El conjunto R de los n´umeros reales es equinumeroso con el conjunto P(N) de las partes del conjunto de los n´umeros naturales.

At a very basic level and from a very practical perspective, shifting our scholarly rhetoric away from a focus on ancient Jewish monotheism and toward a discussion of God as the creator in opposition to all other reality is necessary because this is the language that ancient Jews employed when they sought to describe who God was for them. Unlike scholars today, ancient Jews did not debate whether the personification of divine attributes or the apotheosis of wise men compromised the nature of monotheism. Rather, they conceived of the godhead in a hierarchical manner, believing that many different “divine” beings, even if created, could participate in the divinity of Israel’s creator God without compromising God’s oneness. This observation reveals a fundamental difference between the concerns of the ancients and that of our own. Scholars today ask: How could Jesus be considered divine without compromising the basic tenets of Jewish monotheism? But the ancients wondered instead: How can we, as humans, become god-like ourselves? This discrepancy reveals how the questions scholars employ to interrogate ancient texts often reflect modern preoccupations rather than representing the worldview of the ancients themselves. Our modern knowledge does not absolve us scholars from trying to understand antiquity on its own terms. Rather, it ought to compel ancient historians to unearth again, with fresh insights, what was happening in ancient times. By attending more carefully to the language ancient Jews actually employed with respect to God and the divine realm, new breakthroughs in the study of ancient Jews can emerge.

One of the problems I see with the current focus on questions related to the nature of ancient Jewish monotheism is that it obscures important points of continuity between the earliest followers of Jesus and other Jews who lived at that time. In recent years, a number of specialists

interested in the study of early Christology have been preoccupied with the following problem: Given that the earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish, and Jews during the first century of the common era were ostensibly monotheists, how could these Jews have conceived of Jesus, alongside God the Father, as also being divine? When scholars begin their investigations with an anachronistic focus on the notion of ancient Jewish monotheism, and assume that divinity was the exclusive prerogative of Israel’s supreme God, then early Jesus followers, with their belief in Jesus’ divinity, are immediately singled out and presented in opposition to all other Jews at that time. Yet if the focus can shift to the distinction between the uncreated God and all other reality—a distinction that ancient Jews actually made—and we can recognize that Israel’s supreme uncreated divinity enabled other, lesser entities to participate in his divinity, then the earliest followers of Jesus can be seen as a part of this ancient Jewish discussion rather than as a distinct bifurcation from it. Moreover, more attention can be devoted to how not all Jews agreed on what could or could not be incorporated into the identity of that supreme uncreated God. To put it simply, attending to this distinction between a supreme uncreated divinity and all other reality provides a better window into what was at stake in antiquity when the ancients thought, wrote, and spoke about God.

I have specifically devoted an entire chapter on ancient Jewish conceptions of God because without a clear understanding of how I have navigated this contested topic my broader discussion of divine embodiment in Jewish antiquity could easily be misconstrued. Shifting the focus in this manner also enables me to show how revolutionary certain ideas were, even in their own day, ideas such as those espoused in the prologue of the Gospel of John. Because much of past scholarship has focused on the question of Jewish monotheism, the attendant question of Jesus’ divinity has also come up. The difficulty with this focus, though, as I have demonstrated

in this chapter and will unpack throughout the dissertation, is that there were several other entities within the worldview of ancient Jews that were also considered divine, such that Jesus’ divinity, in and of itself, was not unique. Though there are many current scholars who see as unique the move that early Christians made of incorporating Jesus into the divine identity, as my brief exploration of Philo’s understanding of God’s divine powers has illustrated and my subsequent analysis of these themes in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 will make clear, similar ideologies were well established within Judaism prior to the rise of the early Christian movement. Indeed, As Paula Fredriksen has noted, “Ancient monotheism . . . addressed the issue of heaven’s architecture, not its absolute population. As long as one god stood at the absolute apex of holiness and power, pagan, Jewish, and eventually Christian monotheists could and did accommodate vast numbers of deities ranging beneath.”187 _{Though I disagree with Fredriksen’s} focus on the term “Jewish monotheism”, she makes an excellent point regarding the way that many ancient Jews conceived of the divine. There was not just one divine thing in the worldview of ancient Jews—even in the first century CE—but a number of different layers of divinity all participating in the divinity of their one supreme creator God.

