The Apoth­e­o­sis of Jesus of Nazareth

Pre­am­ble

We believe in…one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begot­ten Son of God, begot­ten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begot­ten, not made, being of one sub­stance with the Father by whom all things were made ; who for us men, and for our sal­va­tion, came down from heav­en, and was incar­nate by the Holy Spir­it of the Vir­gin Mary, and was made man…

These extra­or­di­nary words express the faith of the Chris­t­ian church since it for­mu­lat­ed them in a creed in 325AD at the Coun­cil of Nicea. Jesus is iden­ti­fied unequiv­o­cal­ly as ​“very God” of ​“very God”, of the same sub­stance as the Father. In a word, Jesus is God.

How­ev­er, unknown to the vast major­i­ty of Chris­tians who faith­ful­ly fill the pews each week, since the nine­teen cen­tu­ry his­to­ri­ans of the Bible have attempt­ed to look afresh at the per­son of Jesus of Nazareth to see what his life sig­ni­fied to those first cen­tu­ry writ­ers who wrote the canon­i­cal gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

For the pur­pos­es of this study I want to focus on one aspect of this ongo­ing enquiry into Chris­t­ian ori­gins : the ear­li­est recov­er­able chris­tol­ogy. By which I mean the study of those beliefs held (as far as we can now deter­mine) about Jesus of Nazareth by his imme­di­ate fol­low­ers ; those whose lives chrono­log­i­cal­ly over­lapped that of Jesus but who nev­er met him (e.g. the apos­tle Paul); and the beliefs of the evan­ge­lists who com­posed our four gospels.

It is clear that there has been a devel­op­ment in the way Jesus is pre­sent­ed in the pages of the New Tes­ta­ment. Even a cur­so­ry read­ing of the ear­li­est gospel to be writ­ten, that of Mark, shows us a very human fig­ure, a man who prays to God (1:35); is unable to work mir­a­cles in his own town (6:5); con­fess­es igno­rance about the date of the End of the world (13:32); and who appar­ent­ly despairs of God’s help at the cru­ci­fix­ion (15:34).

If we then read the chrono­log­i­cal­ly last of the four gospels, that of John, we move into a dif­fer­ent world. Here Jesus seems to move effort­less­ly through his min­istry, who is clear­ly por­trayed as a divine fig­ure, indeed as ​“God” him­self. The creed quot­ed above finds a famil­iar echo in the pro­logue to John’s gospel. Chap­ter one, verse 14 ranks as a clas­sic for­mu­la­tion of the Chris­t­ian belief in Jesus as God incar­nate : ​‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. So even this brief sur­vey has shown the enor­mous devel­op­ment which occurred in less than two gen­er­a­tions after Jesus was tak­en up to God.

I believe it is now pos­si­ble to pin­point one instance in the syn­op­tic gospels where we can actu­al­ly wit­ness the writer’s inten­tion­al ele­va­tion of Jesus from a man into a divine being. We can observe in one small but sig­nif­i­cant instance the remark­able apoth­e­o­sis of Jesus.Apoth­e­o­sis : ele­vat­ing to the sta­tus of a god ; deification

I do not claim that this exam­ple explains but a small frac­tion of the the­o­log­i­cal move­ment that lead ulti­mate­ly to the Nicaean creed. In fact a large part of the Trini­tar­i­an doc­trine was ini­ti­at­ed in embry­on­ic form by the apos­tle Paul in the 40s and 50s of the first century.

James D.G. Dunn per­haps more than any oth­er schol­ar made tru­ly sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to Jesus research. His book Chris­tol­ogy in the Mak­ing, a New Tes­ta­ment Inquiry into the Ori­gins the Doc­trine of the Incar­na­tion is vital read­ing for the stu­dent of Christology.

In his For­ward to the Sec­ond Edi­tion of the book (p xii) he asks whether the Chris­to­log­i­cal devel­op­ment to be found in the NT is either an organ­ic devel­op­ment (tree from seed) or an evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment (muta­tion of species)?

It will be clear to the read­er that I believe it is the lat­ter. I will con­sid­er this in more detail in my con­clu­sion at the end.

Let us now sur­vey the evidence.

