Ok well whatever “the prerogatives of deity” are, Paul doesn’t say “Jesus emptied himself of the prerogatives of deity, became human, and lived a perfect human life”.
It’s right there in the text. He humbled himself and lived the life of a servant, obedient to God even to the point of death on the cross.
Philippians 2:
7 but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave,
by looking like other men,
and by sharing in human nature.
8 He humbled himself,
by becoming obedient to the point of death
- even death on a cross!
I don’t think we need to use Platonic definitions of God as a starting point. I don’t see that my comment has anything to do with Platonic definitions of God. To the Jewish mind, God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and this had absolutely nothing to do with “Platonic definitions of God”. Additionally, to the Jewish mind “God” and “human” were mutually exclusive categories.
As I said before, emptied himself as in “humbled himself”.
During his life.
That’s the kind of translation you get when theology clashes with vocabulary; “Being born in the likeness of men” (ESV), is more accurate. In other words, he was human.
Is anyone on this thread familiar with any New Testament scholar who discusses/proposes/refutes the idea that:
Jesus originally said he was the “Son of Man”, who implied his death would deify him? - - followed up by a progressive evolution (only partly reflected in the received New Testament) by his followers to deify Jesus before he died (at the Transfiguration or at his Baptism)… and then eventually deification at Birth… and ultimately deification even before being born?
As you can see, I’m looking for the chief proponents of the pro and the con sides of this discussion.
Sorry Jonathan, but I never skim-read you at all. I’ll expand further on everything soon enough. According to Amazon, Boyarin’s book should arrive to me by tomorrow.
And yet the primary (both chronologically and in importance) revelations of God in scripture are as Creator, Deliverer, Holy…things like that. Not the “big three omnis,” So for Jesus to be (the biblical) God, it is those things that are what matter when it comes to God’s essential nature. And, in fact, this is what the New Testament communicates.
So what do you do with “although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Philippians 2:6)? Would say that “normal humanity” exists in the form of God and grasps at equality with God, but Jesus, in contrast, emptied himself to pursue humility?
Given that I did make a very late intrusion into an already complicated debate which has been going for over three hundred pages, I hope you can provide me with some leeway room if I have unintentionally repeated or misunderstood an element of your argument, while I fully apprise myself of what you are in fact saying. While I did follow your debate with Korvexius intently, it would be impossible for me to perfectly follow the flow and intricacies of your long-ranging discussion as a third party, naturally. My sincere apologies, if so.
I can categorically say that Hurtado is deliberately avoiding the claim that the New Testament writers identified Jesus ontologically as God.
Agreed.
Hurtado tends to reserve the term “God” for “God the Father”, anyway. He noted at one point on his blog: “The NT claim isn’t that “Jesus is God” as if he replaces God”, rather its that he’s been subsumed into the one cultic worship.
But he does regard Jesus as having been understood by the earliest Christians as a co-eternal divine agent of creation, as opposed to a creature. As he’s noted on his blog: “NT texts clearly ascribe to Jesus a status and role that goes beyond that of a human: e.g., as the agent of creation (e.g., 1 Cor 8:4-6), and as bearing “the form of God” (Philip 2:6).”
“…but claiming that Jesus believed all this and that his earliest followers also believed all this, is quite another matter. Even you can’t bring yourself to make the claim that both Jesus and his earliest disciples believed he was God. You know that’s an extraordinary claim which is just too difficult to support…”
Who is saying any of this? Certainly not me, as I’m glad to see you admit, so why then are you raising these notions that aren’t even in contention? Talk of “persons” and “essences” probably does not yet apply in the first century-context, so obviously no early Jewish Christians would speak of Jesus’ relationship with the Father in that way but neither did any of them reject such language, and there are certainly examples where they may in fact have tended towards or even employed ontological language - which even Hurtado admits.
Yes, from what we can tell Jesus never claimed to be divine during his lifetime and I affirmed this in my last post. But everything we know about Jesus comes not from him but filtered through the pen of sacred authors - whose views are binding on Christians - that believed Jesus was a pre-existent divine agent of creation co-eternal with God (the Father).
And what is equally apparent is that soon after his death (and certainly well in advance of the composition of the Pauline epistles some 20 years later), Jesus quickly became regarded in early Jewish Christian circles as both personally pre-existent divine agent of creation and the exalted Son of God who had been subsumed within the cultic worship owed to God the Father. Even Bart Ehrman, who isn’t part of the emerging consensus, accepts that numerous NT texts testify to a belief not simply in exaltation christology but also incarnational christology.
