A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels

By J. R. Daniel Kirk

Thought-provoking alternative perspective on the full humanity of Jesus Christ

In A Man Attested by God J. R. Daniel Kirk presents a comprehensive defense of the thesis that the Synoptic Gospels present Jesus not as divine but as an idealized human figure.

Counterbalancing the recent trend toward early high Christology in such scholars as Richard Bauckham, Simon Gathercole, and Richard Hays, Kirk here thoroughly unpacks the humanity of Jesus as understood by Gospel writers whose language is rooted in the religious and literary context of early Judaism. Without dismissing divine Christologies out of hand, Kirk argues that idealized human Christology is the best way to read the Synoptic Gospels, and he explores Jesus as exorcist and miracle worker within the framework of his humanity.

With wide-ranging exegetical and theological insight that sheds startling new light on familiar Gospel texts, A Man Attested by God offers up-to-date, provocative scholarship that will have to be reckoned with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467445771

J. R. Daniel Kirk

J. R. Daniel Kirk is the Pastoral Director for San Francisco at the Newbigin House of Studies. He is the author of multiple books including A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus in the Synoptic Gospel. He blogs at Storied Theology blog.

Book preview

A MAN ATTESTED BY GOD

The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels

J. R. Daniel Kirk

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

© 2016 J. R. Daniel Kirk

All rights reserved

Published 2016

22 21 20 19 18 17 161 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-6795-7

eISBN 978-1-4674-4616-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kirk, J. R. Daniel, author.

Title: A man attested by God : the human Jesus of the synoptic gospels / J. R. Daniel Kirk.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016013963 | ISBN 9780802867957 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Synoptic problem. | Jesus Christ.

Classification: LCC BS2555.52 .K55 2016 | DDC 232/.8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013963

For Laura, Cora Marie, and Eliot

"The others show him as a man: they gave glory to God who had given such authority to men (Matt 9:8); but John only says that he is God: and the Word was God."

— Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John 1.67

Contents

Tables

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

A.  Idealized Human Figures

B.  Methodology: Framework, Hypothesis, and Paradigm Testing

C.  What This Study Is

D.  What This Study Is Not

E.  Recent Proposals for Early High Christology

F.  Value of the Current Proposal

G.  The Path Ahead

1. Idealized Human Figures in Early Judaism

A.  Adam as Past and Future

B.  Moses and the Prophets

C.  Kings in Worship and Rule

D.  Priests of Divinity

E.  The Son of Man

F.  The Community of the Elect

G.  Conclusions: Idealized Human Figures and the Identity of God

2. Son of God as Human King

A.  Son of God as Human King in Mark

B.  Son of God, Son of David, Son of Adam in Luke

C.  Son of God in Matthew

D.  Conclusion: Son of God as Idealized Human King

3. Son of Man as the Human One

A.  Narrative Unity of the Son of Man Sayings in Mark

B.  The Son of Man in Mark’s Narrative Arc

C.  The Son of Man Outside Mark

D.  The Human One: Son of Man as Son of Adam

E.  Conclusion: Son of Man as the Human One

4. Messiah Born and Raised

A.  God with Us: Matthew’s Christ in Birth and Resurrection

B.  The Son of David: Jesus in Luke’s Birth and Resurrection Narratives

C.  Conclusion: Messiah Born and Raised

5. Lord of All Creation

A.  Exorcisms

B.  Nature Miracles

C.  Healing Hands

D.  Conclusions: Human Agent of Divine Power

6. Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel

A.  Mark

B.  Matthew

C.  Luke

D.  Conclusions: Messianic Hermeneutics

Conclusions: A Man Attested by God

A.  Jesus as Idealized Human Figure in the Synoptic Gospels

B.  The Stories of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke

C.  Human Christology and Jesus’s Followers

D.  Locating Jesus in the Biblical Narrative

E.  Concluding Thoughts

Bibliography

Author Index

Subject Index

Ancient Sources Index

Tables

Table 1-1 Banners for the Battle in 1QM

Table 2-1 Parallels between Son of God Declarations in Mark

Table 4-1 Announcement, Prophecy, Enactment

Table 6-1 Citations in Mark 1:2-3

Preface

One of the most popular arguments for the divinity of Jesus comes from the pen of C. S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity. In the final paragraph of a section entitled The Shocking Alternative, he claims that Jesus can only be understood as liar, lunatic, or lord.¹ Lord in this case is viewed as equivalent to Lord and God. As a young Christian I found that this set of alternatives squared well with two things: (1) the understanding of Christianity I had then, that what lies at the center of everything is belief in the divinity of Jesus, and (2) the Jesus whom I met in the pages of John, who often made the sorts of outrageous self-referential claims that I can only imagine are the ones Lewis had in mind.

Where this framework of coming to terms with Jesus left me short, however, was in my encounter with the Jesus who confronted me in the pages of the Synoptic Gospels. This Jesus was not Lewis’s despised moral teacher (full stop). But neither did he say very many things that left the reader with the choice between this guy is a lunatic on the level with someone who thinks he is a poached egg and this is none other than the Lord God. In short, a divine Jesus whose mission entailed disclosure of a divine identity did not help me make sense of the stories told by Matthew, Mark, or Luke.

The tide began to turn for me at seminary, where a strong tradition of reading the whole Bible diachronically had created a deep sense among the faculty that humanity as represented in Adam, Israel, and David was crucial to the larger biblical narrative. The Jesus story began to take on importance not as demonstrating that Jesus the human was just a better teacher than most, or as showing that the divine had to take on flesh simply so that he could die, but as depicting Jesus playing the part the story had always lacked: a human who fulfilled the purpose of primal humanity to not only rule the world for God, but also to do so as a faithful, obedient son.

