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Joel B. Green’s review highlights Larry W. Hurtado’s significant contribution in *One God, One Lord: Early Christian Monotheism*, a pivotal work addressing the genesis of Jesus’s worship within the strictly monotheistic religious landscape of ancient Judaism. Hurtado grapples with the core question of how Jesus’s disciples came to revere him as “Lord” while simultaneously upholding their unwavering commitment to the singular God of Israel. His central thesis posits that the veneration of Jesus by the earliest Jewish Christians constituted a distinct and unprecedented development—a “Christian mutation”—that cannot be fully explained by merely extrapolating from pre-existing first-century Jewish religious categories. Instead, Hurtado argues, this profound innovation emerged fundamentally from the direct spiritual experiences and lived religious praxis of these nascent Christian communities. Hurtado meticulously constructs his argument by first demonstrating that existing concepts of “divine agents” in Jewish literature—such as angels, personified Wisdom, or the Word—do not adequately account for the unique devotion directed toward Jesus. He shows that while diverse, these figures never truly challenged the essential monotheistic piety of Judaism, where “The God of Israel remained the living center of Jewish devotion.” These agents, far from diminishing God’s singularity, often served to highlight His “unsurpassed greatness.” Thus, Hurtado asserts that while Jewish tradition undeniably supplied the conceptual language and models for articulating Jesus’s exaltation, it did not provide the *immediate and decisive impetus* for the binitarian devotional pattern that subsequently arose in Christianity. Instead, Hurtado locates this crucial impetus in the dynamic religious experience of the early believers. He points to concrete expressions of early Christian devotion—including hymnody, prayer “calling on the name” of Jesus, and the observance of the Lord’s Supper—as key evidence. According to Hurtado, early Christians encountered the exalted Christ in such “unprecedented and superlative divine glory” that they felt compelled to respond devotionally, perceiving any alternative as an act of “disobedience to God.” This perspective effectively shifts the modern scholarly discourse away from a primary focus on christological titles and rhetorical analysis toward a deeper appreciation for the foundational *devotional life* and formative religious experience of the early Christian movement. While commending Hurtado for his convincing and helpful reorientation of the discussion, Green identifies a significant lacuna in the study: a comprehensive examination of the *limits* and *interactions* of this creative religious experience with other sources of theological development in apostolic Christianity. Green suggests that Hurtado’s current framework does not adequately explore how, for instance, Logos-speculation might have informed or been informed by religious experience. Similarly, the reviewer notes a missed opportunity to investigate the impact of Jesus’s earthly ministry and teachings on later binitarianism and early Christian piety, or how reflection on God’s purpose through Old Testament hermeneutics might have intertwined with the devotional life. Therefore, Green concludes that while Hurtado has commendably redressed a significant imbalance in religio-historical method, a complete understanding of the “dynamism of christological formulation” necessitates further scholarly inquiry into the intricate interplay between visionary experience and other intellectual and theological currents within early Christianity.
