Jesus is Lord (Part 18)
As we have seen earlier in this web series, fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, the apostle Peter proclaimed to the people of Jerusalem: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). But what did St. Peter mean by calling Jesus “Lord”? Most likely, he was using the title in the same way that it was used in the psalm he had just quoted in Acts 2:35, that is, Psalm 110:1 : “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand ….” So, “The Lord” (God) had invited the Messiah (“my Lord”) to reign with him in heaven. Peter had already said in Acts 2:33 that after his resurrection and ascension, Jesus had been “exalted at the right hand of God.” In short, in this case, the title “Lord” was explicitly used for Jesus simply as another way of saying “the reigning Messiah.” Still, why would St. Peter say in Acts 2:36 that “God has made him both Lord and Christ” if the two titles essentially meant the same thing?
Elsewhere in the New Testament, we find Jesus referred to not just as “Lord and Christ” but as “the Lord.” (e.g. Acts 8:16; 9:17, 16:31; I Cor 2:8; 11:23; II Cor 4:14; I Thess 4:1, 15-18; Jas 2:1). While the word “lord” in Greek (kyrios) could be used in a secular sense to refer to someone merely as “master” or “ruler,” to call someone “the Lord” was tantamount to ascribing to them the divine name. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the title “the Lord” was used in place of God’s exclusive name Yahweh, just as in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, Adonai (Lord) had been used whenever Yahweh appeared in the text, because God’s special, chosen name, Yahweh, was not to be spoken by mere sinful mortals. Indeed, the ancient Jewish historian Josephus tells us that many Pharisees were executed by the Romans for refusing to use this title for the Roman governors of the Holy Land. After all, to call someone “the Lord,” or even just “Lord” in a supremely exalted sense, was to acknowledge them as one’s highest authority and first loyalty. But only God, the Creator of the world and Redeemer of Israel, deserves to be called “Lord” in that way.
The question then naturally arises: how early in the life of the Church did Christians begin calling Jesus not just “Lord” in the sense of “Master” or “Messiah,” but “Lord” or “the Lord” as a divine title?
Throughout much of the twentieth century, a clear majority of biblical scholars and New Testament historians held the view that ascribing to Jesus divine functions and titles was a gradual invention of the emerging Gentile majority in the Church, late in first century. It simply fit better with the expectations of Greco-Roman culture to have as the central figure of one’s religion a god who had become a human being, just as some of the Greek and Roman gods, such as Apollo and Zeus, had temporarily assumed human form, and some ancient (mythical) human beings had been exalted to divine status after their death, such as Asclepius, and Oedipus. Indeed, the “divine-man” was said to be a familiar figure in ancient Greco-Roman religion. Moreover, there was an early Jewish-Christian group in Syria called the Ebionites who resisted the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Divinity of Jesus Christ on the grounds that these were distortions of the original gospel. In fact, even those scholars who disputed the idea that the divinity of Christ was imported into Christianity from paganism still tended to admit that the doctrine was initially only implicit in the recorded words and deeds of Jesus, and it may have taken many decades for the full truth about the divinity of Christ to unfold and become explicit in the consciousness of the Church. The principal milestone of this legitimate development of doctrine was said to be the Gospel written by St. John, allegedly around 90 AD.
Today, however, that 20th century scholarly consensus no longer seems secure. To begin with, historians of antiquity discovered that the divine-man figure in Greco-Roman religious culture really only arose in the 2nd and 3rd centuries: It was not in place in the first century AD, where it might have exerted influence on the early development of Christianity. Moreover, the pagan “divine-man” figure was always at most an earthly embodiment of one of the gods, not an incarnation of the infinite Creator of all. Furthermore, some scholars now hold that the Ebionites were just an early Jewish-Christian group that refused to go along with the apostolic decision that Christians need not keep the Mosaic Law in its entirety. In other words, the Ebionites did not preserve the original teachings of the Christian mainstream; rather, they were a fringe group and a disgruntled minority from the beginning, from the very time of the apostles onward.
Most importantly, some scholars, such as Larry Hurtado, have done more extensive research on the beliefs and practices of the early Christians, and found that the confession “Jesus is Lord” in a way that ascribes divinity to Christ was present, and at times explicit, from the earliest days of the Church.
For one thing, Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 56 AD, is loaded with indications that the early Christians worshipped Jesus as the divine Lord. For example, in I Corinthians 16:22, Paul preserves for us a prayer in Aramaic, the native, Galilean tongue of Jesus, the apostles, and the very first Christians: Maranatha (“Come, O Lord”; a prayer also found in Aramaic in Rev 22:20). Here is evidence that the earliest, Palestinian followers of Jesus prayed to him as “Lord.” We see another example of this in Acts 7:59, when St. Stephen prays to Jesus as his “Lord” just before his death: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Again, just calling Jesus “Lord” does not necessarily indicate that one thinks of him as fully divine, but to pray to someone while using that title would seem to imply it, and was likely seen as blasphemous by the ancient Jews.
In I Cor 2:8, St. Paul refers to the crucified Jesus as “the Lord of glory” (or, more literally, “the Lord, the glory”). For the Jews, God’s glory belongs to him alone (Is 42:8), so for someone to be equated with the glory of God, or called “The Lord of glory,” is to ascribe to him a divine prerogative (and the same title is given to Jesus in James 2:1).
