I’ve finally finished the book, and so this response can be finally written. I’m going to be gathering a number of things together here, the first section of this reply will have to do with Boyarin and the many issues revolving around him. It appears to me as if you get on Boyarin, quite literally, nearly everything wrong here, or at the very least, simply not correct.
Border Lines VS The Jewish Gospels
The fact is that Hurtado and Schafer have both had very negative responses to the book The Jewish Gospels. Not only, Jonathan, did you at first mis-conflate the arguments of the two books so that criticism of one book strangely applies to the other, but you even went as far as to write this:
I did not confuse Jewish Gospels with Border Lines (I just mis-typed it as Dividing Lines from memory just now, thanks for the correction). What you don’t understand is that Jewish Gospels makes the same argument as Border Lines. That’s why criticism of the argument in Jewish Gospels is relevant, because it’s criticism of the same argument used in Border Lines. And no, the review wasn’t by someone who failed to understand it. The review was by someone who has said the same things about it as scholars such as Schafer and Hurtado.
Well, yes, the (non-academic, random) reviewer did fail to understand it, but that’s besides the point. In fact, now that I’ve read Border Lines, it is dead obvious that they do not make the same arguments whatsoever. In fact, now that Jonathan has read both books, he probably realizes himself that they fail to make the same argument. In order to demonstrate this, we’ll simply take a look at the topic of each book alongside examining two reviews of The Jewish Gospels in our discussion that themselves explain exactly what ithe book is talking about, namely, the reviews of Peter Schafer and this 9-page review by Miriam DeCock of McMaster University. The significant thing about the review of DeCock is that its points are basically identical to those of Schafer’s’s, both scholars make the same four lengthy criticisms and exact same agreements in the same way independently of each other.
Arguments?
The argument of Border Lines is utterly different from that of The Jewish Gospels. Border Lines was written to examine how Christianity and Judaism originally separated from each other. DeCock explains the argument of The Jewish Gospels on the other hand:
Berkeley’s Daniel Boyarin, well-known for his revision of the understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in the years 100–500, looks to extend such work to the period of the New Testament in his 2012 book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. Here he seeks to challenge the popular understanding of the first-century Jesus movement, and thus the relationship between ancient Jews and Christians. As most, if not all, of recent New Testament scholarship has demonstrated, few would dispute the “Jewishness” of the human figure of Jesus. Many, however, would dispute Boyarin’s distinctive thesis in The Jewish Gospels that the divine Christ is Jewish too. According to Boyarin, Christology is itself a Jewish discourse. Behind this claim lies the most significant argument of his book: the “germs” of both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation were already present within the thought-world of Second Temple Judaism. (pg. 183)
So, whereas Border Lines discusses the divergence of Christianity and Judaism, in The Jewish Gospels, Boyarin directly attempts to demonstrate that both Trinitarianism and the Incarnation were already Jewish concepts before the birth of Christianity. These two ideas hold absolutely zero significance in Border Lines, and yet occupy the main discussion of The Jewish Gospels. And, in fact, the arguments are all almost entirely different. Schafer and DeCock make the same four major criticisms of Boyarin’s four major arguments for his claims in his book The Jewish Gospels:
- Boyarin fails to demonstrate in his exegesis of Daniel 7 that the term ‘Son of Man’ primarily and only refers to a divine figure, so that once Jesus is identified with being the ‘Son of Man’, he is identified as God Himself and would clearly have been so
- Both scholars not that Boyarin’s messianic exegesis of Isaiah 53 is less than convincing
- Boyarin provides no discussion on the role of the Holy Spirit in his sources and discussion and its relevance of establishing a ‘Trinity’ before Christianity
- Boyarin fails to reveal sources indicating a Trinitarian belief
In fact, not a single one of these discussions ever occurs in Border Lines. And yet every criticism made by Schafer and and DeCock are basically on these points. So how on planet Earth can Schafer’s and DeCock’s criticisms be extended to Border Lines? It’s an impossibility. You actually tried to claim Border Lines also uses the Daniel 7 argument:
If you have access to both books, you can read these pages for yourself, and see that Boyarin does indeed make the same Daniel 7 “son of man” in both “Border Lines” and “Jewish Gospels”. I will show you now.
- There are two divine figures in Daniel 7 (Border Lines 141, Jewish Gospels 39-40).
- The “son of man” in Daniel 7 is a title referring to God (Border Lines 141, Jewish Gospels 33).
- This use of “son of man” to refer to God, is also found in 1 Enoch (Border Lines 141, Jewish Gospels 52, 73, 77).
- A text attributed to Ravi Akiba (second century), shows he interpreted Daniel 7 as referring to “two powers in heaven”, which Boyarin presents as evidence that early Christians believed the “son of man” in Daniel 7 was one of two divine persons in a binitarian sense (Border Lines 140, Jewish Gospels 40-41).
The fattest problem is that all the citations here 1) only come from pp. 140-141 of Border Lines, meaning that on Jonathan’s best day, the criticism of Schafer and DeCock can only be extended to Border Lines on a molecular level, and 2) This is literally a single point, none of the other major criticisms we’ve seen of The Jewish Gospels have any appearance in Border Lines, meaning that on Jonathan’s best day, only a single criticism that have miniscule appearance in 2 pages of the entire Border Lines book can be extended. But it gets even worse.
