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Listening to Pre-New Testament Christian Sayings! - Gary Habermas, Habermas said that someone (who name was not remembered) opined that “The earliest Christology is the highest Christology.” So I googled the question: “Who said or wrote that the earliest Christology is the highest Christology.” And the answer was suggested, absent a direct quote, that “The idea that the earliest Christology is the highest Christology is often attributed to New Testament scholars Martin Hengel and Larry Hurtado. Instead of being a specific, direct quote, it is a summary of their influential argument that high Christology—the belief in Jesus’s divinity—did not evolve slowly over time but was a rapid and immediate development within the earliest Christian movement.”
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So, I asked ChatGPT and got this: “Short answer: there isn’t a single canonical “who said that” line, but the slogan sums up a view argued most prominently by Martin Hengel, Larry Hurtado, and Richard Bauckham.
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Bauckham actually uses the phrasing:
“Thus the earliest christology was already in nuce the highest christology.”
He ties this to Psalm 110 and Jesus’ inclusion in the unique divine identity. (euangelizomai.blogspot.com) -
Hengel is widely credited with the thesis (even when not in those exact words): that the crucial developments in Christology happened very early (within the first decades). See summaries of his “early high” stance and collections like Studies in Early Christology. (postost.net)
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Hurtado framed it as “early high Christology”: devotional practices and confessional language that ascribe to Jesus honors due to God from the earliest strata (e.g., 40s CE), arguing this wasn’t a slow, later divinization. (Larry Hurtado’s Blog)
For context on the broader debate (including non-EHCC voices), see quick overviews by Bart Ehrman noting how very early some high claims appear in Paul (Phil 2), even if scholars differ on how that happened. (The Bart Ehrman Blog)
Bottom line: The tidy slogan is most closely quotable from Bauckham; the larger idea is strongly associated with Hengel and Hurtado.
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I recently read Bauckham’s God Crucified, and it is outstanding. Our "imposed Greek lenses” of questions, categories, and modes of thought prevent us from seeing what would have been obvious to a 1st-century Jewish audience. The Greeks were asking “what,” but the Jews were asking “who.” There is a wealth of implications to uncover here, including the “I-Thou” from Martin Buber, neurobiology from Dr. Iain McGilchrist, the role of the ancient creeds (see N.T. Wright, How God Became King), and how we risk ignoring the questions being asked in our culture for the sake of the “questions that we want to answer.”
Huh – Barnes and Noble doesn’t have it. So do I lower myself and order from Amazon (I presume they have it; a lot of publishing contracts require a book to appear there first or even exclusively)?