Certainly it is beyond the scope of this religious-historical phenomenology to speak of a “last prophet” who represents the summit of all prophecy. That is the case, for example, in Islam. Muhammad called himself “the seal of the prophets” (Sura 33.40)—that is, the last of all Jewish, Christian, and Arab prophets.4 With him, it is said, all prophecy is completed, for he received the Qu’ran, the perfect and final revelation. But in the view of Islam, Muhammad in no way embodied this perfect truth. It was only conveyed to him. Still, he is the “last” prophet and no other can come after him.
Moreover, Jews would not accede to either position, the Christian or the Muslim. They would say: God had expressed himself definitively long before Jesus. The Torah tells human beings everything they must know and live in order to achieve salvation. They might quote Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” That is, in fact, one of the great texts of the Old Testament. Jesus would have agreed heartily. But probably he would have added: if Israel is really following its path with God—alertly, willingly, and attentively—its path will lead it exactly to the place where now, in this hour, the signs of the reign of God are appearing: to the place toward which the history of the people of God was always on the way and where Torah and prophets are fulfilled because their whole meaning is now illuminated for all to see.
2. If Jesus were only a human being and nothing else, then the church, which regards itself, after all, as “made holy by Jesus Christ” (cf. Eph 5:26-27), can only be a human endeavor and nothing else. Then God does not dwell in the midst of it, even though the whole Old Testament had said that ultimately God will dwell wholly and entirely in the midst of God’s people.5 Then there are no sacraments in which God acts; then the assemblies of Christian congregations are merely human assemblies, no different from millions of other gatherings. Then the church is ultimately a religious society, a community of opinion, an organization for mutual assistance, an agent of meaning, or still worse, an umbrella organization in pursuit of Christian interests.
3. If Jesus was only a human being and nothing else, then there is no redemption in the Christian sense. Then God has not become “one of us”; then the distance between God and the world remains an unbridgeable chasm. Then the miracle that God can already be seen in the face of the man Jesus Christ (John 14:7-9) does not exist.
Stating these consequences is simply meant to make the weight of the question clear. Jesus is true human and true God: infinitely much depends on that statement, far more than one suspects at first glance. For Christians this is not a purely theoretical question. On it depends, for them, whether there really is liberation and rescue. On it depends whether the church is a purely human coalition or the “body of Christ” (Eph 1:22-23). On it depends whether the world contains only the chaos of opinions constantly chasing their tails and eternally contradicting each other, or whether there is a revealed and ultimate truth to be found because God has completely opened God’s self to the world.
Hellenistic Thought?
But enough preconsiderations! Much more important is the following: that Christians, only a few decades after the death of Jesus, said that he was truly God and yet at the same time truly human is one of the most remarkable and exciting phenomena in the history of religions. Why? Because faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ arose within Israel, that is, within the sphere of the strictest monotheism, of the strictest belief in one God. Israel confesses the uniqueness of God. Over centuries it had wrestled its way to the knowledge that there is only the one unique God who made heaven and earth and leads his people through history. Israel very rightly said that the many gods do not exist, and the church holds inexorably to this confession along with Israel. There are not many deities, many divine entities like those that fill the world of other religions; there is only the one God who is Lord of the world but is not identical with the world.
And now, on the soil of this very Israel, in the midst of Judaism, Jesus is confessed and called upon as true God—and by Jews. From the religious-historical perspective that is an unbelievable phenomenon. Precisely because it runs counter to every expectation of the Judaism of the time and also to everything that could have been anticipated, a broad current of liberal theology has tried to explain it away with the phrase “Hellenization of Christianity.” This trend asserted for a long time that in the oldest church, that is, in the Jewish-Christian communities, the confessional tradition that ultimately came consistently to assert that Jesus was true God did not exist at all. That, it is said, is Greek thought and only forced its way gradually into the church by way of the Gentile Christian communities. Such thought was utterly foreign to the Jewish-Christian church. In pure Jewish Christianity, it is asserted, Jesus was regarded simply as a great wisdom teacher or an eschatological prophet or the longed-for messiah. It was Hellenistic thought that deified Jesus. For the Greek world—in contrast to Judaism—that was supposedly no problem because the Greeks saw something divine in everything out of the ordinary and unusual, in everything great and beautiful. There were many “divine men,” theioi andres, and the title “Son of God” was said to have been common. Was Alexander the Great not revered as “son of Zeus,” Julius Caesar in Ephesus as “the god made manifest, offspring of Ares and Aphrodite, and common saviour of human life,” and Augustus—at least in the East—as “god of god”?6
In fact, there was no dearth in antiquity of self-proclaimed sons of God or rulers who were deified after their deaths or even before. But this knowledge does not take us a single step farther, for “Jesus, true human and true God” is not a Greek idea. That confession arose in the midst of Israel, in a spiritual milieu that loathed divinized humans. We only need to compare John 5:18; 10:33 and Acts 12:21-23; 14:8-18. Certainly this confession “grew,” but in such a way that the knowledge of the mystery of Jesus that was present from the beginning developed more and more clarity.