What about Jonathan’s four points? In fact, they all seem to crumble. Schafer and DeCock never claim that it is wrong that Rabbi Akiva interpreted Daniel 7 as referring to two divine figures. Akiva, in the texts Boyarin cites, does make that claim. That’s clear. Schafer and DeCock never criticise that. Akiva makes this interpretation. So where is the relevance in this? There isn’t any. The only relevant question is whether or not the criticisms of Schafer and DeCock can be extended to Border Lines, and if they can’t, citing them as ‘scholarly reception to Border Lines’ is a red herring.
In Border Lines, Boyarin never claims that ‘son of man’ is a title that refers to God, he only says it refers to merely a divine figure, which needn’t be God. Now, DeCock herself points out that scholars either take the divine figure interpretation or the Israel interpretation, so Boyarin is well within the mainstream in his claims. But even without this, Boyarin’s argument isn’t weakened, since his actual argument is dependent on pointing out the fact that early Jewish interpretation of Daniel 7 considered it to refer to a divine figure. Here, the facts couldn’t be more clear, Boyarin demonstrates that texts like 1 Enoch, Numbers Rabbah, BT Haggiga, the Visions of Ezekiel, that early Jewish exegesis based on Daniel 7 identified the ‘Son of Man’ as a divine figure, whether or not the text actually meant that. And that’s the argument Boyarin makes. Does Schafer, for example, deny that the Son of Man is a divine figure as interpreted in the Similitudes/Vision of Enoch? No, if anything he seems to agree:
The long chapter about the Son of Man in the Similitudes of the First Book of Enoch and the Fourth Book of Ezra does not add much that is new, but merely builds on Boyarin’s dubious reading of Daniel 7. Anyway, it has long been recognized that the Son of Man of the Similitudes is obviously a major source for the conception of the New Testament’s Son of Man.
So, any criticism of The Jewish Gospels made by both scholars simply fails to refute a single argument from Border Lines, simply because these are two entirely different books making entirely different arguments, as has been demonstrated earlier. We must remember that I originally wrote that both Alan Segal and Daniel Boyarin’s work demonstrates binitarianism in Judaism by the first century and earlier. In fact, this is virtually consensus because of the two scholars. Both Schafer and DeCock agree with Boyarin that bintarianism existed among the Jews at this time – they just claim that Boyarin makes it seem like he invented this claim, even though he didn’t and that it is well known anyways in scholarship before The Jewish Gospels. Schafer:
I HAVE READ ON. Fortunately, Boyarin forgets about the Holy Spirit and the Trinitarian claim, and focuses instead on the binitarian idea of two divine powers as part and parcel of the pre-Christian Jewish tradition. It must be said at the start that for the reader familiar with the scholarship this notion does not come as a shattering innovation. One thinks of the Wisdom and Logos traditions, in particular the pre-existent Wisdom in the biblical Proverbs and in the noncanonical Wisdom of Solomon; and of certain texts from the Qumran community, most notable among them the so-called Self-Glorification Hymn, whose hero—elevated among and above the angels in heaven—has been described by Israel Knohl (in his book The Messiah before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls) as a direct forerunner of Jesus; and of Philo’s sophisticated speculations about the Logos, which he took to be identical with the intelligible universe as the elder son of God … One would expect Boyarin to jump at these and similar traditions and join in with the growing research literature on this significant topic. But he does nothing of the sort. He does not even bother to mention the relevant literature. Instead he pretends to have invented this wheel, and attributes the discovery of the pre-Christian binitarian Jewish theology to himself.
Schafer makes similar statements later. DeCock similarly points out:
Despite Boyarin’s controversial argument that the “germs” of Trinitarian theology were already present in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, what he actually demonstrates to us is a Jewish binitarian theology, with which few would disagree. (pg. 188)
According to DeCock, “few would disagree” with Boyarin’s claims on binitarianism, which means it is evidently the majority view in scholarship. DeCock goes on to cite Hurtado’s work on binitarianism as an example of the fact that Boyarin hasn’t particuarly invented this wheel. You, yourself, have conceded Hurtado can get you to ontological binitarianism. That demonstrates what is crucial: everybody agrees that binitarianism already existed at this point. So what about Border Lines now?
Scholarly reception and Boyarin conquering the world
Boyarin’s work is almost unanimously taken as a significant advancement. Of course, before providing countless scholarly reviews demonstrating why this is so, I simply need to address the four you cite against it (Schafer’s review of not-Border Lines has already been addressed). Not a single one of these references you give provide a fragment of evidence against the positive reception of Boyarin’s thesis.
- N.T. Wright. This review also has zero to do with Border Lines. N.T. Wright disagrees with The Jewish Gospels (or perhaps a different book, who knows) where Boyarin claims there was a belief in the divine Messiah before Christianity. Boyarin never argues for a divine Messiah in Border Lines. So this is yet another non-review. The rest of the reviews you seem to have located with sufficient surfing on Google Books or something.
- James Paget and Mark Smith. Both of these scholars basically claim that he hasn’t proven that logos theology was normative in Second Temple Judaism. But Boyarin’s thesis does’t require it to be normative, since he states it could easily have been an overall minority. He does, though claim, that there were a multitude of Jews who claimed logos theology. Pretty much all other scholars agree with Boyarin, but that’s besides the point. Neither Paget, nor Smith, deny binitarianism at this point. What’s even worse here for you, however, is the fact that Smith explicitly agrees more with the binitarian picture painted by Alan Segal over the precise picture painted by Boyarin, which means Smith actually agrees with me on binitarianism in the 1st century and earlier.
