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How Could Christ Be Both God and a Human — At Once? The Unusual View of Origen
In this long thread on the Trinity I have been trying to explain how Christians came to the view that Jesus was God but that he was separate from God the Father – that both were God, but they were two different persons, and yet there was only one God. I will have far less to say about the Spirit, since he/she/it got added to the mix more or less because Christ was already in it, as we will see. So far I have taken us up to the early third century, where one view had come to be widely rejected even though earlier it had been prominent: that Jesus actually *was* God the Father, come in the flesh (often called “modalism”). Now I want to look at a more sophisticated way of understanding the relationship of Christ to the Father. This one comes in the writings of Origen, one of the truly important Christian thinkers of the first three Christian centuries. Origen came from Alexandria and was exceptionally learned and unbelievably prolific. According to […]
April 18, 2021
A Heresy that May Not Sound Heretical to You: Arius of Alexandria
I am getting far along now in my discussion of how the Trinity developed. A major development occurred in the fourth century that, remarkably, that many people still have heard about, seventeen hundred years later. Unfortunately *what* they typically hear about it is completely wrong. This is the “Arian controversy,” which was the dispute that let to the calling of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE by the Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. (After his conversion *every* Roman emperor was Christian except his nephew Julian, who ruled briefly – from 361-63 – before being killed in battle; his death was not mourned by the Christians. He had tried to stamp out Christianity and reinstate paganism as the state-approved religion. Who knows what would have happened if he had ruled for 33 years instead of 3….) Many people think that the Arian controversy was over the issue of whether Jesus was God or not. According to that inestimable authority of all things ancient, Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code, […]
April 24, 2021
You Call *This* a Heresy? The Views of Arius, In His Own Words
Here I resume my previous post about the biggest theological controversy in Christian history, which, to modern ears, sounds rather, well trivial. It certainly sounded that way to some of the people who were dealing with it at the time. Others thought it was a life and death matter. It had to do with who Christ was in relation to God. To refresh your memory, the presbyter Arius of Alexandria developed his understanding of Christ in the early fourth century. In a nutshell, he thought that Christ was created in God’s own image by God himself, and so bears the title God, but he is not the “true” God. Only God himself is. Christ’s divine nature was derived from the Father; he came into being at some point in the remote past before the universe was made; and so he is a creation or creature of God. In short, Christ was a kind of second-tier God, subordinate to God and inferior to God in every respect. Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, was not at all […]
April 25, 2021
Jesus Under the Influence (of Women): Guest Post by James McGrath
New Testament scholar, blog member, and blogger with his own blog on topics you may be interested in, James McGrath, has given us one post already about a woman whom the apostle knows, Junia – who he calls his own “relative” — who may well have been involved with Jesus in his ministry. This comes from his most recent book. James has agree to provide us with a couple more guest posts, based on the book. This is interesting stuff! It should make you think. Here’s the next one. – James McGrath is the author of What Jesus Learned from Women, and Theology and Science Fiction among other books. ****************************** There are two individuals that are the go-to examples for those who entertain the possibility that Jesus was a real human person influenced by other people. They are included in my book What Jesus Learned from Women, and in many ways served as the stepping stone and gateway to discovering that the same may be said of other people and stories in the Gospels. […]
April 29, 2021
Women and their Demons in the Life of Jesus: Guest Post by James McGrath
This now is the final guest post by blogger and New Testament scholar, James McGrath, based on his book What Jesus Learned from Women. Are you interested in more? Buy the book! As you’ll see here, it gets onto important ground, with intriguing hypotheses that you probably have never heard before! Many thanks to James for making these posts for us. – James McGrath is also the author of Theology and Science Fiction and The Burial of Jesus, among other books. ************************* It is almost impossible for modern readers of the New Testament to come across the word “demon” and to not think of The Exorcist and other depictions of the phenomenon of “demon possession.” Ancient people certainly attributed what we today would categorize as psychiatric conditions or mental illnesses to demons. However, these are but a small subset of the ailments that they thought of in these terms. We see this in the stories about women in the Gospels. In no instance are we presented with a woman whose symptoms are specified to have […]
May 8, 2021
Another Letter Written By Jesus? Stranger and Stranger…
In a previous post I discussed a letter forged in Jesus’ name, written to the king of Edessa, Abgar. Of course we don’t have anything *actually* written by Jesus (I myself don’t think he could write); but there is another writing that he is alleged to have written. This one is even stranger. Far stranger. It is a letter he writes from the cross to the cherubim in heaven. It’s in a (much) later gospel called the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, an account of Jesus’ Passion allegedly written by the obscure figure in the NT Gospels who buried him. Among other things, it gives us “information” on the two robbers who were crucified with him. Here I explain what the text is and then give the opening scenes. In my next post I will give the rest of it (it’s a short gospel). All of this comes from the book I co-produced with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels, a book you might be interested in getting! It gives about 40 Gospel texts […]
April 27, 2021
The Letter Jesus Wrote from the Cross (!)
