How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 7

Jesus as God on Earth

Early Incarnation Christologies

I HAVE TAUGHT AT TWO major research universities since beginning my career. For four years, in the mid-1980s, I taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and since 1988 I have been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have taught a wide range of students in every respect, including with respect to religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pagans, atheists. My Christian students have been internally diverse as well, from hard-core fundamentalists to liberal Protestants to Greek Orthodox to Roman Catholic to . . . name your denomination. Over the years it has struck me that even though my Christian students come from such a range of backgrounds, when it comes to their views of Christ, they are remarkably constant. The majority of them think that Jesus is God.

In traditional theology, as we will see in later chapters, Christ came to be regarded as both fully God and fully human. He was not half of each—part God and part human. He was God in every respect and human in every respect. My students tend to “get” the God part, but not so much the “human” part. For many of them, Jesus really was God walking the earth; and because he was God, he was not “really” human but was only in some sort of human guise. As God, Jesus could have done anything he wanted to do. If he had chosen, he could have spoken Swahili as an infant. Why not? He was God!

But being human means having human weaknesses, limitations, desires, passions, and shortcomings. Did Jesus have these? Was he “fully” human? Did he ever treat someone unfairly? Did he ever say something nasty about someone? Did he ever get angry without good reason? Was he ever jealous or covetous? Did he ever lust after a woman or a man? If not—in what sense, really, was he “fully” human?

I obviously don’t expect my students to be advanced theologians—and my classes are not about theology. They are about the history of early Christianity and, especially, about historical approaches to the New Testament. But it is interesting, even in the class context, to see that my students’ Christological views tend to be drawn more from the Gospel of John than from the other three, earlier Gospels. It is in the Gospel of John, and only in John, that Jesus says such things as “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58) and “I and the Father are one” (10:30). In this Gospel Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And in this Gospel Jesus talks about existing in a glorious state with God the Father before he became human (17:5). That’s what many of my students believe. But as they study the New Testament more, they come to see that such self-claims are not made by Jesus in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. So who is right?

Scholars have long held that the view of Christ in the Gospel of John was a later development in the Christian tradition. It was not something that Jesus himself actually taught, and it is not something that can be found in the other Gospels. In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians—Jesus’s disciples, for example—did not believe this. And there are clear historical reasons for thinking they did not. The earliest Christians held exaltation Christologies in which the human being Jesus was made the Son of God—for example, at his resurrection or at his baptism—as we examined in the previous chapter. John has a different Christology. In his view, Christ was a divine being who became human. I call this an incarnation Christology.

Exaltation and Incarnation Christologies

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN that early Christians had views corresponding to two of the common Greek, Roman, and Jewish notions of how a human being could also be divine: by being exalted to the divine realm or by being born to a divine parent. What I am now calling incarnation Christologies are related to the third model of a divine human, in which a divine being—a god—comes from heaven to take on human flesh temporarily, before returning to his original heavenly home. The word incarnation means something like coming in the flesh or being made flesh. An incarnation Christology, then, maintains that Christ was a preexistent divine being who became human before returning to God in heaven. Here, Jesus is not understood to be a human who is elevated to a divine status; instead, he is a heavenly being who condescends to become temporarily human.

I have already made the case that followers of Jesus were not calling him God during his lifetime and that he did not refer to himself as a divine being who had come from heaven. If they had done so, surely there would be a heavy dose of such views in our earliest records of his words—in the Synoptic Gospels and their sources (Mark, Q, M, and L). Instead, it was the resurrection that provided the turning point in understanding who Jesus was, as an exalted being. I contend that the earliest exaltation Christologies very quickly morphed into an incarnation Christology, as early Christians developed their views about Jesus during the early years after his death. The stimulus for the transformation of Christology was probably provided by a theological view that I have already discussed. One needs to ask: What did Jews think that a person became if he was taken up to heaven? As we have seen in the case of Moses and others, such a person was thought to have become an angel, or an angel-like being.¹

In the most thorough investigation of Christological views that portray Jesus as an angel or an angel-like being, New Testament scholar Charles Gieschen, helpfully defines the Jewish notion of an angel as “a spirit or heavenly being who mediates between the human and divine realms.”² Once Jesus was thought to be exalted to heaven, he was quickly seen, by some of his followers, to be this kind of heavenly mediator, one who obediently did God’s will while he was here on earth. From there, it was a very small step to thinking that Jesus was this kind of being by nature, not simply because of his exaltation. Jesus was not only the Son of God, the Lord, the Son of Man, the coming messiah; he was the one who mediates God’s will on earth as a heavenly, angelic being. In fact, it came to be thought that he had always been that kind of being.

If Jesus was the one who represented God on earth in human form, he quite likely had always been that one. He was, in other words, the chief angel of God, known in the Bible as the Angel of the Lord. This is the figure who appeared to Hagar, and Abraham, and Moses, who is sometimes actually called “God” in the Hebrew Bible. If Jesus is in fact this one, then he is a preexistent divine being who came to earth for a longer period of time, during his life; he fully represented God on earth; he in fact can be called God. Exaltation Christologies became transformed into incarnation Christologies as soon as believers in Jesus came to see him as an angelic being who performed God’s work here on earth.³

To call Jesus the Angel of the Lord is to make a startlingly exalted claim about him. In the Hebrew Bible, this figure appears to God’s people as God’s representative, and he is in fact called God. And as it turns out, as recent research has shown, there are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion. Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors. Later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel—even the chief angel—but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth.

Incarnation Christology in Paul

I HAVE READ, PONDERED, researched, taught, and written about the writings of Paul for forty years, but until recently there was one key aspect of his theology I could never quite get my mind around. I had the hardest time understanding how, exactly, Paul viewed Christ. Some aspects of Paul’s Christological teaching have been clear to me for decades—especially his teaching that it was Jesus’s death and resurrection that makes a person right with God, rather than following the dictates of the Jewish law. But who did Paul think Christ was?