To bring this idea closer to the language of the Synoptic Tradition: I began to see that the kingdom of God comes near not when God rules as such, but when a human king, anointed and empowered by God’s spirit, exercises an authority on the earth that by rights belongs to God alone. An article by Dan McCartney entitled "Ecce Homo" developed this very theme across various threads of the New Testament and played a seminal role in the formation of a generation of seminary students.² Such notions laid the foundation for the following years, in which I read and began to understand the stories of the Synoptic Gospels with very different lenses than the ones I had tried on in my youth: yes, Jesus is the Christ; but no, this does not mean that he is being depicted as divine.

However, just as I was growing into what I had learned and become convinced of it seemed that the tide shifted, and early divine Christology became the word of the day for those readers interested in the theological texture of scripture. Arguments to the effect that, whatever might be the Christological diversity within the New Testament writings, all early Christians showed that they identified Jesus with God or as God left me wondering if the coherence I had found through a human Jesus was going to be swept away. In the face of this shifting tide of scholarship, the current study is an attempt to reassert the centrality of Jesus as a particular kind of human as the operative Christological rubric for the Synoptic Gospels — a reading that has, to my mind, allowed the stories to find a coherence they otherwise lack and to claim their own voices amid the varied New Testament witness to the identity of Jesus.

This book has been a work in process for almost seven years now. No project of such duration could have endured without the encouragement and support of colleagues, family, and friends. I am grateful for Fuller Seminary’s generous sabbatical policy, which provided me with two opportunities to be free from teaching responsibilities in order to be devoted to this book. I am thankful also to the students who have endured more high human Christology in Gospels class than they bargained for. A number of people read portions of the manuscript, taking on a burden that demonstrates true collegiality and friendship: Michael Bird, Sam Boyd, Craig Carpenter, Justin Dombrowski, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, John Goldingay, Larry Hurtado, Nathan Mastnjak, James McGrath, David Vinson, and Tim Wardle. Special thanks go out to Justin, Stephen, Judy, Mark, Love, David, Jim, Mark, Tim, Keoke, Steve, David, Jer, and countless others who have believed in the value of my work and encouraged me along the way. Most of all I am thankful for Laura, Cora Marie, and Eliot, whose love for me and in me allows me to do my work with the freedom that comes from knowing what truly matters most.

1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 55-56.

2. Dan McCartney, "Ecce Homo: The Coming of the Kingdom as the Restoration of Human Vicegerency," WTJ 56 (1994): 1-21.

Abbreviations

ANCIENT SOURCES

JOURNALS AND BOOK SERIES

Introduction

In the first speech in the mouth of a follower of Jesus after receiving the Holy Spirit, the freshly empowered and comprehending Peter refers to Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God through miracles, wonders, and signs. This book articulates a paradigm that I call idealized human figures, by which I intend to show that Peter’s depiction is sufficient for understanding the Jesus who meets us in the pages of the Synoptic Gospels.

For those who are not convinced, or entering warily, the approach of this study is conducive to functioning as a thought experiment: what if we were to read the Synoptic Gospels themselves (not some presumed prehistory or reconstructed picture of Jesus) as bearing consistent witness to the fact that Jesus is a particular kind of human being, and to ask all along, what sort of man are we seeing in these texts? So I begin with this invitation: to read and reimagine the identity of Jesus in these texts as an idealized human being.¹ Some who read will be convinced that this is sufficient for explaining Jesus as he appears in the first three Evangelists; I hope that others who read will become more deeply convinced that it is a necessary part of explaining the Jesus who meets us there. I hope that the effect of this study will be to raise awareness of, and appreciation for, the rich Christology entailed in renderings of Jesus as an idealized human figure.

New Testament studies is in the midst of a resurgence of early high Christology, specifically of arguments to the effect that the full compass of early Christian witness to Jesus indicates that the early Christians thought of him, and/or treated him, as divine in what might fairly be called a proto-Chalcedonian sense.² Although there are several versions of this argument, many share a common structure. These arguments theorize from the notion that Jews in the first century reserve certain ascriptions, actions, or attributes for Israel’s God alone; that the first-century Jews who wrote the New Testament nonetheless apply these very ascriptions, actions, or attributes to Jesus; and that these texts therefore and in these ways treat Jesus as and/or identify him with the God of Israel.³

The purpose of this book is, first, to problematize such claims by demonstrating that alongside such singularizing statements in the Jewish biblical and post-biblical corpus are extensive indications that God can share such divine roles and instances in which we see human participation in the divine identity so construed. In Jewish sources, humans play roles that properly belong to God alone, without redefining Jewish monotheism.⁴ Such humans are what I refer to as idealized human figures. These figures provide an alternative paradigm for assessing the Christology of the Synoptic Tradition. Second, this study tests the sufficiency of the idealized human figure hypothesis for explaining even the high Christologies we encounter in the Synoptic Gospels.

