- Before I begin,
allow me to express my gratitude
to the faculty of Yale Divinity School,
and I'm particularly honored to realize
that I'm a part of the celebration
of women at this wonderful institution.
So thank you for the invitation.
As members of the Yale Divinity School,
you stand in a great tradition
and your work is tremendously important.
I salute your endeavors.
May you go from strength to strength.
I speak to the faculty
and to the students.
Lest you think I'm merely voicing
introductory pleasantries,
I want to share with you a visual datum
recently sent to me by one John Gager,
my dissertation advisor
at Princeton University,
the author of many books,
including "Reinventing Paul,"
and an M. Div. from Yale, 1962.
Here it is.
I think here it is.
Cue to the picture.
This billboard belongs
to a Presbyterian church
in rural upstate Maine.
Its pastor is the
Reverend Diane Hoppe Hugo,
Yale Divinity School, 1992.
John, driving by this
sign, could not believe it.
He sent the photo to me.
I could not believe it.
This tiny community in the
outback of New England,
I speak as a Rhode Islander,
is now, thanks to its Yale-trained pastor,
out in front of approximately 95%
of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.
I repeat what I have just said.
The work that you all do here,
this is serious, is very important,
and it matters very much.
Thank you for letting me be part of it
for the next three evenings.
Let's bracket the thought communicated
by Reverend Hugo's
billboard for the moment,
though we will return to it.
Thank you.
Please direct your attention-
Does everyone have a handout?
This will be on the test.
Okay.
Please direct your
attention to the handout
where you will see the
quotation starting in number one
from Albert Schweitzer's classic essay,
"The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul."
It's an important idea and I'll read it.
"The fact that even the
second Christian generation
does not know what to
make of Paul's teaching
suggests the conjecture
that he built his system
upon a conviction which ruled
only in the first generation.
But what was it that disappeared
out of the first Christian generation?
What but the expectation
of the immediate dawn
of the messianic kingdom of Jesus?"
Schweitzer's great contribution
to New Testament scholarship
was his courageous insight that
the movement's first
generation believed fervently,
that it was history's last generation,
apocalyptic eschatology
temporally defined.
God's kingdom was at hand,
nearer to us now, says Paul,
item two on your handout,
than when we first became convinced.
For the next three evenings,
working our way through
our ancient evidence,
we're going to reimagine what propelled
this odd Jewish movement out of Jerusalem
into the wider world of the Roman empire,
where it picked Paul up along the way.
In so doing, we will steer by
Schweitzer as our North Star,
apocalyptic eschatology
temporally defined.
God's kingdom in Paul's
lifetime was at hand.
In our third lecture,
we'll look in greater
detail at what that meant.
A second point of orientation.
We are looking at theological ideas,
but we are examining them historically.
Historians are at the mercy
of the accidental survival of data.
Theory, commitments to certain
lines of interpretation,
transform data into evidence.
We grab onto as much as we can,
inscriptions, amulets, art,
archeological sites,
contemporary literature.
We build a thick description
of the social universe
of our ancient subjects,
which sets the interpretive context.
We do the best we can,
but we begin our efforts
knowing in advance
that we can never know everything
that we want to know and
everything we need to know.
Thus, the third citation on our handout
from a recent British novel,
another important thought
which I'll read aloud.
"History is that certainty
produced at the point
where the imperfections of memory
meet the inadequacies of documentation."
Isn't that a nice thought?
Okay.
Schweitzer's eschatology is our Polaris,
but we sail upon rough
waters on a moonless night.
Temporal eschatology and the
contingencies of evidence.
I'll ask you to hold
these two points in mind,
when I come to this
evening's overarching topic,
"Christian identity, Paul's letters,
and thinking with 'Jews.'"
And those of you who watch
reruns of "Friends,"
I'm going to be doing
this a lot around Jews.
This topic rounds us back to the work
that Reverend Hugo's
Presbyterian congregation
is doing in upstate Maine.
She is leading her community
through an exercise
in historical thinking.
But in so doing, she and they are engaged
no less in a theological enterprise.
These two activities are
distinct, and they are different,
but they are conjoined.
And precisely at this juncture
of history and theology
for Christian tradition,
sit Jews and Judaism.
There are good reasons for this.
Christianity or perhaps more
accurately Christianities,
emerged in antiquity from various kinds
of Roman period Judaisms.
The core of the Christian canon,
Paul's undisputed letters,
and the four gospels,
are all types of
Hellenistic Jewish writings.
Further, texts specific
to Jewish tradition,
via Septuagint translations,
were incorporated by the 4th century
into the Christian canon as well.
Christians today have a dual library
of inherited revelation,
the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Thus, as soon as Christians
read Christian scriptures,
they encounter representations
of Judaism and of Jews.
