I'd like to continue this evening with just a brief look at some issues pertaining to Christology in the New Testament. First, just let me extend a word of welcome to those who were not here this morning, joining us this evening. This morning was just introductory, so you probably haven't missed too much and should be able to pick up where we are right now. A word on bibliography at this point, this morning, the question of Edward Skilbeck's book, Christ. was brought up, and there is a very extensive section of Christ which concerns the Christology of the different books of the New Testament, with the exception of the Synoptic Gospels. It runs about 350 pages of the book. It's one of the major sections in it, from pages 112 to 462. And then secondly, I'd also draw your attention to another shorter work on the same subject by Jerome Neyre. with the title, Christ is Community, and then the subtitle, which is a more accurate reflection of the content of the book, the subtitle is The Christologies of the New Testament.

[01:23]

It was published by Glaser in Wilmington in 1985. They've just gone out of business, but the book is probably still in circulation. Liturgical Press is picking it up. So those are two references for the Christologies of different New Testament authors. We won't have time here to go into the individual authors in detail. Instead, I'll be concerned with a few other types of New Testament issues. First, a couple of introductory comments. The first is an issue that we'll come back to at more length later on this evening. It's to reemphasize a point that Catholics in particular have traditionally tended to be aware of, but we still might tend to forget. It's that even the text of the New Testament itself is not an absolute beginning for Christian faith, not an absolute beginning for Christology either. I mean that initially simply in a historical sense.

[02:26]

The oldest book of the New Testament is almost always identified as Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians. And that presumably was written toward the end of the 40s, 49, 50, somewhere in that period. That's 15 to 20 years after Jesus' death. So there's a period of almost two decades between the end of Jesus' life and the writing of the first part of the New Testament. And then, of course, as you get in even to the later Pauline letters and to the Gospels, still more time passes. Reflection on Jesus, and let's just for the moment take that as a definition of what Christology is provisionally. Reflection on Jesus started much earlier than that. had been going on for some time. If we limit Christology in the strictest sense to the reflection of Jesus' followers about him, there's still 20 years of thinking, 20 years of development, 20 years of

[03:37]

formulation even of some briefer texts before we get to the writing of the New Testament itself. We'll come back to that later because there are a lot of Christological issues contained in that fact. At the moment I just wish to emphasize the time factor and its implications. Then let me mention a few dangers that can be present in dealing with the New Testament dangers that might attract one or another of us from different perspectives. First of all, there's the danger of only looking in the New Testament for support for what I already know or think I know. Of course, it's not only the New Testament that we do that with. People do it with letters of the popes and with all sorts. It's not just religious topics. It's done other ways. Think of one politician quoting another politician. It's the same system. But the danger here is that we look at the New Testament as a kind of quarry. out of which we select only the stones that fit our particular interest in constructing a building.

[04:43]

This morning I mentioned a couple of times the scholastic, the neo-scholastic approach to Christology, which has fallen somewhat out of favor at the present time, though it has not disappeared entirely. That system had its strengths, but one of its weaknesses was a tendency just to pick up in isolation individual biblical texts to support a thesis that was established in advance. The problem is not always a problem of misinterpreting individual texts. That can happen. Sometimes the text could be forced to yield some argument that they don't really contain. But even apart from that, the danger is that other relevant New Testament material will be ignored. If we took, for example, as our starting point, only an interest in the divinity of Christ, or only an interest in understanding his death as sacrifice for our sins. We could very easily go to the New Testament, find lots of material that would support the interests that we're looking for, and yet at the same time ignore all sorts of other things simply because they don't fall within our range of vision.

[06:00]

So that's the first point to be alert to, not to let our own interests limit our ability to look at the biblical texts. Because the problems that are mentioned there, from the perspective of a fairly traditional Catholic scholastic theology, those same problems can also develop from the perspective of a liberation theology, from the perspective of feminist theology, or from other perspectives, when one particular frame of vision limits access to the texts. A second rather different type of danger that can also be present is to presume that only questions that were of interest to the biblical authors should be of interest to us. It's one thing to let the biblical text broaden our frame of reference, and they should be permitted to do that. But it's another thing to dismiss questions because they weren't present at the time the Bible was written.