1. Intro­duc­tion

Edward Schweiz­er in an arti­cle pub­lished in 1959 stat­ed : ​“The idea of the pre-exis­tence of Jesus came to Paul through Wis­dom spec­u­la­tion.“Schweiz­er, Herkun­ft, p.109 He fur­ther con­clud­ed that in the expres­sion ​“God sent his Son, to…” which is com­mon to Paul and John one finds ​“a chris­tol­ogy which seeks to grasp Jesus in the cat­e­gories of the pre-exis­tent Wis­dom or Logos.“Schweiz­er, ​‘Hin­ter­grund, p. 92

Turn­ing to the Syn­op­tic gospels we find that ​“Jesus appears as bear­er or speak­er of Wis­dom, but much more than that as Wis­dom itself. As pre-exis­tent Wis­dom Jesus Sophia…“F. Christ, Jesus Sophia, pp.80, 99

In this arti­cle I intend to focus exclu­sive­ly on the syn­op­tic gospels and their for­mu­la­tion and devel­op­ment of Wis­dom chris­tol­ogy. To my knowl­edge the most thor­ough study to date on this sub­ject is to found in the work of Dunn in Chris­tol­ogy in the Mak­ing, A New Tes­ta­ment Inquiry into the Ori­gins of the Doc­trine of the Incar­na­tionSec­ond Edi­tion, 1989, SCM Press. I have relied on his exe­ge­sis and sur­vey of the Wis­dom lit­er­a­ture in my analy­sis of the sub­ject. The con­clu­sions though are mine.

2. Wis­dom in Pre-Chris­t­ian Judaism

To get our inquiry going we must ask who or what was this Wis­dom whose func­tions and descrip­tions are attrib­uted to Christ in the New Tes­ta­ment ? To get an answer we need to inquire into the mean­ing of this con­cept in those Sec­ond Tem­ple Jew­ish texts before the rise of Chris­tian­i­ty. This will pro­vide us with a his­tor­i­cal ​“con­text of mean­ing” with which to eval­u­ate NT texts. The cen­tral pas­sages can be found in Job 28, Proverbs 8 22 – 31, Eccle­si­as­ti­cus 24, Baruch 3.9−4.4, Wis­dom of Solomon 6.12−11.1, 1 Enoch 42 and var­i­ous ref­er­ences to Wis­dom in Philo.

So who or what is Wis­dom in this lit­er­a­ture ? Dunn lists a sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent options in what he calls ​“a still unre­solved debate”.Ibid., p.168

The main options are as follows :

a) Wis­dom is a divine being, as par­al­lels in Egypt­ian and Mesopotami­an texts
b) Wis­dom is a hyposta­sis – i.e. a ​“qua­si-per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of cer­tain attrib­ut­es prop­er to God, occu­py­ing an inter­me­di­ate posi­tion between per­son­al­i­ties and abstract beings“Ibid., p.168
c) Wis­dom is sim­ply a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of a divine attribute
d) Wis­dom is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of cos­mic order (for exam­ple the Sto­ic lan­guage of Wis­dom of Solomon)

So, if we are to answer with any his­tor­i­cal pre­ci­sion the ques­tion ​‘What did it mean that the first Chris­tians iden­ti­fied Christ as Wis­dom?’ we must come to a deci­sion from the list of options as to which is the best inter­pre­ta­tion of these Old Tes­ta­ment and inter-tes­ta­men­tal passages.

When these pas­sages are con­sid­ered in chrono­log­i­cal order we see a devel­op­ment in the con­cept of Wis­dom. Dunn sees this as ​‘due in large part to the influ­ence (pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive) of reli­gious cults and philoso­phies preva­lent in the ancient near east at that time.’

“Job 28 : Sure­ly there is a mine for sil­ver, and a place for gold which they refine…But where shall wis­dom be found?”

Clear­ly there is no per­son­i­fi­ca­tion here or wis­dom as a divine attribute. Von Rad describes it as ​“the order giv­en to the world by God”.Von Rad, Wis­dom, p.148

In Proverbs 8 Wis­dom is robust­ly per­son­i­fied as a woman : ​‘Does not wis­dom call out ? On the heights along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand…she cries out aloud’. Dunn sees talk of Wis­dom as a woman as an attempt to coun­ter­act the per­ni­cious influ­ences of the Astarte cult by por­tray­ing Wis­dom as much more attrac­tive than the ​‘strange woman’ he warns against in Proverbs 2, 5, 6, and 7.

Wis­dom in the Wis­dom of Solomon is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of cos­mic order

She reach­es might­i­ly from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well (8.1);[Wisdom, who] sits besides God’s throne (9.4).