It was in the course of the second century
that some forms of gentile Christianity
became quite specifically not Judaism.
As these Christianities shaped and express
their new identities,
their new theological principles,
and eventually after Constantine,
their new social policies,
they used thinking with Jews to do so.
Ideas about Jews and
Judaism became essential
to articulating the
borders and the content
of Christian communities
and of the Christian self.
More often than not,
a negative construction of the former
served to convey
idealizations of the latter.
Rhetorical Jews,
Jews as a shorthand for
misreadings of scripture
and for the wrong enactments of it,
were hardwired into Christian
discourses of all sorts.
Traditions contra Iudaeos
or adversus Iudaeos,
teachings against the Jews,
came to serve as the drive wheel
for ancient Christian thought.
This unhappy story has
been related many times.
And I mentioned some
core publications of this
in item four of the handout.
But thinking with Jews was not
solely a negative enterprise.
It was rather a flexible
and fluid strategy.
I discovered this by accident
when working on Augustine.
Augustine produced his early commentaries
on Romans and on
Galatians in the mid-390s,
a few years prior to the "Confessions."
They attest to Augustine's uncertain
professional standing in that decade.
A former and successful
Manichaean missionary in Carthage,
he now had to interpret Paul
against his former church.
He thereby performed
his new Catholic persona
in front of a community
of clerical colleagues,
suspicious of his past,
and resentful of his irregular
and accelerated ascent
up the ladder of North
African church office.
He basically went from
being an Adjunct Professor
to a Chaired Professor in a few months.
He's very good politically.
Not that people get resentful
about that sort of thing.
And never one to waste ammunition,
Augustine also used Paul to
take aim, where he could,
at the rival church in
North Africa, the Donatists.
All of this work required the rhetorical
equivalent of buckshot.
Negative stereotypes
of Jews and of Judaism
provided the pellets.
The best way to make Paul look
like a 4th-century North African Catholic
was to construct a
hostile anti-type of Jews.
Years later, I picked up Augustine's
magnum opus against Latin Manichaeism,
the "Contra Faustum" of 399.
To my great surprise-
There are chairs in the
front if you wanna come in.
To my great surprise,
I found exactly the opposite
of what I expected to find.
Once again, Augustine attacked
Manichaean Christianity,
but he never repudiated Judaism to do so.
On the contrary,
he defended Judaism,
and he even praised it,
while defending and praising as well
the traditional practices
of contemporary Jewish communities.
In other words-
It's thrilling when you discover this,
when you're doing research.
Between 394 and '95,
when he wrote his commentaries
on Paul's letters,
and 399/400, when he wrote
the "Contra Faustum",
Augustine came to a view
of Jews and of Judaism
that differ dramatically,
not only from his own prior teachings,
but also from the prevailing
teachings of his church.
In an otherwise gloomy story
of Christian anti-Judaism,
Augustine provided a
surprising shaft of light.
I published "Augustine
and the Jews" in 2008,
the Yale edition in 2010.
In 2011, Roman historian, Brent Shaw,
brought out "Sacred Violence."
This is also in the
bibliography on item four.
This was an anguishing
and detailed closeup
of the brutal North African campaign
against the dissonant Donatist
waged by the Imperial church.
And there, in Augustine's sermons,
Shaw revealed the toxic swamp
of anti-Jewish trash talk,
"Killers of Christ,
vicious and mocking,
ravenous, roaring lions,
vipers, asps and scorpions,
ravens feeding on death."
Jews, said Augustine were
in leagued with Satan,
traitorous, perfidious,
spurred by insane fury.
The trash talk went on and on.
And he's doing it in the
equivalent of social media.
He's saying it in sermons.
Shaw repeatedly notes
that Augustine's target
was his Christian rivals.
I'm quoting Shaw here now,
"The consistent message is that
the Donatists were even
worse than the Jews."
The Donatists, of course, deployed exactly
the same rhetorical Jews
against the Catholics.
The worst way to blacken
your gentile Christian rival
was to call him a Jew.
Here's the main idea for
the next three lectures,
rhetorical Jews do
Christian theological work.
They serve to articulate
theological points of principle
for their Christian authors,
both positively and negatively.
In Roman antiquity,
Augustine used Jews against Manichees
to defend the Catholic doctrines
of creation, incarnation and resurrection.
Jews had long been associated with flesh,
a negative category when
compared with spirit.
Against the Manichees, however,
who really didn't like flesh,
Augustine rehabilitated flesh
as a Christian theological category,
and in so doing, he rehabilitated Jews.
But against his other Christian
opponents, the Donatists,
he developed the dark themes of betrayal,
inconstancy, vicious violence,
accusations that he leveled at Donatists
by identifying them with, and as Jews.
In other words, depending
on the task at hand,
Jews are either good or bad.