This claim exceeds the known evidence. Segal’s more circumscribed approach hews more closely to the known data. (pg. 297, n. 100)
- Finally, Adriel Schremer. Schremer mostly disagrees with Boyarin’s exact laying out of the facts, not because he disagrees with binitarianism in the first century, he actually fully agrees with it, he actually disagrees so much because he wants to hold on to his own (highly) idiosyncratic explanation for the rise of binitarian theology. He basically claims (such as in his paper here) that it arose as a response to the collapse of the Temple in 70 AD (and provides basically no evidence for connecting the rise of binitarianism to this event). [I just noticed that Adiel’s name is spelled Adiel, not Adriel. Because I do not feel like correcting myself earlier, please ignore previous spelling mistakes on name spelling.] So Schremer’s lead against Boyarin hasn’t exactly been followed by … much of anyone. Boyarin himself has fired back in his 2010 paper Beyond Judaisms, where he basically calls Schremer’s theory “highly speculative” and “less than convincing”, and then debunks it. No wonder not many scholars consider Schremer much of a lead. Legend says Schremer hasn’t shot back since.
So, now that all this has been cleared up (basically none of their criticisms refute Boyarin, and not even a single one of them disagrees with the existence of binitarianism in this period, meaning I have no problems), let us try asking again, how has Boyarin’s work been received by other scholars? This is where I’ve done a ton of collecting and I’ve found countless reviews. Every single review of Boyarin’s book has been positive. Every single one. According to Michael Carden of the University of Queensland:
In Boyarin’s reading, John 1:1-5 ‘is a shared or Koine ‘Jewish’ nonchristological midrashic expansion of Genesis 1:1-5 along the lines of Logos/Memra theology’ which is then ‘followed by a christological’ (identifying the Logos with Jesus Christ) ‘interpretation and expansion of this inherited midrash’ (p. 97). I found Boyarin’s reading very cogent, demonstrating John to be one of the ‘most “Jewish” of Gospels’ (p. 104) … He examines Logos theology in Philo, the Targumim and other Jewish texts (including the figure of Metatron) and convincingly demonstrates that binitarianism or Two Powers in Heaven was very much the norm in the Jewish milieu that informed Jesus and the early Christian movement … Boyarin’s readings of Talmudic stories are perceptive and illuminating but he goes further to show how these processes are likewise happening in Christianity in the representation of the council of Nicaea … (etc etc etc)
According to Carden, Boyarin doesn’t just convincingly argue, but demonstrates that the binitarianism of the two powers in heaven concept existed in this point and in all the texts he cites. Elaine Pagels review of Boyarin appears on the back cover:
Boyarin’s book challenges the ordinary usage of the terms ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ and juxtaposes the formation of orthodoxy as it is formulated within rabbinic tradition and among Christians of the patristic period. His bold thesis will no doubt prove controversial and important.
Jack Miles, Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of California, similarly writes on what appears on the back cover of the book:
Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin’s masterpiece.
Next, we have the positive review of Emmanouela Grypeou of the University of Cambridge in the journal Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations (I don’t have a link to this review but it will quickly appear if you google it), where he concludes:
In spite of some provocative ideas that would have deserved a more careful study, Boyarin’s
book presents us with new insights for the study of Christianity and Judaism in Late Antiquity
and of their interrelationship. Admittedly some of his arguments are not new for modern
scholarship but still he succeeds in discussing them in an intriguing and challenging way. This book, written in a masterly prose, is in many ways an illuminating study on the interdependence between Judaism and Christianity in their mutual development as distinct cultural entities.
Next, we will see what Jed Wyrick of California State University says in his review in RBL:
The most fascinating and groundbreaking parts of Boyarin’s book are his chapters on the origin and deployment of Logos theology in pre- and pararabbinic Judaism (chs. 4, 5, and 6). Boyarin argues that the heresy referred to by the rabbis as “Two Powers in Heaven” was, in essence, “binitarianism,” a Jewish worship of a helper divinity, variously referred to as Logos, Memra, and/or Sophia. He then documents how Jewish Logos-theologians (employing the Aramaic term memra) attributed a creative force to God’s “word,” and emphasizes the origin of these traditions in midrashic interpretations of Gen 1 and Prov 8 … None of these minor criticisms detract from Boyarin’s tremendous accomplishment. This work fundamentally enriches our understanding of how Christianity and Judaism developed from one another, by articulating how Christian and Jewish texts make use of legendary history and historical allegory and by reconceptualizing our understanding of how heresy developed in both traditions.
If you think that Boyarin is on a roll and finally finished, you’re mistaken. The scholar Joshua Kulp writes in his review published to the journal The Cultural and Historical Stabilities and Instabilities of Jewish Orientalism that:
After demonstrating that the twin notions of heresy and orthodoxy were used in identity construction by both rabbis and Gentile Christians, the second half of the book examines the pivotal orthodoxy/heresy, Logos theology, out of which these two “religions” were created. A believer in Logos theology, usually termed by the Rabbis as the heresy of “Two Powers in Heaven,” was deemed a min and excluded… Boyarin demonstrates that previous to these centuries the belief in a complex godhead was not a mark through which Jesus-followers were distinguished from those Jews who did not follow him. (pg. 149) … As is nearly always the case with Boyarin’s works, this book requires an overhaul of numerous assumptions previously made by scholars of Christianity and Judaism (even these very terms are questioned!). [and Kulp goes on and on and on, calling the book a must-read, “intensely provocative and innovating”, etc.]