This chapter on re-conceptualizing ancient Jewish monotheism complicates how ancient Jews viewed God. On the one hand, like their Greco-Roman counterparts they envisioned a world with many degrees of divinity, muddying modern definitions of monotheism; their worldview encompassed a belief that several entities (including certain select humans) could participate in the divinity of Israel’s supreme God and thereby be considered “divine” themselves. On the other hand, ancient Jews articulated a clear separation between the creator God and all other reality. Thus, though many entities could be considered “divine,” that did not

187 _{Fredriksen, Sin, 54.}

make them synonymous with Israel’s highest, and uncreated, God. This understanding of the ancient Jewish godhead serves as the backdrop to the rest of my study. In the next chapter of this dissertation, I apply this nuanced understanding to my close reading of Philo of Alexandria’s work. In particular, I demonstrate how Philo—like the author of the Gospel of John (chapter 6)—also presents a means by which Israel’s God could become embodied—though for him the nexus of that embodiment is not the person of Jesus but the souls of created humans. I then show how particularly righteous figures in Philo’s thought exemplify this trend, with Moses serving as a primary example. This evidence suggests that scholarship on God’s embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology.188 Articulations of divine embodiment, like that found in John 1:14 with respect to the figure of Jesus, were not the only way that Jews in the early centuries of the Common Era understood that God could become embodied in human form.

188 _{The idea that God became embodied in the specific figure of Jesus has long been conceived of} as the central and defining event of Christianity. This conception is typically framed vis-à-vis the later doctrine of the Incarnation. See, for instance, Cross, “The Incarnation,” 452–476.

CHAPTER THREE: A JEWISH PHILOSOPHER’S RELUCTANT

EMBRACE OF DIVINE CORPOREALITY

3.1 Introduction

Because, as I pointed out in the Introduction, later polemics established Jews and Christians as binary opposites, differentiated in large part based their views of God’s body, scholars have not sufficiently explored how Jews, in the early Roman period, who stood outside of the Jesus movement, conceived of how the divine could become embodied on earth.189 In this chapter, I employ the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria to illustrate my argument because scholars often point to him as the quintessential representative of a Jew who stressed the absolute incorporeality of God.190 But if, so my logic goes, one can find an articulation of divine embodiment even within the writings of Philo, then perhaps there were

189 _{Since the field of New Testament studies tends to focus on textual or hermeneutical issues that} have relevance for the later development of Christianity, through these methodological approaches scholars often confine their investigations to narrow debates regarding when this idea first arose among Jesus-followers. See Dunn, Christology in the Making, xii, 213; although this is focus of the entire book. For representative examples of scholars who debate a similar question, namely at what point the human figure, Jesus of Nazareth, was first considered divine, see Casey, Jewish Prophet, 9, 31–32, 35–36, 143, 156, 158; Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 1–8, 11–15; 99–128; idem, Lord Jesus Christ, 1–11; idem, How

on Earth, 1–9; 42–53, 152–53, 177–78; Bauckham, God Crucified, vii–x; idem, Jesus and the God of

Israel,ix–59; 182–85; Ehrman, How Jesus Became God. However, a proliferation of recent studies by

specialists of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinics alike has underscored the multifaceted ways that both the ancient Israelite and early Jewish traditions depicted God in embodied form. See Neusner, Incarnation of

God, 4; Wolfson, 239–54; Lorberbaum, The Image of God; Hamori, “When Gods Were Men,” 150–155;

idem, “Divine Embodiment in the Hebrew Bible,” 161–183; Sommer, Bodies of God, 1–11, 38–57, 124– 143; Neis, The Sense of Sight, 18–81; Knafl, Forming God, 72–157; Smith, “The Three Bodies of God,” 471–88.

190 _{The chronology of Philo’s life is obscure. But scholars consistently place his writing career in} the first century CE, with his lifetime often spanning between the years 20 BCE–50CE.See Schenck, A

Brief Guide to Philo, 9; Sterling, “Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series,” ix (cf. Runia, Philo of Alexandria, 3 note 3, for a broader range of possibilities).

other ways that Jews in the early Roman period understood that God could take on bodily form. Here I demonstrate one of the means by which Israel’s God became embodied, according to Philo; granted, for him the nexus of that embodiment is not the person of Jesus but the souls of created humans. In particular, in his interpretation of the creation of humanity in Genesis 2:7, he portrays the bodies of humans as corporeal, earthly, and created, yet he presents their souls as proceeding directly from God—as a begotten or not-created thing—imparted into the human mind through a direct in-breathing by God (Opif. 135; QG 1.4; Leg. 1.33–37). Particularly righteous figures in Philo’s thought exemplify this trend, with Moses serving as a primary example. This evidence suggests that scholarship on God’s embodiment has been limited by knowledge of later developments in Christian theology. Incarnational formulas, like that found in John 1:14 with respect to the figure of Jesus, were not the only way that Jews in the first and second century CE understood that God could become embodied in human form.