A millennium later,
Reformation politics drove rhetorical Jews
into the heart of modern
New Testament scholarship.
Traditions adversus Iudaeos by that point,
had a long history as
a rhetorical stratagem
for making Christian theological claims.
But these were repurposed
in the late Renaissance
when Reformed theologians weaponized,
quote, justification by faith
and not by works of the law, end of quote,
against papal sacramentalism.
Rhetorical Jews peopled
the Reformers' invective.
After all, they were the next
worst thing to Catholics.
Rhetoric impacts reality.
Jews were more than a discursive trope
in intra-Christian invective.
They're also real people.
In the 4th century, thanks to Constantine,
one branch of the church
became the well-muscled arm
of a decaying imperial power.
And as a result, rhetoric
gained social traction.
Historical Jews, as
opposed to rhetorical Jews,
real people,
became the victims of real violence.
Contesting Athanasian
and Arian Christians,
or Nestorian and Chalcedonian Christians,
continued to accuse each
other of being Jews,
being like the Jews, or
being worse than the Jews.
But synagogues were actually seized,
Jewish practices policed,
Roman law altered,
Jewish populations exiled
or forcibly baptized.
In the great bloodletting
between Catholics and Protestants
that convulsed Europe during
the 30 Years War, 1618 to '48,
Jews were caught in the
intra-Christian crossfire.
Christian anti-Judaism mid-20th century,
a few years before I was born,
undergirded by pseudo-scientific
racialist theory,
propelled, encouraged, and excused
the mass murder of
millions of European Jews.
And Americans, in the
last few years alone,
have once again seen
how Jews are always a serviceable other,
a usable target from muscular
assertions of identity,
ideas about citizenship,
about religion and about race.
I'm not here to talk about
Christian anti-Judaism.
I want to look at current academic work
on early Christianity, and
most particularly on Paul.
I want to illumine have the dynamics
of history and theology,
of identity and ethnicity,
of sameness and difference;
dynamics that so shaped the development
of ancient Christianity;
how these dynamics continue to shape
New Testament scholarship today.
In much recent work, I will argue,
the Jews, whom New Testament scholars
conceive and present as historical Jews,
are actually still rhetorical Jews,
a stratagem mobilized to frame modern
Christian theological thoughts.
So with that as my introduction,
let's think about God for
the rest of the lecture.
(speaking in foreign language)
When did Jesus become God?
It was a gradual process,
cresting in 325 at the Council of Nicaea.
But claims for Jesus'
divineness, divinity,
his super-humanness, if you will,
appear as soon as we have evidence
for this late Second
Temple messianic movement,
which is to say, with Paul's letters.
Our earliest Christology,
theology about Christ,
is already high Christology.
Paul makes very high claims for Christ,
and that's in number five
from the primary documents
on your handout.
He designates him as a man from heaven,
as somebody who pre-existed
in spiritual form,
pneumatic form,
as God's agent in creation.
Christ is the first fruits of
those who have fallen asleep,
and thus, the first of those
who will be lifted and transformed.
He is God's son,
the eschatological Lord
and Davidic warrior,
who is about to return
to defeat pagan gods,
and to effect that
signature end-time miracle,
the general resurrection of the dead.
Once Christ reappears at the temple mount,
the 12 tribes of Israel will reassemble,
and together with the
plenum of gentile nations,
will praise Israel's God.
Lower cosmic powers,
newly subject to divine
universal sovereignty,
will as a result of
Christ's victorious return,
praise God as well.
After Christ's conquest of the cosmos,
God will be all in all.
Please remember we're
now in the 1st century,
and it is a geocentric
universe, not a solar universe.
The Earth is in the center of the cosmos.
That's quite a job
description, in my view.
But in terms of current scholarship
on early high Christology,
I am low church.
For several decades now,
some scholars have committed
to Big Bang Christology,
and the Big Bang is Jesus' resurrection.
Some of the bibliography
is listed in item six.
This event or experience,
these scholars argue,
prompted Jesus' earliest
followers to associate him,
even to identify him,
this is their term,
with the God of Israel,
understanding Jesus in
terms reserved previously
for God the Father, alone.
This is just a staccato overview
of a thickening bibliography.
Some scholars urged this
conviction was revealed
in the earliest community's
devotional practices.
Christ-followers called
upon Jesus as Lord.
By the way, in Roman antiquity,
Lord is how you address
any social superior.
And I speak for Dean Sterling now
when I suggest all of you
refer to him as Kyrios as well,
'cause that would be the correct ancient
Mediterranean thing to do.
Okay, others insist-
But I digress.
Others insist that ancient Jews
thought of their God
as uniquely uncreated,
and everything else but God was created.
This is a strict binary that
allows for no intermediary.