Ra’anan Boustan of Princeton University, in his review of Boyarin’s book in the Jewish Quarterly Review, says:
In particular, Boyarin shows, first, that virtually all forms of Second Temple Judaism—including earliest ‘‘Christianity’’—embraced some form of Logos theology, which posited the existence of a second divine power who mediates between an otherwise wholly transcendent deity and the material world… Boyarin argues, convincingly I think, that this prominent feature of rabbinic piety only belatedly displaced the stress on doctrinal correctness that the movement had earlier cultivated…
Boustan later calls Boyarin’s book “characteristically brilliant”. The scholar Joshua Brumbach also wrote a review of Boyarin’s book, where he says:
Building upon points illuminated in Justin’s Dialogue, in the second part of his book, The Crucifixion of the Logos, Boyarin introduces various texts demonstrating that Logos theology was a commonly held view by Jews of all stripes (not just “Jewish Christians”)… Turning to Aramaic texts, Boyarin demonstrates that Logos theology is native to Judaism. He does this by exploring the concept of memra - a term used in Aramaic texts similar to the Logos (p. 116). By examining the role of the Targumim, it follows, according to Boyarin, “that the strongest reading of the Memra is that it is not a mere name, but an actual divine entity, or mediator” (p. 117)… Boyarin does a great job connecting the Logos and Memra, and presenting an understanding of a binitarian theology that is firmly rooted in Jewish soil.
And on. And the last review I’ll quote is that of Stuart S. Miller of the University of Connecticut in The Jerusalem Report:
Readers of The Jerusalem Report would do well to skip the preface and move on to Boyarin’s penetrating exploration of the “border lines” that he contends defined orthodox Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. He has succeeded in convincing us to reconsider the “parting of the ways,” even if many readers will undoubtedly remain convinced that, the separation was well on its way, if not quite over, long before the 4th century.
I also found a review of Boyarin’s book by Jacob Neusner and by James D.G. Dunn, but both are behind a paywall. But considering the fact that literally every published review to this point has been very positive with, of course, minor criticisms in peripheral details Boyarin discusses, it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to just assume they also provide positive reviews about Boyarin’s book. And all of this leads back to the words of Richard Hays, by far the most important scholar in our entire discussion so far, who writes that Boyarin’s work has “provocatively destabilized” scholarship before Boyarin’s book. You respond by arguing, quite literally the most ridiculous thing you’ve said until this point – that Hays uses “decoded language”. LOL. What’s worse is that you try to prove this by providing a totally non-coded review of Hurtado on Evans book. Not a word Hurtado used was ‘coded’, it was pretty straight forward. The only problem is that the person you cited who misunderstood Hurtado’s review simply does not understand the difference between a positive review, which scholars do all the time for books they disagree with if they consider it well-argued and scholarly, and actual endorsement, where one does not simply call a book “lively”. It appears as if you also missed this distinction here.
As I wrote earlier, Hays includes Boyarin’s book on a section that he considers highly influential, both on himself and scholarship, and then comments lavishly on his work on John 1. When he says “provocatively destabilized”, he literally and clearly means the exact opposite of your more than strange interpretation: Boyarin’s work is HIGHLY regarded in scholarship and is nigh-paradigm shifting stuff. This becauses all the more clear in light of all the reviews I’ve mentioned so far. And on top of that, Boyarin’s book won the 2006 Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion as is said on the publishers website (Pennsylvania University Press). And on top of that, according to Google Scholar Boyarin’s book has over 800 citations. I remember watching a video by the Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto, Jordan B. Peterson (I don’t have this video right now) where he was discussing his work and its impact in scholarship. In specific, he mentioned his paper Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five and stated that since it has over 700 citations (it now has over 800), it was basically a classic in the field. Boyarin’s book, by Peterson’s definition, is a classic in the field of this scholarship. This is no wonder, since if you search all through Google Scholar, you’ll only find a handful of scholarly works ever published in the entirety of the fields of NT scholarship, early Christianity, Second Temple Judaism etc with as many citations as Boyarin’s book. Perhaps a dozen ever written maximum, funnily enough, including one of Boyarin’s own other books Unheroic conduct: The rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man with over 900 citations. In fact, Boyarin has literally published four books that have exceeded 700 citations, Border Lines being one of them. Boyarin is liteally one of the most important scholars on the planet. He’s also Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California.
If you start surfing through the 800+ citations Border Lines has received, you’ll find countless recent scholarly works, one after the other, of scholars simply referring readers to Boyarin’s work (usually alongside Segal’s) regarding binitarianism, or perhaps Boyarin’s highly influential work on John’s prologue. In fact, 3 years before publishing Border Lines, Boyarin published a paper titled THE GOSPEL OF THE MEMRA: JEWISH BINITARIANISM AND THE PROLOGUE TO JOHN, a fantastic and tightly argued paper that I’ve read on basically the same thing he discusses and proves in Border Lines. This paper, which was published to Harvard Theological Review, is literally one of the most cited papers ever published to this journal. According to Google Scholar, it has over 100 citations. And it’s not even a book, it’s just a paper. Boyarin published another paper on this in 2010, which also has like 40-50 citations. To imagine that Boyarin’s work has not been influential or widely accepted in part or in most would require an amazing ignoring of almost all of this.
Boyarin’s Views
At this point, you think you have now caught me on whether or not I agree with some of Boyarin’s views. Quite honestly, it appears to me as if you misunderstood Boyarin a lot here.
You’ve claimed that people have misread Boyarin as arguing that some Second Temple Period Jews believed in something like ditheism, when in fact (as you claim), he has never done this. As has already been pointed out to you, Boyarin actually uses the following terms on a regular basis when discussing Second Temple Period Jewish views, and the views of first and second century Christians. Here are just a few examples from “Jewish Gospels” and “Border Lines”.
