian belief that Jesus was divine.  For Hurtado, Jewish authorities considered that belief to be blasphemous, the sort of sin for which the Torah prescribed the death penalty.  I'm not going to argue that there's nothing to Hurtado's case, for there may very well be something to it.  I have to admit that there is plenty in the New Testament about Jewish authorities wanting to put Christians to death, and part of that may have related to how Christians conceptualized Jesus.  But why were there times when Jewish authorities did not seek to put Christians to death?  Why did Jewish authorities flog Paul as someone under their leadership, rather than putting him to death?  Shouldn't Paul get something more serious than flogging, if he were (in the eyes of many Jews) either undermining the Torah or encouraging the worship of another god?  And why does Josephus relate that James was highly regarded by a number of Jews (see here), if James was regarded as transgressing Jewish monotheism?

In my latest reading, Hurtado argued that Jewish Christians concluded that Jesus was divine on account of revelations that they received after Jesus' death.  Hurtado does not think that Second Temple Jewish belief in agents of God----beings who carried God's name or had certain divine powers----was sufficient to give rise to the Jewish Christian worship of Jesus as divine, for agents of God were not worshiped in Second Temple Judaism.  And Hurtado does not seem to believe that Jesus' activity during his ministry was enough to give rise to the notion that he was divine, for, while Hurtado appears to believe that there were indications, Jesus' divinity was not exactly explicit.  Therefore, for Hurtado, Jewish Christians had to get their idea that Jesus was divine from elsewhere, and Hurtado contends that it was through visions.

When I first read this, I rolled my eyes, for I thought that Hurtado was making an apologetic move----that he was suggesting that the Jewish Christians could not have gotten their controversial idea that Jesus was divine from anything in history, and so they had to get it from God.  But that's not Hurtado's goal.  Hurtado appeals to social scientific studies to argue that visions can give rise to new ideas (against those who maintain that visions only reinforce ideas that people already had), and this is the case for a variety of religions.  In short, Hurtado is not privileging early Christianity.  Moreover, Hurtado acknowledges that, historically-speaking, the early Christians could have hallucinated.  But Hurtado's point is that the early Christians had some experience that convinced them of Jesus' divinity.

Blasphemy and Cultic Devotion

I'm still reading Larry Hurtado's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?  Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus.

In my latest reading, Hurtado argues that the claims by Jewish leaders in the synoptic Gospels that Jesus was a blasphemer reflects Jewish concerns about Jewish-Christian claims regarding Jesus.  And what were those claims?  On pages 161-162, Hurtado says that, in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke-Acts, "Jewish Christians of the first few years of the Christian movement are portrayed as practicing a religious devotion to Jesus that involves attributing to him powers and a status that are closely linked to God".  On page 168, Hurtado maintains that the Christological claims of the sort that we find in Mark 14:61-62, "accompanied by a devotional practice in which the exalted Jesus was invoked, hymned, and acclaimed in gathered cultic settings", struck certain Jews as blasphemy.  Mark 14:62 says that the Son of Man will sit on the right hand of power and come in the clouds of heaven.

While Hurtado acknowledges that Second Temple Judaism regarded various beings as principle agents of God----and thereby endowed with God's name or aspects of God's power----Hurtado maintains that what separates early Christianity from these trends was that early Christianity actually worshiped Jesus, whereas Second Temple Judaism did not worship the principle agents of God.

In my reading so far, Hurtado has not really provided a lot of evidence that there was early cultic devotion to Jesus.  Perhaps he does so in other things he has written.  As Hurtado notes, there are hymns in New Testament writings, but I wonder if those hymns reflect acts of worship towards Jesus, or are merely celebrations about Jesus?  I do not have the entire New Testament in my head right now, so I don't know.  I did a search on "Lord Jesus Christ", however, and I think it's probable that early Christianity emphasized Jesus more than Second Temple Judaism did the principle agents of God----as Paul blesses people in Jesus' name, and stresses Jesus in other ways.  But I'd like to see the evidence for early cultic devotion to Jesus fleshed out more.  Perhaps I'd have to consult other works by Hurtado for that, unless he fleshes out his evidence later in this book.

