My methodology differs markedly from that of previous scholarship, since most scholars—especially New Testament and Early Christian specialists—attempt to understand questions related to divine embodiment vis-à-vis inquiries into how and when the earliest Christians came to understand the figure of Jesus as God. Most scholars in these subfields have attempted to investigate the intellectual steps that led early Christians to articulate that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. Especially in relation to the latter part of this equation, these scholars have questioned when the origins of high Christology first emerged. They have
97 To my knowledge, the only potential exception to this rule arises in the work of Alan Segal, “Pre-existence and Incarnation: A Response to Dunn and Holiday,” Semeia, Vol. 30 (1984): 83–95; idem, “The Incarnation: The Jewish Milieu,” in The Incarnation, ed. Stephen Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116–139. These works, however, were merely initial forays into this topic and not a sustained analysis of this period in Jewish history in relation to the question of God’s embodiment in human form.
employed as their starting point the fixed Christological formulas that first emerged in the fourth century CE and then have worked backwards by asking how and when the earliest followers of Jesus started to think of Jesus in this manner.
I find this teleological focus in past scholarship problematic for three distinct yet interrelated reasons. First, I think that this focus has obscured scholars’ ability to see the many ways that Jews in antiquity articulated that God could be embodied in the world or that particularly righteous humans could undergo the process of apotheosis. I am suggesting that although the Gospel of John’s presentation of the divine word made flesh, in the specific person of Jesus, presents a particularly striking example of how God came into the world, other contemporaneous Jewish authors also depicted God’s embodiment in the world, albeit via different means such as through the souls of humans or the figure of the Jewish high priest.
Second, I find this teleological focus problematic because it sets up early Christology— and, by default, early Christianity—in opposition to Judaism.98 In other words, these scholars are so interested in the distinctiveness of Christianity that they don’t fully acknowledge the
98 In the early 1990s, James Dunn first popularized the notion that in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE Judaism and Christianity emerged as two distinct and separate religions out of a shared ancestry in Second Temple Judaism. See James Dunn, The Partings of the Ways:
Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London:
SCM, 1991); for a similar perspective, also see Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and
Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Yet subsequent scholars
have demonstrated how inherent methodological flaws and theological biases make this model insufficient, causing many to overlook the ongoing fluidity between these two developing traditions. See Judith Lieu, “‘The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” JSNT 56 (1994): 101–19; Boyarin, Dying for God, 1–21; Annette Y. Reed and Adam H. Becker, “Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions,” in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and
the Early Middle Ages (ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003),
1–33; Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. 17–33; Schremer, Brothers Estranged, 3–24; Megan H. Williams, “No More Clever Titles: Observations on Some Recent Studies of Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman World,” JQR 99.1 (2009): 37–55. Daniel Boyarin has even gone on to suggest that to impose an appellation like “Jewish Christianity” only reifies the boundaries between two religions, namely Judaism and Christianity, which did not exist as such, even in the fourth century CE. See Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which is Appended a Correction of my Border Lines),” JQR 99.1 (2009): 7–36.
significance of parallel phenomena in the broader religious milieu of Second Temple Judaism. As a result, they see John’s Gospel, or even Paul’s, as being radically different from contemporaneous Judaism, rather than considering the possibility that it is deeply embedded in the Judaism of its day. In my reading, I suggest that John’s Gospel reflects just one of the many diverse ways that ancients Jews expressed how God could connect to humans and humans could connect to God.
Third, this teleological focus among New Testament specialists ignores the rich and multifaceted conversation that is happening in many areas of Jewish studies about God’s body, from Hebrew Bible specialists to Rabbinic scholars. As my brief foray into the groundbreaking work of these scholars has demonstrated, the topic of God’s body, or the way the divine could become embodied, has been part and parcel of Israel’s tradition from ancient times through the time of the rabbis. While it is true that something distinctive occurs around the turn of the Common Era, namely that because of the focus on God’s transcendence, God’s embodiment occurs more and more through divine intermediary figures (and becomes focused within humanity itself), that does not mean that attention to God’s body no longer exists during this period. It simply shows how the move to suggest that God could become embodied in a particular human figure, namely Jesus, made more sense within the current Jewish trends of that day.
