It should also be noted that in the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Bible, kyrios, LORD, is used to replace YHWH, in accordance with the precept that the tetragrammaton, YHWH, is not to be spoken aloud; it is replaced by Hebrew adonaj (= LORD). When Jesus here, against the background of the Septuagint, is publicly acknowledged and called upon as Lord, this says that in this Jesus, God himself has become tangible, visible, audible. He is the eternal and conclusive presence of God in whom and through whom all creatures adore God.
A Jewish Way of Thinking and Nothing Else
Result: in the texts so briefly discussed here (Acts 2:36; Matt 28:18; Rom 1:3-4; John 1:1-18; Phil 2:6-11), despite the christological novelty, everything is formulated in Old Testament-Jewish forms of thought. And all these texts except John 1:1-18 are very old. They all say, on either the eschatological or the protological level, that Jesus is the final word and conclusive action of God, definitive of creation, definitive of all history. He is the Lord. In him God has fully uttered God’s own self. This conviction lays the groundwork for the confession “Jesus: true human and true God.”
The assertion that the first Jewish-Christian communities honored Jesus only as a simple rabbi, a teacher of wisdom, or a prophet, and that it was only Greek thought, rooted in Gentile-Christian communities, that divinized Jesus’ person, is therefore inaccurate fore and aft. The same truth is illustrated by the titles given to Jesus: Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, and Lord. All of them are Jewish; they come from the Old Testament or at least have their basis there. Also important in this regard would be a close examination of the early Christian interpretation of Psalm 110:1 (“The LORD says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’”) and Psalm 2:7 (“You are my son; today I have begotten you”). It would show how accurately the formulations of early Christology could be developed out of Old Testament-Jewish texts.
Incidentally, the statement in Psalm 2:7, “You are my son; today I have begotten you,” very probably assumes an ancient component of Israelite family law: when a son was born in Israel the father took him on his knee and spoke this very formula (Gen 30:3; 50:23; Ps 22:11). Only thus was the child acknowledged as a legitimate son. Adoption of a child from outside the family or even of an adult was only a special case of this common practice. Normally it was one’s own child, but even so it had to be legally acknowledged, affirmed, and legitimated. In this precise sense in the earliest Christian exaltation Christology Jesus, who was already Son of God, was publicly legitimated as God’s Son and installed in his rightful position.
This should make it clear that New Testament Christology is Jewish. From the very beginning the apostles and disciples and, after them, Jewish-Christian prophets and teachers sought to grasp who Jesus was. They attempted to express the overwhelming experience they had of Jesus, during his lifetime and then in the Easter appearances, in the existing Jewish categories available to them. Unless we are completely deceived, it seems that the insight that the formation of early Christology was an internal process within Judaism and not a Hellenization of Christianity is gaining more and more ground. Thus, for example, Gerd Theissen writes in his book The Religion of the Earliest Churches:
The deification of Jesus did not contradict the Jewish sign world, but consistently “built up” and “fulfilled” it. Those who enthroned Jesus at the right hand of God were not Gentiles but Jews; and they did this in the awareness not of forsaking their Jewish monotheism but rather of consummating it.
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This insight represents a crucial scholarly advance over the liberal positions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The question, however, remains, and Theissen’s words about the “deification of Jesus” and his “enthronement” by Christians make it all the more urgent: was the Christology of the first communities and the early church based on Jesus’ own claim and awareness of his sovereignty? Or is that Christology pure ideology, that is, was it simply imposed on the real Jesus after Easter?
The latter appears to be Theissen’s opinion. He speaks of “experiences of dissonance,” by which he means that Jesus’ disciples and the first communities could only overcome the horrible contradiction between the hopes Jesus had awakened, “between the expectations of a charismatic surrounded with a messianic aura” and his shameful and painful failure on the cross by assigning him an infinitely higher status than that they had originally attributed to him. They had to “enthrone” him at the right hand of God; they had to “deify” him; they had to give him a central place: the rank of the universal redeemer.12
It certainly makes good sense to illuminate the psychological and sociological structure of processes in the history of theology. But Theissen’s overall description can only lead ordinary readers to a serious misunderstanding. Or is he really convinced that Jesus was simply a charismatic, a prophet, a healer, a poet, a teacher, a founder of a cult, and a martyr,13 and that early Christology was a “deification” theologically as well?
This should make it clear, once again, why this chapter had to treat Jesus’ sovereign claim so extensively. Everything depends, after all, on the question of the claim Jesus himself advanced and what the eyewitnesses at the time observed him to be. At a later time, 1 John 1:1 reflects what a profound and fundamental experience this represented: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the logos of life.”
The Fundamental Experience of the First Witnesses
But in what did that experience consist? What was it that the first witnesses saw and heard? It makes sense at this point to summarize briefly what we already said in chapter 19.
Jesus spoke as one who stood in the place of God. Jesus did not speak like a prophet who hands on a word received from God. Nor did he speak like a precursor who points to one greater who is coming after him but instead as one who speaks with sovereign authority. We may remember especially the very frequent authoritative “I” in Jesus’ words, and also his cries of woe over the cities that rejected him. Judgment will be measured by a decision for or against him.
Jesus acted like one who stands in God’s stead. According to the theology of Ezekiel, God himself will gather his people (Ezek 36:24). Jesus began the gathering of Israel by authoritatively, in a symbolic act, installing and sending forth twelve men as representatives of eschatological Israel. According to the theology of the book of Isaiah, in the now-dawning time of salvation God will heal his people (Isa 57:18-19), bind up their wounds (30:26); then no one in Israel will again say, “I am sick” (33:24). The whole people will see what the hand of God is accomplishing in their midst (29:23). Jesus’ appearance was accompanied from the very beginning by healing miracles. He cured the blind, the lame, the lepers, and the possessed among the people of God. In Mark 2:7 the scribes quite correctly ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But evidently Jesus assured people that their sins were forgiven (cf. Mark 2:5; Luke 7:47), and in consequence he entered into community with sinners (Mark 2:13-17; Luke 19:1-10). Here again he acts as if he stood in the place of God.
But for all this we should finally consider that Jesus spoke and acted not only as someone who stood in God’s stead. He acted eschatologically, that is, conclusively. This end-time-conclusive or eschatological character is evident especially in the claim that the decision about his own person would become salvation or judgment for those who decide. We may refer once more to Luke 12:8-9: “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.” Jesus’ disciples and the first witnesses heard this claim; they saw, and they internalized it. It was their fundamental experience of Jesus. The church has preserved that fundamental experience, protected it against misinterpretation, and in the process has plumbed and reflected on it more and more deeply. It is true that in subsequent centuries this was done also with the aid of Greek concepts, but the church used those concepts precisely in order to hold fast to the confession of the first witnesses.14