Israel's God and Rebecca's Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity

Chapter 5: Resurrection and Christology

Concluding Remarks Larry Hurtado has contributed significantly to New Testament scholarship in his reconstruction and appreciation of various types of divine figures in Jewish texts of the Second Temple period: divine attributes and powers, such as Wisdom or the Logos; exalted patriarchs, such as Moses and Enoch; and principal angels, such as Michael and Yahoel.92 In my view, however, the starting point for both beliefs about Jesus and devotion to Jesus was the conviction that he was the Messiah. The Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint contained affirmations about the current or ideal king that implied his divinity. In Second Temple Jewish texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ideal king or Messiah was spoken of in ways that suggested at least functional divinity, if not ontological divinity. The Similitudes of Enoch and 4 Ezra portray the Messiah as a preexistent being. Paul, and perhaps some of his predecessors, portrayed Jesus Christ as the preexistent Messiah and, like the Similitudes of Enoch, associated him with preexistent, personified Wisdom.93 Paul sometimes implies that Jesus became the son of God by his being raised from the dead. At other times, he implies that Jesus, as Wisdom, was preexistent. The gospel according to John more consistently and clearly attributes pre-existence to Jesus and perhaps even an eternal character. But it was only in the later christological controversies that “binitarianism”94 and eventually “Trinitarianism” emerged in the teaching of Christian leaders.95 The idea of the divinity of Christ, in a limited sense, did emerge early and did have important precedents in biblical and Jewish traditions . But the successive reformulations and elaborations of this idea, and probably the earliest expressions of it as well, surely owed a great deal to interaction with and the influence of non-Jewish Greek and Roman ideas and practices, not least among them ruler-cults and imperial cults. 66 Adela Yarbro Collins 67 Chapter 5 Resurrection and Christology Are They Related? Pheme Perkins Our two esteemed colleagues have published major volumes staking out new positions on views of the afterlife in Professor Segal’s case1 and Christology in Professor Hurtado’s.2 In an essay honoring both achievements , it seems appropriate to bring them into conversation in the arena where their interests overlap, namely the link between resurrection and Christology. Does an “early high Christology” such as that defended by Professor Hurtado shift the significance of beliefs about Jesus’ resurrection away from the causal center that they occupy in other reconstructions of the origins of Christology? Even apart from hypotheses about when beliefs that treated Jesus as equivalent to God can be ascribed to Christians, can resurrection as it is understood by Jews of the first century C.E. bear the weight of generating christological claims for Jesus of Nazareth without some antecedent beliefs about his unusual or unique relationship with God?3 There is serious disagreement over the significance that the resurrection of Jesus is to be accorded in the origins of Christology. For some scholars, especially those who think that any form of preexistence or distinctive relationship to God comes late, it is the foundation stone for the whole edifice. J. D. G. Dunn writes in his discussion of Romans 1:3-4: [T]he resurrection of Jesus was regarded as of central significance in determining his divine sonship, either as his installation to a status and prerogatives not enjoyed before, or as a major enhancement of a sonship already enjoyed. What is also clear is that there is no thought of a pre-existent sonship here . . . . [T]he divine sonship of which the original formula speaks is a sonship which begins from the resurrection; something of tremendous significance for Jesus (the subject of the divine decree or appointment), something of eschatological import (the beginning of the resurrection of the dead), took place in the resurrection of Jesus and it is characterized in terms of Jesus’ divine sonship.4 (italics Dunn’s) Contrast Joseph A. Fitzmyer on the same passage in Romans: “For Paul the resurrection made a difference in that process, but it did not make Christ the Son of God.”5 Fitzmyer insists that while resurrection is a key event in God’s saving actions toward humanity, which culminate in Christ, it cannot generate such christological categories as “Messiah” or “Son of God.” With his usual concern for precision, Fitzmyer also objects to the tendency to consider all christological titles messianic...