John’s third impacting figure: Dr Dale Tuggy

Fatscript Episode 7 show notes, John’s third impacting figure: Dr Dale Tuggy

• ·        Onscript: http://onscript.study/

·        (Pennington interview http://onscript.study/podcast/jonathan-pennington-the-sermon-on-the-mount-and-human-flourishing/)

• ·        My book chapter is out! Check it out here: https://www.academia.edu/34726445/Trinitarian_Interpretation_Mutated_Faith_and_the_Triune_Hub_Re-examining_the_Foundations_Chapter_1_
• ·        Mark Gooadcre video on John’s relationship to the synoptics: http://www.christianorigins.div.ed.ac.uk/2017/10/23/johnandthesynoptics/
• ·        My first public interaction with Dr Dale Tuggy on his listeners’ questions show: http://trinities.org/blog/podcast-90-listener-questions-1/
• ·        My main interactions with Dale

1.      Dale’s post: http://trinities.org/blog/dialogue-with-john-on-thinking-about-the-trinity/

2.      John’s response: http://faithandscripture.blogspot.fr/2017/07/responding-to-dale-tuggy-on-trinitarian.html

• ·        Please give us a rating! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fatscript-podcast/id1217930034?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Figures who have impacted my journey: Larry Hurtado 2, on Paul...

...including a fresh rediscovery of the gospel for me, how we carefully overlap the LXX and NT usages of Kyrios, why Joel became special.

On God being "our Lord" or "our LORD", results are as scant as I predicted, including Adonai.

Thanks for listening!

Figures who have impacted my journey: Larry Hurtado

Some notes:

- Book chapter is out! Check it out here. Almost works as a standalone paper.

- Quote from James McGrath review of Ehrman's most recent book:  Accurate memory is preserved, even in the process of distorting or reinterpreting it. And so it is frustrating when Ehrman discusses the work of famous form critics such as Bultmann and Dibelius but talks only about the fabrication of memories to meet the needs of churches in the pregospels period, to the neglect of the more interesting question of how the needs of those churches might have led to the reinterpretation of things the early Christians remembered about what Jesus said and did that were not pure fabrication (64–65). Some will suspect that Ehrman is still influenced here by his fundamentalist background, which tends to think of matters of authenticity or historicity in an all-or-nothing manner.

By the way, apologies to McGrath for probably mispronouncing his name!
- John's gospel criticism, please don't misunderstand me on the Jesus is/is not God thing!
- Dr. Hurtado's blog: https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/
- Dr. Hurtado's interviews on Trinities here, here, here and here
- Dr. Hurtado's personal recommendation to my series on his post here
- Tetragram/tetragrammaton , relief from trinity work. First contact. Explain the project *dormant*

- My "gleanings" from my first response series (first series summary here) to Lord Jesus Christ

- Key terms: programmatic inclusion alongside. Binitarian.
- Question of centrality (see my post on Hurtado's opening words here)
- mutation proponent, and "unsuccessful mutations"
- methodology
- Jesus as LORD/Lord.... more on that next time!

LJC S2 Part 9: Prayer - where was the Spirit?

In Part 8, we realised that a minority of passages during the canonical era included direct prayer or calling to the Lord Jesus, while reserving prime recipient to God (the Father) himself as the standard Christian pattern. I failed to note that no mention of the Holy Spirit was included in this section - an error on my part. Hurtado's focus is on the ultra-early explosion of Jesus devotion in a Jewish monotheistic context. My focus is on a first-century establishment of a triune hub mutation to the Jewish Christian faith, so the impetus is on me to spot that, research and expand as appropriate.

Since we are on Paul, we should be careful not to fall prey to an "under-realized eschatological perspective" (G. Fee, Paul, the Spirit and the People of God p. 141;), "for Paul prayer has been radically transformed by the coming of the Spirit" (idem. p. 146)" and "[t]he  beginning of Christian life is marked by the indwelling Spirit's crying out 'Abba' to God (Gal 4:6; Rom 8:15). On all occasions,' Paul urges elsewhere, 'ray in/by the Spirit'; this injunction applies to every form of prayer (Eph 6:18)." (idem. p. 146). This seems of utter importance to realise that the departed Lord Jesus has given this greatest gift that indeed permits that he and the Father might remain present with his people. Among his people. Literally, in their minds. It's literally mind-blowing! Imagine having a personal life-giving power within you that actually helps you to pray when your own words fail you?

I have to say that it is hard to write about the topic of prayer and the Holy Spirit's inclusion without becoming personally excited and involved!

Praying also gives way to praying in tongues, something else we know that Paul practised and is connected with a series of other spiritual gifts demonstrating the life of the eschatological people of God. Praying in this new way embraces the person's and the congregations' entire mind, it is transformational, it utterly embraces weakness and glorifies God and Christ in the wake of our own inability.

Definitely worth a mention, wouldn't you say?

LJC S2 Part 8: Prayer

THIS IS WHERE Hurtado's study gets up, close and personal, if we will let it. Why? Because: "Who did they pray to" is just a tiny step from "who do I pray to". Also, in ways surely never glimpsed by the disciples when they asked for assistance on how to pray to Jesus, the issue of how to pray seems complex when there are at least two, closely related potential recipients. So how does Paul handle it?

Paul's prayers seem to primarily aim for God, although as ever, Jesus is never far removed from view. In Romans 1, the prayer is even offered "through" Jesus. However, as Hurtado rightly notes, there are other occasions when both are addressed, such as 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13:

Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

There are also petition moments that include Jesus, such as Paul's famous petition to the Lord Jesus for the removal of his "thorn" in 2 Corinthians 12. Fascinatingly, Hurtado also informs us that in the "unsuccessful mutations" of Christianity, direct prayers to Jesus are actually more prominent than in the canonical material, which seems to keep something of a balance. Hurtado concludes:

Overall, we get the impression of a remarkably well-established pattern of prayer in which Jesus features very prominently, either as recipient or as unique agent through whom prayer is offered. Moreover, there is simply no analogy in Roman-era Jewish groups for the characteristic linking of Jesus with God in the prayer practice reflected in Paul's letters. (p. 140)

Notes

You may have noticed that I have been treating God as a uni-personal individual. This is in keeping with Hurtado and, I strongly believe, with Paul. We also are clearly thin on Holy Spirit in this area, certainly as a recipient of prayer. That obviously does not mean that Paul dos not have a great deal to say about the Holy Spirit, and indeed sees the Sprit as interceding/praying for us in Rom 8.

LJC S2 Part 7: Paul assumes and does not criticise Christ-worship and Jesus centrality

In Part 6 we tracked the development of the Gentile inclusion process, from Peter addressing Jews from all nations in Acts 2, through understanding (and rejoicing) that non-Jews could be partakers in the great eschatological people via their legitimate receiving of God's great outpouring of his Spirit, to the eventual dawning in Galatians that the scope of Christ's salvation for his People of God was far wider - far greater - than Torah observance of circumcision.

