Loading...In this post I can begin to explain what I *think* is the point of contention between Michael Bird and me on the question of how the followers of Jesus came to think he was God. When I say that I “think” this is the main point, it’s because I’m not completely sure. As I’ve pointed out, Michael never laid out an alternative hypothesis for how the early Christian views of Christ came into existence or developed. Moreover, since he never said how he thought it happened, he obviously didn’t mount a case for his view or indicate what he thought was the evidence for it. So it’s a little hard to know how to assess his view.
What is clear is that he disagrees with a fundamental point in my view, and his main talk at the debate was focused on this point.
My thesis is simple. During his lifetime Jesus’ followers did not consider him to be God (as the Gospels themselves indicate so well). After his lifetime they did (as seen, for example, in Paul). Why did they not think so during his life but did think so after his death? It was for one and only one reason: they came to think he had bee raised from the dead and exalted to heaven.
In the ancient world there were stories about a person (here and there) being taken up to the divine realm after death. What did it mean for someone to be exalted to heaven? It meant that…
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Michael Bird’s most popular books are The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians, and Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message.
While an exalted view of adopted adult males existed among elite Romans and may have extending to the Greek-speaking regions of the empire, how sure can we be that this view perpetrated the psyches of those whom you like to describe as poor, uneducated Galilean fisherman and peasants? Are not these the people who had the first reaction the resurrection implied by Jesus’ appearances?
My sense is that understanding widely practiced social arrangements was not dependent on literacy and education; our real problem, of course, is that we have no writings from uneducated peasants to know *what* they knew. But my sense is that people did know to some extent how the great and might lived (they knew there were emperors, e.g., and that Tiberius was not Augustus’s natural son)
Professor Ehrman, I am curious to find out your views concerning this quote from Matthew’s Gospel, 27:51-53:
“51And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. 52 The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many.…”
My question is this: would Christian readers also think that these saints had been adopted as sons of God by virtue of being raised from the dead?
Warm Regards,
Probably not. My sense is that they thought these saints would die again later — they weren’t raised immortal.
I feel absolutely dependent on God. If He wanted to wipe me out of existence, or deprive me of any ability I have, I would be helpless to stop him.
As exalted as Christ might be after his resurrection, *Christ is just as absolutely dependent on God as I am.* What would Christ do if God wanted to take away his power or wipe him out of existence? He could not do anything at all if God chose to throw him and all humanity into punishment for no reason (not saying that would happen).
Christ and the angel Gabriel are exactly like anyone else in their absolute dependence on God and helplessness before Him. I am explaining this at length because nobody who has this view would think of Jesus as divine after the resurrection.
Just a minor point…am I right in thinking Octavius was *related* to Julius Caesar, somehow? (And if he was…were *many* of those favored adoptees related to their adoptive fathers, as nephews or cousins, rather than total strangers the men had met and come to admire?)
Re Christology, you can distinguish between “exaltation” and “incarnation” without mentioning this “adoption” business at all. So what do you think Bird’s position actually is, concerning what the early Christians thought had happened?
Yes, Octavius was his nephew. Often the adoptees were related, but not always. I’ll get to what I think Michael’s position is in the next post or so.
They usually tried to keep it in the family, sure. But somehow “Only Begotten Nephew of God” doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it now? Jesus would sound silly praying to his Uncle. 😉
If, as argued here, adoption represents so high a view of Christ, why then did Matthew and Luke, independently, or so it seems, abandon this notion in favor of Jesus being God’s son because God had impregnated Mary directly? I would seem from your argument that Christ was now going somewhat backwards rather than higher up in stature if he in now the non-adopted son.
Because they wanted an even HIGHER Christology!
Yes, I see that. But, if Jesus moves from the adopted son in Mark (earlier, Octavius) to the conceived son in Luke (later, Caesarion), how is this move seen to be higher in light of your argument?
