In a previous discussion on this blog Ekaputra Tupamahu made an important statement that I have been pondering. I have argued that it is dangerous to state that Allah equates to God the Father because Muslims will not confess that Allah raised Jesus from the dead. Ekaputra challenged this statement by reminding me that in Indonesia Christians declare that Jesus is anak Allah “son of Allah”. According to Ekaputra this appears to be a declaration that Jesus is the Son of the God that Muslims already know as Allah.
As I have thought about the language of the New Testament there is something that Ekaputra, as well as James McGrath, may very well be correct about: early Christian witness appears to appeal to the deities of the pagan world as a starting point for gospel proclamation. I do not think that this means that the early church affirmed pagan worship as sufficient, nor salvific. But it may be correct that there was some pagan worship that was correct in its assumptions, or some deities that correctly reflect, to some degree, the true God. But I emphasize may be!
I say this because it is true that the church proclaimed Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ θεοῦ (Jesus Christ, the Son of God). It appears that there is an attempt to identify Jesus the Messiah as the Son of the common Greek word for God. The early church could have transliterated the covenant name of God יהוה (YHWH). But the general designation for “God” was used: θεός.
What I have not heard James or Ekaputra say, and I would like to hear their statements on this, is that if we acknowledge that God the Father is known, through some form of general revelation, to Muslims that the one thing we must continue to proclaim is “Allah has a Son, He has raised His Son from the dead” and that there is no other way to Allah, but by Jesus.
Equally, if there are those out there that would like to weigh in on why it is that that θεός makes no difference, I would like to hear your opinion as well. I would like to know why you think that the early Christians did not proclaim Jesus as the son of YHWH to the Greco-Roman world? Or do you think that they did when they equate Jesus with κύριος (although Jesus is never called “son of the Lord”)?
November 1, 2009 at 6:55 pm
It’s quite simple. For Muslims Allah is a proper name and it does not equate to the proper name YHWH. Nor can Allah, according to Islamic theology, be in any way equated with the triune God of Christian theology. Saying that Allah is just the Arabic word for God is a red herring since it doesn’t take into account the differing contexts in which Muslims and Arabic speaking Christians use it.
November 1, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Was the tradition that the divine name couldn’t be pronounced alive during Jesus’ ministry? If so, then they probably wouldn’t have transliterated יהוה either, since they would have been in the habit of saying אלהים/θεος in place of the name.
Also, I think κυριος could have given the idea of “son of god” in the Greek word, as the Emperor cult designated the Caeser’s their divine status in terms of their being “sons of god,” along with the title κυριος–they weren’t gods in and of themselves, but via their election by ο θεος. At least, I think that’s what I’ve read. All of this could be wrong
November 1, 2009 at 7:56 pm
There are a lot of things I could say, many of which would repeat my end of a conversation I had a while back on my blog. But one key question that I asked in that context was about a Muslim I met in India who, learning that our group was from the United States and assuming we’d all be Christians (even though the person he was chatting with from our group happened not to be), emphasized how much he loves Jesus.
The main question I have is why right beliefs about Jesus would matter more than loving him. But once we address that, I think it is appropriate to come back to the question of whether we can assume that the Nicene view of Jesus, or the Johannine view, or some other view is the “right view of Jesus”. Why should the Johannine statements be privileged more than the Lucan? And even within John, why should “no one comes to the Father but through me” be emphasized to the neglect of the identification of the Logos as the light that “gives light to every human being“.
In short, part of the issue for me relates to what I understand the Biblical texts themselves on the whole to emphasize, but part of the issue has to do with the treatment of specific quotes from this or that Biblical texts as “what the Bible says”, as though it can be assumed that there are not other strands of “what the Bible says” that might be in tension with the prooftexts being quoted.
November 1, 2009 at 9:23 pm
It bears pointing out that the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, translates Elohim as θεός and YHWH as κυριος, so the NT is just following a well estabished interpretive tradition. There is no attestation of a Greek transliteration of YHWH. Elohim was not a proper name, and so would only have been translated rather than carried over, and as it happened, elohim was the general Hebrew word for “gods”, and so the singular el mapped over very nicely into ὁ θεός. The choice of a singular translation of a fossilized plural Hebrew noun is only natural, reflecting their discomfort by their single God taking on a plural noun in another language that wouldn’t suffer a singular verb (as it did contentedly in Hebrew).