A. IDEALIZED HUMAN FIGURES

The category I posit here, idealized human figures, refers to non-angelic, non-preexistent human beings, of the past, present, or anticipated future, who are depicted in textual or other artifacts as playing some unique role in representing God to the rest of the created realm, or in representing some aspect of the created realm before God.⁵ The object of concern is not the actual historical figures who may stand behind such idealized depictions, but instead the depictions themselves, which interpret the significance of persons through various ascriptions, actions, and attributes. In positing such a categorization, I am seeking to curtail two possible missteps in the interpretation of the historical evidence. First, more limited categories such as anticipated messiah might prove too narrow and lead to the wrong conclusion: if Jesus does something that no messiah was thought to do, such as raise the dead, one might conclude in too hasty a fashion that this means Jesus is being depicted as more than messiah, hinting strongly that he is God. Second, comparing idealized descriptions from early Jewish texts with those in the Synoptic Gospels enables us to compare like with like (i.e., textual depictions of idealized figures). We need not wait for the discovery of an early Jewish sect that worshiped a human alongside God, for instance, to curtail the notion that the early Christians were treating Jesus as God if we do have texts that provide evidence of when such veneration might be acceptable.⁶

The categorization of idealized human figure seeks to chart a third way between a low Christology that defines Jesus as a mere human being and a high Christology that depicts Jesus approaching, or attaining to, the status of the God of Israel (what I refer to as divine Christology).⁷ At the same time, I should be quick to add that Jesus as an idealized human figure does not eliminate the possibility that Jesus is (being depicted as) divine. While the force of my argument is, throughout, to show the sufficiency of the human category for explaining the many Christologies narrated in the Synoptic Tradition, this book should not be read as constituting a claim to the effect that Jesus is not, in fact, God, in the way confessed by many Christian traditions or that idealized human Christologies are incompatible with divine Christologies. Instead, I am arguing for the best way to read these particular books of the New Testament, claiming that the paradigm of idealized human figures makes best sense of the data. Divine and preexistence Christology is attested to in other early Christian literature.

Idealized human Christology is a high, human Christology. I build the case for its plausibility and significance through a wide-ranging study of early Jewish texts. It is a high Christology because such human figures are variously represented as playing roles otherwise belonging to God alone. It is a high Christology, also, because such humans can be depicted as the very embodiment of God, God’s visible representation, God’s voice, the exhibition of God’s rule and majesty. Indeed, one might even say that human Christology can be divine Christology, without imputing inherent divinity to the human in view, because God creates humanity in God’s own image and likeness, to exercise God’s sovereignty over the earth in God’s stead. However, I attempt to restrict the label divine Christology to the position that sees Jesus as inherently constitutive of God, rather than contingently entailed in God through special creation or anointing. In Pauline terms, idealized human Christology might at times be something akin to Adam Christology.⁸ In the language of Irenaeus of Lyons, idealized human Christology signals recapitulation. In the parlance of the Synoptic Gospels as translated by the Common English Bible, idealized human Christology claims that Jesus is the Human One.

B. METHODOLOGY: FRAMEWORK, HYPOTHESIS, AND PARADIGM TESTING

The methodology entailed in this study is twofold. First, an extensive survey of biblical and post-biblical Jewish literature (chap. 1) provides the raw data for positing the category of idealized human figures as a recognizable phenomenon across a sampling of early Judaism that varies widely in time, place, and ideology. Second, my survey of the Synoptic Gospels (chaps. 2–6) is one of testing the hypothesis that the category of idealized human figures suffices as an overarching paradigm for explaining the diverse Christological expressions we see there.⁹

The approach, then, entails hypothesis testing, assessing the explanatory capacity of a given paradigm, rather than an attempt to inductively establish at every turn that the Gospel writers are themselves working to create such a category. At many points along the way, I argue that certain Christological indices such as the titles son of God and son of man would have been understood by an author and/or audience as referring to such a human. However, at many other points I make the less direct argument that the paradigm I propose suffices to incorporate the data. This approach commends itself for a couple of different reasons. One reason is that it directly responds to the nature of the early divine Christology arguments; namely, that certain expressions are so tied to the identity of God or other divine figure that they cannot be read as descriptions of a creature. In staking such a claim, the various authors have said that the paradigms of human or angelic figures are insufficient to account for the data, so that recourse to something more akin to divinity is required. This would be tantamount to a paradigm shift in the field of early Jesus research. My assessment of these arguments is that the reason the data did not fit the old paradigms had more to do with insufficiently developed heuristics for assessing Jesus’s humanity than the ubiquitous appearance of divine Christology throughout the corpus of earliest Christian writings. Thus, the overall approach of my study is to demonstrate that the data from the varied Gospel narratives fit within the paradigm I propose rather than to argue throughout that the Gospel writers are intending to nod toward such a paradigm with each Jesus story, or to discredit other scholarly views about how each particular passage might signal Jesus’s divinity or preexistence.

This takes us to the second reason such an approach commends itself. It is nearly impossible to survey every relevant passage pertaining to the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels, much less to give an in-depth scholarly treatment of all the arguments for various possible interpretations. Many of the passages I deal with come under consideration precisely because they are clear candidates for demonstrating divine or preexistence Christologies, and for this very reason I do not feel the need to relay in detail the scholarly arguments upholding such interpretations. My purpose is not to refute each argument in favor of early divine Christology so much as it is to show that if one assumes the pervasiveness and prevalence of idealized human figures throughout Jewish religious storytelling, then the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is readily interpreted in such a fashion. As I understand it, the question under debate is this: what assumptions about the identity of Jesus make sense of the Gospel stories as told? The early divine Christology proponents have argued that a human or angelic Christology fails to account for the full breadth of the stories told, ascriptions rendered, and the like, and that the explanation for this lies in the fact that the stories narrate the identity of Jesus such that he shares in God’s preexistence or in what later theologians would call the divine nature. Such a claim constitutes a call for something closely akin to a paradigm shift in New Testament scholarship, put forward to account for data that did not fit with earlier, developmental views of early Christology.¹⁰ With the category of idealized human figure in place, I aim to demonstrate that, overall, an exalted human paradigm is in fact sufficient to contain the data of the Gospels, and that the appeal to divinity is thus unnecessary for these particular stories.