Before advancing in Hurtado's chapter today in Paul, perhaps I could just add in the tension enhanced by Matthew's later addition in Matthew 5:18: "For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." (NIV). So, hopefully it is starting to become more obvious as we allow Hurtado to immerse us in the first-century world, just what a whopper of an issue male circumcision was to the flourishing Christian movement.

Remember how in Chapter 1 we surveyed Hurtado's general thesis? We looked at his four major reasons that helped shaped Christian worship the way it did, and I praised it for its clarity. We had (the rather epic) Jewish monotheism, Jesus himself, religious experience and the religious environment. Here now Hurtado dips briefly into this model and asserts that for Paul indeed Jesus was this ultimate model for Christian living: "Jesus also functions as the inspiring model of the ethical qualities that are to characterize the present life of the redeemed and of the eschatological outcome of their redemption as well." (p. 134)

The section I want to focus on today is simply entitled "Binitarian Worship". Readers might remember that in the first series I had a post entitled: What does Hurtado mean by "binitarian"? I don't want to re-hash all of that here, but I'd like to give a shout out to blog reader, Richard Wilson, who astutely pointed out in a comment he left on one post that Hurtado has distanced himself over the last decade or more separating us from this important 2003 publication Lord Jesus Christ over this term, preferring to speak these days more of "dyadic worship". This is indeed evidenced over the exchange I had with Hurtado concerning his differences with Dunn here and here, alsoace given to Jesus in Pauline Ch in the first series. Good spot Richard! This problem of quite how we describe this early Christian worship is indeed not satisfactorily solved by calling it "binitarian". Binitarian sounds a lot like trinitarian-minus-one. Trinitarianism itself suffers from a lot of ambiguity, but given its ultimate form of the Triune God, then we could indeed agree that Hurtado's move away from binitarian to be a good one. Our author is certainly not implying that for our first-century founders that God himself is binitarian, otherwise his use of "both" would be entirely redundant: "The christological material we have surveyed here reflects an impressive... place given to Jesus in Pauline Christianity. As Kreitzer and Richardson have shown, in Pauline Christianity we see a remarkable "overlap" in functions between God and Jesus, and also in the honorific rhetoric used to refer to them both." (p. 134)

What I can say in summary and in strong agreement with Hurtado throughout this part is to assert the following: Is it not extraordinary that in all of the Pauline correspondence, despite all the issues that he addresses, that the centrality of Jesus and his overlap in functions with God are never critiqued? Hurtado goes into some detail to attempt to demonstrate that this would have included the earliest, Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus themselves.

Worship

I am particularly pleased with what follows. I am a bit of a stickler for detail, as my queries on the precise definition of "binitarian" have probably shown. This time, however, on the question of "Christ devotion", which is clearly demonstrated, Hurtado is going to take head on the challenge (particularly from the likes of Dunn) that this should not be overlapped with how we might define "worship". Does the devotion to Christ reflected in Paul's letters really amount to "worship" in the sense of reverence directed to a deity? (p. 137) Here, Hurtado throttles up to full power and unleashes dense summaries of a string of publications he has published over the years that demonstrate the unique and divine status and "programmatic inclusion" of Jesus alongside the one true God of the Israelites. He is able to compellingly sweep aside allusions to occasional alternative intertestamental Jewish figures who had received some honorific recognition, or some sort of emergence of Jesus in the pagan sense of the Roman religious context of the time, highlighting the consistent "constellations" of practices evidenced and assumed by this earliest extant Christian writer, Paul.

In my next  post, we'll see what Hurtado has to say about prayer in particular, which I hope should cause us who believe in Christ and the Father to reflect afresh about how we address them in light of the earliest Christian practice.

LJC S2 Part 6: Hurray - *they* can become Jewish Christians too!

WHEREVER YOU ARE and whoever you are, you probably know the experience of being on the outside of a group you'd like to be in, or being comfortable in a group, perhaps with a certain role to play and being glad of it. Perhaps the group is quite informal or abides to strict rules. Perhaps there is a leader present to give guidance and instruction, even discipline, like the teacher in the class.

Group dynamics are a part of our way of life and have affected every human life on the planet since the dawn of our species. Today's post, number 6 in our second sequence on Larry Hurtado's 2003 book Lord Jesus Christ, is concerned precisely with religious group dynamics about who's in and who's out.

In this second chapter focussed on Paul, Hurtado reminds us that we are not examining a specific man's theology, but rather the kind of church communities that were supported by him (and vice versa), as he expands a chapter section he calls "Jesus' Redemptive Death and Resurrection".

Most folks know that one of the most defining aspects of the Christian message is that "Christ died for our sins", which is certainly not something that Paul came up with:

Everyone he is writing to obviously already believes in Jesus' redemptive death, resurrection and exaltation, and it gets "tucked away" into a good number of his exhortations or instructions etc., sometimes on quite different topics and often without expansion. Two major exceptions exist, however, but before we get to those, I need to share an insight about the "who's in in and who's out" revolution in the New Testament.

As I took a break from writing this post (the shower is always a great place for new insights I find!) I was struck with a deep urge to study Acts 11 afresh. As I did this I noticed two things.

Firstly, as I have taken for granted like most Christians do, I was reminded of the nonetheless profound discovery of Peter - gentiles are "in". Not only is their food "OK", but the true purifier and enabler, the Holy Spirit is just as freely given to the Gentile believers as the Jewish believers who rejoice (v. 18). It is very hard to describe quite how powerful a paradigm-shift that would have been, and indeed it seems to have needed this profound spiritual encounter in Acts 11 and direct command from the Lord (I presume Jesus) for Peter to grasp it.

But there is a second thing that I noticed. Imagine you are Peter and your heart has been broken about these outsiders, you now see them as your brothers and sisters and a sort of ancient, deep-rooted "racism" has just powerfully fallen from your eyes and dissolved into joy. We have nothing over them, we are all equally indebted to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, equally empowered by God through the precious sending of his Holy Spirit. WE ARE EQUALS. This still leaves the following possibility open: So, of course, they can get circumcised - they're "in" now! 

If we look even further back at the Pentecost described in Acts 2, whom is Peter addressing? They may well be people of different languages, but you can be clear on one thing - sorry to be so crude - there were probably few foreskins in that crowd. These were "fellow Jews" (v. 14), "Fellow Israelites" (v. 22, 29). That's why chapter 11 is after chapter 2, and it's chapter 11's unfinished business with regard to the terms of that wonderful new inclusion that gives rise to an important disagreement between Peter and Paul described in Galatians 2:11-14. Because of James' firm Jewish stance and Act's 11's unfinished business, Paul would attempt to lever Peter and his influence in Jerusalem back toward a fuller understanding of what Peter had already had revealed to him in part. The issue of circumcision may seem trivial to us now, but underneath it lay a huge theological question about the nature of salvation and Jesus' centrality that is far from trivial: The salvation is universal; his centrality is cosmic.