[07:01]

There's no reason why the 4th and 5th centuries, or why our own centuries, shouldn't have additional questions. And there's no reason why the biblical material might not help address those questions, even if they weren't questions that moved the biblical authors in their own time. And when you use texts for purposes that weren't envisioned by the original writers. You have to be very careful that you're not reading your own thoughts back into the text illegitimately. But in principle, the point I just wish to make here is don't rule out the fact that we may have very serious questions about the biblical material that never struck Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but that are nonetheless legitimate questions. can be a two-way street. We can learn from their questions, but we can also bring questions to their texts, maybe come to a deeper understanding of the text as we do that. We can come back to some elements about that later when we talk about the crucifixion and the resurrection more specifically.

[08:06]

Here I just mention it as a general principle. Then let me mention a few tendencies in the analysis and the discussion of New Testament material. Again, this is something we'll come back to. I'll give a little different presentation of it in a few minutes, but first of all, a brief sketch of some perspectives that have been present in the past that you sometimes find in literature and that has to be approached with a certain amount of hesitation. The first is a tendency to divide New Testament Christology into two stages. Split things down the middle, pretty much, and locate everything in one of two categories.

[09:06]

The first category being Jewish Christianity, located basically in Palestine in the very early period. And then the second, being Hellenistic, Christianity, located basically in the Greek cultural area. This is a system of thought that's fairly widespread, a method of classification that one finds a lot in exegetical literature in the first half of this century, even in the 19th century. It's very often accompanied by the idea that this is the most primitive type sometimes also with the value judgment that this is better.

[10:07]

A lot of the people who thought in these terms didn't like the Greeks, and this is a way of brushing things aside. The second type is seen as a later development, and some would say a false development. And usually this is accompanied by the notion that in the later stage people thought more highly of Jesus than they did at the earlier stage. The earlier stage tended to think of him as a prophet, maybe as a messianic figure. It's only in the second stage that one spoke of him as being divine. What's the problem with that, even apart from the Christological application of it? The difficulty is that the cultures and the different titles, the different types of Christology, cannot be pulled apart that sharply. It may seem initially attractive as a method of classification, but it doesn't fit the material adequately.

[11:14]

And so over the course of some time, a three-stage model tended to come into the foreground. One recent example of that is the work of the Anglican biblical scholar Reginald Fuller, who has a book on the types of New Testament Christology. Fuller tries to distinguish between, on the one hand, Palestinian Jewish Christianity, then Hellenistic Jewish and finally Hellenistic Gentile. You can see that's a modification of the original structure with the intention of having some sort of middle ground.

[12:17]

No longer are things presented quite as sharply as they were before. No longer is there suggestion of opposition between one and the other. And the effort is sometimes made, Fuller makes it, other people make it as well, to try to assign different Christological titles. Think simply of the major titles, Christ, Lord, Son of God, Son of Man. to one or another of the different stages and to analyze them in that particular context. What's the problem with that? The problem is still basically that the lines seem to be drawn too sharply. That even in Palestine at that time, there were Greek-speaking people. And a certain cultural influence obviously goes along with the language that's present.

[13:21]

Recall in the Acts of the Apostles, very early in the Acts of the Apostles, there are disputes between the Greek-speaking and the Aramaic-speaking Christians in Jerusalem at a very early stage. So these lines aren't sufficient for getting at these Christological questions. Now, I don't mean to give the impression that anyone would have confused Jerusalem with Athens at that time, or with Corinth. That's not the case. But the relationship of Greek culture to the Jewish world was so strong that this sharp division and the use of these tools as a method of classification doesn't work successfully. So those are a couple of initial factors to consider. I'll come back to this in a minute because there's an effort to replace this system of classification with other systems that some think at least might be more satisfactory.

[14:24]

Let me say a word at this point about titles, the use of titles, and the limitation of titles. Whenever one tries to speak about the Christology of the New Testament, there's always going to be the question, how is this material to be organized? We've seen in the two books that were mentioned at the beginning this evening, Edward Skillebake's book and Jerome Nehry's book, an effort to classify material according to the different authors of New Testament books. a chapter on John, a chapter on Paul, a chapter on Luke and Mark, even in the case of Skillebeak, subdivisions by the different letters of Paul to reflect the thought of the different letters. Well, that's one way of going about things, the Christology of the individual authors. The limitations of that approach simply lie in the fact that there's a lot of overlap from one author to another.

