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The Origin of Divine Christology

2018; Eisenbrauns; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/bullbiblrese.28.1.0145

2576-0998

Joshua W. Jipp,

Religion and Society Interactions

One of the great puzzles for historians of early Christianity is explaining the origins of the belief in Jesus as divine. How did the earliest Christians come to believe that there was a second figure alongside Yahweh who was worthy of being treated with equal respect, devotion, and worship? Loke’s argument is both boldly innovative and simple, namely, Jesus himself claimed that he was divine: “I conclude that the best explanation for the origin of divine Christology involves the earliest Christians perceiving that Jesus claimed and showed himself to be truly divine” (p. 194).Loke first sets forth his belief that the “highest Christology was present among the earliest Christians” (p. 47, ch. 2). Here, he largely rehearses and reproduces the arguments of Richard Bauckham, noting that texts such as 1 Cor 8:4–6 and Phil 2:5–11 portray Christ as a preexistent being who is identified with the God of Israel. He further relies on the claims of Larry Hurtado, who has sought to demonstrate the earliest Christian belief in Jesus as divine by looking at their devotion and worship practices such as prayers, confessions, baptisms, and hymns.Having largely asserted, rather than argued for, the correctness for the view that the earliest Christology was the highest, Loke spends a good portion of his book (chs. 3, 4, and 5) seeking to answer and deflect any and every scholarly objection to Bauckham’s thesis (and to some extent, Hurtado’s, though he is critical of some aspects of Hurtado’s arguments). Loke (and Bauckham) may be correct, but I find the effectiveness of this approach highly questionable because the correctness of his (and Bauckham’s) and arguments are asserted rather than argued for, at least not in nearly enough detail. For example, it is not as though scholars as diverse as William Horbury, Paula Fredriksen, Michael Peppard, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis “seem to have missed” the importance of the “conceptual distinction between Creator and creature” (p. 56), it is that they do not agree with how Bauckham has strictly defined this relation. Again, Loke and Bauckham may be right, but Loke’s manner of arguing will only work for those already convinced. Loke further argues against those who have suggested that so-called Jewish intermediary figures such as the angel of the Lord, kings, messiahs, and Adam illumine the rise of the belief in Jesus as divine. Loke reproduces the argument of Hurtado that there are “no genuine analogies or precedents” to the rise of belief in Jesus as divine (pp. 77–78). To one extent, this is obviously true, but it does not follow that conceptual precedents and analogies may illuminate (not to say fully explain) the Christ discourse in the NT writings.In ch. 4, Loke briefly presents evidence counter to claims that Acts does not portray the earliest Christians as giving worship to Jesus, to assertions that Paul subordinates Jesus to God the Father, and to those who see Jesus’s divinity stemming from his resurrection whereby he was adopted as the Son of God. More briefly, he provides evidence against those who argue Jesus was only considered to be divine in a functional sense, to those who suggest that Jesus was venerated but not worshiped as God, and to those who use the lack of offering sacrifice to Jesus as evidence that he was not truly divine. In ch. 5, Loke continues to give replies to arguments that do not conform to his (and Bauckham’s) thesis, here primarily with an eye on theories that fail to explain the widespread extent of early high Christology.Chapters 6 and 7 finally present the heart of Loke’s argument, namely, that the best explanation for early, widespread, and high Christology is its origin in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The earliest Christians believed that “in order to know a person’s identity, it is important to know what he/she thinks about himself/herself and what he/she does” (p. 137). Therefore, Loke suggests that it is common sense to posit that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus and believed him to be divine because this is what Jesus actually taught them. Again, he notes that it is challenging to explain their worship of Jesus “unless they [the earliest Christians] perceived that the One whom they believed to be the supreme revelation of God (superior to even the torah of Moses) indicated that this innovation was necessary” (p. 139). Again, Loke may be right, but his claim to have argued for this thesis strikes me as problematic. He tends to assert what seems likely or may be possible and then spend the majority of his time defending his assertion from objections. The work strikes me as more along the line of Christian apologetics rather than historical research.He does, however, draw on the arguments of Martin Hengel, N. T. Wright, Darrell Bock, Aquila Lee, and others who have sought to affirm both the historicity and implicit claims to divinity in Gospel texts such as Matt 11:25–27, Mark 14:61–62, and Matt 28:19–20. This is probably the heart of Loke’s thesis, and it would have been nice to have seen this section expanded in much greater detail. I do not expect that the argument will persuade many who are not already persuaded or deeply sympathetic to his conclusions. Overall, the monograph seeks to do too much as it tries to touch on and answer every objection to Bauckham’s proposal (again, without sufficiently arguing for this proposal). As a result, the contribution that Loke seems to want to advance and one deserving further consideration indeed (divine Christology rooted in Jesus’s own teachings and claims) is both obscured and too briefly advanced to move the conversation forward.