One reason for my perplexity was that Paul is highly allusive in what he says. He does not spell out in systematic detail his views of Christ. Another reason was that in some passages Paul seems to affirm a view of Christ that, until recently, I thought could not possibly exist as early as Paul’s letters, which are our first Christian writings to survive. How could Paul embrace “higher” views of Christ than those found in later writings such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Didn’t Christology develop from a “low” Christology to a “high” Christology over time? And if so, shouldn’t the views of the Synoptic Gospels be “higher” than the views of Paul? But they’re not! They are “lower.” And I simply did not get it, for the longest time.

But now I do. It is not a question of “higher” or “lower.” The Synoptics simply accept a Christological view that is different from Paul’s. They hold to exaltation Christologies, and Paul holds to an incarnation Christology. That, in no small measure, is because Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.

Christ as an Angel in Paul

Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something over and over and not having it register. I have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians hundreds of times in both English and Greek. But the clear import of what he says in Galatians 4:14 simply never registered with me, until, frankly, a few months ago. In this verse Paul calls Christ an angel. The reason it never registered with me is that the statement is a bit obscure, and I had always interpreted it in an alternative way. Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways.⁴

In the context of the verse, Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst and they helped restore him to health. Paul writes: “Even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Jesus Christ.”

I had always read the verse to say that the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ himself. In fact, however, the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different. As Charles Gieschen has argued, and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel by New Testament specialist Susan Garrett, the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel or as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ.⁵ By clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.

The reason for reading the verse this way has to do with the Greek grammar. When Paul uses the construction “but as . . . as,” he is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing. We know this because Paul uses this grammatical construction in a couple of other places in his writings, and the meaning in those cases is unambiguous. For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul says: “Brothers, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ.” The last bit “but as . . . as” indicates two identifying features of the recipients of Paul’s letter: they are fleshly people and they are infants in Christ. These are not two contrasting statements; they modify each other. The same can be said of Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians 2:17, which also has this grammatical feature.

But this means that in Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel. Garrett goes a step further and argues that Galatians 4:14 indicates that Paul “identifies [Jesus Christ] with God’s chief angel.”⁶

If this is the case, then virtually everything Paul says about Christ throughout his letters makes perfect sense. As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh. Paul says all these things about Christ, and in no passage more strikingly than in Philippians 2:6–11, a passage that scholars often call the “Philippians Hymn” or the “Christ Hymn of Philippians,” since it is widely thought to embody an early hymn or poem devoted to celebrating Christ and his incarnation.

My friend Charles Cosgrove, a lifelong scholar of Paul who is also one of the world’s experts on music in the early Christian world, has convinced me that the passage could not have been an actual hymn that was sung, since it does not scan properly, as a musical piece—that is, it does not have a rhythmic and metrical structure—in the Greek. And so it may be a poem or even a kind of exalted prose composition. But what is clear is that it is an elevated reflection on Christ coming into the world (from heaven) for the sake of others and being glorified by God as a result. And it appears to be a passage Paul is quoting, one with which the Philippians may well have already been familiar. In other words, it is another pre-Pauline tradition.⁷

The Christ Poem of Philippians 2

I start my discussion of the Christ poem, as I call it, by quoting it at length in poetic lines (the lines work differently in Greek than in English, but the basic idea is the same).⁸ Paul introduces the poem by telling the Philippians that they should “have the same mind” in themselves that was also in “Christ Jesus” (2:5). And then comes the poem:

Who, although he was in the form of God

Did not regard being equal with God

Something to be grasped after.

But he emptied himself

Taking on the form of a slave,

And coming in the likeness of humans.

And being found in appearance as a human

He humbled himself

Becoming obedient unto death—even death on a cross.

Therefore God highly exalted him

And bestowed on him the name

That is above every name,

That at the name of Jesus

Every knee should bow

Of those in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

And every tongue confess

That Jesus Christ is Lord

To the glory of God the Father.

It is difficult to do justice to this theologically rich poem in just a few pages; scholars have written entire books on it.⁹ But several points are particularly germane for my purposes.

The Philippians Poem as a Pre-Pauline Tradition

The first thing to stress is that the passage does indeed appear to be poetic. Scholars have set out the poetic lines in different ways. In the original Greek, of course, poetry was not indented on the page or indicated in any particular way—the Greek manuscripts of the book of Philippians simply give the passage like every other passage, one line and one word at a time. But the lines do make sense—even better sense—when set out poetically. The structure I have adopted here is common among scholarly analyses of the passage: the poem has two halves; each half has three stanzas; and each stanza has three lines. The first half begins by identifying the subject of the poem, “Who” (in reference back to Christ Jesus), and the second half begins with the word therefore. In terms of its overall meaning, the first half talks about the “condescension” of Christ, that is, how he came down from the heavenly realm to become human in order to die in obedience to God; and the second half talks about his “exaltation,” that is, how God then raised him to an even higher level and status than he had before, as a reward for his humble obedience.

As I have said, scholars have long considered the passage to be a pre-Pauline tradition that Paul includes here in his letter to the Philippians. It is not simply something Paul composed on the spot, while writing his letter. There are several reasons for thinking this. For one thing, the passage does appear to be a self-contained unit that is poetic rather than proselike in its composition. Moreover, a number of words—including some of the key words—occur in this passage but nowhere else in Paul’s letters. This includes the word form (used twice: form of God and form of a slave) and the phrase grasped after. The absence of such important words in Paul’s writings suggests that he is quoting a passage that someone else wrote, earlier.

Confirmation for this view comes from the related fact that several of the key concepts in the passage cannot be found elsewhere in Paul’s writings. Again, this includes some of the central concepts of the passage: that Jesus was in God’s form before he became a human; that he had open to him the possibility of grasping after divine equality before coming to be human; and that he became human by “emptying himself.” This last idea is usually interpreted to mean that Christ gave up the exalted prerogatives that were his as a divine being in order to become a human.

One final argument that Paul is here quoting a preexisting tradition that had been in circulation for a while is a little trickier to explain. It is the fact that part of the poem does not seem to fit its context in the letter to the Philippians very well. At this point in the letter, Paul is telling his Philippian Christian converts that they are to act unselfishly by treating other people better than they treat themselves. In the verse before this, he has said that they should not look out only for their own interests, but even more for the interests of others. Then he quotes this passage in order to show that this is in fact what Christ did, giving up what was rightfully his (the “form of God”) in order to serve others (taking the “form of a slave”) and being obedient to God to the point of dying for others.