This, then, is how I propose we arrive at Hurtado's two exceptions to Paul's relative quiet on Jesus' redemption: Galatians and Romans. In Galatians, Paul describes his disagreement with Peter; In Romans, Paul is presenting his ministry more fully since he is writing to a church that he did not plant.

It is certainly worth noting that Paul presumes a familiarity with the idea that Christ’s death and resurrection are redemptive among the Roman Christians to whom this epistle is addressed, circles he had no role in founding, and that had been established at a very early point by other Jewish Christians who “were in Christ before I was” (such as Andronicus and Junia, Rom. 16: 7) (p. 129, emphasis mine)

In both the letters of Galatians and Romans, then, there are different contexts that both required a fuller treatment of God's redemption by Paul:

In both letters Paul explicates and defends the validity of his mission to Gentiles, and his message that all believers are redeemed through Christ, and so Gentiles are not required to supplement their conversion by observance of Torah. (p. 130)

As I already mentioned, the massive issue of "who's in and who's out" was clearly not yet fully resolved for the Galatian churches. For a lot of these Jewish followers of Christ, they could believe that Christ had borne their sins redemptively, even that he had been resurrected by God and now reigned on high at God's right hand, having sent the Holy Spirit to God's people to advance God's kingdom until Christ's climactic return. And some had had the insight that this included, not just Jews from all nations (as in Acts 2), but everyone is welcome to the Jewish Jesus club of being God's children. But:

Jewish = Circumcision = Torah observance = Insufficiency of God's salvific work in Christ + hindered access to Gentiles.

Hurtado conjectures interestingly that along with Peter, perhaps Paul himself too had had to seriously rethink his own position on this issue first as a Torah-abiding Jew (p. 131).

Blog update: what on Earth has John been up to?

HELLO EVERYONE! It seems like a good moment to pause and give readers some insight into this blog and its author’s occupations, hopes.

As the blog description suggests at the top of every post, I have been on quite a theological journey. It has taken me from committed evangelical Trinitarian, via atheism, agnosticism, Biblical Unitarianism, and now back to a form of trinitarianism that I hope resembles something of the first century focus. This has also led me to a lot more tolerance for fourth century squabbles than I had before.

Quick Recap

Quite a big chunk of this journey can be accessed simply by looking back in this blog, as I started in the Autumn (Fall) of 2014 fairly fresh into that scary journey. Over the three years, posts have gotten longer, but I remain proud of my shortest post of all, comprising just nine characters!

In 2015 I wrote a paper to my Christian employer to express that I no longer felt I could sign off on parts of our Faith Statement that were described as crucial when they could be better expressed as interpretative. So I handed over this fairly unsophisticated but lengthy paper. And I wasn’t fired. And the Faith Statement changed. It was mind-blowing.

In 2016, the urgency of the question of the Trinity seem to simmer down with the surprisingly positive outcome of 2015 and I became increasingly curious about the Greek term Kyrios (Lord) used as a translation for the Hebrew name for God, “Yahweh”. I was particularly keen to see if there were differences in the way it was used in the Old Testament to translate Yahweh and how Kyrios was used with Jesus. 

However, for some reason, probably to do with my whole deconstruction-reconstruction faith process, and an overlap with the Septuagint Kyrios project, I fell deeply in love with the Psalms (e.g. here and here). I began to produce a proposed set of meditations based purely on selections from the Psalms ordered according to themes I found running through the Psalter, which I hope to produce in English, French and Arabic (I haven't shared any of this on the blog). There is hidden away inside of me, a real desire to make my theology useful to other people, and this may be one way, especially for people who struggle with their identity, with authenticity, wholeness and presence. For me, what the Psalms were able to help me with that year, was to fight back against what they call in French psychology, morcellement – like a sense of fractured identity, which we can also see nurtured in our society.

Later that year, however, the simmering Trinity continued to develop inside of me. I can remember two key aspects. One of the elders or our church was interested in seeing a copy of my manuscript (that I had already changed quite a bit since 2015), and the second was my developing friendship with Barney Aspray, a Cambridge PhD student who is passionate about a French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur (I first mentioned Barney on the blog in October 2015 - I'm surprised it was that early). In the end, I sent a copy of my much re-worked and honed and proofed chapter 1 of my manuscript to my elder, but I’m not sure if he ever read it.  And with Barney we shared a good number of exchanges about hermeneutics, mainly via email and occasional Skype, which were to have a significant impact on my journey.

Other things were happening in parallel. I had a growing interest in the book of Matthew (which I plan to blog out at some point under a title of Love, Hate & Late). I realised that this gospel contained some crucial components of an earlier trinitarianism that could be traced back to first century Jewish Christianity, especially when placed alongside other early non-canonical sources known as the Didache and the “gnostic” pseudepigraphal Gospel of Thomas. This is not at all the vision I had learned from my Unitarian influences, for the majority of whom the Trinity is a late fourth century fabrication and corruption of the truth in the Scriptures.

Yet I still knew that it was this Jewish Christianity that could assert that God and Jesus needed an “and” to separate them, and whose depiction of the Holy Spirit only very rarely hinted at a distinct person, certainly a country mile from the social Trinitarian sense (see my guest post on Dr Tuggy's blog here). So I was left with nowhere to park my theological vehicle. So I made a choice. To park my faith car faaaaaar away from the theological debates and disagreements.

Personally, I have made it a point to spiritually practice trinitarian devotion as part of my own faith journey, and I tend to avoid words like “Lord” unless I add the clarification of “the Lord Jesus”, and I even avoid “God” mostly. I follow a trinitarian liturgical devotional, Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals, which was an amazing gift from my friend Dean (available here on line though for free).

And so my work became increasingly historical and less theological. It became quite clear to me, that like the “Synoptic Problem”, there was also a Trinitarian problem. Nowhere in the Bible is there explicit talk of a tri-personal God. Yet that is what you get from the church before the close of the fourth century. How? Why? Via which intermediary stage(s)? Under the influence of which factors?Unitarians say it was just a late corruption, and those willing to wade in from the Trinitarian side like to say things like "it was always there but they hadn’t got the right linguistic tools to express it yet" – not really a “problem” per se for anyone. Neither of those explanations satisfied me. There definitely was a problem.

At some point, wow, only as recently as May 2017, I first blogged about a Triune Hub in a post entitled Jewish Roots of the Trinity. This is the model that I’m still working on to this day, which I have named the Triune Hub (it’s kinda unlucky, I think, that the extra H needed for “Hypothesis” doesn’t leave you with some cool acronym – oh yeah, the “THH”). Central to this hypothesis was to extend the vocabulary introduced by leading biblical scholars Larry Hurtado, Tom Wright and John Dominic Crossan of “mutation” to the trinity itself, which meant that all the later, less-Jewish stuff, despite its bravado ontological attire, was indeed interpretative of this earlier trinitarian mutation of the religious hub (I’d simply gotten lucky on that point in my 2015 paper).

