Continuatum a parte tertia.
The historical Jesus, the kerygmatic Jesus, and the dogmatic Jesus are intimately linked. The event of the Jesus of history sparked the apostolic kerygma of his death, resurrection, ascension, and installation in heaven as now and future messiah; this traditional faith, in turn, became the raw material from which Jesus’ dogmatic portrait as Son of God was first constructed, seeking to make sense of the proclamation of Jesus as Kyrios, Dominus, “Lord.”
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Antiquity was an uncomfortably unequal place. Politically and socially, most ancient societies following the Agricultural Revolution engaged in some kind of hierarchical stratification (though what kind and how and with what checks and balances could vary widely). The Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean was a world of haves and have nots, social betters and the mob, oligarchs and demos, patricians and plebs, nobility and peasants, freemen, civilians, citizens, soldiers, and officials, novi homines, old money, and the prestige of the cursus honorum, consuls and kings and emperors. Ancient people generally believed that this hierarchy was simply the human consequence of a larger framework that extended upwards beyond our realm and downwards below it. Demigods, heroes, family spirits, nature deities, and the great gods presided over the universe at large; beneath humans were animals, plants, and the shades of the underworld. Superintendent over all these were the World Soul, perhaps understood as the highest god, or, if not, then the Divine Nous beyond it and the One God beyond that. All things formed a great chain of being supercharged by the dynamism of vertical and horizontal mobility but unshakeable in its categorical constancy. One could be a kind of thing, and could change into being another kind of thing, often with a kind of transgressive ecstasy and divine irony (as Ovid’s Metamorphoses celebrates from its opening lines, In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora…); but the kinds themselves do not pass away. The ranks are the ranks, known or unknown to men, and it is the mortal lot to fall at the bottom of the more positive half of the chain of being and at the top of the more negative, in the relatively powerless suspended middle, and for most, beneath the potestas, auctoritas, and imperium, the raw kratos, of the rich and powerful few.
The world I describe was one where superiority and inferiority, honor and shame, the dignity of kinship ties, purity and impurity, patronage and clientele all put one on a cosmic as well as a socioeconomic, religious, and political map.They were all the same thing, or rather, ancient people had not differentiated their experiences into the categories we find intuitively useful (for whatever reason, given that they are often quite arbitrary and unhelpful). The Roman Empire was the sort of place where family grudges, oaths of loyalty to peers and superiors, and public attacks on the credibility of anyone implicated by such things had an unavoidable hold on what we might think of as one’s personal life, exercising a bond we might describe (and they often spoke of, depending on context) as sacramental. Collegia and class, mystery cults and curial magistracies inducted one into whole new societies of men and gods; binding all of these together, the theandric entities of polis, res publica, and imperium loomed large in ordinary consciousness in a way both more politically conscientious and simultaneously more religiously devout than many moderns can now imagine in either sphere. To whom one owed their fides was almost never simply one’s self and was rarely capable of being ignored for long: the pound of coin, crop, or caro would always soon come due. The common debt was above all owed to the soil of the patria, the “fatherland,” the walls of the metropolis, the “mother-city,” and the bones and beneficence of one’s ancestors buried and burned in them, to the daily observation of those customs passed down from the ancients and kept alive by the appropriate eusebeia or pietas of their descendants.