November 1, 2009 at 10:15 pm
If I say that I love Jesus the Puerto Rican landscaper from San Juan then can I claim to love the same Jesus that Christians worship? Why assume that you can love a Jesus whom you don’t have right beliefs about?
November 1, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Steve: I’d point out that there is attestation of a imitated form of יהוה in the LXX as ΠΙΠΙ. There is also attestation of the tetragrammaton being rendered as ΙΑΩ in 4QLXXLev[b] and a host of other ancient writings (e.g., Diodorus Siculus, Tertullian, Origen, Varro, Jerome, et al. See Sidney Jellicoe’s The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968; Repr., Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1993), 271-2, and Greg Stafford’s Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended: An Answer to Scholars and Critics, 3rd ed. (Murrieta, CA: Elihu, 2009), 40ff. Both authors list plenty of ancient sources. This post by John Hobbins is also worth looking at.
November 2, 2009 at 6:05 am
Nick,
Interesting points. Of course, it doesn’t substantially change that representing the divine name as ὁ κυριος ‘Lord’ was a well established interpretive tradition, especially considering the common practice of substituting adonai ‘Lord’ for YHWH.
November 2, 2009 at 6:31 am
I’m pretty sure that the Jesus whom Muslims regard as a prophet is not a Puerto Rican landscaper. But I could be wrong. Be that as it may, there is a reasonable likelihood that the vast majority of Christians today are unorthodox in their view of Jesus in some respect – I’ve rarely met an Christian without theological education who even understood classic orthodoxy, much less adhered to it in detail. And so my question is how wrong you have to be in order for it to matter when it comes to salvation, in your opinion.
November 2, 2009 at 7:08 am
Interesting questions.
My understanding is that the Arabic word allah means both “[their] God” and “[any] god,” like the English word “god,” except for the capitalization difference. The OT word elohim worked the same way — so God was elohim, but so were other gods. I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in many Arabic dialects the only way to talk about “son of God” is to use the word allah. (I also seem to remember that the word allah predates Islam, and that Allah was an Arabian pagan god, but I don’t remember the details.)
Interestingly, the tetragrammaton (YHWH) does not predate Israelite writings, suggesting that the word was invented to name the one God.
As Nick points out, there are a variety of traditions about how to render YHWH in Greek, including actually writing the Hebrew letters (in the otherwise Greek mss.). It’s not clear whether the NT kurios (“lord”) for YHWH led to, or was influenced by, the Hebrew adonai (literally, “my Lord” or “my lords”) for YHWH.
-Joel
November 2, 2009 at 9:25 am
>I have argued that it is dangerous to state that Allah equates to God the Father >because Muslims will not confess that Allah raised Jesus from the dead.
I imagine many Jews would argue that it is dangerous (or at least inappropriate) to state that God the Father equates to YHVH/Elohim because Christians will not confess that He is One, and not part of a Triune god.
Harold Bloom wrote an interesting book on the subject — Jesus and Yahweh, the Names Divine.
November 2, 2009 at 10:25 am
Steve: I certainly didn’t intend to undermine your point about ὁ κυριος, I only wanted to point out that there were a few different ways of rendering the tetragrammaton in Greek.
James: And I’m pretty sure that the Jesus Muslims regard as a prophet is not the Son of God that the NT bears witness to from beginning to end. Wherever the ‘wrong belief about Jesus’ line is, Muslims have surely crossed it.
November 2, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Everyone,
Thanks for the replies/responses. I had no idea about the tetragrammaton being transliterated into Greek. I am with Nick on this one, whatever the amount of “knowledge” is that one has to has regarding Jesus, being a prophet is not sufficient.
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December 22, 2009 at 4:58 pm
“whatever the amount of “knowledge” is that one has to has regarding Jesus, being a prophet is not sufficient.”
Really? Knowledge of history doesn’t matter? How is one to know the facts? If you study the bible one must come to the conclusion that Jesus was a prophet, not God. Unless of course you learn the bible through a church, in which case you will get a particular preconceived viewpoint depending on the denomination. I suggest taking a religious studies course on Christianity.
December 22, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Shane,
I suggest that you consider that I am currently working on my third degree studying Christianity. I have read authors from orthodox, heterodox, heretical, and secular viewpoints. I am familiar with many views and positions.
