It is not often that I talk about critical scholars and their work in detail. I know most people would find it boring as hell. After all, the whole conception of my blog proves that. Here, I try to present, from a historical point of view, different topics related to the early Christian world in a simple and readable way. However, not often does it happen that you grab a book that forces you to change your long-held views! Precisely that happened to me a few days ago! So, I apologize in advance if this post soon becomes far too technical and boring. Hopefully, a few people who are really interested in early Christian history will find this post useful. Maybe some of my students will enjoy it. Or maybe not ;). Anyways, let’s get started!

HOW ON EARTH DID JESUS BECOME GOD?

For years I have been sure I know the basic story of Jesus’ deification. By “deification” I mean the historical development of the belief that Jesus was divine and the rhetorical framing of that development. The latter simply denotes how early Christians (starting with the New Testament documents, especially the Gospels) shaped their beliefs in Jesus’ divinity. What motifs, pictures, and ideas were they using? How did they put their ideas in words? And how does that corresponds with what German scholars have called Sitz im Leben? This phrase stands for the context in which a text, or object, has been created, and its function and purpose at that time. The Sitz im Leben is also used to refer to the social, ethnic, and cultural setting of a site at a particular era. When interpreting a text, object, or region, the Sitz im Leben has to be considered to allow a proper contextual interpretation. In a nutshell, what do these ideas, motifs, rhetorical strategies, thought patterns, and conceptions tell us about the social and religious context of early Christians? At the beginning of the 20th century, the prevailing notion was that Jesus’ deification (or divinization) came in a later stage (in the second part of the 1st century) because of the influence that Hellenized pagans who entered Christianity had. The most important advocate of this idea was the German scholar Wilhelm Bousset. In his book Kyrios Christos, he argued that the Hellenistic Church’s declaration of “Jesus as Lord” is a transformation of the pre-Christian Judaic community’s understanding of Jesus as the Son of Man. This unique distinction between the primitive Palestinian community and secondary Hellenistic Christianity reveals how the earliest Christian beliefs were informed by existing religious influences. In a nutshell, Jesus as Lord was (historically speaking) a secondary (in contrast to the primarily Palestinian/Jewish setting where Jesus was considered only to be a Son of Man) phenomenon that happened primarily because of the Hellenistic influence. However, in the later part of the 20th century, scholarship overturned Bousset’s paradigm. A great scholar by the name of Larry Hurtado (who unfortunately passed away a few years ago) wrote a massive (760 pages!) book entitled: Lord Jesus Christ:  Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. In it, he argued that the divinization of Jesus happened already during the first couple of years after his death when Christianity was still very much part of (Palestinian) Judaism. In other words, Hurtado rejected the idea that Christians used Hellenistic images and motifs while developing their own beliefs of Jesus’ divinity. It all happened too soon for the Hellenistic cultural forces to enter the picture. I remember reading this book during my graduate years thinking that Hurtado’s argumentation is airtight. This was the cornerstone of Christological studies.

M. DAVID LITWA: IESUS DEUS: THE EARLY CHRISTIAN DEPICTION OF JESUS AS A MEDITERRANEAN GOD

Recently I’ve been reading the book Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God which pushed me to rethink my previously held conclusions. The author is M. David Litwa whom I knew from other works he has done in the area of early Christianity. But this book is by far the best thing he has written! In a detailed study, Litwa tried to establish a balance between Hellenistic and Jewish influence on the development of the belief in Jesus’ divinity. On several occasions, he exposes Hurtado’s weak points by noting (for example) that Judaism was Hellenized long before Christianity ever emerged. Because of that, it is simply wrong to postulate a sharp distinction between the influences Judaism and Hellenism had on Christianity. A historical reality that Hurtado surprisingly recognized in his earlier works. Unfortunately, he didn’t apply his conclusions regarding the question of Jesus’ divinity. One of the major problems Litwa points out is that within the current climate of Biblical scholarship, any sort of comparisons made between Jesus and other Mediterranean mythology, legends, and stories is almost certainly accused of presenting parallelomania. Unfroutanatly, those comparisons bear the weight of previous scholarship (from the end of the 19th century) that saw the huge similarities (parallelomania!) between Jesus and other ancient gods as proof that Jesus never existed and that Gospel writers borrowed their stories from those narratives making things up. This is, of course, a poor scholarship that has been justifiably debunked! I have explained that in earlier posts. In other words, some of these parallels between Jesus and figures (such as Mithras, Isis, and Attis) have rightly been given harsh criticism, but Litwa contends that some of the parallels between certain stories of Jesus do have strong connections to the matrix of the Mediterranean world. He makes a case-by-case base that different stories associated with Jesus share common ideas closely associated with other Greco-Roman Mediterranean stories about various gods (both lower and uppercase g gods). So, for example, in the first chapter, he convincingly argues that Luke’s infancy narrative employs a theological (or philosophical) discourse known among the platonic-minded intellectuals of his day. Most notably, Litwa analyses similarities between Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth (virgin birth of Jesus) and Plutarch’s account of Plato’s divine birth. However, Litwa emphasizes that these similarities don’t constitute genetic relations (Luke didn’t borrow elements from Plutarch). Rather, they both shared the same intellectual milieu and thus they used similar language (akin to Platonism) while constructing the story of divine conceptions.

The main thrust of Litwa’s arguments is that the process that led to the deification of Jesus was not solely influenced by Second-Temple Judaism (as so many have stressed for the past two decades), but rather contained features of Hellenistic influence as well. This is not to say (despite what popular writers and movies have suggested), that the emerging Christian faith simply sought, stole, and applied various aspects of Greco-Roman Pagan myths as they saw fit. Rather, they used common language, images, and symbols found throughout the Mediterranean as a means to crystallize their beliefs about Jesus. After all, early Christian authors were part of that world. They couldn’t escape it! Litwa selects his material carefully and applies them to the various stories about Jesus in an extremely scholarly fashion. One of the greatest strengths of Iesus Deus is that Litwa is just as quick to point out the differences within the stories of other Mediterranean stories in comparison to Jesus, just as much as the similarities. As he states (p. 33): to focus on pure similarity is parallelomania; to focus on pure difference is apologetics. His study is thus an attempt to restore balance in contemporary historical scholarship on the meaning and cultural context of Jesus’ divinity. Litwa brings incredible nuance to his work. His style of writing is amazing, and his philological analysis of key Greek terms such as ἐπισκιάζω, δύναμις, and πνεῦμα is meticulous. Throughout the book, it becomes evident that Litwa is well acquainted with both the Greco-Roman world and Second Temple Judaism. One of the strongest methodological features of his book is the fact that he does not grant Christianity or any other ancient faith tradition any sort of privilege and is extremely unbiased in his approach to the sources in question. I have often read studies in which scholars would lean either toward privileging Christianity or towards privileging non-Christian religions of the ancient world. Litwa successfully avoids that! Given its ambitious task, Litwa succeeds in convincing readers that Hellenism played some sort of influential role in the development and understanding of Jesus as the Christian deity. A book worth reading!