Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon J. Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, Chris Tilling. How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2014. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-310-51959-1. $16.99.
Introduction
In the interest of space, my review of Michael F. Bird’s response volume, How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature—A Response to Bart D. Ehrman, will be divided into two separate posts. This first post will address the contributions of Bird himself, which include the introductory chapter (“The Story of Jesus as the Story of God”), a chapter on monotheism (“Of Gods, Angels, and Men”), a chapter on Jesus’ view of himself (“Did Jesus Think He was God?”), and the final essay (“Concluding Thoughts”). The second post will treat the remaining essays in the volume by Craig A. Evans, Simon J. Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, and Chris Tilling (wherever he may be).[1]
First I’d like to address an issue that’s been raised elsewhere, namely the rhetorical tone of Bird’s essays. In what seems to me to be an effort to match the less formal register of Ehrman the storyteller, Bird’s articles make extended use of personal anecdotes, sarcasm, and hyperbole, but I think they miss the mark, bordering in their casualness on juvenile and even insulting in some places. For instance, in the preface Bird suggests that for people who do not identify as religious, Ehrman provides “succor and solace that one need not take Jesus too seriously” (pp. 7–8), as if agnostics and atheists are fraught with doubt and worry, and Ehrman’s scholarship swoops in to comfort them in their tribulation. Even as a believing Christian I find this rhetorical fiction insulting and puerile. Then on the first page of the first essay Bird comments, “Ehrman’s view of Jesus is low, so low in fact that it could probably win a limbo contest against a leprechaun” (p. 11). This kind of awkward humor punctuates most of the contributions, but is most acute in Bird’s essays. I think this detracts from the scholarship somewhat and gives his essays a decidedly apologetic and antagonistic flavor. Making fun of Oprah and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (p. 23), for instance, tells me this volume is not aimed at scholars or undecided third parties, but at Evangelicals who want to be convinced their constituency has a legitimate response to Ehrman. It descends in many places into the kind of sectarian polemic I would expect to find on Facebook, not in print.
I’m not going to respond separately to each of Bird’s four essays, but will instead divide my review into comments about Bird’s characterization of Ehrman’s arguments and methods, and Bird’s own fallacies and methodological improprieties. I have begun this review four different times, and I have made an effort to describe Bird’s presentations of his arguments, and give outlines of his articles, but my comments have balooned well beyond a reasonable length for a blog post. As a result, I will have to limit this post to these methodological concerns and refer readers to reviews posted elsewhere for outlines of the essays.
Bird’s Characterizations of Ehrman’s Arguments
From the very first paragraph of the introductory essay, Bird sets out to rhetorically compartmentalize and marginalize Ehrman’s approach, calling his approach “essentially evolutionary,” and insisting there’s nothing in it “particularly innovative or new” (p. 11). The use of the code word “evolutionary,” Bird appears to think, groups Ehrman with the misguided Hegelians of a bygone era (he even aims a criticism from a previous generation of scholarship at Ehrman’s 2014 publication) and signals to the conservative readers that there’s nothing new here with which anyone need be concerned. The trouble, beyond the flagrant hasty generalization fallacy, is that Ehrman himself explicitly rejects a linear view of christological development, instead insisting that different regions and congregations had their own christological views that differed one from another but could be categorized according to two broad typologies: exaltation christology and incarnation christology.[2] While Ehrman’s vernacular certainly sounds evolutionary in places, his actual discussion paints a more nuanced and sophisticated picture—one that seems to have evaded Bird.
These caricaturizations of Ehrman’s case are numerous and disappointing. In assessing Ehrman’s criteria in his chapter on the historical Jesus, Bird attributes quite peculiar claims to Ehrman (p. 50):
For case in point, let’s consider Ehrman’s use of the “criterion of dissimilarity,” which on his account dictates that a given unit in the Gospels is historically authentic if “it is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him.”
Note the absolutism of the criterion: dissimilarity = “historically authentic.” It is not a question of probability in Bird’s eyes. He continues to describe it in another paragraph:
But even then it verges on the ludicrous. Think about it. A story about Jesus or as a saying attributed to Jesus is only historical if it does not sound anything like what the church was saying about Jesus.
This is a stunningly manipulative and misleading description of Ehrman’s criterion. In reality, Ehrman claims that dissimilarity indicates that the segment can “stake a high claim to being historically accurate” (p. 96, emphasis mine). Note it’s a question of degrees, not of the absolutes that Bird attributes to it. Bird is certainly aware of this difference and its importance, since he describes his own criterion as indicating “a high degree of historical authenticity” (p. 51, emphasis mine).[3] He allows himself the methodological nuance of which he flagrantly robs Ehrman. His claim that Ehrman thinks a saying is “only historical” if it satisfies the criterion of dissimilarity is just asinine. Ehrman describes several criteria suggestive of authenticity, and he nowhere intimates in any sense whatsover that historical authenticity can only be asserted where there is dissimilarity.
