I applaud articles like that of Lloyd Geering in the latest The Fourth R, and the work of the Jesus Seminar in general, for their unflinching examination of the early Christian record and their debunking of many of Christianity’s myths which are no longer acceptable to the modern mind. However, I would say that neither Professor Geering nor the Seminar have gone far enough. The former’s use of the evidence, it seems to me, is selective and skewed, and thus the picture he creates of “how Jesus became God” is considerably distorted.
The biggest problem is created by his failure to take into account the view of Jesus found in virtually the entire corpus of New Testament epistles, especially Paul. Instead, Prof. Geering takes a representative speech from Acts (2:22-36), a document which modern scholarship is increasingly dating well into the 2nd century and which has no identifiable source elements (let alone attestation) from any earlier period, and identifies this as representing the earliest view of Jesus’ glorification by his followers to the status of Messiah, earlier than that of the Gospels. He then looks at various Gospel elements to show an apparent progression of thought about Jesus, one which moves in retrograde fashion, envisioning Jesus as the Christ and Son of God at an ever earlier stage of his career and life. When he concludes with John’s Prologue, which makes Jesus God’s Word (in the Greek Logos sense) and pre-existent with him in heaven, Prof. Geering is implying that this is the culmination, presumably some time in the 2nd century, of early Christian elevation of a human man to Godhead.
Unfortunately, when one takes into account the view of Jesus in the epistles, many of which predate the Gospels and virtually all of which seem to predate knowledge of the Gospels, this pattern and progression is seriously compromised, if not destroyed.
Three passages will represent my point. The hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, generally considered pre-Pauline, begins with a description of Jesus as “existing in the form/nature of God,” having “equality with God,” and concludes with an exaltation to the status of “Lord”, one of God’s own titles. Paul himself, in 1 Corinthians 8:6, styles Jesus as the “one Lord, through whom all things came to be and we through him,” mirroring current ideas about the Logos and personified Wisdom as pre-existent divine agencies of creation, themselves emanations of the ultimate God. The Epistle to the Hebrews 1:2-3 describes the Son as “the heir of all things and through whom (God) made the universe; the Son who is the effulgence of God’s splendor, and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his word of power.”
Since Hebrews is often dated somewhere around the period of the Jewish War, we have here various views of Jesus predating the Gospels—indeed beginning from a time when Jesus could scarcely have been cold in his grave—which makes him everything from God’s Son, full sharer in the divine nature, to creator and sustainer of the universe!
As Herman Ridderbos puts it (Paul and Jesus, p.3): when reading Paul and the other early epistle writers, Christ’s “human attributes (are) obscure” and he “appears to have significance only as a transcendent divine being.” I would say that this earliest record shows Jesus to have attained an exalted divinity almost from the very moment the movement began. Certainly, nothing that can be relied on (which excludes the excavated, primitive layers of Q which may originally have had nothing to do with a Jesus) shows us anything different. What, then, does this do to Prof. Geering’s pattern of progression?
There is a further discordant fact contained in this epistolary evidence of when Jesus became God. Not only does it seem to have taken place immediately at the beginning of the Christian movement and is the only view of Jesus to be found in the earliest surviving record, it gives us a divine Christ without a human counterpart. For the curious fact is that the New Testament epistles have virtually nothing at all to say about the Jesus of the Gospels. The divine Christ which Paul (and others like the writer of Hebrews) believes in is never equated with a recent Jesus of Nazareth, and much that the epistle writers say about their Christ seems to make him an exclusively mythological figure, newly revealed by God and derived from scripture. That missing equation has led to the strained—and unlikely—explanation that the earliest Christians somehow “lost interest” in the incarnated life which had begun the movement. Consequently, I would advocate the theory which suggests that the Christian movement began not with an historical man but with belief in a heavenly, spiritual Son only, who had undergone his sacrifice in a heavenly (Platonic-style) realm, like the myths of the other savior-gods of the day, and that no Jesus of Nazareth ever existed.
Prof. Geering makes much of the Transfiguration scene as representing an initial vision of Peter following Jesus’ death, and which “marked the beginning of the Easter faith.” He envisions dispirited disciples returning to Galilee and pondering the tragic end of their “man of quality,” their psyches operating on them through “the previous experience and basic symbols” already imbedded in their minds. But did the symbols in the minds of these supposedly simple fishermen include the entire panoply of ancient world mythological thinking, Greek and Jewish? Would they have been led to style their teaching Master the creator and sustainer of the universe, sharing God’s nature and titles in a way which would have been blasphemous to virtually every Jew? And would they have been led to abandon all interest in the earthly life they had just witnessed and taken part in?
In fact, the New Testament does supply us with a probable record of that vision of Peter: 2 Peter 1:16-18. But note that this account contains no Gospel details, and does not place the event in a ministry of Jesus, or even post-resurrection. As it reads, it is simply a theophany of a divine figure, a foretaste of the Christ’s (first and still-awaited) coming, and a support for the message already read in scripture (1:19). [Note: This passage is analyzed extensively in my Supplementary Article No. 7: Transfigured on the Holy Mountain: The Beginnings of Christianity.]
Prof. Geering makes the increasingly common claim that the early “Jewish-Christians”, including Peter and James, still saw Jesus with Jewish eyes, that they regarded him as Messiah but that he “was not himself divine.” But I would maintain that there is no support for this view in the early record. Quite the opposite. Paul’s relations with the Jerusalem group, who were “apostles before me” (Gal. 1:17), suggests no such quantum gap between their interpretation of Jesus and his own, and in fact if Paul alone had turned Jesus into a part of God, this would have so offended Peter & Co. that any relationship between them, let alone the degree of cooperation suggested by passages like Galatians 2:8 and Paul’s collection for the Judean church, would have been impossible. This is quite distinct from, and more fundamental than, their disagreements over the applicability of the Jewish Law.
This, by the way, renders unworkable any fallback position that it was not the Petrine group which created the cosmic Christ of the Pauline and other epistles, but rather some group off in a place like Antioch. Besides, Paul implies in 1 Corinthians 15 that they ‘all proclaim the same thing.’ And Jesus dying for sin and rising on the third day, a doctrine with which the Jerusalem group seems to be associated, has a definite mythological and cultic ring to it.
Prof. Geering calls the letter of James “the best example of Jewish Christian thinking.” But all that this epistle has to say about Jesus (2:1) is: “believing as you do in our Lord Jesus Christ, who reigns in glory.” This does not suggest a strictly human view of Jesus, and in fact even implies that Christ is a heavenly entity in whose existence one has to have faith. The rest of the epistle is full of ethical maxims which are often strikingly similar to many of Jesus’ Gospel teachings, and yet ‘James’ makes not the slightest attribution of such teachings to him. If Jewish Christians had a solely human view of Jesus, based on their memory of him as an historical rabbi, I would ask if this blanket silence in James and elsewhere about his role as a teacher and the source of Christian ethics makes any sense.
There are other things in Prof. Geering’s article which are dubiously supported, and I would say that to draw conclusions, as he does, based on a record which in many cases states or implies the opposite of those conclusions, needs calling attention to. . . .
[Closing remarks here deleted.]
Lloyd Geering is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
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