So while I felt like the nuts and bolts were ready for a book on the subject to tell this story, I began fresh research – firstly on Tom Wright’s use of “mutation” with respect to the Resurrection. That is a definite series to come, but it will not be in the same depth and scope as the current Hurtado series. Secondly then, in Larry Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ, I really found some firm ground that I felt the Triune Hub could benefit from via deeper analysis, and so I wrote a first series of posts on Hurtado's introduction and first chapter, accessible here, which included the hugely-inspiring recommendation from Hurtado himself here. Interactions with blog readers increased around this time, and I am very grateful for them as they often seem to know a lot more than me! A third series will also be necessary on Crossan, although rather than on a whole book, it will focus on the key chapter he wrote about Jesus' understanding of the Kingdom of God shifted and prepared for the sending of the Holy Spirit - a monumental mutation from the interventionist God to the collaborative God.

Other Bits & Pieces

Following further encouragement from Barney, I did a few posts on the hermeneutic circle and Ricoeur – but I think I eventually got a bit out of my depth and besides felt like I had gotten what I needed for now from Ricoeur anyway (although my French is pretty good, I think maybe reading the French version alone was maybe not the best idea).

Most recently, there have been a small string of book publisher rejections, which were disappointing, but have led me to focus more on the blog for now.

Since I used to lead worship in my local church for about ten years, I have a keen sense of the spiritual and theological formation that takes place during the vulnerable and sacred space of worship. As a result, I have at various points attempted to appraise the good, bad and ugly doing the rounds out there (see here for examples, scroll down past the first two Hurtado posts).

Approximately 3% of my posts are in French (click here for the seven posts in French), which mainly reflects my desire to remain open to a French public, some of whom are my friends and have expressed their wish to understand what on Earth I am going on about. The reality, however, is that my hits tend to go down when I do this.

Recent Reading

• I recently read “The Day the Revolution Began”, by NT Wright, which I don't have specific plans to blog about, but I can definitely recommend.
• I have very recently made a start on Robert MacEwen's Matthean Posteriority, (yep, it gets the really cool “MPH” acronym). Since it is relevant to my model, I will probably need to do some posts on it later. Strangely, the cheapest way by far to get this was on Google Books, not Amazon.
• The Unseen Realm has left an indelible mark on my biblical worldview, written by Michael Heiser. For those who appreciate Old Testament theology in particular, I can really recommend not only this book, but also Heiser's The Naked Bible podcast. 
• During my Kyrios research phase, I read the accessible When God Spoke Greek by Timothy Michael Law, and part way through Invitation to the Septuagint, by Karen H. Jobes  & Moisés Silva
• Finally, as regular blog readers will know, I also recently read Dale Tuggy’s recent book, What is the Trinity? Following that, he and I began a blog exchange, which so far goes me, him, me. More than once he has assured me that he will get round to his next response, but he has a lot going on right now so I’m not hassling him for it.

On the more inspirational side I have recently read:

• Mike McHargue’s Finding God in the Waves, which is a great book (with whose journey I also sense some resonance),
• Rob Bell’s Here To Be Here, which helped me at one stage take some pro-active steps on my journey,
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving aF**K, by Mark Manson. Despite its offensive title, I'm glad I followed my Christian friend’s recommendation. However, for Christian readers, you might have to put your cultural filters up to really get the core message of this book which covers some important life topics. If that’s not for you, then there is a short Christian book that The Subtle Art kept on reminding me of by author Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, which I think I read in 2012. By the way, a not well-known fact: in a former life, I enjoyed composing some alternative music, and you can enjoy this song which is on this same theme of breaking out of self-centredness, recorded back in 2002. It’s called Looking Straight Through the Eternal Mirror. Even lesser-known fact: it contains a recording of a whale! 
 If you like my alternative music style, then you might also appreciate a mini-album entitled Integrity, available freely here since 2010. 
• Naked Marriage: Uncovering Who You Are And Who You Can Be Together, by Corey Allen. Really good.
• The Pressure's Off: Breaking Free from Rules and Performance, by Larry Crabb. Basic but very necessary for me to hear afresh.

How's the blog doing?

So how am I doing in terms of blog visibility? Hmm, not great to be honest. When there is interaction with a more well-known scholar like a Hurtado or a Tuggy, I can just about break into triple figures. Mostly though, I’m typically around the 15-25 visits. In Blogdom, that’s like a virtual non-starter, especially after nearly three years of posting. So I’m curious – can you recommend this blog to anyone? Do you have any recommendations or advice to give me to increase its popularity and access? Is the style too academic? Too informal? I’m working on shorter sentences (my Mum’s repeated request, although even she isn’t a regular reader)…

What next?

Loads!

• I don’t know how far I will continue into my coverage of Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ. I feel like there is so much common ground with THH that I have plenty to say on the content of this great book, even if our paths are already set to diverge on certain points, like around his “Q” chapter, which maybe when I bring in MacEwen. It is just possible that if I do go “the full hog”, that I have another stab with the publishers, editing the posts as a response book to Lord Jesus Christ.

• I haven't painted for decades. But I have inspiration to do a reconfiguration of the reunion described in Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son. I want to capture the moment of reconciliation, but not just with the prodigal and his Father, but also with the Elder Son, who is neither jealous nor resentful, but shares in his Father's joy.
• I would like to test-run the Psalms meditation proposal with some friends, blog readers, maybe my local church if the leadership accepted.
• “Love, Hate & Late Matthew”
• I have begun writing a brief commentary on the Old Testament book of Joel, which has relevance for my overall work on the Trinity. Rather than piecemeal it into this blog, when it is ready, I plan to provide a link on the blog to my space on https://www.academia.edu/ where folks can access it and download it if they would like.
• I may pick up the book project at some point and look at self-publishing if I receive fresh inspiration.
• I would like to approach Pastor Sean Finnegan to see if he’d be interested in interviewing me on his podcast, Restitutio to tell this story, which I think may be interesting to his show listeners. That may also lead at some point to an invitation from Dale onto the trinities podcast, only time will tell. My problem with Sean is that I simply don’t know how to contact him (can anyone help?)
   Anyway, if either work out, then it could be helpful to promote this blog.
• I would love to do a simplified animation of how I see Christianity got its Trinity and put it up on Youtube. That’d be a big job for me and a steep learning curve technologically.
• I want to re-visit each New Testament book to see how well the THH fares there. I know that systematic theology is always an approximation. We’re always working with “best-fit” models, and so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I recently re-read 1 John, that neither Triune God nor Triune Hub hypotheses seem to thrive there. A more thorough NT survey is definitely required (in my rejected book proposal, this section was going to be entitled “Taking the Triune Hub For A Test-drive”;).
• I also need to survey all references to John the Baptist, who for me is a key player in the rise of early trinitarianism.
• I have come to realise that I am more excited about tracing first century developments than second-fourth century stuff, but I guess at some point I’ll also have to dredge through the ancient sources (to which I have good access) and try to trace the formalisation of the TH within the institutionalising church toward the Triune God. What I do look forward to in that project, is to see that it is frequently when the triune hub principle is upset that the church feels the need to respond, correct and clarify as one “unsuccessful mutation” is stamped out after another (even Galatians, in my view, could be an early example of that).
• If there’s a worship song someone would like my opinion about, I’m always happy to have a listen to it and a good think about the lyrics.
• If there's a dodgy Christian apologetic argument out there, then I'll happily continue to try blowing it respectfully to pieces!

