Early Belief in Jesus' Divinity

"In all of Paul’s letters cultic devotion to Christ is presupposed as already characteristic of the Pauline congregations, which means it must be traced back at least to the 40s." — Larry Hurtado, 2003¹

"No, by and large the first Christians did not worship Jesus as such." — James D. G. Dunn, 2010²

Summary

The popular claim that Christians first made Jesus divine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is false.  None of the scholars tested here holds it, including the skeptic Bart Ehrman.  The live disputes are narrower.  One is what Jesus' first followers meant by the exalted things they said and did.  The other is how far back before the surviving letters those things go.

The firm evidence is the seven letters nearly every critical scholar accepts as Paul's.  They were written between about AD 48 and 62:  Galatians perhaps as early as the late 40s, most of the others in the 50s, and Philippians anywhere from the mid-50s to about 62, depending on where Paul was imprisoned.  That is roughly fifteen to thirty years after the crucifixion.  They show the following.

1. "Divine" is several claims, not one. Raised and exalted to heaven, given God's name, existing before his birth, acting in creation, prayed to, called "God," and sharing God's one essence are separate claims. The letters attest most of them. They do not use the language of one essence. They call Jesus "God" at most once, in Romans 9:5, where the sense depends on punctuation that editors supply; the Greek word order favours reading it of Christ, but not decisively.
2. Paul's churches prayed to Jesus and called on his name. Paul calls Christians "all who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place."³ He applies Joel's "whoever will call on Yahweh's name shall be saved" to Jesus.³³ He asks "the Lord" three times to remove an affliction, and the answer he reports speaks of "the power of Christ," so the Lord he asked was Jesus.³ He prays to "our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus" together.³ He quotes an Aramaic cry, most probably marana tha, "our Lord, come," untranslated, to Greek readers.⁴ Verdict: established for the 50s. Paul presents invocation as familiar practice, which favours an origin before the letters. The cry preserves an Aramaic form of invocation, most plausibly from Judea or Syria. Paul, "a Hebrew of Hebrews" who had lived in Damascus and visited Jerusalem, could have carried the phrase himself, so it alone cannot show that the cry began before his Greek mission.³ Together with Paul's use of Jewish scriptures about Yahweh, it counts against Wilhelm Bousset's 1913 theory that the cult of Jesus as Lord began in Gentile churches under pagan influence (Part 9). An origin in the 40s is plausible. Paul had preached for well over a decade before his first surviving letter, and the church at Rome, which he did not found and had wanted to visit for years, shared the confession "Jesus is Lord" and the call on his name.³³³³ Those facts suggest an inherited devotional pattern, but do not date every practice or belief to that decade. An origin in the 30s, and the practice of every early leader, remain uncertain.
3. The Father still receives the thanks, and no early text reports a sacrifice to Jesus. Paul's thanks go "always" to God, often "through" Jesus.⁵ James McGrath argues that animal sacrifice was the clearest line in Jewish worship, and no early text has Christians offering one to Jesus.⁶ The letters do not describe congregational animal offerings to either Jesus or the Father. This limits what the absence of an offering can establish about their beliefs; it does not remove McGrath's proposed Jewish boundary. Whether to call the practices "worship" depends on which acts count. Larry Hurtado says the cluster of practices amounts to worship. James Dunn grants that Jesus was invoked and prayed to, but calls the result "veneration ... something short of full-scale worship."⁵⁵
4. 1 Corinthians 8:6 puts Jesus beside God in a Shema-like confession, as the one "through whom are all things." The verse sets "one God, the Father" beside "one Lord, Jesus Christ" in an argument about idols.³ It uses the key words of the Shema in Greek, "the Lord our God, the Lord is one."⁷ Richard Bauckham reads this as Paul including Jesus within the identity of Israel's one God.⁸ McGrath reads it as one God plus one agent beside him.⁶ Verdict: that the verse gives Jesus a part in creation, and so existence before it, is probable. Karl-Josef Kuschel reads the clause instead as the new creation of salvation.⁹ Creation agency does not settle the main dispute by itself: Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Paul, called God's Word the "instrument" by which the world was made.¹⁰ Bauckham's reading fits the Shema pattern and the Yahweh texts best, but the words do not force it. "One God, the Father" keeps a real distinction.
5. Philippians 2:6-11 most probably describes a pre-existent figure who became human, then was exalted and given "the name which is above every name." Ehrman, Hurtado and Bauckham read it this way.¹⁸¹¹ Dunn reads it as a story of Christ in the role of Adam. By 1998 he granted that it "set in motion the thought of Christ’s preexistence," while calling that "an extended metaphor."¹² The passage applies to Jesus the oath of Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh says "to me every knee shall bow."³ Verdict: pre-existence probable. Whether he already held "equality with God" is disputed in the specialist studies. Roy Hoover's study of the Greek idiom concludes that he held it and did not exploit it; Samuel Vollenweider reads the word as "booty" that he did not seize.¹³¹⁴ That the passage was a hymn older than the letter is not established.
6. Paul also orders Jesus under the Father. God exalts him and gives him the name. At the end "the Son will also himself be subjected" so "that God may be all in all."³ These verses do not deny Jesus' divine status. They do not formulate the Son's relation to the Father in the Council of Nicaea's later terms, including "of one substance" in 325. That creed itself kept Paul's frame: one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, "through whom all things came to be."¹⁵
7. Jewish texts of the period had exalted agents, but the surviving sources show no community praying to one in its regular worship. Philo calls God's Word "God" in a lesser sense.¹⁶ The Parables of Enoch, probably from around the turn of the era, picture kings who "fall down" and "worship" the Son of Man at the judgment.¹⁷¹⁸ So the ideas were available. The closest parallels go further in single respects: a Qumran scroll reads the "God" of Psalm 82:1 as the angel Melchizedek, and the angel Yahoel bears God's name. But each text keeps its figure distinct from Yahweh, and neither figure is worshipped.⁸⁸ What Hurtado finds no parallel for "in the extant sources" is a pattern of public, corporate worship given to a second figure alongside God.¹ That is a claim about what survives, and most of what survives is literature, not records of worship.
8. Later texts show where this went, and that it did not move in a straight line. Under the emperor Trajan, who reigned 98-117, the Roman governor Pliny reports that Christians sang or chanted "to Christ as to a god."¹⁹ The letters of Ignatius, dated by different scholars to Trajan's reign or to the 140s, call Jesus "our God."²⁰²¹ John's Gospel has Thomas say "My Lord and my God!"³ These cannot be pushed back into the 30s. They show plain "God" language present by the early second century, alongside prayer still offered to the Father through Jesus.

Verdict.  By the 50s, Paul's letters attest calling on Jesus' name in words scripture used of Yahweh and prayer to him alone and together with the Father.  They also probably give him a part in creation.  The dating is strong:  it rests on letters of secure authorship and on practices they assume rather than defend.  The meaning is less certain.  Two overall accounts fit the evidence.  In one, Jesus is included within the identity of Israel's one God.  In the other, he is God's unique agent, honoured beyond any known precedent.  The first reads the Yahweh texts and devotional pattern as inclusion within God, while allowing an order between Father and Son.  The second reads them as extraordinary honours delegated by the one God, the Father.  The Father's primacy is compatible with both accounts; the point at issue is whether the honours cross the boundary between God and an agent.  On balance the evidence favours the first, but not decisively.  Whether the belief was true is a separate question, and this evidence cannot settle it.

Part 1: What "divine" can mean

Arguments about early Christology often fail because the two sides mean different things by "divine."  Ancient people called many beings "god."  Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Paul, says plainly that "There is one true God only: but they who are called Gods, by an abuse of language, are numerous."¹⁶  So the question is never just whether a text uses an exalted word.  It is which of the following claims the text makes.

The table separates three things the evidence often blurs.  First, what Jesus claimed during his ministry is a different question from what his followers believed afterward.  Ehrman's own position on the first is "messiah, yes; God, no."¹¹  This article does not try to settle it.  Second, a title can carry different weights in different places.  Greek kyrios could mean "sir," "master" or the name of God, so the context has to show which.⁶  Third, a high belief early does not prove that the belief is true.  It answers the question of when and how, not whether it was right.

Part 2: The texts and their dates

The base for this question is the seven letters of Paul that almost no critical scholar doubts:  Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon.  Ehrman calls them "our earliest surviving writings from an early Christian."¹¹  Their dates and the grounds for them are set out in Paul's Letters as Historical Evidence:  about AD 48 to 62 in all, with Galatians possibly in the late 40s, most letters in the 50s, and Philippians somewhere from the mid-50s to about 62, depending on where Paul was imprisoned.  Hurtado gives about 60 for a Roman imprisonment, "perhaps a few years earlier" for one in Ephesus.²²  Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians and the Pastoral letters are disputed, as Did Paul Write the Disputed Letters? explains, so this article leaves them out of the firm base.  If they are not Paul's, they are probably later;  their date depends on the authorship and dating arguments, not on the dispute itself.  They are used here only as cautious controls.

A letter dates a practice it mentions to before the letter.  It does not date it to a particular earlier year.  Three levels need to be kept apart.

1. What the letter says. This is dated by the letter.
2. What the letter treats as already known and shared. When Paul mentions a practice without explaining or defending it, the practice is older than the letter. How much older depends on other clues.
3. What the letter may quote. Scholars have long argued that Philippians 2:6-11 and parts of 1 Corinthians 8:6 are older formulas.¹¹¹¹ A poetic shape does not prove that. Paul could write elevated prose himself. Bauckham thinks Paul "composed it," and Hurtado came to say he was "considering more that it may be a “hymnic” composition by Paul."⁸²³ Hurtado also noted that the hymn idea "does not seem to have occurred to anyone prior to the early twentieth century."²²

The dates of the letters provide the firm limits.  The joint prayer-wish appears in 1 Thessalonians, about AD 50; invocation and maranatha in 1 Corinthians, in the mid-50s; and Joel's words in Romans, in the late 50s.  There are reasons to look earlier: Paul presents invocation as familiar, the Aramaic formula points to Aramaic-speaking networks, his preaching began well before the surviving letters, and Rome shared the confession although he had not founded its church.  These facts make a devotional pattern originating in the 40s plausible.  They do not date each component to that decade.  A missionary can develop his teaching, and a familiar practice need not have existed throughout his mission.  Nothing here establishes the complete pattern in Jerusalem in the 30s or among every early leader.