The difference is that when talking specifically about *God* as the father, the “natural” father is obviously important, since then Christ is partly divine by “nature”
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that if a scholar *personally* believes Jesus was a preexistent divine being, he or she won’t be able to understand “how the earliest Christians came to regard him as divine” in the same way as a non-believer. Someone who starts from the premise that Jesus *was* divine will *have to* speculate that at least some of his disciples sensed it – and probably mentioned what they sensed to other “followers,” even before his death.
It’s as if a person living today was *sure*, for some reason, that – I’ll make it ridiculous – Jesus had blue eyes. *Of course*, they’d say, his contemporaries would have noticed those blue eyes! How could they not?
Another way of looking at it:
You don’t believe in any kind of afterlife. I – while not presuming to claim certainty – incline strongly to belief in reincarnation.
So there might be some type of situation in which I’d think, “*If* reincarnation is a fact, such-and-such may have happened.” And you, taking for granted that reincarnation *isn’t* a fact, wouldn’t see any possibility of whatever-it-was having happened.
What I’m arguing is that a believer’s assessment of a situation may – inevitably – differ from a non-believer’s.
Very good analysis. It makes absolute sense that the earliest Christians would have had an adoptionist view of Jesus, which as you say is amazing in itself. My question is why is it so important for evangelicals to hold on to even more exalted views ie the virgin birth and the co-eternal status of Jesus . It would be great to hear your views.
I would say that for modern evangelicals, it is so important because it is in scripture. Were it not (if the new testament were entirely adoptionist) then it would be “so important” to them to maintain THAT view.
Given scripture is mixed, I think it is easier to read the “lower” Christology “up into” the higher than it would be to ignore the higher, explicit Christology of say the Gospel of John.
And of course, they knew Jesus was a natural-born man, and SOME believed (and some verses in the NT bear this out, esp. in Luke/Acts) that Jesus wasn’t elevated/adopted at his resurrection to Christhood, but at his baptism, which you point out was changed to “this is my son, in whom…” from ‘This day I have adopted you.” (Luke 3:22) in “Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p. 49 “Anti-Adoptionistic Corruptions.” I’m not sure why this is seen by you as a “late” view, following the Church “fathers” who clearly also had an agenda to make this view “go away” and portray it as a Second Century viewpoint, when it clearly makes more sense to view “mere” humanity and adoption as a Prophet of God (using some of the same language as in the Prophet books) as the first run of the evolution to godhood.
Dr. Ehrman, while I do agree with you that the adoptionist belief was the first christological view of the incipient church, the sense I get from reading the synoptics, esp. Mark, is what you have at times called a Separationist view. That is, Jesus the man and Christ the spiritual being were two distinct “persons”. But I don’t think it was like how the Separationists of the later centuries imagined it, with the Christ person being something like the Christ of Christianity. It was more like Jesus the man was “possessed” by the spiritual/angelic being we would associate with the Christ. Indeed, one of the reasons that demon possession and exorcism play such a featured role in Mark (and, thus, Matthew and Luke) is that Jews at that time (esp. rural bumpkin Jews) thoroughly believed in bodily possession by spiritual beings, both malevolent and benevolent. In the case of Jesus, I think the disciples believed that Jesus had come to be possessed by a benevolent spirit (i.e. an angel), and it was this “holy” spirit (Ruach haQodesh) that spoke through Jesus, allowing Jesus to prophecy. The disciples believed that Jesus had literally become a conduit through which God spoke, just like the prophets of old. And it was this divine spirit — the Ruach haQodesh — that entered Jesus upon John’s baptism, and it was this spirit which left his physical body when he died on the cross.