So the raised Christ could
not be such an intermediary.
Therefore, on the basis
of Jesus' resurrection,
these scholars say, his followers
understood that Jesus was,
and I'm quoting one of them now
quote, contained within the
unique identity of the one God.
I don't know what that actually means.
Or the early movement
addressing Jesus as Kyrios,
and they're referring to
biblical Yahweh texts,
mean that they thought of Jesus as God.
The Jewish Jesus movement's,
quote, unwavering
commitment to monotheism,
coupled with its referral of uniquely
divine attributes to
Jesus, meant that Jesus,
I'm reading one of these scholars,
they realized that Jesus was
the God of Israel's divine presence.
Jesus shares in God's divine identity.
In short, maintain these
higher-tier scholars,
for this new messianic
movement, Jesus was God.
Paul in this reading really
is a Christian theologian.
And what he articulates
is the theological novum,
distinctly and even disruptively
or transgressively different
from other forms of,
quote, monotheistic Jewishness.
And this Christology
originated well before Paul,
in Jerusalem, right
after Jesus' execution.
Nicaea and Chalcedon might be
three or four centuries off
over the historical horizon line,
but according to the
above reconstructions,
these councils' points of principle
were already understood,
articulated and proclaimed
in Aramaic at Easter
among Jesus' original,
strictly monotheistic Jewish followers.
True, their amazing theological insight,
namely that Jesus is God,
was adequately, and I'm quoting here,
appropriated only eventually,
says one of these
scholars, Richard Bauckham,
appropriated only
eventually by Martin Luther,
Karl Barth, Jurgen Moltmann
and Richard Bauckham.
Page 59 of his book.
The Catholics still didn't get the memo.
Evidently, the earliest
Christians were distinctly,
if perhaps only incipiently, Protestant.
Note the work that Jews do
in these reconstructions.
Jewish monotheism is a good thing.
It provides Christ-monotheism's
necessary precondition.
It is also a bulwark against
the contagions of paganism.
After all, this ball starts rolling,
not in the diaspora, but well
before Paul in Jerusalem,
untouched by Hellenistic culture.
Yet at the same time,
Jewish monotheism is a bad thing.
In defense of their
traditional strict monotheism,
most Jews reject
Christianity, some violently.
Paul stands both at the giving
and the receiving ends of this violence.
Early incredibly high
Christology, I will argue,
is generated not by ancient evidence,
but by modern theological commitments
to the Nicene formula.
The Jews, conjured by this construct,
are a formal and formative
element of this Christology.
They are rhetorical Jews.
How do we gauge their
relationship to historical Jews?
I'm glad you asked.
Let's start with the
operative concept, monotheism.
Monotheism is not a term
of historical description.
Even for those ancient people
whom we habitually identify as monotheist.
In antiquity, the highest God,
be it, whatever his denomination,
pagan, Christian or Jewish,
was a member of a larger
class called gods.
The very idea of a highest
God, theos hypsistos,
is intrinsically comparative.
The God in question is the
highest or biggest or best
or strongest of all the other gods.
Even the phrase that we
find in inscriptions,
one God in heaven, asserts
superiority, but not singularity.
The bibliography for this is
in item seven of your handout.
An added complication is that
Jewish scriptures teemed with other gods.
And you have a sample in
item eight of your handout.
As is common in ancient literatures,
and as is to be expected given antiquity's
normal and normative association
of peoples with pantheons,
a point where we turn to tomorrow evening,
gods struggle when their people struggle.
Heaven's politics mirrored human politics.
Therefore, when Israel battles Egypt,
Israel's God battles the
gods of the Egyptians.
When Israel prevails over the Ammonites,
Yahweh exiles their god.
Their contesting relationship with Yahweh
implies the autonomy and
the moral independence
of these other gods.
After all, they resist him.
In Jewish texts, of course,
Yahweh always prevails,
even when Israel does not.
Outside of battle situations,
the supremacy of Israel's
God over these lesser gods
is simply asserted.
Yahweh presides over a divine court.
In the midst of the
gods, he gives judgment.
He appoints his lesser beings
to be the gods of gentile
nations in Deuteronomy 32.
These other elohim or theoi
all bowed down to him.
You have these texts in number eight.
Israelite religious culture was aniconic.
Many texts condemn the worship
of the visual representations
of these lower gods.
That is, their cult statues or idols.
But the reality, the power,
and the active social
agency of these other gods,
is simply assumed.
Once Hebrew writings shift into Greek,
some of these gods receive an upgrade.
Moses counsels that they
should not be reviled,
in Psalm 95:5.
Also, these idols are no longer idols,
but they are presented
in Greek as daimonia,
which means godlings.
Not demons, demons seem trivial.
Godlings, lesser gods.
Lesser meaning closer in to the Earth.
