Lexham Press has just released Honoring the Son, an unassuming little volume whose impact far outweighs its modest size (less than 100 pages!). In this book Larry Hurtado, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, unveils the core of his large number of scholarly volumes and articles devoted to what has been called “early high Christology.” With volumes like Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (2003); How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (2005); and One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (2015), Hurtado has established himself as an authority on the subject of this book. Hurtado has also been recognized for over thirty years for his broader contributions to the study of early Christianity in such volumes as The Earliest Christian Artifacts (2006) and most recently Destroyer of the Gods (2016). He also has been honored by not one but two festschriften (see the Bibliography).
So what does professor Hurtado condense into these few pages? Simply that the first Jewish followers of Jesus were convinced that God required them to reverence Jesus as divine, alongside the worship they were to render to Yahweh. This conviction was based on not only how they remembered the earthly career of Jesus but on the fact that God raised Jesus and exalted him to his right hand.
This worship and devotion was evident by the many ways they expressed those convictions, not the least of which was the application of Yahweh texts in the OT to the ascended and glorified Jesus. See, e.g., the use of Isaiah 45 in Philippians 2:9-11 and 2 Corinthians 5:10/Romans 14:10. Early Jewish Christian prayers were also directed to Jesus, such as the Aramaic Maranatha, “O Lord, come” (1 Corinthians 16:22). He refers to this usage of the Aramaic prayer as “the Achilles heel” of the idea that Jesus was only viewed as divine by later Gentile worshippers. These comprise only a small sample of the evidence he provides.
The book begins by placing the issue within the context of scholarly issues raised by such Germans as Wilhelm Bousset who argued that the rise of “Jewish worship of Jesus” was from its Hellenistic soil, not from that of its early Judean followers. Hurtado then offers a concise but helpful discussion of ancient Jewish monotheism and how early Jewish believers’ worship of Jesus was a “mutation” of that monotheism, but not a violation of it. Then he turns to those key texts that reflect the Christological claims of the earliest Christian circles, concentrating on Paul’s letters because they preserve the earliest evidence of beliefs about Jesus, but also exploring Johannine texts and the Apocalypse.
His final chapter is best expressed in his own words. “I then turn … to the evidence of the kinds of devotional practices in which the risen Christ had a prominent place as a joint recipient with God. I contend that the place of Jesus in earliest Christian practice is the most remarkable feature of the young Christian movement … a uniquely ‘dyadic’ devotional pattern in which God and Jesus are recipients” (3-4).
The reader can certainly discern my enthusiasm for this book which argues in the title and in its content that Jesus followers did “honor the Son as they did the Father” (see John 5:23). I acknowledge that this issue is more personal to me than it is to some readers, because this Spring my university suffered the doctrinal defection of one of our faculty members centering on the very subject of this book – the preexistence and deity of Jesus. While many answers to trinitarian doubts can be found in the field of systematic theology, I found that the most effective arguments lie in the recognition of the early historical development of Jesus worship. Why is it that early Christians were known by outsiders as those who “sing a hymn to Christ as God” (Pliny’s Letter to Trajan, 115 AD)? The answer lies in the devotional practice of the earliest Jewish Christians, not in a 4th century Greek philosophical definition.
So if you want a summary of over thirty years of research on this subject, you have it in Honoring the Son. Unitarianism raises its head in surprising locations, not only in the cultists knocking at your door.