See Hurtado too, when he notes in his review of Ehrman’s book that we must:
consider evidence from ancient Jewish sources (especially apocalyptic texts such as 1 Enoch) that the “preexistence” of eschatological figures was a Jewish theological trope. This evidence suggests that Jesus’ preexistence could well have been an almost immediate corollary of the conviction that God had exalted him uniquely to heavenly/divine glory as the eschatological redeemer, the Messiah.
This, in turn, would explain why (as Ehrman also grants) these two types of christological statements are often combined in the earliest sources. Illustrative of this is the famous hymnic passage in Philippians 2:6–11, in which most scholars (including Ehrman) see the preexistent and divine Jesus described as first becoming “incarnate” as a man (vv. 6–8) and then subsequently exalted by God to a uniquely high status as “Kyrios,” to be acknowledged by all spheres of creation (vv. 9–11). In short, it’s not all that clear that first-generation Christians distinguished as sharply as Ehrman does between claims about Jesus’ exaltation and his preexistence, or saw them as in tension with each other.
As Hurtado explains above, incarnation and exaltation were for these early Christian believers two sides of the one coin. The one presumed the other.
We have evidence from Second Temple Judaism demonstrating that divine beings were thought to incarnate in human form and subsequently get exalted by God to new roles that he’d pre-planned from the beginning. It was a Janus-faced framework which would have been second-nature to the early Christians: if God had exalted Jesus to divine honours, this naturally meant Jesus must also have pre-existed his birth as a divine being whom God intended for this purpose.
A very straightforward equation (exaltation = pre-existent incarnation), hardly advanced algebra. To quote Hurtado from his blog:
Jesus’ “exaltation” was the initial basis/impetus for treating him as worthy of worship, but in the “logic” of ancient apocalyptic thought (as I described briefly in my posting), “pre-existence” (and so “incarnation”) were immediate consequences as well.
You don’t have one without the other in the logic and context of ancient Jewish apocalypticism.
But the early Christians took this established tradition and did something with the ideas of incarnation and exaltation that no Jewish author had ever done before with Enoch, Melchizedek, Adam or Moses: they accorded Jesus an active role as co-eternal divine agent with God the Father in creation (incarnation) and claimed that God the Father now willed that Jesus be given cultic worship in the same context as that owed to God himself (exaltation), both of which were a “novel mutation”. So, the result is something that does not cohere with prior patterns of “principal agent” thinking and practice
The problem with your perspective Jonathan, is that you make it look like its just “exaltation” alone and completely deny the other side of the coin, yet claim to be accurately representing Larry Hurtado’s view - which your not, if you omit incarnationalism in its entirety. For you, Jesus was a human being whom God exalted to divine honour.
For Hurtado, however, (and most other scholars) the early Christians believed that Jesus was actually a pre-existent, co-eternal divine being and agent of creation with God the Father who had incarnated, died, resurrected and then subsequently been exalted by God to a new role as the recipient of cultic worship by being subsumed into the worship already paid to God the Father.
The end result is that for Hurtado, the early Christians did not regard Jesus to be a “creature” but a co-eternal divine agent of creation who pre-existed his human birth, as he stated on his blog in October 2017:
As an exegetical question, I can’t think of NT texts that describe the “pre-existent” Christ as God’s creation.
Do you agree with Hurtado here? No, you don’t…because you believe the NT texts pertinent to the argument about the “pre-existent” Christ still amount to Jesus’ being a “creature” rather than him having pre-existed on the other side of the creator/creature divide. Hurtado doesn’t agree with you that this was the early Christian belief and neither do the vast majority of New Testament scholars, including the likes of Ehrman, which means that the onus is upon you to prove them all wrong.
Can we just be clear about this, please? Hurtado’s position is fundamentally different from the one you are claiming he espouses because yours consists solely of “exaltation” Christology but completely denies the “incarnational” Christology which is now standard in scholarship, and not merely within the emerging consensus, and which Hurtado clearly affirms.
Claiming that Jesus’ earliest followers did not believe he existed before he was born, and did not preach that he existed before he was born, and that this is a legitimate position for Christians to continue to hold, does not require extraordinary evidence because these are not extraordinary claims.
