WHEN DID JESUS BECOME GOD? – Dr Michael Bird is a very widely published expert in both Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins. Below he answers this controversial question. I invite your questions and comments now. He will interact with you on this wall, today only. Please read my house rules in my first comment. Michaels opening statement: When did Jesus become God? Some claim that Jesus was a rabbi and no more. Some claim that Jesus was a prophet and no more. Accordingly, it was only later, much later, that the early church began to venerate Jesus as God. The initiative to worship Jesus as God came about due to the infiltration of Greek philosophy into Christian faith so that veneration of Jesus became incrementally greater and greater in intensity. So, in some tellings, Jesus proclaimed God and, only later, the church proclaimed Jesus as God. Now it is important to remember that Jesus did not cruise around Galilee saying, “Hi, I’m God, second person of the Trinity, I’m going to die on the cross for your sins, but first let me tell you some good stories to tell your children at Sunday school.” That’s not what Jesus thought about himself. The place to start is with Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God. When Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, in light of Israel’s sacred traditions, it meant the coming of God as king. Jesus enacted and embodied in his own person the long awaited hope of the return of Yahweh to Zion to redeem and save his people. This explains why Jesus did and said things that seemed to go beyond normal prophetic paradigms. He didn’t say, “The word of the Lord came to me,” rather he spoke with an unmediated divine authority to the effect, “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you …” believing that the authority of his words equaled that of the Torah or Jewish Law, a Law that the Jewish people thought was given by God. In other places, Jesus appears to have identified himself with God’s presence in the world and declared that he would be enthroned beside Israel’s God, not on a throne next to God, but on God’s own throne. The subsequent belief in Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation led Jesus’ followers to describe him in a manner reminiscent of Yahweh. Of course, the apostles and the early church did not magically have the Nicene Creed downloaded into their heads, there was genuine discussion and debate over the next four centuries about the best grammar, language, and scriptural paradigms for describing Jesus in terms of his divinity in relation to the Father and how his divine and human natures related together. However, the New Testament writings present a crisp and clear witness to the belief that Jesus was regarded as intrinsic to the identity of the God of Israel. The monotheistic language of Deuteronomy and Isaiah was taken up and applied to Jesus by the Apostle Paul in important texts like 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Philippians 2:5-11 (and that’s not considering Hebrews or Revelation). The God of Israel was now known and experienced as God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and (implicitly) as the Holy Spirit. Authors like St. John could even intensify this divine language even further, drawing on a largely independent line of tradition, that regarded Jesus as “one” with the Father and “equal” with God. The identification of Jesus as God in the New Testament is correlated with early Christian devotional practices that worshipped Jesus and gave him the devotion ordinarily reserved for the exclusive worship of Yahweh. So, in both belief and practice, the early church regarded Jesus as a divine figure – not semi-divine, or quasi-divine – but he was a manifestation of the God of Israel, a contention that is rooted in Jesus’ own claims about his person and work. Let the conversation begin ...
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 21:17:58 +0000
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