[15:45]

Think especially of the Synoptic Gospels, where the same scenes may be reflected in all three texts, and this method of classifying by author parcels things out. Think also of the fact that there's the whole question of the development that lies behind the thought of the individual authors before you get to their work. So the system of going author by author has its values, but it also has its limitations. of classifying material, one that's been used quite a bit in the past, is to try to do so by use of title, by use of the major titles that are used with reference to Jesus. One example of that is Fuller's book, which was just mentioned, but a better known example is the work of Oskar Kuhlmann, a Swiss exegete who wrote a book entitled New Testament Christology about 25 or 30 years ago. And Kuhlmann's procedure was to give one chapter throughout the book

[16:54]

not to the authors of the New Testament books, but to the titles predicated of Jesus in the New Testament. A chapter on Christ, a chapter on Lord, a chapter of Son of God, Son of Man, even some of the lesser titles in Coleman's case. In each case, what he tries to do is show a bit of the history of that title before the time of Christ. History in the Old Testament, perhaps, or history in the Greek world. And then secondly, show the application of the title to Jesus in the New Testament books. And finally, analyze the strengths and the limitations of that particular title. What aspect of Jesus' work that title sheds light on. That approach, too, has had great value. But the limitation to it is that there are aspects to New Testament Christology that aren't contained in the titles.

[17:58]

There are other ways of saying things about Jesus that are pursued in the New Testament. It isn't always just the use of a title that accomplishes things. So that approach also has its limitations. And it brings us to One further factor to be kept in mind with regard to the titles that points, I think, not in the direction of neglecting the titles, but it points against focusing primarily on the titles as a vehicle for understanding. Whenever we take a title, let's say, Take one of the more basic ones, Jesus is the Messiah, Christ. You can ask the question, how would I go about investigating the content of this statement?

[19:10]

What would you do if you wanted to learn something about that? One method that people do follow is to say, well, let's take the title Messiah. Let's look in the Old Testament literature. Let's look also in other Jewish literature. from the appropriate period of time, say some of the material from Qumran, matters of that sort. And let's see if we can come up with a better understanding of Jewish messianic expectations. That's the type of work that a biblical scholar might well perform, not only with regard to this title, but also with regard to the others. What happens, however, is that you run into something that may initially seem very odd.

[20:19]

When you have the Christian statement that Jesus is the Messiah, Part of what goes on in saying that Jesus is the Messiah is a rethinking of what it means to be Messiah. The Christians don't take over everything in Jewish messianic expectations. They don't, for example, take over the nationalistic element or the, in some cases perhaps, a political element. That's weeded out. Instead, they take over only those aspects of the expectation which really do apply to Jesus. And so if I can put it in a little perhaps paradoxical fashion, to know what it means to say Jesus is the Messiah,

[21:23]

You can't just look at how the word Messiah has been used in different places and times in the past. Instead, you have to look at who Jesus was, because in the application to Jesus, the title is being transformed. Now I've taken just one example here with the title Messiah, but the same thing is true of many of the other titles, or really all of the other titles. The logic of applying them to Jesus is that they're transformed in that application. They have to be somewhat suitable to begin with, or else Christians wouldn't have used them. They wouldn't have taken something that didn't apply in any way. But they were always critical in their acceptance and critical in their application. So it's not simply an analysis of the title itself, which will shed light on the matter, but rather a look at who Jesus was, what he did, what happened to him.

[22:26]

Well, if those approaches, if the approach looking simply at the different authors of the New Testament and the approach looking simply at the different titles in the New Testament are not sufficient, what other possibilities exist? I'd like to sketch here a proposal that has been advanced Initially by Helmut Christe of Harvard Divinity School, it has been adopted, but again with some modifications. It's like the title Messiah, less significant matter, but it's a bit like that, by Edward And I'd like to present it, first of all, in the fashion that Kirste has proposed, and then secondly say a word or two about Skillebig's modifications, because it sheds light on another matter by doing that as well.

[23:41]

First of all, Kirste says, basically, that what we want to investigate is the period between Jesus' death and the writing of the New Testament. We want to try to look at this period of 15 to 20 years to see what Christological thought is present among Christians in that period. Now, by definition, that's hard to do because we don't have written texts from that period. What we have are texts from later periods in which we can detect fragments of things that go back earlier. So it's quite clear that this reconstruction has to be rather tentative and incomplete. That's the nature of the situation. On the other hand, the 15 to 20 year period that's involved here is an extremely important one for Christians, because it's the first 15 to 20 years of Christianity.