The problem is that the second half of the Christ poem (vv.9–11) does not at all convey this lesson, and if taken seriously, it may seem to run counter to it. For according to these three stanzas, God rewarded Jesus abundantly for his temporary condescension to become a human and to die. God exalted him even higher than he was before (that’s what the Greek verb “highly exalted” seems to imply, as do the verses that follow), making him the Lord of all, to whom all living beings would offer confession and worship.

But the idea of Christ’s eventual exaltation does not fit the purpose behind Paul’s quotation of the poem, since if someone is humbly obedient because of what he or she will eventually get out of it, that is simply another way of doing things out of self-interest. And the whole point of the passage is that people should not act out of self-interest, but selflessly, for the sake of others.

Since the second half of the poem does not “work” very well in the context, it is almost certainly the case that this was indeed a preexistent poem that was familiar to Paul and, probably, to the Philippians as well. Paul quotes the entire poem because it is familiar to his readers and conveys the point that he wants to convey—that they should imitate Christ’s example in giving themselves up for others—even though the second half could be interpreted to undercut this point.

These, then, are some of the reasons that scholars have thought that Paul probably did not compose this poem himself while writing to the Philippians. It is a pre-Pauline tradition. You may have noticed that one line is longer than the others in the poem: “obedient unto death—even death on a cross.” It is even longer in the Greek. Scholars frequently think that Paul added the words “even death on a cross,” since for him it was precisely the crucifixion of Jesus that was so important.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds his readers that when he was first with them—trying to convert them from worshiping idols to become followers of the God of Israel and his messiah, Jesus—his message was all about the cross of Jesus: “For I decided not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and this one as crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). In his letter to the Galatians, he stresses that it was specifically a death by crucifixion that mattered for salvation. If Jesus had been stoned to death, for example, or strangled, that would have been one thing. But because he was crucified, in particular, he was able to bear the “curse” of sin that other people deserved. And that is because the scriptures indicate that anyone who “hangs on a tree” is cursed by God (Gal. 3:10–13). This is a reference to the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 21:23, which states: “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” In its original context the verse meant that anyone who had been executed and left to rot on a tree obviously stood under God’s curse. For Paul, since Jesus died by being nailed to a “tree”—that is, crucified on a stake of wood—he bore God’s curse. Since he did not deserve this curse, he must have borne the curse that was owed to others. So it was of utmost importance to Paul not just that Jesus died, but that he died by being crucified.

The lines of the Christ poem in Philippians 2 “work” somewhat better without the words “even death on a cross,” suggesting that Paul added these words to the poem in order to make them conform even more closely to his own theological understanding of Jesus’s death. If this is the case, it also suggests that Paul was not the original author of the poem but that he inherited it from tradition and quoted it here because it suited his purposes.

By quoting the poem Paul obviously is indicating that he agrees with its teaching about Christ. But what is that teaching exactly? I argue below that this poem presents an incarnational understanding of Christ—that he was a preexistent divine being, an angel of God, who came to earth out of humble obedience and whom God rewarded by exalting him to an even higher level of divinity as a result. But before embarking on this interpretation I should point out that some scholars have not seen this poem as embracing an incarnational theology at all.

The Christ Poem and Adam

Some scholars have had real difficulty imagining that a poem existing before Paul’s letter to the Philippians—a poem whose composition must therefore date as early as the 40s CE—could already celebrate an incarnational understanding of Christ. That seems rather early for such a “high” Christology. As a way of partly resolving this problem, an alternative explanation has been proposed. In this alternative interpretation, the beginning of the poem does not represent Christ as a preexistent divine being. It presents him as a fully human being. In fact, it presents him as a human who was a kind of “second Adam,” a second appearance, in a sense, of the father of the human race.¹⁰

According to this interpretation, when the poem indicates that Christ was in the “form of God,” it is not suggesting some kind of preexistent state in heaven. He was instead like Adam, who was made in the “image of God.” In this understanding, the words image and form are synonyms. When God made Adam and Eve, he made them in his own “image” (Gen. 1:27). But even though Adam and Eve were in God’s image, they obviously were not equal with God—they were his creations. And God gave them one commandment about what they were not to do: they were not to eat “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” If they ate that fruit (it is not called an apple, by the way), they would die (Gen. 2:16–17).

And what happened? The serpent—which is not called Satan in Genesis; instead it is an actual snake (which originally walked on legs, apparently)—tempted Eve by telling her that eating the forbidden fruit would not cause them to die but would make them “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). And so Eve ate the fruit, gave some to her husband, Adam, and he too ate. Their eyes were then “opened,” and they realized they were naked. They were no longer innocent but could and did make moral judgments. And they eventually died, as did all of their children and descendants (with two exceptions: Enoch and Elijah).

In Paul’s letters he sometimes speaks of Christ as a “second Adam.” Unlike the first sinful Adam, Christ was the “perfect man,” who reversed the course of human affairs brought about by the first Adam. The first Adam brought sin into the world, and Christ removed the curse of sin; just as Adam brought death to all his descendants, so too Christ brought life to all who believed in him. As Paul says in Romans 5: “For just as the transgression through one man came as judgment for all people, so also the righteousness that came from one man leads to justification and life for everyone; for just as the many were made sinners through the disobedience of the one person, so also the many were made righteous by the obedience of one” (vv.18–19).

Paul, then, saw Christ as a kind of second Adam who reversed the sin, condemnation, and death brought about by the first Adam. Could this understanding be applied to the Christ poem of Philippians? Some scholars have argued so. In their view, as I indicated, just as Adam was in the “image of God,” so too was Christ in the “form of God.” But Adam reacted to that state by sinning. Christ reacted by humble obedience. Adam sinned because he wanted to be “like God.” Christ on the other hand “did not regard being equal with God / Something to be grasped after.” And so, just as Adam brought death into the world by his disobedience, Christ brought the possibility of life into the world by his obedience. This is shown above all by the fact that God “highly exalted” Jesus and made him the Lord of all.