There are several scholars who exemplify this teleological perspective. In Christology in the Making, for instance, James Dunn writes that his intent is “to trace the emergence of the Christian idea of the incarnation from inside (not the emergence of the concept of ‘incarnation’ per se); to follow the course of development (whether organic or evolutionary), as best as possible, whereby the concept of Christ’s incarnation came to conscious expression in Christian
thought.”99 Likewise, James McGrath states that he intends to “offer a brief overview of [his] understanding of the processes that take us from the historical Jesus to the Council of Nicaea— focusing almost entirely on the snapshots of this unfolding Christological development that we have in the New Testament, but recognizing that there is both a before and an after.”100 The perspective of both of these scholars, then, is teleological. Knowing the historical outcomes of Nicaea and the later ecumenical councils, they attempt to trace the socio-historical factors and intellectual developments that led to this particular outcome at this particular time.
I have highlighted the work of these two scholars, but this interest in tracing the development of early Christology over time represents a major trend in scholarly thought that goes back at least as far as Wilhelm Bousset’s classic work in Kyrios Christos.101 Bousset, a German protestant theologian who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was a part of the history of religion(s) school (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), a school that was characterized by two main concerns. First, the history of religion(s) school sought to trace the evolutionary development of religion in relation to human history.102 That is, their work pushed against the assumption that religions are fixed, static entities; instead, they underscored how religions are constructed, complex phenomena, deeply embedded in the socio-historical contexts out of which they emerge. Second, this school of thought attempted to investigate early Christian literature from a historical perspective, without concerns about later dating doctrines. Though its
99 Dunn, Christology in the Making, xxii.
100 James McGrath, “How Jesus Became God: One Scholar’s View.” New Testament Seminar, University of Michigan, March 19, 2015.
101 Also see my discussions of Bousset above.
102 For more information on the lasting legacy of Wilhelm Bousset’s work, especially in view of recent developments in the field of Second Temple Judaism, see Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Kyrios
Christos in Light of Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Second Temple Judaism,” Early Christianity
members self-identified as Christians, and thus knew the later outcomes of Christological debates, they attempted to read each text in its own socio-historical context, without reference to theological dogma. Bousset’s classic monograph, Kyrios Christos, combined these two emphases by presenting “a schema for the evolution of Christology and worship of Jesus in the early church.”103 Although Bousset, like others from the history of religion(s) school, attempted to sidestep questions of dogma, an implicit theological perspective still undergirded his work. Since he saw high Christology as an endpoint, he sought to trace how later Christians arrived at that point.
Bousset may have initiated this teleological focus, but in recent years a proliferation of publications has followed a similar route. Despite intense disagreement on when and out of which context high Christology first emerged, as Andrew Chester points out in a recent review, the focus upon the evolution of early Christology persists.104 In particular, Chester identifies four major trends in recent scholarship in relation to this topic. In the first, scholars such as Maurice Casey and Geza Vermes suggest that, because of the constraints of Jewish monotheism, an understanding of Jesus as divine could have emerged only relatively late in the development of Christianity and in a gentile context.105 They propose that it was only within the Johannine community, which they claim had an increasingly Gentile composition, that the source of this divergence from Judaism first occurred.106 Casey, in particular, argues that it was only after the Jewish members of the Johannine community were “kicked out the synagogue” (cf. John
103 Bautch, “Kyrios Christos,” 32, emphasis mine.
104 Andrew Chester, “High Christology—Whence, When, and Why?” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22–50.
105 Casey, Jewish Prophet, 9, 23–40, 141–161; Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 2000), but see also his earlier work, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the
Gospels (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1981).
