Seeing the Lord's Glory: Kyriocentric Visions and the Dilemma of Early Christology

Conclusion: Accomplishments and Some Unresolved Issues

Conclusion: Accomplishments and Some Unresolved Issues The objective of this treatise has been to address a dilemma that confronts students of New Testament Christology: the writers and their predecessors were (mostly or all) pious Jews, yet they ascribed deity to their teacher, Jesus, in a way that no pious Jew could ever think of doing. Our Conjecture and the Case for its Plausibility Our investigation has taken us from Second Temple texts like Enoch and Daniel (third to second century bce) to the theological consensus that emerged under the leadership of the neo-Nicene Cappadocians (late fourth century ce). Our strategy has been: (1) to view these texts in relation to the communal performances they reflect; (2) to root early Christology in a particular kind of performance—the rehearsal of Kyriocentric visions in the context of communal prayer—that can be documented in Second Temple literature as well as in the New Testament; (3) to ask what sort of demands occasioned the identification of the envisioned Lord as Jesus; and (4) further to see whether the sort of demands that were created by the Lord-Jesus identification can account for other christological features of the New Testament and early Christian literature (including alternative tradition histories). The conclusion of our investigation is that the deity Christology of the New Testament can readily be explained by conjecturing new visions of the Lord, this time having the name and face of Jesus. The primary impetus for deity Christology was therefore the belief that the Lord had appeared in anthropic form and identified himself as Jesus (Kyrios Iēsous). This identification was unique, but only in the sense that we have no evidence of other such occurrences in the history of Judaism. It is a case of fortuitous uniqueness. Early cultic devotion to Jesus needs no further explanation than that the first disciples were Jews who ascribed divine attributes to their Lord and addressed him in prayer.1 303 No amount of exegesis could ever prove the Kyriocentric vision conjecture to be true. Our main objective has been to establish a viable scenario alongside others and to demonstrate its plausibility and explanatory potential. This plausibility can be demonstrated in a variety of ways, in relation to its background in Second Temple literature, its foreground in early (Tannaitic) Rabbinic traditions (chs. 2, 3), and its implications for the development of Christology in the New Testament era and beyond. With regard to the latter, the Kyriocentric conjecture explains the following: • The use of Kyriocentric vision language in an important group of New Testament narratives (ch. 5) • The dedication of some prayer motifs to the Lord Jesus and others to God the Father (the latter indicating the constraints of Jesus traditions, ch. 6) • The reformulation of Kyriocentric visions in terms of the resurrection of Jesus—a second-order belief that raised as many questions as it resolved (ch. 7) • The variety of traditions concerning the initial identification of the Lord with the life of Jesus—a concurrent theological development (ch. 7) • The reformulation of Kyriocentric visions in binitarian language—a second-order belief that raised further questions (ch. 7) • The identification of Jesus as a suffering Messiah—a second-order belief that raised still further questions (ch. 7) • The existence of alternative tradition histories or textures that combined the narrative threads in different ways (ch. 8) • Reasons why leading theologians felt the need to reinterpret the anthropic form of Old Testament theophanies and even to eliminate Kyriocentric visions (ch. 9) All of this adds up to a good case for supposing that Christology began at a high level (“The Lord is Jesus”) and was subsequently adjusted in various ways out of respect for memories of Jesus’ life and death. The early disciples were superimposing two portraits, or interweaving two narratives, in creative ways that made sense in terms of their performances but have never completely succumbed to systematization. The resulting structure is like the divergent fractal pattern of a growing tree more than the convergent pattern of a crossword puzzle. 304 | Seeing the Lord's Glory Some Unresolved Issues In the spirit of “truth in advertising,” I should advise the reader of several important areas where our scenario has not worked so smoothly. The four areas that I am most concerned about are the following: • If Kyriocentric visions were widely practiced in apocalyptic groups, as I have argued, why was the Qumran community so reluctant...