In short, according to this interpretation, Christ is not portrayed as a preexistent divine being in the Philippians poem. He is human, like other humans. He is in the image of Adam, who is in the image of God. But he reverses Adam’s sin by his obedience, and only then is he exalted to a divine level.

I have long thought that this was an intriguing interpretation of the passage, and for many years I wished it were correct. That would help solve the problem I had in understanding Paul’s Christology. But I’m afraid I’ve never been convinced by it—even when I wanted to be—for three reasons. First, if Paul (or the author of the poem) really wanted his reader to make the connection between Jesus and Adam, he surely would have done so more explicitly. Even if he chose not to call Adam by name, or to call Jesus the second Adam, he could have made verbal allusions to the story of Adam (and Eve) more obvious. In particular, rather than saying that Christ was “in the form of God,” he would have said that Christ was “in the image of God.” That is the word used in Genesis, and it would have been quite simple for the author to use it here in the poem if he wanted his reader to think of Genesis.

Second, in the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, it is not Adam who wants “to be like God”—it is Eve. Adam eats the fruit only when she gives it to him, and we are not told why he does so. But this means in his desire not to be equal with God, Christ would be the counter not to Adam, but to Eve. Nowhere in his writings does Paul make a connection between Christ and Eve.

Third, and possibly most important, from other passages in Paul it does indeed appear that he understands Christ to have been a preexistent divine being. One example comes from a very peculiar passage in 1 Corinthians, in which Paul is talking about how the children of Israel, after they escaped from Egypt under Moses, were fed while they spent so many years in the wilderness (as recounted in the books of Exodus and Numbers in the Hebrew Bible). According to Paul, the Israelites had enough to drink because the rock that Moses struck in order miraculously to bring forth water (Num. 20:11) followed them around in the wilderness. Wherever they went, the water-providing rock went. In fact, Paul says, “the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). Just as Christ provides life to people today when they believe in him, so too he provided life to the Israelites in the wilderness. That would not have been possible, of course, unless he existed at the time. And so for Paul, Christ was a preexistent being who was occasionally manifest on earth.

Or take another passage, one in which Paul actually does speak of Christ as a second Adam. In 1 Corinthians, Paul contrasts Christ’s place of origin with that of Adam: “The first man was from the earth, and was made of dust; the second man is from heaven” (15:47). What matters here is precisely the difference between Adam and Christ. Adam came into being in this world; Christ existed before he came into this world. He was from heaven.

And so, the interpretation of the Philippians poem that takes it as an indication that Christ was a kind of “perfect Adam” does not work, on one hand, because the passage has features that do not make sense given this interpretation. And on the other hand, this interpretation is completely unnecessary. It does not solve the problem of an incarnational Christology—because Paul clearly says in other passages that Jesus was indeed a preexistent divine being who came into the world. That’s what this poem teaches as well.

The Christ Poem and Incarnational Christology

Lots of other things can be said about this amazing passage. Among scholars it is one of the most discussed, argued over, and commented upon passages in the New Testament. If the majority of scholars are correct in their opinion that it embodies an incarnational Christology, then the basic perspective on Christ that it paints is clear: Christ was a preexistent being who chose to come in the “likeness” of human flesh, who, because he humbled himself to the point of death, was elevated to an even higher status than he had before and was made the Lord of all. This view of Christ makes sense if we think of him as existing before his birth as an angelic being who abandoned his heavenly existence to come to earth to fulfill God’s will by dying for others.

I want to stress that Christ appears to be portrayed here, in his preexistent state, as a divine being, an angel—but not as God Almighty. He is not the Father himself, since it is the Father who exalts him. And he is not—most definitely not—“equal” with God before he becomes human.

There are several reasons for thinking that he was not yet God’s equal in his preexistent state. The first comes in the first part of the poem, where it says that Christ did not regard being equal with God “something to be grasped after.” Interpreters of this passage have long debated the precise nuance of these words. Do they mean that he already had equality with God and that he did not clutch on to this equality as something to retain, but instead became human? Or do they mean that he did not already have equality with God and chose not to grasp for that kind of equality, but instead became human? It makes a big difference.

Part of the problem is that the key Greek word here—the verb for grasped—is rare and could in theory be used in both senses. But in reality, the word (and words related to it in Greek) is almost always used to refer to something a person doesn’t have but grasps for—like a thief who snatches someone’s purse. The German scholar Samuel Vollenweider has shown that the word is used this way widely in a range of Jewish authors; moreover, it is the word used of human rulers who become arrogant and so try to make themselves more high and mighty (divine) than they really are.¹¹ This seems to be, then, what is meant here in the Philippians poem.

A second reason for thinking that Jesus was not yet God’s equal is that only this interpretation makes sense of the second half of the poem, in which God “exalts” Christ even more “highly” than he was before (which is the probable meaning of the verb I translated as “highly exalted” in the poem). If Christ were already equal with God, then it would not have been possible for him to be exalted even higher than that after his act of obedience. What could be higher than equality with God? Moreover, it was only after this higher exaltation that Christ is given “the name that is above every name” and is to become the object of worship for all living beings. Christ must have been a lower divine being before he humbled himself by becoming human and dying. When it says, then, that he was “in the form of God,” it does not mean that he was the equal of God the Father. It means he was “Godlike,” or divine—like the chief angel, the Angel of the Lord, as referred to in passages of the Hebrew Bible.

It seems strange to many people today that Christ could be a divine being yet not be fully equal with God. But it is important to remember what we found in Chapter 1. Our notion that there is an inseparable chasm between the divine and human realms, and that the divine realm has only one level or layer to it, is not the view held among Greeks, Romans, and Jews in the ancient world—or by Christians. Recall the inscription that I cited on page 39, about how Caesar Augustus was declared “divine,” and if he provided even further benefits for the people during his reign, they could deem him even “more divine.” How can someone become “more” divine? In the ancient world, they could—because divinity was a continuum. So too in Jewish and Christian circles. For the Philippians poem, Christ started out as divine, but at his exaltation he was made even “more divine.” In fact, he was made equal with God.