Let us also examine his description of Ehrman’s comparative approach (p. 25):
So for Ehrman, Augustus was hailed as a son of God, and Jesus was hailed as a Son of God, to they might be saying the same thing with only minor variations on a theme. Moses became an angel, Enoch became an angel, so maybe Jesus became an angel too. Well, there are obvious relevancies with such comparisons, but it might not be so simple as A = B. It’s kind of like saying, “Butternut squash and butterscotch pudding, they are all made of butter, aren’t they?” Alas, no, they are not the same thing!
To imply Ehrman would be so methodologically juvenile and so ignorant of the literature and the vernacular of Judaism and the Greco-Roman world as to naively assume mere lexical correpondence indicates a genetic relationship (butternut and butterscotch both come from butter!) insults the intelligence of Bird’s readers, not to mention Ehrman.
Continuing, because of Ehrman’s putative naivety when it comes to comparative studies, Bird lists three principles he insists need to be kept in mind: (1) beware of parallelomania, (2) analogy does not mean genealogy, and (3) we must give equal attention both to similarities and to differences. Whether or not Ehrman is guilty of the first two is never stated, the risk is just said to be there. The examples he provides are not from Ehrman, but just stock examples used to generically illustrate the principle. Apparently the power of suggestion is indictment enough.
The third principle is an entirely artificial standard that Bird himself violates by paying brief lip-service to the possibility of similarities between Christian and “pagan” literature (three total sentences) and then going on for over two pages about the ways in which Christianity is completely unique. Observe one of his claims:
If Christian ideas about God were so snug and down within the ancient world, then why was Paul flogged by Jewish communities (2 Cor 11:24) and laughed out of the Athenian Areopagus by Greek philosophers (Acts 17:32)?
The notion that these events preclude the possibility of significant conceptual overlap between Paul’s theology and those of the Jewish and Greco-Roman communities is just laughable. How many volumes would it take to list the cosmological and theological concepts shared between Jewish, Muslim, and evangelical communities? How much violence has taken place between the three over the millennia? Despite the severity of their one fundamental difference, how many similarities were there between the worldviews of Arius and the bishops who opposed him? And yet the sentence passed upon Arius and his constituency was far more severe than simply being laughed at.
In his rhetorical zeal to marginalize and mock Ehrman’s argument, Bird insults the intelligence of his readers and betrays his own dogmatism and myopia.
Fallacies and Poor Methodology
Not only does Bird have to flagrantly mischaracterize Ehrman’s arguments for his rhetorical blows to land, but he commits a number of other fallacies and methodological improprieties in crafting his own case. For instance, in his chapter on monotheism, Bird describes Ehrman’s discussion of a divine continuum in the following way (p. 23):
In Ehrman’s reading of ancient sources, there was a continuum of existence from the human to the divine. Not only that, but within the divine realm there were numerous deities, ranked within a graded pyramid of power and grandeur. . . . In other words, to say that Jesus is ‘god’ does not require that he be part of an absolute and singular divine reality, which is infinitely removed from the world and utterly beyond all earthly reality.
Fair enough, but quite quickly Bird’s concept of an “absolute and singular divine reality” is conflated with the broad notion of “monotheism,” which is then leveraged against Ehrman in a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand. Observe (p. 28):
Ehrman seems to think that a strict and absolute monotheism was a later invention that took place in the fourth century as part of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. He goes so far as to say that, apart from Jews, ‘everyone was a polytheist.’ The problem is that this is just plain untrue. There was a long tradition of pagan monotheism well before the Christian era. . . . It was possible in the ancient world to be a pluralistic monotheist by giving the one God different names.
So we have two separate claims here from Ehrman: (1) “strict and absolute monotheism was a later invention” (this is Bird’s paraphrase), and (2) “everyone was a polytheist [in the first century]” (p. 39 in Ehrman). Bird’s discussion of syncretism is certainly a legitimate challenge to the second claim that “everyone was a polytheist,” but in suggesting the second is just an extension of the first (“he goes so far as to say . . .”), Bird seems to want the reader to think that pagan syncretism also undermines the first claim, which it absolutely does not. If anything, it supports it, since Bird can only find syncretistic and “pluralistic monotheists” that in no way whatsoever support the notion of that “absolute distinction” Bird insists characterizes “strict and absolute monotheism.”[4] Bird does not appear willing to directly engage Ehrman’s case, and so he sidesteps it here with this rhetorical diversion.
Bird actually misses an available opportunity to quite forcefully make his point, though. There absolutely were pre-Christian “pagan monotheists” (if you can call Greek philosophers “pagan”) who asserted that absolute distinction between God and the rest of reality, but they were Platonists, and if Bird were to appeal to Platonism, he would be playing right into the hands of Michael Peppard, whom Ehrman mentions as particularly influential on his current viewpoint. Y’see, on p. 30, Bird contends that “This exclusive devotion to one God isn’t based on abstract philosophical speculation or a generalized belief about the world above.” To acknowledge otherwise would open the door to the Greco-Roman philosophical origins of that distinction—exactly the origins for which Peppard and others contend. Bird has to tiptoe around the strict and absolute monotheism of Platonism while highlighting the “pluralistic” monotheism of Varro and Celsus.
