Jesus the Eternal Son

Answering Adoptionist Christology

Michael F. Bird

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467447775
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

Adoptionism—the idea that Jesus is portrayed in the Bible as a human figure who was adopted as God's son at his baptism or resurrection—has been commonly accepted in much recent scholarship as the earliest explanation of Jesus's divine status. In this book Michael Bird draws that view into question with a thorough examination of pre-Pauline materials, the Gospel of Mark, and patristic sources. Engaging critically with Bart Ehrman, James Dunn, and other scholars, Bird demonstrates that a full-fledged adoptionist Christology did not emerge until the late second century. As he delves into passages often used to support the idea of an early adoptionist Christology, including Romans 1:3–4 and portions of the speeches in Acts, Bird persuasively argues that early Christology was in fact incarnational, not adoptionist. He concludes by surveying and critiquing notable examples of adoptionism in modern theology.

CHAPTER 1

Christology and Christian Origins

The Birth of Christology

It is very difficult to provide a comprehensive description of how early Christian beliefs about Jesus emerged in a way that adequately summarizes the many contexts, texts, artifacts, and complexities that were formative for those Christian beliefs.¹ At the risk of simplification, I would suggest that early Christologies emerged as the attempt to express, in belief and devotion, what the earliest Christ-believers thought God had revealed in the life, passion, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition, there was a palpable need to make sense of what they had experienced of Jesus in their own communal and interior religious life. Reflection on Jesus’s prophetic career and the events of the first Easter—in addition to practices like prayer, worship, healing, visionary experiences, and charismatic phenomena—fostered a set of shared convictions about Jesus among adherents of the primitive churches. Core to those convictions was not only that Jesus was God’s agent, but that Jesus was to be identified with God and with God’s activities in the world—at least in some sense.² Thus, early Christologies were driven by a mixture of ideational factors (beliefs, propositions, and cognitive frameworks) and experiential events (rituals, devotional practices, and sensations of divine presence and power). This led to the creations of narratives and propositions that attempted to answer a double-sided question: (1) Who is Jesus? and (2) Who is God in light of the memory of Jesus and the continuing experience of Jesus? This is where Christology began.

On the question of Jesus’s identity, a simple glance through the New Testament shows that Jesus was described in many ways: as a miracle-working prophet, a new Davidic Messiah, the mysterious “Son of Man,” the pre-existent Son of God, a priestly agent with divine power, a heavenly figure with angelic qualities, the personification of divine wisdom, God’s messianic κύριος, and the divine Logos made flesh. Scholars often mistakenly assume that these beliefs were mutually exclusive and that one view could only be held by one community at any one time. It is more likely, however, that assertions about Jesus’s identity swirled around early Christian networks, no doubt competing for consensus.³ These ideas converged and coalesced into a constellation of common convictions about Christ among the proto-orthodox churches of the second century.⁴

The raw materials for proto-orthodoxy and, indeed, later Nicene Orthodoxy reside in the teachers—and their communities—who wrote the documents that formed the New Testament. While christological claims do not appear to have been the most contested matters of first-century churches, we find indications already in the New Testament that certain aspects of Jesus’s person and work were regarded as intrinsic and defining for certain communities.⁵ That is most likely because tinkering with Jesus meant tinkering with the type of salvation he provided, which in turn undermined a particular expression of group identity. Thus, “Who is Jesus?” is important because it is directly connected to “What has God done for us through Jesus?” and “Who are we?” What one thinks of Jesus will determine what one has received from him and who his followers should understand themselves to be in the divine plan. There is little wonder that Jesus’s identity became a central, albeit flexible, fixture of the early church. It explains why we detect in the first generations of the church a number of repeated titles for Jesus being used—such as Messiah, Lord, Savior, Son of Man, and Son of God—within a common kerygmatic narrative centered upon his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and future return. Early narrations of the story of Jesus described it as a divinely orchestrated sequence that results in salvation, a salvation in which Jesus played, continues to play, and will yet play, a key role. In light of this, it is clear that conceptions of Jesus’s identity were not determined by abstract speculations, but by his specific role in the deliverance wrought by God and its associated benefits for his followers. We can affirm that among many early Christ-believers there was broad and near-immediate unity on two key christological ideas: (1) identification of Jesus with the God of Israel (in a very intense albeit ambiguous sense); and (2) identification of Jesus of Nazareth as the risen and exalted Lord Jesus Christ (fostering a unity between Jesus’s earthly career and his exalted status). These ideas, I submit, were the germinal seeds of christological orthodoxy.⁶