A serious problem with your own personal scholarship and exegetical reading on this, IMHO, is that you deny something which even the majority of the minority of “non-emerging consensus” scholars have conceded: that in certain NT texts Jesus is not only presumed to have personally existed prior to his human conception but to have been an active agent, co-eternal with God the Father in creation. As Bart Ehrman puts it in his 2014 book:
From there, it was a very small step to thinking that Jesus was this kind of being by nature, not simply because of his exaltation. Jesus was not only the Son of God, the Lord, the Son of Man, the coming messiah; he was the one who mediates God’s will on earth as a heavenly, angelic being. In fact, it came to be thought that he had always been that kind of being.
If Jesus was the one who represented God on earth in human form, he quite likely had always been that one. He was, in other words, the chief angel of God, known in the Bible as the Angel of the Lord…If Jesus is in fact this one, then he is a preexistent divine being who came to earth for a longer period of time, during his life; he fully represented God on earth; he in fact can be called God…
There are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion…This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors…If the majority of scholars are correct in their opinion that it embodies an incarnational Christology, then the basic perspective on Christ that it paints is clear: Christ was a preexistent being who chose to come in the “likeness” of human flesh
This is the standard view in general, irrespective of the “emerging consensus”. If you think that its wrong, as you do, then I reiterate: extraordinary evidence is required to rebut such an extraordinary concurrence between eminent scholars in the field.
The exact mechanics of how this could be so - to avoid ditheism - from a philosophical and metaphysical vantage point, had likely not yet been worked out in the first century (using ontological categories) because nobody had yet thought to approach the issue in this systematic way, like later theologians such as Tertullian did.
Hurtado has merely aimed to prove - and he has done so successfully - that a dyadic or binatarian cultic devotional pattern centered around the monotheistic worship of these two co-eternal, pre-existent divine figures - God the the Father and the Lord Jesus, with the later being subsumed into the worship of the former - had become a central plank of nascent Christian belief when Paul wrote his letters, such that he doesn’t even think to expand upon the idea but just endorses it as self-evident. It was unsystematic at this primitive stage, more the result of cultic devotion than philosophical articulation.
The difficulty for Christians then and thereafter concerned reasoning philosophically how Jesus could be a co-eternal divine agent of creation with God the Father, but pared with the fact that there was still only one God in a monotheistic framework. Later ontological theorizing, beginning probably in the second century, provided the best way of doing this and Hurtado regards this development as a “natural” progression to smooth out the difficulties and firmly avoid the unintended spectre of ditheism (i.e. two eternal creator deities, albeit one subordinate to the other). To quote Hurtado:
Over the 400 years following Paul, the early church struggled to develop doctrines adequate to express and justify this binitarian monotheism. The Nicene Creed of AD 325 and the Chalcedonian Creed of AD451 are the classic formulations. But well before these developments – indeed, driving these developments – was the binitarian pattern of early Christian devotion and worship reflected in 1 Corinthians 8:5-6. In other words, it is not an exaggeration to say that the 400 years of doctrinal controversy which followed Paul were essentially an attempt to form doctrine adequate to the pattern of religious life which had taken shape within the first 20 years of the Christian movement. (Themelios 19 (1994): 4)
We are agreed inasmuch as Hurtado does not believe the earliest Christians factored ontological categories into their ruminations upon the relationship between Jesus and God the Father, although he did state:
It’s hard to say whether the authors of John 1 and Hebrews 1 were making “ontological” statements, because they don’t use that kind of category. I do think, however, that they (and even Paul) were making the highest claims that they could with the language and concepts available to them.
Which you concurred with when you said: "to judge what Jesus’ portrayal in the New Testament means in ongological terms is a “fair question”.
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.
Very interesting “revelation”!!! I had never read this before… pregnant with all sorts of implications… including the idea that a man could be a holy man, without necessarily being God at the same time!
Also Mark 1:8-12 (NIV2011)
8 I baptize you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9
At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
10 Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, He saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on Him like a dove.
11 And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with You I am well pleased.”
12 At once the Spirit sent Him out into the wilderness,
There are many verses like this. So if the Holy Spirit is not a person, perhaps it is some sort of advanced technology programmed to behave a certain way in order to control the minds of the gullible? (Just kidding)