"Euphemism": A Critical Response to Koog Hong

WE HAVE VERY quickly looked at some of the different issues around the Tetragrammaton in the Septuagint, with brief reference to John Wevers, Larry Perkins, Albert Pietersma, Martin Rösel, Larry Hurtado and Koog Hong, whose contribution I want to unpack with you now. Before I do that, however, I'm pleased to note that I did receive a response from Dr. Pietersma about my reservations with his conclusions on the Psalms. I will integrate his answer into my next post on "How the Adonai Cookie Crumbles", coming soon.

So Hong's paper, written for the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament in 2013 in 37.4 pp. 473-484 in Yonsei University, South Korea, treats the ineffability of God's name as a problem that found an early solution in the Hebrew Bible itself. Its title is The Euphemism for the Ineffable Name of God and Its Early Evidence in Chronicles and (wonderfully) is available for download via Hong's profile at academia.org here. What he does quite well here is to isolate very similar passages between Kings and Chronicles, and looks at how care over usage of God's Name may have affected its usage over the period of time separating the redaction of the two historical accounts. Here are the two most important statements from his abstract:

...the unique value of the double title אדני יהוה [Adonai Yahweh = "Lord LORD"] is established in tracing the euphemism in question, and the replacement of אדני יהוה of 2 Samuel with יהוה אלהים [Yahweh Elohim = "LORD God"] in Chronicles is presented as early evidence of the euphemism. Thus the reading Adonai for the Tetragrammaton appears to have begun considerably earlier than is commonly thought.

 p. 473

So put in simpler terms, Hong is saying that the Israelites were happy describing their God with a double title of Adonai Yahweh and at a later stage, when integrating the exact same story of David wanting to build God a temple, the double title had to go. What I never come to terms with in this paper is how Hong reconciles his belief that Adonai had become this great euphemism for the Sacredness of Yahweh, when in fact the narrow selection of examples that he points to seems to suggest, on his logic, the opposite direction of thought. 

Here's my difficulty: Later in the paper, Hong lays out all the passages he wants to compare for "the" euphemism, and actually 4 of the 7 comparable passages he examines simply contract the title Adonai-Yahweh into Yahweh. Only on two occasions, in 1 Chronicles 17:16-17, do you get the new appendage of Elohim that he just mentioned in the Abstract, and in the very same verse (1 Chronicles 17:17) you also get a contraction into Elohim. In summary, Hong's language of "the" euphemism implies a single solution to the ineffability and sacredness of the Divine Name while his key passage points to multiple acceptable practices, and they all involve ditching Adonai! If it is Yahweh that you want to exclude, why would the Chronicler ditch Adonai? 

The paper wants to set the context for its discovery of the early euphemism mentioned above in the debate around the Greek translation of kyrios ("LORD") for Yahweh. Kyrios, as you probably know by now if you read this blog, is what we know was used by Greek-speaking Jews (and Christians) very early on for "Yahweh", and like Yahweh, it was treated as a name. It was treated as a proper name in that it rarely held the definite article that we systematically smack on to the front, the LORD. I don't think Hong notes this or its significance to the discussion. What he does do is point to early sensitivities or preferences around God's name being significant enough to affect a diaspora community's history books. 

One question that we should check, given even the diversity of expression in the microcosm of Hong's passage: what is the Chronicler's usage of Adonai generally? Here, the other research we are currently unpacking on this blog is of some help to us. If we refer to Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord,  we can see that Hong is correct, the Chronicler "avoids" using Adonai completely, despite its 38,013 Hebrew words. 

That sounds impressive (see Hong's emphasis p. 482, "...[Adonai Yahweh] is never retained in Chronicles", emphasis original), but set in the wider context of the Yahweh and Adonai concentrations of the Hebrew Bible, it's not so impressive and points more generally, in my view, simply to an early limited use of Adonai. Look, Genesis and Exodus use it a tiny handful of times, Leviticus doesn't, Numbers has a single occurrence... none of this evidence is used to point to Adonai as a euphemism, sorry the euphemism for Yahweh. So what about Samuel? Oh dear - only 2 Samuel 7 contains Adonai - in all of its 38,003 words it mentions Adonai in just six verses ! It seems there would have been plenty of other opportunities of story overlap between Samuel and Chronicles to implement this apparent practice, but nope, just here. It seems pretty conspicuous to me and could quite conceivably be the work of a redactional revision of Samuel (Hong simply states his strange assumption, p. 474 "the Chronicler's replacement of Samuel's אדני יהוה with יהוה אלהים is presented as early evidence of the use of Adonai as a surrogate for the Tetragrammaton"). Indeed, redactor revision in the opposite direction would seem to work more in step with the chronology required by both Hong's logic and evidence.

