Chapter 247 of 404

Exalted Figures in Early Jewish Thought

Judaism’s use of divine language was more fluid in this period¹⁵³ than it later became.¹⁵⁴ (One may compare, for example, hellenistic Jewish application of divine language to Moses¹⁵⁵ or Palestinian Jewish exalted language for “Melchizedek.”) ¹⁵⁶ Many portrayed a sort of subordinate but powerful vizier alongside God, sometimes apparently understanding wisdom or the logos in such terms.¹⁵⁷

More often, early Judaism seems to have understood wisdom as an aspect or part of God, merely personified distinctly.¹⁵⁸ Although Jewish Christians’ christology violated the messianic concepts of most other Jews, especially those later seeking to normativize Judaism,¹⁵⁹ it offered an alternative interpretation rather than a disavowal of God’s unity.¹⁶⁰ Rather than defining what God was in a metaphysical Greek sense, biblical faith knew God by his acts and words and distinguished him from all other realities. At some point, early Christians began affirming Jesus’ deity within the identity of the God of their Bible, the way their contemporaries often presented wisdom as a divine attribute. They continued to distinguish this biblical God’s identity from all other realities.¹⁶¹

As we have noted, Wisdom christology informed early Christian understanding about Jesus already in our earliest sources such as Paul and possibly “Q.” That a first-century Palestinian Jewish movement would within its earliest decades already hold a consensus that their founder rose from the dead and somehow embodied or existed as divine wisdom is remarkable. We have no comparable evidence for the deification (or even belief in the heavenly exaltation) of other first-century Jewish messianic figures. It seems that something distinctive within the movement, rather than merely following a common first-century Jewish social pattern, produced this consensus. It is difficult to comprehend how without the authority of Jesus’ teaching about his exalted identity in some form so many monotheistic Jews in the early church would have simultaneously come to emphasize Jesus’ exalted character, and, while debating circumcision, food laws, Jerusalem’s authority and other points, fail to offer concrete evidence of being deeply divided over this aspect of Christology.¹⁶²

Israeli scholar David Flusser contends that “On the one hand, Christology developed from Jesus’ exalted self-awareness and from what happened to or was believed to have happened to Jesus and, on the other hand, from various Jewish religious motifs which became connected with Jesus Christ.”¹⁶³

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