This is a point that is widely agreed upon by interpreters, and it is because of the wording of the final two stanzas of the poem, vv.10–11. There, we are told that God “hyperexalted” Jesus, so that “At the name of Jesus / Every knee should bow / Of those in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. / And every tongue confess / That Jesus Christ is Lord / To the glory of God the Father.” The casual reader may not realize this, but these lines allude to a passage in the Hebrew Bible. And a striking passage it is. According to the original passage as found in Isaiah 45:22–23, it is to Yahweh alone, the God of Israel, that “every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess”:

Turn to me and be saved

All the ends of the earth!

For I am God, and there is no other.

By myself I have sworn,

From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness

A word that shall not return:

“To me every knee shall bow,

Every tongue confess.”

The prophet Isaiah is quite explicit. There is only one God, no other. That God is Yahweh.¹² That God has sworn that to no other shall every knee bow and every tongue make confession. Yet in the Philippians poem, it is not to God the Father—apart from whom, according to Isaiah, “there is no other”—but to the exalted Jesus that all knees will bow and tongues confess. Jesus has been granted the status and honor and glory of the One Almighty God himself.

This interpretation of the Christ poem in Philippians shows that very early in the Christian movement the followers of Jesus were making audacious claims about him. He had been exalted to equality with God, even though God himself had said that there was “no other” apart from him. Somehow, Christians were imagining that there was indeed “another.” And this other one was equal with God. But it was not because he was God “by nature”—to use the later philosophical/theological term that came to be applied to discussions of Christ’s deity. He was God because God had made him so. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there was only one God? This became the key question of the Christological debates in later times, as we will see. At this stage, all we can say is that early Christians were not bothered enough by this dilemma, or this paradox, to have written anything about it, so we don’t know exactly how they dealt with it.

One final point to make about the Philippians poem may have occurred to you already. I have been calling the Christology that it embraces “incarnational,” since it portrays Jesus as a preexistent divine being who becomes human. But there is obviously an “exaltation” element in the poem as well, since at Jesus’s resurrection God exalted him to an even higher state than he had before. In a sense, then, this poem provides us with a transitional Christology that combines an incarnation view with an exaltation view. Later authors will move even further away from an exaltation Christology, such that Christ will come to be portrayed as being equal with God even before his appearance in the world—in fact, as equal with God for all time. But this is not the view of the Philippians poem. For this beautiful passage, as quoted by and presumably believed by Paul, Christ was indeed a preexistent divine being. But he was an angel or an angel-like being, who only after his act of obedience to the point of death was made God’s equal.

Other Passages in Paul

The incarnational Christology that lies behind the Philippians hymn can be seen in other passages of Paul’s letters as well. I have already said that Paul understood Christ to be the “rock” that provided life-giving water to the Israelites in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10:4) and pointed out that Paul stated that Christ, unlike the first Adam, came from “heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). When Paul talks about God “sending” his son, he appears not to be speaking only metaphorically (like John the Baptist is said to have been “sent” from God in John 1:6, for example); instead, God actually sent Christ from the heavenly realm. As he put it in the letter to the Romans, “For what the law could not do, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (8:3). It is interesting that Paul uses this term likeness—just as the Philippians poem did when it spoke of Christ coming in the “appearance” of humans. It is the same Greek word in both places. Did Paul want to avoid saying that Christ actually became human, but that he came only in a human “likeness”? It is hard to say.

But it is clear that Paul does not believe Christ just appeared out of nowhere, the way angels seem to do in the Hebrew Bible. One of the verses in Paul that long puzzled me was Galatians 4:4, in which Paul writes, “When the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law.” I always wondered why Paul would indicate that Christ had been born from a woman. What other option is there, exactly? But the statement makes sense if Paul believed that Christ was a preexistent angelic being. In that case, it is important to point out that Jesus was born in a human way: he did not simply appear as the Angel of the Lord did to Hagar, Abraham, and Moses. Here in the last days he actually was born in the likeness of human flesh, as a child.

Paul says even more exalted things about Christ. In Chapter 2, we saw that some Jewish texts understood God’s Wisdom to be a hypostasis of God—an aspect or characteristic of God that took on its own form of existence. Wisdom was the agent through which God created all things (as in Proverbs 8), and since it was God’s Wisdom in particular, it was both God and a kind of image of God. As the Wisdom of Solomon expressed it, Wisdom is “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty . . . for she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (7:25–26). Moreover, we saw that Wisdom could be seen as the Angel of the Lord.

Jesus, for Paul, was the Angel of the Lord. And so he too was God’s Wisdom, before coming into this world. Thus Paul can speak of “the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). Even more striking, Christ can be described as the agent of creation:

For us there is one God, the Father,

from whom are all things and for whom we exist,

and one Lord, Jesus Christ,

through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor. 8:6)

This verse may well incorporate another pre-Pauline creed of some kind, as it divides itself neatly, as can be seen, into two parts, with two lines each. The first part is a confession of God the Father, and the second a confession of Jesus Christ. It is “through” Christ that all things come into being and that believers themselves exist. This sounds very much like what non-Christian Jewish texts occasionally say about God’s Wisdom. And God’s Wisdom was itself understood to be God, as we have seen.

So too Jesus in Paul. One of the most debated verses in the Pauline letters is Romans 9:5. Scholars dispute how the verse is to be translated. What is clear is that Paul is talking about the advantages given to the Israelites, and he indicates that the “fathers” (that is, the Jewish patriarchs) belong to the Israelites, and “from them is the Christ according to the flesh, the one who is God over all, blessed forever, amen.” Here, Christ is “God over all.” This is a very exalted view.

But some translators prefer not to take the passage as indicating that Christ is God and do so by claiming that it should be translated differently, to say first something about Christ and then, second, to give a blessing to God. They translate the verse like this: “from them is the Christ according to the flesh. May the God who is over all be blessed forever, amen.” The issues of translation are highly complex, and different scholars have different opinions. The matter is crucial. If the first version is correct, then it is the one place in all of Paul’s letters where he explicitly calls Jesus God.