Really interestingly, Hong notes Jewish sources from the first and second century B.C.E. that seem to affirm hesitation and replacement between the two names, Adonai and Yahweh (pp. 474-5), although it seems to be in the direction Yahweh -> Adonai, not Adonai - > Yahweh.

Another great contribution by Hong is the summary of the early textual evidence around the Greek translation of these two terms, that does not point favourably to "Kyrios" being in the original Old Greek Alexandrian translation, although as already stated, that is a point of controversy, and I am myself far from convinced. More importantly, several scholars, including Albert Pietersma, Larry Perkins and Martin Rösel are also on the sceptical side of this fence, despite Hong's remarks about what "specialists now tend to see" (p. 477).

The next contribution made by Hong (and I promise to summarise the contributions and problems at the end), is that we must understand there was a difference between written and spoken practices, namely that because of the spoken practices that may have replaced Yahweh with Adonai, that the double-occurrence in the text created redundancy in the Scripture read (p. 482).

We also learn something about the scriptural purpose of the Hebrew, Yahweh-Elohim, which is rarely to do with invocation (Hong, however, seems incorrect in his emphasis about Adonai-Yahweh as commonly used for invoking God - in Ezekiel, where it is most prominent, Adonai-Yahweh is about communicating God's words: "thus says the Lord GOD"). We can agree that the scribal and spoken practices and distinctions are probably what affected the changes between 2 Sam 7 and 1 Chron 17, even if that may have no bearing at all on the originality of the Greek translation for both words, Kyrios.

Final point of note, which does go in the direction of Hong's chronology, Hong notes that Targum Onkelos and Pseudo-Jonathan, this practice of Adonai -> Yahweh became systematic. Dating of this evidence, however, is late, especially in the case of Pseudo-Jonathan.

Let's summarise, with plenty to say on the positive for Hong's contribution:

• highlights an interesting discrepency between Samuel and Chronicles in Divine Name appellation
• introduces the notion of "euphemism" as a tool to understand the substitution mechanisms in place over the centuries
• usefully surveys the lack of earliest extant textual evidence for the written usage of kyrios
• highlights that there is strong evidence for a distinction between written and spoken practice of the Divine Name, 
• asserts the alleged purpose of Yahweh-Elohim is not usually invocational (I can check this out soon with the tool I am developing), 
• Some strands of Judaism later continued in the Adonai -> Yahweh direction.

Great!

What about the negatives?

• Insufficient connection with the controversy around the originality of the Greek kyrios translation,
• Unclear as to why an Adonai -> Yahweh euphemism would help clear up the issues created around the ineffability of the divine Name of Yahweh
• The narrow evidence provided in Chronicles fails to account for any other ancient practice in the direction Hong assumes and fails to integrate the overall concentration differences in the Hebrew Bible between Adonai and Yahweh, the latter dwarfing the former massively and Adonai being generally so very rare in the earlier compositional periods.

Some of the disagreement about origins of the divine Name translation laid out

It is important to ground any research in other research - and all this Divine Name stuff I've been doing has been inspired by a number of scholarly perspectives and articles, that have seeped into my own perspective over time. The downside is it's pretty complex at times and does not all agree, but hopefully we can draw out some of the fascination that is there too (not least because it affects how we understand early perspectives of Jesus' conferred lordship among first and second century Christian communities). Of course, I've already mentioned Larry Hurtado as being one of the key figures that alerted me to the question of the anarthrous rule (no article) in the Greek translation of the Divine Name, Yahweh. I've also referenced already the great LXX scholar, Albert Pietersma, whose comments about indifference on the part of the Septuagint translators between Yahweh and Adonai in Psalms have spurred me on recently to document the different ways in which Yahweh and Adonai are translated into Kyrios in Greek (I have just emailed Dr. Pietersma about the evidence I describe in my post from October 2016 "Why This Research Matters" - if I hear back from him, I'll be sure to fill you in).