This notion may seem bizarre to modern Christians, because they are usually unfamiliar with the ancient Jewish beliefs. The ancient Jews saw human beings as made up of three parts: the physical flesh (basar), the animating soul (nephesh), and the divine breath (neshemah). (The basar, nephesh and neshemah were analagous to the Greek sarka, psyche and pneuma, respectively). Jesus the man was made up of a physical, fleshy form (his basar) and an animating soul (his nephesh). He also possessed the divine spark (neshamah) that every human being inherited from Adam at the creation (Gen. 2:7). When ancient Jews believed that a person became possessed by a demon, malevolent or otherwise, they believed that spirit took control over that person via their neshemah so that it competed with their animating spirit (nephesh) over control of the body. In the case of Jesus, the disciples believed that Jesus was, essentially, possessed by a benevolent spirit, sent by God down to earth to proclaim the coming End Times and Kingdom, using Jesus as a conduit. Once we are able to wrap our heads around this concept, the gospels’ christological views, esp. that of Mark’s, make a whole lot more sense.
For instance, when Jesus talks about God and His Kingdom having arrived on earth, Jesus is merely talking about the Ruach haQodesh making its appearance on stage at the beginning of the End Times drama, just as prophets such as Joel (3:1-2 MT) said would happen. It would also explain why, upon his return to his home town post-baptism, everyone looked at Jesus as if he were a completely different person, because the disciples actually believed Jesus had become possessed by an otherworldly spirit, making him act and talk like a totally different person (Mark 3:21-35, 6:2-4).
Interesting. I would encourage Prof. Ehrman to respond to this line of thinking, at least briefly.
It’s hard for most of us, with our idea of kingship that derives from the European medieval era, where primogeniture was the ruling principle (and indeed, the reason for the Church of England breaking away from the Church of Rome, and therefore ultimately for the existence of the King James bible you and I assume Mr. Bird as well first read as boys) to realize how non-hereditary the position of Emperor of the Roman Empire truly was.
If we consider Julius Caesar the first Emperor (it’s debatable), there were fully ten of them before the usurping general Vespasian’s son Titus–and after that, no natural son of an Emperor succeeded him until the unfortunately named Commodus succeeded his father Marcus Aurelius, and it’s not just in the movies that this did not turn out well. As a general rule, the best emperors were never the ones that succeeded their fathers. Wise emperors would choose a potential successor based on merit, and make him an adopted son, to grant him added legitimacy, point the way to the desired succession.
Not that poor Caesarion was ever given a chance to prove his worth.
So yes, your point is well-taken. In that era, being the blood son of a ruler meant far less than being chosen by him for some high position. Somebody should have told Jeb Bush. 😉
Is the reason that Jesus’ early followers were able to come to the conclusion that God had adopted Jesus was because they were apocalyptic, they believed Jesus’ apocalyptic message, they were extremely emotional involved in this message, to the point of causing themselves to believe that they had seen a vision of Jesus alive and pass this message of visions to others who also believe for the same reason and then come to the conclusion that God has raised Jesus from the dead in order to adopt him so that he can be given all of God’s glory, grandeur, and power? Maybe believing this also brings them some comfort after experiencing the tragedy of seeing Jesus executed on the cross.
Is Mark’s Christology quite similar to Paul’s? (i.e. much closer to Paul’s than John’s). I’m wondering if still by around 70 CE, the ideas about Jesus were “relatively” similar, but soon thereafter (around the time of the writing of the other gospels) began diverging rather quickly for whatever reasons.
On another note, soon after reading both HJBG and HGBJ (just after they came out), I wrote on Michael Bird’s Patheos blog that I wanted my money back for purchasing HGBJ, primarily for the reason that he and the other co-authors had not provided a clear explanation for their counter position (and that I should have invested in a case of beer instead). I feel that he still hadn’t offered any clear explanation during your recent NOBTS debate (nearly two years after both books were released). This isn’t meant as a slam against Michael, and I suspect that his hands are tied by his theological leanings. But then again, maybe I’m jumping the gun if he and his coauthors are releasing Jesus “Way” Before the Gospels on your next Tuesday’s release date.
Mark does not have a view of Christ as a pre-existent being who became human, so no, in that way they are not alike. Their views of the significance of Jesus’ death, however, are very similar.
This is ridiculous. Can’t Michael just tell us what he thinks?
Rofl! I like the way you put things!