It was a world of slaves and masters.Ancient slavery was in many ways different from the sort known to Europeans and Americans from their still recent and deeply shameful history of the practice; that is not to say it was less horrible, but it was at least not strictly based on the unscientific modern concept of race. For the most part, ancient slaves found themselves in their situation on the grounds of debt or military misfortune; while their enslavement and treatment could and did entail Roman xenophobia against other peoples, genos alone did not justify slavery in the Roman mind. Slaves were members of the households of their despotēs, kyrios, or dominus, though more the way livestock or furniture might be than a child (though one of the normative ways of belittling them was the common address of paida or puer, “child” or “boy,” for males, and puella for females; some slave-master relations may have had a kind of paternalistic affection to them, but we should not exaggerate the number or importance of such relationships). At the same time, they were legally non-entities in the empire, non-persons, sons of no fathers apart from their masters, tied truly to no patria other than the lands their masters served, available for the lust and wrath of their captors at any moment they decided. The Romans were under no illusion that their slaves were automatically their intellectual inferiors, however. Rich families often bought paidagogoi for the rearing and education of their children, or else literate slaves for the accounting and management of the estate. Roman comedies like Plautus’ Pseudolus laughed off the tension of fear that slaves might pull one over on their masters with servi callidi characters who did exactly that, speaking fast and slyly like poets and psychagogues to the uncomfortable joy of generations of audiences (we still watch this play when we watch a production of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum). The Romans confronted their fear of slaves’ strength by sending them to train in the ludi and fight in the arena; and the threat of competent slaves overpowering their masters left an evident impression on the Roman psyche in incidents like the Servile Wars and, most famously, the revolt of Spartacus (put down by Crassus in 71 BCE). Well-to-do Romans might experience the cultural pressure to manumit, by staff or pileus or some other recognizable ritual, at appropriate junctures in the life of the household, certain slaves of noted worth. Later emperors would grant more rights to slaves, until slavery itself would become a less significant force of the imperial economy in late antiquity. Both of these—individual manumission and imperial benefaction to those considered lowest in ancient society—were examples of charis or gratia, “grace,” which kept the formerly enslaved permanently indebted to their former masters as patrons and ensured their continued loyalty. So it was that at the door to many a Roman villa, those once slaves in the household still congregated around their masters as part of their wider entourage, attending to daily affairs, from the local collegial captain to the emperor himself. As I said, we rightly find this society both alien and damnable in certain respects. But we do so in large part because of the very confession of Jesus as Kyrios, “Lord,” that its social logic enabled.
As I said, ancient people included their gods in their kinship, collegial, peer, and political circles.Their duties to them followed the same logic as that to ancestors, patrons, and kings, and operated, so to speak, in the same basic world of associations. Zeus or Iuppiter was “father of men and gods”; but he was also, crucially, victor of the Titanomachy and slayer of Typhon. The loyalty owed to him as divine emperor, the universal acknowledgment expected of his kyriotēs, was one of gratitude as much as prudent recognition of unchallengeable supremacy. Zeus’ charis did not stop with the mythic past, either: he remained Zeus Soter, “Savior” and “Preserver” in the daily life of his worshipers and of the empire as a whole. Likewise, Herakles slew the last of the great monsters born from Typhon’s blood, and founded the civilized world as ancient people knew it: one owed him the pietas of worship, the fame of his myth, but also more often than not for individual boons secured from him by oracle or sacrifice. The relative omnipotence of the gods in the ancient universe, ruled as it was by the turns of the rota Fortunae and the power of Necessity or Fate (whether caused or merely signified by the stars was the point of debate by late antiquity): one hoped, and philosophers urged, that gods were neither slaves themselves to these forces nor capricious abusers of them; but the irrational fear of the gods (Grk: deisidaimonia; Lat: superstitio) as the cause of every misfortune was still quite popular despite their efforts, especially among the uneducated and untrained in distinction between mythic persona and divine reality. The ultimate such fear, that perhaps the universe’s Craftsman (Grk: Demiourgos) was after all an ignorant, incompetent, or malicious creator, and the World Soul inherently vicious, would find its final iterations in late antique gnosticism.
