The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (review)

Too many authors writing on the first through the fifth centuries C.E. exhibit something of a disciplinary monomania, unwilling to incorporate insights from another academic field. Not so Michael Peppard, author of the book under review, a monograph based upon his 2009 doctoral dissertation at Yale University. Throughout, he deftly makes use of recent scholarship and methodologies from Roman history, religious studies, and Patristics. This interdisciplinary approach contributes to the work being well-grounded socially and chronologically and also having new things to communicate. Peppard's basic thesis is that, removed from their original context from which the terminology derived, metaphors fossilize and in a sense, die, which is what happened to Christian "Son of God" terminology bereft of its association with Roman emperor worship. In an attempt to recover that original understanding of these words in Mark's text, Peppard examines five areas.

In his first chapter "Divine Sonship Before Nicea," he reviews where the discipline has brought our understanding thus far. The author shares both praise and criticism for the approaches of scholars from what he categorizes as the Nicene, narrative criticism, and religionsgeschichte schools of thought. Having demonstrated that there is room for a new approach, he lays out his own path. Far and away the best parts of a very useful book are Peppard's analyses of divine sonship (emperor worship) and Roman adoption in Chapters Two and Three. These are rapidly expanding areas, and his judicious summary shows how this new understanding can be successfully utilized in several disciplines. Peppard sets aside what he sees as the dead end of diachronic stemmata, focusing instead on resonance, or how a term would have sounded to its different audiences. Specifically, he asserts that Greco-Roman audiences would primarily have thought of the "son of God" in association with the emperor, divi filius. He emphasizes there was no clear dividing line between human and divine in the Roman worldview, as there was instead a sliding scale of honor. Based on measurable practice, not indefinable intentions, the emperors received worship as gods, meaning that in the Christian era, the only gods who "reached the whole empire" were Christ and the emperor (44). Peppard quite rightly notes that pagans were frequently not polytheistic, citing Athanassiadi and Frede's Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (193 n. 17). His suggestion, however, that modern assumptions of monolithic pagan polytheism are rooted in the early Christian apologists (35) is somewhat unfair to those who recognized diversity in paganism, including Platonic monotheism (e.g., Athenagoras, Plea 5-7; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepikos 6).

In Chapter Four, "Rethinking Divine Sonship in the Gospel of Mark," Peppard applies the above understanding to the "Son of God" texts in the second gospel. He argues convincingly for Mark's authorship in Rome based on language, historical tradition, and intriguing evidence from Clement of Alexandria's Adumbrationes (90). Peppard also explains Mark's use of eudokesa as God being "pleased to choose" Jesus (101), using adoption language to cast him as the "counter-emperor, the authoritative Son of God," as the emperor gained his unparalleled power via adoption (131). The final chapter, "Begotten and Adopted Sons of God—Before and After Nicea," traces the development of Christology in the patristic period. Peppard argues for the development of a distinction in this period between the only-begotten Son of God and his people the (lesser) adopted children of God. He substantially critiques the neoplatonist categorizing of the Nicene theologians, concluding "Orthodoxy is nothing if not tidy" (171).

Peppard takes pains to note at the outset that he is neither a heretic nor, theologically speaking, an adoptionist (6). While he states that, as a biblical scholar, he will not be pursuing the theological meaning of these texts in Mark, this strict demarcation leaves several obvious questions unanswered. It is unfortunate that the theological implications of the possible dichotomies created...