Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

It should also be noted that in the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Bible, kyrios, LORD, is used to replace YHWH, in accordance with the precept that the tetragrammaton, YHWH, is not to be spoken aloud; it is replaced by Hebrew adonaj (= LORD). When Jesus here, against the background of the Septuagint, is publicly acknowledged and called upon as Lord, this says that in this Jesus, God himself has become tangible, visible, audible. He is the eternal and conclusive presence of God in whom and through whom all creatures adore God.

A Jewish Way of Thinking and Nothing Else

Result: in the texts so briefly discussed here (Acts 2:36; Matt 28:18; Rom 1:3-4; John 1:1-18; Phil 2:6-11), despite the christological novelty, everything is formulated in Old Testament-Jewish forms of thought. And all these texts except John 1:1-18 are very old. They all say, on either the eschatological or the protological level, that Jesus is the final word and conclusive action of God, definitive of creation, definitive of all history. He is the Lord. In him God has fully uttered God’s own self. This conviction lays the groundwork for the confession “Jesus: true human and true God.”

The assertion that the first Jewish-Christian communities honored Jesus only as a simple rabbi, a teacher of wisdom, or a prophet, and that it was only Greek thought, rooted in Gentile-Christian communities, that divinized Jesus’ person, is therefore inaccurate fore and aft. The same truth is illustrated by the titles given to Jesus: Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, and Lord. All of them are Jewish; they come from the Old Testament or at least have their basis there. Also important in this regard would be a close examination of the early Christian interpretation of Psalm 110:1 (“The LORD says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’”) and Psalm 2:7 (“You are my son; today I have begotten you”). It would show how accurately the formulations of early Christology could be developed out of Old Testament-Jewish texts.

Incidentally, the statement in Psalm 2:7, “You are my son; today I have begotten you,” very probably assumes an ancient component of Israelite family law: when a son was born in Israel the father took him on his knee and spoke this very formula (Gen 30:3; 50:23; Ps 22:11). Only thus was the child acknowledged as a legitimate son. Adoption of a child from outside the family or even of an adult was only a special case of this common practice. Normally it was one’s own child, but even so it had to be legally acknowledged, affirmed, and legitimated. In this precise sense in the earliest Christian exaltation Christology Jesus, who was already Son of God, was publicly legitimated as God’s Son and installed in his rightful position.

This should make it clear that New Testament Christology is Jewish. From the very beginning the apostles and disciples and, after them, Jewish-Christian prophets and teachers sought to grasp who Jesus was. They attempted to express the overwhelming experience they had of Jesus, during his lifetime and then in the Easter appearances, in the existing Jewish categories available to them. Unless we are completely deceived, it seems that the insight that the formation of early Christology was an internal process within Judaism and not a Hellenization of Christianity is gaining more and more ground. Thus, for example, Gerd Theissen writes in his book The Religion of the Earliest Churches:

The deification of Jesus did not contradict the Jewish sign world, but consistently “built up” and “fulfilled” it. Those who enthroned Jesus at the right hand of God were not Gentiles but Jews; and they did this in the awareness not of forsaking their Jewish monotheism but rather of consummating it.

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This insight represents a crucial scholarly advance over the liberal positions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The question, however, remains, and Theissen’s words about the “deification of Jesus” and his “enthronement” by Christians make it all the more urgent: was the Christology of the first communities and the early church based on Jesus’ own claim and awareness of his sovereignty? Or is that Christology pure ideology, that is, was it simply imposed on the real Jesus after Easter?

The latter appears to be Theissen’s opinion. He speaks of “experiences of dissonance,” by which he means that Jesus’ disciples and the first communities could only overcome the horrible contradiction between the hopes Jesus had awakened, “between the expectations of a charismatic surrounded with a messianic aura” and his shameful and painful failure on the cross by assigning him an infinitely higher status than that they had originally attributed to him. They had to “enthrone” him at the right hand of God; they had to “deify” him; they had to give him a central place: the rank of the universal redeemer.¹²