9.22,12.42–43) and thus started to self-identify as “Gentiles,” that belief in Jesus’s divinity emerged.107 He thus reads John 9:22 and 12:42–43 as reflecting a reality that had already happened, rather than rhetoric that was encouraging such a separation.
In the second scholarly trend, scholars such as James Dunn and Gabriele Boccaccini also suggest that this development occurred relatively late, but within the confines of the Jewish tradition.108 Like Casey and Vermes, they locate the understanding of Jesus as God in the Johannine community,109 but Boccaccini in particular emphasizes that such a development does not suddenly make the Gospel of John “non-Jewish”; Johannine Christology merely reflects a variation of other forms of Jewish messianic expectation in its day.110
By contrast, in a third strand of scholarship, Larry Hurtado, John Collins, and Adela Yarbro Collins, among others, argue that the idea of Jesus as divine was an early development among the followers of Jesus, one deeply rooted in the Jewish context of its day. Hurtado, for instance, suggests that the early worship of Jesus marked a distinct “mutation” from how other divine intermediary figures in Judaism were conceived.111 In particular, since Jewish monotheism demanded the worship of the one God of Israel alone, this development in religious
107 Casey, Jewish Prophet, 9, 31–32, 35–36, 143, 156, 158.
108 Dunn, Christology in the Making, xxiii; James Dunn, The Christ and the Spirit: Collected
Essays of James D.G. Dunn. 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 3–54, 212–238, 270–423; Gabriele
Boccaccini, “Jesus the Messiah: Man, Angel, or God? The Jewish Roots of Early Christology,” Annali di Scienze Religiose 4 (2011): 193–220, esp. 214–18; idem, “How Jesus Became Uncreated,” 208.
109 Dunn, Christology in the Making, xiii, 249–50, 258–61; Boccaccini, “Jesus the Messiah,” 215–16.
110 This perspective has come up primarily in personal conversations with Gabriele Boccaccini, although he expresses a similar sentiment in his published work when he writes, “The rediscovery of the diversity of Judaisms in the Second Temple period makes it now possible to relocate Jesus and his movement within the Jewish world . . . There was not in fact a single normative Jewish messianism from which, or against which, the Christian messianism arose. In its origins, Christian messianism was nothing but one of the possible messianisms in competition with others.” See Gabriele Boccaccini, “Jesus the Messiah,” 207.
111 Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 2, 12, 99–124; Hurtado, How on Earth, 153–54, 178. Elsewhere he describes this as a “variant form” rather than a “mutation,” see Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 50, n. 70.
practice, based on the lived religious experiences of the early followers of Jesus, suggests that already the earliest followers of Jesus conceived of Jesus as God.112 Adela Yarbro Collins and John Collins argue for a similar perspective to that of Hurtado, insisting on the Jewish context out of which belief in Jesus’ divinity arose, albeit via a very different route. For them, the divinity of Jesus emerged out of the longstanding understanding of the divinity of the king, or messiah, as the son of God.113 By tracing evidence from royal ideology in the ancient Near East all the way to its appropriation in the New Testament, they argue that there was a long-standing belief in the divinity of the king, arising first in the Egyptian milieu before being transposed into the Jewish context. As such, it was preserved especially through the Septuagint’s Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Citing texts such as the LXX’s version of Psalms 72:17, 110, and Isaiah 7:14; portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such as 4Q174, 4Q246, and 11QMelchizedek;114 and texts like I Enoch 48:2–3, 6 and 62:7, Proverbs 8:22–31, and 4 Ezra 13, John Collins and Adela Collins argue that the background for an understanding of Jesus as “pre- existent and divine” divine was already present within a Jewish milieu, and thus that the understanding arose out of a Jewish context.115
The only exception to this approach, which for Chester comprises the fourth strand of scholarship, is the work of Richard Bauckham. In contrast to the other scholars, Bauckham argues that “early Christology did not develop” because all New Testament documents, and by extension, all early Christians who were associated with them, articulated the “highest
112 Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 1–8, 11–15; 125, although this theme is evident throughout the entire work; Hurtado, How on Earth, 42–53.