Not surprisingly, nowhere in Bird’s response volume does anyone acknowledge, much less engage, Peppard’s christological research. It is not difficult to see why. Peppard’s discussion of the relationship of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy to early Christianity is quite thorough and also quite problematic for the christological picture Bird, et al., try to paint (pp. 10–11):
For many scholars, Nicene christological thinking has become second nature and thus guides their analyses of New Testament texts. William L. Lane, for examples, evokes the language of the Creed when interpreting the divine sonship portrayed by the Gospel of Mark: “Jesus did not become the Son of God, at baptism or at the transfiguration; he is the Son of God,” and it is “an eternal and essential relationship.” Clear echoes of the Creed resound in Lane’s analysis—the relationship is “eterna;” (eternally begotten of the Gather) and “essential” (homoousios, “one-in-being” or “of the same essence”). What is more, this quotation emphasizes the fundamentally Platonic concerns of Nicene-era theologians and their modern recapitulators. For Plato and his philosophical heirs, the chief metaphysical distinction divides the static world of Being from the dynamic world of Becoming. By the time of Nicea, many Christian theologians had embraced this philosophical distinction and, having all agreed that God the Father belonged on the side of Being, were then concerned with where the Son belonged. Lane pronounces in favor of the orthodox: the Son is, he did not become.
More recently, Simon Gathercole has taken up the Platonic debate anew with regard to divine sonship in the Synoptic Gospels. In The Preexistent Son, he argues that “the preexistence of Christ can be found in the Synoptic Gospels,” precisely the place where most biblical scholars would not look for such a doctrine. When commenting on the Gospel of Mark, Gathercole describes Jesus’ divine sonship with the following terms: it is “beyond a merely functional sonship possessed by someone with otherwsie entirely natural origins,” having instead a “supernatural, transcendent origin.” The Son “participates in the same reality as the angels and the Father,” His concern here is thus metaphysical in Platonic terms: is the Son natural or supernatural, mundane or transcendent, earthly or heavenly? (The language of “participation in reality” would find a perfect home in a philosophy course on Plato.) In Gathercole’s own words, on which side of the “God/Creation divide” does Jesus exist? Being or Becoming?
Now the standard response is that Platonic and other philosophical terminology was simply adopted in the third and fourth centuries for the sake of convenience of expression—because it allowed Christians to articulate what they had previously neglected to make explicit. The ideas did not originate with the adoption of Greco-Roman philosophical expression, but just the expression itself. I have already shown the fallacy of this claim in my criticisms of Bauckham’s christological monotheism.
Moving on, in his chapter on the historical Jesus, Bird makes a series of methodological errors that seriously undermine his entire premise. To begin, his goal for the chapter is to “show that Jesus identified himself as a divine agent with a unique authority and a unique relationship with Israel’s God” (p. 46). My concern is that this identification is quite a bit different from saying Jesus believed he was God (note the title of the chapter: “Did Jesus Think He was God?”). Throughout this chapter Bird tries to distinguish Jesus from other intermediary figures asserted to have contributed to the development of Christ’s conceptualization. Bird’s description of Jesus’ self-identification actually supports the conclusion that the angel of YHWH and Metatron—also divine agents with unique authority and a unique relationship with God—were conceptual templates for Jesus’ relationship with God.[5]
He argues against himself even more exlpicitly than that, though. Note that if we go back to his chapter on monotheism, we find Bird rejecting the notion that the Enochic Son of Man is an appropriate template for early Christology because “the fact that kinds and nations worship him, even while on God’s throne, is still merely the acknowledgment that he is God’s appointed agent who will gather the elect and punish the wicked kinds and nations who have not acknowledged the one true God and his people” (p. 34). Bird is identifying the Enochic Son of Man as “a divine agent with a unique authority and a unique relationship with Israel’s God.” He’s even receiving worship. This is exactly what he’s trying to say Jesus’ view of himself was. How does Bird navigate around this contradiction? He simply asserts that these seemingly parallel conceptualizations of the Enochic Son of Man and Jesus are fundamentally different because “such beings were not part of God’s divine identity” (p. 35).
There’s a problem here, though, because in some cases, they are! On p. 37 Bird discusses the angel of YHWH, pointing out that “paradoxically the angel of the Lord both is YHWH and is not YHWH.” How could we possibly find a more direct analogy to the early Christian view of Christ’s relationship to God? Was not the entire christological question how we may understand Jesus to both be YHWH and not be YHWH? According to Bird, that’s misguided, though. Observe (p. 37):
The problem with the angel is whether or even how he is identifiable with YHWH’s own presence and person. However, Christ’s person was understood as being distinct from God the Father, and his mode of divine presence was couched in far more concrete language, like “form” of God, “glory” of God, “image” of God, and even “God enfleshed.”