Since these gods live in the diaspora,
diaspora Jews had to deal with them.
Gods are resident of
Roman and Greek cities.
I include two Jewish inscriptions
in number eight as well,
just talking about dealing with these gods
who are literally in the neighborhood.
Where did all these other gods come from?
It's a nice question.
Ancient Jewish texts display a
certain narrative insouciance
about divine origins.
Some of these beings are named
as God's sons as Genesis 6.
This hierarchical family language
organizes their relationship.
Sonship, especially in
Mediterranean antiquity,
implies derivation,
dependence and subordination.
The unnamed divine assistants
in Genesis 1:26, however,
are just there, without
framework or apology.
Angelic origins likewise go unexplained,
though angels abound in all
sorts of ancient Jewish texts,
with many powers and
duties delegated to them.
And that's, some
bibliography in number nine.
God's absolute power over
all these lesser beings
is continuously asserted.
His role as their maker, however,
must be assumed or inferred.
Because, again, often in a narrative,
they just show up.
What then about God's status
vis-a-vis all the other
stuff, other than God?
Not just these other powers,
but all of it.
As with these lesser divine entities,
so also with the larger material universe.
We seem to be missing the backstory.
In Genesis 1, God arranges
what is already at hand.
Empty and formless Earth,
primeval cosmic waters.
These primordial media, again
without apology, are there.
There is no idea of
creation out of nothing,
complicating the biblical stories,
nor would there be,
until pagan philosophies develop the idea,
long after Paul's lifetime.
Divine making in Genesis,
and as we will see in a minute,
in pagan philosophies,
was fundamentally a form of organizing.
Preexistent stuff was whipped into shape,
ordered and sorted,
with the heavy lifting subcontracted
to divine intermediaries.
In the 1st century,
there were a lot of them.
Some of them were Jewish.
Pagan philosophy in the early Roman period
helped to order the
opening chapter of Genesis,
now available in Greek,
into a form of rational cosmology.
And in number 10, you'll
see the terms that are used
in Greek philosophy for this.
In theistic philosophies,
philosophies that posit a high God,
Theos, God,
and hyle, matter,
where, all this stuff
makes me think of what the
surface of my desk looks like,
are just there.
They're two extreme poles of reality.
Cosmos represents a
precipitant that's organized,
that kind of forms between them.
You'll excuse me for using time language,
because time is not a factor
in the way this is imagined.
Theos, God, expressed philosophy's
criteria of perfection.
The highest God was self existing,
that means he was contingent
on nothing else for his own being.
He or it was all good.
Good, explained not
ethically, but metaphysically.
He was all powerful.
He was changeless, which is
an aspect of his perfection.
He was without body,
because body is a form of limitation.
Therefore, he is beyond space and time.
This God's notional opposite is,
the surface of my desk,
hyle, preexistent unformed matter.
The organization of hyle
was tasked to divine powers,
subordinate to the high God.
It could be the highest God's demiurge,
or his logos or logoi,
or depending on the myth, to his angeloi.
Action and time do not really frame
this idea of world-making, however.
To preserve Theos, God, from
any imputation of change,
philosophers also posited
that hyle and cosmos
are co-eternal with God.
They all exist co-eternally together.
Christian theologians
will eventually adapt
these formulations to describe
the interrelationship of
persons in the Trinity.
Philosophically educated
readers of the Septuagint
understood the biblical creation
narrative in these terms.
God's logos is Philo's second god,
as similarly was the pre-incarnate
Jesus for Justin Martyr.
He calls him a heteros theos, another god,
in the dialogue with Trypho.
The highest God, this
is the job description,
the highest God doesn't move.
His lieutenants eternally shaped
order out of co-eternal matter,
which was shadowy, vague and formless.
Only eventually did some thinkers come
to fret over this idea.
Did preexistent matter imply
some kind of limit on God?
To what degree would it imply
a principle independent of God?
It was only in these
intellectual circumstances,
in the course of the
2nd and 3rd centuries,
that the counterintuitive idea
of creation out of nothing
itself comes to be.
In the here and now,
here and now being the
Mediterranean in the 1st century,
in the here and now,
I don't know what was
happening in New Haven then,
the world was full of gods.
Loyalty to, or pious enthusiasm
for one particular God,
or the assertion of the superiority
of one's own city's god,
great is Artemis of the Ephesians,
was not the same as asserting that
the deity in question was the only God.
For ancient monotheists,
the heavens, although they
were heavily populated,
were organized by ranks
with one God on top.
At the pinnacle is this one highest God,
but others range beneath.
The physical universe
expressed this theology.
Fixed stars,
then the planets and sun,
then the moon,
and then the Earth in the middle.
Which is what cosmos means,
the organized universe.