Why does the assertion that Jesus was not deified in Jewish-Palestinian but instead in Gentile-Christian “Hellenistic” communities miss the point entirely? Simply because this opens a cleft between Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian communities that never existed in such a form. Israel’s conflicts with Hellenism had begun much earlier, not at the time when Gentile-Christian communities were created. Since Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) Israel had been confronted with Hellenistic ideas and had adapted many of them to its own uses. That is unquestionably true. But the question is: what was adapted? Most surely it was not anything that touched the center of Israel’s faith. It is true that, especially in its mission literature, Israel had taken over Hellenistic stylistic figures, literary genres, Greek concepts and patterns of thought—but it never employed Hellenism to water down its faith in the one unique God, creator of heaven and earth.
The clear separation of communities—“Jewish-Christian here, Gentile-Christian Hellenistic there”—is also, for another reason, a construct that does not stand up to comparison with historical reality: the great successes of the mission in the Mediterranean region did not happen, at least in the first decades, by means of Paul and other apostles and missionaries having converted a large number of Gentiles. The people they gained for the Gospel were overwhelmingly drawn from the so-called God-fearers, that is, Gentiles who had long sympathized with Judaism, who attended the synagogue on the Sabbath, heard the readings from the Torah and the prophets, tried to live according to the Ten Commandments, and felt themselves drawn to the monotheism of Judaism. From a purely religious-historical perspective they did, of course, remain Gentiles; the men had not yet accepted circumcision. Nevertheless, they were already immersed in the Jewish faith tradition.7 At least as far as the time of Paul is concerned, the notion that there was such a thing as a “pure” Gentile Christianity is a phantasm. And yet it was precisely in that period that the basic substance of the christological confession developed. Thus what the early Christian com
munities said about Jesus must be understood entirely in terms of internal Jewish forms of thought.
How could the apostles and Jewish-Christian teachers express the fact that God himself had spoken and acted totally and in unsurpassable fashion in Jesus? That God had uttered himself completely in him, so that Jesus was the never-to-be-surpassed self-definition of God, the final image and definitive place of God in the world? Because that is exactly what Jesus’ disciples had experienced, and that same experience had to be “appropriately” expressed after Easter. There were two basic possibilities for this in Israel, eschatological and protological:
In Terms of the End
In this case “eschatological” means: the end of time is here. Therefore, God is now acting conclusively, because these are the “last times,” that is, the hour for God’s concluding word and final action has come. The definitive, conclusive, unrepeatable, in which everything, without exception, is said and done, is expressed precisely in the fact that it takes place at the end, that it is the last in time, that nothing more can be added afterward. Jewish apocalyptic literature in particular sees the end of the world and what happens at the end as the definitive revelation of God. To take one example, in chapters 24-27 of the book of Isaiah, often called the “Isaian apocalypse,” the glory of God shines forth at the end of time over all peoples. This glory is, however, also a dreadful judgment on the nations. And yet what took place on Sinai for the elders of Israel and thus for all Israel (Exod 24:9-11) is now repeated in worldwide dimension: God will spread a banquet on Zion for all peoples, and there all tears will be dried, the shroud of sadness that covers all the nations will be taken away, and death will be destroyed. God’s royal glory will be revealed to the whole world (Isa 25:6-8; 24:23). What is promised in Isaiah 24–27 is definitive and unrepeatable. Therefore it reveals the true nature of God. The whole and conclusive truth about God is evident in that it is located “at the end.”
The oldest post-Easter Christology that is still entirely Jewish-Christian formulated the mystery of Jesus within this same thought pattern: namely, within an eschatological horizon. It says not only that God raised Jesus from the dead, that is, that the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time has already begun in him, but beyond that, “God has made both Lord [kyrios] and Messiah this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). As the context shows, this means that God has made the crucified Jesus Lord and Messiah in that God raised him from the dead and exalted him to God’s right hand. In this way God has shown that this very Crucified One, who appeared to have failed and been discredited in every respect, has been approved in God’s eyes, and not only approved but made Lord of all. The exaltation Christology of Matthew 28:18 belongs here also: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” And we should mention here the confessional formula Paul received, which he quotes in Romans 1:3-4: “the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.”
