Who Did Paul Think Jesus Was?
Who Did Paul Think Jesus Was?
Paul’s evidence, ranging from less than two to roughly three decades after the resurrection, offers our earliest NT evidence and a decisive contradiction to the idea that Christians only gradually evolved the idea of Jesus’ exalted status.137 To be sure, Paul’s interests were not the same as those of authors who composed later Christian creeds; but for him Jesus was not only human, but also the preexistent Wisdom of Jewish tradition and the exalted Lord.
In the earliest extant Christian document, 1 Thessalonians, Paul might apply to Jesus’ appearing some Old Testament language about God’s coming.138 Likewise, the Marana tha invocation of 1 Cor 16:22 indicates Jesus’ exalted status, and is taken by many scholars as “clear evidence that in the very earliest days the Aramaic-speaking church referred to Jesus by the title that in the OT belongs to God alone.”139 In other words, the title “is the ascription to Jesus of the functions of deity.”140
Paul uses wisdom language for Jesus. The language is found in what are often taken to be pre-Pauline formulas, but of which Paul at the least plainly approves.141 These passages include 1 Cor 8:6, probably also adapting the Shema (the confession of the oneness of Israel’s God, the Lord): “To us there is only one God, the Father, from whom is everything . . . and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom is everything . . .”142 Likewise Phil 2:6-7 reads at least something (despite some debate) like this: Jesus “being in God’s form did not consider equality with God something to be taken hold of; instead, he emptied himself, taking a slave’s form, having embraced human likeness . . .”143 Like some other passages, this one goes on to apply to Jesus an Old Testament text about God (Phil 2:10-11, using the language of Is 45:23). Many also would count here the wisdom language in Col 1:15-17144 and other passages. Paul’s references to the “day of the Lord Jesus” or “day of Christ” (1 Cor 1:8; 5:5; 2 Cor 1:14; Phil 1:6, 10; 2:16) clearly evoke OT texts about the “day of the Lord” (YHWH).145
This summary does not even count the rare passage where many scholars believe that Paul explicitly calls Jesus “God.”146 Nor does it count the many incidental references assuming Jesus’ divine status, such as blessings from Jesus along with the Father (in epistolary introductions where a blessing from a deity was conventional)147 or links with the Father and the divine Spirit.148
It is not likely that Paul originated this “wisdom christology” himself. As we have noted, the same wisdom imagery appears for Jesus in Matthew and probably Q (Matt 11:28-30;149 23:34; Lk 11:49; cf. Matt 11:19; Lk 7:35), is most developed in John,150 and is nowhere clearly challenged in extant records of the early Christian movement. Paul shows that preaching a divine/wisdom Christ precedes Mark’s adaptation of the Greco-Roman biographic form to appeal to Gentile audiences accustomed to the sort of narrative structure Mark provides. 151 His (and some other early Christians’) central proclamation was a briefer outline of the salvific story, and in that story Christ was no mere mortal (e.g., Acts 2:21, 38; 22:16; 1 Cor 8:6; 12:3; Phil 2:6).
The issue is not that later christologies exalt Jesus in contrast to early sources that do not (though later ones like John are clearly more developed). The issue is instead that it is difficult to find any early Christian source that says much about Jesus that leaves him as a mere earthly Messiah. (Even James, which deals little with Christology, speaks of “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ,” claiming Jesus’ Lordship and perhaps comparing him with the divine “glorious king” in Scripture.)152 Unless one counts hypothetical reconstructions as evidence, we lack concrete evidence for a first-century Jesus movement that did not exalt him beyond normal earthly messianic status. This observation may not fit easily into modern theories about the evolution of early Christian christology, but it should not be simply ignored.
At what point might such claims have created tension with other Jewish groups? Judaism was monotheistic and Palestinian Judaism rejected divinizing mortals, but it did provide a fertile context for speculation about exalted figures.