It was of course not all smooth sailing from Nazareth to Nicea. Complicating factors included varied presentations of Jesus’s person in light of diverse interpretations of Israel’s Scriptures, the struggle of the Judean and trans-Jordan churches to find legitimation for their messianic faith within common Judaism (pre-70 CE), and then antagonism with proto-rabbinic Judaism (post-70 CE). In addition, by the middle of the first century we already see the first phase of an extended encounter with Hellenism and its philosophies, the influence of Jewish and Greco-Roman categories for divine agents, and the adaptation of the Jesus story to various Hellenistic literary genres. Then follows the multiplication and dissemination of Christian writings, ranging from “other” Gospels to anti-heretical tracts, and an increasing diversification of the churches geographically, linguistically, and theologically. Even imperial politics in the third and fourth centuries shaped christological debates. All of this fashioned the christological language and devotional patterns of the early church.

Resultantly, we cannot speak of a single monolithic Christology of the early church, but neither can we settle for postulating an endless variety of Christologies that were all mutually exclusive and proportionately distributed across the early church, each with equal claims to validity. Therefore, rather than refer to a single and uniform “early Christology,” I prefer to speak of “early christologizing,” with various expressions of Jesus’s identity gradually clustering together, becoming fused through the sharing of texts, the development of a common lexicon, shared hermeneutical strategies, and common rituals. The upshot was that a cohesive mode of discourse and mutually recognized patterns of worship gradually emerged. Concurrently, seemingly incongruent beliefs and practices began to be pushed to the margins when they did not meet with consensus or find reciprocation in the burgeoning church communities.

These incongruent Christologies—later labeled as “heresies”—were regarded as invalid portrayals of Jesus. The Jesus described by a growing collection of fringe groups either could not be squared with existing beliefs or else was simply unrecognizable to others. These newly spawned Christologies often ranked high in contextualization but seemingly lacked antiquity and consensus. Often these “heresies” pursued genuinely noble ends, such as constructing a theodicy while attempting an integration of Christian theism with platonic cosmogony (gnosticism), maintaining a high Christology in conjunction with a platonic disdain for the material world (docetism), safeguarding the oneness of God (modalism), or retaining the monarchy of the Father without completely disparaging the divine nature of the Son (subordinationism). The heresies were not trying to undermine belief in Christ; rather, they were trying to contextualize it, to explain its coherence anew, and to make it palatable in the existing cultural environment by utilizing the philosophical resources on hand. Yet these dissident Christologies were ultimately rejected by an emerging majority on different grounds: (1) they failed to commend themselves as built on apostolic foundations, (2) they seemingly lacked scriptural warrant, (3) they had questionable internal coherence, or (4) they espoused dubious consequences for everyday life. It was not that these views were suppressed by a group of bishops who insisted on imposing their own narrow dogma on diverse group who was self-consciously pluralistic and tolerated gnostic and kenotic Christologies side by side. Far more likely, the Jesus in the Apocalypse of Peter was discarded because he was not “according to the Scriptures.” Docetism was thought dubious because it made a mockery of the cross and the Eucharist. Subordinationism was censured because it tore apart the fabric of the gospel and entailed that the worship of Jesus was blasphemous. Modalism was rejected on the grounds that it turned the baptism of Jesus into a ridiculous moment of divine ventriloquism. To give a specific example, Simon Gathercole asserts that the Gospel of Judas did not catch on because it presents a disembodied Jesus, a loveless Jesus, and a Jesus without suffering. The result was a Jesus whom many did not find attractive for veneration.⁷

Adoptionism

One of the most potent if not persistent heresies of the second and third centuries was adoptionism. The problem with adoptionism was that although Jesus’s divine sonship was arguably the most characteristic of Christians, claims about him,⁸ those advocating an adoptionist view of divine sonship were perceived to be reducing Jesus to a human figure who had acquired divine status by merit. Whereas the proto-orthodox church said that this sonship preceded the incarnation (“eternally begotten” in the language of the church fathers), others insisted that Jesus’s sonship had a historical beginning at some point: at his birth, baptism, or resurrection. In adoptionism there was a time when Jesus was not the Son of God. Divine sonship is not something that Jesus had possessed for all time, but something he attained in the course of his life.