But is it correct? My view for many years was that the second translation was the right one and that the passage does not call Jesus God. My main reason for thinking so, though, was that I did not think that Paul ever called Jesus God anywhere else, so he probably wouldn’t do so here. But that, of course, is circular reasoning, and I think the first translation makes the best sense of the Greek, as other scholars have vigorously argued.¹³ It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship. And so I now have no trouble recognizing that in fact Paul could indeed flat-out call Jesus God, as he appears to do in Romans 9:5.

If someone as early in the Christian tradition as Paul can see Christ as an incarnate divine being, it is no surprise that the same view emerges later in the tradition. Nowhere does it emerge more clearly or forcefully than in the Gospel of John.

Incarnation Christology in John

I WAS IN GRADUATE school when I first came to realize just how different John is from the other Gospels. Before that, when I was in college, I read the Gospels as if they were all saying basically the same thing. Sure, there may have been different emphases here or there, but on the whole, I thought, they had the same basic views about most everything.

In my master’s degree program I decided to do a kind of thought experiment by reading only Matthew, Mark, and Luke (not John). I did this for three years. At the end of my third year, to complete the experiment, I sat down to read John. In Greek. In one sitting. It was a revelation. Having grown accustomed to the language, style, themes, stories, and perspectives of the Synoptic Gospels, I simply couldn’t believe how different John was. In every respect. With John we are dealing not just with a different author, but with an entirely different world. Among other things, in this Gospel there are not simply allusions to Jesus’s divine power and authority. There are bald statements that equate Jesus with God and say that he was a preexistent divine being who came into the world. This view is not simply like Paul’s, in which Jesus was some kind of angel who then came to be exalted to a higher position of deity. For John, Jesus was equal with God and even shared his name and his glory in his preincarnate state. To use the older terminology (which I favored back then), this was an extremely high Christology.

Already at that early point in my research career, I had reasons to doubt that this Christology was the earliest one known among Jesus’s followers. On one hand, it was not the Christology of the earlier Gospels—and that itself was obviously highly significant. If Jesus really were equal with God from “the beginning,” before he came to earth, and he knew it, then surely the Synoptic Gospels would have mentioned this at some point. Wouldn’t that be the most important thing about him? But no, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke he does not talk about himself in this way—nor does he do so in their sources (Q, M, and L).

On the other hand, I was taken aback when I realized that all the perspectives in John’s Gospel are shared by Jesus himself and the author. Let me explain. Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education. Yet there are passages in John in which the narrator sounds just like Jesus, so much so that you cannot tell, in places, who is doing the talking.¹⁴ Jesus sounds just like the narrator and the narrator sounds just like Jesus. But how can that be, if Jesus was from a different time and place, living in a different culture, speaking a different language, and without having the advantages of what we today would call a higher education? And so I realized with breathtaking suddenness what the answer was. It is because in John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.

Elevated Teachings About Jesus in John

One of the most striking features of John’s Gospel is its elevated claims about Jesus. Here, Jesus is decidedly God and is in fact equal with God the Father—before coming into the world, while in the world, and after he leaves the world. Consider the following passages, which are found only in John among the four Gospels:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the unique one before the Father, full of grace and truth. (1:1, 14; later this Word made flesh is named as “Jesus Christ,” v.17)

But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I also am working.” This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God. (5:17–18)

[Jesus said:] “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” (8:58)

[Jesus said:] “I and the Father are one.” (10:30)

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (14:8–9)

[Jesus prayed to God:] “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” (17:4–5)

[Jesus prayed:] “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” (17:24).

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28)

I need to be clear: Jesus is not God the Father in this Gospel. He spends all of chapter 17 praying to his Father, and, as I pointed out earlier, he is not talking to himself. But he has been given glory equal to that of God the Father. And he had that glory before he came into the world. When he leaves this world, he returns to the glory that was his before. To be sure, Jesus comes to be “exalted” here—he several times talks about his crucifixion as being “lifted up”—a play on words in reference to being “lifted onto the cross” and being “exalted” up to heaven as a result. But the exaltation is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both “God” and “with God” in his preincarnate state as a divine being. Nowhere can this view be seen more clearly than in the first eighteen verses of the Gospel, frequently called the Prologue of John.

The Prologue of John

In the Prologue we find the clearest expression in the New Testament of Christ as a preexistent divine being—the Word—who has become a human. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that God’s Word—or Logos in Greek—was sometimes understood to be a divine hypostasis, an aspect of God that came to be thought of as its own distinct being. Since it was the Word of God, it was an entity that could be imagined as being separate and distinct from God (just as the words that I am typing come from inside my head but then take on their own existence). At the same time, since this Word was the Word of “God,” it perfectly manifested the divine being of the Father and for that reason was itself rightly called “God.” The idea of the divine Logos could be found not only in Jewish literature, but also in Greek philosophical circles connected with both Stoicism and Middle Platonism. All of these may have affected the most poetic and powerful expression of the Word to come down to us from early Christian literature—the first eighteen verses of John.

The Prologue as a Preliterary Poem

It is widely held among scholars that the Prologue is a preexisting poem that the author of John has incorporated into his work—possibly in a second edition.¹⁵ This is because it has the earmarks of a preliterary tradition as a self-contained, poetic piece and because its key term—the Word, or Logos—occurs nowhere else in reference to Christ in the entire Gospel. If it is a preexisting piece, then the author of the Gospel—or its later editor—found its Christological views highly compatible with his own, even if the terms used in expressing those views were different from the ones he customarily used. And so he began his Gospel narrative with it.¹⁶

The poetic character of the passage can be seen in its use, in places, of what is called staircase parallelism, in which the final word of one line is also the beginning word of the next line. And so, for example, we have the following (key words are in italics):

In the beginning was the Word

And the Word was with God.

And God was the Word. (John 1:1)

In him was life,

And the life was the light of humans.

And the light shines in the darkness.

And the darkness did not overcome it. (1:4–5)

Inserted into the poetic passage of vv.1–18 are two prose additions, which do not seem to fit with the flow of the poem, which is otherwise all about the Logos; both additions deal not with Christ, but with John the Baptist as his forerunner (vv.6–8 and v.15). If you remove these verses, the poem actually flows better. Probably, the author (or the editor) who added the poem in the first place made these additions himself.