The distinction of the “presence” and “person” is Nicene, however. It occurs nowhere near the New Testament. Bird is forced to retroject his Nicene frameworks onto the New Testament to distinguish the conceptualization of the angel of YHWH from the conceptualization of Jesus. That “more concrete language” is simply the result of quite a bit more time and attention having been dedicated to pondering and expounding upon Christ’s mission and relationship to God. It in no way undermines the quite solid position held by many that these figures that so frequently found themselves wrapped up in the identity of God provided the conceptual canvas for the composition of Christ’s relationship to God.
In another section, Bird presents a bizarre description of the field of social memory, suggesting (it appears to me) that social memories—in virtue of nothing other than being shared by a community—have a high degree of authenticity (p. 49):
. . . I would advocate that the Gospels are generally reliable and coherent sources for studying the historical Jesus. As long as the early church knew the “Lord Jesus” to be the same as “the crucified one,” the historical Jesus was always going to be properly basic for the church’s faith. The things Jesus said and did pre-Easter mattered for what the church believed and said about him post-Easter.
That is not to deny that the Gospels are documents designed for proclamation, theologically loaded, and written to create faith. The Gospels are, then, the interpretation and application of the memory of Jesus for readers in the Greco-Roman world. A memory was carried by eyewitnesses anf was put into the custory of corporate interest in the Jew from Nazareth.
The assumption seems to be that if the early Christian community considered a specific tradition about Jesus important, it must have some historicity to it—either no one would be so presumptuous as to create or evolve a new tradition, or there would not be time or opportunity to do so. Either way, the assumptions are baseless. One can point to numerous instances of traditions about living and recently dead charismatic figures evolving from different events or being invented out of whole cloth and immediately gaining circulation within the associated communities. Bird entirely misrepresents the relationship of social memory to the historical Jesus.[6]
Concluding Remarks
I cannot recommend Bird’s contributions to the response book, although I will have some praise to give for some of the other essays published alongside his. I was disappointed in Bird’s tone, in his misrepresentations of Ehrman, and in his methodological lack of care. His essays strike me as shockingly rhetorical and apologetic, and despite the flaws and shortcomings of some of Ehrman’s arguments, I don’t think Bird has made a significant dent in his overall case. If anything, Bird has shown his scholarship and his grasp of the issues to lag quite a distance behind those of Ehrman.
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Daniel O. McClellan has a BA from Brigham Young University in ancient Near Eastern studies, a master of studies in Jewish Studies from Oxford University, and a MA in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University. He plans to enter into a doctoral program and he is currently a Scripture translation supervisor for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, UT. In future posts he will continue reviewing the response book How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature —A Response to Bart D. Ehrman before offering his own modal for understanding how Jesus came to be understood as “God”. See also his earlier posts “A Critical Engagement with Richard Bauckham’s ‘Christology of Divine Identity’” and Book Review: Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God.
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[1] I don’t want to make this a focus of either review, but the editing has numerous problems of various sizes and significance, likely because of time issues. For instance, the tertiary title from the cover, “A Response to Bart D. Ehrman,” is missing Ehrman’s middle initial on the title page. Similarly, Simon J. Gathercole’s middle initial is included on the cover, in the title page, and at the beginning of his essay, but is omitted in the Table of Contents. Jeffrey Thompson’s name is spelled without a “p” on the copyright page, but includes it on the back cover. There’s also a space missing between the words “Ehrman’s” and “Interpretative” in the title of Christ Tilling’s first essay in the Table of Contents. On page 47, the first paragraph of the quoted text is a particular font size and in block text, in agreement with other quotations in the book, but the second and third paragraphs are in a different size and are only left-justified. Additionally, the three paragraphs are from two separate publications, but no additional line breaks separate them from each other. Near the top of page 43, the transliterated word Exagōgē appears to have extra spaces after the ō and the ē, likely because of some space issue with the font’s use of the macron. Many other examples could be highlighted.
[2] See p. 237 in Ehrman’s volume for the clearest rejection of an “essentially evolutionary” christological development.
[3] And note his criterion (p. 51): “We can regard a unit in the Gospels as claiming a high degree of historical authenticity when a saying or event attributed to Jesus makes sense within Judaism (i.e., plausible context) and also represents a starting point for the early church (i.e., a plausible consequence).” I am at a loss for words. If something has two markers of “plausibility,” Bird considers it to have “a high degree of historical authenticity.” And those markers are about as subjective and vague as one could possibly hope for. I would love to see Bird identify some saying or event in the New Testament that doesn’t “make sense within Judaism” and doesn’t represent “a starting point for the early church.” Just about anything could be spun to fit those categories.
[4] Bird cites the volumes Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity and One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, but few of the essays there actually support his point, and some flatly reject it. The conclusion of Nicole Belayche’s article, “Deus deum . . . summorum maximus (Apuleius): Ritual Expressions of Distinction in the Divine World in the Imperial Period” (p. 166) perfectly reflects Ehrman’s continuum within a “monotheistic” framework: “The term heis theos, ‘alone/unique’, signifies that the divinity was alone of its type, unmatched (praestans in Apuleius’ words), capable of achieving the impossible, but not one god as such. It is the equivalent of a relative superlative form, like hypsistos, designed to affirm the unequalled characteristics of the god celebrated. These acclamations, which are the intensified form of an act of thanksgiving, accompany other ritual forms of exaltation, for example the use of epithets or theonyms of glorification and praise. This redesigning of the architecture of the divine world does not require the heis theos to be exclusive; on the contrary, the exaltation of a divinity takes on greater significance in a pluralistic context. We here encounter an intrinsic quality of polytheism, which was pluralist and capable of organising the pantheon according to hierarchies that varied according to the contexts.”