Martin Hengel drew the strong conclusion.  He wrote that Paul's letters "demonstrate a stereotyped christology within which we cannot establish any real development," so that by about AD 48 "his christology was largely complete."²⁴  That is an inference from the absence of development across about ten years of letters.  It counts against a slow process running through the 50s.  It does not by itself rule out change before the surviving letters, which report those years retrospectively, or after them.

Part 3: Prayer and devotion to Jesus

Hurtado's argument in his own terms

Larry Hurtado of Edinburgh built his case on what early Christians did, not on titles.  Dunn, who dedicated his own book on the question to Hurtado and Bauckham as "partners in dialogue," summed up Hurtado's claim as "that cultic devotion to Jesus was practised within a few years of Christianity’s beginnings."²  In 1988 Hurtado listed "six features" of early devotion:  "(1) hymnic practices, (2) prayer and related practices, (3) use of the name of Christ, (4) the Lord’s Supper, (5) confession of faith in Jesus, and (6) prophetic pronouncements of the risen Christ."²⁵  In 2003 he put the pattern in two parts:  "(1) a strong affirmation of exclusivist monotheism in belief and practice, along with (2) an inclusion of Christ along with God as rightful recipient of cultic devotion."¹

Hurtado's claim is about the pattern, not any single act.  He grants that one can find "examples here or there in Jewish texts where some figure other than God is appealed to for help", but says these "hardly constitute a pattern of devotional actions that could be regarded as cultic worship of such figures."¹  He also grants the key question is fair:  "whether the devotion to Christ reflected in Paul’s letters really amounts to “worship” in the sense of reverence directed to a deity."¹  On timing, he concludes that the pattern "began so early that no trace is left of any stages of development," and so must be traced "at least to the 40s", and probably "to the first years of the Christian movement (the 30s)."¹

His explanation for why it happened is separate.  He argues that "Something more is required" than reverence for a teacher, and points to revelatory experiences, while adding that "It is not necessary for my theory, however, that we grant the religious validity of these (or any other) experiences."¹  The timing argument does not depend on that explanation.

The evidence, act by act

Each kind of act needs to be sorted.  Prayer addressed to Jesus is one thing.  Prayer to the Father "through" Jesus is another.  Joint address of God and Jesus is a third.  Bowing or honor is a fourth, and the Greek word for it, proskyneō, was used for bowing to kings and masters as well as to God.⁶

1. Calling on the name. Paul greets the Corinthians along "with all who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place."³ In Romans he quotes Joel exactly: "Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved."³ In Joel the name is Yahweh's.³ In Romans the "Lord" is the one confessed in verse 9, "Jesus is Lord," and verse 12 calls him "Lord of all."³ The Greek of Romans 10:13 matches the Septuagint of Joel 3:5 word for word apart from the connecting "for."⁴⁷ Hurtado notes that "To “call upon the Lord” is a frequent biblical expression for worship of Yahweh."¹ Bauckham concludes that "confessing Jesus as Lord or calling on the name of the Lord Jesus is tantamount to acknowledging YHWH as the one and only God."⁸ This is address to Jesus in scripture's words for calling on Yahweh, and Paul treats it as the mark of a believer. "In every place" is Paul's description of what he took to be normal, not a survey of every congregation.
2. Maranatha. Paul ends 1 Corinthians with the Aramaic words Μαράνα θά.⁴ The early Greek manuscript tradition usually runs words together, so the printed division is an editor's. Read marana tha, it means "our Lord, come!"; read maran atha, it would mean "our Lord has come." Hurtado says the phrase "is probably vocalized marana tha, “Our Lord, Come!”"¹ Two Greek texts support the petition. Revelation ends its book with the same request in Greek, "come, Lord Jesus!"³ The Didache, a church manual Kirsopp Lake dated "probably early second century, or possibly earlier," prints the letters as μαρὰν ἀθά at the close of its Eucharist prayers, but in a run of petitions: "Let grace come and let this world pass away ... let him repent: Maran atha." Lake renders it "Our Lord! Come!"²⁰²⁰ Hurtado and Dunn both take it as an appeal to Jesus.⁵¹ Hurtado reports that Conzelmann thought it "an open question" whether Jesus was asked to come to the gathering or at the end of history.¹ That question of setting is separate from the parsing. On the preferred petition reading, Greek-speaking Gentiles in Corinth used an untranslated Aramaic prayer to Jesus. The alternative reading would attest an acclamation about his coming, rather than this particular act of prayer. That points to Aramaic-speaking believers, most likely in Judea or Syria, before the letter. Paul could have brought it to Corinth himself, so it does not show that the practice began before his mission. It cannot say in what year it began, or whether every leader in Jerusalem used it.
3. Personal prayer. "Concerning this thing, I begged the Lord three times that it might depart from me." The reply is "My grace is sufficient for you."³ Verse 8 does not name the Lord. But the reply speaks of "my power," and Paul at once calls it "the power of Christ," so the Lord addressed is most naturally Jesus. Hurtado calls this "explicit indication of direct, personal prayer to Jesus."¹
4. God and Jesus addressed together. "Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way to you."³ The Greek verb is singular with the two subjects.⁴ That is ordinary Greek and proves nothing by itself: Matthew 5:18 also puts a singular verb with "heaven and earth."⁴ The evidence is the joint address. Six of the seven letters wish their readers grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ together; the seventh, 1 Thessalonians, addresses the church "in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."⁴³ Dunn adds a point from C. J. Davis: "there are no examples of such binitarian prayer within pre-Christian monotheism."⁵
5. Confession. "Jesus is Lord" is the confession that saves in Romans 10:9 and the one only the Spirit can prompt in 1 Corinthians 12:3.³³
6. Prayer to the Father, through Jesus. In the letters this is the most common form. How congregations actually prayed is not recorded in numbers. Hurtado himself says prayer "is most characteristically offered to God “the Father”."¹ Romans 1:8 gives thanks to God "through Jesus Christ."¹

Dunn's and McGrath's objections

James Dunn, who agreed with Hurtado on most of the texts,² read the same evidence more cautiously.  He found Paul careful with worship words.  "His thanks (eucharistein, eucharistia) are always addressed to God and never to Christ," and the normal prayer words "are usually addressed to God and never to Christ."⁵  The one use of proskyneō in Paul is worship of God (1 Corinthians 14:25).⁵  Hymns like Philippians 2 "give praise to God for Christ" rather than to him.⁵  He proposed "veneration of Christ, meaning by that something short of full-scale worship."⁵  In 2010 his answer was "No, by and large the first Christians did not worship Jesus as such," while adding that "Jesus enables worship."²²

James McGrath calls Hurtado's approach "the one I find extremely helpful", but asks which acts marked the boundary.⁶  He notes that proskynēsis "could denote a range of practices, from prostration before another individual to animal sacrifice," and that bowing to others "did not always raise controversy in a Jewish context, while the latter pretty much always did."⁶  So "if animal sacrifice was the key issue, then the failure of Christians to offer such sacrifices to Jesus suggests that the early Christian movement adhered to Jewish monotheism."⁶

The atheist writer Tim O'Neill makes a related objection.  He says Hurtado's argument rests on Gospel scenes where people "worship" Jesus, and that the word there "simply means "to bow before, to prostrate yourself, to show submission before"."²⁶  The point about the word is right.  But it answers a weaker argument than Hurtado's main one.  Hurtado's case rests on the cluster of acts in Paul's letters, including calling on his name and praying to him, not on bowing in the Gospels.¹

What the evidence supports

The central acts are granted on both sides.  Dunn agrees with Hurtado that "Jesus was invoked or besought in Christian worship and prayer," and that maranatha was "an already well-established invocation."⁵⁵  McGrath asks which acts crossed the line.  The disagreement is partly about the label and partly about the pattern:  Dunn weighs that thanks, most prayer and glory still go to the Father, while Hurtado weighs the acts that do go to Jesus as one programme.

Calling on Jesus' name in words scripture uses of Yahweh is significant, but whether it crosses the boundary McGrath proposes is the question to answer.  No early text examined here reports animal sacrifice to Jesus.  The letters also do not describe congregational animal offerings to the Father; that absence does not establish that no Christian ever participated in a Temple sacrifice.  Nor does it remove the Jewish distinction between sacrificing to God and sacrificing to another being.  McGrath's evidence therefore remains relevant: the clearest sacrificial boundary is not shown to have been crossed.  Hurtado's response must rest on what the other devotional acts collectively imply, rather than on sacrifice being absent.  Where Paul uses sacrifice as a metaphor, it goes to God: "present your bodies a living sacrifice ... to God" (Romans 12:1).³  Paul also sets the Lord's Supper beside cultic meals.  He asks, "Don't those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar?", then says "You can't both partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons."³  That associates the meal with the Lord's fellowship; it does not by itself identify Jesus as the recipient of a sacrifice.  The Father remains the recipient of Paul's thanksgiving.

Graded: that Jesus was invoked and prayed to in Paul's churches by the 50s is established.  The formula preserves Aramaic-speaking devotion, most probably a petition.  An origin of the devotional pattern in the 40s is plausible, but the evidence does not date each act to that decade.  A beginning before Paul's mission, in the first year or two, or among every early leader is unproved.

Part 4: 1 Corinthians 8:6 and the Shema

The verse in its argument

Paul is answering a question from Corinth about food offered to idols.  He quotes or agrees with a slogan, "there is no other God but one," and then writes:

For though there are things that are called “gods”, whether in the heavens or on earth—as there are many “gods” and many “lords”—yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for him;  and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we live through him.³

In Greek the second half reads ἀλλ’ ἡμῖν εἷς θεὸς ὁ πατήρ, ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς αὐτόν, καὶ εἷς κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς δι’ αὐτοῦ.⁴  The setting is a conflict over worship:  whether believers may eat in temples.  So the verse is about who receives a believer's allegiance, and it is not an abstract statement about the nature of God.