YIgal Allin concludes in his article (see link below) that not a single source indicates the legal status of adoption in first century Jewish society, unlike in the Greco-Roman world. His subject is, of course, the presumed adoption of Jesus by Joseph in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. But applying the same logic, it’s possible to argue that adoptionistic Christology should be ascribed to Hellenistic cultural and social influence, and so presumably was not a creation of the original 12 apostles but can be attributed to Paul – within a very few years of the Crucifixion.
http://www.academia.edu/239076/Jesus_Son_of_God_and_Son_of_David_The_Adoption_of_Jesus_into_the_Davidic_Line
That’s a really nice point, Hari, and a very interesting paper!
Professor Ehrman,
Just to shift the topic a little bit…has anyone in NT studies raised a problem about how we know that Jesus was an “itinerant preacher”? I have a very hard time understanding how this description of Jesus came to be so unquestioningly accepted.
After his baptism, he seems to have gone around preaching mainly in the settlements around the sea of Galilee, which is a very small area indeed; and one of the evangelists states that he came to live in Capernaum, which suggests he wasn’t homeless during this time. This limited amount of travelling hardly warrants the description “itinerant preacher”; if a carpenter were to travel this same amount from his home in Capernaum to make money through taking on projects, nobody would say “He’s an itinerant carpenter” — as he would just be a man with a home who travelled for work. To give another analogy: I can see, Professor Ehrman, that you travel a lot to give lectures; yet I doubt anyone calls you an “itinerant professor” on that account. 🙂
Beyond his local preaching, Jesus went to Jerusalem for the festivals that all religious Jews took seriously, and preached along the way. None of this amounts to a reason to think he was an “itinerant holy man”; Paul, on the other hand, seems to fit the “itinerant” description much better.
I don’t think it’s been an issue for NT scholars generally. By itinerant preacher they simply mean that Jesus went around from village to town to rural area preaching his message, rather than preaching just in one spot all the time.
Bart points out–I think in one of his Great Courses lectures–that the Greek word “tekton” does not mean “carpenter” specifically but only “someone who works with his hands.”
I’m more curious than ever to know if there is a plausible, alternative view. Are you debating anyone else about this same subject?
You might read the book How God Became Jesus; I’m not sure they object to the *overall* thesis of my book so much as the details.
I want to ask about monasticism. When did it become important part of christain life and did the early christains think that renouncing sexuality is a way of getting close to God?or was it also a later developement?
The standard view, I think, is that monasticism starts becoming an identifiable “thing” in the fourth Christian century, that in a way it (like other rigorously ascetic forms of Xty) was a way to show complete and absolute commitment to God, in a way that involved suffering, once Christianity was no longer an opposed and persecuted religion (of course ascetic forms of Christianity can themselves be traced way back to the beginning)
I may be wrong but in one of your videos i heard you say that some christains even believed that salvation is attained not by believing the atonement but by renouncing sex.(i think it was in the video about “did jesus marry”)
Fortunately, that’s something I’ve never thought.
In “How Jesus Became God,” you capably and clearly describe how both ancient Romans and ancient Jews made some humans into gods. I recently came across a similar phenomenon in Taoism. Evidently Lao-Tzu was thought to be “divine” and evidently there is an ancient book ,”Tao Te Ching,” attributed to Lao-Tzu, but this book was probably written by multiple authors and probably contains much legendary material. Indeed, there is dispute about whether Lao-Tzu may have been a legendary rather than a historical character. Lao-Tzu may have lived 300 to 500 years before Jesus. And so on and so forth … Sounds sort of familiar doesn’t it????
I’ve often wondered if Jesus was considered the son of God because so many of the Roman emperors were considered “sons of god” and they wanted to elevate Jesus to that status as well.
Yup, that’s a big part of it. I talk about this in my book.
I don’t think you’ve really dealt with a point made by a couple of posters. You assign great importance to the Romans’, at least, having considered it *better* to be someone’s adopted son than to be his natural son. But if you’ve used that to stress the importance of Jesus’s being called the adopted son of God, you can’t logically go on to say Matthew’s and Luke’s making him God’s *natural* son was a higher Christology!
