Watching the Christian Hayes lecture series. She mentions that a major revolution of the Israelite God was that it was all powerful. Pagans had Fates or other primordial beings who affected how the gods behaved. YHWH was all powerful. If he was just, that was his choice. He was not force by some power of Just to behave in any manner.
Some Christians (most of those I know) feel that God had to sacrifice Jesus in order to cleanse humanity of their sins. This means that God is somehow limited by a Cosmic Order rather than outside of Cosmic Order.
I wonder if the author of the gospel of Luke understood this as he portrays the sacrifice of Jesus as an attempt by God to get our attention, to shame us into changing our ways and following the laws of God written in our hearts.
Doesn’t The Adversary in Job affect the way God behaves? God wasn’t going to do anything to Job until the Adversary (who is in Heaven, apparently resident there) says Job wouldn’t be so faithful to God if tested severely enough. And in Genesis, the serpent (another form of Adversary) thwarts God’s attempt to create a perfect world for humankind. Even after Jews became monotheistic, there were still other supernatural agencies at work besides Him. And the notion of there being a God above all others is hardly unique to Judaism.
The Greeks did believe the Furies had some power the gods couldn’t directly control, but there is ample evidence (as in the play Eumenides) that the gods were still seen as having final authority, and they were forced to relent in their desire to kill Orestes, and indeed to relinquish their role as avenging spirits (the older tribal traditions giving way to civilization). The Fates are passive figures, and I see no evidence the Jewish God is able or willing to change destiny. In a sense He is destiny. He knows, we assume, that Adam and Eve will fall, but does nothing to prevent it. Perhaps because He can’t. To create a sentient being is to eventually lose control over him/her–as any parent knows.
Pagans were not the only other religious people in Eurasia. Leaving aside religious beliefs on other continents. Jewish beliefs were actually older than the religion the version of ‘paganism’ the Romans followed, which is one reason the Romans agreed to exempt them from sacrificing to the gods of the polis.
I agree in principle that the Jewish vision of the godhead evolved into something more omnipotent, but it’s hard to be sure of that, when we have such fragmentary records of other belief systems that are no longer extant. What we see in the OT is not all there is to Jewish belief, as the Apocrypha make clear.
I’m not sure this has anything to do with the way Luke told the gospel story. Could you go into more detail about the question you’re asking?
I am hoping you have read the specific passages I have. I am sure they are Bart Ehrman’s. In his analysis of the gospel of Luke I am pretty sure he distinguishes the message of the Passion as one of abandonment and humiliation for Christ. This was supposed to prick the conscience of the lost, to turn our attention to one who died at our hands for no good reason and shame us into turning to God because of that shame. This is a God who died to get our attention where it needs to be.
In contrast, most people believe in a more transactional reconciliation where Jesus paid a price that had to be paid. This is where we see a less powerful God, imho, theologically. This God is required by Law to provide blood for sin. He could not reconcile humanity to him except through this transaction. An all powerful God is not limited by transactional legal terms. In other words, an overarching Order is forcing God to decide whether He should redeem humanity by sending Christ or simply not redeem humanity.
A more powerful God, an all powerful God, could redeem humanity in any way He chose to. Such a God might behave in such a way as I presented the Luke Passion narrative above, or any number of ways, to redeem peoplekind. No transaction of blood for sins is forced upon him by some overarching Design or Order.
I remember Bart talking about how Luke had a different conception of the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection than the other evangelists, but I’m not sure this proves Luke saw God as more powerful. What God can do and what God does are not necessarily the same thing. Like God could have chosen not to send the Flood, but he sent it anyway. There was no divine sacrifice needed for him to promise not to do it again (though of course there’s been lots of floods since).
It’s an interesting idea, but you’d need a bit more to substantiate it.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert
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