Bauckham's reading

Richard Bauckham, "formerly of St Andrews" in Dunn's description,² argues that the statement "has been composed from two sources."  One is the Shema, Israel's daily confession, "The LORD our God, the LORD, is one."  He writes that Paul "has, in fact, reproduced all the words of the statement about YHWH in the Shema‘ ... but Paul has rearranged the words in such a way as to produce an affirmation of both one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ."⁸  The other source is a Jewish formula about God as creator, which Paul uses undivided of God alone in Romans 11:36:  "For of him and through him and to him are all things."³  In 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul gives "from" and "for" to the Father and "through" to Jesus.  Bauckham concludes that "Paul’s reformulation in 1 Corinthians 8:6 includes Christ in this exclusively divine work of creation by giving to him the role of instrumental cause."⁸

His key step is a dilemma.  If Paul were "adding the one Lord to the one God of whom the Shema’ speaks," he "would certainly be producing, not christological monotheism, but outright ditheism."  So, Bauckham argues, Paul must be "identifying Jesus as the ‘Lord’ whom the Shema’ affirms to be one."⁸  He calls the result as high a Christology as is "scarcely possible."⁸

Testing the word match

The claim that Paul reproduced "all the words" can be checked.  The Greek Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 reads κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν κύριος εἷς ἐστιν.⁷  Apart from the article, it uses five different words.  Paul's two lines use four of them:  κύριος, θεός, εἷς, and the pronoun "our," which Paul has as ἡμῖν, "for us."  Bauckham notes that last change himself.⁸  Paul drops ἐστιν, uses κύριος once where the Shema has it twice, uses εἷς twice where the Shema has it once, and adds "the Father" and "Jesus Christ."

So the vocabulary match is real, and the small differences do not count against Bauckham.  Dropping the verb and changing a pronoun's case are ordinary in a Greek formula, and Bauckham claims a reworking, not a quotation.  Equally, the word count cannot carry the argument:  any Jew who wrote "one God" and "one Lord" in the same breath would use most of these words.  The stronger tests are the setting and the shape.  The setting is a dispute about idols, where loyalty to Israel's one God is the issue.  The shape gives "God" to the Father and "Lord," the word the Greek Shema uses for Yahweh, to Jesus.  And it divides between them the prepositions that Romans 11:36 gives to God alone.  Those features make a deliberate echo of the Shema probable.  They leave open which of two things Paul meant by it:  that the one Lord of the Shema is Jesus, or that beside the one God stands one Lord who acts for him.

McGrath's alternative: an expanded Shema

McGrath reports that "In the view of the majority of New Testament scholars, in 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul has “split the Shema”."  He argues that this "does not do justice to the nature of the Shema itself", since the Shema "clearly identifies “Lord” (rendering the tetragrammaton) and “God.”"  Paul "does not say that there is one God who is both Father and Son; he says rather that there is one God and also one Lord."⁶  On his reading, the "many lords" are earthly rulers who act for the gods, and Paul's point is that "there is only one God in heaven, and there is only one Lord, one agent and mediator, who rules on his behalf over all creation."⁶  He calls it "an expanded Shema rather than a split Shema," and offers parallels.  The nearest is 1 Timothy 2:5, "one God and one mediator," which he notes may not be Paul's own.⁶

McGrath's reading has two strengths.  It takes "one God, the Father" at face value, and it explains the distinction Paul keeps between God and Lord throughout his letters.  Its weak point is not the creation clause alone.  A Jewish thinker could describe creation through God's Word while distinguishing the Word from the supreme God:  Philo, writing in Alexandria in Paul's lifetime, sorts the causes of the world into the one "by whom" it was made, the material, the instrument "by means of which" it was made, and the purpose, and says "the instrument is the word of God."¹⁰  The same Word is, for Philo, God's "first-born" and "the eldest of his angels."²⁷  So a "through whom" agent of creation had a Jewish precedent, and in Philo the line between God's own Word and his chief agent is not drawn the way modern categories draw it.  What tells against McGrath is the combination:  the agent here is named "Lord" inside a Shema-like confession, is called on in prayer with Joel's words for Yahweh, and receives Isaiah's oath in Philippians 2.  The Philo passages cited here do not describe prayer to the Word.  McGrath's nearest parallel, 1 Timothy 2:5, "one God and one mediator," shows that a monotheistic formula could add a second, subordinate figure;  but it comes from a disputed letter and concerns salvation, not creation.⁶

Dunn and Ehrman: Wisdom

Dunn agrees with the creation reading.  "The “one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things,” clearly existed before the creation of the “all things (ta panta).”"⁵  But he explains it through Jewish talk about God's Wisdom, which he holds was "universally understood within early Judaism as God’s wisdom, as the immanent God in his wise engagement with his creation and his people."⁵  So, he says, "Is there then a thought of preexistence in 1 Cor. 8.6 ... Of course there is. But it is the preexistence of divine Wisdom."⁵  Ehrman, too, says the verse "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."¹¹

The Wisdom reading should not be counted as a half-step toward Bauckham's.  For Dunn, Wisdom is "God in his wisdom," God's own action, and to identify Christ with it is to say that God's creative action is now seen in Christ.  That is not the claim that the man Jesus existed as a person before creation, and Dunn means it not to be.  Bauckham, who also holds that Word and Wisdom are "intrinsic to the unique divine identity,"⁸ draws the opposite conclusion:  a figure intrinsic to God who is also the personal Lord Jesus Christ.  The verse's wording, "one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom," names a person, which fits Bauckham's reading better.  But Dunn's reading is a real alternative, not a concession.

What "all things" means

Two scholars read "through whom are all things" as the new creation.  Karl-Josef Kuschel argues from the setting, a baptismal acclamation, and from the fact that "in Paul the Kyrios is never a protological figure ... but is always already an eschatological figure."  He gives the two "all things" different scopes:  "the theological ta panta might refer to the very first creation of the world;  by contrast, the christological ta panta refers (as is usual in Paul) to the prevailing circumstances in the present."⁹  Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, as Kuschel reports him, held that "the alternative ‘cosmology or soteriology?’ is a false one," and read the verse as "a universal soteriology which embraces the whole creation."⁹  In his own commentary he supplies "verbs of movement rather than the static ‘are’ and ‘exist’" and calls the verse "in fact an acclamation" used at baptism.²⁸  His 1978 article was not read for this review.  Dunn rejects both readings.⁵

Kuschel's reading has a real difficulty.  It gives one phrase, τὰ πάντα, two scopes in two parallel lines, "from whom are all things" and "through whom are all things."  A writer who wanted the second line to mean something narrower than the first would have reason to say so.  Murphy-O'Connor's reading does not split the phrase, so this objection does not touch it;  it asks instead whether Paul's "all things" means the world or the world as now being remade.  Romans 11:36 does not settle that question by itself.  It closes three chapters on God's plan for Israel and the nations, and the verses just before it quote Isaiah 40:13, a passage about the Creator.³  Its "all things" covers everything, created things included, in a doxology about God's saving plan.  Taken together, the parallel lines and the Creator language of the formula make a reference that includes creation the more probable reading.  The "we" clauses bring salvation in, as Bauckham and Hurtado both say.¹  So creation is the more probable scope, with redemption added;  the new-creation reading is a minority view with real arguments, not an error.

Assessment

Graded:  that 1 Corinthians 8:6 gives Jesus a part in the creation of all things, and so existence before it, is probable.  That Paul echoes the Shema deliberately is probable.  That he thereby includes Jesus in the identity of the one God is the best fit, but not proved.  McGrath's reading of an agent beside God survives as a minority alternative.  The creation clause alone does not defeat it, given Philo;  it is weakened by the combination of Shema wording, prayer in Yahweh's words and Isaiah's oath.  The verse calls only the Father "God."  It does not say that Father and Son are equal, and it is silent on how they are related.

Part 5: Philippians 2:6-11

The passage and its purpose

Paul tells the Philippians to do "nothing through rivalry or through conceit, but in humility, each counting others better than himself," and to "Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus."³  Then:

who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, yes, the death of the cross.  Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.³

The passage serves an ethical point:  someone with status who does not use it for himself.  Two word links in the Greek tie it to the verses before it.  "Counting others better" in 2:3 and "didn’t consider" in 2:6 are the same verb, ἡγέομαι.  The "conceit" of 2:3 is κενοδοξία, literally "empty glory," and "emptied himself" in 2:7 is ἐκένωσεν, from the same root.⁴  Ehrman's objection concerns the second half.  He argues that the exaltation "does not seem to fit its context," because "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," so Paul must be quoting a familiar older poem whole.¹¹  The second half does have a use later in the same letter.  Philippians 3:21 promises that Christ "will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able even to subject all things to himself."³  The Greek repeats the passage's own words:  "humiliation" (ταπείνωσις, compare ἐταπείνωσεν, "he humbled," 2:8), "conformed" (σύμμορφον, compare μορφή), and glory.⁴  So the pattern of humiliation then exaltation is one Paul applies to his readers, which weakens the claim that the second half sits awkwardly in the letter.  None of these links decides who wrote the passage.  They fit Paul writing it for this letter, and they fit Paul choosing an older piece because it suited his argument.

Three readings

1. A pre-existent figure becomes human. He is first "in the form of God," then takes "the form of a servant" and is "made in the likeness of men." This is the reading of Ehrman, Hurtado and Bauckham. Hurtado gives the reason from the structure: "given that 2:8 explicitly refers to the earthly Jesus’ self-abasement and obedience to death on the cross, it would be somewhat redundant if 2:6-7 were simply recounting the same action."¹
2. A human being who reverses Adam. Dunn argued in 1980 that "If Christ walks in Adam’s footsteps then Christ need be no more pre-existent than Adam," and that "no implication that Christ was pre-existent may be intended."²⁹ Adam grasped at being "like God"; Christ did not.
3. A pre-existent figure who was not yet God's equal. Ehrman's own version. Christ was "“Godlike,” or divine—like the chief angel, the Angel of the Lord," and "only after his act of obedience to the point of death was made God’s equal."¹¹¹¹ O'Neill takes a similar line.²⁶ Samuel Vollenweider, whom Ehrman cites, shares the reading of ἁρπαγμός as something seized, but not the angel: in his summary, Christ is the opposite of rulers who seized equality with God, and "the mantle of God's Oneness also embraces Christ as the Lord."¹⁴

"In the form of God"

The phrase is ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ.  The word μορφή occurs three times in the whole New Testament, twice here and once in the longer ending of Mark.³⁰  In the digital Rahlfs Septuagint used here, a search for words beginning μορφ- returns 13 verse entries.  They cover 12 verse references, because Tobit 1:13 appears in two textual forms of Tobit.  Every one is about visible form or appearance:  "there was no form before my eyes" (Job 4:16), hearing a voice "but not seeing a form" (Wisdom 18:1), an idol made "like the form of a man" (Isaiah 44:13), in this article's translations of the Greek.  None has "form of God."³⁰  That is one translated corpus, not all Greek written by Jews before Paul, so it shows only that the Greek Bible gave no precedent for the phrase.  Bauckham concludes that the two "forms" in Philippians "refer to forms of appearance: the splendour of the divine glory in heaven contrasted with the human form on earth."⁸

That weighs against the Adam reading, but it does not exclude it.  Genesis says Adam was made κατ᾿ εἰκόνα θεοῦ, "in the image of God."⁷  Hurtado observes that later Jewish writers who allude to that idea "consistently use the eikén theou phrase", and that "morphé theou is never used elsewhere in any allusion to Adam."¹  Ehrman makes the same objection in plainer words:  a writer who meant Adam "would have said that Christ was “in the image of God.”"¹¹  He adds that in Genesis it is Eve, not Adam, who is tempted "to be like God."¹¹  That point is weaker than it looks.  In the Greek of Genesis 3:5 the serpent's promise is plural, "you will be like gods," and in 3:6 "they ate," in this article's translation.⁷  Paul himself makes Adam's transgression the type of the one to come (Romans 5:14).³  An allusion does not need the exact word, any more than Paul's Shema echo needs the Shema's verb.

