In my earlier posts I started to show the early Christians believed that because they were living at the very end of time.  This was an interim period between the time when the resurrection of the dead began with Jesus being raised and was soon to culminate with the general resurrection, in which all who had ever died would be brought back to life  to face judgment.  Most important for our purposes here, these Christians thought God had sent the Spirit upon them in fulfillment of the prophecies of Scripture, especially Joel 2. The Spirit was both the sign of the end of time and a helper for those living in it.  Since now God was closer to his people than ever, arguably since the Garden of Eden (as the End was beginning to be more like the Beginning), he communicated with them directly, as he had once upon a time.  Now was the time that he gave dreams, visions, and prophesies directly to people, not just isolated prophets, in order to convey to them [...]

During the earlier parts of this thread on the Trinity, I kept thinking that by the time I got to the Holy Spirit there wouldn’t be much to say: it’s all about the Father and Son.  And even as I started planning this final part on the Spirit, I thought I would do it in a post, maybe two.  But now that I’m digging into it, I’m realizing that the one-or-two post thing doesn’t make sense without a lot of background.  Now I’ve decided I need to take the long path to get there.  Consider it the scenic route. I’ve been talking so far about the Spirit in the Hebrew Bible – from Genesis 1 up through the prophets.  The Spirit is far more important for early Christianity, and hence for the New Testament,  than for ancient Israelite religion (and hence the Old Testament), but I don’t believe I’ve ever articulated the reasons fully, either in writing or speaking.  For a long time, I’ve thought it works like this, in a nutshell.   (This may seem [...]

There is a whole lot more that could be said about the Christ-poem in Philippians 2.   You could literally write an entire book on just this passage.  In fact, people *have* written books on just this passage.   The most important one, a classic in the field, is by Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ (which in earlier editions was called Carmen Christi) (which is a Latin phrase that, unsurprisingly, means A Hymn of Christ  :-) ).  This passage has had more ink spilled over it by scholars over the last century than almost any other in the entire Bible (with the exception of John 1:1-18).   In any event, to make sense of what I want to say here, it would help, if you haven’t done so, to read the other posts I’ve made on it. Here I just want to mention briefly an interpretation that is sometimes floated for the passage which takes it in a very different way indeed, as not being about incarnation at all.  In this alternative interpretation, the passage is not [...]

My last couple of posts have been on the "Christ Poem" found in Philippians 2:6-10.  Many years ago when I talked about the poem and argued that it was in fact a poem, a reader (who apparently knew Greek!) objected that the poetic lines I suggested don't actually work.  I answered that question before moving on to showing just how amazing the poem is: it ends by giving the resurrected Jesus the authority of God Almighty himself. That may not seem surprising to Christians who already think it's true.  But just imagine how it would resonate with someone living in the first century who knew that Jesus was publicly executed for crimes against the state.  It might help if you imagine how you would feel if someone made a claim like this for someone who was condemned as an enemy of the of the state for insurrection against the United States who suffered the death penalty -- and someone claimed he had become God, the Lord of the universe.  Uh, really?  Yup, that's what Paul's [...]

[…]

In my posts on Christology so far I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status. In this view he was not God from eternity past or a pre-existent being. He was a human being who was taken up to the level of divinity at some point (or, in the case of the Virgin Birth, that he came into existence at a point in time as a person who was partially human partially divine). But there was another kind of Christology which was also very early – earlier, in fact, than our earliest surviving Christian writer, Paul. This is the view [...]

In my previous post I began to speak about the “incarnation” Christology found famously in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, 2:6-11.  There are a lot of other things I want to say about this passage, all of them relevant to the issues I’ve been discussing.  The first and most important thing is that it has been widely recognized by scholars for a very long time that this passage is something that Paul appears to be quoting, that it is not simply part of the prose letter.  Moreover, it is frequently called (probably wrongly) a “hymn” (that’s probably wrong because – as I’ve been told by an expert in the field of ancient music, it doesn’t actually scan as music).   But in any event, it is highly structured in a balanced fashion and thus seems to be more like a poem than like prose.  The reasons for thinking that Paul is quoting rather than composing it are pretty compelling, and I will get to them eventually.  For now I want to point out the rhythmic structure. [...]