Concept

Early High Christology Thesis

Intro

For most of the twentieth century the standard account of how Jesus came to be worshipped as God ran roughly like this: a Jewish prophet was executed, his followers concluded he had been vindicated, and over the following decades the movement drifted out of its Jewish setting into the Greek-speaking world, where surrounding religious categories, dying and rising gods, divinised emperors, philosophical intermediaries, gradually elevated him from teacher to Lord to God. The conclusion was that the deity of Christ is a late Hellenistic development rather than anything the first Christians believed.

The early high Christology thesis is the scholarly position that this account is wrong, and wrong on the evidence rather than on doctrinal preference. Its claim is that the worship of Jesus as sharing in the identity of the God of Israel appears at the very beginning, within the first two decades, inside a fiercely monotheistic Jewish setting, and cannot be explained as gradual Hellenistic drift.

The argument rests on three observations that do not depend on trusting the gospels.

First, the timing. Paul's letters are the earliest Christian documents, written in the 50s, and they already contain the highest possible Christology, stated without argument. Philippians 2:6-11 has Christ in the form of God, and applies to him the passage in Isaiah 45:23 where every knee bows to Yahweh and to no other. Paul is not defending this; he is quoting it, which means it was already established and shared.

Second, the creeds inside the letters. Passages such as 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 have the compressed, rhythmic, non-Pauline vocabulary of material Paul received rather than composed. On standard dating these go back to within a few years of the crucifixion. See Pre-Pauline Creeds.

Third, the practice, which is the strongest evidence. Devout Jews did not worship anyone but God. Not angels, not the patriarchs, not Moses, not the Messiah. Yet from the earliest recoverable stage, Christians prayed to Jesus, sang to him, baptised into his name, invoked him at meals, and preserved the Aramaic prayer Marana tha, "our Lord, come" (1 Corinthians 16:22). The prayer being in Aramaic matters: it belongs to the Palestinian Jewish church, not to a later Greek environment.

Quick reply line: "The idea that Jesus was gradually promoted to divinity by Greek converts runs into a dating problem. Paul is quoting hymns and creeds about Jesus in the form of God in the 50s, and one of the prayers is preserved in Aramaic, which puts it in the Jewish church before the Greek mission got going. There is no period of low Christology to find. It goes all the way back."

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

In full

The thesis is associated principally with Larry Hurtado (One God, One Lord, 1988; Lord Jesus Christ, 2003) and Richard Bauckham (God Crucified, 1998; Jesus and the God of Israel, 2008), with important contributions from Martin Hengel (The Son of God, 1976), whose work first pressed how little time the developmental hypothesis actually has, and from N. T. Wright and Chris Tilling.

It stands against the older history-of-religions school (Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 1913) and its later inheritors, on whose account the decisive step occurred when the movement crossed from Palestinian Jewish soil to Hellenistic Gentile soil.

The two principal proponents make different arguments, and it is worth keeping them distinct because they are independently strong.

Hurtado: the argument from devotional practice

Hurtado's method is to ask what people did rather than what titles they used, on the ground that in a monotheistic culture, practice is the harder evidence. He identifies a cluster of devotional behaviours directed to Jesus, all attested in the earliest sources, all of which a first-century Jew would have reserved for God alone:

1. Prayer to Jesus and through him, including the Aramaic Marana tha.
2. Invocation and confession of his name, in baptism, healing and exorcism.
3. Hymns sung to him, which Pliny still reports to Trajan around 112 as singing a hymn to Christ as to a god.
4. The Lord's Supper as a meal in his presence, with the cup as a participation in him.
5. Prophecy and revelation given in his name.
6. Ritual confession of him as Lord, applying to Jesus texts about Yahweh.

Hurtado calls the result a binitarian devotional pattern: two figures receiving worship within a framework that remained self-consciously monotheistic and continued to refuse worship to any other being. He argues this constitutes a genuine mutation in Jewish monotheism, rapid rather than evolutionary, and that its trigger was the resurrection experience combined with the conviction that God had exalted Jesus.

Bauckham: divine identity rather than divine nature

Bauckham argues the older debate was framed badly. Scholars asked whether Jesus was placed in a category of divine beings, and then debated whether Jewish angelology or wisdom speculation provided intermediate figures who could serve as precedent. He contends Second Temple Judaism did not think in terms of degrees of divinity at all, but in terms of identity: who God is, marked out by unique characteristics.