Dunn gave a fuller answer in 1998.  He grants that "the case for seeing Philippians 2:6—11 as an expression of Adam christology is not immediately obvious" and "depends on an awareness of how allusion functions."  He answers four objections:  μορφή and εἰκών were "near synonyms";  the object of the refused grasping, "the being like God," is "a clearer echo of Gen. 3:5";  the two stages of the passage echo Adam's two deaths;  and the exaltation fits Paul's Adam passage in 1 Corinthians 15, with its "all things" put under his feet.¹²⁵  He also warned against judging an allusion word by word:  "To make recognition of such allusions depend on precision of meaning in individual terms would run counter to the art of allusion."⁵  Hurtado overstates his side in one sentence.  He says that, other than "God," there is "not a single word" in Philippians 2:6-8 from the Greek of Genesis 1:26-27.¹  Genesis 1:26 has ἄνθρωπον and ὁμοίωσιν, "likeness";  Philippians 2:7 has ἀνθρώπων and ὁμοιώματι, from the same root.⁴⁷  These are common words and make a weak allusion, but the sentence as written is not accurate.  On balance, an Adam echo is possible and perhaps likely in "being like God";  the vocabulary of form and slave fits a heavenly figure taking human form better than it fits Adam.

The Adam question and the pre-existence question are separate, and Dunn says so himself:  "the issue is in fact independent of finding an Adam christology in the Philippians passage."  His formulations in 1980 and 1998 differ.  In 1980 he wrote that "no implication that Christ was pre-existent may be intended."²⁹  In 1998 he granted that "“became in the very likeness of humankind” (2.7c) is more naturally read as a reference to birth," and that the passage "has also set in motion the thought of Christ’s preexistence."  He called a choice made in eternity to become human "the almost inevitable corollary."  But he added at once that "this is an extended metaphor":  the passage speaks not "simply" of "Christ Jesus as such ... but Christ Jesus in the role of Adam," and "The mistake would be to collapse the metaphor into a straightforward statement of historical fact."¹²⁵  So Dunn concedes what the text evokes, a pre-temporal choice, and denies that Paul meant it as a literal claim about the man Jesus.  That is a partial concession, not agreement with Ehrman, Hurtado and Bauckham.  Its value for their side is that a critic of the pre-existence reading grants the passage reads that way;  whether a first-century reader would have heard it as metaphor is the remaining question.

"A thing to be grasped"

The hardest word is ἁρπαγμός.  It occurs once in the New Testament and never in the Greek Old Testament, which has instead the related noun ἅρπαγμα, "plunder."³⁰  The noun alone does not settle whether Christ already had equality with God.  Roy Hoover, whose 1971 study is the basis of one main reading, says exactly that:  "the fundamental linguistic datum in Phil. 2:6 is the expression οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ and not the term ἁρπαγμός considered by itself."¹³  The idiom, the syntax and the story all bear on it.

1. Something not yet held, to be seized. Ehrman says the word "could in theory be used in both senses," but "is almost always used to refer to something a person doesn’t have but grasps for—like a thief who snatches someone’s purse," citing Samuel Vollenweider.¹¹ He calls it a verb, but it is a noun; the slip does not affect his point. Vollenweider, in his own summary, says the phrase "should not be understood in the manner of an idiom but in a clearly negative way," as "booty," against a background of kings and rulers who usurped "equality with God," as in Isaiah 14:12-15.¹⁴ O'Neill says the word "means "something to be seized, stolen, looted"," so that Christ "doesn't already have it."²⁶
2. Something held, not to be exploited. Hoover studied the phrase as an idiom: a negative, a predicate noun, a verb such as "consider" or "make," and an object, as in Heliodorus' Aethiopica 7.20, καὶ οὐχ ἅρπαγμα οὐδὲ ἕρμαιον ποιεῖται τὸ πρᾶγμα.¹³ His translation is "he did not regard being equal with God as something to take advantage of," or "as something to use for his own advantage." He adds that "in every instance which I have examined this idiomatic expression refers to something already present and at one's disposal."¹³ N. T. Wright judged that "If Hoover is right (and, though his conclusions have often been misunderstood, he has not been conclusively challenged on philological grounds)," the rival views "are undercut at a stroke."³¹ Bauckham follows Hoover: "the issue is not whether Christ gains equality or whether he retains it ... He has equality with God and there is no question of losing it; the issue is his attitude to it."⁸ Hurtado adds a grammatical point: the clause about the form of God gives the circumstance that makes the choice possible.¹

Hoover's case is stronger than "few parallels" suggests, and has one weak joint.  He reports canvassing the indices or lexicons "for sixty-eight Classical and Hellenistic authors" and finds the idiom foreign to the Greek Bible.¹³  But his idiom is mostly attested with the related noun ἅρπαγμα.¹³  The cases with ἁρπαγμός itself come from Christian writers who knew Philippians:  Eusebius, in the fourth century, who uses ἁρπαγμόν and ἅρπαγμα of the same thing, a martyr's death, and Cyril of Alexandria, later still.¹³³¹  Hoover himself prints George MacRae's caution that Eusebius may be echoing Philippians.  Dunn answers Hoover from the same texts:  for the martyrs, death "was not something already possessed ... but something they eagerly grasped at."¹²  Vollenweider rejects the idiom reading outright.

Michael Wade Martin offers a third position in 2016: he defends Hoover's idiom while denying that it establishes prior possession.  His examples distinguish exploiting an available opportunity from owning its object: in Heliodorus, Arsace makes use of words spoken by Cybele.  He argues that context must decide whether equality was already held.³²

Equality before exaltation remains unresolved.  The dispute concerns the idiom and what the surrounding passage implies; accepting an idiom need not settle possession.  Ehrman and Bauckham both read the opening as heavenly pre-existence despite disagreeing about equality.  The separate Adam reading need not do so.

The name above every name

After the death on the cross, "God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name."  The next words borrow Isaiah 45:23.  In the Greek of Isaiah, Yahweh swears "to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to God," a few lines after "I am God, and there is no other."⁷  Philippians keeps "every knee shall bow" and "every tongue shall confess" and turns the object to Jesus:  "that Jesus Christ is Lord."⁴

Bauckham calls Isaiah 45 "the passage in Deutero-Isaiah which depicts ... the eschatological demonstration of YHWH’s unique deity to the whole world," and reads Philippians as "his identification as YHWH in YHWH’s universal sovereignty."⁸  Hurtado reads the given name as "the Greek equivalent of bearing the Old Testament name of God."¹  The echo is hard to avoid:  an oath from what Bauckham calls "the most insistently monotheistic passage in Isaiah 40 — 55" is fulfilled in bowing at Jesus' name.⁸

Paul knew the oath as Yahweh's.  He quotes it in full in Romans 14:11, "‘As I live,’ says the Lord, ‘to me every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess to God,’" in a passage about the last judgement that has just called Christ "Lord of both the dead and the living."³³  Bauckham reads "the Lord" there as Jesus and "God" as the Father.⁸  The verse before speaks of "the judgment seat of God" in the SBL Greek text, so "the Lord" may equally be God, and the verse does not settle it.⁴  What the pair does settle is narrower:  the echo in Philippians is deliberate, written by a man who used the same verse of God's own judgement.  The nearest Jewish case of a figure who bears God's name, the angel Yahoel, is weighed in Part 7.

Three things here need to be kept apart.  The wording says God gave him "the name which is above every name," so that at "the name of Jesus" every knee bows and every tongue confesses "that Jesus Christ is Lord."  The echo is of Isaiah 45:23, an oath Yahweh swears about himself;  that is a strong textual fact.  The inference is that the name given is Yahweh's own name, rendered κύριος.  It is probable, because the confession is "Lord" and the oath is Yahweh's, but the text does not say "the name Yahweh."  Two limits follow from the same verses.  God gives the name, so Jesus receives it.  And the confession ends "to the glory of God the Father."  Ehrman asks, "What could be higher than equality with God?", and takes the exaltation as proof that Christ was lower before it.¹¹  Bauckham answers that the exaltation "is not a matter of gaining or regaining equality with God, which he has always had and never lost, but of acquiring the function of implementing the eschatological sovereignty of God."⁸  Dunn notes "the consistent emphasis that kyrios was bestowed on Jesus at exaltation."⁵  The "therefore" of 2:9 makes the exaltation a response to obedience, which Ehrman's reading explains naturally.  But a reward need not raise rank:  the passage itself describes a descent from "the form of God" to death, and an exaltation that answers it can restore and publicly confirm a status as well as create a new one.  Which reading is right depends on the meaning of 2:6, so the rank question here is as open as the ἁρπαγμός question.  What the passage presents after the cross is God's grant of a name and lordship for universal acknowledgement; it does not say that every creature had already acknowledged him.

Was it a hymn, and how old?