Endemic to my argument is a shared overall approach with the proponents of early divine Christology, which looks to Judaism, with its commitment to the worship of only one God, as the seedbed for early Christianity and as the most important cultural (including literary) background for making sense of the Gospels as we have them. Issuing this internal critique of recent studies advocating divine Christology serves a couple of purposes. First, it takes the important step of reassessing an argument that many have found compelling on what is essentially its own grounds. In so doing, the reader can reassess with a fresh set of eyes whether the paradigm(s) on offer in the work of my predecessors is truly as compelling an explanation of the data as it appeared at first blush. The presentation of an alternative paradigm (idealized human figure in the place of divine identity) that deals with the same data (depictions of Jesus as found in scriptural accounts) and attempts to make sense of it within the same cultural-religious framework (biblical and post-biblical Judaism with its commitment to the singularity of the creator God) should lend clarity to the options on the table.

Second, this approach enables us to see points at which the early divine Christology arguments themselves stand in need of internal clarification or strengthening. One of the challenges in reading and understanding what these scholars claim is that the conclusions are often vague and amenable to multiple significations. To say, for instance, that Jesus’s and God’s identities in the Gospel of Luke are inseparable from each other is a faithful assessment of the Third Evangelist. But someone might also rightly say that in various parts of the Bible the identity of Israel and the identity of God are inseparable. The idealized human paradigm provides an alternative to divine Christology for accounting for such data as we find in the Gospels in step with the claims we might make for other idealized Jewish figures. It allows us to see that not only the New Testament data themselves but also the conclusions articulated by other scholars are amenable to various interpretations, including the conclusion that Jesus is depicted as an idealized human figure.

Third, by engaging the same data, and seeing an alternatively construed high Christology (i.e., a high human Christology) in the same (sorts of) passages in which my interlocutors see divine Christology itself, my study demonstrates significant overlap with the work they have done before me. In the end, it is hoped that this study thus has the capacity to enrich the Christological conversation by putting a new piece into play, one that has the capacity to augment the positions of my interlocutors even if they continue holding to their alternative paradigm.

Fourth, a paradigm approach enables me to deal with diverse Christologies without flatting any one into the likeness of another. Paradigms are not singular theories about how something works; they are overarching explanatory grids within which singular theories develop, make sense, and are understood to be coherent. When the paradigm about the earth’s shape shifts from flat, stationary mass to spherical, rotating planet, the new paradigm enables us to say opposite things about the lunar and solar orbs that appear to be doing the very same things over our heads: one circles the earth, the earth circles the other, despite the fact that both rise and set daily across our sky. I argue that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all depict primarily idealized human Christologies, but also recognize ways in which each reflects the peculiar theology of the given writer.

Fifth, and finally, the approach of testing the hypothesis of a paradigm provides room for the study to say that some data might not fit.¹¹ As I go through the Gospels, it will be Matthew, in particular, whose exalted human Christology at times takes turns that might step beyond the category of idealized human figure. In naming such instances, the study raises the question of how we can clearly frame the reasons for seeing such a transgression of the idealized human paradigm. By holding the idealized human paradigm in tension with the divine identity paradigm we can ask whether the data fall within either, or whether anomalous instances of potentially divine Christology are simply outliers that point toward some different paradigm for making sense of Jesus as we encounter him in these pages.

In all, then, I hope that the presentation of an alternative paradigm both enriches the conversation already unfolding and generates new possibilities in our readings of the Gospel texts. By recalibrating the scholarly discussion in light of data that are less often explored in Christology discussions, those pertaining to human figures rather than divine hypostases or angelic figures,¹² I am opening up possibilities for a new family of readings, only some of which are offered in preliminary fashion in the current study.¹³ I should underscore here that in discussing the methodology of hypothesis and paradigm I am offering exegetical and hermeneutical suggestions for making sense of the narratives as we have them. The approach of this study is not an abstract application of data to a preconceived paradigm. As much as possible, the chapters that follow seek to honor the developments of the plots of each of the Gospels and the overall stories that they tell, as they narrate those stories in conscious dialogue with Jewish biblical and post-biblical traditions.

As should be evident, then, my work is participating in a particular conversation in New Testament scholarship, in which the Christological question is assessed from within the Jewish frame of reference. I address the question of how these texts signify within the biblical and post-biblical Jewish framework. Each of the Synoptic Gospels offers early indications to its readers that such is the interpretive milieu for understanding the story that unfolds: Matthew begins with a summary of Israel’s history from Abraham through David and the exile to Jesus’s birth; Mark proclaims that the story begins in accordance with what is written in the prophet Isaiah; Luke says that the life of Jesus consists of the things that have been fulfilled, and weaves his early chapters with themes from Israel’s scriptural past.¹⁴ The framework developed here demonstrates promise as a category that explains the exalted depictions of Jesus in a manner that fits well within early Jewish ideas without the redefinition of monotheism that marks the later Christian tradition.¹⁵ I recognize that with such a singular focus there is a price to be paid. The approach I have taken leaves aside the important, complementary question of how a non-Jewish, Greco-Roman reader would have read the Gospels.¹⁶ Although I take up the perspective of such a reader at a few points in my study, my main intent is to engage the crucial question raised by the proponents of early high Christology: what does it mean for writers who are mostly Jewish themselves, functioning within what we might call the theological parameters of first-century Judaism, to narrate the life of Jesus in the ways we see unfolding in Matthew, Mark, and Luke?

C. WHAT THIS STUDY IS

1. A STUDY OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

This is a study of the Christology (or, Christologies) of the Synoptic Gospels. As such, it attempts to do justice to the literary features, narrative development, and symbolic worlds created by each story. It is not, then, a study of the historical Jesus and how he presented himself, or a study of the underlying sources. It is a historical study in the sense that it attempts to provide a historically viable reading of the texts from within the first-century Greek-speaking Jewish world in which they were written. This also means that the only diachronic dimension of early Christology that I take up is particular changes introduced by Matthew or Luke into Mark’s text. I am not arguing for a developmental theory of early Christology.

