How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (29 page)

This is obviously a big problem, since, as I have said, we don’t have any writings from that time. And the one New Testament writing that allegedly records what was happening at the earliest period in Christian history—the book of Acts—was written around 80–85
CE
, again, fifty or fifty-five years after the time we are for now most interested in. Moreover, the author of Acts, whom we continue to call Luke, did what all historians of his day did: he told his story in light of his own beliefs, understandings, and perspectives, and these affected how he recounted his material, much of which he no doubt inherited from storytellers among the Christians who had long been recounting—and therefore changing and embellishing—the stories of the early years of the faith.

Given this state of affairs with our sources, how can we get to the earliest forms of Christian belief, before the time of our oldest surviving writings? As it turns out, there is a way. And it involves passages of a sort I mentioned earlier: preliterary traditions.

The first Ph.D. seminar I took in my graduate program was called “Creeds and Hymns in the New Testament.” The professor was named Paul Meyer. He was an erudite and deeply learned New Testament scholar, respected by all the leading scholars of the day for the astonishing care he took when engaging in exegesis and, as a result, for his unusually penetrating insights into the text of the New Testament.

The idea behind the course was that some passages in the New Testament—especially in some of the epistles and in Acts—are remnants of much older traditions from the early decades of the Christian movement. For the sake of this class, we called these preliterary traditions
hymns
and
creeds
(recall:
preliterary
means that the traditions were formulated and transmitted orally before they were written down by the authors whose works we still have). Scholars had long supposed that some of these traditions had been sung during very early Christian worship services (hymns) and others of them were statements of faith (creeds) that had been recited in liturgical settings—for example, at a person’s baptism or during a weekly worship service.

The value of being able to isolate preliterary traditions is that they give us access to what Christians were believing and how they were extolling God and Christ
before
our earliest surviving writings. Some of these preliterary traditions can plausibly be located to a time within a decade or less after Jesus’s followers first came to believe he had been raised from the dead.

It is not easy to detect places where preliterary traditions survive in the New Testament writings, but as a rule there are several indicators. Not every creed or hymn (or poem) has all of these features, but the clearest such traditions have most of them. First, these traditions tend to be self-contained units—meaning that you can remove them from the literary context we now find them in and they still make sense, standing by themselves. These traditions are often highly structured in a literary sense; for example, they may have poetic-like stanzas and various lines that correspond in meaning to other lines. In other words, these traditions can be highly stylized. Moreover, one often finds that the words and phrases of these traditions are not favored, or used at all, by the author within whose works they are embedded (showing that he probably did not compose them). Even more striking, these preliterary traditions not infrequently express theological views that differ in lesser or greater ways from those found in the rest of an author’s writing. You can see how these features suggest that the tradition did not originate in the writings of the author: the style, vocabulary, and ideas are different from what you find elsewhere in his work. Moreover, in some cases the unit that has been identified in these ways does not fit very well in the literary context where it is now found—it looks like it has been transplanted there. Often, if you take the unit out of its context and then read the context without it, the piece of writing makes sense and flows perfectly well, as if nothing were missing.

In Chapter 4 we examined one piece of preliterary tradition: 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. These verses meet several of the criteria I have laid out, as we have seen: they form a tightly structured creed in two parts, each part containing four lines that correspond in meaning with one another (between the first and second parts), and they contain certain key words not found elsewhere in Paul’s letters. Paul is almost certainly quoting an earlier creed.

There are other such preliterary traditions in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts. What is striking is that a number of them embody Christological views that are not exactly those of Paul himself, or of the author of Acts. In the judgment of a wide range of biblical scholars, these views are quite ancient.
²
In fact, they may represent the oldest views of the very earliest Christians, views first reached when the followers of Jesus came to believe he had been raised from the dead. These particular preliterary traditions are consistent in their view: Christ is said to have been exalted to heaven at his resurrection and to have been made the Son of God at that stage of his existence. In this view, Jesus was not the Son of God who was sent from heaven to earth; he was the human who was exalted at the end of his earthly life to become the Son of God and was made, then and there, into a divine being.

W
E FIND THIS VIEW
of Christ in what is arguably the oldest fragment of a creed in all of Paul’s letters, as well as in several of the speeches of Acts.

Romans 1:3–4 appears to contain a pre-Pauline creed at the beginning of what is Paul’s longest and perhaps most important letter. I have said that Paul’s letters are, as a rule, written to churches he had established in order to help them deal with the various problems that had arisen in his absence. The one exception is the letter to the Romans. In this letter Paul indicates not only that he was not the founder of this Christian community, but that he has never yet even visited Rome. His plan is to visit it now. Paul wants to engage in a Christian mission farther to the west—all the way to Spain, which for most people living in the Mediterranean world was the “end of the earth.” Paul was one ambitious fellow. He believed God had called him to spread the gospel to all lands, and so naturally he had to go as far as was humanly possible. And that was Spain.

But he needed support for his mission, and the church in Rome was an obvious place to get it. This was a large church, located in the capital city of the empire. It could serve as a gateway to the West. We don’t know who started the church or when. Later tradition said that it was founded by the disciple Peter (allegedly the first bishop there, hence the first “pope”), but this seems unlikely: Paul’s letter provides us with the first surviving evidence for the fact that a church existed in Rome at all, and in it he greets the various people he knows there. But he never mentions Peter. This is hard to imagine if Peter was there—especially if he was the leader of that church.