Thanks very much for stopping by, your presence and participation is shaping my journey and I hope you also continue to travel through your own storms with anchors and harbors of refuge that will see you through when you need it most. Remember, friends are worth far more than the greatest of "insights".

Lord Jesus Christ, S2 Part 5: Did Jesus Pre-exist for Paul?

DID JESUS PRE-EXIST? It's an interesting question to be taken seriously, especially if you happen to believe that the Christian story about his resurrection and cosmic reign of love and justice might actually be true. But a long way away from what you or I might think about this issue, if we believe our beliefs have to be shaped by New Testament positions, then we had better pay good attention to what the apostle Paul wrote on this point, with Hurtado as our ever-faithful guide.

Before we do that, I'd like to recap on the two posts I made regarding Jesus' lordship from LJC. I lost a lot of visits during that double post (sorry, I guess I failed to keep it interesting!) but I think I covered some important ground worth summarising, which I will do now in six short bullets:

• Kyrios (Lord) was likely used by the earliest followers of Jesus in its Aramaic translation, including in spiritual contexts assimilable to worship (maranatha!).
• Kyrios in Greek had a wide range of meanings from "sir", to "master" and in some eastern provinces of the Roman empire as a form of greeting the Caeser.
• Kyrios was used frequently by Paul to describe the God of the Old Testament. He frequently applies the translation standard of the time of removing the definite article "the" in two of the most common cases especially.
• There are several instances where prophecies of the divine Kyrios of the Old Testament are astonishingly fulfilled in the eyes of Paul (and others) when Kyrios Jesus accomplishes that promise, and the "kyrios-ship" is mapped onto him in these instances perfectly (including the grammar).
• However, we noted that despite this definite overlap and function of Divine Agent and name bearer, Jesus' Lordship is significantly different and broader to how Jews perceived their god as Kyrios. Jesus is closer and more intimate and is more often than not our Lord, something that was virtually absent from the inherited Jewish worldview. As ever, Jesus shatters our attempted ideas to contain him in this or that predefined concept or ideal! (In some of the referenced posts at the bottom of both the posts on Hurtado's treatment of Jesus as Kyrios in Paul I provided further more technical evidence referring to how the Greek of Jesus' lordship was treated slightly differently to the anarthrous Kyrios of our Old Testaments in linguistically parallel scenarios).
• I also threw in at the end of the second post (3000 words in!), that the "Kyrios overlap" may have been an important factor in settling the question of quite how much authority and worship should our exalted Lord Jesus receive.

Check out the posts in full here and here

Turning, then, to Hurtado on Paul's belief on a pre-existent Jesus, i.e. before his birth
be that eternally or as some early Christian theology would have it, right back to the dawn of time - not a distinction Hurtado develops here, i.e. to make clear the different types of pre-existence on offer, although he will mention and dismiss one version from James Dunn and later in the section will crucially state that "eschatological entities can be referred to as pre-existent in various ways", p. 124). Another, that Christ might have pre-existed for Paul as an angel is not mentioned. Bart Ehrman has postulated, for example, that for Paul, the structure in Gal 4:14 ὡς ἄγγελον Θεοῦ ἐδέξασθέ με, ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν (as an angel of God you received me, as Jesus Christ) is used as a repetitive technique, not a climaxing analogy. Ehrman shows a couple of other instances where these "as" do not contrast but compliment in Paul's usage "ὡς....ὡς....." (1 Corinthians 3:1 and 2 Corinthians 2:17). Regardless of these different types of pre-existence, I suppose the point of this section should be - would belief in a second figure worthy of Jewish divine worship needed to have pre-existed in some sense? That might have tied the section in more nicely to the overall book purpose, even if a wider version does exist: What [do] Paul's letters tell us about the Christ-devotion that characterized Pauline Christianity, and perhaps other and earlier circles as well? (p. 119) and also there are questions about how early this view of Jesus arose, how to account for the belief historically, and what Jesus' pre-existence meant for early Christians. 

I think the main point really is that we can't say a great deal about this topic in detail, given how brief and fleeting Paul's references are to this supposed pre-existence. Since these references do not attempt to teach recipients anything new about the pre-existence of Christ, we are best left to analyse quite what Pauline churches could be assuming (the idea had already become disseminated among his churches so early that by the time he wrote his epistles he could take it for granted as known - p. 124). And if I could draw in my assumption at this early point, that this lack of need to develop significantly in the early stages may be because certain assumptions have been naturally taken from a graft into Judaism of belief in a divine logos (quite apart from Christianity), which may have already been associated with the Messiah-to-come. This possibility sets us up for what I see as a false dichotomy in Hurtado, as we shall see in a minute.

In his discussion with various scholars, particular Dunn, Hurtado wants to say that this assumption of the pre-existence of Jesus should be greater than some sort of personalised wisdom. Dustin Smith is a great resource for the opposite view, by the way, and can be mined in his co-written book The Son of God: Three Views of the Identity of Jesus (I have written a small series also on this book if you look back to March - April 2016 on this blog). Hurtado also correctly asserts that at some point a real belief in literal pre-existence did emerge, which, with our hermeneutic circle hats firmly back on, should mean that these references and the divine/religious centricity that Jesus takes/is given in other areas were of importance to early interpreters doted, we should note, with greater cultural insight than we have in the twenty-first century. Hurtado also notes that literal pre-existence is more firmly asserted in John 1:1-18 (although Smith still has cards to play in this instance), but Smith et. al still have their work cut out in passages of Paul like Philippians 2:6-8, 1 Corinthians 8:6 (one of those "through whom"s the world was made references), 2 Corinthians 8:9, Galatians 4:4, and a few more. Hurtado maintains that the question should still remain about how "solid" or "imaginary/symbolic" that pre-existence was. Hurtado is on the solid side; his main sparring partner, James Dunn holds "the dissenting view", which tends to focus on the personalised Jewish ideas of (Lady) Wisdom.