You certainly seem to believe that making him God’s natural son was *intended* as a higher Christology. So maybe you shouldn’t put so much emphasis on that exalted Roman concept of adoption?
Yes, it’s a little different when you’re talking about GOD as the Father. Then a “birth” son is actually of the same nature/essence as God, adn that’s a different kettle of fish. (With human adoption the adoptive father is no more a human than the birth father)
Bart, no doubt you’re familiar with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He knew there were many stories to be told by or about the common people who rarely made or wrote history, as distinct from established histories that, almost always, have been written by the victors. He found plenty to work with. But in the case of “poor, uneducated [Jewish] Galilean fisherman and peasants” (see Scott), we apparently must surmise or guess or believe because we want or need to believe that adoption had a similar significance to them as it had for more pagans. Thesis: If adoption, for Jewish, Galilean Jews–tektons mostly–did not have beliefs about or practices of adoption that had a similar significance to them as it had for pagan, and if we are without evidence that they did (which is apparently, the state of affairs), then the probability is that those apostles, disciples and other Jews who witnessed the resurrected Jesus or who believed he was resurrected would not have had a belief that Jesus was made divine upon his ascension. Having a “sense” that they would have known about some of the practices of the high and mighty is not enough. The beliefs of those who continued to believe that he was God’s messiah most likely limited to an expectation that he would be returned to do what a messiah was expected to do. If they did not believe he was divine or was made divine and did not believe that his death and resurrection had any salvific power, then by what criteria would we call them “Christians”? They would still be non-Christian Jews, no? It seems it would have to come down to the evidence of Paul’s letter in which he claims to have received the Gospel from those who came before him. I know you apply the criterion of dissimilarity here since receiving the Gospel from others is an unlikely admission from the full-of-himself Paul. But sometimes Paul puffs himself up and distances himself from the Apostles, even placing himself above them and other times, he plays it humble and tries to persuade his readers of his ties to the Apostles, of his being in the lineage of those to whom the risen Christ was revealed. So, I’m not sure we have dissimilarity here.
I think I am missing something here. Do you think early Christians took the idea from the Romans?
Did early Christians apply the Roman idea of the son of god to Jesus?
It wasn’t merely a Roman idea. It was an idea widely held in the Roman empire.
Hi Bart:
As you no doubt recall, Bird responded to your question about what his historical construction looked like by deferring to the work of Larry Hurtado. If you haven’t already done so, I would suggest that you read Hurtado’s work, especially (a) Lord Jesus Christ, (b) How On Earth Did Jesus Become a God?, and (c) various articles he’s written responding to his critics, especially his attempts to justify dreams and religous experiences as the catalyst for a monotheism that is supposedly ‘binitarian’ or ‘dyadic’ in its shape.
In conjunction with the perusal of Hurtado’s work, you’ll definitely want to read the work of his critics (see below), especially the work of Crispin Fletcher-Louis, who, in my judgment, has demolished Hurtado’s historical model, creating the need for a different explanation.
Crispin Fletcher-Louis apparently believes that the more plausible historical answer lies in pre-Christian precedents for “binitarian” monotheism, but I suspect that, once the dust of scholarly vetting has settled, his model will prove to be just as problematic as Hurtado’s has proven to be. I also suspect that, at the end of the day, some variation of James D.G. Dunn’s and Maurice Casey’s model will emerge as the new “emerging consensus”. Right now Hurtado is in the driver’s seat, but critics have flattened a few of his historical tires, and while Dunn is currently trailing him, I’m confident he’ll over take him in the end:-) That is to say, in the end, I think folks will begin to realize that language that has been interpreted as representing ‘binitarian’ monotheism has simply been misconstrued or over-interpreted.