John Wevers is also a massive name in this field - he's passed away now, but he was able to respond to the question of the decaying consistency of the Kyrios translation in Psalms with respect to the Pentateuch and some of the other historical Hebrew books (which I have yet to get to). See the Hurtado hyperlink above.

Another contributor to my thought process was Larry Perkin's whose paper, which I reviewed and whose third point about the originality of the anarthrous Kyrios solution to the unpronounceable Yahweh problem, registered on my radar as a fundamental question. If we could demonstrate that the anarthrous solution was most stringently applied in the Pentateuch, but still applied in the other books of the Septuagint canon to a lesser degree, then we could unearth some potentially very interesting information about the Tetragrammaton conundrum as it was rolled out over time and maybe even over geographical locations. For Perkins and Martin Rösel, (see “The Reading and Translation of the Divine Name in the Masoretic Tradition and the Greek Pentateuch,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31 (2007):  411-28), the translators came up with this directly (or Jewish religious authorities overseeing their Egypt-based translation). Emmanuel Tov, Koog Hong and others disagree, citing the lack of Greek Jewish papyri in support of the Kyrios solution. This problem is significant, and the Rosel camp that I think I belong to have yet to provide a satisfying solution to it, but the Pentateuch's perfection on the rule points to a much earlier placement than Tov and others suggest (he points to what has to be an impossible mechanical replacement of "iao", one of the extant early Greek options).

So with those few references in mind, we are ready to have a look at an interesting contribution by Koog Hong in my next post or two, who reasons in terms of Euphemism.

Centering Prayer, with Cynthia Bourgeault 2

Bourgeault provides her own helpful summary in her Epilogue (p. 161-167) of this in-depth-yet-practical guide to reawakening our life of prayer and spiritual practice. I'm going to combine a few of her 12 points to summarise still further into just six:

1. Possibly via a "sacred word" in a designated timeframe of perhaps 20 - 30 minutes of centering prayer, this is a model of surrender of oneself via gentle release of all of one's thoughts as they occur. Bourgeault connects this to the famous kenosis (emptying) of Jesus as described by Paul in Philippians 2. Earlier in the book, the author importantly mentions that the release process is very gentle.

2. Establishing some kind of inner "breathing" in this surrender (?) means that "good" and "bad" meditations are done away with. Some will involve more thought-surrender than others. It also involves "releasing the passions and relaxing the will".

3. Over time, the sense of self steadily relocates itself outside the insatiable attention draw of thoughts, a new "magnetic centre" that expands out of meditational times into a more contemplative and larger and deeper self. This doesn't do away with the "egoic" self. Training and moving out of it is all part of the process. This GPS (God Positioning System!) realigns our outer and inner self, the inner being characterised by "your yearning for God and God's yearning for you". Bourgeault connects this new centre with the authentic heart of our person, a deep connection with God's own true heart.

4. This is the goal: to nurture this heart. It differentiates centering prayer from other prayer methodologies which are more focussed on clarity of mind in favour of a singleness of heart.

5. This is not preparation for relationship with God, but relationship with God itself with real psychological outworkings. Divine therapy - centering prayer encourages psychological healing as unconscious emotional baggage is slowly released.

6. The earmarks of this journey are "compassion, humility and a growing equanimity". The whole approach creates enhanced inner harmony. A key word for Bourgeault in this book is "consciousness", and she reminds us of it here: growth toward "unitive" consciousness.

While I hope this super-brief summary might be of help, I highly recommend reading the book cover to cover for yourself. Some of Bourgeault's teaching on Centering Prayer can also be accessed via YouTube (Part 1 here), and she also works with Fr. Richard Rohr.

NB: I have omitted one of Cynthia's own bullets completely. I also failed to fully grasp her description of one of her stages of the meditative process whereby we locate the thought, emotion, passion, tension etc within our bodies in order to prepare for its release. I believe this can only be achieved adequately via experience.

Centering Prayer, with Cynthia Bourgeault 1

IT WAS LIBERATING to me to read this book. I am usually very critical in all I read but I find so little to fault here in the deep, practical pages of Cynthia.