Read Philippians 2:5-11. One of our earliest Christian writers, Paul, speaks of Christ sharing the nature of God. The first chapter, and the fourteenth through the seventeenth chapter of John, are about as evident as it comes that Jesus was consider divine in early Christianity. Matthew applies the name “Emmanuel” to Jesus which means “God with us” (1:23). Mark 1:1-3 quotes OT passages used to describe the coming of YHWH to introduce the coming of Jesus.
I suggest you stop taking everything your professor told you in some introduction to Christianity class verbatim and go read the Bible for yourself. You don’t have to come to the conclusion that Jesus was anything more than a prophet, but it is incorrect to say that only the church taught this and the biblical authors did not.
December 23, 2009 at 3:49 am
Brian, bravo on responding with patience to a rude commenter!
I would like to politely ask, however, whether you think the passages you mentioned in your last comment are not merely compatible with an understanding of Jesus as more than a prophet or God’s agent, but actually REQUIRE such an interpretation. There’s no doubt that, if one has a developed doctrine of the incarnation in mind, one can find it in Philippians 2:6, or in the phrase “God is with us.” But the latter, I assume we’d both agree, did not necessarily imply incarnation of a divine person to Isaiah, and thus conceivably could have been similarly understood by an early Jewish-Christian author quoting it; and about Philippians 2 I’ll just ask what you think of the Adamic background proposed by Dunn and others. But again, my point is less about what interpretations of these texts are possible, and more about the fact that it is possible to interpret them other ways, which suggests that these texts are at the very least not emphatically and unambiguously asserting the incarnation and/or Christ’s divine nature – which is rather odd if they are not only seeking to convey those ideas but regard them as ESSENTIAL Christian beliefs.
December 23, 2009 at 6:46 am
James,
I don’t think I was very patient with that last commenter, but thank you for the compliment.
Of course, it is possible with many of the references, such as Matthew’s “God with us” or Mark’s connecting Jesus to the visitation of YHWH, to see Jesus as being God’s representative in a superior way to other prophets and such. I am not saying this is not a possible reading. But I do think there is strong evidence that these biblical authors had developed some idea of the incarnation (maybe not full blown Nicene or Chalcedonian theology). I do not think John’s theology in the Fourth Gospel came out of nowhere to the point where the author of the other three gospels would have been blown away.
With Paul it is pretty hard to read Phil. 2 any other way (though I confess I am unfamiliar with Dunn’s view on this matter, which may be b/c it hasn’t gotten very far amongst his peers). It can very well be said that the church (i.e. second, third, fourth century Christianity) “interpreted” statements found in Mt, Mk, and Lk by grouping these three with Jn which leads us to read back into the previous gospels a doctrine of incarnation that may not have been as apparent had we not had Jn. But I do not think that the authors of these gospels did not have a partial concept of the incarnation in mind.
So then the real question is was it possible for the Holy Spirit to have guided the earliest Christians in such a way that those books that were compiled interpreted each other so that the church arrived at orthodoxy. I am very comfortable with this. But I am not willing to jump on board w. Shane who assumes that the authors of the first three gospels would have been utterly shocked to hear Jesus described as he is in John or Paul.
December 23, 2009 at 9:09 am
Just a quick reply to say that Dunn’s Christology in the Making is considered a key book on NT Christology in our era. Plenty have disagreed with his conclusions on Phil.2:6-11, and Dunn himself nuanced things slightly differently in more recent works (such as his Theology of Paul the Apostle). But even those who disagree with him interact with him, and so I’m not sure how anyone could have missed him altogether.
As for John’s distinctiveness, it can indeed be overemphasized. But drawing a clear line between inspiration and incarnation has proven challenging – and it may be that it is possible for Christology to develop seamlessly from one to the other, without anyone along the way feeling that they had introduced something completely new.
December 23, 2009 at 10:00 am
I will have to take a look at Dunn’s work. What I was trying to say is that his reading of Phil. 2 must not have caught fire b/c it hasn’t been repeated elsewhere (at least with any frequency). And if you say Dunn himself adjusted it may be that he threw his idea out there, realized it didn’t hold up, and adjusted.
Maybe those who disagree have interacted. Again, I just haven’t seen those interactions.