[24:55]

It's a bit, again to make a comparison, it's a bit, if we think of our own lives, We know that our own childhood is a very important period in all sorts of ways for our development, and yet we don't have the access to that as directly as we do to other things that happen to us when we're adults. A bit of the same thing is true here with regard to the Church. This is the Church in its infancy, the Church in its process of formation still, and almost by definition, there aren't that many documents available to look back at that period. You can't imagine any of the Christians' Pentecost afternoons sitting down and writing out the Gospel of John. That's not the way things like that get done. Christa argues, though, if we look back at this period, going through and looking for fragments in the material that we have, we can find four trajectories, four movements of understanding Jesus reflected in the texts that we now have.

[26:05]

The four movements don't come one after the other. Kirster's argument is that they exist side by side in different Christian communities in this period. The first type, but the listing one through four is somewhat, somewhat arbitrary here. The first type is focused on the parousia, Jesus as the Lord who will come to judge the world on the last day. Characteristically, there is very strong emphasis on the future, in this perspective, and in many cases, at least, it's expected that the end will come quite soon. The time in between is so short that it seems you don't have to pay all that much attention to it, but it's going to end very quickly. A title that's connected with this very frequently is the title, Son of Man.

[27:15]

There's a reference to the Son of Man coming in glory in the book of Daniel, chapter 7, and that's part of the background of what's present here in what he calls the Parousia Christology. Now, I have to add two qualifications on this, two elements that are important for understanding his position. First of all, It's not the case that all references to the Son of Man fit under this heading. We're familiar with the references in the Gospels to the Son of Man suffering. That's a different type of usage. Similarly, the references to the Son of Man having nowhere to lay his head, something of that sort. That's a different type of usage too. This, rather, is the kind of usage I suggested with the vocabulary speaking of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven as judged at the end of the world. the final conclusion of the world's history.

[28:23]

And then secondly, here we have to try to put ourselves into a position that's quite different from our own. When we recite the creeds, we also profess the belief that Christ will come again at the end of the world. But when we do it in the creed, that's one profession of faith among many. That's one piece of the picture, you might say. Think of everything Christological that has preceded that in the creeds. And it's probably a piece of the picture that we don't pay that much attention to, except maybe the Sundays in Advent or something, when the appropriate Gospels get read. Kirste's suggestion is that for a certain group of early Christians, this perspective was the main focus of their faith. This was not just one element among many, but this was the first and central thing that they thought of with reference to Jesus.

[29:33]

He was the one who would come as judge, probably in the very near future. is a Christology which focused on Jesus as the worker of miracles. Jesus as miracle worker, or what is sometimes called the divine man. And here, for examples of that, you can think primarily of the miracle stories in the Gospels. I'm thinking here not of the full text of the Gospel, but simply of the individual elements within it. For the first type, for the parousia, you could think of the apocalyptic discourse in the Gospels. For example, Mark chapter 13, the Gospels that are read at the end of the liturgical year and the beginning of Advent.

[30:34]

Here, think of the miracle stories. whether that would be short stories or more developed miracle stories. Jesus as the divine healer, the presence among us of divine power. A third type, a wisdom Christology. Jesus as the teacher of wisdom, Mount, for example, or corresponding passages elsewhere. For the theme of Jesus as wisdom encountered, the major reference is to the prologue of John's Gospel, The Word Became Flesh. And finally, fourthly, we have what Kirster calls the Easter or Paschal Christology.

[31:39]

Focus on death and resurrection. Here you can think of passion resurrection narratives as examples in the Gospels, but you can also think of a good bit of the Pauline letters. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 1 Corinthians 15. Compressed formulas which speak not of the whole of Jesus' life, but simply of his death and resurrection and identify him as the one who has died for us, who was raised from the dead by God the Father. Now, think for just a moment about our creed. Just concentrate for a minute on the Christological portion of it, in pretty much any of the major creedal forms.

[32:50]

We say, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. Anything strike you as odd about that? the greater detail toward the end. There's greater detail toward the end, so much so that, I think of it this way, you mentioned birth, and then suddenly death, with the suffered under Pontius Pilate as a bit of the trial and so on, perhaps in war, but that's war. It leaves out his life. It basically leaves out his life. Now, if you were to think in terms of a biography of Winston Churchill that was being read at lunch, they don't go from birth to death.