A few things that may alarm conservative evangelicals: this book will not be judgemental toward other faiths but will attempt (in my view, successfully) to situate contemplative prayer firmly within the Christian tradition. Secondly, Cynthia manages to anticipate worries about this alternative approach without a defensive tone and without portraying centering prayer as the be-all-and-end-all of prayer. And she will certainly not advocate a babbling word-loaded time of prayer ("pummel my spirit with Truth").

I will shortly provide a summary of her book, itself a summary of her own message summary that she provides at the end of her book. But first, it's really worth pointing out the necessity of this summary. You know how some books basically divulge their message in a nutshell and slowly unpack that nutshell for the rest of the book? I don't know about you, but I don't always feel very motivated to finish that kind of book. Every single chapter of Cynthia's book brings something fresh, is loaded with humorous stories and is instilled via a non-professional and accessible style and vocabulary. The irony is that some of her own summary points at the end do overlap, which gives me a small sense of purpose for my following post on this book: provide an even more condensed summary. Coming Soon, as they say! (here)

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

Sample Chapter is out!

I have no idea how much time I have spent crafting this chapter. I feel like I have written it several times over the last couple of years!

This opening chapter of my book manuscript introduces a new combination of already established theological concepts. It applies hermeneutic principles of interpretation to the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity, thus opening a middle ground between "Triune God advocacy" and Biblical Unitarianism and, I hope, increase the opportunities for productive dialogue between these traditionally-opposed schools.

This, the opening chapter, is a very personal one.

Particular credit goes to Marc Gallagher who gave me some fantastic constructive criticism and advice on it a few months ago, although quite a number have contributed in various ways to the development of the thesis of this book, which I extract here from the uploaded chapter:

First century Christian faith did indeed seem to have – at least in the more successful strands of Christianity of the time – an all-new trinitarian hub, and indeed did not yet feature a tri-personal God. The latter would be the expression and safeguarding of the former. That is the thesis of this book: the Triune God is the fourth-century expression and safeguarding of the first-century triune faith.

Please read or download the chapter in full here.

As readers may have learned already from a previous post, I haven't had much luck with my first three publishers, so until the book situation changes, I will tend to prioritise my other goals via this blog. Hopefully, folks might at some point realise that the Triune Hub hypothesis could give new leverage and clarity to the trinitarian enterprise. If that does happen, I may not even be the best person to publish on it. I'm more committed to getting a more accurate perspective of the past and improving the state of Christian apologetics to mind too much, although I have wondered and prayed about a partnership. But this chapter remains one of my most nurtured, careful and developed pieces I have written to date, so if you would like to read it I'd love to hear your feedback.

Blessings.

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 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).

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"

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

I HAVE BEEN really looking forward to this section. Some readers might know that I had some dialogue with Dr. Hurtado back in 2016 around the fascinating issue of Kyrios use in the Greek Septuagint, a compilation of Greek translations initiated in Alexandria in the third century BC for diaspora Greek-speaking Jews living in that area and beyond. The reason why this is of interest to us here is to recall that Lord Jesus Christ was written in 2003. Research into the Septuagint has been going on for many years, but new scholarship continues to shine fresh light on some aspects of the New Testament, and will certainly come up here in this section. Before we look any further, then, into Hurtado's 2003 perspective on Paul's use of Kyrios as a "divine title" for Jesus, let's recap what we know about the usage of Kyrios in Judaism in the second temple era.

When the LXX was written, certain theological understandings and tendencies had ultra-sanctified the name of Yahweh, God's revealed name for his people to call him by (paradoxically!), to such an extent that even uttering the name might be considered so terrible that the person might risk being divinely fried.

As a result, there were special ways of writing Jewish texts that had two forms - the proper form and the read-aloud form. Scholars ponder a lot about how Jews of the second temple era got around the numerous references to Yahweh (or Kyrios), but I believe that Kyrios represented a good route for the mainstream Greek-speaking diaspora. It is also a common term used for a human master and the Alexandrian translators had inserted a clever designator that this Kyrios was both different and personal. How? They removed the article. So, whenever we read in our English Bibles, especially from Genesis to Deuteronomy, "the LORD" said or did this or that, I recommend you start practising replacing that with either simply "Yahweh" or "LORD" (no "the"). The second option I still find the most stilted, even if loyal to an intermediate state of transmission of the text to us (which should make us ponder why we are so loyal to it, in fact).