These ubiquitous concepts of lordship also conditioned how ancient Jews thought about their god, YHWH.When YHWH displaced Baal in the Levantine pantheon for ancient Israelites and Judeans, he took Baal’s role as the cosmic champion of El against the chaos monsters of Yamm and Mot; later, after YHWH was fused with El, the theomachy with chaos was used to structure the memory of the Exodus as well. Ancient Jews saw YHWH as their patron, their savior, their liege-lord; it is not accidental that when the Divine Name itself became taboo to pronounce, it was Adonai, ho Kyrios in Greek, that Jews optioned to address and name God. When English readers of the Bible see “The LORD” in all capitals as God’s Name, it is a remnant of this ancient culture of domination and hierarchy, patronage and obedience, that they engage with: YHWH defeated the monsters, YHWH defeated the gods of Egypt in the Exodus, and YHWH brought home Judah’s exiles from Babylon. YHWH, therefore, obviously to the Early Jewish mind, held the supremacy of the universe. In the cosmopolitan centers of the empire, where Jewish communities thrived and Greek was the lingua franca, a partial and unofficial form of interpretatio Graeca might be acceptable: YHWH was theos hypsistos, God Most High, so insofar as pagan writers spoke of Zeus in ways appropriate to God Most High, it was possible to understand their words as transferable to YHWH (at least, so thought Aristobulus and Aristeas). There was, and logically could only be, one ultimate Lord of the world, one source and summit of the world’s auctoritas and potestas, one guarantor of providence and law. And as supreme lords of the universe went, YHWH was not a bad master, at least as Early Jews of the Second Temple period, and Rabbinic Jews thereafter, understood his expectations of human beings: piety in the form of monotheism, justice for the neighbor à la the Ten Commandments, compatible with the ethical virtue as discerned by the philosophers. Judaism added something distinctive to Greco-Roman humanism with its doctrine of humankind created b’tselem Elohim, “in the image of God.” It is not that the Greco-Roman world had no concept of divine-human continuity and analogy, nor still that homoiosis theō, “likeness to god” (Theaetetus 176a-177b) was alien to Hellenic tradition. The very concept that resounded in Greek thought of the capacity of humanity for divinity depended on the idea that there was something valuable about being human. It is rather that Jewish Tradition democratized a concept of human-divine iconicity, first within the qahal Yisrael and then beyond it, that the empire could not accommodate nor its most humanistic philosophers fathom. Divine likeness was possible for everyone, theoretically, who was a child of Adam, at least through the virtues of ethical monotheism: as much for a slave as for the emperor himself. Christians have often been tempted to say that Jesus in some sense expanded or deepened this principle in Judaism, but this would be to stretch the evidence; it is rather that Jesus, as a Jew, believed his Judaism and taught accordingly; Christians, proclaiming Jesus as Kyrios, “Lord,” took the implication of this Jewish anthropology to the gentile world.
The confession of Jesus as “Christ” or “Son of God” would potentially have been innocuous to Roman ears. “Christ” simply did not mean anything important to anyone that was not a Jew; “Son of God” was broad enough to include many kinds of people and theoretically had an inclusive sensibility, whether Christians meant it that way or not (they did not, incidentally, as later pagan critics like Celsus and Porphyry would realize). “Lord” was a different story. There is a scene in HBO’s Rome, towards the end of season one, as Caesar prepares for his triumph and Marc Antony mocks the idea of him “playing God” for the day, that spells out what I mean here. “I’m not playing,” Caesar replies. “This is not a game.” The craving for and pretense to divinity and universal lordship was not feigned. It is difficult to overstate the seriousness with which the Romans generally and the Caesars in particular saw themselves as genuine masters of their universe; it is not so much that Christ-faith seriously threatened them (with what?), even just with civil disobedience (whose? Pockets of dissident peasants?), as it was that the claim struck them as impious and antisocial. Christians refused to participate in the cultural life of the Roman Empire: they would not go to games or public festivals, would not frequent feasts at temples, would not share in anything that had to do with worship of Greek and Roman gods.If they were Jews, they had imperial exemption from such mandated religious observances. But if they were themselves Greek or Roman by birth, they were commonly understood to have a responsibility for the empire’s cosmic well-being as maintained by cultic piety towards the gods; Christians aroused ire because they threatened the stability of the oikoumenē with their foreign cult and its exclusivism, but as the Romans became more aware of Christianity, they were also more aware of the specificity of its claims for Jesus’ Lordship, a faith that many Greeks and Romans found incredible given Jesus’ marginal status in the empire and the ignominious nature of his death. Consider from the pagan perspective for a moment what this idea sounded like: Jesus was a Jew, a people the Romans regarded benignly as idiosyncratic but at worst as superstitious and barbaric (like they did most non-Greek and non-Roman peoples, to be fair); he lived his life a day-laboring or, at best, artisanal peasant without public notoriety anywhere other than in Judea for the final three years of his life; he was crucified by his provincial prefect, suffering the worst imaginable death, and therefore either being ill-used by Fortune, ill-starred by Fate, or more simply abandoned by the divine. The revolutionary element in proclamation of Jesus as Lord was that, to Jewish ears, an apparently failed messianic candidate had been granted the Divine Name, YHWH/Kyrios, itself; to pagan ears, a political and social non-entity had assumed either a or the position of cosmic supremacy. His Lordship vindicated the marginal (to the Roman mind) in a way that, when Christianity was a tiny community scattered across the Mediterranean and Near East, was easily ignored as a minor nuisance but, as Christians grew more numerous and more influential, it became clear even to the more charitable and sympathetic pagan critics of Christianity that it constituted a danger to the Roman way of life. Porphyry, whose Against the Christians was destroyed by Christians after their ascendancy (showcasing how deeply it seemed to cut into their sensibilities), and who was happy to acknowledge Jesus as a divinized sage, a teacher of monotheism and good ethics, still thought of Christians as destabilizers of the world order through their detachment from their lawful cosmocrats both divine and human, just as Celsus before him had accused.
