Hurtado, Bauckham, and the explosive early Christology

The standard nineteenth century skeptical model held that Jesus was originally seen as a Jewish teacher, gradually deified by his followers over generations as the Gospel moved from Palestinian Jewish soil into Hellenistic Greek soil. By the fourth century, the deified Jesus was canonised at Nicaea. The earliest Christianity, on this model, did not believe Jesus was God.

That model is dead in mainstream NT scholarship. Larry Hurtado (1943 to 2019) and Richard Bauckham have led, alongside others, sustained work showing that the earliest discoverable Christology was already very high, and that the worship of Jesus as divine was not a late Hellenistic accretion but an early, Jewish, near immediate development.

Hurtado documented a "binitarian devotional pattern" already in the earliest extant Christian texts: hymns to Christ (Philippians 2:6 to 11, considered an even earlier hymn quoted by Paul; Colossians 1:15 to 20); prayer to Christ (Maranatha, an Aramaic invocation preserved untranslated, indicating its origin in the earliest Aramaic speaking Palestinian church); confession of Christ as Lord using kyrios, the Septuagint translation of YHWH; baptism in Christ's name; the eucharist as a meal in Christ's presence; doxologies to Christ.

The pattern is binitarian: Jewish monotheism modified to include Jesus alongside the Father. Not Hellenistic polytheism. A recognisable mutation of Jewish monotheism, occurring within a Palestinian Jewish context, within years of the crucifixion.

Bauckham complements Hurtado: the earliest Christology was an identification of Jesus with the God of Israel, expressed in language drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Philippians 2:10 to 11 directly applies Isaiah 45:23 to Jesus. Romans 10:13 applies Joel 2:32 to Jesus.

Bart Ehrman tried to defend a late deification view in How Jesus Became God (2014) but was forced by the data to push the timeline far earlier than nineteenth century skepticism had it. His current view: high Christology emerged within years of the crucifixion, not centuries. He still rejects orthodox Trinitarian doctrine on philosophical grounds, but the historical claim that "the church gradually deified a merely human Jesus over centuries" is one he no longer makes.

Reading

• Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, 2003.
• Larry Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?, 2005.
• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 2008.
• Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 2014 (skeptical concessions).