Ehrman reports the usual case that the passage is "a pre-Pauline tradition":  it is poetic, self-contained, and uses words found nowhere else in Paul.¹¹¹¹  He even notes that some scholars find a date "as early as the 40s ce" too early for so high a Christology.¹¹  The vocabulary argument is weak for so short a passage on a unique subject.  Ehrman also concedes that it "does not have a rhythmic and metrical structure";¹¹ that does not rule out older elevated prose, but it removes one reason to call it a song.  Bauckham thinks Paul wrote it.  Hurtado, who in 2005 reported the hymn theory as "the dominant view" and noted that it "does not seem to have occurred to anyone prior to the early twentieth century," later wrote "I’m definitely re-thinking the matter."²²²³  The recent origin of the hymn theory is not evidence against it;  it means only that the theory is a modern inference from the passage's form.

So the safe date is the date of the letter, from the mid-50s to about 62.  An earlier origin is possible.  It is not demonstrated, and the argument here does not need it.

Assessment

Graded:  that the passage describes a pre-existent figure who became human is probable.  The order of events and the birth language favour it, and Dunn, a critic of that reading, grants that the text evokes it while reading it as metaphor.  An Adam echo is possible, and it does not compete with pre-existence.  That Isaiah's oath to Yahweh is applied to Jesus is established as the text's wording.  That the given name is Yahweh's own is probable.  Whether he held equality with God before the exaltation is unresolved: specialists disagree about the idiom, and Martin argues that even an idiom reading leaves possession to context.  That the passage is older than the letter is possible, not shown.

Part 6: The texts that set limits

What they say

Paul also distinguishes and orders the Son and the Father.  These statements need to be read alongside the high claims.

1. God raised and appointed him. The opening of Romans speaks of Jesus "declared to be the Son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the dead."³ Ehrman takes the formula behind it to show that, for its first framer, "The resurrection was Jesus’s exaltation into divinity."¹¹
2. The Father is the God of the Lord Jesus. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."³ "Christ is God’s." "The head of Christ is God."³³
3. The Son will be subjected. At the end Christ "will deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father." Then "the Son will also himself be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all."³³

Dunn draws the conclusion that "kyrios is not so much a way of identifying Jesus with God, but if anything more a way of distinguishing Jesus from God," and that Christ's lordship "will in the end be wholly subject to God."⁵  McGrath uses 1 Corinthians 15:25-28 the same way:  "all things (other than God) are subjected to Christ because God has placed them there".⁶

What they do and do not show

These texts are as early and as secure as the high ones.  They must be weighed, not explained away, and not used as a trump either.

A first-century reader could infer three things from them.  The Father is the source:  the Son is sent, raised, given the name and given the rule.  The Son's present rule serves the Father's final purpose.  And the two are never merged:  Paul keeps "God the Father" and "the Lord Jesus Christ" as two subjects, even when one verb serves both.

These statements do not require the conclusion that Jesus is a creature or an angel.  That is an interpretation to test against the other passages, rather than a consequence of subordination alone.  The same letter that ends with the Son subjected also puts him in the "through whom are all things" line of 1 Corinthians 8:6.  Hengel, who held the high reading, argued that "The subordination which is clear in I Cor. 15.23-28 does not tell against this; in its way it only demonstrates the unique connection between the Son and the Father which is quite unparalleled."²⁴  That is a judgement, not a proof.  The opposite judgement, that subordination makes Jesus less than divine, is also a judgement.  The text states an order between Father and Son.  It does not define what kind of being the Son is.

Later doctrine cannot by itself settle Paul's meaning, in either direction.  The Council of Nicaea in 325 said the Son is "of one substance" (ὁμοούσιον) with the Father, "begotten, not made";  its creed adds of the Holy Spirit only "and in the Holy Spirit," so its definition concerns the Son, and the later Trinitarian formulas about the Spirit came afterward.¹⁵¹¹  Paul does not formulate the issue in Nicaea's terms.  The term is absent; whether his statements imply or fit the later definition requires an argument from those statements.  Being sent, receiving authority and being subject at the end are statements about roles.  They do not by themselves deny an equality of being, and Nicaea's own creed keeps the order "one God, the Father ... one Lord Jesus Christ."  Equally, they cannot be waved away:  a reader of Paul alone sees an order, and nothing in the letters says the order is only one of roles.

Does Paul ever call Jesus "God"?

The only candidate in the seven letters is Romans 9:5.  The Greek reads ἐξ ὧν ὁ χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων, θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας.⁴  The sense turns on punctuation, which editors supply.  With a comma after "flesh," the Messiah is "over all, God, blessed forever," as the World English Bible prints it.³  With a full stop there, the last words become a separate blessing, which Ehrman renders "May the God who is over all be blessed forever, amen."¹¹

Ehrman changed his mind on this verse.  "My view for many years was that the second translation was the right one ... 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."¹¹  Dunn grants that reading Christ as God "can hardly be disallowed," but suggests that "Paul’s own reserve on the issue slipped at this point," and that the verse should not be treated "as a considered expression of his theology."⁵

The grammar can be weighed, not just counted.  Three observations favour reading the words of Christ.  First, Paul's other doxologies of this shape attach to the noun before them:  "the Creator, who is blessed forever" (Romans 1:25) and "The God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, he who is blessed forever more" (2 Corinthians 11:31), the second with the same words, ὁ ὢν εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας.⁴³  Second, familiar scriptural blessings put "blessed" before God or Lord, as in Genesis 9:26 and Exodus 18:10; Romans 9:5 has θεὸς εὐλογητός, "God" first.  That favours attachment to the preceding description of Christ.  The broader corpus count in the note includes blessings of people and other constructions, so it is not a sample of 100 comparable independent blessings.  Psalm 67:19 supplies a case with the reversed order.³³  Third, "according to the flesh" invites a contrasting statement about Christ.  Against these, Paul nowhere else calls Christ theos in so many words, and his blessings are elsewhere addressed to God;  a sudden doxology to God after mentioning Christ is possible, and Psalm 67:19 shows that the reversed word order can occur.  So the reading that calls Christ "God" is probable on the Greek, not certain.  It is still a passing phrase, and Paul's high Christology does not depend on it.  It rests on what he says Jesus does and receives, not on the word theos.  Titus 2:13, "our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ," is clearer, but Titus is a disputed letter outside the firm base, and Dunn counts it among the "later" texts.⁵³

Part 7: Jewish monotheism and exalted agents

The interpretations above disagree mainly about one historical question.  Could a Jew of Paul's time give a second figure divine titles, functions and honour while treating it as God's agent rather than as part of who the one God is?  If yes, Paul's language may mean an exalted agent.  If the line was drawn at certain acts, Paul's churches may have crossed it.  The evidence needed is what Jewish texts of the period actually say and what Jewish groups actually did.

What the texts show

1. God's Word and Wisdom. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek Jewish work, prays to God "who made all things by your word; and by your wisdom you formed man".³ Proverbs 8 has Wisdom say, in the World English Bible, "I was the craftsman by his side."³ The Greek translation reads differently, "I was beside him, arranging," so the article does not lean on "craftsman."⁷ Dunn notes that "in Judaism, Wisdom had no temple, no priests".⁵ These are ways of speaking about God's own action, with no cult of their own.
2. Philo's Word. Philo, writing in Alexandria in Paul's lifetime, calls God's Word "his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names," including "the name of God."²⁷ He even calls the Word "God," while explaining that "There is one true God only" and that scripture marks the true God with the article and uses "God" without it for "his most ancient word."¹⁶ And he makes the Word the instrument of creation: God is the cause "by whom" the world was made, and "the instrument is the word of God, by means of which it was made."¹⁰ This is a philosopher's allegory of scripture. It shows that a pious Jew could call something other than the Father "God" in a lower sense and give it a part in creation. It does not show anyone praying to the Word.
3. The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch. This part of 1 Enoch is dated "sometime around the turn of the era" by its modern editors, George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam.¹⁸ It says the Son of Man's name was named "before the sun and the signs were created," and that "All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before him."¹⁷¹⁷ The kings "Shall fall down before him on their faces, And worship and set their hope upon that Son of Man."¹⁷ Bauckham treats this as "one exception which proves the rule": a figure who sits on God's own throne and "will also be worshipped," but only in the future and only partly, so that his inclusion "remains equivocal."⁸ The date and influence of the Parables are debated. They are a vision of the last judgment, not a record of anyone's worship. That does not make them irrelevant. A Jewish writer could picture a second figure receiving obeisance from the kings of the earth without treating it as idolatry, and that bears on what honour was thinkable, even though it says nothing about a community's rites.
4. Adam honoured by angels. In the Latin Life of Adam and Eve, Michael orders the angels to "Worship the image of God," meaning Adam, and Satan refuses.³⁴ Its translator in 1913, L. S. A. Wells, dated the original Greek work, and "very probably also" the editor of the Latin, to "between A.D. 60 and 300," and thought the Latin translator may have taken these chapters "from earlier Jewish sources."³⁴ That is a wide range, and not secure evidence of anything before Christianity. Bauckham argues that the word behind "worship" was proskynein, "a gesture that, in itself, was not exclusive to divine worship."⁸ That is his reconstruction of the wording behind a Latin text. The scene shows angels in heaven, not a human community at prayer.
5. Angels who refuse worship. In Revelation, John falls at an angel's feet and is told, "Don’t do it! I am a fellow bondservant with you ... Worship God."³ The same book has every creature say, "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be the blessing, the honor, the glory," and the elders "fell down and worshiped."³ This is a Christian book, later than Paul, but it shows the line its author drew: angels are refused, the Lamb is included.
6. Melchizedek at Qumran. A damaged scroll from Qumran Cave 11, 11QMelchizedek, quotes Psalm 82:1, "Elohim will stand in the assembly of God, in the midst of the gods he judges," as written "about him," the angel Melchizedek who will free the righteous from Belial. Later it quotes Isaiah 52:7, "your God reigns," and explains that "your God" is Melchizedek, though both "of God" in the psalm and the name Melchizedek in the explanation are restored in gaps.³⁵ Hurtado called this reading of the psalm "a remarkable development."²⁵ It is the nearest known case of a Jewish writer reading a scripture's word for "God" as a second heavenly figure. Bauckham replies that the writer kept the angel apart from Yahweh, so that "there is no confusion between Melchizedek and YHWH," and that Paul, by contrast, "does not provide christological applications of scriptural texts about ‘God’ … but only of texts about YHWH."⁸ That line may be finer than the scroll keeps. In Isaiah, "Your God reigns!" announces the moment "when Yahweh returns to Zion."³ What the scroll does not show is worship. The Qumran texts, Hurtado notes, "give no indication that any of God’s angels were to receive worship, even principal angel figures such as Michael/Melchizedek."²⁵
7. Yahoel, the angel with God's name. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, God sends an angel with the words "Go, Jaoel, and by means of my ineffable Name raise me yonder man," and the angel calls himself "a power in virtue of the ineffable Name that is dwelling in me."³⁶ The scene draws on Exodus 23:21, where God says of the angel he sends ahead of Israel, "my name is in him."³ Maurice Casey uses this angel to read Philippians 2:9-11: Jesus "is not equated with God the Father, and he is not described as a second deity," and Yahoel shows "quite how exalted a being could be perceived to be without being thought of as a deity."³⁷ For the name, the parallel is real. For the rest it is weaker. The book was written after the Temple fell in 70, since Abraham laments its destruction, so it is later than Paul.³⁶ And Yahoel worships God but is never worshipped; in Bauckham's words, "there is no suggestion at all that he himself might be worshipped."⁸ In Philippians every knee bows at the name of Jesus.
8. Yahweh's imagery used for the Messiah. The Parables of Enoch say the mountains of metal "shall be in the presence of the Elect One, As wax before the fire."¹⁷ Psalm 97:5 says, "The mountains melt like wax at the presence of Yahweh."³ William Horbury, as Bauckham reports him, collected this passage and 4 Ezra 13 as cases of biblical theophany language applied to a messianic figure. Bauckham accepts the allusions but limits them: "The functional overlap is limited to the execution of judgement on the wicked on earth," and "the phenomenon of transferring biblical language about YHWH to the Messiah is limited in these texts to a very few instances, whereas in Paul it is pervasive."⁸

