Early Jewish Monotheism

Just a note to an interesting post on the topic of early Jewish monotheism over on Larry Hurtado's blog. Larry is a retired professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, and I have been following his blog for some time. Larry's posts are always informative, and our interests in early Christianity and the New Testament overlap considerably. His 2005 book, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, is a good introduction to historical issues related to how Jesus came to be identified with the Divine in the practices of the early Christians. His post referenced above refers to an article of his coming out later this year. He proposes the term "ancient Jewish monotheism" to describe the early Jewish commitment to worship only the one God of Israel. Students in my Paul and Early Judaism class: take note! There will be material here to add texture and perspective to our discussion of Jewish creational monotheism as explained in N.T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

How did Jesus come to be acclaimed as "LORD"?

Wilhelm Bousset’s influential and groundbreaking book on the origins of Christianity, Kyrios Christos, which was originally published in 1913 and translated into English in 1970, has now been reprinted with a new preface by Larry Hurtado (Emeritus Professor; New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh). Hurtado, whose own major work, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003) is in close dialogue with Bousset (though he comes to rather different conclusions), has made his 19-page introduction available here at his blog.

For those new to the question of how and when it came about that Jesus was first called “Lord” and was worshipped alongside the Father by his early followers, Hurtado's introduction provides a fascinating historical perspective. While affirming Bousset’s impulse to set earliest Christianity within its historical context, Hurtado identifies a number of problems with Bousset’s conclusions:

• The problem of positing two theologically and culturally distinct early Christian groupings: “Palestinian-Jewish” and “Hellenistic-Gentile” (14). Even widening that to three divergent groups is problematic since the inter-relationships between early Jewish and Gentile Christian communities were much more complicated than such a framework allows.
• The failure to recognize the appropriate background of the title “Son of Man” (15)
• Bousset’s problematic suggestion that the Aramaic mara natha of 1 Cor 16:22 was later than, and influenced by, the Greek attribution kyrios (15-16)

In addition to the historical critique is the identification of the extent to which Bousset was writing in the context of a German intellectual framework which sought to minimize any connection between Christianity and Judaism. Hurtado cites two recent studies which have documented this troubling aspect of German biblical scholarship of the early 20^th century.

For its concise review of the impact of this volume and its attention to these critical points of ongoing relevance, Hurtado’s preface is well worth reading.