~Sean Garrigan
Footnote:
Crispin Fletcher-Louis’s critique can be found, here (start with this one):
http://www.tyndalehouse.com/Bulletin/60=2009/1%20Fletcher-Louis.pdf
Adela Yarbro-Collins offers critical analysis Hurtado’s thesis, here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=4QIwvdHdrUkC&pg=PA55&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
She also touches on problems with both Hurtado’s and Bauckham’s theses in the book she co-authored with her husband, John J. Collins: “King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature” (Highly recommended)
William Horbury offers critical analysis, here:
http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/2/531.extract
Paula Fredricksen offers critical analysis, here:
http://www.bu.edu/religion/files/pdf/Lord-Jesus-Christ-devotion-to-Jesus-in-Early-Christiantiy.pdf
Paul Rainbow offers critical analysis, here:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561199?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
James D.G. Dunn offers critical analysis, here:
http://www.amazon.com/Parting-Ways-Christianity-Significance-Character/dp/0334029996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465047439&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Parting+of+the+Ways%2C+dunn
Maurice Casey offers critical analysis, here:
http://jnt.sagepub.com/content/27/1/83.full.pdf
And both last and least, I pointed out that there’s a Mûmakil in Hurtado’s room, here:
https://kazlandblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/on-the-problem-of-expectation/
Yes, I know Hurtado’s work quite intimately. (I’ve known him for years, and have read all of his books — but these two I read very deeply; I have some disagreements, but on the whole I’m actually addressing a slightly different issue.)
“I have some disagreements, but on the whole I’m actually addressing a slightly different issue.)”
True, you’re interested in Bird’s view about “How Jesus Became God” historically, where as Hurtado’s historical work doesn’t really get one beyond “How Jesus came to be an object of cultic devotion early in the life of the new Christian movement”. My point is that even Hurtado’s historical reconstruction, which doesn’t give Bird what he needs, is itself so problematic that a better understanding is required, in my judgment.
As you astutely observed during one of your dialogues with Bird (on the radio, I think), if the earliest Christians were hailing Jesus as “God” early on, wouldn’t that have been a central component of their teaching, i.e. “Wouldn’t they have talked about it?” (to paraphrase your question). It’s simply ridiculous to suggest that the apostles believed that Jesus was God Himself early on, but didn’t bother to mention that apprehension;-)
Your question is important, and it contains the seed from which a better consensus should emerge which must supplant Hurtado’s thesis. Why? Because if one would expect the early Christians to talk about Jesus as God Himself if that’s what they believed, and they surely would have included an apologetic for those who experienced cognitive dissonance over such a seemingly paradoxical proposition, then one would also expect the early Christians to talk about how remarkable it was for Jesus to be an object of cultic veneration, if such cultic veneration suggested what Hurtado believes it suggested (= ‘binitarian monotheism’).
It seems to me that the evidence in light of historical expectation points in the other direction: Just as the absence of early exclamations that Jesus was thought to be “God Himself” along with the expected supporting apologetic logically suggests that they didn’t believe that proposition early on, so likewise the absence of early exclamations that Jesus was an object of veneration in a manner that required a reshaping of monotheism in ‘binitarian’ terms along with the expected supporting apologetic logically suggests that they didn’t infer what Hurtado infers from those practices.
~Sean Garrigan
Although Jesus is usually assumed to be a God, it’s sometimes hard to know, when reading the New Testament, whether the authors thought Jesus was a man or a God. For instance, Mark portrays Jesus as a fallible prophet, not an almighty God, who is unable to perform miracles in his home town (see Mark 6:5). The prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is another example of this. In the prayer, Jesus is a man in agony and terror about his fate, terrified of his place in God’s plan, and petitioning God to change His plan! You would need to go through complicated mental gymnastics to explain the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane from a Trinitarian point of view. In fact, it doesn’t really make sense to see Jesus as any kind of God here, since it seems silly that a God would be terrified of his atoning death, because that is the only reason he would be on earth in the first place. Does it make sense that in a story about a God who came to earth to die to wipe out the sin debt of mankind, that this God would beg to abandon his post? After all, Jesus knows he has nothing to fear because he will just suffer for a few hours and eventually be resurrected: Jesus says “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise (Mark 9:31).” You can picture a human Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, doubting that he will be resurrected (and terrified by that) – doubts that Jesus would not have if he was a God.