Paul is writing the letter to the Romans in order to drum up support for his mission. The reason he needs to write such a long communication to accomplish this end becomes clear in the course of the letter itself. The Christians in Rome do not know fully, or accurately, what Paul’s mission is all about. In fact, they seem to have heard some rather unsettling things about Paul’s views. Paul is writing the letter to set the matter straight. So his purpose is to explain as fully and clearly as he can what it is that he preaches as his gospel. This is why the letter is so valuable to us today. It is not simply addressing this or that problem that had arisen in one of Paul’s churches. It is meant to be a clear expression of the fundamental elements of Paul’s gospel message, in his attempt to clear up any misunderstandings among Christians who were somewhat distrustful of his views.

In any situation like that, it is important for a lengthy communication to get off on the right foot. And so the beginning of Paul’s letter is significant:

¹
Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God,
²
which he announced in advance through his prophets in the holy scriptures,
³
concerning his Son, who was descended from the seed of David according to the flesh,
⁴
who was appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

As in all of Paul’s letters, he begins by introducing himself by name and saying something about who he is: the slave and apostle of Christ who is committed to the gospel. Paul may be saying this because he had opponents who charged him with being a self-centered, self-aggrandizing, false apostle. But in fact, he is enslaved to Christ and is completely committed to spreading his gospel. This gospel, he tells us, is a fulfillment of what was proclaimed in the Jewish scriptures. As will be seen through the rest of this letter, this is a key claim precisely because Paul’s opponents had charged him with preaching an anti-Jewish gospel. Paul insisted that gentiles could be made right with God without being Jews. But doesn’t that undercut the privileges of the Jews as God’s chosen people and deprive the gospel of its Jewish roots? Not for Paul. The gospel is precisely the good news proclaimed by the Jewish prophets in the Jewish scriptures. And then Paul indicates what the gospel is all about. It is here, in vv.3–4 of this letter opening, that we have a statement of faith which scholars have long recognized as a preliterary creed that Paul is quoting.

Unlike the rest of the first chapter of Romans, these two verses are highly structured and well balanced into two thought units, in which the three statements of the first unit correspond to the three statements of the second—similar to what we saw with the creed from 1 Corinthians. Immediately before the creed Paul tells us that it is about God’s Son, and immediately afterward he says it is about “Jesus Christ our Lord.” If we set the verses between these two statements in poetic lines, they look like this:

           
A1 Who was descended

                 
A2 from the seed of David

                      
A3 according to the flesh,

           
B1 who was appointed

                 
B2 Son of God in power

                      
B3 according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

The first statement of what I have labeled unit A corresponds to the first statement of unit B: Jesus descended (from David), and Jesus was appointed (Son of God). So too the second statements of each unit: seed of David (= the human messiah), and Son of God in power (= exalted divine Son). And the third: according to the flesh, and according to the Holy Spirit. This final statement in unit B is longer than the corresponding statement in unit A because “the flesh” involves both the realm in which Jesus existed and the means by which he came to exist in it: he existed in the fleshly, earthly realm because he was born as a human. All of this is conveyed by “according to the flesh.” To make the contrast complete the author of the creed—whoever he was—needed again to address both the contrasting realm and the contrasting means by which Jesus entered it: it is the realm of the Holy Spirit, and it was entered when he was raised from the dead. Thus A3 speaks of his being made alive in this world where he was the messiah, and B3 speaks of his being brought back to life in the spiritual realm where he was made the powerful Son of God. The only phrase that does not seem needed for this correspondence of the two parts is “in power,” and scholars have widely argued that Paul added these words to the creed.
³

From this creed one can see that Jesus is not simply the human messiah, and he is not simply the Son of Almighty God. He is both things, in two phases: first he is the Davidic messiah predicted in scripture, and second he is the exalted divine Son.

That this is a pre-Pauline creed that Paul is quoting has seemed clear to scholars for a long time. For one thing, as we have just seen, it is highly structured, without a word wasted, quite unlike how normal prose is typically written and unlike the other statements Paul makes in the context. Moreover, even though the passage is very short, it contains a number of words and ideas that are not found anywhere else in Paul. Nowhere else in the seven undisputed Pauline letters does Paul use the phrase “seed of David”; in fact, nowhere else does he mention that Jesus was a descendant of David (which was requisite, of course, for the earthly messiah). Nowhere else does he use the phrase “Spirit of holiness” (for the Holy Spirit). And nowhere else does he ever talk about Jesus becoming the Son of God at the resurrection. For a short two verses, those are a lot of terms and ideas that differ from Paul. This can best be explained if he is quoting an earlier tradition.

Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings. Here, unlike in Paul’s writings, Jesus’s earthly messiahship as a descendant of King David is stressed. Even more striking—as I will emphasize in a moment—the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed. It is interesting as well to note—for purposes of showing that this is an existing creed that Paul is quoting—that one can remove it from its context and the context flows extremely well, as if nothing is missing (showing that it has been inserted): “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, which he announced in advance through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his son . . . Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So, Paul appears to be quoting an earlier tradition here. How early was it, and why is Paul quoting it?

In fact, the tradition appears to be one of the oldest statements of faith that survives in our earliest Christian writings. Several features of this creed make it look very ancient indeed. The first is its emphasis on the human messiahship of Jesus as the descendant of David, a view not otherwise mentioned in the writings of Paul, our earliest Christian author. As we saw in Chapter 3, there are good reasons for thinking that this was a view of Jesus that was circulating among his followers already during his lifetime: Jesus was thought to be the one who was predicted to come in fulfillment of the messianic prophecies of scripture. The earliest followers of Jesus continued to think this of him even after his death. His resurrection confirmed for them that even though he had not conquered his political enemies—the way the messiah was supposed to do—God had showered his special favor on him by raising him from the dead. So he really was the messiah. This view is stressed in the first part of the creed, as the first of the two most important things to say about him.