The Teaching of the Prologue

Without the addition of the comments on John the Baptist, the poem is all about the Logos of God that existed with God in the beginning and that became a human in Jesus Christ. Christ is not named until near the end, in v.17. But there is no doubt that the poem is about him, as is clear once you read it through from start to finish. Still, it is important to be precise in how one understands this poem and its presentation of Christ. The poem is decidedly not saying that Jesus preexisted his birth—and there is nothing about him being born of a virgin here. What preexisted was the Logos of God through whom God made the universe. It was only when the Logos became a human being that Jesus Christ came into existence. So Jesus Christ is the Logos that has become a human; but Jesus did not exist before that incarnation happened. It was the Logos that existed before.

Quite elevated things are said of this Logos, the Word. The very beginning of the poem quickly calls to mind the beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. Here in John we are told, “In the beginning was the Word,” and that it was through this Word that “all things were made,” including “life” and “light.” How could a Jewish reader not immediately think of the creation story in Genesis? Genesis also starts with the words: “In the beginning”—the same Greek words later used in John. This opening of Genesis is all about creation. And how does God create the world and all that is in it? By speaking a word: “And God said, ‘Let there be light. And there was light.” It is God who creates light, and eventually, life, and he does so with his word. Now in the Prologue to John we have a reflection on that Word as a kind of hypostasis of God.

As in other Jewish texts, the Word is a being separate from God, and yet since it is God’s word, his own outward expression of himself, it fully represents who he is, and does nothing else, and in this sense it is itself God. So John tells us that the Word was both “with God” and “was God.” This Word was that which brought all life into existence and brought light out of darkness—just as in Genesis.

A careful reader at this point will be reminded of what some Jewish texts say about Wisdom, as the divine agent through whom God created the world, as in Proverbs 8. This comparison is indeed apt. As Thomas Tobin, a scholar of ancient Judaism, has summarized the matter, the following things are said both about Wisdom in various non-Christian Jewish texts and about the Logos in the Prologue to John:¹⁷

Both were at the beginning (John 1:1; Prov.8:22–23).

Both were with God (John 1:1; Prov.8:27–30; Wis. 9:9).

Both were the agent through whom all things were made (John 1:3; Wis. 7:22).

Both provide “life” (John 1:3–4; Prov.8:35; Wis. 8:13).

Both provide “light” (John 1:4; Wis. 6:12; 8:26).

Both are superior to darkness (John 1:5; Wis. 7:29–30).

Both are not to be recognized by those in the world (John 1:10; Bar. 3:31).

Both have dwelled among people in the world (John 1:11; Sir. 24:10; Bar. 3:37–4:1).

Both have been rejected by the people of God (John 1:11; Bar. 3:12).

Both have tabernacled (i.e., dwelt in a tent) among people (John 1:14; Sir. 24:8; Bar. 3:38).

The Logos in the Christ poem of the Prologue of John, then, is being understood very much like Wisdom in other Jewish texts. As Tobin points out, the things said of the Logos here in John are also very similar to the portrait of the Logos found in the writings of Philo. In both cases, the Logos is reminiscent of Wisdom. In both, the Logos existed with God before the creation, “in the beginning”; and in both, it is called “God.” For both, it is the instrument of creation and the means by which people become children of God.

No one should think that Philo, or the Jewish writings about Wisdom, are the actual literary source for the Prologue’s poetic celebration of the Logos. My point instead is that what is said about the Logos here at the beginning of John is very similar to what Jewish authors were saying about both Logos and Wisdom. There is a crucial difference, however. In John’s Gospel—and only there, among the texts I have been considering—the Logos becomes a specific human being. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the Logos.

As I intimated before, the Prologue is not saying that Jesus preexisted, that he created the universe, that he became flesh. Instead, it is saying that the Logos did all these things. Before all else existed, it was with God, and since it was God’s own Logos, in that sense it actually was God. It was through the Logos that the universe and all that was in it was created and given life. And this Logos then became a human being: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That in-fleshment, or incarnation, of the Logos is who Jesus Christ was. When the Logos became a human and dwelt among his own people, his own people rejected him (John 1:11). But those who received him were the ones who were made “the children of God” (1:12). These were people who were not merely born into this physical world; they were born from God (1:13). That is because this Logos-made-flesh is the unique Son of God; he is superior even to the great lawgiver Moses since he is the only one who has ever dwelled with God—in his very bosom. And he is therefore the only one who has made the Father known (1:17–18).

In considering the far-reaching implications of this magnificent incarnation Christology, there is a clear downside that you may have detected just from my preceding remarks. If the Logos-made-flesh is the only one who truly knew God and made him known—far more so than Moses the lawgiver of the Jews—and if this one who revealed God has been rejected by his own people, what does that say about the Jews? According to this view, they have obviously rejected not only Jesus, but the Word of God who was God himself. And by rejecting “God” the Logos, have they not also, by implication, rejected God? The far-reaching, and rather horrific, implications of this view will be the subject of a later discussion in the epilogue. Some Christians came to argue that by refusing to recognize Jesus’s true identity, the Jews rejected their own God.

One other point needs to be reemphasized at this stage however. If one uses the term high Christology to talk about this kind of incarnational view, the Prologue of John would be presenting a very high Christology indeed—higher than that even in the Philippians poem. For the author of that poem, as for Paul himself, Christ was some kind of angelic being before becoming a human—probably the “chief angel” or the “Angel of the Lord.” And as a result of his obedience to God unto death, he was given an even more exalted state of being as one who was equal to God in honor and status as the Lord of all. This in itself is a remarkably exalted view of Jesus, the rural preacher from Galilee who proclaimed the coming kingdom of God and who, having ended up on the wrong side of the law, was crucified. But the Prologue of John has an even more elevated view of Christ. Here, Christ is not an angel of God, who was later “hyperexalted” or given a higher place than he had before he appeared on earth. Quite the contrary, even before he appeared, he was the Logos of God himself, a being who was God, the one through whom the entire universe was created.