Sto­ic thought about cos­mic rea­son is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in 7.22ff.:

intel­li­gent, holy, unique, man­i­fold, sub­tle, mobile,…
For wis­dom is more mobile than any motion ;
because of her pure­ness she per­vades and pen­e­trates all things.
For she is a breath of the pow­er of God,
and a pure ema­na­tion of the glo­ry of the Almighty.

Dunn con­cludes his in-depth sur­vey of the Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture with the view that no wor­ship is ever offered to Wis­dom ; Wis­dom has no priest­ly cast in Israel. ​“When set with­in the con­text of faith in Yah­weh there is no clear indi­ca­tion that the Wis­dom lan­guage of these writ­ings has gone beyond vivid per­son­i­fi­ca­tion.“Dunn, Chris­tol­ogy in the Mak­ing, p. 170 ​“The wis­dom pas­sages are sim­ply ways of describ­ing Yahweh’s wise cre­ation and pur­pose”.Ibid., p.174

Sec­ond Tem­ple Judaism there­fore, as far as the tex­tu­al evi­dence goes, sug­gests that there was no thought of Wis­dom as a ​“hyposta­sis” Hyposta­sis : hav­ing being, sub­stance or ​“inter­me­di­ary being”. Wis­dom, like the name, the glo­ry, the Spir­it of Yah­weh, was a way of express­ing God’s imma­nence, his near­ness to the world, his con­cern for Israel ; while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­serv­ing his utter oth­er­ness, his tran­scen­dence. Wis­dom was a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of God’s own activ­i­ty in cre­ation, rev­e­la­tion and sal­va­tion. This is impor­tant to bear in mind as we con­sid­er the syn­op­tic gospels use of Wis­dom lan­guage in ref­er­ence to Jesus.

3. Q and the Con­trast­ing Redac­tions of Matthew and Luke

What is Q ?

The Q doc­u­ment (or just ​“Q” from the Ger­man Quelle, ​“source”) is a pos­tu­lat­ed but now lost tex­tu­al source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The recog­ni­tion of 19th cen­tu­ry NT schol­ars that Matthew and Luke share much mate­r­i­al not found in their gen­er­al­ly recog­nised com­mon source, the gospel of Mark, has sug­gest­ed a sec­ond com­mon source, called Q. It seems most like­ly to have com­prised a col­lec­tion of Jesus say­ings. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion and links go to : http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​Q​_​d​o​c​u​m​ent

The con­trast­ing redac­tions of Matthew and Luke

Hav­ing briefly dis­cussed the nature of Jew­ish Wis­dom lan­guage I now want to analyse how the syn­op­tic gospels utilise such lan­guage in their redac­tion of the Q logia, and why this is so sig­nif­i­cant for our under­stand­ing of the his­tor­i­cal Jesus and how lat­er gen­er­a­tions came to por­tray him.

I want to focus on Matthew chap­ter 23 and the par­al­lel pas­sages in Luke. In this chap­ter Math­ew seems to iden­ti­fy Jesus as Wis­dom. He does this by edit­ing the Q mate­r­i­al at his dis­pos­al. It is pos­si­ble, by a com­par­i­son with Luke, to demon­strate how this was done. Dunn gives us sev­er­al exam­ples of this redac­tion but I want to focus on one, part­ly for simplicity’s sake but also because my exam­ple most clear­ly demon­strates this fact. (It might prove help­ful for the read­er to read these quo­ta­tions in their larg­er gospel context).

Luke 11.49 : There­fore also the Wis­dom of God said, ​‘I will send them prophets and apos­tles, some of whom they will kill and persecute’…

Matt. 23.34 : (Jesus’ words) ​‘There­fore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and cru­ci­fy, and some you will scourge in your syn­a­gogues and per­se­cute from town to town…’

Here we have a Q say­ing. I would argue that Luke’s ver­sion is near­er to the orig­i­nal Q form, because it is more prob­a­ble that Luke’s Wis­dom utter­ance : ​‘I will send them…’ is more like­ly to be the orig­i­nal than that he delib­er­ate­ly altered a pre­cious first per­son say­ing of Jesus : ​‘I send you…’

So in Q we have Jesus quot­ing a say­ing of Wis­dom where she promis­es to send emis­saries to Israel, and Jesus is the spokesman of Wis­dom. So much is clear.