Hurtado agrees with Dunn that there is metaphorical language at play, and shouldn't be read woodenly (e.g. 2 Cor. 8:9, Christ "impoverished himself"). The differences lie in what you do with the reality behind the metaphor. Dunn claims that the passage is a "one-stage act of abasement" (Jesus' death). To answer the question more fully, responds Hurtado, we need to look elsewhere in Paul to see what Christ's self-abasement might mean, and goes straight for the jugular of Philippians 2:6-11. As a keen follower of Hurtado's blog, I have noted that his views on this passage have now enlarged slightly. He recognises now that the parallel between the first "god" (anarthrous) is paralleled (also anarthrously) by the first "servant", so it seems that if you want to say that Jesus became "a servant", then you have to be open to the view that Paul's cited poem might have read that although he subsisted as "a god" (see Hurtado's post here). On this Philippian passage, Hurtado sees Dunn's view as too dependent on a pretty absent "Adam Christology", including too much looseness with "made in the image of God" and "subsisting in the form of God". Fform and image, although similar, have distinctions, and if Paul wanted to imply the Adam version, he wouldn't have used "form" here (morphé theou is never used elsewhere in any allusion to Adam p. 122).

As with his recent blog-post, Hurtado demonstrates openness again here in his book when he says on pp. 122-123: In Philippians 2:6, however, "being equal with God" seems to be presented as something already held by Christ or really within Christ's grasp (emphasis mine). The point is that the Greek word used by Paul for "grasp" is very seldom used at this time, but the best I could find when I researched this passage a year or two ago was that "pillaging" seemed to be one of the predominant usages. In which case, openness is definitely the way to go here with this grasping business and is appropriately adopted in the NET translation I believe. The conclusion, nonetheless for the 2003 stage of Hurtado reflection is that this astonishing belief encapsulated in the early Christ poem in Philippians should be seen as the action of a pre-incarnate Christ, thus shedding light on other passages such as the number of stages of abasement in 2 Corinthians 8:9.

But this pre-existence is not a static point - New Testament theology virtually never is. It would feed into the belief that Jesus had really come from God and that the story of Jesus' own involvement in redemption extended back beyond his earthly existence and his crucially redemptive death and resurrection (p. 123). So this pre-existence from a Jewish perspective about this redemptive plan, either alongside or in the Messiah himself, was a firm expectation - the "eschatological agent of redemption". Hurtado says that for the earliest Christians who saw Jesus in this light, sent from God and for this eschatological purpose of salvation, it was "only a small and very natural step to hold that he was also in some way "there" with and in God from before the creation of the world" (p. 125). Hurtado will again later conclude the section that this fulfilment perspective would have also provided a basis for making appeals for Christian behaviour (humility and concern for other in Phil. 2:1-18; generosity in 2 Cor. 8:8-15 (p. 126).

Having returned to 1 Cor 8:6 (One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things), Hurtado now arrives at the false dichotomy that I referred to earlier: The idea of Jesus' agency in creation and redemption is not driven by speculative interests, and does not respond to philosophical questions about how a transcendent deity could create the material world. Instead, the logic proceeds from profound convictions about the sovereignty of the one God reflected in Jewish apocalyptic tradition, which posit that all of history is subject to God (emphasis mine). Here I see a false dichotomy. This seems to be saying that Christians chose between philosophical categories or Jewish categories. But Philo, in particular, is bona fide proof that those two options had already collided and intertwined. Judaism had already encountered and in some respects embraced hermeneutically philosophical ideas even in the examination and application of her own sacred texts.

Hurtado's own summary of this section

• The condensed Pauline references imply that notions of Jesus as a pre-existent divine agent had already been appropriated. Paul's not introducing the ideas as new.
• The pre-existence was active, as an agent in God's creative act.
• The ideas supporting this pre-existence were Jewish, apocalyptic/eschatological view in which "final things are seen as primal things". 

Lord Jesus Christ, S2 Part 4: Jesus as Lord or Jesus as LORD? (2)

YESTERDAY WE STARTED TO ASK if early Christians called their Jesus "Lord" or "LORD"? There were and are no quick, univocal answers - there never can be. Maybe the question is, in fact, the wrong one to be asking.

First, we recapped on the special translation of Yahweh as Kyrios without the article by the first wave of Alexandrian Greek translators. Second, we presented multiple lines of evidence that Paul was aware of this particularity. Third, we agreed with Hurtado's presentation that at that time there was a wide range of meanings and social implications behind Kyrios. Fourth, I pondered the importance of the underdeveloped idea of semantics, of such pivotal importance in answering even the binitarian question we asked in Series 1, Part 9: What does Hurtado mean by "binitarian"?, and fifth, we realised that Hurtado's 2003 account was unlikely to factor in important innovations of Jesus' own Kyrios-ship, some of which I presented. This poised me to be careful as I prepared to read on into the Jewish world and layers of meaning that Hurtado correctly beckons us to travel, careful of overreaching the divine implications of using kyrios even in a Jewish or Aramaic-speaking context.

Most typically, Jesus' lordship is really actually quite unique with respect to Yahweh and Adonai in the Torah (with whom he does indeed seem to also overlap despite their clear distinctions), as there is this huge fresh emphasis of Jesus being our Lord. On the look out for reconfigurations and mutations? There's one right there - our Lord was seen as exalted to the right hand of (his and our) God to reign, which as Hurtado consistently points out means including our Lord in our Jewish cultus. But careful, this is not because Jews typically gave worship to "our Lord" or "my Lord". Quite the contrary, that would have been a really unusual way for a Jew to describe their god.

Hurtado points out that the usage of "Lord" must have gone right back to the Aramaic-speaking origins of the movement seems right, as in Paul's epistles he teaches gentile Greek-speaking Christian converts two Aramaic terms: maranatha (our Lord comes) and the delightful Abba (Daddy/Father). Hurtado's conclusion, however, seems to play a little strongly to the numbering of these Aramaic expressions, saying: It is very interesting that Paul passed on to his Greek-speaking converts these two Aramaic prayer-expressions used by Jewish Christians to address both God and Jesus, which, taken together, reflect a "binitarian" devotional pattern. (p. 111). Sorry, but I'm not sure it does - first and foremost, I'd need to be reassured that if we had a third Aramaic saying passed onto Paul that this would not upset the binitarian concept too much. Hurtado's generally great hypothesis of early binitarian worship doesn't need unnecessary argumentation like this, in my view. Secondly, I'm still not clear quite what Hurtado's point is exactly about the earliest Aramaic-speaking followers crying out Maranatha? Remember, it is not simply: Come Lord! It is rather, may our Lord come! Something which is difficult to tie down too firmly to an Aramaic-Jewish understanding of the One True God, even if that seems to be the semantic association Hurtado requires. Let's see.

