How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (34 page)

My friend Charles Cosgrove, a lifelong scholar of Paul who is also one of the world’s experts on music in the early Christian world, has convinced me that the passage could not have been an actual hymn that was sung, since it does not scan properly, as a musical piece—that is, it does not have a rhythmic and metrical structure—in the Greek. And so it may be a poem or even a kind of exalted prose composition. But what is clear is that it is an elevated reflection on Christ coming into the world (from heaven) for the sake of others and being glorified by God as a result. And it appears to be a passage Paul is quoting, one with which the Philippians may well have already been familiar. In other words, it is another pre-Pauline tradition.
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I start my discussion of the Christ poem, as I call it, by quoting it at length in poetic lines (the lines work differently in Greek than in English, but the basic idea is the same).
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Paul introduces the poem by telling the Philippians that they should “have the same mind” in themselves that was also in “Christ Jesus” (2:5). And then comes the poem:

           
Who, although he was in the form of God

                 
Did not regard being equal with God

                 
Something to be grasped after.

           
But he emptied himself

                 
Taking on the form of a slave,

                 
And coming in the likeness of humans.

           
And being found in appearance as a human

                 
He humbled himself

                 
Becoming obedient unto death—even death on a cross.

           
Therefore God highly exalted him

                 
And bestowed on him the name

                 
That is above every name,

           
That at the name of Jesus

                 
Every knee should bow

                 
Of those 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.

It is difficult to do justice to this theologically rich poem in just a few pages; scholars have written entire books on it.
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But several points are particularly germane for my purposes.

The first thing to stress is that the passage does indeed appear to be poetic. Scholars have set out the poetic lines in different ways. In the original Greek, of course, poetry was not indented on the page or indicated in any particular way—the Greek manuscripts of the book of Philippians simply give the passage like every other passage, one line and one word at a time. But the lines do make sense—even better sense—when set out poetically. The structure I have adopted here is common among scholarly analyses of the passage: the poem has two halves; each half has three stanzas; and each stanza has three lines. The first half begins by identifying the subject of the poem, “Who” (in reference back to Christ Jesus), and the second half begins with the word
therefore.
In terms of its overall meaning, the first half talks about the “condescension” of Christ, that is, how he came down from the heavenly realm to become human in order to die in obedience to God; and the second half talks about his “exaltation,” that is, how God then raised him to an even higher level and status than he had before, as a reward for his humble obedience.

As I have said, scholars have long considered the passage to be a pre-Pauline tradition that Paul includes here in his letter to the Philippians. It is not simply something Paul composed on the spot, while writing his letter. There are several reasons for thinking this. For one thing, the passage does appear to be a self-contained unit that is poetic rather than proselike in its composition. Moreover, a number of words—including some of the key words—occur in this passage but nowhere else in Paul’s letters. This includes the word
form
(used twice:
form of God
and
form of a slave
) and the phrase
grasped after.
The absence of such important words in Paul’s writings suggests that he is quoting a passage that someone else wrote, earlier.

Confirmation for this view comes from the related fact that several of the key concepts in the passage cannot be found elsewhere in Paul’s writings. Again, this includes some of the central concepts of the passage: that Jesus was in God’s form before he became a human; that he had open to him the possibility of grasping after divine equality before coming to be human; and that he became human by “emptying himself.” This last idea is usually interpreted to mean that Christ gave up the exalted prerogatives that were his as a divine being in order to become a human.

One final argument that Paul is here quoting a preexisting tradition that had been in circulation for a while is a little trickier to explain. It is the fact that part of the poem does not seem to fit its context in the letter to the Philippians very well. At this point in the letter, Paul is telling his Philippian Christian converts that they are to act unselfishly by treating other people better than they treat themselves. In the verse before this, he has said that they should not look out only for their own interests, but even more for the interests of others. Then he quotes this passage in order to show that this is in fact what Christ did, giving up what was rightfully his (the “form of God”) in order to serve others (taking the “form of a slave”) and being obedient to God to the point of dying for others.

The problem is that the second half of the Christ poem (vv.9–11) does not at all convey this lesson, and if taken seriously, it may seem to run counter to it. For according to these three stanzas, God rewarded Jesus abundantly for his temporary condescension to become a human and to die. God exalted him even higher than he was before (that’s what the Greek verb “highly exalted” seems to imply, as do the verses that follow), making him the Lord of all, to whom all living beings would offer confession and worship.

But the idea of Christ’s eventual exaltation does not fit the purpose behind Paul’s quotation of the poem, since if someone is humbly obedient because of what he or she will eventually get out of it, that is simply another way of doing things out of self-interest. And the whole point of the passage is that people should not act out of self-interest, but selflessly, for the sake of others.

Since the second half of the poem does not “work” very well in the context, it is almost certainly the case that this was indeed a preexistent poem that was familiar to Paul and, probably, to the Philippians as well. Paul quotes the entire poem because it is familiar to his readers and conveys the point that he wants to convey—that they should imitate Christ’s example in giving themselves up for others—even though the second half could be interpreted to undercut this point.