As it happens, the pagan critics were both right and wrong. Christianity did, on the one hand, substantially change the ethics of the Roman Empire and the ancient world where it went, at least in principle.It did not completely succeed, as official establishment corrupted its moral revolution, at least to the degree that the Church came to rely upon the way of the preexisting world for its own mission. Where the first followers of Jesus were obliged to renounce violence, service in state magistracies, and adultery, Christianized Rome still certainly had soldiers, hierarchies, and sex scandals. The most damnable corruption, from the late first century onwards, as some Christians sought to distance themselves from Jews and Judaism and increasingly desired the favor of Hellenic society, was the rise of Christian antisemitism (to distinguish this from anti-Judaism is only meaningful if one adopts the mistaken view that Judaism is a religion rather than an ethnoreligion), first as rhetoric and, after enfranchisement, as public policy. Given the contexts in which the messianic identity, divine sonship, and cosmic lordship of Jesus were first declared, the long history of Christian mistreatment of Jews remains a hanging question mark over the final meaning of Christianity itself.
But the proclamation of Jesus as Lord—the one who took the form of a slave, suffered a humiliating death, and was exalted by God to the supreme position of power in the universe—was a genuine revolution in the hierarchy of the ancient world. It placed at the pinnacle of the cosmopolis someone whose sociopolitical agency was next to non-existent in the eyes of the people who “mattered” in the ancient world; and for Christians, it offered the notion of the potential of absolute dignity for every human being. This was reflected in their dogmatic tradition, for once Christians had established the uniquely Nicene sense in which they took Jesus’ divine sonship, as that of the eternally generated mode of the One God’s existence in and through whom the world existed as its intelligible ground, they also now had to reckon with the meaning of his humanity. What did it mean that God had raised not simply this particular human being, the Galilean prophet proclaimed Christ and Son of God, but any human being, to the office in which Jesus was installed? What did that say about what it was to be human—how, especially, could the unique Son of God also be human, and a human being also be the Son of God? The Christological Controversy of the 5th and 6th centuries offered three competing visions based on the incertitude of the still-developing vocabulary. The Nestorian vision, which was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, saw Jesus’ humanity as a separate substantive reality (hypostasis) from his divinity; at least, this is the conclusion that his enemies derived from his rejection of the title Theotokos, “birth-giver of God,” for the Blessed Virgin Mary, though it is an interpretation he resisted and denied the rest of his life. The Cyrilline vision, which Ephesus affirmed, appeared to stress a miaphysite view in which the incarnate Christ had one divine-human nature as a result of the incarnation, albeit in such a way that what is divine and what is human exist in Jesus “without confusion, change, separation, or division.” A third answer, the dyophysite or Chalcedonian view (offered in 451), appeared to some followers of Cyril’s theology to be a regressive capitulation to Nestorianism: affirming as it did that Christ had two natures, one divine, the other human, united in one substance (hypostasis) and one face (prosopon), it appeared to them once more to say that there were in fact two Christs. The eventual fallout of the Christological Controversy (which broke the Christian East and likely facilitated both the rise of Islam and the slow eclipse of the Eastern Roman Empire) and the borderlines echoing out from it are perhaps less interesting than three closely related facts. First, once the character of Jesus’ divinity requisite to ensure his ability to deify humanity had been established, the specific nature of his humanity was now logically at stake. Second, no common language yet existed for describing the theandric mystery of Christ. Much of ancient Christian heresiology is an exercise in the theatrics of pretending that one’s experimental theology is in fact ancient and ubiquitously held; much of historic Christian orthodoxy, by contrast, represents the contingencies of historical victories and losses in the struggle for religious and political power as much as it does the hard-won fruits of spiritual and theological endeavor to know and love God in Christ.