There were a variety of types of adoptionism.⁹ Common to all versions are basically two things. The first said that divine sonship was not essential to Jesus. Rather, it was acquired at some point in his terrestrial life. The second claimed that divine sonship is not ontological but honorific. Thus, sonship is not derived from Jesus’s unique filial relationship to Israel’s God, but is conferred as a legal fiction even if it means elevation to divine status. Adoptionism is normally associated with (1) the Ebionites who are alleged to have been a Jewish Christian sect of the early to mid-second century; (2) Theodotus, a lay Christian and Roman cobbler of the late second century and (3) Paul of Samosata, a bishop of Antioch in the third century who was deposed for his beliefs. Although adoptionism was rejected by the orthodox churches, this does not mean that all forms of adoptionism thereafter became extinct. Adoptionism has re-emerged from time to time, notably in Spain under Muslim suzerainty in the eighth century, and has found expression even in the modern period.¹⁰

A widespread assumption in modern scholarship is that the earliest recoverable Christology was adoptionism, and only later—with Paul, John, Ignatius of Antioch, and Justin Martyr—did an incarnational Christology fully develop, rise to dominate, and then attempt to dispel all competing accounts of Jesus’s person.¹¹ Knox, an American scholar, contended that adoptionism corresponded more closely than any later belief with the actual experience of the early church, which knew Jesus to be a man declared to be Lord and Messiah. He put it bluntly: “That [Christology] began with ‘adoptionism’ and ended with ‘incarnationism’ is hardly open to doubt.”¹² Dunn is similar, noting how the Ebionites held to an adoptionist Christology and yet that “heretical Jewish Christianity would appear to be not so very different from the faith of the first Jewish believers.”¹³ Bart Ehrman has suggested that if one of Jesus’s followers had written a Gospel a year or so after his resurrection, one would find an “exaltation Christology,” which described how Jesus “became the Son of God when God worked his greatest miracle on him, raising him from the dead and adopting him as his Son by exalting him to his right hand and bestowing upon him his very own power, prestige, and status.”¹⁴

The Goal of This Book

My objective is to question this quasi-consensus that the earliest retrievable Christology was adoptionist. To that end, I intend to develop two central claims: (1) the first Christologies were hastily devised venerations of Jesus as a divine figure, which then crystallized over the next twenty years into a series of presentations of Jesus that were variations of a theme of incarnationalism, even if the details were still to be fully worked out; and (2) adoptionism originated as a particular second-century phenomenon driven largely by internal debates about preferred texts and socio-religious influences on reading them. So, when did Jesus get adopted as the Son of God? As we will see, probably in the second century, though precisely when will remain a matter of debate.

Given that objective, this study will proceed in several distinct stages. First, I will examine Rom 1:3–4 and materials in the Lucan speeches in Acts that are alleged to espouse a primitive adoptionist Christology whereby Jesus became the Son of God at his resurrection. Second, Mark’s Gospel is purported to have been influenced by Greco-Roman accounts of the deification of human figures, which calls for an examination of deification in relation to the Jewish monotheism which shapes Mark’s symbolic world. Third, it is often argued that several features of Mark’s Gospel make it adoptionistic, not least the baptismal scene, and those features need to be weighed and tested in light of the Gospel as a whole. Fourth, there are several texts and groups from the second century alleged to have been adoptionist. The Shepherd of Hermas has a very eclectic and opaque Christology which is sometimes associated with adoptionism. Some scholars routinely claim that the Ebionites had an adoptionist Christology, so it is worth studying who this obscure group was and what they actually believed about Jesus. Closely following that I will examine the Theodotians—an incontestable adoptionist movement—and what their specific articulation of adoptionism tells us about the origins of adoptionist Christology. Fifth, and somewhat excursively, I will briefly survey and critique some recent manifestations of adoptionism in modern theology.

1. For a good summary of recent debates see Andrew Chester, “High Christology—Whence, When and Why?” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22–50.

2. The notion of Jesus as part of the “divine identity” was put forward by Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), esp. 1–59. What Bauckham means by “divine identity” is “who” God is rather than “what” he is, specifically, the revelation of his name YHWH and his relationship to the whole of reality as creator and ruler. But this approach has been criticized by others. For example, James D. G. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testa...