These, then, are some of the reasons that scholars have thought that Paul probably did not compose this poem himself while writing to the Philippians. It is a pre-Pauline tradition. You may have noticed that one line is longer than the others in the poem: “obedient unto death—even death on a cross.” It is even longer in the Greek. Scholars frequently think that Paul added the words “even death on a cross,” since for him it was precisely the
crucifixion
of Jesus that was so important.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds his readers that when he was first with them—trying to convert them from worshiping idols to become followers of the God of Israel and his messiah, Jesus—his message was all about the cross of Jesus: “For I decided not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and this one as crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). In his letter to the Galatians, he stresses that it was specifically a death by crucifixion that mattered for salvation. If Jesus had been stoned to death, for example, or strangled, that would have been one thing. But because he was crucified, in particular, he was able to bear the “curse” of sin that other people deserved. And that is because the scriptures indicate that anyone who “hangs on a tree” is cursed by God (Gal. 3:10–13). This is a reference to the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 21:23, which states: “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” In its original context the verse meant that anyone who had been executed and left to rot on a tree obviously stood under God’s curse. For Paul, since Jesus died by being nailed to a “tree”—that is, crucified on a stake of wood—he bore God’s curse. Since he did not deserve this curse, he must have borne the curse that was owed to others. So it was of utmost importance to Paul not just that Jesus died, but that he died by being crucified.

The lines of the Christ poem in Philippians 2 “work” somewhat better without the words “even death on a cross,” suggesting that Paul added these words to the poem in order to make them conform even more closely to his own theological understanding of Jesus’s death. If this is the case, it also suggests that Paul was not the original author of the poem but that he inherited it from tradition and quoted it here because it suited his purposes.

By quoting the poem Paul obviously is indicating that he agrees with its teaching about Christ. But what is that teaching exactly? I argue below that this poem presents an incarnational understanding of Christ—that he was a preexistent divine being, an angel of God, who came to earth out of humble obedience and whom God rewarded by exalting him to an even higher level of divinity as a result. But before embarking on this interpretation I should point out that some scholars have not seen this poem as embracing an incarnational theology at all.

Some scholars have had real difficulty imagining that a poem existing before Paul’s letter to the Philippians—a poem whose composition must therefore date as early as the 40s
CE
—could already celebrate an incarnational understanding of Christ. That seems rather early for such a “high” Christology. As a way of partly resolving this problem, an alternative explanation has been proposed. In this alternative interpretation, the beginning of the poem does not represent Christ as a preexistent divine being. It presents him as a fully human being. In fact, it presents him as a human who was a kind of “second Adam,” a second appearance, in a sense, of the father of the human race.
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According to this interpretation, when the poem indicates that Christ was in the “form of God,” it is not suggesting some kind of preexistent state in heaven. He was instead like Adam, who was made in the “image of God.” In this understanding, the words
image
and
form
are synonyms. When God made Adam and Eve, he made them in his own “image” (Gen. 1:27). But even though Adam and Eve were in God’s image, they obviously were not equal with God—they were his creations. And God gave them one commandment about what they were not to do: they were not to eat “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” If they ate
that
fruit (it is not called an apple, by the way), they would die (Gen. 2:16–17).

And what happened? The serpent—which is not called Satan in Genesis; instead it is an actual snake (which originally walked on legs, apparently)—tempted Eve by telling her that eating the forbidden fruit would not cause them to die but would make them “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). And so Eve ate the fruit, gave some to her husband, Adam, and he too ate. Their eyes were then “opened,” and they realized they were naked. They were no longer innocent but could and did make moral judgments. And they eventually died, as did all of their children and descendants (with two exceptions: Enoch and Elijah).

In Paul’s letters he sometimes speaks of Christ as a “second Adam.” Unlike the first sinful Adam, Christ was the “perfect man,” who reversed the course of human affairs brought about by the first Adam. The first Adam brought sin into the world, and Christ removed the curse of sin; just as Adam brought death to all his descendants, so too Christ brought life to all who believed in him. As Paul says in Romans 5: “For just as the transgression through one man came as judgment for all people, so also the righteousness that came from one man leads to justification and life for everyone; for just as the many were made sinners through the disobedience of the one person, so also the many were made righteous by the obedience of one” (vv.18–19).

Paul, then, saw Christ as a kind of second Adam who reversed the sin, condemnation, and death brought about by the first Adam. Could this understanding be applied to the Christ poem of Philippians? Some scholars have argued so. In their view, as I indicated, just as Adam was in the “image of God,” so too was Christ in the “form of God.” But Adam reacted to that state by sinning. Christ reacted by humble obedience. Adam sinned because he wanted to be “like God.” Christ on the other hand “did not regard being equal with God / Something to be grasped after.” And so, just as Adam brought death into the world by his disobedience, Christ brought the possibility of life into the world by his obedience. This is shown above all by the fact that God “highly exalted” Jesus and made him the Lord of all.

In short, according to this interpretation, Christ is not portrayed as a preexistent divine being in the Philippians poem. He is human, like other humans. He is in the image of Adam, who is in the image of God. But he reverses Adam’s sin by his obedience, and only then is he exalted to a divine level.

I have long thought that this was an intriguing interpretation of the passage, and for many years I wished it were correct. That would help solve the problem I had in understanding Paul’s Christology. But I’m afraid I’ve never been convinced by it—even when I wanted to be—for three reasons. First, if Paul (or the author of the poem) really wanted his reader to make the connection between Jesus and Adam, he surely would have done so more explicitly. Even if he chose not to call Adam by name, or to call Jesus the second Adam, he could have made verbal allusions to the story of Adam (and Eve) more obvious. In particular, rather than saying that Christ was “in the form of God,” he would have said that Christ was “in the image of God.” That is the word used in Genesis, and it would have been quite simple for the author to use it here in the poem if he wanted his reader to think of Genesis.