113 See Collins & Collins, King and Messiah, x–xiv for how they frame this perspective. 114 Collins & Collins, King and Messiah, 56–74.
Christology” from the very start.116 Rather, they included Jesus “wholly and unequivocally within the divine identity.”117 Jesus participates in God’s role as creator and sovereign, thus subsuming his identity into that of God’s own.118 Bauckham thus argues that from the earliest moments after the Easter event, the early followers of Jesus always conceived of him as God.
Consequently, whether early or late, and whether within Judaism or outside of it, an implicit teleological focus and diachronic approach unites the efforts of all of these scholars. Since these scholars know the historical outcomes of various early church councils and early ecumenical debates, rather than recognizing that at any particular time in history innumerable alternative outcomes could have occurred, they attempt to work backwards. Thus, their work seeks to trace an unbroken line of intellectual development from one stage in history to another.
By contrast, by employing a synchronic (rather than diachronic) approach, my methodology aims to uncover a snapshot of Jewish history. I focus on Jewish Antiquity, and particularly, texts that date primarily from the end of the first-century BCE to the early second century CE. The period of history that I am interested in thus spans from the late Second Temple Period into the early Roman period. I have made this choice because I am focusing on Jewish texts that date close to the Gospel of John, that is, near the end of the first century CE or early second century CE.119 Accordingly, rather than repeatedly writing “late Second Temple and early Roman periods,” when I refer to Jewish Antiquity as a shorthand in this dissertation, that designation includes Jewish texts that date from the first century BCE to the early second century CE. My primary sources include: Philo, Josephus, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, the Book of the Parables (as
116 Bauckham, God Crucified, vii; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 19.
117 Bauckham, God Crucified, vii; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 3–4, 18–21. 118 Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 20–30.
preserved in 1 Enoch), 2 Enoch, and of course, the Gospel of John. Why? Because I am looking for other Jewish texts besides the Gospel of John that date as close as possible to that Gospel. Although I also consider other texts that are now housed in the New Testament to be Jewish, my focus remains on the Gospel of John because there have been extensive debates regarding when the notion of incarnation first arose within the New Testament. Most scholars, however, agree that the Gospel of John provides the clearest evidence for it.120
The primary question that I ask throughout this dissertation is why it is at this particular time in Jewish history that so many Jewish texts present a manner by which God can become embodied or humans can become deified. I do not assume that the authors of these texts necessarily knew one another. Nor do I claim that they were dependent upon one another. What I do observe, however, is the wide variety of ways that Jews in this period thought about how God and humanity could be connected through embodiment. Thus, though I posit a number of different ways that first-century Jews conceived of divine embodiment, I demonstrate how the Gospel of John’s description of this phenomenon both stands in continuity with other Jewish descriptions and is distinct from them as well.
I close with two cautionary notes as to why the Gospel of John’s description of divine embodiment ought not to be considered the one and only way that ancient Jews conceived of God’s embodiment on earth. First, from a purely historical point of view, during the first few centuries of the Common Era there was no “official” definition of what has later become known as the Christian concept of “incarnation.” Thus, to employ the term “incarnation” at all is to
120 See Casey, Jewish Prophet, 23. Although, as Adela Yarbro Collins and John Collins have pointed out, even this assumption “is somewhat misleading… [because if] the proclamation of the Gospel were really unequivocal, it would be hard to explain the extended christological controversies in the early church” See King and Messiah, 175. Indeed, as I will argue for throughout, even John’s Gospel represents a means by which the divine can become embodied, but this is not the same as suggesting that the second person of the trinity has become incarnated in the specific person of Jesus. Rather, it would take much time before such an ideology developed.
impose an ideology onto a period of time when no such definition or articulation yet existed. Consequently, if one can see the formula of John 1:14 as merely one of many ways in which first- century Jews—including early Jesus followers—were articulating an ideology of divine embodiment, then a historical snapshot of the various theologies of divine embodiment operative