• “two divine figures” (Jewish Gospels, 39)
• “two divinities” (Jewish Gospels, 40)
• “two divine figures in heaven” (Jewish Gospels, 40)
• “a second divine figure” (Jewish Gospels, 43)
• “a young God subordinated to an old God” (Jewish Gospels, 51)
• “Son as a “Second God”” (Border Lines, 90)
• “a second God” (Border Lines, 92)
• “a “second” God” (Border Lines, 113)
• “second god” (Border Lines, 116)
• “second god” (Border Lines, 122)
• “two divine powers” (Border Lines, 123)
• “second god” (Border Lines, 125)
• “second God” (Border Lines, 138)
• “two divine figures” (Border Lines, 141)
• “two divine figures” (Border Lines, 301)You find it incomprehensible that Boyarin could make such statements and mean what he says, given the strength of Second Temple Period commitment to monotheistic Judaism by both Jews and Christians. I wonder what you would make of this claim of Boyarin’s.
I will repeat the obvious. Boyarin never argues for ditheism, he argues for binitarianism. Using the term “second god” is irrelevant, since Philo himself uses that language. That’s where Boyarin got it from. And he explicitly says that the usage of this langauge does not preclude monotheism. So how can any of the quotations you provide be evidence of something like ditheism in Boyarin?
It becomes apparent, therefore, that for one branch of pre-Christian Judaism there was nothing strange about a doctrine of a deuteros theos, a “second” God (although to be sure, Philo uses this “shocking” term only once), and nothing in that doctrine that precluded monotheism. (pg. 113)
Here, Boyarin actually provides a citation on Philo’s language to Alan Segal’s discussion on it. Boyarin makes it impossibly clear he is discussing binitarianism, not ditheism. At one point, he even claims that it was originally the Rabbis who tried to equate binitarianism with ditheism:
We could, moreover, almost as easily desribe the developments in the opposite direction, namely, that Christianity insisted on separate persons and rejected Modalism as a response to the rabbinic insistence that binitarianism was equal to ditheism. (pg. 138)
Boyarin couldn’t have been more clear that he was discussing in the context of monotheism, and he was discussing binitarianism (as he says countless times), not ditheism. We’ve already seen Fletcher-Louis make an unmistakable distinction between the two terms. You then ask if I agree with this that Boyarin writes:
In the first and second centuries, there were Jewish non-Christians who firmly held theological doctrines of a second God, variously called Logos, Memra, Sophia, Metatron, or Yahoel; indeed, perhaps most of the Jews did so at the time. There were also significant and powerful Christian voices who claimed that any distinction of persons within the godhead constituted ditheism.”
Wait, what is exactly controversial here? It’s a fact that some early Jews accused Christians of ditheism. This is obvious. It is so obvious that Boyarin doesn’t even find the need to provide a reference, even though he provided a reference for the sentence that comes directly before this. Jews accused bintarian Christians of ditheism. The entire quote is pretty and simply correct. You then provide a quotation of Boyarin saying he is using the functional definition of “divine”, not ontological, “throughout this book”. But when I scrolled down to your citation, that “book” is not Border Lines, but rather The Jewish Gospels. There is no such qualifier in Border Lines, which makes this irrelevant since I almost couldn’t care less about Boyarin’s arguments in The Jewish Gospels, nor, quite frankly, do I know the context of the passage you quoted.
Finally, what’s next?
That was quite a lot of work around Boyarin’s book. Now, we can finally move to other issues.
For Origen, it must be noted that I never denied what you said about Origen. I simply wanted a better citation than an old, German commentary, that is affiliated with the Jesus Seminar before believing the claim since it could have been outdated, or possibly not correctly reflecting scholarship. This is not wrong at all, since the German author agreed to have his book translated by Funk, and therefore is “affiliated”. But this is all irrelevant now, since you have provided better citations and we can lay this to rest. I’m also going to put off our discussion on Michael Heiser, since it would make our discussion impossibly longer if we actually got into all of that. I think we should focus more on what we were originally debating.
I then pointed out to you that the frequency with which an English translation has translated a word, does not give us any information about how that word is used in a specific context. I said specifically “Think about this for a minute; we’re talking about an English translation of the word”.
Seriously, what relevance does this have? It looks as if you might be driving this discussion away from the point and onto a rather minor misreading (at best). It’s undoubtable that in John’s close to 100 uses of ‘theos’ in his Gospel, and you can only point to a single time in the entire Gospel, namely John 10:34, where it does not mean ‘God’, rather in this context, ‘gods’. And I’ve already demonstrated this passage is entirely dissimilar to John 1:1, seriously, the comparison is flat out impossible. If we look at uses of theos in John that are more similar to the one in John 1:1 (i.e. every other use of theos in the Gospel, including the other one right there in John 1:1), all of us translate them as ‘God’. This shows that John is very, very rare to ever use the ‘divine’ version, since there is no evidence he even uses it a single time. Remember, scholars have established three valid translations of ‘theos’, that is, 1) God, 2) a god, and 3) divine. The only way to determine the most valuable translation is by looking at the context. There is literally no other way to doing this. And John’s overwhelming use of theos establishes exactly my point: John is using it as ‘God’, most likely. Something I have also noted is that even with the translation ‘divine’, this too can be interpreted as basically ‘God’, and so your claim, even if true, would still keep you from getting anywhere.
Regarding debate on John 1:1 definitely claiming Jesus as God, you claim Daniel Wallace notes this has been debated somewhere by scholars sometime in the last century. Of course, I’ve shown Wallace prefers to ‘God’ translation, but his citation goes to Murrary. And then you write that also Murray prefers the ‘God’ translation, but cites others that don’t. This suddenly gets confusing. Which scholar does Murray cite that does not agree John 1:1 establishes Jesus as God, regardless of whether or not you translate it as ‘God’ or ‘divine’? You only seem to show him discussing different grammatical usage of theos in John 1:1. Let me more directly ask you. Which scholar does Murray cite who claims that John 1:1 does not show Jesus is God?