[33:53]

It doesn't make any difference how significant the death might be. They don't jump over things like that. Well, the creed is an example of one of these crystallogical types, basically the Easter type, where the life is skipped over, the creeds as we have them come out of that type of material from Paul, it may be perfectly legitimate in that context. I'm not suggesting that the creed be rewritten But I am suggesting that a good bit of other aspects of Christology are not incorporated into the creed. The parousia does make it, of course, afterwards in the creedal formulation. There are other places where things are absent as well. Think of Paul. There's a great deal of this Easter Christology. Occasional references to wisdom, but not very much of the content of Jesus' teaching.

[34:57]

That's highly unusual in Paul. Practically nothing about miracles. Good bit of emphasis, on the other hand, on the parousia. So for Paul, you have some of these elements, but others are not particularly in focus. Christa's argument is that if you take the different pieces that are there, the pieces in Paul, the pieces that you can see reflected in the Gospels, you can find behind them these four different approaches which were originally localized in one or another Christian community. maybe not completely separate, but in large part, different communities develop different aspects of Jesus' existence. Now, what's the problem? The problem is in part, you might say, a literary problem.

[36:01]

How do you get from these more fragmentary approaches to the New Testament? And the other way of looking at the problem is ecclesiological. Why doesn't Christianity fall apart into four different groups? What have these approaches got in common with each other? Now, Christa's own position on this is that what happens in the canonical New Testament is that the four approaches are brought together. And they're brought together in one particular way. They're brought together in a way which accents the importance of the Easter Christology. Think of the fact that in the Gospels, a disproportionate amount of space, disproportionate chronologically, is devoted to the passion material.

[37:08]

It's in the creeds, as you mentioned, but it's also in the Gospels as well, particularly true in Mark, where a relatively short, very short Gospel and yet a very extensive passion narrative. It's also the case that the passion material is alluded to very frequently in earlier portions of the Gospel, which directs the reader's attention ahead to the passion. Transfiguration scene ends with the discussion of the passion. There are the predictions of the passion in Resurrection 3. important stages of Marx's Gospel, and so on. So Christa's argument is that, in fact, the first step of his argument, in fact, the Easter Christology is what was used not to eliminate the others, but to bring them together, but to bring them together in a form which subordinates the other three to the Easter Christology. But the second step of his argument goes a bit beyond that.

[38:12]

Krista holds that that's not an accident. It's not just by chance that that's the one that stood in the foreground. He's of the opinion that the Easter Christology is the only one of the four with the qualities needed to bring that off. That the Easter Christology goes deeper than the other three, not in the sense that the other three should be discarded, but again in the sense that they should be subordinated. to the focus on death and resurrection. You can see the point of his argument, at least in one very simple way. Try thinking of a gospel written from a different perspective. You can't very well write a gospel that ends with the parousia. We haven't got that far yet. That doesn't work. You can end with the promise of the parousia, but that's a different story.

[39:16]

You can't really write a gospel that ends with Jesus working a miracle. not without leaving other things out. You can't have the crucifixion tucked away in the middle someplace and a healing take place at the very end. Similarly, you can't really end with Jesus as the teacher. That can be incorporated, but it can't be the final focal point. So his argument is that the actual emphasis on the Easter Christology is not by chance, but is rather the result of its inherent qualities. It's the only one that can do that. This is his vehicle for trying to argue these are the approaches that were present in the 15 to 20 years leading up to the New Testament and leading then into the formulation of the New Testament itself. One of the great effects then of doing this is that it supports the unity of the Church The individual types left by themselves would tend toward disintegration.

[40:22]

The different Christian communities with the different emphases would go apart from each other. The unification of the four tendencies under this heading is a way of promoting the unity of the various Christian communities. Now, let me say just one more word about Kirste's position, just to raise a question about it, Kirste is a good Lutheran theologian with a very typically Lutheran emphasis on the theology of the cross. To what extent does his own personal theological emphasis influence his choice of this particular title? I'm not suggesting that the focus is absent from Mark or absent from Paul, but there is perhaps a tendency on Christus' part to accent it even more than the text itself suggests.

[41:28]

I said at the beginning that Schiller-Beecks picks up most of Kirster's position, but not quite all of it. I'd like to end our look at this New Testament development or this possible analysis of the New Testament developments by pointing out just where Skillebeaks goes in a different direction. Skillebeaks has no basic objection to the initial analysis of the four types. He takes that over pretty much as it is. He does say that he does not think that the miracle worker type is as developed as the others. He doesn't quite think that should be classified in the same category with the other three, but basically he's got nothing against the four. What Skillebeaks does say, however, is that the Easter Christology is simply one of the four.