And then daimonia, godlings, spirits,
and special humans, as we'll see;
heroes, emperors and apostles.
It's on the handout!
So it must be true.
All were divine.
Godness, theos, in antiquity,
was a fluid idea.
Apollo, for example, was unquestionably
one of the Olympian high gods.
But with philosophy's
development of the idea
of a highest uncreated un-contingent God,
an intellectually sophisticated Apollo,
in good hexameters,
referred to himself and
his Olympian colleagues as,
this is a pagan inscription,
as that god's angeloi or messengers.
The inscription is number
11 on your handout.
Philo of Alexandria's 1st-century heaven glowed with gods,
those celestial bodies whom he names,
quote, the manifest invisible theoi.
It's in his commentary
on Genesis, number 12.
Justin, in the mid-2nd century,
could comfortably identify Christ as,
and I'm quoting him here,
another god, as an
angel, and as the logos.
For Clement of Alexandria, by contrast,
gods and angels were two
distinct and different
species of superhuman beings.
Both Celsus and Origen concurred that
there are many different divine entities,
angels, daimonia, gods, godlings.
Though Origen disputes that daimonia
have a positive morality.
As late as the 5th century,
no less a light than Augustine,
conceded that the true difference
between pagan gods and Christian demons
really got down to terminology.
This is "City of God," 9.23.
Christians called gods, demons,
pagans called demons, gods.
Jews, pagans and eventually Christians,
also all imputed divinity
to special humans.
And that, you have some of this
in 13 and 14 on your handout.
Philo, at several points in his writings,
designated Moses as theos, god.
In the 3rd century,
Origen named both David and Paul as gods.
They were without doubt,
not men, but gods, dii,
in his commentary on Romans.
And for pagans prior to 312,
as well as for Christians thereafter,
Roman emperors were divine.
Up until Constantine,
emperors received sacrificial cult.
Thereafter, although the
blood sacrifices were gone,
divine prerogatives like
priesthoods, liturgies,
adoration of the imperial images,
celebration of festival days,
ritual proskynesis,
body postures,
incense, which is a
marker of divine presence,
all publicly acknowledged
the divine numen.
In other words, there is a
Christian cult of the emperor.
Item 14.
For all of these ancient
persons and groups in brief,
sharp lines and clear boundaries
between divinity and
humanity were lacking.
It's more like radio frequencies.
Divinity traveled along a
gradient between heaven and Earth.
An interesting and unusual
opportunity for clarity, however,
did present itself when the Romans,
I love this, humans are
just like themselves,
when the Roman Senate
in the 1st century BCE
had to decide on a question of accounting.
At issue was the tax status of a god.
Amphairaus, a lesser deity,
already in one of your
earlier inscriptions,
he was a lesser deity closely associated
with the healing god, Aesclepius,
number 15 on your handout.
The question before the Senate was,
could lands attached to the temple,
dedicated to Amphairaus' cult, be taxed?
The Senate ruled yes,
reasoning that Amphairaus,
since he had begun life as a
human before becoming a god,
did not fall into the
category of immortal gods.
He only became immortal.
As now, evidently, so then
the higher the status,
the fewer the taxes.
Well, God is a pretty big topic,
I'm going to sum up.
We have ranged over heaven and Earth.
We've ranged across biblical traditions
in Hebrew and in Greek.
We've touched upon
philosophical cosmogonies,
and we have surveyed a
wide range of beings,
human and superhuman,
whom ancients designated as gods.
In the late Hellenistic
and early Roman periods,
biblical myth transmuted by Greek language
became available to
philosophical rationalization.
Philosophy could organize the narratives
available in Hebrew scriptures.
But the Greeks were not the ones
who introduced many gods
into biblical stories.
Celestial intermediaries and
lower divine beings were there.
In other words, God
was never the only god,
not even in his own book.
Other gods in Jewish
writings were always there.
The problem with the
interpretive notion of,
quote unquote pure Jewish monotheism,
such as my colleagues, who are early,
incredibly high
Christology people, slight,
the problem with the idea
is that it never existed.
Early very high Christology
requires its existence, however.
This construction firewalls
very high Christology
against any complicating
concept of divine multiplicity,
thereby enabling, as a claim
about the early 1st century,
the identification of the
post-resurrected Jesus
with the God of Israel.
But no one in antiquity,
neither Jew nor Greek,
as I hope I have persuaded you,
believed in the existence of only one God.
That idea of monotheism
had not yet been born.
Nor was there a sharp binary
between God and everything else.
A p, not-p, distinction, cosmically.
The strictly monotheist Jews required
of early very high Christology, in short,
are rhetorical Jews doing
Christian theological work.
They are not historical Jews.
But this Christological
construct fails historically
for a second reason.
Namely, it renders the next
three to four centuries
of Christian theological developments,
all but incomprehensible.
