In this post I return to the topic of early Christology. To review what I’ve covered so far: I have indicated that early on in the Christian tradition there were two types of Christology, one of which I have called “exaltation” Christology (I have not mentioned yet the other type); this is sometimes called a “low” Christology or a Christology from below. This is the view that Jesus started out as a human, nothing more, but came to be exalted by God to become his Son, the Lord. This view, I have argued, can be found in fragments of creeds and confessions that were later quoted by authors of the New Testament, so that in terms of raw chronology, they were formulated well *before* the New Testament was written. And I isolated Romans 1:3-4 as just one such case, where Paul quotes a confession that indicates that whereas Jesus was the human messiah from David’s seed, he became the “son of God in power” at the resurrection. This is not exactly Paul’s own view, but it’s close enough that he can quote the confession. So much for review.

The idea that at the resurrection God exalted Jesus to a new, divine status can be found in other pre-literary fragments quoted by New Testament authors. That is especially the case with the book of Acts. Scholars have long realized that the speeches in Acts are not the speeches that the apostles themselves would have delivered. Whatever Peter may actually have said on the Day of Pentecost (as in Acts 2), no one was taking notes so that Luke would be able to reconstruct it accurately 50 years later when he wrote his account. Where did the speech come from then? Luke made it up.

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