In “The Penguin History of the World”, which unfortunately I don’t have with me now, there is a sentence that to me implies that before Paul traveled and evangilized, Jesus was not thought of as the son of God, but merely a man who taught God’s message, and it was Paul who either introduced or popularized the notion that Jesus was in fact God’s son. Can anyone shed light on this?
All four Gospels, and the book of Acts, refer to Jesus as the “Son of God.” Whether or not they mean the same thing by that title that Paul does could be debated.
And, although chronologically the events of the Gospels and Acts occurred before Paul’s ministry, they were mostly written a bit later. However, the source texts for the Gospels, and even the book of Mark itself, could predate most or all of Paul’s writings.
The bottom line is, since some of Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian writings we have, it’s hard to know what people thought of Jesus before that – depending on how accurate you think the Gospel stories were transmitted.
I should have added that the author of Hebrews, John in his epistles, and John the author of Revelation called Jesus the Son of God also – so if Paul really did coin the phrase, it would have had to have spread very widely and very quickly to be picked up by all these other authors. I’m more inclined to think it was a pre-Pauline designation.
We actually have a fairly, for that time & place, clear picture of Paul interacting with the folks who knew Jesus best in life, his Apostles and the followers in Jerusalem.
The tension (and there was plenty), the hard feelings and the disagreements weren’t over the nature of Jesus…They centered on the role of Jewish Law and how it applied to the new converts to Christianity. The nature of Jesus was not recorded as an issue of contention… all that means is that Paul seems to have understood him the same way as the Jerusalem church did.
Paul was a politician and Christianity was his movement, he just employed a polito-spin that deified a dead persecuted man who had some good ideas and a message. Could I get any more cynical?
Probably not. (And this is a legitimate General Question that really does not need to be thrown into Great Debates.)
Paul’s letters are the earliest extant Christian writings we have. Every work in the New Testament in which Jesus is identified as God was written after Paul’s letters (sometimes by as much as 40 years). Throughout Paul’s letters, we can perceive (correctly or incorrectly) the development of the idea of Jesus as God. In his earliest letters, for example, (the two letters to the Thessalonians), Paul refers throughout to “God” separately from Jesus, never making a direct connection that Jesus, himself, partakes of Divinity. In contrast, by the time he wrote the letter to the Philippians, Paul was explictly discussing the way in which Jesus was God, but had put aside his Divinity to become man for our salvation.
Some people look upon this apparent development as an indication that the earliest Christians only slowly developed the idea of Jesus as God. In this scenario, the statements found in the Gospels in which Jesus identified himself as God would have been inserted to make the point rather than actually being a recounting of the words of Jesus.
Opposite this position, of course, would be those who hold that the Gospels were written as actual (if sometimes flawed) memories of the specific words and deeds of Jesus. They would note that while the style in 1st and 2d Thessalonians tends to separate Jesus from God, there is no explicit statement that identifies Jesus in a way that precludes him sharing on the Divinity of God the Father.
Matthew 16:
13When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15"But what about you?" he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
17Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.
So, if you’re willing to take the Gospels as a history, the idea was around not only before Paul’s writing, but before his conversion.
It’s easy to toss off comments about how the whole thing is made up, Paul invented the basic ideas for some crazy reason, etc., but every time I hear these kinds of complete dismissals, I discover that the person hasn’t done any serious study of the books as historical artifacts.
Nice post/sig match.
Sure you could. In this post you assume that Paul existed and wasn’t a fiction created by others, that he didn’t entirely make up the existence of a dead persecuted man, and that the said dead man had certain ideas and a message.
I don’t mean to comment upon those assumptions, but in answer to your specific question, the answer is: Yes.
The phrase “Son of God” existed in Hebew/Aramaic idiom and could easily have been applied to Jesus but it had a different meaning than how Paul applied it. “Son of god” in Hebew scripture and language was not a literal connotation of divine descendancy. It had a range of applications, including righteous men and sometimes the Israelite people as a whole but it’s most common association was with Kings, especially as it pertained to the Davidic dynasty. If people were calling Jesus “Son of God” while he was alive, they were not calling him God, they were suggesting that he was the heir to the throne of David (and hence, the Messiah but the Jewish expectations of the Messiah were not divine). The phrase “Son of man” was an idiom meaning human being. Actually it was “Son of Adam,” but Adam means man. All men are descended from Adam, so all men are the “Son” of Adam. The phrase was applied to a prophesy of the messiah in Daniel in which he was described as “one like a son of Adam,” in other words, the Messiah would be human. There is no tardition in Judaism or in Hebew scripture for a divine Messiah.
