Lord Jesus Christ, by Larry Hurtado, Part 7: Response from Dr Hurtado

OVER THE LAST couple of years, I have been amazed at both the opportunities created through the digital age to interact with scholars - regardless of credentials (I have virtually none in the field) - and the openness of some Christian scholars to discuss.

I have previously had some interaction and interest with Dr. Hurtado over my work on the LXX's translation tendency to remove the article to Kyrios as a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew divine name for God, Yahweh. (That work is currently on hold, but I do intend to continue it).

On this occasion, Dr. Hurtado responded to my previous post in this series on the disagreement with James Dunn - you can consult that post here.

In that post, we were exploring a section on Hurtado's review of monotheism as a factor contributing to Christian "binitarian worship" of Jesus and the Father. His interaction with James Dunn there was fascinating. For Dunn, that kind of worship was progressive: through the humble pre-Pauline beginnings to the full-blown binitarian worship of Jesus "alongside" the Father, to use Hurtado's term, an event that was perceived by the Jewish establishment to finally break their monotheistic requirements of worship to Yahweh alone. Hurtado wants to disagree: all of the first-century expressions of "successfully mutated" Christianity from its Jewish heritage (please see here for what is meant here by "successful", it was an important post in developing my view) were properly binitarian in their worship practices.

At this point, my Ricoeurian viewpoint kicked in. How can both be true? My viewpoint is that it is both useful and important to remember that hermeneutics does not begin after the close of the Christian canon. The New Testament authors were interpreting one another, along with their own theological and practical settings, and of course in line with their own revelation (a question for another day: is there really a fundamental difference between divine inspiration and divine interpretation?) That is the case of Luke with respect to Mark, and of Matthew with respect to both of them, plus their other aforementioned concerns. John, a representative of a late first-century Christian practice, may not have any literary dependence on the Synoptics, which is significant for discussions on its authorship (I'm back on board with the apostle), but ignorance of Pauline and earlier Christianity and worship practices is obviously absurd. I then attempted to present the two Dunnian views diagrammatically, in order to attempt to highlight the potential for deeper convergence of views despite the surface-level disagreement between our two scholars.

It is both possible that my subsequent explanations were insufficient, and that due to his time restraints Dr. Hurtado read it en diagonal. Although maybe not: I had said:

The break-through nuance of (1) is that whereas second temple Judaism knew some striking examples of divine agents, acting in the Name of Yahweh (or Name of LORD), this is the first time that an agent can mediate a hitherto divinely reserved right back to God. That, combined with exclusion from the Jewish synagogues and Jewish communities, and the image of Christ reigning and God's right hand, may have led later Christian communities to interpret the earlier nuance in a new, more "alongside" fashion...

Dr. Hurtado perceived my presentation of the Johannine worship as dualistic. He reminded me to be cautious with John's gospel: 

... [it] is a tricky text:  It both presents a highly exalted picture of Jesus and also emphatically makes him the unique Son/agent of the one God.  And even where the text asserts that Jesus is to be reverenced "just as the Father" (5:24-25), it makes it clear that this was the Father's fiat for this to be so.

Needless to say, I felt a little humbled and wondered if I had overstepped. But if I look back to my presentation, it really is not a defence of Dunn's development, and I don't think I ever intended Dunn to imply that, and certainly not that I was implying that. If that had been the case, then the undoubtedly oversimplified diagram of the Johannine picture would not have commenced with a single arrow that split to the Father and the Son, but simply two arrows.

Dr. Hurtado's other comments regarding Paul simply seemed on the one hand to confirm the "through" aspect I was highlighting of worship to Jesus, who would naturally mediate that back to the Father, although on the other hand provided me with fresh fodder for the "alongside" development/interpretation idea with Paul's consistent joint grace/peace greetings from God and Jesus.

Finally, a couple of comments on a 2013 paper Dr. Hurtado very kindly shared with me, which highlights the dangers of adopting "trajectory" development models of early Christianity. The scholars who have advocated this in the past and whose work Hurtado is critiquing, I haven't yet read so can't comment specifically. But this paper is much more than a critique, it is a proposal for a model that integrates both interaction and diversity of the early Christian movement. As I read this paper, I was reminded of my early concerns of Ricoeur that I shared with my friend, Barney Aspray. I was worried that the ideas he was sharing with me (absolutely new to me) could not integrate precisely these same two central characteristics of diversity and interaction that prompted Dr. Hurtado to also share with me his paper, that it was too linear.

