A Review of Fletcher-Louis's Jesus Monotheism
Jesus and Second Temple Christology Reconsidered
Crispin Fletcher-Louis’s Jesus Monotheism is one of the best Biblical theology books I have read this year. At the same time it is a speculative work that creates as many questions as it answers, some of which may threaten long-held conservative readings and theological impulses. Thus, despite some wariness, I want to offer it a qualified recommendation of this book.
In this book, the first of a series of four on the topic of NT Christology, Crispin Fletcher-Louis investigates the Jewish theology of God, men, angels, and Messiahs, that Jesus stepped into, and he argues that some of the more recent studies of Pseudepigraphal texts have a lot to contribute to our understanding of first-century Judaism.
I think it is helpful to have some historical background to understand Fletcher-Louis’s interlocutors. In the nineteenth century, modern scholarship became significantly more skeptical about the historicity of the Gospels and tried to uncover the “real events” behind the supposed propaganda. This was the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus,” which ended up falling out of fashion, often because the Jesus who was reconstructed would often be made in the image of nineteenth and twentieth century sensibilities, and become obsolete with every generation.
In recent years, comparatively conservative scholars such as N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, and Larry Hurtado have come forward arguing that the Gospels are in fact reliable and that Jesus was worshipped as God within the first century. In particular, Bauckham and Hurtado take great pains to show that Jesus was recognized and worshipped as God within a few months of the resurrection, in fact. And remarkably they do this in a way that is respected within the secular academy.
Fletcher-Louis calls this new generation of conservative scholarship an “emerging consensus,” and he locates himself within it while seeking to offer a different historical accounting of it. Fletcher-Louis agrees that Christ worship began very early, but he argues that a historical investigation of the Gospels needs to take apocryphal Jewish documents like 1 Enoch, The Life of Adam and Eve, and other Pseudepigrapha way more seriously. His basic critique of Hurtado and Bauckham is that they basically dismiss these texts as being outliers to Second Temple Judaism and that they impose an understanding of God and the Creator-creature distinction that is foreign to the first-century context.
The problem, of course, is that the books we know as the Pseudepigrapha are not a set of first-century scrolls, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a collection of often heretical Jewish writings, sometimes with remarkable commonality, but often dating them is a difficult matter, with some scholars dating some as late as the 9th century AD! To use them to contextualize the New Testament is a risky proposition, to say the least.
Even so, Fletcher-Louis basically makes an extremely persuasive case that some of the texts are early or reflect an earlier, broader spectrum of Jewish orthodoxy at the time of Christ. Fletcher-Louis’s critique of Bauckham and Hurtado is absolutely devastating because he shows that they do not so much as disagree as dismiss recent Second Temple studies, and that they impose highly fragile scholarly constructs upon the New Testament.
For instance, Hurtado insists that it was not the events of Christ’s life that convinced his followers of his divinity, but post-resurrection visions, dreams, and experiences of a glorified Christ that convinced them of it, without any New Testament evidence for this radical claim. Fletcher-Louis rightly notes that, were such a consensus to be the sole foundation, then the early Christians would have been open to the charge of idolatry, especially if Judaism in the first century had as airtight a Creator-creature distinction as Hurtado argues.
The other glaring lacuna in Hurtado’s scholarship is the title Son of Man. Basically Hurtado argues that the title Son of Man is not a historical title that Jesus used for Himself, and in the synoptic Gospels it had absolutely no symbolic meaning!
With Bauckham, the problems are less extreme, but similarly pronounced. When the Enoch seminar came out and argued that the Son of Man figure in 1 Enoch was probably from the first century, Bauckham appears to have simply ignored it based on the mere fact that the portions of Enoch that describe a Son of Man are not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Further, Bauckham assumes what he needs to prove. There was, according to Bauckham, a chasm between God and man in first-century Judaism. Jesus is clearly on the God-side of the chasm in the New Testament, and everything else follows from that. The problem is that it begs the question: were the Jews of Jesus’s day committed to a chasm between God and man? It’s certainly good theology, but is it also good history?
Fletcher-Louis argues it’s not, based on the Jewish writings we have. He argues that in fact, Jews could have quite a permeable boundary between God and man, and he appeals to three examples:
There is a semi-divine Son of Man figure in 1 Enoch, Daniel 7, and even in the Dead Sea Scrolls who appears to straddle the boundary between God and man by sharing God’s throne.
Surprisingly, some high priests (Ben Sirach) and prophets (Dan. 2) seem to participate in God’s glory within early Jewish texts.
Weirdest of all, Adam and Enoch are often worshipped in Jewish texts. Fletcher-Louis explains this in terms of man being the true idol of God, which can legitimately receive the kind of worship that pagans rendered to idols in the ancient world.
Fletcher-Louis tries to explain very clearly that he does not think this Jewish theology can entirely explains how Jesus could be worshipped so quickly. Much as the resurrection functions for Wright as an intelligible yet not theologically central concept in Judaism, so too for Fletcher-Louis NT Christology had precedents but those precedents are not sufficient cause for the development of the worship of Jesus.
Very pleasantly, Fletcher-Louis tries to be as orthodox as possible while making such daring claims. For instance, he insists that Jesus is God, but also not identical with the Father. Indeed, his arguments from 1 Cor. 8:6 are the clearest arguments against modalism that I have read in a long time. He observes, for instance, that the Father is never said to have died on the cross, which implies unity with distinction in line with Nicaea.