All of the gospels were written well after Paul’s letters and none were written by anyone who ever met Jesus. They are colored by 40-70 years of Christian tradition and reinterpretation of Scripture.
The answer to the OP is that the letters of Paul represent the first documented references to Jesus as divine. There is no evidence that he was so regarded during his lifetime.
Diogenes and I have been through this before. There is evidence of a Jewish tradition in the around the 1st century BCE of a divine/semi-divine/angelic messiah refered to as the Son of Man. This tradition never made it into any texts recognized as scripture by either Jews or Christians and was rejected by Judaism. If I recall correctly, Diogenes believes that the relevant passages are later Christian interpolations to the books in question. This is possible, and not without scholarly support, even though I don’t happen to be convinced. At any rate, many scholars believe the idea was floating around before it was applied to Jesus, whether by himself or others. (And as others have pointed out, it would have had to have spread awfully quickly without provoking any debate or controversy if Paul invented it.)
The SDStaff (who are second only to Cecil in their godlike omniscience) are not so sure.
It seems to me that most commentators agree that verses 6-11 of the 2nd chapter of Philippians
Though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
is not the original work of Paul, but a pre-existing hymn - which suggests that the idea of the divinity of Jesus didn’t originate with Paul.
Any discussion of this question is incomplete without mention of the hypothetical Q document. This document has been reconstructed by comparing the parts of Matthew and Luke that are similar in wording, but aren’t based on Mark’s gospel. IIRC, Q doesn’t refer to Jesus as Son of God (or as Messiah, for that matter). Q may well be as old as Paul’s letters, so it may be that the earliest generation of Christians didn’t use those designations for Jesus.
OTOH, the four gospels represent a large variety of different Christian communities, and they do refer to Jesus as Son of God. These communities probably didn’t derive directly from Paul’s churches, since their theology is quite different from Paul’s, and they don’t quote Paul’s writings. This makes it highly unlikely that Paul originated the “Son of God” designation.
Also, as Kerriensis notes, the Philippians passage is thought to have been a common “hymn” in the church, not written by Paul.
The most likely scenario is that the title “Son of God” became attached to Jesus at a very early stage, just as other titles did. For example, Messiah=Christ, Son of Man, Lord, King of the Jews, Logos=Word. These all come from Jewish tradition, with the exception of Logos which comes from Greek philosophy (and probably comes later in the development). There is also a close association between Jesus and God’s divine Wisdom, who was also thought of as a person, albeit a female.
Barclay’s theory is not really supported by empirical evidence, it’s just a hypothesis based on a reading of old traditions. The Gospel does not actually say that John was the Beloved Disciple, nor does it say that the Beloved Disciple was the author. Attribution of authorship to John was a late second century tradition. Chapter 21, which asserts that the Gospel was written by “the disciple” is widely believed to be a later appendix and not part of the original book.
The current consensus in schlaorship is that John was the product of a late first century Syrian community of disenfranchised Jewish Christians. It’s not impossible that this community was founded by an apostle, or even by John, but there is no real evidence that such is the case and John would have had to be close to a hundred years old when it was written.
For a number of critical reasons, John is also regarded as the least historical of the gospels and most liturgical in intent. The stuff about the Logos is also quite distinctively Greek and non-Jewish. It’s highly unlikely that anyone called Jesus the “Word” while he was alive.
I thought so too, but my understanding is that modern scholarship is inclining towards the view that far from being the logos of Greek philosophy the concept of ‘Word’ in John’s Gospel relates more to the Jewish notion of dabar, the Hebrew for the Word of God. My (limited) understanding is that this term dabar is broader than the English conception of ‘word’ and includes such meanings as a spoken word, a promise, a thought, reason…
To be quite honest, I don’t have a clue one way or the other regarding the merits of the argument, but it’s certainly interesting that something normally interpreted as being of Greek origin is actually semetic.