Larry Hurtado on early Christians’ worship of Jesus

Larry Hurtado is, rightly, one of the most respected historians of early Christianity. His massive Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity is much cited. To new reader, I would recommend his later and shorter How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus as a good starting point. Also notable is his God in New Testament Theology.

Goaded by once fashionable theories that worship of Jesus arose in the second century or later, Hurtado has pulled out all the stops in looking at all the historical evidence, both in and beyond the New Testament. He shows that an intense devotion to Jesus alongside God arose very quickly, and very early, in the first generation of believers in the risen Christ.

I think his work is insightful, and while I disagree with his exegesis of some texts, I find him in general an astute commenter on them, one who is committed, rightly, to understanding them in their own terms, and not reading into them what we would like them to say.

He has never much pursued the theological implications of his discoveries. It is clear to me that he does think the NT strictly identifies the one God with the Father, and with the one god Yahweh of the OT. He’s clear, unlike many Christians, that Jesus and God are two, that they are not numerically identical. He seems to acknowledge that later catholic tradition says that the one God is numerically identical to the Trinity. But he never discusses the fact that this is logically incompatible with the one God being identical to the Father alone. This is hardly just the translation of the NT gospel into the terminology of a different culture, as Hurtado sometimes suggests. He’s holding out hope that some sort of (vaguely social?) trinitarian belief truly does fit well with the NT. That remains to be seen, though, because he says precious little about what such a theology would be. (See e.g. Lord Jesus Christ, 651; God, 99-113; How on Earth, 55)

In this post, I want to highlight one of Hurtado’s key insights about early christology – one which theologians and apologists should pay attention to. I happened to hear a public discussion of his (linked here, last file). Just after the 27 minute mark, Hurtado says

“…I don’t think that we can account for the worship of Jesus, or the level of cultic devotion that was given, on the basis of his historical ministry and reminiscences of that alone. And part of the reason for that it seems to, that from what I understand to be key texts, such as Philippians 2 and even subsequent texts, it seems to either explicitly or implicitly root the justification for the veneration of Jesus in the action of God. God has highly exalted him and given him a name [unintelligible] with the intention that every knee should bow and every tongue should confess. So I think that the early Christians’ fundamental answer to the question “How dare you worship this figure?” at the earliest moment, would be, “Because God says so – because God requires it. And to refuse to reverence Jesus is to disobey God, quite seriously.” And so Paul can describe the unbelieving Israel who doesn’t see Jesus as “blinded” and as seriously disobedient to the God of their own tradition. …The point is that they root it not in “We worship Jesus because he told us to do so” but “We worship Jesus because God has appointed him and requires it.” It’s a very theocentric justification for this amazingly exalted, high christology.” [bold added, transcribed by me, omitting some verbal false starts, and a follow-up question I could not understand]

Well said. He of course says it even better in his published works. (Lord, 640-1; God 107-8) I have argued the same myself.

But given this justification for the worship of Jesus, why then did they have to infer that Jesus is “fully divine” or make him, someone or other, exist “in” the one God. Hurtado says,

…this peculiar view of God (as “one” and yet somehow comprising “the Father” and Jesus, thereafter also including the Spirit… was forced on them [2nd c. and later Christians] by the earnest convictions and devotional practice of believers from the earliest observable years of the Christian movement.” (Lord, 651)

But this move to a “fully divine” Jesus was not forced on them, not, anyway, by the worship of Jesus, as Hurtado himself shows. We know that many in the early catholic or “proto-orthodox” movement dissented even from the late 2nd c. logos theologies, fearing that they posited two gods. And various groups were sometimes denounced as holding to “psilanthropism” – the view that Jesus is a “mere man” – i.e. that he have a human nature but not the divine nature.

We should ask: if the earliest Christians’ answer (re: how one can be a monotheist and yet worship both the one God and Jesus, the unique Son of God) was a good answer then, why isn’t it a good answer now? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question; I think it is a good answer. It’s a perfectly good and understandable answer, and it seems to have been part of the apostolic message. Count me in.