Third, though, the concern about the relation of divinity and humanity in Christ was, like the original concern with the nature of Christ’s divinity itself, entirely animated by soteriology, because all sides believed as a matter of the utmost import that Christ saved by deifying. What was needed was a way of explaining how the exaltation of the man, Jesus Christ, to the position of universal Lord modeled and made possible the deification of any (every?) other person. Christians, functioning with the same basic ancient belief as other ancient people that philosophical truth was necessary for a genuinely philosophical, virtuous way of life, were anxious over the technical details therefore of the person and natures of Christ—regardless of whether they understood them very well or not (and it is certain that the Christian illiterati then as now did not always grasp the finer points of their professed theologies very well). If Jesus as Son of God meant that God could become human, Jesus as Lord had to point the way for humans to become God, as the Church, following both its inspirations in the texts and talk of Early Jewish sectarians and Hellenistic philosophers, had always taught.
Before and after the birth of Christian philosophy,however, the most important witness to the Lordship of Jesus, and all the vindication of those marginalized by the greed and thirst for power of the "great men" of history, has been the Church's ethics at their best. It is Jesus who taught both that the Son of Man came to serve, not to be served and that the greatest of his disciples should serve instead of “lording” it like the gentiles (Matt 20:26-28); it was also Jesus who prophesied that when the Son of Man sat on his throne of glory to judge the nations, it would be their treatment of the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the prisoner that would save or condemn them (25:31-46)—that is to say, all those deemed to be beyond or without value in the ordinary course of society, perhaps placated by the populist emperor intent on buying their love with bread and circuses, but not genuinely cared for as truly or fully human. Christians were known in the early centuries for exactly this kind of common benefaction: they advocated against the exposure of infants, invented hospitals, refused to kill, ensured that the poor had a regular meal in their eucharistic banquets and provision for their needs from the common purse. St. Ambrose of Milan made a Roman emperor kneel in the snow and beg God’s forgiveness before readmitting him to communion after the emperor oversaw a massacre in the hippodrome; Christians offered late antique women uninterested in the prospect of their marriages or duties pertaining thereto an agency of self-determination through the option of virginity frequently denied them by wider society (though the Romans also had priestesses devoted as lifelong virgins). Again, Christians also bear tremendous guilt for various social evils. Christians may have announced Jewish ethics to the Greco-Roman world in a missional way, but they also amplified ambient Greco-Roman anti-Judaism when their movement was no longer distinguishable from the empire; Christian antisemitism ultimately made the Shoah possible, but even so, there were Christians who willingly died in the Holocaust with, for, (and sometimes as) Jews. Christians launched the Crusades and the Inquisition; but St. Francis won the friendship and love of Saladin. The ambiguity of Christianity is precisely that the apocalyptic character of Jesus’ Lordship should lead us to expect a fully transformed world, in which Christians demonstrate the truth of the messianic era by their own embrace of peace and justice as expressed in Torah and hoped for by the Prophets; the fully legitimate complaint of Jews in dialogue with Christians is that this obviously has not happened, and Christianity is responsible for no small amount of especially Jewish suffering. How can Jesus be the messiah if the world has not substantially changed since his coming? What can the real meaning of his Lordship be when history’s engine runs much on the same fuel as before—chaos, violence, suffering, death, decay, dissolution? But perhaps the mystery of Jesus’ Lordship is to be found here as well: Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of God comes gradually, like a mustard seed working its way across the mountainside (Matt 13:31-32) or like yeast working its way through bread (13:33). Origen took this principle quite literally, to suggest that Jesus’ Lordship, keyed to God’s own status as Pantokrator, “Ruler of All” or “Almighty,” are both eschatological in character, having to do with the final state in which all creation freely assents to the divine rule through Christ after however many ages of gradual development (De Principiis III.4-6). In a sense, it is only this solution that preserves the radicalism of the acclamation Kyrios Iesous itself: Jesus is exalted on the grounds of his humiliation in humanity, obscurity, slavery, and death, in one continuous unfolding of the divine life in his kenosis; and so whatever contingent truth there may be to the Lord who now exercises cosmic power against his enemies the same as every other Lord divine or human before him had, the ultimate revelation of that Lordship must indeed be in the very constancy of love and the non-imposition of devotion top-down, from above; instead, God’s glory is revealed in Jesus’ Lordship by the patient awaiting of free and volitional acknowledgment by all (Phil 2:9-11). What else is the point of Jesus being Lord? If what was desired was an austere commander of the celestial ranks, a dread liege, many a deified king or hated lich offers itself to us other than Jesus. His glory is his humility, which is what John’s Gospel sees so clearly in redefining the crucifixion itself as the hour of his glorification, the paradoxical enthronement of the Son of Man in this fallen kosmos.