When we turn to Matthew’s redac­tion of Q, he has turned the say­ing of Wis­dom into a say­ing of Jesus him­self. For Matthew, Jesus is Wisdom.

How are we to assess the sig­nif­i­cance of Matthew’s Wis­dom chris­tol­ogy ? The syn­op­tic tra­di­tion allows us to see the chang­ing thought of Chris­tians in the first cen­tu­ry. We are for­tu­nate to be able to com­pare and con­trast Matthew and Luke with their sources Mark and Q. With close and intel­li­gent atten­tion to the texts we can detect where Matthew and Luke have altered or expand­ed the tra­di­tions about Jesus.

Not all changes to Mark and Q are the­o­log­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Some­times the evan­ge­lists abbre­vi­ate a longer sto­ry in Mark, or retell a sto­ry about Jesus to bring out a par­tic­u­lar dra­mat­ic point.

Here how­ev­er I want to argue that the evan­ge­list in his redac­tion of Q (here and else where, see 11.25−30 ; 23−37−9) has made a move of incal­cu­la­ble the­o­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance the grav­i­ty of which is not suf­fi­cient­ly recog­nised by Dunn in his oth­er­wise per­cep­tive dis­cus­sion of the issue.

I refer of course to the apoth­e­o­sis of Jesus implic­it in Matthew’s nar­ra­tive. I want to pro­vide a snap­shot of this meta­mor­pho­sis. Dunn’s char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of this trans­for­ma­tion as a ​“tran­si­tion” is too weak ; we are deal­ing with some­thing of pro­found onto­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.Ontol­ogy : con­cerned with the nature of being

4. Christ as Wis­dom in Matthew’s Gospel and the Apoth­e­o­sis of Jesus of Nazareth

Math­ew, with­out any appar­ent fan­fare has made a change in Jesus’ onto­log­i­cal sta­tus from Jesus as a mes­sen­ger of Wis­dom to Jesus as Wis­dom. His­tor­i­cal­ly one may pos­tu­late that this opened up the pos­si­bil­i­ties for a sub­tle deifi­ca­tion of Jesus, which becomes explic­it in the chrono­log­i­cal­ly lat­er parts of the NT (Pro­logue to John’s gospel comes to mind). This means that we have a fun­da­men­tal shift away from the his­tor­i­cal Jesus of Nazareth towards the Trini­tar­i­an spec­u­la­tions of the patris­tic era.

As Dunn con­cludes, ​“when we press back behind Q, inso­far as we reach back to the actu­al words of Jesus him­self, the prob­a­bil­i­ty is that Jesus’ own under­stand­ing of his rela­tion to Wis­dom is rep­re­sent­ed by Q rather than by Matthew.“Dunn, Chris­tol­ogy in the Mak­ing, p. 206

If the gospel was writ­ten after 70 CE (the con­sen­sus of schol­ars), the out­break of hos­til­i­ty between rab­binic Judaism and Jew­ish Chris­tian­i­ty which occurred after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 (which is implied by Matthew 23) may have been pro­voked by what to Jew­ish monothe­is­tic ears trained to val­ue the uni­ty of the God­head, must have sound­ed like the rank­est blas­phe­my in attribut­ing deity to a creature.

5. Con­clu­sion

It will be appar­ent from this analy­sis that at least one writer known to us many years after Jesus’ ascen­sion, by his delib­er­ate edit­ing of the gospel say­ings of Jesus, took a com­plete­ly new step : he applied Wis­dom cat­e­gories that had pre­vi­ous­ly drama­tised Gods sav­ing actions in the world to a man who lived only decades earlier.

The most sophis­ti­cat­ed attempt known to me to save ortho­dox Chris­t­ian teach­ing in the face of ear­ly Christianity’s chang­ing doc­trines about Jesus is to be found in the cel­e­brat­ed Vic­to­ri­an church­man John Hen­ry New­man. He was con­cerned to defend the truth of Catholic teach­ing about Jesus against his­tor­i­cal evi­dence sug­gest­ing that the dog­ma of the deity of Christ was not church teach­ing till cen­turies after Jesus’ time. He wrote a high­ly influ­en­tial work An Essay on the Devel­op­ment of Chris­t­ian Doc­trine.

