Section 62
95As in 1 Cor. 1:24; cf. C. A. A. Scott, Christianity according to St. Paul (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 264-65. The question how such early Christian thinkers pictured Christ in the role of heavenly Wisdom is best answered by reference to his occasionally speaking in that role himself. Cf. J. R. Harris, The Origin of the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel (Cambridge, 1917); The Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Manchester, 1919).
96Followers of Athanasius were particularly embarrassed by the LXX wording, Kύϱɩος ἕϰτɩσέ με (“The LORD created me”), which seemed to play right into the hands of Arians and other heretics.
97On the primitive-Christian character of this affirmation see F. V. Filson, The New Testament against its Environment (London, 1950), pp. 61-62. More recently, J. D. G. Dunn has argued that the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ (as the Word of God) does not emerge in the NT before the Fourth Gospel, that Paul’s presentation of him as the Wisdom of God does indeed imply a doctrine of incarnation, but one which views him as embodying God’s creative and saving activity rather than as actually preexisting (Christology in the Making [London, 1980], pp. 176-96, 258-68). See also A. T. Hanson, The Image of the Invisible God (London, 1982).
98Cf. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, Wisdom and the Son of Man (Cambridge, 1973).
99One example will suffice: Messiah’s preexistence was inferred from Ps. 72:17, “May his name continue as long as the sun” (lit., “. . . before the sun”), where the verb yinnôn (“may it continue”) was treated as a proper noun and the clause taken to mean: “Before the sun his name was Yinnon” (TB Sanhedrin 98b, citing the school of R. Yannai).