What the comparisons settle

They settle that Jewish writers could speak of an exalted second figure with divine titles and functions.  Ehrman and Dunn are right about that, and Hurtado agrees:  his 1988 book argued that "principal angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking" gave the first Christians "a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God."²⁵  So Paul's language did not have to come from pagan religion.

They do not show any Jewish group calling on such a figure in its regular worship.  Hurtado's claim is careful.  Against Margaret Barker and Peter Hayman, who argued for two-god tendencies in Judaism, he says that "Neither is able to show an actual devotional pattern involving public and corporate worship offered to any figure other than the God of Israel in the extant sources," and he reports Loren Stuckenbruck's finding that Jewish "venerative language" about angels "did not amount to cultic worship of angels."¹  This is an argument from what survives.  Most surviving Jewish texts of the period are literature, and few describe how a congregation prayed, so the silence is partial.  Hurtado's answer is that the silence is not for lack of evidence:  "we have in fact a good deal of evidence that devout Jews were quite scrupulous in restricting full worship to the God of Israel alone."¹  Meanwhile the Christian practice shows up plainly in the earliest Christian letters.

So the comparisons support two things at once.  The ideas used for Jesus were available in Judaism:  a second figure named "God" in a lower sense, active in creation, given the divine name, honoured by angels or kings in heaven or at the end.  The practice of calling on a second figure alongside God, with scripture's words for Yahweh, as the mark of a community, is not attested in the surviving Jewish sources.  The nearest cases are each partial:  prayers asking angels for help, a future scene of worship, angels bowing to Adam in heaven, a scroll that reads a psalm's "God" as an angel, an angel who bears God's name, and Yahweh's imagery borrowed for the Messiah's judgement.  Nearly every single element of Paul's language has a near-parallel somewhere.  In each case the text keeps the figure distinct from Yahweh, and none of these figures receives a community's regular worship.  None combines regular invocation, confession and a sacred meal in a community's life.  That partiality is Hurtado's point:  in his words, Christ's place in the devotional pattern "has no real analogy in the Jewish tradition of the period."¹  Whether it is decisive depends on whether Jews judged by the whole cluster or by particular acts such as sacrifice, which is McGrath's question.  And whether the practice shows that Christians included Jesus within God, or only that they honoured an agent beyond any precedent, the comparisons cannot settle by themselves.

Part 8: Later witnesses as controls

Texts written after Paul cannot date what happened in the 30s.  They are useful as controls:  they show where the early language led, whether it moved in one direction, and whether outsiders saw the same thing.  The Gospels' dates are discussed in When Were the Gospels Written?;  the grounds for dating the other texts are given with each.

1. Mark. When Jesus forgives a paralysed man, the scribes ask, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?"³ O'Neill reads the story as Jesus disagreeing with them: he claims authority "on earth" as Son of Man, not identity with God.²⁶ Ehrman changed his view of the first three Gospels during his research. He "used to say before doing the research for this book" that they "portray Jesus as a human but not as God."¹¹ In a blog post of April 2014 he wrote, "Until a year ago I would have said – and frequently did say, in the classroom, in public lectures, and in my writings – that Jesus is portrayed as God in the Gospel of John but not, definitely not, in the other Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke."³⁸ This article does not try to settle the Synoptic question. The scribes' question and Jesus' answer can be read as a claim to share God's prerogative or as a claim to delegated authority "on earth," and a decision needs a study of Mark as a whole. Ehrman's change of mind is reported here as his own reading, not as a settlement.
2. John. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."³ Thomas says to the risen Jesus, "My Lord and my God!"³ And Jesus' opponents say he was "making himself equal with God," using the same word, ἴσος, as Philippians 2:6.³ Two of these overlap with Paul directly. "All things were made through him" (John 1:3) states as narrative the creation agency that 1 Corinthians 8:6 gives in a verbless formula, and John 5:18 uses Philippians' word for "equal."³ That Paul meant the same as John is the contested inference of Parts 4 and 5, not something John can show. Ehrman notes that this view "did not originate with the Gospel of John, as I used to believe."¹¹
3. Hebrews. The author is anonymous, and the date is uncertain. 1 Clement, which Lake dated between 75 and 110, echoes its opening closely: "who, being the brightness of his majesty is by so much greater than angels as he hath inherited a more excellent name."²⁰²⁰ If, as the wording suggests, 1 Clement is borrowing, Hebrews is older than it. The Son is "the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance," the angels are told to "worship him," and Psalm 45 is applied to him: "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever."³³³ Ehrman points out that it still mixes incarnation with exaltation: Christ "sat down at the right hand" and became "superior to angels" after his death.¹¹
4. Pliny. Writing to the emperor Trajan, who reigned 98-117, the Roman governor Pliny reports what former Christians told him under questioning. They met before dawn on a fixed day and would carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem, "recite a hymn to Christ as to a god among themselves in turn," in this article's translation. The word carmen can mean a song, a chant or a set form of words.¹⁹²⁰ It is an outsider's description of Christian worship. "As to a god" is Pliny's phrase, a Roman's reading of what he heard, not a statement of Christian doctrine.
5. Ignatius. The bishop of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom, calls Jesus "our God, Jesus the Christ," "our God, Jesus Christ," and "Jesus Christ, the God who has thus given you wisdom."²⁰²⁰²⁰ Kirsopp Lake reported "a general tendency to think that Ignatius was really a martyr in Rome in the time of Trajan," whose reign he gives as 98-117.²⁰ Timothy Barnes has since argued that "the letters were probably written in the 140s."²¹ Either date puts Ignatius well after Paul: at least half a century after the letters, and on Barnes's date over a century after the crucifixion.
6. 2 Clement. This sermon is undated; Lake reported that critics placed it "between 120 and 170."²⁰ It begins, "BRETHREN, we must think of Jesus Christ as of God, as of “the Judge of the living and the dead”."²⁰

These witnesses have different dates: John supplies plain "God" language by about the turn of the century on the usual dating; Ignatius supplies it by the 140s on the later proposal; 2 Clement supplies it within Lake's range of 120-170.  How common it was cannot be measured from so small a sample.  They also warn against a straight-line chart from "mere man" to Nicaea.  John calls the Word God and has Jesus say "the Father is greater than I."³  Hebrews mixes eternal Son and exalted Son.  In the prayers of the emerging mainstream church, prayer still went to the Father:  1 Clement, a letter from Rome that Lake dated "between 75 and 110," most probably "the last decade of the first century,"²⁰ prays "we praise thee through Jesus Christ, the high priest and guardian of our souls."²⁰  Hurtado notes that in such liturgical texts "direct prayer to Jesus is not common," though it is frequent in apocryphal works.¹  The language varied by setting and genre.  It did not simply rise.

Part 9: Hurtado, Bauckham and Ehrman compared

Sources for the table:  Hurtado 2003 pp. 114, 136;¹¹ Dunn 2010 p. 4 on Bauckham;² Ehrman 2014 pp. 269, 279;¹¹¹¹ the other cells from the passages quoted in Parts 3 to 5.

Where they agree, and why

All five put exalted claims about Jesus, and devotion to him, within the first generation.  None supports the claim that the church made Jesus divine at Nicaea.  Ehrman, the best-known skeptic of the five, puts incarnation belief "well before Paul’s letters" and grants "Possibly it is much earlier."¹¹  Hurtado praised him for it:  "In a commendable example of changing his mind, Ehrman acknowledges that prior to immersing himself in the evidence ... he had assumed a much slower and more drawn-out process."³⁹

That agreement is not five independent proofs.  Ehrman builds partly on Hurtado:  he quotes Hurtado's thesis on divine agency and his account of early worship.¹¹¹¹  Dunn wrote his 2010 book in dialogue with both Hurtado and Bauckham.²  Their agreement is better described as five readings of one body of evidence.  The reasons for it are the ones laid out above:  the letters are early and genuine, they assume rather than argue these practices, and the practices include acts tied in scripture to Yahweh.

Where they disagree, and why

The disagreements are about meaning, and each has a specific cause.