Since we are talking about Paul, I will also say that I believe we have good evidence he was aware of this special translation practice. Not only do we have his testimony of his intensive religious training as a literate multilingual Jew, but I think I also stumbled over some interesting textual evidence that I have examined before on this blog in 2 Corinthians 3:16-18, see here. (Note: I am not at all convinced that such intimate textual knowledge can be postulated for other authors of the New Testament, Revelation being one example I noticed just recently.)

So before we get into this section of Hurtado's chapter on Paul, what should we be asking? Hurtado is on the lookout for special status for Jesus that would warrant the evidence of the binitarian worship patterns we have looked at in Chapter 1. I too am on the lookout for special New Testament treatment of Christ and the Spirit that could explain Father-Son-Spirit religious dynamics that would require a reconfiguration of the Jewish core view. But, as on this blog we have insisted over and over again: absolutely no shortcuts are allowed. Some apologists want to insist that Jesus "just is Yahweh", pointing to occasions when the New Testament authors, including Paul, apply Yahweh texts to Jesus who seems to become the Kyrios in question. Seems simple enough? But can it be as simple as that if anarthrous Kyrios is a personal name as well as a title?

We want to see if the simple theory neatly matches the fuller usage of the term. For me, seeing how sensitive Paul is to not only repeating anarthrous Kyrios citations but also applying that anarthrous principle to Yahweh elsewhere (that in context does not have the Lord Jesus in view, rather, Yahweh or "LORD", see the aforementioned post on 2 Corinthians 3:16-18), I would want to see how Paul responds to the question of the article when it is applied to the Lord Jesus, both inside and outside of Old Testament fulfilment passages. Of course, I also want us to learn from Hurtado what Kyrios could have meant as a title for the early Christian communities we learn of through Paul.

In response, Hurtado immediately opens with the obvious concession: Kyrios was used to refer to and address someone in a variety of socially superior positions (p. 108) It's the title a slave-owner would expect from his slaves, it could be a general term of respect like "sir", and came to be used in some Eastern provinces of the Roman empire. I would also expect John the Baptist's disciples to have referred to John in this way, as "master". Hurtado notes the usage of Kyrios for these eastern provinces in the same breath as noting that this is also where living emperors could be divinised, which was not possible in the west. Regardless, what we are looking at is a highly diverse word with ranges of meanings in multiple contexts, and so I would be more hesitant than Hurtado, when he states:

This pagan religious usage ... shows that pagans could easily have understood the term as connoting reverence for Jesus as divine (p. 108).

For Jewish understanding of the term, Hurtado recognises that we don't look first and foremost at the pagan culture, but at the ethnic and religious heritage of the Jewish people, introducing a word that is absolutely key to my own hypothesis of the Triune Hub: "semantic", a term Hurtado sadly leaves sadly underdeveloped with only five other meaningful occurrences (pp. 293, 302, 304, 305, and fn48 p. 506):

Most recent studies of these questions conclude that the key semantic background lies in Jewish tradition, and that the christological designation of Jesus as "Lord" goes back into the very earliest circles of Jewish Christians. (p. 109, emphasis mine)

But will that earliness really settle the questions we were asking just now, and what does Hurtado mean by "semantic background"? Recently, we have opened up the idea via Paul Ricoeur's work in Conflit des Interprétations; of the impact of "phenomenology" to our human processing, itself deeply impacted during its development by Freudian psychoanalysis, that insists on multiple layers of meaning. Suffice it to say for now that this bridge between phenomenology and "theological mutation" has not yet been sufficiently developed and articulated, despite its successful employment by Hurtado, Wright, Crossan and no doubt others (by the way, if blog readers could point me to other serious biblical scholars who reason in terms of mutation of Jewish worldviews/semantics, etc., please let me know). Regarding the question of earliness, I'm not sure. For Hurtado, everything has to be very early, that's how his model works. But if Jesus is by and large referred to largely in the non-special sense introduced by the Septuagint, then that should strongly nuance any unnecessarily strong assumptions about the divinity overhanging the word Kyrios. And yes, by the way, Jesus generally does have an article and, perhaps more importantly still, his lordship is personalised: "my Lord", "our Lord", etc. Yahweh, despite his thousands of mentions in the Old Testament, is never "my Yahweh" or "our Yahweh". Even other Hebrew words rendered Lord like Adonai are very rarely used in this possessive sense - twice in Nehemiah and four times in the Psalms. Jesus? 73 times. That is a totally different and unique usage that LJC simply does not account for as far as I can see in its bid to create a semantic divine overlap between Jesus and God, at least with respect to worship reserved for the One True God.