Here is some more of the intriguing (later) Gospel, allegedly written by none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the figure who, in the New Testament Gospels, buried Jesus. It is entirely apocryphal, of course, based on some information from the Gospels, later legends, and an extremely vivid imagination. The point of these posts has been to talk about whether Jesus ever wrote anything. Here he does, kind of. While hanging on the cross. You don’t find stories like *this* every day… This is my own translation, taken from the book The Other Gospels, co-edited/translated with my colleague Zlatko Plese. *********************************************************** Jesus Put on Trial (1) At three o’clock on the next day, the fourth day of the week, they brought him into the courtyard of Caiaphas. Annas and Caiaphas said to him, “Tell us, why did you carry off our law? And why have you preached against the promises of Moses and the prophets?” But Jesus made no answer. Again a second time, when the multitude was also present, they said to him, “Why do […]
April 28, 2021
How Yahweh of the Israelites Became God of All: Platinum Guest Post by Dan Kohanski
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Tags: Platinum
YHWH and Jehovah: Same? Different? Where’s Jehovah Come From?
I received a number of comments on my recent posts about whether Jesus was Yahweh (Hebrew: YHWH) in traditional Christian thinking/theology. And a number of people have wanted further explanation of the name. In particular: how does it relate to “Jehovah”? In fact, where does the name “Jehovah” come from? And is it in the New Testament? I was asked this question directly years ago on the blog, and posted on it. Here is the question and what I said in response. QUESTION: How firmly grounded in reality is the claim of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the ‘divine name’ (Jehovah) belongs in the New Testament? RESPONSE So this is an interesting question, with several possible ramifications. At first I should explain that the divine name “Jehovah” doesn’t belong in *either* Testament, old or new, in the opinion of most critical scholars, outside the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s because Jehovah was not the divine name. So here’s the deal. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) God is given a number […]
May 1, 2021
The Council of Nicaea and The Resulting View of Christ
I have been discussing the Arian controversy over how to understand the relationship of the Father and the Son – the crucial element in establishing the doctrine of the Trinity. It led to the Council of Nicea. A lot could be, and has been, said about the Council. It is NOT when church Fathers decided which books would be in the New Testament and is NOT when they decided that Jesus was divine (even though that’s what you read in the Da Vinci Code !!). They did not discuss the first issue and everyone at the council already fully believed Christ was God. The question was: in what sense? Here is what I say about the Council in my book The Triumph of Christianity, in a chapter in which I deal with the emperor Constantine and his involvement with the church after his conversion. I begin by summarizing the two main positions in question – Arius’s view of Christ and his bishop Alexander’s view. ********************* Arius maintained that Christ, the Logos, could not be equal […]
May 2, 2021
Was Paul Peter’s Enemy?