[5] NB: this is not to say Jesus was an angel (or a butternut squash), but that the specific relationship was patterned after the angel. Bird has difficulty distinguishing these ideas. I will go into much greater detail on this in my final post of this series.
[6] A good example of insightful and methodologically sound applications of the theory to early Christianity is the Semeia volume edited by Kirk Alan and Tom Thatcher, Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity.
the archives near Emmaus 
Daniel,
The “angel of Yahweh” seems to me to be Yahweh and yet different from Yahweh, which as you say, sure does sound like Christ to me. I honestly think the more I read that every NT scholar would be very well served to study OT theology first.
Martin Hengel made the following comment, “IF all you know is the NT, you do not know the NT”. He could not have been more accurate.
There is ground breaking work ongoing which explains why a 2cd temple era Jew “could/would” worship Jesus and retain OT monotheism. Hint, had nothing to do with any Christian centric theology!
It “fit” with what they knew of the OT text.
I like Bird, but, I felt his was the weakest dialectic, too.
Patrick – Thanks for the comment. I agree about the need to read the NT through a Jewish lens informed by the Hebrew Bible, but I’m still wary of the way most insist on retaining monotheism. My last post in the series will clarify my position on this, as well as my thoughts on the relationship of the angel of YHWH’s conceptualization to that of Jesus.
Thanks for such a detailed essay, Daniel. From the sound of it, it is not only Bird to be chided, but also Zondervan for an inadequate job of editing. Many of the things you mention are not technical scholarly matters but things that any good copy editor, especially one with at least some background in NT studies, as I’d expect exists at Zondervan, should have challenged or just removed some stuff.
My mind often goes this some what different direction, as your observations prompted it to: to possible personal “agendas” and or the social/emotional as well as theological “location” of a given author, Bird in this case. I recall reading a brief autobio statement by him re his coming to Xn faith, early and later education, etc. I wish I remembered where to re-read it, as details have faded. But I think he fits a general category I’ve come to identify over the years, without me trying to make everyone who may be in it fit precisely or be just the same, by any means. But the general outline is people (almost always males, that I’ve noticed) who had either a non-religious upbringing or perhaps nominally religious but not emotionally engaging. Then, after some period of either general angst or perhaps a “low point” of depression or substance abuse, etc., they have a conversion experience. This is often through or at least followed-up by some orthodox/conservative (theologically) group.
In the process of interpreting the great relief, joy, etc. that may have come during and following the experience, this bright person (Bird or others) attaches to basically orthodox Christian theology as explaining it. I can’t explain all the details of how this works, but I know that such turn-around or “awakening” experiences are very powerful. But they are also generally not linked so much to a new set of beliefs taken on which resulted in the conversion, as to a subtle shift of some kind, or even a non-subtle reversal of will from opposing “God” (or some caricature thereof) to submitting to God. I wouldn’t say that the “Holy Spirit” is NOT involved, as I do believe in a powerful “lure of love” from God. But I think there is a whole lot going on on the human level that then skews how people converted in this basic way tend to interpret spiritual life and view biblical theology, the “work of Christ”, etc.
And, part of the picture is that such conversions are generally those that take place in late teens to about 30 or so… the significant stage of “becoming adult” in mental and social terms. As I recall the basic outline of Bird’s self-described personal history and conversion, it seems to fit the general picture above. And I’m getting the feeling that, even with PhD academic studies (I don’t know much about Queensland U. or his program there), Bird is skewing things pretty regularly in order to protect the validity (in his mind) of the kind of theology he attaches to his conversion on a powerful but only partly conscious emotional level. There are a number of Christian apologists who I’d say fit into this basic dynamic and who are not genuine scholars as a result.
The ideas did not originate with the adoption of Greco-Roman philosophical expression, but just the expression itself. I have already shown the fallacy of this claim in my criticisms of Bauckham’s christological monotheism.
Not so fast. Even if these ideas were greatly influence by and borrowed directly from particular Greco-Roman philosophical expressions, that still does not prove their only origin lay there. For example there were competing notions to Platoism in the Greco-Roman world Christianity could also have borrowed from such as Hellenistic Judaism (few would argue Philo was residue influence of Platonic heritage).
In your criticism of Bauckham’s christological monotheism you state that This absolute metaphysical distinction is nowhere articulated (in narrative, poetry, or ritual), and a concept that is not articulated cannot be shared within a community, much less be the very foundation of their conceptualization of God. This is obviously and demonstrably false.
