opinions and musings

Summarizing where we are now in this investigation of developing Christology within the New Testament, we have seen that for Paul and the original apostles, Jesus was the human Messiah who had died to save humanity from sin and from the powers of evil.   He was resurrected by God and installed as Lord of the nations at God’s right hand. This was in fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies about the Messiah, the son of David, who would rule on the throne of David forever. That was the original gospel preached by the disciples of Jesus after his resurrection.   We find that original gospel in the seven undisputed letters of Paul (Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon), in the Synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, and in the book of Acts. As we move to later periods in the first century we see a greater influence of the Jewish wisdom tradition and Greek philosophy on the early Christians understanding of who Jesus was. The C...

Continuing our study, we will now consider the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews, both written in the 90's. In Proverbs 8 we read that Wisdom “ was beside Him [God] , as a master workman .” The idea of the “master workman” or craftsman has an interesting parallel in Greek philosophy among the Stoics.   They proposed around 300 BC that the supreme God was transcendent and unknowable by humans, but that a second god, called the Craftsman, was the creator of the material world and the revealer of the supreme God to humanity. Another term for this “second god” in Stoic philosophy was the Greek word Logos , meaning “idea”, “word” or “reason”. This second god, the Logos, mediated the truth of the supreme transcendent God to humanity. Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived from 50 BC to 25 AD in Alexandria, Egypt combined the ideas of the Stoics with the Septuagint.   The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures.  It is what we Ch...

The gospel of Matthew tells essentially the same story as Luke, but there is now a hint of the Wisdom tradition coming in from the Jewish Old Testament as a way of understanding Jesus.   In the roughly twenty year period between the publication of the gospel of Mark and the publication of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, the early Christians have been poring over the Old Testament scriptures in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Jewish Old Testament) and they are asking questions about the nature and origin of Jesus. They must have begun to make connections between the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the person of Jesus.   In the Old Testament, wisdom was personified as the first creation of God who then helped him create the rest of the world.   For example Proverbs 8:22-30: “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, Before His works of old.   “From everlasting I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest ti...