This very early Christology would be totally misunderstood if we were to leap to the conclusion that Jesus only became, through his exaltation, something he was not beforehand. For such confessional formulae do speak of an event, but not one that can be compared to the promotion of a human being to a higher position. Jesus’ exaltation, his heavenly installation as “Son of God”—in Acts 2:36 even kyrios—is in no way to be compared with the awarding of a PhD or the inauguration of a president. Instead, Jesus’ exaltation is an eschatological event, that is, here God is acting conclusively in Jesus inasmuch as God shows who Jesus truly is and thus demonstrates eschatologically, i.e., definitively, that he is who he always has been. In this way the one exalted through resurrection is proved and shown to be the final, conclusive, and unrepeatable truth of God, God’s final Word and God’s last act. That is precisely what these oldest Christian confessions are trying to say.
They definitely did not intend to say that Jesus was not the Messiah previously, that he was not the Son of God and kyrios but became all that only through his resurrection and exaltation. Enthronement here signifies confirmation, justification, proof, recognition. Jesus is, so to speak, publicly elevated to the status his opponents had denied that he possessed. We must on no account introduce into these very ancient confessional formulae the much later adoptionist Christology of the second century. That existed within a different context and did not simply reflect the earliest time of Christian beginnings.8
Thus, inasmuch as the oldest christological statements are formulated in terms of the end, eschatologically, they said who Jesus truly is. But their thinking was entirely and utterly Jewish. The Greeks did not think eschatologically at all, but rather in the system of an eternal cycle: at the beginning the golden age, then the silver, bronze, and iron—and then everything starts over from the beginning.
In Terms of the Beginning
It is important to note that in Judaism the true nature of a thing or a person could be expressed not only eschatologically but protologically. The latter means thinking not from the end but from the beginning. For Christology that means it could be formulated not only in terms of the end of time but also in terms of a “time before time.” In that case it does not say that at the end, thus conclusively, God shows who Jesus is, but that from the very beginning, before all creation, Jesus was the whole truth of God and the absolute measure of the world.
Protological thinking developed in Israel in the so-called Wisdom literature and was personified in the figure of “Wisdom.” In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom speaks of herself and tells of her cooperation in creation:
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
9
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race. (Prov 8:22-31)
Thus Wisdom is God’s creature, but she precedes the creation of the world. Thus she can be present at all the work of creation; she plays about God and creation. In this very way it is made clear that all creation was formed in wisdom. Because the figure of Wisdom was always prior to creation, it is filled with meaning, with order, with beauty—and reflects the wisdom of God.
While the book of Proverbs only echoes at its end the truth that it is Wisdom’s whole joy to be with the human race, the motif is broadly developed in Sirach 24:1-22:
“I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,
and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in the highest heavens,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone I compassed the vault of heaven
and traversed the depths of the abyss.
Over waves of the sea, over all the earth,
and over every people and nation I have held sway.
Among all these I sought a resting place;
in whose territory should I abide?
“Then the Creator of all things gave me a command,
and
my Creator chose the place for my tent.
He said, ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob,
and in Israel receive your inheritance.’” (Sir 24:3-8)
Thus in the book of Sirach itself, but even more in the continuing process of Jewish thinking, this Wisdom whom God had created before all creation was equated with the Torah. Thus, for example, in the great Jewish commentary on Genesis, Bereshit Rabbah, we read of Genesis 1:1:
[T]he Torah speaks, “I was the work-plan of the Holy One, blessed be he.” In the accepted practice of the world, when a mortal king builds a palace, he does not build it out of his own head, but he follows a work-plan. And [the one who supplies] the work-plan does not build out of his own head, but he has designs and diagrams, so as to know how to situate the rooms and the doorways. Thus the Holy One, blessed be he, [first] consulted the Torah [and then] created the world.
This commentary alludes to the text quoted above from Proverbs (8:30: “then I was beside him, like a master worker”). Creative Wisdom playing before God is thus identified with the Torah. Torah existed even before the creation of the world. It is thought of as preexistent, prior to the cosmos. God creates the universe according to the building plan of the Torah.
What did Israel express in this discourse on Wisdom, i.e., Torah? It is intended to say that inasmuch as Torah was present before anything was created it is the absolute measure of all created reality, its internal order, its meaning. Thus the thought scheme of protology clearly presents the priority of Torah over all creation. From this starting point it was possible and even unavoidable to speak of Jesus, too, protologically, that is, “in terms of the beginning.”
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