In a lecture I gave recently, I was talking about “forgeries” in the name of Peter, Jesus’ disciple — that is, books that *claimed* to be written by Peter but certainly were not. They were written by Christians living later who *said* they were Peter — possibly in order to get more readers for their books! There is a big question about the canonical books of 1 and 2 Peter. The vast majority of critical scholars (i.e. those who make their historical judgments apart from questions of what they would personally like to believe about the Bible religiously) agree that 2 Peter was not written by Peter; whoever wrote it, it certainly was not the author of 1 Peter. A lot of scholars, including me, somewhat forcefully, also argue that Peter could not have written 1 Peter either. But that’s a topic for other posts (which I’ve made in the past). In my lecture I mentioned three others, that no one disagrees about: the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Letter of […]
May 4, 2021
Got a Question for Me? Gold Q & A for April!
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April 23, 2021
How Did the Holy Spirit Get Into the Trinity? In the Beginning….
Since I started this thread on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, I have received the same question over and over again: What about the Holy Spirit? As I’ve repeatedly answered, I can’t really deal with that question until I finish explaining how the “orthodox” view of the relationship of the Father and Son came to be settled. In fact, that view never was really settled. There were debates for a very long time. But I’ve taken us up through the major issues, up to the council of Nicea, where it was decided that Christ was not a subordinate divine being from eternity past who at some point long, long before the creation of the universe had been brought into being by God, but that he had always existed, along with the Father and was not subordinate to him but was equal to him in every way, “of the very same substance” as the Father. And so, we have two persons, completely equal, both fully God, distinct from one another, but in some […]
May 5, 2021
The Spirit of God in the Old Testament
I will not be giving a full account of the presence of the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament (or the New) – just enough to give a sense of how the Spirit seems to have been widely understood in a range of authors. The short story: biblical authors seemed to understand that one way God manifested himself and provided his power to specially chosen people was to send his Spirit upon them. In this understanding, the spirit is simply the divine force that God sends. It is not seen as a separate “person” from God. In an undefined sense (that probably the authors didn’t think about much), the spirit is both part of God (as your breath is part of you) and yet is separate from God (remember: spirit and breath and wind are all the same word in Hebrew). As an analogy: when you blow out a candle it is your breath doing it, and that act, the tool used to achieve it (the breath itself), and that which is actually achieved […]
May 6, 2021
Who Wrote the Pentateuch Anyway?
A couple of posts ago I talked about the account of creation in Genesis 1 (with respect to the first two verses, the creation of the “heavens and the earth” and the “Spirit of God” hovering over the water). One question I repeatedly get asked by blog readers is what we can say about the author of that creation account and of the Pentateuch (or the “Torah”; the first five books of the Old Testament — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). It’s been years since I’ve talked about it on the blog. Historically, it was always said (as it is still often said by avid Bible readers today) that these books were written by Moses, the great leader of the Israelites in the 13th century BCE, and main figure of all the books of the Pentateuch, except Genesis (the story of his birth is given at the opening of Exodus, and much of the rest of the Pentateuch is about him). But scholars came to doubt it. That’s what these posts will be about. […]
May 9, 2021
Two (Contradictory?) Accounts of Creation in Genesis?
In my previous post I began to explain why scholars have thought that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), were not written by Moses, but later, and that they represent not a single work by a single author, but a compilation of sources, each of them written at different times. The evidence for this view is quite overwhelming, but in the context of my textbook on the Bible, as in the context here, I didn’t really think it appropriate or useful to dig deeply into all the nuances and ins and outs. Instead, I gave some of the prominent data. Here is how I started to do that. ****************************** The internal tensions in the Pentateuch came to be seen as particularly significant. Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled […]
May 11, 2021
More Inconsistencies in the Pentateuch
A few posts ago I more or less backed into a new thread on literary discrepancies found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament; these discrepancies are key to understanding why the books were almost certainly not written by a single person — Moses, for example — but are a combination of sources put together centuries after the stories were first placed in circulation. I talk about this in my textbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Here is how I discuss the matter there: ****************************** The literary inconsistencies of Genesis are not unique to these two chapters. On the contrary, there are such problems scattered throughout the book. You can see this for yourself simply by reading the text very carefully. Read, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9, and you will find comparable differences. One of the most glaring is this: according to Gen. 6:19 God told Noah to take two animals “of every kind” with him into the ark; but according to Gen. 7:2 God […]
May 12, 2021