1. Ehrman against Hurtado and Bauckham: an angel? Ehrman reads Galatians 4:14, "you received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus," as Paul "equating him with an angel."¹¹³ His source is Charles Gieschen. Gieschen's case is grammatical: the two "as" clauses stand in apposition, and Paul's only other paired "as ... but as" clauses, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 and 2 Corinthians 2:17, use the second clause to explain the first, so the verse means "You received me as God's Angel, namely Christ Jesus."⁴⁰ The other reading takes the clauses as a rising comparison: not despised, but welcomed as an angel, even as Christ. That fits the rhetoric of praise, and Paul is himself neither. Both are possible Greek. Hurtado replied that Gieschen offers this only as a "possibility" and that Paul elsewhere puts angels among the created things that cannot separate believers from Christ (Romans 8:38-39).³⁹³⁹ Gieschen's own wording is "very real possibility," followed by a firm conclusion. And Romans 8 does not touch Gieschen's claim, because he understands Christ as the Angel of YHWH, a divine manifestation rather than a created angel. He says plainly that "Angelic forms and functions do not of necessity imply a nature that is less than divine."⁴⁰ This separates two inferences. If the apposition reading is right, Galatians supports identifying Christ with God's Angel. The verse does not itself specify that figure's nature or rank before exaltation. Gieschen's interpretation is therefore support for the angel identification, but not an independent argument for Ehrman's lower rank. That further claim needs evidence from passages such as Philippians 2.
2. Dunn against Hurtado: worship or veneration? They agree on most of the acts. Dunn weighs Paul's word choices for thanks and glory. Hurtado weighs the cluster of acts and the scriptural phrases behind them. Part 3 found both observations correct.
3. McGrath against Bauckham: inside or beside? The question is whether "one Lord" is part of the one God or an agent beside him. Part 4 found that the creation clause alone does not decide it, since Philo gives creation agency to God's Word; the clause together with prayer in Yahweh's words and Isaiah's oath favours Bauckham, but not decisively.
4. Hurtado on the words. Hurtado was careful about "God" language. Asked whether the Angel of the Lord passages make Jesus God, he replied that "Paul didn't think "Jesus is God" in the sense of "overwriting" God," that Paul thought of Jesus "as now sharing the glory of God, and being the unique expression of God's glory," "uniquely linked with God, such that it is now necessary to accord Jesus the kind of devotion previously/otherwise restricted to God," and that "neither Paul nor other NT writers say things like "Jesus is God"."³⁹ The reply distinguishes sharing God's glory from replacing God, and it declines the bare formula "Jesus is God" for Paul. It does not discuss later terms such as one substance, so it cannot be read as his verdict on them.

The older development theories: Bousset, Dunn and Casey

The view that Jesus was made divine gradually has stronger forms than the Nicaea claim.  Three of them are stated here in their authors' own words.  The German is translated by this article.

Wilhelm Bousset, 1913.  Bousset's Kyrios Christos argued that devotion to Jesus as "Lord" began not in the Jerusalem church but in the Greek-speaking churches of Syria, which took the title from a pagan world that called its cult gods "lord," as Egypt did Osiris, Isis and Serapis.  There, he wrote, "the young Christian religion took shape as a Christ cult," and this "doubling of the object of worship" was "only conceivable in an environment in which Old Testament monotheism no longer ruled with absolute certainty and without condition."⁴¹  Bousset knew the maranatha objection.  He answered that the Aramaic formula "need not have arisen within the Palestinian first community" and could have arisen "just as well on the bilingual soil of Antioch, even if the church there consisted mainly of Greeks."⁴¹  That answer is possible, and the cry alone does not refute him (Part 3).  Three other facts count against his thesis.  First, the scriptures Paul uses for Jesus are Jewish texts about Yahweh, Joel 2:32, Isaiah 45:23 and the Shema, not pagan cult titles, and 1 Corinthians 8:6 sets the "one Lord" against the "many lords" of the pagans rather than among them.³  Bousset himself granted that by Paul's time the churches applied Joel's verse about calling on the name of "the Lord (Yahweh!)" to themselves "quite simply and unselfconsciously."⁴¹  Second, the same letters insist on Jewish monotheism:  "there is no other God but one."³  The setting Bousset needed, one where that conviction had weakened, is not the setting the letters show.  Third, the time is short.  Of a pagan-influenced church at Damascus, where Paul was converted, Martin Hengel asked, "Is such a development conceivable in the few years before Paul’s conversion?"  He also objected that Bousset turned the mixed church of Antioch into a Gentile one, which "was certainly not the case in Antioch between about AD 35 and 48."²⁴  Bousset's theory of a pagan origin is improbable on the evidence of the letters.  One of his observations survives.  He saw that Paul's Lord-language puts Jesus "directly on God's side" while also subordinating him, which is close to this article's own verdict.⁴¹

James Dunn, 1980.  Dunn's Christology in the Making placed personal pre-existence late:  "only with the Fourth Gospel can we speak of a full blown conception of Christ’s personal pre-existence and a clear doctrine of incarnation."²⁹  On 1 Corinthians 8:6 he wrote that the thought "is not of Jesus himself as there in the beginning, despite what to us seems the ‘obvious’ meaning of the language."²⁹  By 1998 he granted that Philippians 2 evokes pre-existence, while still calling it metaphor (Part 5).  His 1980 thesis is the scholarly form of the John claim below, and Part 4 explains why this article prefers the "obvious" reading he set aside.

Maurice Casey, 1991.  Casey's From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God argued that Jesus was called God only once a Christian community stopped identifying as Jewish:  "Jewish people who remained in the Jewish community could not hail Jesus as God because this would infringe Jewish monotheism.  Gentiles who did not belong to the Jewish community, and who identified against “the Jews”, could do so."³⁷  He places that step in the community behind John's Gospel, after the war with Rome, and reads Paul as "still within the bounds of Jewish monotheism."³⁷  His main argument from Paul's letters is their silence:  "the lack of conflict about christology in documents from the pre-Johannine church means that it cannot have been common," because "if there had been a general perception among Jewish members of the communities that other Christians were hailing Jesus as fully God, there would have been disputes severe enough for us to hear of them."³⁷

Hurtado answered that there was such conflict.  He called Dunn's form of the same claim, that no Christian source before John shows Jewish opposition to devotion to Jesus, "simply incorrect," and pointed to Paul himself:  "The pre-Christian Paul himself becomes an important example of devout Jews being outraged by the Christological claims and practices of Jewish Christians."²²  Paul later received "forty stripes minus one from the Jews" five times, a synagogue punishment for serious offences.³  Hurtado concludes that Paul "was deemed guilty of one or more serious crimes particularly associated with his being an exponent of Christian beliefs and practices."²²  That too is an inference.  Paul never states the charge.  The one time he gives a reason for his own persecution, it is that he no longer preaches circumcision, which he ties to "the stumbling block of the cross."³  So the letters record serious Jewish opposition without saying whether devotion to Jesus was part of it.  Casey's silence is therefore not complete, and Hurtado's reading of the opposition is not documented either.  Two further limits apply to Casey's test.  It looks for Christians "hailing Jesus as fully God," a formula Paul uses at most once (Part 6), and it does not address the invocation and Yahweh texts on which this article's case rests.  And his reading of Paul as within Jewish monotheism is a form of the exalted-agent account, which this article treats as a real alternative (Objection 14).

Three claims that should not be confused

The Nicaea claim says that Jesus was first regarded as divine at the Council of Nicaea in 325.  The seven letters refute it:  invocation of Jesus and Yahweh texts applied to him are certain in the 50s, and pre-existence and a part in creation are probable.  That conclusion does not establish the later creed's account of the Son's being.  Every scholar tested here agrees.

The John claim says that personal pre-existence and incarnation first appear in the Gospel of John.  The letters make this improbable.  Philippians 2 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 most probably speak of pre-existence, and Ehrman, who used to hold the John claim, now puts incarnation belief "well before Paul’s letters."¹¹  It is not refuted for every sense:  Dunn reads both passages of God's Wisdom, or of Christ in Adam's role, as metaphor, and a reader who accepts his readings can still say that pre-existence of the person Jesus is first plain in John.  Casey's version, that Jesus was first called God in John's community, survives in the same limited way:  Paul calls Jesus "God" at most once, but the devotion and Yahweh texts that Casey's argument from silence leaves aside are already there.

The early-development claim says that belief about Jesus grew in the years between his death and the letters, from exaltation at the resurrection toward pre-existence and plain "God" language.  Ehrman holds a version of it, and the evidence does not refute it.  The letters are a record from the 50s, after about twenty years.  Hengel's point that they show no development over ten years weighs against a slow process through the 50s.  It does not by itself exclude development in the earlier years, which Paul describes retrospectively.

So the strongest early-devotion case, Hurtado's and Bauckham's, answers the Nicaea claim completely, the John claim in most of its senses, and the early-development claim only in part:  whatever development there was happened fast.  The strongest development case, Ehrman's, agrees on the dates and differs on what the earliest believers meant.

Objections and responses

1. "Kyrios just means 'master.'  Jesus' followers called him mar, teacher, and the Greek word followed."  This is O'Neill's point, and the word does range widely.²⁶  McGrath agrees that it ran "all the way from “sir” to “Yahweh.”"⁶  So the title alone proves nothing.  The case does not rest on the title alone.  It rests on its use in sentences taken from scripture about Yahweh:  Joel's "call on the name" in Romans 10:13 and Isaiah's oath in Philippians 2:10-11.

2. "Proskyneō just means bowing.  The Gospel 'worship' scenes prove nothing."  Correct about the word.  Bauckham, a defender of high Christology, says the same:  the gesture "in itself, was not exclusive to divine worship."⁸  But that answers Gospel bowing scenes, not the Pauline evidence, which is about prayer, invocation and confession.

3. "Exalted figures were common in Judaism.  Paul's Jesus is one more of them."  The ideas were available, as Part 7 shows, including a second figure active in creation.  What is not attested in the surviving sources is a Jewish group praying to and invoking such a figure as part of its regular worship.  The Parables of Enoch picture the Son of Man worshipped at the last judgment, which is the nearest parallel.  It shows such honour was thinkable for a writer;  it is a vision, not a record of practice.

4. "Paul is the only witness.  He may have invented the high view, and the Jerusalem leaders may have disagreed."  This is the strongest objection to an early date.  Three things count against it.  The Aramaic maranatha is not Paul's own Greek coinage.  Paul reports open conflict with Cephas at Antioch over eating with Gentiles (Galatians 2:11-14), but no conflict with Jerusalem over Jesus' status.  And he claims a common message with them:  "Whether then it is I or they, so we preach."³  Hurtado argues that Judean believers "could not have countenanced the cultic reverence of Jesus practiced in Corinth" unless they shared it, since "there was no objection on this matter."¹  But that is an argument from the silence of letters written for other purposes, and silence about a dispute is not testimony that every leader held every element.  Maurice Casey uses the same kind of silence in the other direction (Objection 16).  Paul's claim of a common message is about the preaching of Christ's death and resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.  A shared Jerusalem practice is plausible, but not directly documented here.  The Aramaic formula and Paul's contacts provide reasons for the inference; neither records Peter or James making this invocation.  That every leader shared every element of Paul's Christology is not shown.

