Luke’s Christology of Divine Identity


Book Description

Henrichs-Tarasenkova argues against a long tradition of scholars about how best to represent Luke's Christology. When read against the backdrop of ancient ways of constructing personal identity, key texts in the Lukan narrative demonstrate that Luke indirectly characterizes Jesus as the one God of Israel together with YHWH. Henrichs-Tarasenkova employs a narrative approach that takes into consideration recent studies of narrative and history and enables her to construct characters of YHWH and Jesus within the Lukan narrative. She employs Richard Bauckham's concept of divine identity that she evaluates against her study of how one might speak of personal identity in the Greco-Roman world. She engages in close reading of key texts to demonstrate how Luke speaks of YHWH as God in order to demonstrate that Luke-Acts upholds a traditional Jewish view that only the God of Israel is the one living God and to eliminate false expectations for how Luke should speak of Jesus as God. This analysis establishes how Luke binds Jesus' identity to the divine identity of YHWH and concludes that the Lukan narrative, in fact, does portray Jesus as God when it shows that Jesus shares YHWH's divine identity.




God Crucified


Book Description

God Crucified presents a new proposal for understanding New Testament Christology in its Jewish context. Using the latest scholarly discussion about the nature of Jewish monotheism as his starting point, Richard Bauckham builds a convincing argument that the early Christian view of Jesus' divinity is fully consistent with the Jewish understanding of God. Bauckham first shows that early Judaism had clear ways of distinguishing God absolutely from all other reality. When New Testament Christology is read with this Jewish context in mind, it becomes clear that early Christians did not break with Jewish monotheism; rather, they simply included Jesus within the unique identity of Israel's God. In the final part of the book Bauckham shows that God's own identity, in turn, is also revealed in the life, death, and exaltation of Jesus. Originating as the prestigious 1996 Didsbury Lectures, this volume makes a contribution to biblical studies that will be of interest to Jews and Christians alike.




The Identity of Jesus Christ


Book Description

In this seminal work, Frei considers the concepts of Jesus' identity and presence, maintaining that the logic of Christian faith requires that we begin with identity, not presence. Drawing on Ryles' philosophy, Frei argues that a person isÓ primarily what they say or do. Hence, theologians should not look for Jesus' essence by looking past the stories but must look to the stories themselves.




Reading Backwards


Book Description




Luke's Christology of Divine Identity


Book Description

Henrichs-Tarasenkova argues against a long tradition of scholars about how best to represent Luke's Christology. When read against the backdrop of ancient ways of constructing personal identity, key texts in the Lukan narrative demonstrate that Luke indirectly characterizes Jesus as the one God of Israel together with YHWH. Henrichs-Tarasenkova employs a narrative approach that takes into consideration recent studies of narrative and history and enables her to construct characters of YHWH and Jesus within the Lukan narrative. She employs Richard Bauckham's concept of divine identity that she evaluates against her study of how one might speak of personal identity in the Greco-Roman world. She engages in close reading of key texts to demonstrate how Luke speaks of YHWH as God in order to demonstrate that Luke-Acts upholds a traditional Jewish view that only the God of Israel is the one living God and to eliminate false expectations for how Luke should speak of Jesus as God. This analysis establishes how Luke binds Jesus' identity to the divine identity of YHWH and concludes that the Lukan narrative, in fact, does portray Jesus as God when it shows that Jesus shares YHWH's divine identity




Echoes of Lament in the Christology of Luke's Gospel


Book Description

Crisler suggests that the interplay between the laments crafted by Luke and laments from Israel's Scriptures produce highly suggestive Christological points of resonance. Crisler considers how echoes of lament shape our understanding of Lukan Christology and make a contribution to ongoing debates about earliest Christology.




The Preexistent Son


Book Description

In this challenging book, rising New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole contradicts a commonly held view among biblical scholars -- that the Gospel of John is the only Gospel to give evidence for Jesus' heavenly identity and preexistence. The Preexistent Son demonstrates that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were also well aware that the Son of God existed with the Father prior to his earthly ministry. Gathercole supports his argument by considering the "I have come" sayings of Jesus and strikingly similar angelic sayings discovered in Second Temple and Rabbinic literature. Further, he considers related topics such as Wisdom Christology and the titles applied to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Gathercole's carefully researched work should spark debate among Synoptic scholars and extend the understanding of anyone interested in this New Testament question.




Corpus Christologicum


Book Description

A compendium of approximately three hundred texts--in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages--that are important for the study of Jewish messianism and early Christology. In recent decades, the study of Jewish messianic ideas and how they influenced early Christology has become an incredibly active field within biblical studies. Numerous books and articles have engaged with the ancient sources to trace various themes, including "Messiah" language itself, exalted patriarchs, angel mediators, "wisdom" and "word," eschatology, and much more. But anyone who attempts to study the Jewish roots of early Christianity faces a challenge: the primary sources are wide-ranging, involve ancient languages, and are often very difficult to track down. Books are littered with citations and a host of other sometimes obscure writings, and it can be difficult to sort them all out. This book makes a much-needed contribution by bringing together the most important primary texts for the study of Jewish messianism and early Christology--nearly three hundred in total--and presenting the reader with essential information to study them: the critical text itself (with apparatus), a fresh translation, a current bibliography, and thematic tags that allow the reader to trace themes across the corpus. This volume aims to be the starting point for all future work on the primary sources that are relevant to messianology and Christology. About the Author Gregory R. Lanier (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He has written extensively on early Christology and published Old Testament Conceptual Metaphors and the Christology of Luke's Gospel (Bloomsbury, 2018); Septuaginta: A Reader's Edition (Hendrickson, 2018); and Is Jesus Truly God? How the Bible Teaches the Divinity of Christ (Crossway, 2020). He also serves as associate pastor of River Oaks Church in Lake Mary, Florida.




Aspects of Coherency in Luke's Composite Christology


Book Description

Luke has often been understood to transmit a variety of Christological traditions without reflecting on them in relation to each other. In this study, Daniel Gustafsson challenges such positions and demonstrates that when the Gospel of Luke is approached as a narrative, a different picture emerges. Presentations of Jesus as "Messiah", "Son of God", "prophet", and "Son of Man" are shown to conform to Luke's overall plot and significantly overlap each other. The voices of characters with high authority, the use of Scripture, and Jesus's relationship to the Holy Spirit are examples of other factors that contribute to coherency in Luke's Christology.




Jesus and YHWH-Texts in the Synoptic Gospels


Book Description

Scott Brazil examines the frequent practice of applying Old Testament YHWH-texts to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. He argues that this YHWH-text phenomenon evidences a high Christology in the primitive church that traces back to Jesus himself. He thus finds in this Synoptic practice a stinging contradiction against the modern critical theory that a high Christology took many decades to develop in the early church and exists only in John among the canonical Gospels. Brazil surveys the Synoptic Gospels in canonical order, exegeting dozens of passages in which OT texts originally referring to YHWH are either clearly or most probably applied to Jesus. He observes the frequency, diversity, and ubiquity of the practice, as well as its wide range of OT source material and its parallel to the NT practice of applying OT messianic texts to Jesus. And from the data he offers several ramifications, including the early deliberate employment of YHWH-texts to Jesus, the likelihood that Jesus is the source of the practice, the high Christology of the Synoptics, and the redemptive-historical metanarrative that Jesus is the divine interpreter and central figure of the Jewish Scriptures. Ultimately, Brazil argues that understanding the prolific application of OT YHWH-texts to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels cannot be neglected without truncating genuine NT Christology.