But I think that is not at all characteristic of the Ricoeurian model - Ricoeur is defiantly opposed to a simplistic ontological understanding of the world, including biblical texts. There are no shortcuts to his voie longue, which questions our relationship to the matter at hand, asking lots of tricky why questions. Like why am I interested in Christian origins? Why am I writing a blog, and why are you reading it? I am still on the lookout for an explicit rejection of linearity with Heidegger's hermeneutical circle as I slowly plough through Ricoeur's Le Conflit des Interprétations, but perhaps the point is that a line must always be traced between you and your interpretation of events. It sounds kinda like philosophical mumbo jumbo, but interpretation would be said to reside within your sense of being. This prods us to humbly realise that we are probably unable to have a direct access to truth, one that bypasses this process. 

So my response is again to highlight that I am neither siding with Dunn or Hurtado in this matter - I am trying to ask how we might perceive the hermeneutical circle functioning between these perspectives highlighted of Paul and John, which indeed embraces the interaction and diversity between the two and the communities they represent. If John is more "alongside" in worship practice and Paul more "through", neither (as I already emphasised in the post in question) would need to be positionning Christ less centrally, and neither would need to be devoid of the other emphasis. Both interpret according to what precedes them, which, I wholeheartedly agree, is the extraordinary resurrection-ascension event of the Messiah to the right hand of God.

My thanks once again to Dr. Hurtado for such a stimulating conversation!

Taking on some mythicists and an update on how my "sting" evolved

MY APOLOGETICS ALERT meter is going beep - beep...

Here's why.

Have you ever heard of mythicists? Maybe not. Their basic view is that Jesus never existed, and the legend that developed around "Jesus Christ" borrowed from a number of pagan and middle eastern sources, not least of which being Zoroastrianism. Their views do not represent a mainstream historical perspective, regardless of religious commitment.

Since I am currently privileged enough to have the time and the resources of Hurtado's most significant contributions (Lord Jesus Christ and One God & One Lord), I realised I may be in a position to politely engage and defend the historical grounding of Jesus. If you'd like to see how I am getting along and watch the mythicist video I disagree with, you may do so here. Strangely, I seem to have been granted the last word!

I have also been fortunate to interact with Evan Powell, who is the author the website http://synoptic-problem.com/, which I can really recommend - although it is also where I got a faith "sting", mentioned in my previous post. I'm pleased to say that I have recovered from it, but with a fresh realisation of how some of the resurrection evidence fits together. The reason why I got stung by Evan's research and analysis, is that while he brought extra clarity and weight to my conviction that Matthew not only was later than Luke and Acts (which is important to note when researching the factors surrounding the emergence of a proto-trinitarianism in the first century), he also reports that Matthew's treatment of the burial story in Mark and Luke shows the story's weakness.

I think the reason why his views particularly affected me was because of how deeply I shared his other convictions about Matthew - and that should be a lesson to anyone. You probably agree with everyone about something, and you should probably check that you disagree with everyone about something. That's part of what makes you, you and me, me. And it certainly is true for theology.

Fortunately, I revisited his page about the burial and pushed him on it. We have had a very friendly and respectful exchange since then, and I have come to a conclusion I will probably now carry with me to my grave - and I am better for it. The point is this - it doesn't matter what you do with the existing evidence. You can realign it, reconstruct it. But if the basic building blocks are the same, you will *always* run into the following problem if you want to explain what happened to Jesus' body: at the time, the evidence pointed in favour of believing that Jesus had been raised by God back to life by his followers. Now, I'm a big sceptic when it comes to apologetics - the number of times I have dabbled in it positively on this blog could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I'm not going to say to people, the evidence means the only possible explanation is that Jesus was raised. In my exchange with Evan, I came up with a scenario according to what I understood his interpretation of the facts required. But it was incomplete and created fresh problems that are hard to explain.

In his reply, Evan told me that I was creating an unnecessarily complex situation - all it would have taken was for Joseph of Arimathea to move the body at the end of Saturday. My complex situation had included that Joseph was ignorant of someone having removed Jesus' body, that someone perhaps being the indignant family tomb owner. Evan's brushing aside of the need for Joseph's ignorance shouldn't satisfy. How could this designated member of social and religious standing be recalled so positively by all four gospel writers as a positive witness to the events that unfolded during the first Easter if he had, in fact, moved the body to another location? Would he not have clarified the situation? Apologists are correct (I admit) that the recipe is something like this:

• EMPTY TOMB ON SUNDAY MORNING
• POWERFUL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES OF THE RISEN CHRIST BY HIS FOLLOWERS
• NO OTHER CREDIBLE EXPLANATION GIVEN FOR THE BODY'S ABSENCE

The simple fact that brilliant minds and millions of people believe that this miracle could indeed have taken place should give us all pause for thought. Something strange happened to Jesus' body. If there *were* a simple explanation, then Christianity simply wouldn't have taken off. We wouldn't even be having this conversation. However, to my Christian friends who want to go take this and slam dunk their atheist friends, we must remember that strange things do happen (see an in-depth analysis of this natural and unpredictable phenomenon in The Black Swan). We must remember that we have sound reasons for believing what we believe, that we don't have all the answers. We also live in a surprising and unpredictable world in which we have to bind our beliefs to time-tested and storm-blasted foundations. Abandon them at your peril.

