Loading...In my previous post in this thread I tried to show how one way to show that a text that embraced a “problematic” view (e.g., a potentially heretical understanding of Jesus as an *adopted* son of God instead of, say, the *eternal* son of God) was by interpreting it in light of *other* texts that held more acceptable views. I named an example in my previous post. I end the thread here with this one.
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A similar emphasis might be detected behind the entertaining stories of other infancy Gospels, including the one that is arguably the earliest, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It’s true that later authors like Irenaeus found this set of tales distasteful and even heretical; according to Ireneaus (assuming that he was referring to our Infancy Thomas, which I think he was; Adv. Haer 1:20) this was a gnostic text that inappropriately emphasized Jesus’ gnosis at a young age, when confronting his teachers with supernatural knowledge. But there’s little in the text itself actually to suggest a Gnostic origin. In fact, these stories about Jesus as a miracle-working Wunderkind may well have been popular tales told among the proto-orthodox who were interested in knowing what the miracle working Son of God was like as a child. What matters for my purposes here is that Jesus is shown in these tales to have supernatural powers simply as part of his being. He brings clay pidgeons to life, he withers his playmates, he strikes dead those who offend him; he raises people from the dead, he heals snakebite, he pulls off a handy miracle now and again in the home and in the carpenter shop. All of this is effortless and innate in his nature. Jesus is the miracle working son of God because of who he is, not because he has been chosen as a human to fulfill God’s mission on earth, and not because some other divine power has come upon him from the outside enabling him to do miraculous deeds.
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The adoptionist view makes more sense to me than what became the orthodox view (fully human, fully divine, God incarnate). Is there a short answer to why the orthodox view won out? Perhaps I need to go back and re-read How Jesus Became God; it’s been a while.
Short answer is that over the passage of time Christian thinkers adopted increasingly exalted views of Jesus, so that he wasn’t “just” a man but a divine being — and increasingly divine over time, from begin “adopted” at the resurrection to being “adopted” at the baptism, to being born of as the literal son of God to a virgin, to being an incarnate divine being (possibly the High Angel), to being on God’s level, to being completely equal with God in any way. Anything less than that was thought to be weak, inappropriate, and heretical. But if you’re interested in what the earliest beliefs were — they ain’t that.
Off topic: Which James was it that wrote the Proto-Gospel of James? Where did he get all the weird stories he relates?
I think the topic of original sin would be a good one for the list.
I hope you have a good trip to the UK and a happy holiday season.
Tom
James the brother of Jesus. Who would be unusually well situated to know these things from his mother! It’s hard to tell how much of this he has heard from story tellers and how inventive he himself was in coming up with it. But it’s pretty amazing stuff.
As a physicist interested in astronomy and having taught it for many years, I’ve been fascinated with various attempts to figure out what the phenomenon was that led the magi. I’ve concluded that those efforts are probably futile and lately have been wondering more about the literary background; i.e., were such “wise” visitors a theme in Greco-Roman literature of the era. So I was fascinated by the book The Magi by Erich Vanden Eykel. About 1/2 of the book involves digging into how the Greek term “magoi” was used elsewhere in the NT and then in literature of the period in general. Very interesting. The rest of the book focuses on how Christian writers have used, modified, and expanded on Matthew’s tale over the centuries. I think blog members will find this book interesting, and in fact, it might be interesting to have Vanden Eykel do a couple of posts on the Magi.
Of course you are assuming that an astronomical/astrological event actually happened and was not simply a literary device. Astrology was a powerful force at that time and place, and using such a literary device to cement the notion that Jesus was inherently divine would have been an obvious technique to make that point (or to be falsely remembered and told around the manger…). Only Matthew reports this event and his account, including the slaughter of the innocents, cannot be supported historically. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke are irreconcilably different. It’s like trying to reconcile the ‘census of Augustus’ and the death of Herod – they don’t overlap, so you have to pick one to hang your hat on because both can’t be true. In my opinion, the best we can do is to agree that the various stories of the gospels likely represent actual stories, more or less, that were circulating at the time of their composition. Beyond that, who knows? But as you say trying to figure out the factual origin of the stories is likely not something that will bear much fruit.
I saw a you tube video that theorized that the appearance of the Magi was just a literary device showing that while the Jewish establishment did not see Jesus as anything special. Non Jews such as the Magi did and recognized him as the messiah and thereby showing his rule of all of the earth and I think was a shot at the Jewish establishment. I think that makes sense.
How can the gospel of Luke be an originally adoptionistically open work when Luke’s Jesus claims to be the beloved son and heir of the Lord of the vineyard; a beloved son who is only sent to the vineyard after the failure of the servants to collect the fruit?
How can it be adoptionistic when Luke’s Jesus claims David called him Lord?
How can it be adoptionistic when Luke’s John the baptist says the threshing floor and winnowing fork of the day of judgement all belong to Jesus, and that the storeroom where the wheat separated from the chaff will be gathered also belongs to Jesus?
One of the most intriguing features of Luke is that he states that Jesus became the son of God at a variety of times in his life, from his birth (Luke 1:35) to his baptism (Luke 3:22) to his resurrection (Acts 13:32-35). This is consistent with his other titles for Jesus, as well, including Christ and Lord. I have a fuller discussion of it in my book Orthodox Corruptoin of Scripture. It appears that Luke knows a number of traditions and is not afraid to use all of them in celebrating the fact that Jesus is all these things, even if the traitions are, strictly speaking, not fully commensurate with one another.