The concept of Gravity was not articulated before Newton, and yet the idea ‘things fall’ was obviously shared throughout Europe. You could have has asked anyone ‘What will happen if I let go of this apple?’ and universally the concept recognized would have been that the apple would fall to the ground. The idea that a concept needs to be articulated to be shared is a fallacy of ‘memory theory’ which restricts knowledge propagation to language.
You also say “ … similar rhetoric can be found in several other places, but the majority of the rest of the related literature flatly precludes a metaphysical distinction separating the deity from the rest of reality. and “.. notions in play was indeed sovereignty, but a functional sovereignty, not a metaphysical one except that intuitively there is a metaphysical difference between causation and effect even if this distinction is not expressed or articulated. Something can be observed and appreciated whether or not it is expressed! Greek philosophy did a good job of parsing out the metaphysical difference using philosophical language however your conclusion that early Hebrew thought did not contain a metaphysical distinction between divinity and nature is speculative.
I would point out that Alan F. Segal’s thesis (including J McGrath, and others) on early Israelite monotheism (involving ‘Two Powers in Heaven’ ISBN 978-1602585492) shows that our ‘modern notions of monotheism’ don’t quite match ancient notions of monotheism, including monotheism at the time of Jesus and earlier – yet, this early monotheistic distinction between creator and created was clearly evident in Philo’s Hellenistic Judaism; and contains clear notions of divine powers ‘not divine in and of themselves’ inherited from Judaism just as early or earlier than Plato. The metaphysical distinction Segal (and others) sees in the early Hebrew divine council theology was between whether a being was self-existential or not, and though articulated primitively is clearly evident and clearly a product of earlier Hebrew thought, not Plato. (The ‘Two Powers’ were clearly distinct from all else … and early Hebrew pre-Platonic thought clearly identified YHWH and the angel of YHWH as distinct from all other created beings including angels as Hebrew scripture itself attests).
The existence of similar notions in Platonic thought and Hellenistic Judaism, albeit using different philosophical nomenclatures, suggests these were different branches of some earlier philosophical influence with clear dichotomies of being; one ‘in-and-of-itself’ and the other contingent ‘being’. Christianity’s initial view of this monotheistic dichotomy could have drawn heavily on Platonic philosophical expression (since this was where the development of nomenclature apart from Hebrew theology was starting to happen) yet still including other more ancient influences (such as that evident in Philo).
So comparing apples and apples and oranges to oranges, if the patristic Greco-Roman philosophical expressions Christianity may or may not have borrowed from Greco-Roman philosophy (I think it did), the source influence could still have existed in multiple forms from earlier multiple sources apart from the Greco-Roman philosophies themselves.
I’m mostly enjoying your observations about Bird’s thesis, but some of your own presuppositions, and memory theory (still a highly controversial and somewhat limited methodology, I might add) are interfering.
Otherwise very thorough and thoughtful review, very much appreciated.
Hi, Andrew. Thanks for offering some comments and for the kind words. Let me see if I can offer some clarifications and ask for some from you. First, Platonism is the most dualistic of the ancient Greco-Roman philosophies, and there’s really no other candidate for the origin within early Christianity of the uniquely Platonic idea that God existed apart from all other reality. Philo was heavily influenced by Stoicism and Platonism, but Stoics were monists, which doesn’t fit Bauckham’s notion of that absolute metaphysical distinction at all. I don’t see Philo appealing directly to a Platonic notion of God’s separate existence. If you’d like to propose some other source for early Judaism or Christianity’s development of God’s existence over and against “all other reality,” I would be interested in some specific examples. Further below you repeatedly insist that Philo and others “clearly” appeal to such a distinction, but I know Segal’s text quite well, in addition to those of Philo and many other Jewish writers, and I can think of no such examples. I don’t see that metaphysical distinction in early Judaism, so I’d appreciate specific examples if I am to be convinced that it’s quite clearly there.
Next, gravity is a law of nature that exists and operates apart from our perception and always has. God’s existence apart from “all other reality” does not. It’s an abstract philosophical principles that is predicated entirely upon the philosophical principles and models that developed it. Since it presupposes a notion of creation ex nihilo in the Judeo-Christian iteration, the second century CE is the terminus post quem, as far as I can tell. Also, I nowhere suggest that knowledge propagation is restricted to language. In fact, I quite explicitly mentioned ritual as another vehicle for that propagation. For abstract philosophical principles, however, you do need some kind of articulation. Interpretive dance or other non-verbal communication can hardly communicate philosophical principles like that.
Yes, there is a metaphysical difference between causation and effect, but that in no way suggests that ancient Judaism conceived in any uniform way at all of a metaphysical difference between God and all other reality. Such an abstraction simply requires articulation if anyone is to accept that it was a shared belief among early Jews. As far as anyone can tell, there was no secret handshake to let everyone know that God existed apart from all other reality. Calling it “speculative” without offering any alternative explanation strikes me as specious. The absence of such a specific abstract philosophical principle from a worldview that never articulates it and is largely devoid of abstract philosophical principles is not speculation. In my opinion, it would be speculation to insist that such an abstract philosophical principle actually existed within a worldview that never expressed it and was largely devoid of abstract philosophical principles.