Andrew Loke prefers the divine translation, but as we’ve seen from your very quotation of him, he also interprets this as basically establishing Jesus as God, especially in its context where the Logos is known as an agent (not simply God’s utterances/claims/words as you interpret) that creates everything, etc, and the NT also says elsewhere that Jesus is the medium through which everything was created (i.e. Colossians 1:15-20, which I will discuss later).
As I have pointed out, Witherington asks Hurtado why he won’t just say (as Bauckham does), that Jesus is part of the divine identity, that “God was complex, involving more than one personal entity”. Hurtado states explicitly that the reason why he will not say this, and the reason why he objects to terms such as “Godhead”, divine “persons”, divine “substance” and others, is that they do not reflect the way that the New Testament writers thought about Jesus.
And that is because, as Hurtado writes, the NT writers did not use that precise language since they developed later, and therefore may carry baggage that fails to reflect the NT itself. That’s what he says. It’s the language being used that Hurtado disagrees with. You yourself admit Hurtado’s arguments can get you to ontological binitarianism (and ditheism, which they actually can’t), which is basically one God, two persons.
You claimed that both instances of theos in John 1:1 refer to the Father. When I pointed out that this was “confusing the persons” and constituted modalism (and quoted a scholar saying so explicitly), you denied this. In an attempt to defend yourself, you then posted the Scutum Fidei. You clearly did not understand what it was or how to read it, and for some reason you even posted a version which had three crucial parts of it missing. The irony is that the Scutum Fidei specifically denies the very claim you were making. You claimed that the Son is the Father, when the Scutum Fidei states explicitly that the Son is not the Father, following the Athanasian Creed.
I only accidently posted a wrong version of the Scutum Fidei. Either way, it looks as if you misunderstood my point. Jesus and the Father are the same, in the sense that they are the same being. And that’s exactly what the Scutum Fidei shows – they are both part of the same being. They just aren’t the same persons, which I’ve also said over and over. They are the same in the sense of being, different in the sense of persons. That’s my position. Based on your misunderstanding of my words, you funnily conclude I have a “rather inadequate understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity.” Perhaps you must read me a little better. I also appreciate your explanation of your views, which is finally clear to me now. But in doing so, you say something more than weakly argued:
The same way that the word became Adam; God spoke, and it was so. Thus Psalm 33:6 says “By the word of God were the heavens made, and all the stars in the sky were created by the breath of His mouth”. Saying that the word became flesh is just another way of saying that Jesus’s conception and birth was miraculous; it couldn’t be clearer that Jesus was created by God.
In fact, this is all wrong, since John 1 never says that the Logos created Jesus. Ever. It doesn’t say that. It says that the Logos, the Word, is Jesus. The Logos became flesh. What became flesh was the Logos. See that? Jesus is the Word in John 1. That’s exactly what it says, it couldn’t be more clear.
You claim that the consensus that Jesus is not depicted as God in the Synoptics is “clearly changing and quickly”. However you don’t cite any evidence of actual change. You cite a number of authors who have always argued this, which is not evidence for a change in the consensus.
This almost sounds contradictory. I provide numerous references to new evidence as adduced by scholarship of the Synoptics understanding Jesus as God that wasn’t available beforehand, including the work of Hays, Staples, Loke, and now Ehrman whose mind has now finally changed just in 2014, which signifies real change in scholarship. Ehrman, a month after publishing his book How Jesus Became God, writes on his blog:
So yes, now I agree that Jesus is portrayed as a divine being, a God-man, in all the Gospels. But in very different ways, depending on which Gospel you read.
Do you agree that Jesus is portrayed as a divine God-man in all the Gospels? Ehrman’s change signifies real change. You claim the other authors I cite “always” believed this. That’s irrelevant. Probably, a significant minroity of scholars believe that Luke’s account of the census can be resolved, but almost 100% of published claims on this issue claim there is a big problem. What matters is the scholarly and published arguments, not the belief. The question is, does the scholarship now on Jesus being God in the Synoptics differ with scholarship before 2014? The answer is undoubtedly yes. With a big scholar, Ehrman now on the boat, much much more evidence has been described, significantly including Hays work and Staples work (at least as far as I know, there could be more). And both scholars specifically state that this new evidence must revise current beliefs on the Synoptics. Neither of their arguments have been refuted yet – in fact, Hays book, even though it has only been published for 4 years, has already had considerable influence and basically every word that has been said on it is very positive. I think Hays book is irrefutable, quite frankly, Reading Backwards is still the best scholarly book I’ve ever read in my opinion. It was really a paradigm shift (and it’s covers are filled with endorsements by Bauckham, N.T. Wright, etc).
Regarding Staples, you say that you can’t evaluate his argument since you “haven’t read it”. Now that you have (since I made it available to you), you’ll have to respond, perhaps in a better way than what you tried to say earlier:
Obviously, despite the fact that Jesus is apparently saying that the people to whom he is speaking were literally calling him “Lord, Lord”, there is actually no record of anyone in any of the gospels ever calling Jesus “Lord, Lord”.