(UPDATE: On pages 198-199, Hurtado refers to his book, One God, One Lord, in which he discusses the early Christian reverence towards Jesus and how that differed from Jewish treatment of God's agents.  According to Hurtado, early Christianity had hymns sung about and to Jesus, prayers that were to Jesus himself or were in Jesus' name, the use of Jesus' name in "public cultic actions (i.e., baptisms, exorcisms, excommunication, etc.), confession of Jesus, the Lord's supper, and prophecy in the name of Jesus.  Hurtado may base this on the New Testament, for there are some places in the book I'm currently reading where he cites New Testament passages in arguing that early Christianity worshiped Jesus within a cult.)

How High Was Early Christology?

I started Larry Hurtado's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus.

My impression is that Hurtado is arguing that Jesus was regarded as divine within early Christianity early on, and that this initially occurred within Jewish Christianity, which was why Jews persecuted the early Christians.  What is Hurtado's basis for these claims?  In what I have read so far, Hurtado contends that Paul regarded Jesus as divine and indicated in Galatians 1 that his views were the same as Jewish Christians, as well as included in his letter to the Philippians an earlier hymn (the one in Philippians 2) that depicts Jesus as pre-existent and as God.  Regarding Jewish persecution of early Christians, Hurtado notes passages that say that the persecution is on account of Jesus himself (for Jesus' name), and Hurtado takes this to mean that Jews were upset by what the early Christians were saying about Jesus, namely, that Jesus was divine.  And Hurtado refers to the stoning of Paul, which Hurtado interprets in light of the punishment for apostasy/idolatry in Deuteronomy 13:1-11 and 17:2-7.

So why did Jewish Christians conclude early on that Jesus was God, when they lived in a monotheistic culture?  Hurtado's answer is that they received some revelation that Jesus was exalted, perhaps similar to God revealing God's Son to Paul in Galatians 1. Hurtado does not think that the worship of Jesus as God was due to pagan influences, for Judaism and Christianity were anti-paganism.  And Hurtado appears to be skeptical about the claim that the early Christians' worship of Jesus flowed from early Judaism's treatment of wisdom, certain biblical figures, or other intermediaries as principle agents of God, for early Judaism did not worship these entities, but early Christians worshiped Jesus.

How high was the Christology of the early Christians?  I think that the hymn in Philippians 2 is saying that Jesus was pre-existent, but it also appears to maintain that Jesus became God at his ascension.  At the same time, in discussing how other scholars have interacted with the issue of how Jesus came to be worshiped, Hurtado mentions I Corinthians 8:6, which says (in the KJV): "But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him."  That appears to be saying that Jesus was involved in creation.  I do not know how someone like James Dunn----who thought that Paul did not believe that Jesus was pre-existent----handled that passage.  Perhaps he could argue that Paul was talking about Jesus as the agent of the new creation, not the original creation.

Philo's Logos; Dunn's Argument

In my latest reading of James D.G. Dunn's Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, Dunn talked about Philo's conception of the logos and summed up his own argument about the origin of the doctrine of the incarnation.

Regarding the logos, Dunn does not think that Philo regarded the logos as a being who was separate from the transcendent God.  Rather, if I understood Dunn's argument, he argued that the logos for Philo was God when God was close and accessible to creation (which includes human beings).  In short, when God chose to be less transcendent, that was God's logos.