I appreciate your comments of 5:27, Daniel. Well studied (background) and well stated… have to admit you’re informing me quite a bit here, and on what does strike me as important. Incidentally, D. R. Griffin (“Two Great Truths”), drawing mainly from Nicholas Berdyaev and David Lindberg (“The Beginnings of Western Science”), says that creation “ex nihilo” was not the position of the early Xn’s until sometime around the middle to late 2nd century. His understanding is that the more ancient view was creation out of chaos (seems to be so in Gen. 1). I think this lines up better than later-developed orthodoxy with God not standing clearly apart from all else. There were a lot of (mostly unfortunate) spin-offs of the move to “ex nihilo”. The main one: a kind of “supernaturalism” that is indeed hard to reconcile the basic approach of science.
Daniel, thanks again for your comments? You argue “ … and there’s really no other candidate for the origin within early Christianity of the uniquely Platonic idea that God existed apart from all other reality.” This is the thesis I’m arguing somewhat against. Before Alan F. Segal (Two Powers), Daniel Boyarin (History of Christology) and others, work on “Two Powers”, delving into the mysteries of Israelite monotheism and emergent Christology, there was no other philosophical source for dualism apart from Platonism as you suggest. However Segal and Boyarin’s both show that very early Israelite monotheism (meaning pre-Christian rabbinic tradition) showed evidence of earlier pre-existing Christological ideas deeply engrained in pre-Rabbinic Israelite tradition preceding the New Testament. By implication a second possible source of dualism could be Persian dualism, or ironically even previous Hebrew dualism in monotheism ([Isa 45:7] being an admonishment against universal Persian dualism (Zarathustra) showing all apparent dualism in creation comes under YHWH the creator). Segal shows that early rabbinic Judaism contained influences that revealed not only a principal angelic being or hypostatic manifestation in heaven equivalent to God, but also a rabbinic dichotomy between God (His hypostatic manifestation) and everything else (so decidedly not Platonic). Boyarin showed that binitarianism was long evident in non-Hellenistic rabbinic literature (evident in this rabbinic treatment of binitarianism is theistic dualism and implicitly earlier non-Platonic influences)
So there are other possible candidates more ancient than Greek Platonism, contrary to your claim above. (I’ve long argued that we Westerners only see Greece and Rome where we should instead be seeing Assyrian and Babylon beneath). Now admittedly the real value of Segal’s work is to advance our understanding early monotheism, and Boyarin’s work shows that the concept of ‘Trinity’ was not Christian; people don’t look at either work as a source of dualism separate from Plato. Admittedly people are only now starting to see as these themes emerge from his work traces of non-Hellenistic dualistic thought . It is there, so it is an unintended consequence of their work perhaps, and there may be some PHD theses or careers to be made from exploring these theme further, however, it still refutes the strength of the claim only Plato could be a source for dualistic thinking in Christianity, if the implication Plato himself borrowed from Zoroaster (Zarathustra) or earlier Hebrew though is true. Philo’s dualism would not be Platonic then, but an additional Hellenistic reflection of earlier Persian or Hebrew thinking.
You say how about an example? Daniel Boyarin discusses how ‘Two Powers’ (i.e. hypostatic union of YWHW with the Angel of YWHW (to borrow later theological language)) was treated as early rabbinic heresy or not (so treatment in Tannaitic midrashic for example). The point is pre-Christian rabbinic debates (post Erzraic midrash of 5th century BCE onwards) about what constitutes heresy reveal very clear and sophisticated doctrines of God entailing creator/creation dichotomies, and the early rabbi’s credit biblical and pre-Platonic traditions.
With respect to my use of gravity to show that things need not be expressed to be commonly shared – the point was that use of language (ala Memory theory) is not the only way to shared knowledge is propagated; but fine you don’t like a naturalist example, so I’ll provide a non-naturalistic example: “The concept of the Law of Excluded Middle, that something cannot be both true and false at the same time, or another way, that something cannot exist or not exist at the same time is recognized universally whether or not it has been articulated, expressed, and studied” So with respect to the divinity/natural dichotomy, whether or not a culture expressed this dichotomy using theological language proves nothing. There is an obvious intuitive distinction between something that creates and the thing that is created. Moreover this distinction goes well beyond a simple essential difference but includes a qualitative difference as well (He who creates will always be greater than the thing created). Tracing the literary residue of an idea only tells us about its development as an intellectual theme, and is something akin to dichotomy of the history of an event with the event itself. The two are different.
I agree with your point “ it would be speculation to insist that such an abstract philosophical principle actually existed within a worldview that never expressed it ” however I don’t agree that either the Israelite or Persian world view never expressed it, so it’s hardly speculation.
Andrew, we’re talking about two kinds of dualism. One is cosmological and the other is ethical. Christianity’s ultimate view of God as existing apart from all other reality is a refraction of the Platonic notion of a cosmological dualism. The influence of Persian religion is primarily relevant for theodicy.