One of Fletcher-Louis’s strongest points, but one I am going to be pondering for the next couple of years is the argument that the Jews do not appear to have accused early Christians of idolatry. If, in fact, an Incarnation of God was unthinkable for Jews, then clearly claiming that Jesus was both God and man would have elicited all kinds of protest from the Jews.
But if an Incarnation already had first-century precedents, this would explain why the Gospels do not seem to give an extensive discussion of Christology. Jesus just comes onto the scene and is matter-of-factly identified as God. The same theological problem pops up as with the Trinity: the Bible seems to have been more concerned with showing that Jesus was God than with explaining how Jesus could be both God and man. Granted, the Jews protest that Jesus made himself equal with God (John 10:33), but the texts in which this happens are surprisingly few in number and none is definitive in showing that this was the singular point of contention between Jews and Christians.
This also shows why Hurtado and Bauckham’s work really is in trouble. If both scholars are right, then it is unclear why the New Testament, in teaching such radical crossing of the divine-human gap, did not go into more detail explaining it. The New Testament ends up being an extremely novel theological movement which burst upon an unprepared world.
Reading a book like this is illuminating and also troubling on various levels.
First, one of the most daunting challenges is how badly conservatives can do scholarship. Hurtado gets a fair drubbing, but Bauckham gets called out by and large for not updating the software and for superimposing a (really orthodox!) theological construct on the text. It’s a good caution to Christians doing scholarship to not be too quick to force solutions on difficult scholarly conundrums.
Second, what is really striking is that Fletcher-Louis is a quintessentially quick mind. He is both theologically conservative, and yet he is also an imaginative historian eager to use literary readings of obscure texts to illuminate the New Testament. One of my favorite lines is a little quip he has against the idea that the weird blending of the divine and human in Enoch violates the strict monotheism of Deuteronomy: “Either the theology we find in Deuteronomy and Isaiah did not become the absolute norm [within Judaism] or, perhaps, we have misunderstood these two biblical texts and their theology.” Ha!
However, this quickness to see parallels between Pseudepigrapha and Scripture sometimes makes me wonder whether Fletcher-Louis at times sees more connections than are actually there. For instance, he makes the extremely persuasive case that Daniel has a lot more anti-idolatry polemic than I thought. For instance, Nebuchadnezzar offers Daniel incense and burnt offerings (Dan. 2:48), which is parallel to the worship that the Son of Man receives in Daniel 7. Similarly, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are presented as the real idols of God that are not destroyed, as an idol would be, when they are put into the furnace. In the story of the Lion’s den, the king puts his seal or “image” upon the den, and yet the king’s image is less potent than Daniel, who is God’s image.
All of this is extremely stimulating, but then Fletcher-Louis argues that the Aramaic portions of Daniel borrow from Pseudepigrapha as well. For instance, when Nebuchadnezzar calls all his representatives to worship the golden image, Fletcher-Louis argues this has parallels to Michael gathering the angels to worship Adam in The Life of Adam and Eve. Daniel is unharmed by the lions much as Seth can stop the lions’ mouths in the same work, and when Nebuchadnezzar is transformed into a beast, his fall imitates Adam and Eve’s shameful eating of the plants of the field like animals.
Such readings are fun, but a lot of questions have yet to be answered. One area of disagreement is Fletcher-Louis’s treatment of Messianic kingship. He argues, surprisingly, that the primary sources from the Second Temple period do not emphasize a kingly descendent of David so much as a Messianic priest. This is fair enough, since we need to follow the textual evidence here, but then Fletcher-Louis overemphasizes anti-kingship passages in favor of priestly ones, and ignores Judges, Psalms, and Proverbs, which have extremely positive things to say about kingship.
Finally, the last section of the book is a tour-de-force on how a strict Creator-creature distinction is not found in the Bible, and that actually a participatory or “sacramental” model is more accurate. In some ways I agree with Fletcher-Louis, but we can see the eagerness to synthesize, for instance, when he lumps in Plato and his notion of timelessness with the modern chasm between the divine and human that Bauckham and Hurtado assume.
This leads to probably the most alarming point of the book. I have tried to make it super clear throughout this review that Fletcher-Louis is extremely orthodox, and in fact I don’t think that he is actually arguing for a breakdown of the Creator-creature distinction as understood by church fathers like Augustine. However, it definitely opens a can of worms that Christian scholars now will have to deal with.
For instance, Fletcher-Louis’s model will now have to deal with Arianism—not in the modern liberal sense that Jesus is merely a glorified man, but rather in the idea that he is somehow less than the fullness of God or that somehow as a man he participates in God. Believers all participate in the life of God, but 2000 years of theology would say that Jesus is God and does not just participate in Him. That will be a challenge for conservatives going forward if we are to bring Pseudepigraphal texts into conversation with the Scripture.
Knowing what older Jewish theology is preserved in the Pseudepigrapha will be a difficult task. Fletcher-Louis is right that the deification or angelification of Enoch is something that jumps out from the text. However, understanding the full significance of it is going to take time, and I worry about intellectual fadism.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were rediscovered, the academy basically exaggerated their importance and tried to overhaul Pauline scholarship though that fad known as the New Perspective on Paul. If every primary source is seen as the interlocutor of the New Testament, we will be doomed to a Philonic rethinking of Judaism, a Josephine reinterpretation of Jesus, and perhaps even a Stoic over-reading of Paul. I suspect a similar thing is happening with Crispin Fletcher-Louis and the Pseudepigrapha, and while he is right that these weird texts should be part of the conversation, some of his work strikes me as an overcorrection.
At the same time, I will never read the title Son of Man the same way again, and for that reason I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in Biblical theology of the New Testament.