This is literally a red herring since a sentence earlier you provided a quotation where Jesus says “Why do you call me Lord Lord, and don’t do what I tell you?” By the way, as Staples say in his paper, his demonstrations regarding the phrase ‘Lord Lord’ also show the correct translation is ‘Lord Lord’ rather than ‘Lord, Lord’ – there is not supposed to be a comma (pg. 19 n. 87). Staples has shown that what Jesus is called in the Synoptics here, the phrase ‘Lord Lord’ (which is originally derivative of the phrase ‘Adonai YHWH’, not just ‘YHWH’, as Staples makes clear and proves in his paper) is only ever applied to God Himself, ever, in all Jewish and Second Temple literature. Staples literally documents all of the uses of this phrase in the first place. Scholarship is changing, like it or not.
By the way, saying that binitarianism is just Trinitarianism with two people instead of three, is like saying France is just Germany in a different place, with a different culture, and a different language. Binitarianism and Trinitarianism are not the same, and you cannot smuggle the latter into the former.
Ugh, binitarianism is two people in one being instead of three, this isn’t like saying France is Germany but in a different place, and I never said that binitarianism and trinitarianism were the “same”. Binitarianism is literally two persons, one being. Trinitarianism is three persons, one being. I would instantly become a binitarian if I suddenly declared the Holy Spirit and the Father were the same person.
The logos (Word [of God]), was with theos (God, the Father), and the logos was theos (divine).
All things came into being through the logos, and without the logos not one thing came into being. See Genesis 1 and Psalm 33. Nothing was created without the word of God; He spoke, and it came to be.
In John 1:14 Jesus is spoken of for the first time; the word became flesh. The text is no longer describing the word. No, we are not told in John 1:14 that the word is the Father’s only son; the phrase about the only begotten comes later, in John 1:18. Regardless, even if John 1:14 was saying that the logos was the only son of the Father, that would simply be repeating what Philo had already said about the logos many decades earlier.
Earlier, I demonstrated that the Word is God in John 1 by pointing out the context: the Word existed in the beginning, is the medium of all creation, and possesses a relationship with the Father that is not possessed by anything else in creation. None of this seems to refute anything I said – point 1 simply seems to agree with me that the Logos (or ‘Word of God’) was in the beginning. Point 2 agrees with me that the Logos is the medium of all creation. Point 3 is where things look like they get mangled. The Word is Jesus. John 1 literally calls the Logos the “Father’s only Son”. I mean, that’s Jesus. Philo also thought that the Logos was the firstborn of the Father, and in John, that’s Jesus. That’s what John says.
You then raise points I forgot to respond to. I’ll go through them one by one.
The New Testament uses none of the “multiplicity of persons” language which we see in texts which actually are referring to a multiplicity of persons.
That’s because you’re talking about 2nd century language that didn’t exist in the time of the NT. Obviously they couldn’t use such language. But do they use language that can allow us to conclude that Jesus is God? Ugh, yes. Pretty clearly in the way I see it.
The New Testament shows clear evidence that many Jews considered Jesus’ claim to be the son of God, to be deeply heretical; where is the evidence that they understood he was referring to himself as one of the persons in a multi-personal God, but had no problems with that?
Wait, what? This sounds like an argument from silence at best. At worse, you try to shift around the fact that the Jews directly understood Jesus words as claiming to be God in the NT, especially John. Perhaps you’re the one who should be explaining that?
Claiming that John 1:1 can be understood as referring to a multiplicity of persons is one thing, but demonstrating that this is what he meant, is quite another.
Agreed. I think I’ve done a good job at this. I guess our arguments will have to be discussed, eh?
To claim that a multiplicity of person was a Christian innovation is of course an even more difficult challenge to meet, but either way at some point you need to address the fact that the overwhelming use of θεὸς in the New Testament refers to one person, the Father, and the fact that God in the entire Bible is never referred to as “they”.
Of course it is more difficult, but again, I’m not actually arguing that right now – I’m pointing out it’s pretty clear in scholarship, from the work of Segal and Boyarin, that Christians didn’t have to make any such innovation, as is agreed upon by innumerable scholars, including Hays, Schafer, DeCock, Smith, etc, etc, etc.
Can Jonathan be part of the emerging consensus too?
You claim yes, since he argues that the definition of the emerging christology is sufficiently vague that his views can be included. You try to prove that from this quote of Fletcher-Louis:
“In particular, there has been a long-running debate about the phenomenon that scholars traditionally call a “high Christology” (the belief that Jesus was somehow divine and was treated as such by his followers).” [17]
Seriously? This is obviously not Fletcher-Louis’s complete explanation of what a ‘high Christology’ is, that’s what he writes mid-sentence. Louis expands later, and it becomes clear, sorry Jonathan, that you cannot be part of the emerging consensus. You have what Louis terms a ‘low Christology’, as is clear by what he writes later in the very page you quoted from:
On this view, during his ministry in Galilee and Judea the disciples must have had either no Christology – no very strong beliefs specifically about Jesus – or a “low” one in which Jesus is simply a created being (a prophet, or even the long-awaited Jewish messiah). (pg. 3)
So, according to Fletcher-Louis, the idea that Jesus is a “created being” (i.e. your view) is basically the idea that he uses to literally define low Christology. But of course, this idea of Jesus being created, and other low Christological ideas, are finally being done away with in scholarship. You literally quoted the passage above and missed the “created” part that is used to define low Christology. So you are not part of the emerging consensus. Ehrman is, I think you simply misunderstood Ehrman’s words elsewhere. Vouthon, for example, provides the following quote from Ehrman:
It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship. And so I now have no trouble recognizing that in fact Paul could indeed flat-out call Jesus God, as he appears to do in Romans 9:5. If someone as early in the Christian tradition as Paul can see Christ as an incarnate divine being, it is no surprise that the same view emerges later in the tradition.