Because it is a study of the Synoptic Gospels, it is also not a study that draws firm conclusions about the full Christologies held by the persons who produced them or the communities that first received and read them. It may well be, for instance, that all of the Gospel writers held some sort of divine Christology, and yet told stories that attempted to tell the story of the human Jesus during his time on earth with minimal reference to a divine quality that transcended his already transcendent humanity. As an analogy, we might think of the works of Paul, which many hold to contain a stock of verses that indicate preexistence. Throughout his letters, however, the role that Jesus plays in Paul’s arguments is almost always one that depicts his idealized humanity, union with and likeness to us, or lordship via resurrection, rather than one that depends on preexistence.

Whatever may be the reason for the depictions of Jesus, the depictions themselves provide their own set of evidence. Difficulties that we might have in determining how these depictions fit within the development of early Christology pose a separate question. The answer may be that Christology did not develop in a straight line, such that lower always means earlier. The answer may be that an author is striving to preserve and present a true portrait of Jesus’s earthly ministry. The answer may be that there is a theological point to be made about Jesus as the quintessential human being, the faithful Davidic messiah, the Human One who plays the part of second Adam. Any of these is possible, but the first question to answer is how, in fact, Jesus is depicted in each of the Synoptic Gospels. That is where the current study focuses.

Focusing on three different stories is going to raise some challenges, as it is difficult to honor the respective narratives of each while digging into topics, issues, and themes that stretch across all three. But I endeavor to honor the respective stories even though I do not work through the Gospels book by book. When I study Christological titles (son of God and son of man) I do not examine a title in the abstract and import a given meaning into the Gospels. Instead, I look at how the titles function and develop across the course of the narratives. This provides an inroad into Mark’s story in particular. Similarly, studying the birth and resurrection narratives allows Matthew and Luke their own voices in establishing the trajectory and resolution of the Jesus stories they narrate. Throughout, the question is how the Christological signals of any given pericope both find and lend meaning within the developing story.

2. A READING IN CONTINUITY WITH SCRIPTURE AND EARLY JUDAISM

As stated above, the primary frame of reference I am using to read the Gospels is the combination of Israel’s scriptural rubric and its development in post-biblical Jewish texts. Of course, any new telling or next chapter of an ongoing story will introduce its novel developments. The question before us is precisely where the Jesus stories introduce those notes of newness. The point of my extensive focus on early Jewish texts is to demonstrate that being identified with God as such is not a novel development that entails a redefinition of monotheism. Or, if it is, then it redefines monotheism in ways analogous to God’s earlier self-identification with characters such as Abraham, Moses, and Israel. Because God’s identity is known through a narrated story, that story and its characters are always bound up with God’s identity, distinguishable if not separable from it.

To say that identification with God itself does not single Jesus out as unique is not, however, to fall off the horse on the other side and claim that the Gospels depict Jesus as just like any other biblical hero. When Jesus exercises powerful control over waters, for instance, there is at least one option between, Look, Moses is back! and Look, God incarnate is among us! Idealized human figures fall in between the merely human and the divine. In the case of Jesus, the Gospels claim in their own ways that Jesus is the eschatological agent through whom God’s promises to visit, redeem, and restore God’s people are taking place. Jesus is the expected and uniquely empowered messiah who would share in God’s rule over the world and receive the homage of the nations. Jesus is the Human One who exercises God’s authority on the earth as God intended for humanity to do at the beginning. Thus, reading in continuity with the scriptures of Israel and with early Judaism is not a claim to Jesus’s normalcy, but is a call to understand with greater acuity where, exactly, Jesus’s uniqueness lies in these particular stories.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all invite the readers of their stories to interpret them in conversation with biblical precedents. Luke’s Gospel draws to a close with the resurrected Jesus providing provocative suggestions about his whole life being a fulfillment of the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms. These generalities tell us that we cannot understand the Gospels aright unless we are reading them in conversation with the scriptures of Israel. What these generalities do not tell us is what that point of connection might be. For this we must look at the specific exegesis of each passage. The Christological implications will take the whole of each of the Gospels to sort out. I aim to demonstrate that the biblical and Jewish intertexts supply us with tools to recognize a high, human Christology of a man at the turn of the ages who is initiating the restoration of the world’s rule to God’s appointed human agent(s).

3. LISTENING TO A SURPRISING PERSPECTIVE

Each book of the New Testament, and each author or group of books as well, has the capacity to offer some unique contribution to our understanding of how the early church articulated Jesus’s identity. If I have one fear in the midst of the onslaught of early high Christology studies it is that an increasing focus on the ways in which Jesus is shown to be divine will lead to an ever-increasing tendency to bypass Jesus’s humanity as its own biblically and theologically significant reality. As this study shows in some detail, by Jesus’s humanity I do not simply mean that Jesus has a body so that he can die. Nor do I simply mean, à la Anselm, that humanity has gotten into such a terrible hole that the only way for God to be paid back is for someone else to get into the terrible hole with us and from there offer restitution to the Divine. Nor, again, do I mean that we need to demythologize the Jesus of the Gospels in order to discover the true Galilean peasant hidden behind. Instead, I am talking about apprehending the stories in the Synoptic Gospels as narratives of a man attested by God (Acts 2:22). This is the contribution that the Synoptic Gospels have to make to our understanding of what it means for Jesus to be human.