It was com­posed in 1845, when New­man was halt­ing mid­way between two forms of Chris­tian­i­ty. Its aim was to explain and jus­ti­fy what Protes­tants regard­ed as cor­rup­tions and addi­tions to the prim­i­tive Chris­t­ian creed, and to show these to be legit­i­mate devel­op­ments. In a series of elo­quent and eru­dite analo­gies, he seeks to show that the present high­ly com­plex doc­trines of the Church lay in germ in the orig­i­nal deposi­tum of faith, which has evolved or devel­oped through pro­gres­sive unfold­ing and expli­ca­tion.Har­rold, Charles F., A New­man Trea­sury, Lon­don : Long­mans, Green and Co., 1943, pp.83 – 84

New­man was writ­ing at a time when Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land was com­ing to terms with the notion of devel­op­ment in his­to­ry and sci­ence. The idea of evo­lu­tion­ary change was part of the zeit­geist, and soon Dar­win would pub­lish his mon­u­men­tal Ori­gin of Species.

But was New­man right ? Did the church’s devel­op­ing doc­trines about Jesus sim­ply make explic­it what had been implic­it in the truth about Jesus ? Could one still cred­i­bly believe that Jesus believed him­self to be Almighty God as the Nicaean Creed sug­gests ? Would Jesus him­self be con­tent with what the church has done with his mem­o­ry and teaching ?

In answer to these ques­tions I would like to leave the last word to the Jew­ish schol­ar Geza Ver­mes, who has spent over 50 years of schol­ar­ly activ­i­ty study­ing Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Tes­ta­ment and Jesus.

By the end of the first cen­tu­ry Chris­tian­i­ty had lost sight of the real Jesus and of the orig­i­nal mean­ing of his mes­sage. Paul, John and their church­es replaced him by the oth­er­world­ly Christ of faith, and his insis­tence on per­son­al effort, con­cen­tra­tion and trust in God by a reliance on the sav­ing mer­its of an eter­nal, divine Redeemer. The swift­ness of the oblit­er­a­tion was due to a pre­ma­ture change in cul­tur­al per­spec­tive. With­in decades of his death, the mes­sage of the real Jesus was trans­ferred from its Semit­ic (Aramaic/​Hebrew) lin­guis­tic con­text, its Galilean/​Palestinian geo­graph­i­cal set­ting, and its Jew­ish reli­gious frame­work, to alien surroundings…Jesus, the reli­gious man with an irre­sistible charis­mat­ic charm, was meta­mor­phosed into Jesus the Christ, the tran­scen­dent object of the Chris­t­ian religion.

The dis­tant fiery prophet from Nazareth pro­claim­ing the near­ness of the king­dom of God did not mean much to the aver­age new recruit from Alexan­dria, Anti­och, Eph­esus, Corinth or Rome. Their gaze was direct­ed towards a uni­ver­sal sav­iour and even towards the eter­nal yet incar­nate Word of God who was God.Geza Ver­mes, The Chang­ing Faces of Jesus, Pen­guin, 2000, p. 263

Fur­ther Thoughts

At the end of the day the con­sid­er­a­tions of this paper do not exist in a vac­u­um. If I am broad­ly on tar­get in my analy­sis then this mat­ters pro­found­ly. In the are­na of the world’s reli­gions, claim and counter claim about reli­gious truth calls each of us to respond thought­ful­ly and with courage.

If ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty, the Chris­tian­i­ty of the Trini­tar­i­an creeds, is now shown to be too rad­i­cal­ly dis­con­tin­u­ous with the his­tor­i­cal flesh and blood Jesus who walked the streets of Jerusalem 2000 years ago, then we are oblig­ed to look else­where for unal­loyed revelation.

Some­one once asked the not­ed Eng­lish Mus­lim writer Gai Eaton why there is no his­tor­i­cal crit­i­cism of the Qur’an as there is of the Bible. He answered :

There is a mis­un­der­stand­ing : the Bible is made up of many dif­fer­ent parts, com­piled over many cen­turies and it is pos­si­ble to cast doubt upon one part with­out impugn­ing the rest ; where­as the Qur’an is a sin­gle rev­e­la­tion, received by just one man, either you accept it for what it claims to be, in which case you are a Mus­lim or you reject this claim, and so place your­self out­side the fold of Islam.Gai Eaton has writ­ten some of the most acclaimed books about Islam in the Eng­lish lan­guage. Par­tic­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend­ed is Islam and the Des­tiny of Man. See reviews here.