Ehrman’s main contention in the book is that the idea that Jesus is God was a response to the resurrection of Jesus, since Ehrman thinks that in pagan religions, it was common for deities to be exalted into gods after their death and exaltation. Ehrman thinks this happened right after the resurrection, not at some later period. Thus, his words about our earliest NT writer, Paul, are made clear enough. By the way, Ehrman also thinks that Paul and earlier Christians at this time had already concluded Jesus was pre-existent, as is made clear enough by Hurtado in his review of Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God:
As a final criticism, Ehrman posits that the key to Paul’s Christology is that he thought of Jesus as an (or the) angel (of God/the Lord). That, says Ehrman, explains how Paul could ascribe “pre-existence” to Jesus, and how, as a devout Jew, he could countenance worshipping Jesus.
John 14 and Colossians 1
Finally, I get to the last section of my response. If I missed some of your points throughout, please remind me which ones I must still discuss. As I said earlier, according to John 14, “The Father will send the Holy Spirit in Jesus name. This sounds just strangely Trinitarian.” You respond:
It is no more “Trinitarian” than it is Judaistic, or Unitarian. Again, do you note that the Holy Spirit doesn’t even have a name?
Of course it sounds Trinitarian. The Father will send the Holy Spirit in Jesus name. Why is the Father doing things in the name of Jesus? And since the Holy Spirit is shown to be different from the Father here, since the reading of this passage that basically says “the Father sent Himself” is absurd, we find that we have three persons who are all God. And there is one God, as we know from the NT and John, and so this does sound strangely Trinitarian. I will also refer you to this amazing video:
The fact that the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a personal name is irrelevant. The Holy Spirit has a title that we can identify Him by, i.e., “Holy Spirit”. Needing a personal name beyond this is practically pointless.
If you believe that differentiating X from Y means that X is necessarily a person, then you can tell me if you differentiate between your chair and you, and if this therefore means that your chair is a person.
Wait, what? No one is claiming that I and my chair are the same being. This sounds like a total strawman.
The Old Testament and the New Testament both differentiate the Word of God from God. This does not mean the Word of God is a person.
The only time that the OT makes a differentiation between who the Word is and who God is is in John 1, and I argue that this passage precisely makes them out to be different persons.
If we substitute “Holy Spirit” with “The Spirit of the Father” (not my interpretation, but whatever), we get “The Spirit of the Father, which the Father will send in my name”, and what is being sent is not the Father, but the Spirit of the Father.
Hmm? The passage says that the Father will send the Holy Spirit – if these weren’t different persons, why the third person? Again, this is the quotation (or at least one of them):
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
If the Spirit was just the Father’s Spirit, the passage would obviously say “The Father will send His Spirit”, exactly your view, rather than something like “The Spirit will be sent by the Father”, which is what the passage actually says. These are clearly different persons.
Now, let’s move on to Colossians 1. Beagelady quoted a passage from Colossians 1, and your response flabbergasted me.
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,
16 for all things in heaven and on earth were created in him—all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers—all things were created through him and for him.
17 He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him.
18 He is the head of the body, the church, as well as the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself may become first in all things.
19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son
20 and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross—through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
This passage outright says all things were created in heaven and on earth through Jesus, that Jesus is pre-existent, and that the Father literally dwells in the Son, etc. This is your response:
And I have responded to this. I cited the entire chapter, not simply the six verses you quoted. I also pointed out that Jesus is identified as the image of God, not identified as God. The image of X is not X. The image of God is not God. The image of Adam is not Adam. Jesus is also the firstborn, which is difficult to do if you’ve always existed since the eternal past, and you were never really born.
You basically circumvent the entire passage and just focus on the very first verse quoted. Sheesh. The arguments in your response doesn’t even work, of course.
- You literally ignored basically the entire passage, trying to focus on v. 15 and not the rest – the very beginning words of the next verse, which he refused to dip his toes in, say “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created”, etc, etc, etc. The passage is much too much.
- The idea of Jesus being the firstborn has nothing to do with pre-existence of the birth, especially since the passage actually says Jesus is pre-existent. Nevermind when the passage says Jesus is the “firstborn of all creation” it can’t have anything to do with Jesus’ birth, since Jesus wasn’t the first human to be born, not even close. “Firstborn” is literally just a title. In the OT, God even declares he will make someone into the firstborn (probably a prophecy of Jesus of some sort): Psalm 89:27: “And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” So X person will be made into the firstborn, but of course, by the time the Psalms were written, the “firstborn” human or whatnot had already been long born. The phrase has nothing to do with actual birth, it’s a grand title.
- Being the “image of God”. You argue that if you’re the image of God, you aren’t God. Or the Father? The passage, it seems to me, is clearly just saying that when Jesus was born, His human nature was made in the image of God. This has nothing to say about His pre-existence, before the incarnation and creation of His human nature, at which he would never have had the image of God (since only humans can bear the image of God). So it’s easily possible, it’s almost certainly the fact that Jesus is pre-existent, and during the incarnation, the human nature of Jesus is created in the image of God. This has nothing to say of the divine nature, and to claim that Jesus isn’t identical to the Father is a fact that no Trinitarian denies to begin with – this is actually assumed on Trinitarianism.
And perhaps the most important fact, the passage literally unequivocally says Jesus is pre-existence. I mean, it outright says that. You think I’m exaggerating?
Colossians 1:17-18: He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
Interestingly, the passage here, besides outright saying Jesus is pre-existent, also calls Jesus the “firstborn of the dead”, further revealing that the title of “firstborn” has nothing to do with actual birth and is just a title. Seriously dude.