[42:33]

It's not the qualitatively superior position. There's nothing wrong with it, but just like the other three, Easter Christology too can have its exaggerations and its dangers. Skillebeaks also says that if the four types were really as disparate as Christus suggests initially, it's hard to imagine that they would have come together so smoothly, so readily into the New Testament. Why wouldn't the adherents of the first three types have seen this as an imposition? Why would they have been so willing to accept the unity which came about. And so Skillevix's argument is that there must be something earlier, something more basic than any of the four types that underlies all three, all three of these as well as the Easter Christology itself.

[43:45]

There must be some kind of initial identification of Jesus. Now here he suggests that there are three possible candidates for this role. One is the idea of Jesus as Messiah. A second, Jesus as son of man. And a third of Jesus as the eschatological prophet. Now Christians have considered Jesus to be all three of these.

[44:50]

That's not what's at issue for him. What's at issue is what's the most basic, what's to him the most original. And his conclusion is in favor of the third, the understanding of Jesus as the eschatological prophet. He argues that that comes first. It then gives rise to the four types, but because the four types all come from a common source, they're related to each other. And so when they're brought back together in the New Testament, nothing foreign is being imposed. They're coming back in richer, more developed form. to the basic structure from which they merged. Now what does he mean by eschatological prophet? What's he getting at here? This is a title that can easily be misunderstood.

[45:53]

What he has in mind is a passage from the book of Deuteronomy This is chapter 18, verses 15 to 18. I'll read the text. Many of you may have it here. The person presented as speaking here is Moses. This is just before the end of Moses' life. Moses says, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from among your brethren. You shall heed him. Just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, or see the great fire, lest I die. The Lord said to me, they have rightly said all that they have spoken.

[46:58]

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren, and I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And the passage goes on somewhat further. Skilbeck argues that this expectation of a prophet like Moses was widespread at the time of Jesus. And that the description of the prophet like Moses, the one who knows God face to face, who even sees God face to face, who bears in his mouth the words of God, is quite suitable for use with regard to Jesus. Unlike the category of Messiah, the eschatological prophet does not have to be stripped of political connotations. They're not there. Unlike the category of son of man,

[48:01]

The eschatological prophet does not seem to be an otherworldly figure. It's a figure within human history as well. And so Skilovic's position is that this notion of Jesus as the final prophet, because the eschatological prophet is not just another prophet, it's much more than that, as the final definitive representative of God, is the first identification which gives rise then to the various others and which undergirds them permanently and helps lead them back into the New Testament. Now, that's just one or two reconstructions of the material. It's not the only possible reconstruction, and questions and critiques have been raised about the different elements within it. But I mention it here this evening as one way of getting at a type of New Testament issue that is a matter of great interest at the present time.

[49:06]

Maybe we could take a couple of minutes for questions if there are any. I know we're getting a little late. Yes. Is divine man the same as the Son of God? No. There's an issue with regard to a lot of the titles like that. When we say Jesus is the Son of God, we mean that Jesus is divine, second person of the Trinity, and so on. And when we hear something like divine man, we may tend to hear the same thing in that. But the title Son of God, going back, doesn't necessarily mean that at all. The title Son of God is a title that was used for kings in the Old Testament. It doesn't have the same meaning that we attribute to that phrase.

[50:12]

And so too with the title Divine Man. It's not a royal title. but it's a title for a miracle worker. Someone, in other words, invested with divine powers of one sort or another, but not necessarily the same as Son of God in our later sense of that term. It's a funny thing with regard to some of these titles, but in the initial sense of the New Testament, the title Son of Man actually suggest divinity more than the title Son of God does. When we say Son of Man, we often think of the humanity of Christ or something of that sort, but when they spoke of the Son of Man, they were thinking of a heavenly figure coming in judgment, and so there are very, very strong connotations of divinity implied in something like that. Can we consider ourselves Son of Man or Son of God?

[51:15]

We don't have... Well, that's a different usage in any case. The initial effort here is first to find a title that's distinctive of Jesus. And we would not say sons of men in that sense of ourselves. We would not say, even when we speak of being children of God, as we do, of course, we don't mean that we supplant Jesus in that situation. We don't mean that we're ourselves part of the Trinity or something of that sort. So I would say that you're not choosing between one title or another, but there's a great difference between using titles with reference to Jesus and using even similar language with regard to yourself.