In I Corinthians 8:5-6 the apostle picks apart the daily prayer of all Israelites, called the Shema in a way that includes Jesus on the divine side of the equation. The Shema begins “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt 6:4). But St. Paul divides it into two parts:
For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn comments on this passage:
What is so striking here is that Paul seems to be taking up the Shema, Israel’s creed …. As already noted, in its fuller form the Shema confesses “The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Dt 6:4). But Paul seems to have pulled apart the confession of one God as one Lord into a twofold confession of one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. (New Testament Theology: an Introduction, p. 62)
In other words, St. Paul has put Jesus on the same, divine level as the God and Father of all — and he has done this in the context of the most thoroughly Jewish prayer of all, not a Gentile one!
In his Epistle to the Romans (written ca. 58 AD), St. Paul again indicates that the early Christians confessed that Jesus is their divine Lord. For example, in Romans 1:3-4, he writes that Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh, and was designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord ….” “Designated” here seems to mean “declared to be, or acknowledged as,” and he is said to be not just God’s Son in the sense of the Davidic Messiah (which was affirmed separately at the start of verse 3), but in addition “Son of God in power,” in other words, declared to be in a state where he exercises divine power. Moreover, “the Spirit of holiness” who raised him from the dead seems likely to be an Aramaic way of speaking of the Holy Spirit — which, again, pushes this early Christian mini-creed back to the earliest days of the Church.
In Romans 10:9-13, St. Paul writes of Jesus: “[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord … you will be saved.… [T]he same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” Here, again, St. Paul encourages Christians to pray directly to Jesus as “the Lord.”
Perhaps most revealing of all in this regard is Philippians 2:5-11, from an epistle written about 60-62 AD. Many scholars believe that here St. Paul is quoting a hymn or canticle familiar to his readers, which (again) means that this passage probably expresses the faith of Christians much earlier than the writing of the epistle itself.
There has been much scholarly debate over what St. Paul meant in the first half of this passage:
Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
When St. Paul writes that Jesus was originally in the “form of God” and later assumed “human form”’ the Greek word used here is morphe, which legitimately can mean “having the precise nature of.” That would make this a hymn or canticle first of all about the Incarnation, telling us that the Son of God in his divine form pre-existed his earthly life, but then he humbled himself to assume all the limitations of human nature “and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” Also, the phrase translated by the RSVCE (above) as “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” legitimately can be translated (as the Jerusalem Bible did): “[He] did not cling to equality with God”— which would mean that the Son was fully divine, but was willing to let go of his equality with God the Father in some way in order to be “born in the likeness of men.”
On the other hand, some scholars have argued that it is not strictly necessary to translate these words and phrases in this way, or in any way that implies that this part of this hymn or canticle witnesses to the Incarnation.
What should tip the scales of that debate, however, is what we find in the second half of the passage:
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
There can be absolutely no doubt that this half of the canticle expresses faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The name he is given at his exaltation (that is, after his resurrection and ascension into heaven) is “the name which is above every name”— namely, the divine name, Yahweh. Moreover, when the canticle says “at the name of Jesus very knee should bow ... and every tongue confess,” this marks a direct allusion to the words of the Lord God in Isaiah 45:23: “To me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear.” Since neither the early Christians who recited or sang this canticle, nor St. Paul who records it, can possibly have meant that Jesus was originally a mere creature, a human being, who was later raised somehow to fully divine status, equal to the infinite Father and Creator of all, then the first half of this canticle must, by default, refer to the fact that Jesus originally had a divine nature equal to that of God the Father, and after his human life and crucifixion, his true identity was declared and made manifest in heaven, and one day all humanity will come to acknowledge this truth: Jesus Christ is truly the divine Lord.
Finally, this passage in Philippians has a parallel in miniature in St. Paul’s writings in II Cor 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” When was Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter from Nazareth, ever “rich,” if not in his pre-existent life in heaven as the divine Son, before he assumed the poverty of our human condition in the Incarnation?
Other passages in the Pauline epsitles also state or imply the divinity of Jesus Christ: Galatians 4:4 (from the mid-50’s AD) and Colossians 1:15-18 and 2:9 (probably from the early 60’s AD)>
One other consideration remains: notice that in all of these passages in the New Testament, all written in the mid-first century, there is no sign of any debate at all about the divine identity of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul does not try to convince skeptical readers that Jesus Christ (whom they supposedly thought was merely a human Messiah) was really a divine person after all, and that it is therefore OK to ascribe to him divine titles and to pray to him. It seems that faith in the full divinity of Jesus was taken for granted by most, if not all Christians, no matter how far back into the first century we go — even if the theological details still needed to be unpacked, and the full implications of this for a Trinitarian understanding of God still needed to be pondered and articulated. Saint John’s gospel does indeed play a crucial role here — but only because he clarifies what the mainstream of the followers of Jesus believed, implicitly and explicitly, from the very beginning.
Next Time: The Witness of Jesus to His own Divine Identity
Robert Stackpole, STD
© 2020, Mere Christian Fellowship