Since both Jesus is called Kyrios so frequently by Paul and God is so often called Kyrios as well in the Greek translation used by Paul, Hurtado now wants to extensively reference Pauline usage of Kyrios as evidence of the binitarian worship pattern central to his thesis. Since the question of anarthrous usage has arisen more strongly since the writing of LJC, introducing an important indicator of usage, I propose now to note by each if the article is present (arthrous) or absent (anarthrous) and how closely Jesus is associated to the usage of Kyrios there.

Hurtado begins with Paul's usage of Kyrios as applied to Israel's god.

• Romans 4:8 (Ps. 323:1-2), anarthrous. Context: God. Jesus not in view.
• Romans 9:28-29 (Isa. 28:22), anarthrous and anarthrous. Context: God. Jesus not in view.
• Romans 10:16 (Isa. 53:1), vocative (i.e. irrelevant) and context: God. Jesus not in view.
• Romnas 11:34 (Isa. 40:13), anarthrous. Context: God. Jesus not in view.
• Romans 15:11 (Ps. 117:1), arthrous (accusative, so fairly irrelevant): God. Jesus not directly in view (God is the designated receptor of praise ordained from gentiles via the Jews generous acceptance of them as Christ had accepted those Jews)
• 1 Corinthians 3:20 (Ps. 94:11), anarthrous. Context: God. Jesus not in view.
• 2 Corinthians 6:17-18 (Isa. 52:11; 2 Sam. 7:14), anarthrous and anarthrous. Context: God. Jesus not in view.

Clearly indeed, anarthrous usage of Kyrios for God was firmly in Paul's thinking in the appropriate Greek cases (especially nominative and genitive).

Let's see how the next passages he cites square up, for they contain usages like my 2 Corinthians 3:16-18 study of where Paul seems to be talking about God and referring to him as Kyrios (Lord), without being direct citations from the Septuagint Scriptures:

• Romans 11:3 (1 Kings 19:10), vocative (i.e. irrelevant), however, this could easily be a shortened citation of 1 Kings 19:9-10, for just prior to the citation, Kyrios is mentioned twice, one of these in a case that the Septuagint translators often opted to make anarthrous in the pattern we have described).
• Romans 12:19 (Deut. 32:35). Here Hurtado is pointing to Paul's addition of λέγει κύριος (says [the] LORD). This is not just a common way to prefix a citation of Yahweh by Old Testament prophets, it is littered with it. Since my own study so far has been limited to Psalms and Ezekiel, I can affirm with near certainty that λέγει κύριος is used no less than 203 times by the translator of Ezekiel, all of which anarthrously. 
• 1 Corinthians 14:21 (Isa. 28:11). The precise same remark as Romans 12:19. λέγει κύριος is the standard prophetic sign-off.

Now things get interesting, when Jesus comes into view, as Hurtado will now show us:

• Romans 10:13 (Joel 2:32). Absolutely right, this is an astonishing application of the Old Testament Kyrios name to Jesus. However, read in context, Paul likely thought that the conferred lordship would have been clear.... if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.". If a worship pattern can be "binitarian", then so can a salvation plan. So in context, God raised this Lord - our Lord - back to life so that now in the same way that his people had called upon God's name, they should now do so in reference to his appointed son and heir (see Heb 1:4).
• 1 Corinthians 1:31 (Jer. 9:23-24). Couple or remarks are needed here. The Jeremiah citation is not identical to the citation used by Paul to the Corinthians, although the correspondence seems easily strong enough to make it the agreed reference point. Secondly, unlike the previous passage of clear conferred lordship, here the context in 1 Corinthians is all about God and his wisdom. It almost seems that in order to avoid confusion in this section, Paul explicitly leaves out any mention of the Lord Jesus whatsoever. From verse 18 through to the end of the chapter (which includes the citation Hurtado is referring to: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord"), "God" is mentioned intensively, a dozen times by name (theos). Jesus Christ is also frequently referred to, this crazy wisdom of God, but Lord is not mentioned here apart from the citation, so it is much less clear to me than in Hurtado's first example that the "great transferral" of lordship is certainly implied here.
• 1 Corinthians 10:26 (Ps. 24:1), however, is a good example, although maybe still not quite as great as the crown jewel of Romans 10:13. Here Paul mentions simply Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, for, "The Earth is the Lord's, and everything in it". Who would have thought a 2000-year-old meat-market issue would raise a significant a theological question millennia later? Isn't humanity great? This "throwaway" comment of Paul's is utterly undeveloped, since he simply continues to the next socially awkward scenario for the Christian of his time, being invited for a meal containing the aforementioned meat. The theme of food eating, however, and the wider context here of 1 Corinthians is important in instructing us how to deal with this passage. Famously, two chapters previous to Hurtado's current focus point, in the face of the confusing array of gods and lords in Corinth, Paul has reaffirmed Jewish Christian monotheism: "There is one God the Father" (1 Cor. 8:6) while adding (and we could say having to add) "There is one Lord, Jesus Christ". Prior to the Christian mutations of Jewish theology, God was LORD (and God). Because he was anarthrously LORD, he wasn't really LORD of anything very much, it was pretty obvious: the entire universe. So the first wave of Alexandrian translators just called him LORD. The second and subsequent waves did later introduce some "of"s, but they were isolated instances outside the first-translated Pentateuch - esp. "LORD of hosts"). Here, some scholars (including N. T. Wright, I believe, but also Hurtado, LJC see p. 114) want to assert that in Chapter 8 Paul is "splitting the Shema" of Deut. 6:4 Hear, O Israel: [The] LORD our God, [the] LORD is one." Can that be right? I doubt it. The deciphering seems too motivated and distant from this same old context of eating meat sacrificed to idols that is occupying whole chapters of the Corinthian epistle. And there's a bunch of pagan gods to satisfy in different cultic ways and another bunch of human lords who are ensuring everything is going on smoothly in the city and to whom people show obeisance. Ultimately, I guess we can't know which "Lord" Paul is referring to here in 10:26, the most likely one seems to me Yahweh, simply "God", although I admit the 8:6 reference involvement of Christ as the creating logos of God could also be in view.
• 2 Corinthians 10:17 (Jer. 9:23-24). This is obviously the same citation Hurtado pointed us to two bullets earlier in 1 Corinthians 1:31 where I expressed dubiousness. Here I feel more open, while also spotting a clear and natural distinction between God and Christ: The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised for ever, know that I am not lying (11:31). So the distinction of two individuals is as clear as can be possible and is close to our target text. But here in 2 Cor. 10 we have some of the key conferral language we need to understand "kyrios-ship" to be reread, as it were, in order to avoid thinking that the earliest readers might have been confused. 2 Cor. 10:13 states: We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but will confine our boasting to the sphere of service God himself has assigned to us, a sphere that also includes you. 14 We are not going too far in our boasting, as would be the case if we had not come to you, for we did get as far as you with the gospel of Christ. 15 Neither do we go beyond our limits by boasting of work done by others. Our hope is that, as your faith continues to grow, our sphere of activity among you will greatly expand, 16 so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. For we do not want to boast about work already done in someone else’s territory. 17 But, “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” Paul certainly seems to think he is quoting Jeremiah, but as already mentioned above, that is not at all how Jeremiah goes in the Greek version critics are trying to reconstruct to this day (see here for example as an institution and the NETS project). If you do turn to Jeremiah 9:23-24, you have something like: 

This is what [the] LORD says: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this:

    that they have the understanding to know me,

that I am [the] LORD, who exercises kindness,

    justice and righteousness on earth,

    for in these I delight,”

declares [the] LORD.