In terms of whether I agree with Dunn on this, I'm not sure.  I tend to agree with Dunn that, when it comes to wisdom in Proverbs 8, we're not dealing with a being independent of God or a hypostasis of God, but rather a poetic personification that concerns God being wise.  (According to Dunn, the concept of hypostasis came later.  Still, there are scholars who see the concept of hypostasis as relevant to interpreting the Hebrew Bible, so I don't know who's right.)  When it comes to the logos being a personal being, I tend to shy away from Messianic Jewish views that Philo's concept of the logos is similar to the Christian belief in Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity.  But I'm open to the logos being a personal being, such as an angel----think the divine spokesman whom Alan Rickman played in the movie Dogma.  For one, Philo calling the logos a second god tells me that it may not be the same as the first God.  Second, I think that the logos being a separate being allows God to be transcendent----there's a transcendent God, and God becomes more imminent through God's spokesman, the logos.  With Dunn's scenario, I'm not sure how God can be transcendent and imminent at the same time.

Regarding Dunn's overall argument on how the doctrine of the incarnation developed, Dunn thinks that John 1 is the only passage that explicitly has an incarnation.  He's open to John 1 using an earlier hymn, though.  Why Dunn thinks that the doctrine developed, I'm not entirely sure.  He believes that there was some movement in that direction in other writings----as I John treats Jesus as the Word, for instance----but he maintains that John 1 is the first place where we see Jesus as a personal being who pre-existed his human life.  Perhaps what happened was that Jesus was equated with wisdom, which was with God at creation, and so someone chose to take that in the direction of saying that Jesus personally was present with God at creation.

Pre-Existence? Divine Being?

In my latest reading of Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, James D.G. Dunn argues that New Testament passages that are believed to support the pre-existence of Jesus (that Jesus existed in some form prior to his life as a human) actually do nothing of the sort. 
 
Philippians 2:5-11, for Dunn, does not say that Jesus was God and became a man.  Rather, it's contrasting Jesus with Adam: Jesus, unlike Adam in Genesis 3, did not try to attain equality with God but rather humbled himself by embracing death.  When II Corinthians 8:9 says that Jesus was rich yet became poor, Dunn does not think that means that Jesus was rich in a pre-existent state.  Rather, for Dunn, Jesus as a human being enjoyed a rich relationship with God, yet he chose separation from God on the cross.  When I Corinthians 10:4 says that the Israelites from the wilderness drank from the spiritual rock, Christ, Dunn believes that is saying that the rock that brought forth water was a type of Christ, from whom Christians drink.  And, when Colossians 1:15-16 presents Jesus as the firstborn of creation, the creator, and one who was before all things, Dunn argues that Paul was using a wisdom song for a purpose: to show that wisdom finds its fulfillment in Jesus.  For Dunn, Paul in Colossians 1:15-16 does not depict Jesus as pre-existent.

I can't say that I find Dunn's exegesis on some of these passages to be overly convincing.  Regarding Philippians 2:5-11, the hymn appears to emphasize that Jesus had a human likeness or appearance.  That tells me that part of his act of humbling himself was becoming a human being (or appearing as a human being).  I Corinthians 10:4 appears to be saying that the Israelites were somehow partaking of Christ in the wilderness.  And Colossians 1:15-16 seems to present Jesus as pre-existent.  Dunn acknowledges that John and Hebrews lean in that direction.  I think he should say the same thing about Colossians.  But his belief that Paul wrote Colossians may influence his exegesis, for he probably does not want for Paul to uphold Jesus' pre-existence in Colossians, when Dunn has argued that a belief in Jesus' pre-existence is late and came a little while after Paul.

Something else that I found interesting in my latest reading: Dunn discusses what some have considered to be hypostases of God----wisdom, the Memra, the angel of the Lord in parts of the Hebrew Bible, etc.  But Dunn does not think that the Hebrew Bible or Judaism depicts these things as independent divine persons.  Rather, for Dunn, wisdom is a personification, the Memra is a way to convey God's nearness without compromising God's transcendence, and the angel of the Lord is God himself.  This stood out to me because there are elements of Messianic Judaism and Christian apologetics towards Jews that try to argue that there are things like the Trinity in the Hebrew Bible and Judaism----that neither saw God as one person alone but rather was open to a God-like being existing with God.  But Dunn argues the opposite.   