Well in none of those instances is there an explicit statement that that is the time Jesus became the son of God.
So all should be interpreted in light of the fact that what Luke actually believes is Jesus is the Lord come to earth.
“Praise be to the Lord the God of Israel because he has come to his people and redeemed them … and you child will be called a prophet of the Most High for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way for him.”
The intriguing features of Luke can be explained by Luke wording his narrative in such a way that Jesus is seen to be fulfilling OT prophecies.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas brings to mind the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life.”
Wish it into the cornfield Jesus.
Dr. Ehrman, in reading this post and having listened to this week’s podcast focused on the Proto-Gospel of James, I’m puzzled about the concept of Jesus being both fully human and fully divine. It has long been Catholic belief that Jesus was born without the stain of “Original Sin,” and the tradition also developed that so was Mary (since an imperfect vessel could not bear a perfect son). But how did church fathers address the conflict or Christ being fully human without carrying Original Sin? I hadn’t known that theologians believed OS was transmitted through semen. (LOL..in parochial school, I don’t remember that particular word or substance ever being mentioned.) I get that if Mary conceived as a virgin, no human father-to-offspring transmission would be involved. But can Jesus be considered fully human without Original Sin? Can Mary? Any insight into historical thinking?
They maintained that Jesus had to be fully human, and he was becuase he was born of Mary. But in their view, being fiully human meant having a truly human body, soul, and spirit. Adam originally did not have a din nature, but was fully human, and so Christ too cold be fully human without a sin nature. (He didn’t inherit it because of the Immaculate Conception: Mary herself did not have a sin nature because when Anna and Joaichim conceived, God did a miracle to prevent her from having one. She took though, was fully human)
Good contrast Dr. Ehrman. The infancy gospel is considered tabloidy stuff written in Aramaic, right?
Luke-Acts is ʻhigh-brow’ koine Greek, written by an author(s) with an access to an understanding of heirarchy (through Nicholaus of Damascus’ work or Josephus himself) to educated Theophilus, the High Priest.
Begotten means chosen to rule in Abraham’s story — chosen from several biological sons, unlike say, the Egyptian title King’s Son of Kush which is adopted. Sometimes just a few townlets like Herod’s daughter, or both Jewish -and- Arab kingdoms, like Agrippa 1.
So there’s several meanings to son, and several meanings for pater, too. One is bio dad. Another is ancestor. Could be the ancestor cult of Jesus’ bio dad, my guess as I’ve said is Obodas Theos.
“Recall that in Luke Jesus grows and becomes stronger (2:40) and that he increases in strength and wisdom (2:52)”. Yep yep, author of gLuke is trying to counteract the peasant narratives where signs and works (medicated oils, and rites like walking on the Sea of Galilee’s cairn) become supreme god miracles. Like Barnabas being taken for Zeus.
This thread is making me wonder, more broadly, whether orthodox theology generally evolved as it did strategically, in order to hold the community together, giving the extremes at either end a piece of what they wanted with a strong “Yes, but…!” thrown in.
It’s a good question. We don’t have any evidence to suggest that there was a kind of political strategy that DROVE the formation of the views, although the views often were closely connected (conveniently) with political agenda. The idea that there must be ONE bishop over the church, for example, and that it must be a MAN seems pretty convenient for someone to advance if they were a power-hungry man, and less than, say, if they were a power-hungry group of women.
One of the eye-opeining discussions of this kind of thing in modern scholarshup was Elaine Pagels book The Gnostic Gospels.disabledupes{e3a1f3bca6900077919908b30f7ae6da}disabledupes
So, the canonical and non-canonical writings have Jesus covered for the neonatal period, ages 5-12 and adulthood from around age 30. But what about ages 12-30? Any literature for this period? would love to know was he was like as a teenager!
wouldn’t we all. Nope, speculation on that for the most part has to wait on forgeries from the 19th century. That’s where we start getting narratives of him going to India to learn from the Brahmins or to Egypt to learn magic, etc.
In his sermon this morning, the priest at our church compared the word “overshadow”(“episkiásei”) (he didn’t cite the Greek- I looked it up) in Luke 1:35 to the word used in Exodus 40:34. referring to manifestation of God in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle.
Since the word “overshadow” isn’t used in Exodus 40 in any of the English translations I looked at, I wonder if the word “episkiásei”or its derivatives was used in Exodus 40 in the Septuagint.
I think he must have meant Exodus 40:28-29. Yup ,the word appears there (v. 29)– Moses, after setting up the tabernacle, cannot enter it because the “cloud” “overshadows” (same word as in Luke 1:35) it, and the cloud was “filled with the glory of the Lord.” Interesting: if Mary = Tabernacle, the human cannot enter into it/her. (Also worth noting that in the Gospel of John, which doesn’t have this annunciation scene, describes Christ’s incarnatoin as his “tabernacling” among us. (often translated “came to dwell among us” 1:14) You got a smart priest — or at least one who reads good books! (But note, it’s not a reference to the Holy of Holies but to the tent/tabernacle as a whole)