And I cite Professor Adela
Collins, in 16 of our handout.
How could generations of theologians
have so consistently and
universally failed to see
that Paul had already
claimed that Jesus is God?
Why indeed did the Arian
Controversy erupt at all?
If the radical identification
of Jesus with God
had already debuted on
a Sunday in the year 30,
somewhere in Jerusalem, probably in April,
why, if the resurrection provided early
incredibly high Christology
with this Big Bang,
do we have this big lag?
And lastly, we have one
more awkward complication.
Paul himself acknowledges the existence
of many other gods and lords,
and that's the final
item, 17, on your handout.
These beings are active and
independent social agents.
They seek to frustrate Paul's mission.
The god of this world has
blinded the minds of unbelievers,
2 Corinthians 4:4.
At the end,
these pagan gods will staff
Christ's cosmic resistance.
Christ will triumph, Paul asserts,
but the question is triumph over what?
Over precisely these lower
gods, lords and cosmic forces.
All those superhuman knees, quote,
above the Earth and upon the
Earth and below the Earth,
in Philippians 2, will bend in submission.
No hostile cosmic forces
can or will prevail
against God's returning
eschatological warrior.
That's the job description of a messiah.
No more Mister Nice Guy.
Messiahs have Davidic
lineage and they're warriors.
Paul's ideas about Jesus'
Davidic identity, in other words,
Paul's vision of final redemption,
Paul's convictions about the
establishment of God's kingdom,
all of these absolutely required
the real existence and
active independent agency
of lower pagan gods.
That this was so, we have
in Paul's own letters,
and you have in item 17 of the handout.
But why was this so?
Come back tomorrow
evening and I'll tell you.
(audience laughing)
Thank you.
(audience clapping)
- Cheers.
- Thank you very much,
Professor Fredriksen.
So the floor is open to questions.
We have a mike,
if you would, I'll call on you,
would you please identify
yourself briefly,
and then pose your question succinctly.
Describe your problem, in other words.
(laughing)
Well the floor is open.
So I'll ask a question,
just break the ice here.
- Thank you.
So when you think of monotheism,
or excuse me, creatio ex
nihilo, this is about that,
one of the views is that
it actually comes out
of a response to Gnosticism,
beginning 2nd century and beyond.
So you've talked about out of
the philosophical tradition,
and this is this footnote in your topic,
but I'm wondering if you
would respond to this,
still post-1st century.
- Yes.
- Yes.
It's still 2nd CE, that
we're talking about or later,
before you have this,
and it's not in Jewish sources.
- I think it's an issue-
Theology depends on philosophy,
the way physics depends on mathematics.
And I think that you
have to have developments
within philosophy before
theological problems
can even dawn, much less be articulated.
Valentinus, I mean, if you read-
Have any of you read
Ptolemy's "Letter to Flora"?
That's a very sophisticated
philosophically inflected vision of God.
He is a Christian Gnostic, but he's a-
He's got a PhD in Middle Platonism.
So he's thinking with philosophy.
And obviously this is something that
Plotinus worried about too.
So these are philosophical issues,
I think you can-
There's a problem of
how nothing is nothing.
Let me clarify that.
Is nothing, absolutely nothing,
or is it sort of something?
And there's a question,
Henry Chadwick raised this issue
with the making something
(speaking in foreign language),
which is, mei, is this
subjunctive form of negation
or (speaking in foreign language)
which is the indicative form.
So is it absolute nothing
or nothingness relative to something?
And it takes somebody of the brilliance
and intellectual flexibility
of Origen of Alexandria
to square the difference.
Has any of you read Origen's
"On the First Principles"?
This is,
yay!
It really is one of my favorite books.
I don't get out much.
Origen makes the argument that
there is a pre-cosmic world
of eternally existing preexisting souls,
which have spiritual bodies,
and body is the principle
of individuation,
and the rational being
has a spiritual body.
And there's God, which
is the only asomaton,
the only non-embodied thing.
And then because things slip slide away,
God, as a gracious
providential and loving act,
calls matter into
existence out of nothing,
as a medium for redemption,
so that the fallen souls
can work their way back up.
Even Origen who-
And he says,
not in English,
he says,
it's so obvious that matter
is created out of nothing,
that I'm puzzled that so many intelligent
and well-educated men before this point,
have, which is late
2nd, early 3rd century,
have thought that matter
comes from relatively nothing.
But even for Origen, he had
to have a pre-cosmic cosmos.
It's still not, matter
might come from nothing,
but cosmos is eternally
preexisting anyway.
So even Origen couldn't quite get there.
I'm glad we clarified that.
Any,
yes?
- Thank you for that,
That was really interesting.
Really interesting presentation
on a really complex set of issues.