Don’t know if you’ve read my book How Jesus Became God, but this is the issue I deal with there.
I have your book. I thought the examples I gave of Jesus being a fallible human prophet who couldn’t perform miracles in his home town, and my thoughts surrounding the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane that I gave above, supported your position. This is a fun blog!
And then there’s all the things “he said” that deny or imply that he is not God:
1. Mr 9:37 (plus Matthew 10:40, Luke 9:48, and John 13:20), “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”
2. Mark 10:18 “And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’ ”
3. Mark 12:29 Jesus said “Here, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” The words “our God” indicate that Jesus had a higher God over him, a stronger God than him.
4. Mr 13:32, “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
5. Matthew 7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
6. Matthew 19:17, Jesus responded to one who addressed him as “O good master”, saying: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God.”
7. Mt 24:36, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.
8. Luke 22:42 “…not my will but Thine be done”
9. Joh 5:19, “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise’.”
10. John 5:19 “Verily, verily I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do…”
11. John 5:30 “I can of myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is righteous, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.”
12. John 7:28-29 “…I have not come of myself. I was sent by One who has the right to send, and Him you do not know. I know Him because it is from Him I come; he sent me.”
13. John 7:16 “Jesus said: ‘My doctrine is not my own; it comes from Him who sent me.'”
14. John 8:40 “You are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God”
15. John 8:42 “Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but He sent me.’ ”
16. John 8:50 “And I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks and judges.”
17. John 10:29 “My Father is greater than all.”
18. John 14:10, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”
19. In John 14:28, Jesus says, “The Father is greater than I.”
20. John 15:2 “My Father takes away every branch in me that bears not fruit; he purges it; that it may bring forth more fruit.” Here, we see Jesus’ acknowledgement that he is an impefect sinner just like the rest of us; he too must be purged and purified.
21. John 20:17, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene to tell his followers: “I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.”
22. 1 Timothy, 2:5, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
Dear Bart,
I’ve watched the debate between Mike Licona and your colleague Dale Martin in which Licona made interesting argument. He was looking for a evidence of the existence of adoptionistic Christology in the 1st century when (as he said it) the only two authors who have some verses that can be interpreted in an adoptionistic way (Paul and Luke) certainly are not adoptionists! Furthermore, only evidence we have (he said) of adoptionistic Christology comes from the 2nd century and if one wants to argue on that basis that adoptionism was around in the 1st century also, then one can argue gnosticism was also around in the 1st century.
Hope you can see where he is going with that argument. How would you response to that? Thank’s!
Yes indeed. We frequently have evidence of views only in the writings of those who oppose them. But to argue that such views did not exist on those grounds is a little peculiar. It would be like someone in 1940 saying that Gnosticism didn’t exist because the only evidence we have for it is Irenaeus and Tertullian.
As a good student of your work, I went back to your book “How Jesus became God” where you talk about preliterary traditions in Paul’s epistles and Acts. It made everything much more clear for me. But I do have one question. In the book you ask yourself why would Luke put this preliterary tradition (which contained different christology) in his work when it is clear that Luke didn’t believe that Jesus was exalted at his resurrection (he had even higher christology). You provide one explanation: “because they encapsulate so well his emphasis in these addresses to “unbelievers” that God has drastically and dramatically reversed what humans did to Jesus, showing thereby that he had a radically different evaluation of who Jesus was”.
That’s sounds good for me, but I was wondering is it possible that Luke does that also because this creeds were known to be old (he did after all use different sources that pre-dates him), popular among christian communities and conversely very important?
Yup, that may be part of it too, definitely. That’s why Paul does a similar thing in Rom. 1:3-4 apparently.