Jesus Monotheism: Volume 1 - Christological Orgins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond

by Crispin Fletcher-Louis

This is the first of a four-volume ground-breaking study of Christological origins. The fruit of twenty years' research, Jesus Monotheism lays out a new paradigm that goes beyond the now widely held view that Paul and others held to an unprecedented "Christological monotheism." There was already, in Second Temple Judaism and in the Bible, a kind of "christological monotheism." But it is first with Jesus and his followers that a human figure is included in the identity of the one God as a fully divine person. Volume I lays out the arguments of an emerging consensus, championed by Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham, that from its Jewish beginnings the Christian community had a high Christology and worshipped Jesus as a divine figure. New data is put forward to support that case. But there are weaknesses in the emerging consensus. For example, it underplays the incarnation and does not convincingly explain what causes the earliest Christology. The recent study of Adam traditions, the findings of Enoch literature specialists, and of those who have explored a Jewish and Christian debt to Greco-Roman Ruler Cult traditions, all point towards a fresh approach to both the origins and shape of the earliest divine Christology.

Genres: Theology, Christianity, Biblical Studies, Christian, Faith, Church, Religion

386 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2015

Reviews

[Chad]

I've been reading extensively on the subject of early Christology. This volume is an indispensable part of that reading list.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis explores how the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus could confess him as divine while remaining monotheistic. He builds on the important work of scholars such as Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado, agreeing that a high Christology arose very early and from within Judaism, but arguing that they have not gone far enough in explaining why this happened.

Drawing extensively from the Old Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature, Fletcher-Louis shows that Judaism already possessed categories for understanding angels, priests, Adamic figures, messianic figures, and other human beings as sharing in God's glory, authority, and rule. Yet none of these parallels fully explains what the earliest Christians said about Jesus.

So Fletcher-Louis pushes the discussion back to Jesus himself. The earliest Christians did not simply take an ordinary human Messiah and gradually elevate him into the identity of Israel's God. Rather, their astonishing confession of Jesus grew out of Jesus' own words and actions, understood within a Jewish and biblical world that had already prepared the categories for recognizing the divine identity of the Messiah.

I look forward to Volume 2, whenever it might finally be available.

[Ben]

This was my first experience with Fletcher-Louis, but it will not be the last. Although some of his arguments were speculative--that numerical criticism thing is still not sitting right--I found his critiques of Bauckham's and Hurtado's theories of Christological origin well founded, and it has given me a lot to consider. I give this book 4 stars, because I don't think Fletcher-Louis was as careful as he could have been in asserting that the Jewish texts he dealt with reflected the Judaism(s) out of which Christianity evolved. That is, not every Jewish group would have found the Similitudes orthodox, so there needs to be a more careful consideration of that.

[Kendall Davis]

CFL provides a refreshingly theological account of the relevant issues that sets his work a part from more merely historical accounts. His highlighting of the importance of anthropology, incarnation, and the image of God to these questions is, in my opinion, his most important and helpful contribution. He seems to have a tendency to rely too much on individual (sometimes obscure) texts from the Second Temple period that struck me as somewhat unpersuasive. His criticisms of Hurtado and Bauckham are also quite helpful.

[Matthew Colvin]

CFL stands on the shoulders of Bauckham and Hurtado, but his contribution is not nearly as persuasive, and he has not convinced me that the NT authors were especially influenced by the Enoch literature, or that the Christology that he finds in that literature is really at work in the NT.