5. "1 Corinthians 15:28 makes the Son subject to God.  So Paul did not think Jesus was divine."  It shows an order between Father and Son.  It does not show what kind of being the Son is.  The same letter puts the Son in the creation formula of 8:6.  Part 6 weighs both.

6. "Early belief does not make it true.  Legends can form quickly."  Agreed.  This article measures when and how the belief arose, not whether it was correct.  How fast the resurrection reports could have grown is tested in Legendary Development.  An early high view does show that the belief was not a slow drift over centuries.  Paul, who held it, stayed with Cephas and met James, "the Lord’s brother," within a few years of his conversion.³

7. "Paul teaches what Nicaea defined."  The texts do not show that.  The Council of Nicaea in 325 defined the Son as "of one substance" with the Father, "begotten, not made," and said of the Holy Spirit only "and in the Holy Spirit";  the fuller Trinitarian statements about the Spirit came later.¹⁵  Paul does not formulate the relation in these terms; whether his statements entail the later definition is a further interpretive question.  Hengel, who held the high reading of Paul, described the later step as "a concern to bring the ‘divine functions’ of the Son of God into line with the conceptuality and thought patterns of the Greek metaphysics of being."²⁴  Whether that step was faithful to Paul is a theological question.  The letters supply evidence the later debate sought to interpret; the absence of its terminology does not decide whether its conclusions follow.

8. "Romans 9:5 settles it:  Paul called Jesus God."  The Greek favours that reading, as Part 6 shows, but not decisively, and one doxology is a thin base.  The case for an early high view is stronger without leaning on it.

9. "'Divine identity' is Bauckham's modern category, not Paul's."  It is a modern term, and Bauckham offers it to replace the older contrast between "functional" and "ontic" Christology, which he thinks "do not reflect an adequate understanding of the way Jewish monotheism understood God."⁸  Any modern category must be judged by how well it fits the texts.  It fits the creation and Yahweh-text evidence well.  It must also account for the Father's primacy, as Bauckham's interpretation does by distinguishing the two without placing Jesus outside the divine identity.

10. "Hurtado's explanation smuggles in the supernatural."  It does not need to.  He states that his theory does not require granting "the religious validity" of the experiences.¹  His dating argument is separate from his explanation in any case.

11. "Jesus himself never claimed to be God, so the followers invented it."  What Jesus claimed is a separate question.  Ehrman's view is "messiah, yes; God, no."¹¹  Even on his view, belief in Jesus' exaltation arose among his first followers, and belief in his incarnation before Paul's letters.  This article does not test his reading of the Gospels.

12. "The Philippians hymn dates high Christology to the 30s."  Not shown.  The hymn theory is an inference from the passage's form, and Ehrman grants it lacks regular meter.  Hurtado, who once reported it as the dominant view, said in 2015 he was "re-thinking the matter," and Bauckham thinks Paul wrote the passage.²³  An older origin is possible.  The firm date is the letter's.

13. "Paul always says God raised Jesus, and Jews thought the Messiah pre-existed, so nothing in Paul makes Jesus divine."  This is O'Neill's case about Paul.  He writes that Paul "always uses agency terms when describing his resurrection" and that "the idea that the Messiah pre-existed in heaven was common amongst Jews in this period."²⁶  Both points have force.  Paul does make God the one who raises Jesus, and Hurtado himself notes that "in ancient Jewish apocalyptic thought one or another kind of pre-existence could be ascribed to eschatological figures."³⁹  So pre-existence alone does not show divinity.  But O'Neill's answer does not discuss the evidence this article rests on:  calling on Jesus with Joel's words for Yahweh, Isaiah's oath, maranatha, and the creation clause of 1 Corinthians 8:6.  His case meets the weaker argument from titles and pre-existence, not the stronger one from devotion.

14. "An exalted-agent reading explains all of this without making Jesus part of God."  It is a serious overall account, not just a reading of single verses.  It explains "one God, the Father," thanks and glory given to the Father, God raising and exalting Jesus, and the final subjection, all without strain.  It explains creation agency too, given Philo's Word.  Where it strains is the combination of acts and texts:  a figure called on in prayer with Joel's words for Yahweh, made the "one Lord" of a Shema-like confession, and given Isaiah's oath, in communities that otherwise kept Jewish lines about worship.  No surviving Jewish agent has that combination.  The closest single parallels, Melchizedek read into Psalm 82, the angel Yahoel who bears God's name, and the Messiah described in Yahweh's imagery, each match one element, and none is worshipped (Part 7).  So the agent reading extends the surviving Jewish parallels.  That is a cost to assess, rather than a contradiction: an unusually honoured agent and a figure included in God remain different explanations.  That is why this article judges the inclusion reading the better fit, and not decisively.

15. "Calling Jesus 'Lord' came from pagan cults of divine lords in Syria, as Bousset showed."  Bousset's case is set out in his own words in Part 9.  The letters count against it.  The texts Paul applies to Jesus as Lord are Jewish scriptures about Yahweh.  His confession is built on the Shema and set against the "many lords" of the pagans.  And the few years between the crucifixion and Paul's conversion leave little room for a separate pagan-influenced stage.  The Aramaic maranatha fits a Jewish-Christian origin, though Bousset's reply, that bilingual Antioch could have produced it, remains possible.

16. "Paul's letters record no Jewish objection to his view of Jesus, so he cannot have treated Jesus as God."  This is Casey's argument (Part 9).  The letters do record serious Jewish opposition to Paul, including five synagogue floggings, but they do not say what it was for, except that Paul once links his persecution to his refusal to preach circumcision and to the offence of the cross.  The silence cuts both ways:  it cannot show that devotion to Jesus was the charge, and it cannot show that it was not.  It is the same kind of argument as Hurtado's claim, in Objection 4, that Jerusalem raised no objection.  It also tests only the formula "Jesus is God," which Paul uses at most once, and not the prayer and Yahweh texts.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The harpagmos idiom. Roy Hoover's 1971 study was read for this article on its key pages; Samuel Vollenweider's 1999 article was read only in its published summary, because the open copy could not be reached; J. C. O'Neill's 1988 reply to Hoover is known only through Wright's answer to it. The verdict on equality with God stays open partly for this reason.
2. Secondary quotations. Joseph Fitzmyer on maranatha, C. J. Davis on "binitarian prayer" and Loren Stuckenbruck on angel veneration are quoted only through Hurtado and Dunn, and are labelled that way. Murphy-O'Connor's 1978 article on 1 Corinthians 8:6 is known through Kuschel and Dunn; his 1991 commentary was read. William Horbury's case that Jewish texts applied Yahweh's theophany language to the Messiah is known only through Bauckham's summary. Casey's 1991 book was read on the pages quoted, not whole, and his 1999 essay on Pauline worship was not read.
3. Not read. Crispin Fletcher-Louis's Jesus Monotheism, Gordon Fee's Pauline Christology, J. R. Daniel Kirk's A Man Attested by God, Paula Fredriksen's Paul: The Pagans' Apostle, Hurtado's Honoring the Son, and the 2014 reply to Ehrman by Michael Bird and others, How God Became Jesus.
4. Ehrman's later posts. Ehrman's 2021 and 2025 blog posts on Philippians are partly for paying members. His reasons against the Adam reading there could not be read, so the article relies on the book.
5. The Parables of Enoch. Whether they were known to Paul or the first Christians, and how firm their turn-of-the-era date is, remain open. A later date would weaken the closest Jewish parallel.
6. Jerusalem's Christology. This article has no independently dated record from the 30s of Peter's or James's Christology. It relies on Paul's retrospective reports and the Aramaic phrase; Acts is not used here.
7. Ignatius's date. Lake reports the traditional reign of Trajan; Barnes argues for the 140s. The article's use of Ignatius does not depend on which is right.
8. Jesus' own claims. Whether Jesus spoke of himself in divine terms is not assessed here.

Verdict

1. Timing: established for the 50s; an origin in the 40s is plausible, and the 30s remain uncertain. Paul's letters, written about AD 48-62, attest prayer to Jesus, invocation of his name in Joel's words for Yahweh and confession of him as Lord. The creation and pre-existence readings are probable interpretations of the relevant passages. They present the practices as normal and shared. The Aramaic maranatha points to Aramaic-speaking believers. Paul's earlier preaching and the Roman church's shared confession make an older devotional pattern plausible, but do not date each belief or act to the 40s. The first years, and the views of every early leader, are not documented.
2. Sense: probably a figure on God's side of the line, ordered under the Father. Two overall accounts fit. Inclusion in the identity of Israel's one God treats the Yahweh texts, Shema pattern and devotion as identifying Jesus with God. An exalted-agent account treats them as extraordinary delegated honours. It can include creation agency, while an inclusion account can include the Father's primacy and an order between Father and Son. The combination of devotion and Yahweh texts tips the balance toward inclusion, not decisively; the Father's primacy does not by itself decide between the accounts. The letters call Jesus "God" at most once, in Romans 9:5, probably but not certainly.
3. Not Nicaea, and not an invention at Nicaea. The evidence refutes the claim that Jesus was first treated as divine in the fourth century. It makes the claim that pre-existence first appears in John improbable, and Bousset's theory that devotion to Jesus as Lord came from pagan cults in Gentile churches improbable too. It does not show Nicaea's term, "of one substance," or its question in the first century, and it cannot rule out fast development in the years before the letters.
4. The scholars. The practices at the centre of Hurtado's account are attested in the letters. Their classification remains disputed: Dunn stresses the Father-directed vocabulary, while McGrath stresses the sacrificial boundary, which the texts examined do not show being crossed for Jesus. Bauckham's divine-identity reading is the best single explanation of the Yahweh texts, the Shema pattern and the devotion taken together, not a proven one. Dunn's metaphor readings remain real alternatives, though he grants that Philippians 2 evokes pre-existence. Ehrman's dating agrees with both; his angel reading of Galatians 4:14 has a grammatical case, but the verse does not itself establish that Christ was lower than God before exaltation. His source, Gieschen, understands the figure as the divine Angel of YHWH.
5. What it does not settle. Early belief is evidence about the first Christians. Whether their belief about Jesus was true depends on other questions, chiefly the resurrection, which other articles in this series address.

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