Even though this view of Christ as the Logos made flesh is not found anywhere else in the Gospel of John, its views are obviously closely aligned with the Christology of the Gospel otherwise. That is why Christ can make himself “equal with God” (John 5:18); can say that he and the Father “are one” (10:30); can talk about the “glory” he had with the Father before coming into the world (17:4); can say that anyone who has seen him has “seen the Father” (14:9); and can indicate that “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). This last verse is especially intriguing. As we have seen, in the Hebrew Bible when Moses encounters God at the burning bush in Exodus 3, he asks God what his name is. God tells him that his name is “I am.” In John, Jesus appears to take the name upon himself. Here he does not receive “the name that is above every name” at his exaltation after his resurrection, as in the Philippians poem (Phil. 2:9). He already has “the name” while on earth. Throughout the Gospel of John, the unbelieving Jews understand full well what Jesus is saying about himself when he makes such claims. They regularly take up stones to execute him for committing blasphemy, for claiming in fact to be God.

Other Traces of Incarnation Christologies

BY NO STRETCH OF the imagination have I intended to provide a full, complete, and exhaustive evaluation of every Christological passage of the New Testament in my discussions so far. To do that would take a very long book indeed, and my objective is something else—to explain the two dominant Christological options of the early Christian movement: the older Christology “from below,” which I am calling an exaltation Christology, arguably the very first Christological view of the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven; and the somewhat later Christology “from above,” which I am calling an incarnation Christology. We don’t know how soon Christians started thinking of Jesus not merely as a man who had become an angel or an angel-like being, but as an angel—or some other divine being—who preexisted his appearance on earth. But it must have been remarkably early in the Christian tradition. This view did not originate with the Gospel of John, as I used to believe (as have a lot of other scholars). It was in place well before Paul’s letters, as evidenced in the fact that the pre-Pauline Christ poem of Philippians attests it, as does Paul himself in scattered and sometimes frustratingly vague references throughout his writings. I don’t think we can say for certain that this incarnation Christology dates earlier than the early 50s CE, but there’s no reason it could not do so. Possibly it is much earlier. Once Christians thought of Jesus as an angel—and that could have happened very early, perhaps in the first years of the movement—the way was opened for the idea that he had always been an angel, and therefore a preexistent divine being. And so an incarnation Christology was born.

As we will see, eventually incarnation Christologies developed significantly and overtook exaltation Christologies, which came to be deemed inadequate and, eventually, “heretical.” Already in some of the later writings of the New Testament we have elevated affirmations of the divinity of Jesus in Christological passages that apparently were written to counter earlier, objectionable views. This is the case, for example, with a passage attributed to Paul in the book of Colossians.

The Letter to the Colossians

I say this passage is attributed to Paul because scholars have long had reasons to think that this book was written by one of his later followers some time after Paul was dead.¹⁸ I won’t go into those reasons here. But I do want to note quickly that the book embraces Christological views that are astounding in their affirmation of who Christ really is. In particular the poetic section (another preliterary tradition perhaps?) in 1:15–20 has long fascinated scholars. Here, Christ is said to be the “image of the invisible God” (1:15)—a clear allusion to Jewish teachings of Wisdom as a hypostasis of God. Christ is called the “first born of all creation” (1:15), and we are told that “all things were created in him” (1:16). These “all things” are not just the material world, but all natural and supernatural beings “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities” (1:16). Just as in the Prologue of John, Christ the Logos was made flesh; here, he is Wisdom made flesh. In fact “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (1:19). We have now moved into an entirely different realm from the earlier exaltation Christologies.

The Letter to the Hebrews

Something similar could be said of the elevated Christological statements of the letter to the Hebrews, a book that was eventually admitted into the New Testament once church fathers had become convinced that Paul wrote it, even though it does not explicitly claim to be written by Paul and was almost certainly not written by him. The book begins with striking Christological claims. Christ is the “Son of God” who is the “heir of all things” and “through whom [God] created the world” (1:2). More than that, like the hypostases of Wisdom and Logos, Christ “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (1:3).

This may appear to be the kind of incarnational Christology found in the Gospel of John—and indeed it is very close in some respects. But a hint of exaltation Christology remains here as well, much as we found in the Philippians Christ poem. For here, after Jesus’s death, we are told that he “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs” (1:3–4). Once more, as in Philippians, we have an incarnational Christology mixed with a later exaltation. One of the major themes of the early part of Hebrews is that Christ in fact is superior to all angelic beings (e.g., 1:5–8; 2:5–9). In stressing this point, the unknown author quotes the passage from Psalm 45 that we had occasion to notice in Chapter 2, in which the king of Israel is called “God.” Now the verse is taken to refer to Christ: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (1:8).

The book of Hebrews wants to stress that Christ is superior to the angels in part because of its overriding emphasis: Christ is superior to simply everything in Judaism—angels, Moses, the Jewish priests, the Jewish high priest, the sacrifices in the temple, and on and on. Once again, we are confronted with the discomfiting situation. To make such exalted professions about Christ more or less forced the Christians to drive a wedge between their views and those of Jews, a matter to which we return in the epilogue.

Beyond Incarnation

AT THIS POINT IT is enough to note that exaltation Christologies eventually gave way to incarnation Christologies, with some authors—such as the anonymous writers of the Philippians Christ poem and the letter to the Hebrews—presenting a kind of amalgam of the two views. Eventually, however, incarnation Christologies emerged as dominant in the Christian tradition.

But this is not the end of the story of how Jesus became God. As we will see, innumerable developments occurred as theologians tried to work out the precise implications of these rather imprecise early claims made about Christ. One of the first issues to be addressed is one that may seem blindingly obvious to most readers as a potential problem. If Christ really was God, and God the Father was God, how could Christians claim that there was just one God? Aren’t there two Gods? And if the Holy Spirit is also God, aren’t there three Gods? If so, aren’t Christians polytheists instead of monotheists?

Many of the struggles in the period after the New Testament period were over this precise issue. Numerous solutions to the problem were posed, several of which were eventually denounced as false teachings and heresies. But other solutions led theologians further onward and upward as they tried to refine their views, so as to affirm in the strongest terms their hard-fought convictions: Jesus was God; he was not God the Father; yet there was only one God.