That infinite patience of Christ is but the first half of the good news of his Lordship, though; John gives us the other: that in a society where formerly we were higher and lower, patrons and clients, masters and slaves, divided by ethnos and gender and class, he who is Lord of All no longer calls us slaves but friends (Jn 15:15). It is for this reason that, as Paul writes, there is no longer Jew or Greek, male and female, slave and free in Christ (Gal 3:28); the author of Colossians (not Paul) expands the list to include “circumcision and foreskin, barbarian, Scythian, slave, freeman” (Col 3:11), implying that his sense of Christ’s imperium has grown. Indeed, in his vision, where Christ has already reconciled “all things in heaven and on earth,” one might be invited to see gods and godlings, spirits and fay, all those orders previously standing in various degrees of alienation from the divine rule, as already confessing Christ’s Lordship, or at least some of them are. The Christian attitude towards the other “gods and lords” of heaven and earth (1 Cor 8:4) cannot be simply that of the apocalyptic Paul, for whom the Lordship of Jesus will come to imminent clash with the evil gods of the universe; Colossians and Ephesians both have already long since softened that vision. It is not that there are no longer “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenlies” (Eph 6:12), but that the process of subordinating these to God and reconciling them as servants and friends of Christ has been underway now for two millennia, at least if we believe Christ is indeed truly Lord already. If we believe this, it can only finally be that all encosmic enmities resolve in the hypercosmic unity of all things beneath Christ’s Lordship and God’s plenitude; and so every rule not already broken so as to be restored, every servitude not already transmuted into glory, every first not already made last and last first, shall be by the final consummation.
I have billed Jesus’ Lordship as the kerygmatic grounds of his cosmopolitan reception; but here, there has proven to be too much necessary in the way of table-setting for what Jesus as Lord meant in its original context to properly assess how Jesus has been received beyond the Christian pale. That will have to be reserved for two further entries.
Continuandum in parte quinta.
See Zeba A. Crook, ed., The Ancient Mediterranean Social World: A Sourcebook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
See Sandra R. Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Peter Hunt, Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017);
See Niall W. Slater, Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (London: Routledge, 2013), 97-120.
There’s a fantastic treatment of this in Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
M. David Litwa makes this point in We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 53-55.
See R. Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
On Jesus’ theonymy, see Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 181-214.
See Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 94-163.
Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World (New York: Simon & Schuster 2018); Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic, 2019).
See Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010).
See George Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2021).
Thank you - lots to like and think through here. One worrying shortcoming, I suggest, is that you seem to go along with the kind of supercessionism or "Christian" demoting and would-be replacement of Judaism (and so something too close to antisemitism) that Kendall Soulen calls economic supersessionism, or supersessionism that interprets Christ's fulfilment of the Torah as predominantly cancellation of the ritual dimension of the Torah rather than preominantly the confirmation of Judaism and of the Lordship of the God of Israel. Soulen's most recent book "Irrevocable" (see on Amazon) explains this in helpful detail. In the New Terstament "LORD" goes together with Jesus' and his followers' strong commitment to indirect reference to the LORD of the Shema, honouring his presence and activity ("hallowed by thy name") by frequent us of the "Divine passive" etc, etc. This demotes the history of religions school as the primary authority on how to interpret "LORD" and its near synomyms in the New Testament and the earliest Christianity. Soulen's (and similar NT) work is like a gripping detective story tracking down the hidden centre of gravity in the NT.
Ooh, double cliffhanger. This series has been very helpful, as I just happened to be teaching about the origins of Christianity to my 9th graders this week, and I worked in some of your insights in my lesson on the historical Jesus. Even when I don't agree, it's been an exciting and informative read.