Dunn's Christological Model of Development

I started James D.G. Dunn's 1980 book, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation.  Dunn is looking for the origins of the doctrine of the incarnation, the notion that God became flesh in the person of Jesus.

Dunn does not think that the doctrine of the incarnation originated with Paul because Paul in Romans 1:4 says that Jesus was designated to be the Son of God at his resurrection, which (for Dunn) means that Paul thought Jesus became Son of God at that time.  This sort of message also appears in Acts, Dunn maintains.  Dunn does not appear to believe that Paul thought Jesus was pre-existent.  In my reading so far, Dunn does not interact with Philippians 2:5-11 and II Corinthians 8:9, passages that seem to support the notion that Jesus was a pre-existent being who became human, but Dunn may do so later in the book.  Dunn does, however, address Galatians 4:4 (which says that Jesus was made of a woman) and Romans 8:3 (which says that God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh), but Dunn does not think these passages support pre-existence, but rather highlight that the Savior has a solidarity with human beings as he redeems them from their condition: like human beings, Jesus was made of a woman and under the law and has the likeness of sinful flesh.

Dunn does not think that the doctrine of the incarnation originated with the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of Matthew, either.  Neither talks about Jesus' pre-existence, according to Dunn, and each presents Jesus as becoming the Son of God at different points: Mark depicts it as occurring at Jesus' baptism, and Matthew at Jesus' birth to a virgin.  Dunn does not believe that passages about Jesus coming or being sent relate to a notion that Jesus pre-existed.  Rather, Dunn argues, prophets (and others) came and were sent by God for certain purposes, without being pre-existent, and that's what is occurring with Jesus when he came or was sent (see here for a response to that sort of argument).  Dunn also does not think that the title "Son of Man" indicates that Jesus was believed in Mark and Matthew to be pre-existent, for the notion that the Son of Man is a heavenly Messiah is in the Similitudes of Enoch, which Dunn believes came after the synoptic Gospels because it appears to interact with them, in some manner.

Dunn believes that Hebrews moves a little in the direction of Jesus being pre-existent.  Dunn does not think it's a full-fledged concept in Hebrews, however, but rather that Hebrews is drawing from Platonism.  Dunn also argues that Hebrews, in addition to employing Platonist ideas, sometimes depicts Jesus as becoming the Son of God at his resurrection.  Dunn is open to the notion that what we see in Hebrews is an idealized pre-existence, the idea that Jesus pre-existed in the sense that he was in the thoughts and plans of God from the beginning, not in the sense that he was an actual pre-existent being.  But Dunn settles on the idea that Hebrews depicts Jesus as actually pre-existent.  (UPDATE: Dunn later in the book appears to backtrack from this position.)

For Dunn, the Johannine writings have more of a concept of Jesus' pre-existence.  But, as Dunn notes, John was late.  And, because such a concept does not appear in Paul, Mark, and Matthew, Dunn believes that it is a result of John's reflections on the significance of Jesus, rather than something that goes back to Jesus himself.  (UPDATE: Later in the book, Dunn says that John 1 may be using an earlier hymn.  Dunn also appears to argue that I John does not support Christ's pre-existence, but was somewhat of a transition to that view.)  Regarding Jesus' own Christology, Dunn appears to think that Jesus thought his relationship with God was special, but Dunn does not seem to believe that Jesus saw himself as God incarnate.

This was essentially the model of Christological development that I got at DePauw University.  So why read Dunn, if I've already encountered his concepts before?  Well, he does have a good discussion about the idea of the Son of God in the Greco-Roman world, as people claimed to be divine, and yet Celsus dogmatically proclaimed that "no god or son of god either came or will come down to earth" (Origen, Contra Celsum V.2).  There are also other interesting side-discussions.