The Synoptic Gospels offer a rich depiction of idealized, eschatological human agency in the person of Jesus. This is not merely a portico into some deeper mystery of Jesus’s identity hidden in the texts, but is its own many-roomed house. Because these texts do not depict Jesus as God, they consistently depict Jesus and God as separate characters: God in charge, Jesus subordinate; God as father, Jesus as son; God as all-knowing, the son as limited in some ways; God remains in heaven, not intervening, while Jesus is crucified on earth below.¹⁷ Because Jesus is an idealized human, he is the demonstration that God is with God’s people; he enacts God’s own authority to forgive sins; he exercises dominion over even the wind and the waves — as well as the spirits that are hostile to humanity. Through Jesus’s hands the creative power of God is at work to feed thousands in the wilderness. Through Jesus’s submission to the father, the father brings redemption to Israel. Any reading of the Synoptic Gospels has to do justice to both of these dynamics. Jesus and God (not just the son and the father) are distinct characters. And Jesus is the human through whom God’s authority, and we might even say identity, is being put on display in the world. This is what it means for Jesus to be an idealized human figure. This is the contribution to our understanding of the New Testament picture of Jesus that the Synoptic Gospels uniquely offer.

D. WHAT THIS STUDY IS NOT

1. NOT A THEORY OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS

As I have intimated already, this study is not a study of how the Christology of the early church developed. Such motion-picture depictions are important, but this study is, instead, an assessment of three frames. This means that the study raises questions for some readers that it simply does not attempt to answer. For instance, those who see preexistence or other such divine Christology in the genuine Pauline letters might ask how such earlier developments could not be reflected in the later, written Gospels. It is a fair question, one for which there might be any one of several possible answers. But on the other hand, the assumption of a divine Christology in Paul should not be determinative for our reading of the Gospels, and the latter must be allowed, in the scholarly movement from particular data to general theories, to offer their unique claims about Jesus without being forced to fit into preconceptions that are created either by subsequent church history or by larger theories of Christological development.

2. NOT A SUSTAINED CONVERSATION WITH GRECO-ROMAN LITERATURE

Despite the universal recognition in New Testament scholarship that Judaism and its Greco-Roman environment are mutually intertwined, particular studies and even systems of schooling tend to focus on one or the other.¹⁸ In the analysis of early Christology, several recent studies have devoted themselves to bringing Christian claims into conversation with non-Jewish Greco-Roman sources.

David Litwa has pursued such an explanatory field with studies in Paul and in the early Jesus tradition more broadly.¹⁹ In Iesus Deus, he lays out the importance of directly engaging the broader Hellenistic milieu rather than following the path of the scholars who are my primary interlocutors. He sees the work of Hurtado, for instance, as betraying the idea that deification would have to be brought into Judaism from without, from a Greco-Roman realm of thought, rather than something that might be an expression of Hellenized Judaism.²⁰ Because Judaism was already Hellenized, however, Litwa cautions that such an approach will inevitably leave the story unbalanced.²¹

In his study of Jesus as son of God, Michael Peppard deploys a similar grid to a similar end.²² He aims to get behind Christian commitments entailed in fourth-century confessions in order to help readers better apprehend the connotations of divine sonship in the first century. When it came to being the son of a god, the model of adoption loomed larger in the first-century social reality than disputes about the begetting or making of sons. Divine sons were empowered to rule and to be heirs of their divine adoptive fathers.²³ He critiques the work of Hengel and Hurtado, and to a lesser extent James Dunn, for being insufficiently attuned to the importance of Roman data for understanding Jewish deployments of the term son of God.²⁴ Peppard goes on to discuss son of God terminology within a Roman rubric in which the distinction between divine and human is not so neatly drawn as it appears to be in the proponents of early divine Christology such as Hurtado and Bauckham, and in which the adopted emperor was the most widespread point of contact for such a title.

Both Litwa and Peppard raise important issues, not just for the study of early Christology, but also for the study of the New Testament across the board. And yet, to return to Litwa’s framing of the issue, the argument about the pervasiveness of Hellenization, and its importance for reading the New Testament, is a double-edged sword because it underscores that the Judaism with which scholars are comparing the New Testament is, itself, Hellenized Judaism.²⁵ This, in turn, raises questions about the value of direct comparisons with non-Jewish Hellenistic elements. The Jewish predecessors with which the New Testament depictions of Jesus are being compared, both in this study and in the studies of my primary conversation partners, are themselves the same Hellenized Judaism within which the early Christian tradition arose. In choosing such a focus, scholars are not eliminating Hellenization from their field of vision, but are homing in on one sprawling set of communities who expressed their religious conviction in ways that were to some degree Hellenized. The choice to focus on Judaism is not a choice to eliminate the Greco-Roman world from consideration, but to focus on one set of data that contains within itself already those Hellenized markers — and which chose at points, whether consciously or unconsciously, ways to assimilate or reject aspects of that culture. Within the Hellenized world, Jewish people were still attempting to live out and to articulate their unique story as told in scripture and lived through various defining rituals and observance of a unique set of laws. Thus, the recent attempts by Hurtado, Bauckham, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis to focus on Jewish texts and practices is not an ignoring of the Hellenization endemic to early Judaism and Christianity; it is an attempt to compare like with like: Hellenized Jewish texts with Hellenized Jewish texts. The apparent strength of Litwa’s approach might, in fact, be its weakness. By making direct comparisons between the New Testament and Greco-Roman texts that bear no Jewish markers, connections might be drawn that were consciously or unconsciously eschewed either by the Hellenized Jewish community at large or by the Hellenized Jewish followers of Jesus that rendered the early tellings of his appearance, work, and exaltation.

