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5 Traces of Kyriocentric Visions in the New Testament We have reviewed a wide range of material in the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple apocalypses, early Rabbinic texts, and early Christian literature, and we have found good evidence for the performance of Kyriocentric visions, particularly in contexts of crisis and petitionary prayer, both corporate and private. The pivotal question for this investigation is this: are there any traces of the performance of Kyriocentric visions in the New Testament itself? And, if there is such evidence, how could it have escaped notice in prior treatments of the origin of deity Christology? A partial answer to the latter question is that such texts are susceptible to different interpretations, particularly when they are written for purposes that had nothing to do with investigations like our own. In fact, many New Testament texts appear to be addressing problems that arose from the charismatic practices of the early church—charismatics at Corinth, a theology of glory in the Gospel of Luke, and so forth—the very kind of practices that we are now trying to retrieve from the texts. Nonetheless, we may assume enough transparency and conservatism in the early traditions to allow us to expect some traces of Kyriocentric visions—now identified with the name of Jesus—even if they are modulated by the need to address other concerns. To put it the other way around, the complete absence of such traces would make our conjecture far less plausible. The answer to the former question, whether there are any traces of the performance of Kyriocentric visions in the New Testament, will accordingly depend on the pre-understanding one brings to the texts. If one reads them from the perspective of any one of the three familiar explanations of how Jesus was included within the divine identity (as reviewed in the Introduction), the answer would probably be a resounding “no.” The externalist, evolutionary scenario of Maurice Casey postpones all notions about the deity of Jesus to 121 later stages of development, when gentile influence came into play—it was not historically possible for such notions to arise in a Palestinian Jewish context, so “Lord Jesus” was more like a Hellenistic savior than the God of Israel. The resurrection scenario of N. T. Wright views the post-execution sightings of Jesus as empirical rather than visionary and finds strong support in the empirical emphases of the later Gospels. Finally, the binitarian, neo-Canaanite scenario of Margaret Barker views these sightings as special cases of a form of Canaanite and Jewish binitarianism in which YHWH was a second god—New Testament Christology may have been visionary, but it was binitarian from the outset. We are confronted here with the problem of circularity between preunderstanding and interpretation. In such cases, it is best to be explicit about one’s pre-understanding so that it can be judged on its own merits. In our case, it is not gradual evolution (Casey) or empiricism (Wright) or protobinitarianism (Barker)—valuable as these perspectives are in many cases—but a performative understanding of the communities who produced the New Testament texts. A Performative Approach to New Testament Vision Texts Because we are working with a scenario based on a conjecture (picking up the discussion in ch. 1), we cannot advance the argument simply by citing isolated texts as “evidence” without incurring the charge of circular reasoning. It is precisely the selection and meaning of such texts that is in question. The most we can do here is to build on the plausible notion that New Testament communities performed their visionary traditions (defended in chs. 1–3) and then to point out features of various New Testament texts that likely reflect such performances. The value of the conjecture is found in its fruitfulness for adding depth and coherence to otherwise disparate features of the texts. If there are such texts in the New Testament, we can assume that the performances and discussions they reflect occurred decades later than the “historical” events they describe. In technical terms, the horizon of each text is synchronic: it is based on narratives and performances as they were known in the community that produced them. Nonetheless, they were not created out of nothing. In most cases, they reshaped earlier narratives and performances, largely (but not exclusively) stored in the memories and imaginations of the community, and put to work to serve the current needs of its members. In short, we cannot expect our texts to address all of our...

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