While I think there is more to be said about these limits, spheres, "fields" (in other translations) as helpful semantic levers to help people understand how a responsibility might be conferred upon another, personally, with such textual complexity involved and the clear Jesus/God distinctions of the following chapter firmly in place, I would really rather have preferred Hurtado to have excluded this example entirely. On the other hand, I suppose I represent a small percentage of readers to actually go checking the references he makes (and I certainly won't be doing that systematically - it just seemed necessary given the direction he wanted to take Paul's usage of Kyrios and the research I had already committed some time into on the Septuagint).

For the reasons already cited, we won't bogged down in the next two passages next described by Hurtado as harder to discern whether the Kyrios reference is to Jesus or God, although I will give my view that for Romans 14:11, the referral is simply to God, although usual caveats on the translation Paul was using, and 1 Cor 2:16, which is also a reference to an alternative Greek translation (again!) used by Paul to refer to the mind of God, but which is now accessible by this wonderful mediatory mind of Christ.

Hurtado now moves his readers onto what seem to him clearly conferred instances of Kyrios-ship, if I could put it that way, let's see if we can find his examples as clear as he thinks:

1. 1 Corinthians 10:21 - Jesus's table is "the Lord's table" (τραπέζης Κυρίου) which is pretty darned close to Mal 1:7 and 12 (τράπεζα κυρίου). 
2. 1 Corinthians 10:22 (note, very next verse) - can't see the match Hurtado's seeing with Deut. 32:21, sorry.
3. 2 Corinthians 3:16 (the veil of [the] Lord/LORD) - as readers are probably aware, I have found this passage (2 Corinthians 3:16-18) quite striking and have blogged about it before to introduce the hypothesis that it could be Yahweh who is the referent here (see link below to The Lord is the Spirit.... WHAT? New thoughts on 2 Corinthians 3:16-18). Were we not "made in his image" (Gen 1:27)? Christ may well be the perfect human divine image bearer, but I believe we could be looking here, especially with all the strong anarthrous usage around the half-dozen kyrios instances in this passage, at God directly, not using Kyrios to refer to "our Lord Jesus Christ". I might be wrong, but that's still how I see the evidence, contra Hurtado (and most scholarship probably). Hurtado's correct reference of it echoing Exodus 34:34, however, does not mention that specifically the wording of the presence of the LORD is not repeated by Paul, but that's pretty irrelevant.
4. 1 Thessalonians 3:13 (Zech. 14:5) - this is a fantastic overlap of firstly "then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him" in Zechariah, then for Paul, who opens with the clear distinction of God and Jesus with "may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you".... by going on to say "may he [=the Lord Jesus] strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones." I love it. This comparison I feel encapsulates so well where I stand, which I think might be close to Hurtado's own position, that God and Jesus are utterly distinct for Paul and the early Christian church, and yet there is this great and unforeseen transferral of divine prerogatives to the Messiah. Wonderful stuff. Let's see if the next Thessalonians passage is as good.
5. 1 Thessalonians 4:6: "the Lord [Jesus] will punish men for all such sins" with Hurtado providing Psalm 94:2 as an example of this divine prerogative of punishment (or rather avengement), although it is an approximate reference and not, I think, altogether convincing as the hermeneutic basis for Paul's application. Here, I'd like to point out also verses 7-8, immediately following this startling and divine attribution of judgement to the Lord Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4: "For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit". Christ as divine judge against impurity is best understood in the light of this addition: the gift from God of his *Holy* Spirit enables us to proceed and live those holy lives to which we are called. This is not a binitarian passage - it is trinitarian to its core and is found in arguably the earliest surviving Christian texts of 1 Thessalonians.

In footnote 277, Hurtado provides a few more examples that I won't exhaust us with here. But it would be lapse of me to not mention the most important text of all in this strong-distinction-yet-association scenario Hurtado is now helping us picture: Philippians 2:10-11: "which appropriates Isaiah 45:23-25 (originally proclaiming a universal submission to God) to portray the eschatological acclamation of Jesus as Kyrios "to the glory of God the Father". These applications of Old Testament Kyrios passages to Jesus connote and presuppose the conviction that in some profound way he is directly and uniquely associated with God. (p.112) I quite agree, even if I do not find Kyrios matching quite as neatly as Hurtado seems to find in the examples he gives, and also would not want to assume that it was this early and explosive exaltation of Christ that caused the first aramaic-speaking groups to refer to their master as Kyrios. 

It is more likely, in my view, that Kyrios was applied to Jesus during his ministry as a biblical teacher or apocalyptic preacher by his groups of disciples first (as we might expect also John the Baptist to have been), arthrously, possessively. Subsequent to the revelatory experiences of Christ's resurrection and exaltation to God's right hand, that familiarity with calling Christ our Lord combined with familiarity of the title and God's name of LORD helped ensure what kind or level of exaltation and power Christ would be so quickly ascribed (Hurtado notes also the likely earliness also of the Christ poem cited by Paul in Philippians 2).

All of this allows us nonetheless to agree with Hurtado and Larry Kreitzer that these two Kyrios figures rightly describe a "conceptual overlap between God and Christ" in Paul. Throw in Paul's double insistence from 2 Corinthians 3:16-18 that: "the Lord is the Spirit", then I would want to expand that conceptual overlap further to include the Holy Spirit.

Thank you for reading through what has been a complex point here on Paul and his use of Kyrios. I'd love to hear back from you if you think this has helped you, confused you, if there are things I should be looking at that I have missed (especially with respect to my interpretation of Hurtado's points). Blessings.

For other related posts on this subject (close to my heart, for some reason), please see the following posts, mainly from last year, one in French:

Lord Jesus Christ, S2 Part 3: Jesus as Lord or Jesus as LORD?

The name of [the] LORD

Rattrappage sur la traduction du Nom Saint et Personnel et Retour à la Trinité

Why this research matters

Asterisked *Lord... in one French translation: DARBY

Who's who?

From [the] LORD - more cases for NT translators

The Lord is the Spirit.... WHAT? New thoughts on 2 Corinthians 3:16-18

2 Corinthians 3:16 and Luke 1:16 --> the LORD in the New Testament continued...

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: results

John's gospel: "the Lord"