Both Litwa and Peppard have raised an important caution flag about focusing too singly on the Jewish context of the early Jesus tradition; and both studies offer some measure of important Christological corrective due to their broadening of the field of vision. The current study, however, mines these works for their contributions and debates them where they seem to me to go astray, without attempting the wholesale work of imagining how the Jesus stories might have been heard by the average Roman on the street. The narrative cues to the readers, noted above, direct them from the very first verses of each Gospel to find the significance of the story, and its needful interpretive grid, in the Jewish context. It might thus be argued that in following the advocates of early divine Christology into conversation grounded on biblical and post-biblical texts that this study focuses on the implied authors of the stories rather than on actual readers. It may well be that the discrepancies between my primary conversation partners and the work of Peppard and Litwa mirror discrepancies between what the stories meant to their real authors and what they meant to the first auditors.

3. NOT A FULL-ORBED CHRISTIAN CHRISTOLOGY

This book does not aim to say everything that there is to say about Christology, either the Christology found in the New Testament or the Christology of the Christian faith. In repeatedly arguing that divine or preexistence Christology is not implied or necessary for making sense of various Gospel texts, I am not thereby arguing either that divine and preexistence Christologies are absent from the New Testament or that they are wrong. Divine and preexistence Christologies can be found in the New Testament, including John’s Gospel, the Christ hymn of Colossians 1, and the opening salvo of Hebrews.

My argument, then, is not that these components of Jesus’s identity are unattested in the New Testament, but that they are not (significantly) constitutive of the Christologies that empower the narratives of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. A different paradigm is at work. This does have ramifications for the larger Christological posture of Christians. First, the battle for a divine Christ has been so deeply engrained into the collective church psyche that for many Christians it is difficult to imagine a more important thing that could be said about Jesus. Indeed, one wonders if the resurgence in early high Christology is not, at least in part, fueled by the sentiment that to speak of the humanity of Jesus is to engage in a colossal exercise of missing the point. But if we recognize that Jesus in his humanity is the subject matter of these canonical lives of Jesus in ways that profoundly signify the Christology being deployed, then we have to step back and reassess this posture. It might be that the only way to truly make sense of these narrated Christologies is to recognize that in them the human Jesus is precisely the point. It may be that the pious posture of affirming Jesus’s divinity is keeping readers from receiving the story that has actually been given.

Second, in my various exposures to Christology in both academic and ecclesiastical settings, the understanding of Jesus’s humanity has been thin, and this has been part and parcel with a thin Christian anthropology more generally. Here I hope that my book helps even if the majority are not persuaded by its thesis. That is to say, even if readers are not convinced that idealized human Christology is sufficient to explain who Jesus is, I hope that it will convince most that idealized human Christology is both necessary for understanding his story and a crucial, often missing component in the Christian conceptuality.

E. RECENT PROPOSALS FOR EARLY HIGH CHRISTOLOGY

The purpose of this section is to survey some recent proposals for early high (i.e., divine) Christology. This section is not intended as a review of literature per se, or as a full plotting of the landscape of Christology studies, low and high. Rather than such a broad survey, I have laid out in more detail representative and influential arguments for the family of positions that I aim to offer an alternative to in my own proposal. If there is a resemblance among most of the studies surveyed here, it is in a general methodology that articulates some unique facet of God’s identity and then demonstrates how this facet is predicated of Jesus as well. Often, these studies are quite careful to circumscribe particular aspects of the divine identity as being hard lines separating the Deity from all creatures, thus homing in on a particular aspect of Jesus’s identity that shows him being placed on the divine side of the creator-creature divide. As I indicate throughout the ensuing engagements, a good part of my argument is devoted to reimagining the relationship between unique divine attributes and others who might bear them.

One challenging dynamic of these studies bears pointing out. While they are engaging the Christological question of Jesus’s identity, they are all attempting, at the same time, to be faithful to the historical contexts and content of the texts under consideration. This means that at the same time that they are piling up correlations between God and Jesus, and telling the reader how Jesus is, for instance, sharing in the divine identity, they are also often careful to not say that Jesus is being depicted as God, or that Jesus is being depicted as divine.²⁶ The unwillingness to cross such a line is commendable, but it often leaves the reader with a somewhat fuzzy conclusion. Jesus is being depicted as identified with God, but the two characters are consistently distinguished. This is at times said to be the tension that then finds clarification and explanation in the developing God-man Christology of the church. Part of the challenge of these studies, as I read them, is that the rhetorical effect of the arguments is often poised to lead readers to draw the very conclusions that the authors themselves are too careful to make. The Gospel texts are, in fact, full of mystery, luring readers to enter into the story to more fully understand who Jesus is. The following writers, in different ways, suggest that the mystery unfolds as it approaches the paradoxical divinity of Jesus, his sharing in the identity of the God of Israel.

1. RICHARD BAUCKHAM

In many ways, Richard Bauckham is the figure who looms most largely behind the current project. Not only has his particular thesis been widely influential, but also the form of the argument, in which Jesus’s identity is understood against a background of strict Jewish monotheism that isolates certain actions, ascriptions, or attributes as pertaining to God alone, has taken on various mutations among other New Testament scholars.

Bauckham claims that the identity of God is known through God’s exclusive role as creator and ruler of all things, as recipient of worship, and as bearer of the divine name YHWH.²⁷ Sharing in the work of creation and rule and the ascription of worship are the three categories that carry the most weight in Bauckham’s foundational essay. With the establishment of these categories as the realm of God’s unique purview, and articulating these realms as the identifying markers of who God is, Bauckham has created the category of divine identity. These actions and ascriptions identify God, and any other who is so depicted is being identified with Israel’s God. This work has compelled widespread assent. The notion of divine identity, and of Jesus in the New Testament playing roles that are otherwise reserved for God alone, has proven to be fertile soil for explorations of New Testament Christology. The following two scholars whose work I assess, Kavin Rowe and Richard Hays, develop Bauckham’s thesis in different ways (though Hays does so more explicitly than Rowe), taking hold of the conceptual framework of divine identity Christology and expanding it in more general ways to show how Jesus shares in the divine identity in the Gospels.