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:

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"

Lord Jesus Christ, S2 Part 2: Jesus' divine sonship

Hurtado will now move through sections of Paul's Jewishness, Paul the Convert, The Gentile Mission, Christological language and Themes, Jesus as "Christ", to Jesus' Divine Sonship. I propose to pick up again here (don't worry, any important elements fast-forwarded here will be recalled during the chapter summary), Jesus' divine Sonship. Here Hurtado is weighing the various arguments for the source of this idea of divine sonship. Was it from the Roman pagan world (where indeed divine sonship did exist)? Or was it from within the Jewish Bible? 

Hurtado cites serious scholars Nock and Hengel as both having shown how difficult it is to demonstrate that it is the application of pagan mythology onto Christ in Paul's writings that permits him to apply divine Sonship, Nock even concluding "[T]he attempts which have been made to explain it from the larger Hellenistic world will fail." (p. 103) (My emphasis. A. D. Nock, Early Christianity and its Hellenistic Background (New York: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 45). So if the divine sonship motif comes from within Judaism, how did that work? What did that mean? Paul's most exalted term for Jesus actually isn't "son of God", and in particular, it is absent at times when we might have seen it fitting to have used it (1 Corinthians chapters 8-10). 

What is important to say from the first-century Roman era of Judaism is that the diversity of translations available to the Jewish communities of their Holy Scriptures would most certainly have included ideas of "sons of God", in particular with reference to the heavenly realm's population. But given the "failure" of this as the predominant ignition for the idea of Jesus' divine sonship, we need to look into Israel's sacred past. The most significant association, then, would most likely have been the ways in which God's anointed king of Israel (see esp. 2 Sam 7:14), other righteous individuals (some extra-biblical literature usage would have been well known) and Israel collectively (e.g., Exod. 4:22; Deut. 14:1; Isa. 1:2; Jer. 3:22; Hos. 1:10; 11:1; Wisd. of Sol. 12:21; 16:10, 26; 18:4, 13) as son(s) and "firstborn" of God. (p. 103). Given Paul's preference for other titles of Jesus with regards to the level of his exaltation, i.e. Kyrios (Lord), I think the most important allusion we should make here is that shared with the leading theme of the second gospel, Mark. The Jesus-God relationship represents the relationship God had always intended to maintain with his people collectively. Jesus powerfully represents "his" people. Whose people? It's now a double "his". God's people are now entrusted to their rightful king, the Messiah Jesus. In which case, although this is not a developed biblical speculation, there is also a double "son", the restored people of God as restored sons of God and Jesus as the archetypical Son.

Whatever the Pauline nuance usage behind his usage of the expression, I think the context shows that it was fairly far removed from the ways in which we can often hear it used today. As Hurtado himself points out (in agreement): In this messianic usage, divine sonship did not function to connote divinity, but it certainly indicated a special status and relationship to God.

We do not need to go through the various Pauline examples takes here, but as I went through it I wondered if there was something that could have been said about uniqueness. Hurtado says on pp. 107-108 "If, as is likely, in his preconversion oppostion Paul rejected early Jewish Christian claims that Jesus was God's unique Son.... this would help explain the importance that Jesus' divine sonship seems to have had in Paul's postconversion religious life." It could explain a lot more besides. If Jesus' first followers whom he had persecuted claimed that he embodied "true Israel" as the true son of God, as a uniquely chosen people (or son), then we also have a backdrop for deep Pauline reflection on the grafting in of other nations into God's special unique people/family.

So in summary: the divine sonship was a Jewish idea and Paul's occasional use of it in relationship to Jesus does not express his inherent divinity, but rather his unique standing and intimacy with God, and his involvement in God's redemptive work. (see p. 104) Regarding the fact that this took place in a social context where divine sonship meant something else, we can perhaps expect that this may have had an underscoring effect on the full ontological divination of Jesus as the serious theologizing and apologetics began to get into full swing in the subsequent centuries - part of a wider process I am calling triunification of God.