Do you have a publication and page numbers for Boyarin’s discussion? I disagree with your conceptualization of God and the angel of God, but I’ll address that more directly in my last post in my series. I’ll save that discussion for then.
Next, I take issue with something you say about the inviolable distinction between creator and created. You said the following:
“There is an obvious intuitive distinction between something that creates and the thing that is created. Moreover this distinction goes well beyond a simple essential difference but includes a qualitative difference as well (He who creates will always be greater than the thing created).”
This is only true if you presuppose creation ex nihilo, as I have already said. I am not appreciably distinct, ontologically, from my children, nor is there a guarantee that I will always be greater than them. In light of that, you cannot posit this distinction until you can posit creation out of nothing, which you cannot until the second century CE. This is no coincidence that creation ex nihilo and our ontological compartmentalization appear around the same time, well after the composition of the New Testament.
Daniel,
If you don’t posit ex nihilo by Yahweh at some point, how is it stuff came into existence in your judgment?
Daniel, I appreciate your response very much.
Since you are planning additional post(s), I won’t belabour this any further than to protest your point about creation ex nihilo using equivocation. Yes, procreation is a meta-form of creation but to use it to refute my point is equivocation. As believers, we believe that human’s possess spirit, soul and body (or some variation). Accordingly procreation entails the procreation of a spiritual component bequeathed to the baby. Perhaps the template is God’s work [Gen 1:27] or the bequest of the breath of life [Gen 2:7] to make us ‘living’. However, we do not typically credit ourselves with this artifice, but God. I concede that procreation falls outside of my claim since it includes God as a partner.
However consider instead a more appropriate alternative: The perfect artist might create for herself a perfect reflection of her person as a statue, but that statue will never be alive. So the creator is not only different but superior to the created. This act of human creation more than procreation involving God, solely our own activity does not presuppose ex nihilo and conforms to my claim above.
Patrick – I don’t believe the question of original creation can be answered based on the available data.
Andrew – You’ve shown that the verb “create” can have incredibly broad as well as incredibly technical and specific senses. How do you determine which is intended by the first century Jewish and Christian authors we’re reading?
Larry Hurtado just posted some responses to some questions about christology, preexistence, etc. I thought one of the comments was relevant this this blog post. First, the post is here:
http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/jesus-pre-existence-etc-responding-to-questions/
Second, note his final two paragraphs:
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4. What about subsequent creedal controversies and formulations? E.g., the three “persons” (or “hypostases”) that comprise the “Trinity,” etc.?
To my mind, these should be seen as valiant and impressive attempts by Christians living in later (than the NT texts) times, engaging and appropriating conceptual categories of those later times, to address questions and issues that had arisen then. But these conceptual categories and issues weren’t always the same ones that we find in the NT texts. E.g., referring to “persons” of the “Father” and the “Son” seems to have emerged sometime in the 2nd century (e.g., Justin Martyr’s references to the “prosopon” of the Son or the Father (literally = “face”, the Latin “persona” a subsequent attempt at an equivalent term). Simply reciting NT terms and expressions wasn’t sufficient (and is never sufficient for the theological task, to my mind). The questions had shifted, and the conceptual categories (heavily shaped by Greek philosophy) were different (the NT texts still heavily steeped in biblical/Jewish categories), and couldn’t rightly be avoided.
But I suspect that if Paul were asked whether Jesus was the “second person of the Trinity,” he would likely have responded with a quizzical look, and asked for some explanation of what it meant! Were the patristic texts and creedal statements saying something beyond or distinguishable from what the NT texts say? Certainly. Does that invalidate those later creedal discussions and formulations? Well, if you recognize the necessity of the continuing theological task (of intelligently attempting to articulate Christian faith meaningfully in terms appropriate and understandable in particular times and cultures), then probably you’ll see the classic creedal statements as an appropriate such effort. But that’s a historical judgement about that later period, and/or a theological judgement. And my emphasis is on the historical question of what the NT texts say and how to understand them in their own historical context.
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While I don’t unilaterally agree with Hurtado, I think it’s instructive that he can acknowledge that not only the expressions, but the very conceptual categories of Trinitarianism were foreign to the thought of the authors of the New Testament and were shaped in later centuries by Greek philosophy.
I appreciate your succinct answer to Patrick on the 9:07 (my timer) post! And not-knowing the exact relation of Creator to whatever-already-existed did not seem to concern the ancient Hebrews, nor the writers of Intertestamental lit or the NT. Just curious: are you familiar with either Griffin’s “Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith” or others of his similar works? At what point(s), if any, do you find his explanations lacking? It’s not my precise field, but with a lot of relevant background, I can’t find any significant fault and a lot of “synthesizing” power of practical use.
Hi, Howard. Thanks for the questions. No, I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with Griffin’s work. I’m generally wary of trying to synthesize the two fields, given I think they operate under completely different worldviews and with completely different epistemological assumptions. I’m more of an advocate of compartmentalization when it comes to scientific inquiry and religious belief.