When Bauckham turns to a brief discussion of divine identity in the Gospel of Mark, it is notable that the qualifications for divine identity become more fluid. The transfiguration is supposed to be a revelation of Jesus in the glory of his divine identity, but in that scene there is neither application of the divine name, nor affirmation of a place in creation or rule over the cosmos, nor does Jesus receive worship.²⁸ In Mark 1 Jesus is referred to as the LORD from Isaiah 40, but whether this is a signal that he inherently bears the name YHWH is not so clear.

Then, in a footnote, Bauckham lists passages in which Jesus’s sharing in the divine identity is supposed to be signaled: the scribes’ question of who but God alone can forgive sins (2:7); the disciples’ question about who Jesus is because even the wind and sea obey him (4:41); Jesus’s self-declaration when walking on water (6:50); Jesus’s statement that no one is good but God alone (10:18); Jesus’s linking of his authority with the authority given to John the Baptist (11:27-33); Jesus’s query about how David can call the Christ his Lord (12:37); and Jesus’s claim to be the son of man who will sit at God’s right hand (14:62).²⁹ Of these, the only two that might fit Bauckham’s own rubric for sharing in the unique divine identity are the water episodes, which might be ways of indicating that Jesus shares God’s unique rule over the cosmos, though they need not be read that way. The last example explicitly falls outside Bauckham’s rubric inasmuch as it is sitting on God’s own throne, not sitting next to God, which constitutes a violation of monotheistic sovereignty over the cosmos according to his established framework.

I do not doubt that these passages all serve to identify Jesus with God in some manner, but I do question whether they signal an identification after the particular fashion that Bauckham has advanced. My purpose at this juncture is simply to point out that Bauckham himself allows for the general, conceptual framework he has established, that of playing the part of God, to exceed the specific measures he himself has articulated by which we know that such divine identity is depicted. It is therefore all the more important that my study of Old Testament and early Judaism demonstrate not only that numerous Jewish figures share in God’s rule and receive worship, while a few others become the subjects of what were originally biblical YHWH texts, but also that the general notion of playing roles otherwise assigned to God is so widespread as to be nearly ubiquitous.

Overall, the argument as Bauckham advances it contains two major problems. First, there is abundant evidence that appears to disprove his case, including some he himself discusses. Bauckham recognizes that the Parables of Enoch depicts the son of man figure as both sitting on God’s own throne (what Bauckham sees as the telltale sign that someone is sharing in God’s unique sovereignty over the world) and receiving worship.³⁰ Bauckham discusses this evidence under the somewhat lame rubric of the exception that proves the rule. It might be better to say that it is the exception that disproves the rule. It is true that this figure does not participate in the work of creation, the other significant marker of divine identity, but the appearance of such an alleged transgression of Jewish monotheism would surely be more shocking than Bauckham lets on were his standards of measure as strong as he claims. Hurtado notes the weakness of Bauckham’s framework: "Contra Bauckham’s claims, the representation of Christ as participating in God’s sovereignty (e.g., sitting on/sharing God’s throne) is not unique, and Bauckham’s attempts to deny the analogies in ancient Jewish texts (e.g., Moses’ enthronement in The Exagoge of Ezekiel) are not persuasive."³¹ This study of early Judaism demonstrates that human beings playing roles otherwise assigned to God alone is a recurring theme in both scripture itself and the writings of its later adherents. Examples of humans receiving worship are expanded to include Adam, Moses, and Solomon, among others. And innumerable instances of humans functioning as co-rulers with God are also on offer.

This brings us to the second and more conceptual weakness of Bauckham’s thesis. His explorations of who might be depicted as co-ruler with God or co-recipient of worship focus too narrowly on angelic figures, whereas in the biblical and post-biblical tradition it is humans who are created to share in God’s rule over the earth. Humans, created in the image of God, or particular humans standing in for what humanity was meant to be, also function at times like images of other gods: objects the veneration of which signals veneration of the god whose image is represented. There is no one biblical or Jewish theology of humanity that lays out such claims and that commands the adherence of all other biblical and Jewish theologizing about humanity or about particular humans who play special roles for God in heaven or on earth. However, I demonstrate that the case of the son of man in 1 Enoch is not so anomalous as Bauckham suggests. But we have to be looking in the right place.³² Rather than focus on angelic or other semi-divine intermediary figures, I look at idealized human figures throughout the Jewish tradition. There we find recurring instances in which a person’s (or humanity’s) very purpose is to play the role of God, whether in heaven or on earth.

It is impossible to overstate the radical claim that Bauckham is making. Although he, like most of the other authors surveyed here, strives to avoid the ontological language of saying Jesus is God, what most people would mean by such a phrase is precisely what he offers. In his introduction to Jesus and the God of Israel, he says the following:

The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology. . . . When we think in terms of divine identity, rather than divine essence or nature, which are not the primary categories for Jewish theology, we can see that the so-called divine functions which Jesus exercises are intrinsic to who God is. This Christology of divine identity is not a mere stage on the way to the patristic development of ontological Christology in the context of a Trinitarian theology. It is already a fully divine Christology, maintaining that Jesus Christ is intrinsic to the unique and eternal identity of God. The Fathers did not develop it so much as transpose it into a conceptual framework more concerned with the Greek philosophical categories of essence and nature.³³

If someone were to say that for Bauckham the very first followers of Jesus always thought that Jesus was God, they might be forgiven for transposing into common ecclesiastical parlance what Bauckham has stated in terms of his own depiction of early Judaism. But while I agree that Jesus performs innumerable divine functions, the burden of my chapter on scripture and early Judaism is