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58
Larry
W.
Hurtado, Devotion and Ancient
One
Jewish
God,
One
Fortress, 1988),
xiv + 178
pp.
Reviewed
by Joel B. Green
emphasis
important study
Professor of
Religion
and
well-plotted
among
veneration offered Jesus
Lord:
Early
Christian Monotheism
(Philadelphia: ISBN 0-8006-2076-3
of Manitoba.
By
means of a
monotheistic
confession
Judaism assisted
What were the
origins
of the
worship
of Jesus in earliest
Christianity? How did his
disciples
come to honor him as “Lord,” while at the same time
affirming
their continued
loyalty
to the fundamental OT and Jewish
on monotheism? These
questions
set the
agenda
for this
of
christological beginnings by Larry Hurtado,
now
at the
University
wide-ranging argument,
Hurtado insists that the rever- ence of Jesus in divine terms and
continuing
the earliest Jewish Christians was a novel
development.
He dem- onstrates that the
religious categories
of
first-century
this innovation in the monotheistic
tradition,
but that the
distinctive
is not
fully explicable against
the
backdrop
of first-century
Judaism. This “Christian
mutation,”
as he calls
it, arose
all in the
spiritual experience
That
is,
“the earliest and
key
innovation in
Christianity
of honorific.
titles
or other
christological
nature of the
religious praxis
of early and influential
[Christian] groups”
above
(p. 124).
Procedurally,
the discussion alternative
Judaism,
constituting
evidence
not to
say
that these
aspects
worship
of Christ as
conceptual
of the
early
Christian movement.
was not the use
rhetoric.
Rather,
it was the
greatness.
Chris-
by
God as chief
Hurtado makes his
point primarily by removing
from
explanations
of
christological origins. Thus, he
surveys
relevant
primary
materials to show
that,
in
spite
of the exis- tence of a wide
variety
of divine
agents
in the literature of contemporary
monotheistic
piety
was never
really
threatened: “The God of Israel remained the
living
center of Jewish devotion”
(p. 27).
Far from
of the
experience
of God’s
remoteness, then,
the postexilic
interest in
angels, speculation
about
personified
divine attributes such as Wisdom and
Word,
and the elevation of patriarchs to the role of divine
agents point
to God’s
unsurpassed
This is
of Jewish
religion
were irrelevant to the growth
of earliest
christology,
however. After all, Hurtado notes, the
divine had its
beginnings among
Jewish tians. And it was
Jewish
tradition that “…
supplied
the
language
and
models for
articulating
Jesus’ exaltation
agent
of the divine will”
(p. 68).
interests as background, the
question
remains,
What provided
immediate and decisive
impetus
for Christian binitarian devo-
that
placed
the
rise
Christ
alongside
God? Evidence for Jesus’
heavenly
status as God’s chief
agent
is grounded above all in expressions
of early Christian
devotion-hymnody, prayer, “calling
on
the Lord’s
Supper,
and so on-so we should not be
With such Jewish
tion,
this mutation
the name” of Jesus,
1
59
surprised
to discover that
early religious experience
had a creative influ-
ence
along
these lines. In this
regard,
it is worth
recalling
that
Seyoon
Kim
argued
a decade
ago
that the
primary
contours of Paul’s
gospel
could be traced back to his Damascus Road encounter with Jesus
(The
Origin of
Paul’s
Gospel [Tiibingen:
J.C.B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck),
1981]). Hurtado,
no
doubt, would
insist that other
visionary experi-
ences of Paul and others must also be
given
their due.
Early
Christians
encountered the exalted Christ “… in such
unprecedented
and
superla-
tive divine
glory
that
they
felt
compelled
to respond
devotionally
as they
did”
(p. 121).
To have done otherwise would have been an act of . .
disobedience to God.
One God, One Lord thus
places
a premium on formative
religious
experience
in a way that far outdistances other
explorations
of christo-
logical beginnings.
It is true that others have found in the
early worship
of Jesus data relevant for
christological inquiry.
But Hurtado has shifted ‘
the modem
scholarly
discussion
away
from its fascination with christo-
logical
titles and other forms of alleged hard evidence toward a concern
for the devotional life of the
early
Christian movement. And he has
done
so in a convincing and
helpful way.
What is missing from this
approach,
in its present incarnation at least,
is
any exainination
of the limits
placed
on creative
religious experience
by,
or the interaction of such
experience
with,
other sources of theologi-
cal
development
in
apostolic Christianity. Thus,
Hurtado shows the
limited relevance
of, e.g., Logos-speculation,
but does not
explore
how
such
speculation might
have informed
(or
been informed
by) religious
experience. Similarly, though
Hurtado devotes a brief section to the
possible
affect of Jesus’
ministry
on later
binitarianism, he does not
explore
how the life and
teaching
of Jesus
might
have had an impact on
the
piety
of
early Christianity.
Nor do we see how reflection on God’s
purpose
as expressed in the OT
(and early
Christian
hermeneutics) might
have interacted with devotional life in the early Christian movement.
Hence, although
Hurtado has
helped
to redress the
striking
imbalance
in religio-historical
method,
much remains to be done if we are to come
to terms with the
dynamism
of
christological formulation-yesterday
and
today.
Joel B.
Green,
is Academic Dean and Associate Professor of New Tes- tament at New
College
of Advanced Christian Studies,
Berkeley,
CA.
2