In my next post, I will feed back on my exchange with Professor Larry Hurtado! Yes, my theological hero responded to my post on his disagreement with James Dunn. We are also not done yet on a late Matthew. Back soon.

Lord Jesus Christ, by Larry Hurtado - Part 4: No to history-of-religions explanations; No to naive christian apologetics explanations.

IT IS POSSIBLE to resume the remainder of Hurtado's introduction fairly succinctly - I will try to hold back on Triune Hub compatibility comments unless there are key links to be stressed.

Hurtado does not hold back on his thesis - I think that's excellent to get it out there so quickly. I have felt tempted in my own manuscript to allow the journey slowly unfold for the reader in a fashion similar to my own experience, but that does not necessarily constitute good writing. So his thesis in three points about Jesus worship is that
1. religious devotion to Jesus took place phenomenally early, waaay before Paul,
2. expands on point 1 to say that it was very intense and diverse (not entirely sure if the diversity is illustrated quite as well by Hurtado as the intensity, but let's put that question on hold for now)
3. expands on points 1 and 2 to underscore that all this was going on within the Jewish "matrix" of monotheistic religious thought and practice. This is Hurtado's groundbreaking argument really, which is aptly summarised at Kindle location 200 (sorry no page number available): Jesus functions as divine in the religious life of Christian groups of the first two centuries. If we link that to his opening sentence's usage of the word "centre", upon which we reflected here, then I feel confident that Hurtado could agree that "divinity" in the context of monotheistic "function", is fairly equivocal with his own usage of (quasi-spatial) religious centrality. However - Hurtado is not presuming to mean here in his Introduction anything akin to what Dunn labels "Jesus-olatry", making an idol of Jesus. Hurtado in this book will refer to Dunn at various junctures (as anyone writing in this field would have to; likewise for Hurtado), but is in agreement on that this binitarian devotion is only possible as through (extraordinary) appointment by God himself. One of my critiques of Hurtado will nonetheless be an insufficiently vigorous analysis of the distinctions between through and alongside with respect to Jesus' reception of worship, and where the respective emphases might lie between Pauline and Johannine churches.

Remember what I said yesterday: being religious, as Hurtado will point out in outstanding clarity, is not just about what you believe; it is also about what your beliefs bring you to do, which is why the study of worship patterns are so important in mapping out the evolution of Christian belief from within Judaism.

Hurtado is going to take on a major project here mapping out Jesus devotion in the first two centuries, but he senses, correctly in my view, that he does this in opposition to two critical pressure points, themselves opposed to one another. One of these is a liberal historical-critical method inspired by 20th century and earlier German theologians, which assumes that it can reconstruct the emergence of Jesus as a divine figure through normal historical (by which he might mean "merely human") process of inquiry that involved the syncretism of various worldviews. I think Hurtado also means by this that it does not require religious experience to account for Jesus' meteoric rise.

The second pressure point is from Christian apologetics, who would want to assume that no such historical inquiry is of any use since the New Testament - divinely inspired - has it all neatly laid out already, then any further work is probably a waste of time.

Hurtado will convincingly show both positions to be false: both the naive view and the familiar history-of-religions view are wrong in portraying early devotion to Jesus as basically simple, unremarkable, and not difficult to understand. (Kindle location 243). It was not simple inserting Jesus into a monotheistic framework and to find the suitable language (and reshape the framework without compromising it critically) - so the naive view is wrong. And its religious intensity is argued cogently in this book to be too early for the history-of-religions methodology, which downplays the necessity of religious experience. This earliness is underlined by an assumption (which I believe is justified, but that is another big body of research - feel free to click on "lord" as keyword on this blog to see some references and work into the LXX translation of Yahweh) that the earliest Christian Jews would have been familiar with "Lord" language and its associations for their fellow Greek-speaking Jewish converts. That said, from the chapters I have read so far, particularly chapter 1 that develops the thesis, that assumption and its limitations are not developed sufficiently in my view (e.g. widespread usage of Kyrios in ways that do not imitate LXX usage, c.f. even the flawed efforts to present 1 Cor 8:6 as "splitting of Shema", see 1 Cor 9, which immediately applies Kyrios to Christ in a non-LXX/Yahweh compatible fashion. Sorry. Pet topic.

That's the end of the introduction. In the next two posts I will summarise the first chapter of the book as it sets out the explanations for how and why Jesus worship arose in Christian circles. I hope you are excited - it really is a brilliant chapter.

Part 5 coming next...