The God of Israel is identified by being sole Creator of all things, sole sovereign Ruler over all things, the one named by the divine name, and the only proper recipient of worship. Everything else, angels included, is on the creature side of that line, and the exalted-angel texts consistently have the angel refuse worship.

The New Testament, on Bauckham's reading, does not place Jesus in an intermediate category. It includes him within the unique identity of God while maintaining monotheism:

• Creation. 1 Corinthians 8:6 splits the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, the confession that the Lord our God is one Lord, placing "God the Father" and "one Lord, Jesus Christ" inside it, and attributes creation to both.
• Sovereignty. Christ is seated at God's right hand on the divine throne, which in Jewish apocalyptic no creature occupies.
• The divine name. Philippians 2:9-11 gives Jesus the name above every name and applies Isaiah 45:23 to him, a passage whose entire point is that Yahweh shares glory with no other.
• Worship. He receives it, and unlike the angels in the parallel texts, he does not refuse it.

Bauckham's formulation is that the highest Christology is present in the earliest sources, and that it is a Christology of divine identity expressed in Jewish categories rather than a Christology of divine nature expressed in Greek ones. The Greek philosophical vocabulary of the fourth-century creeds is a later articulation of a conviction already fully present.

Why the timing matters

The developmental hypothesis requires time and a change of environment. The evidence supplies neither.

The window between the crucifixion and the earliest of these is a few years, in Jerusalem, in Aramaic, among Jews. The one thing the Hellenistic-drift account most needs, a period of low Christology followed by gradual elevation, is exactly what the sources do not contain.

Objections

"Paul invented it, and the Jerusalem church did not share it."

The material Paul cites is explicitly received rather than composed, and its vocabulary and rhythm mark it as pre-Pauline. More decisively, Paul's letters record sharp conflicts with the Jerusalem leadership over circumcision, table fellowship and the Gentile mission, and never over the status of Christ. A dispute that severe about the identity of God could not have gone unmentioned in letters that record the lesser ones in detail. See Pre-Pauline Creeds.

"Jewish monotheism was more flexible than this suggests. There were exalted angels, divine hypostases, and figures like Enoch and Metatron."

The most serious academic objection, argued by Margaret Barker and in a different form in the "two powers in heaven" research of Alan Segal. Two replies. First, the intermediary figures consistently refuse worship, and the refusal is the point of those scenes. Second, whatever latitude existed for exalted figures, it did not extend to including a recently executed contemporary in the divine identity and directing to him the worship reserved for the God of Israel.

"This is apologetics dressed as scholarship."

The thesis is mainstream in New Testament studies and is granted in substantial part by scholars with no confessional stake. Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God (2014) concedes that Jesus was regarded as divine in some sense extremely early, and argues about which sense and about the exaltation-versus-incarnation question, not about a long developmental timeline. The remaining dispute is narrower than the popular presentation of it.

Apologetic deployment

• Lead with the dating, not with the doctrine. The argument's power is chronological, and it works with an interlocutor who grants nothing about inspiration.
• Marana tha is the single best detail. It is short, it is Aramaic, it is a prayer to Jesus, and it is embedded in a letter written to Greek speakers who evidently already knew it.
• Use the Shema-splitting in 1 Corinthians 8:6 for a Jewish or Muslim interlocutor, since it engages the monotheism question in its own terms rather than importing Greek metaphysics.
• Concede the development of vocabulary. The creedal language of substance and person is fourth-century, and admitting it costs nothing. The claim is that the conviction is first-century, not that the terminology is.
• Know the limit. This establishes what the earliest Christians believed and practised, not that they were right. It defeats the late-development objection specifically.

See also

• Christology, the doctrinal hub
• Larry Hurtado, the argument from devotional practice
• Richard Bauckham, the divine-identity framework
• Pre-Pauline Creeds, the dated tradition underlying the thesis
• Philippians 2.6-11, the Christ hymn
• Son of Man Title, the corresponding evidence from Jesus's own self-designation
• Trinity, the doctrine this evidence feeds
• Bart Ehrman, the principal contemporary interlocutor
• Mythicism Refutation, the adjacent argument against the copycat thesis