And I thoroughly agree with you
that the really really
early high Christology folk
are pushing things anachronistically.
But I'm wondering a
little bit about Philo.
You have one little section here on Philo,
and I suspect Greg might have something
to say about this too.
And in Philo, you do have, right,
you do have the second god,
the logos, who is the
second god, deuteros theos,
but you also have a
kind of emerging notion,
the transcendence of the
first principle, don't you?
That you don't have
creation ex nihilo yet,
but you have a notion of transcendence
based on platonic
philosophical principles.
You're right on that too,
the platonic philosophy is important here.
And doesn't that push things
toward a certain kind of monotheism,
philosophically informed Jewish monotheism
that's a little different
from what you get
inscriptions in the Bosporus.
- Do you wanna answer this question too?
(laughing)
Yes. (chuckling)
People are emotionally
very attached to the-
It's almost like the word
monotheism is a slogan.
I mean, it's what makes us in
the West different from them,
which must be people not in the West.
But if Philo was calling Moses a god,
and if he's calling the logos a god,
and if he's calling God, God,
then that's not monotheism.
And there's a book by Benjamin Sommer
called "The Body of
God," is that the right?
Where he has an appendix
specifically on the problems
with using the word,
and he says, face it,
the commonsense definition of monotheism
is that there's only one God,
and that's not an ancient
idea of monotheism,
but monotheism is-
And this is what I say,
ancient monotheism is one God on top.
God, the highest God, is special.
That's the job.
But I wouldn't say-
Why keep using this word?
It's as an invention of the
17th century for good reason.
- Yeah?
- Just one little comment.
And it'd be interesting to have this
in a seminar discussion,
because you're right,
that Philo calls Moses god.
But he does so because scripture does.
- Yeah, right.
- For him, it's a problem,
that he has to solve and has to resolve,
because it raises philosophical issues.
And so the fact that
there are those issues
suggest that there is something-
- How about calling the
stars and planets, theoi?
- Yeah, you can use
things metaphorically too.
And he does that because Aristotle does.
So he has a philosophical precedent
for using divine language
for a natural phenomena.
But for him, this would be using things
in a secondary or allegorical sense.
- You're saying he doesn't really mean it?
- That's right.
And he has a theory about how-
(audience laughing)
He has a theory about how language works,
that allows him to do that.
- I'm just a historian,
I can't read his mind.
I'm just reading his text.
- Lauren.
Some of us can discuss this over dinner.
(laughing)
- Or we can just stay
here and argue about it
the rest of the night.
(audience laughing)
- I wanna thank you-
- I feel like you should say
Kyria also and just,
do this whole thing, right-
- Thank you for such a great talk.
It's hard to come up with questions
'cause I find it largely convincing.
I wanted to ask you to refine,
to talk more if you would like, about
so there's, you know, you
say the current debate
kind of among those
who are more interested
in so-called pagan
literature, on henotheism,
megatheism, pagan monotheism,
you have argued yourself earlier
that we should think about
local gods, and the God
of Israel as a local God,
that is itself transportable
to other regions.
I wondered if you wanted
to talk about that issue
of the local god?
And then in terms of Paul's letters,
to talk about the issue
of the kyrios within,
of divine possession at all.
Or maybe I'm presaging what
you're gonna do in the next.
- Well,
in fact, I am availing myself
through the Libanius tomorrow.
The one, the text that you shared with me.
Ancient gods are local in two senses.
I'm talking god gods, not-
I mean, philosophy is a very
special sub population of
intellectuals in antiquity.
I'm talking about gods here instead.
Gods tend to attach to
people and to places.
And there's a wonderful book by,
it was just the Sather
Lectures, "Greek Gods Abroad."
Do you know that book by
Parker about divine diasporas?
gods traveling,
because gods are located with people.
If you talk to classicists as I do,
they're not,
they think of the God of
Israel as an ethnic god.
What's the big deal that
he's the god of Israel?
He may be claiming that
he's the God of everybody,
but other people who aren't part of Israel
tend not to know that.
And one of the big repair
that eschatology does is,
they'll know it at the end.
But there's an ethnic
identification with ancient gods,
that's normal for ancient gods.
Philosophy is a metadiscourse.
And,
what's amazing about the development
of Christian theology is the way it-
It actually goes back to a problem that
Plato talks about with poets, right?
It's the problem of making
philosophical sense of narrative.
And that's where you get
the gear grinding and
the confusions of, well,
this God in this narrative
is fighting other gods,
but actually when you read about it,
he's gotta be a transcending God.
And then that flips
over to a metadiscourse
on the narrative.
So,
that's a response.
It's not really an answer.
But, I mean, this is really
the radioactive core of
what creates classical Christian theology,
is exactly this, I think, tension
with philosophy and biblical narrative.