[52:26]

I just, of interest to me recently is seeing Jerome Murphy O'Connor, and I know we have a book of George Floyd's done, and they're saying, I guess a lot of people do these days, that St. Paul didn't believe that Jesus was divine. He didn't deny it, but didn't believe it, and so he's really using that Adam business of the first and second Adam creation again to do the whole thing over here. Yeah, not enough to say, I'd hesitate to comment directly on that interpretation, but I would say this in general terms, that there are titles and ways of speaking about Jesus that may sound to us to be rather low titles, not implying divinity. but that actually have much more content than they strike us as having. Eschatological prophet is an example of that.

[53:31]

Son of Man may be another example. I don't know enough about the use of second Adam. I'd hesitate to comment directly on that. You mentioned earlier that in Christ I discussed the different titles, Jesus, Messiah, and so on, and not enough to go to the Old Testament amongst the many expectations that are because Jesus often redefines, or in most cases redefines, all of these titles in any case, which is also quite misplaced. For instance, even Eschatology. Yes. Even if we just go to the Old Testament, we've already read that even that is that redefining of Jesus Christ. Yes. Yes, I'd say it's redefining each case. I take Skillebeak's point to be that there's not as much redefinition needed, he would argue, in this case as in some others. But there always is some element of reinterpretation.

[54:36]

And I take it as clear. I don't mean that Jesus spoke directly about these titles. This is, in fact, a redefinition through what he did. Presumably what you're saying is more, not that these were necessarily the actual titles that Jesus chose, but this is the early church coming to grips with. Yes, it is that, but there's still the question of when this began to happen, and that's a disputed point with regard to all of the titles. Schiller at least thinks that Jesus was considered as the eschatological prophet even during his lifetime, then with further development after his death. be something that he would be able to, or the disciples would be able to discuss with him directly. In other words, they would use some of their own thinking about what that meant, and in their conversations with him would be able to address that.

[55:42]

Conceivably. The only thing that you run into, of course, is that we don't want to be trying to reconstruct conversations. But let me take one passage and This is one I had planned to mention but didn't. It's a much disputed passage as far as its content goes, but let me just read it as it stands. It's from Mark, chapters 27, excuse me, chapter 8, verses 27 to 30. This is the scene where Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah, but I'm interested in it from another angle, not the one that we all usually think about. Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, who do men say that I am? And they told him, John the Baptist, and others say Elijah, and others one of the prophets.

[56:42]

And he asked them, but who do you say that I am? Peter answered him, you are the Christ. Now, you've got a whole series of titles there. You have an odd identification of Jesus as John the Baptist. You can't really call that a title, but it's an identification. You have people saying that Jesus is Elijah, returned somehow. More broadly, that he's one of the prophets. And then you have, contrasted to that very sharply, Peter speaking in the name of the disciples, identifying Jesus as the Messiah. Now, you'll notice that in the categories that are put on the other side, they're all favorable categories. Nobody's saying, these are not the foes of Jesus that are speaking here. But you also notice that no one has said that he is the prophet in this sense. One of the prophets, Elijah, like Isaiah, like Jeremiah, and so on. Messiah is contrasted to that. Now, Skillebig's position would be that the eschatological prophet would fall on the messianic side of that, and that the Christian notion even of Messiah has a lot of prophetic elements to it.

[58:00]

So that's what he is thinking about. Now, the question will be how much of this goes back to the lifetime of Jesus and how much of it is later. That's very, very much disputed. It's clear, of course, that questioning about Jesus definitely goes back to his lifetime. That's why he was killed. But it's also clear that further developments took place later, and it's very difficult to pin down. The quotation from Deuteronomy also says that there's a prophet in the image of Moses. Is there a connection between the image of Moses that is being, one might see some of the evangelist drawing of Jesus as second Moses? They do, and that's an element of, that's also an element of Schillerbeek's consideration.

[59:01]

See, you have the places, of course, for example in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus puts himself above the law, and in effect above Moses. You have heard that it was said to men of old, but I say to you. That ties in with the same theme. And you can think, too, passages that we'll come back to in another context, but places where Jesus, the Lamento of Jerusalem, cannot be that a prophet perish outside of Jerusalem. That's putting himself in the prophetic tradition. The question that I always wonder about, and which I keep seeing in a lot of places, is what is the nature, or how much continuity is there between all of this early stuff and the later official definitions that we're very familiar with in creating such things?

[60:02]

And Beth, if I could pick it up. One of the more popular Catholic positions going is that they were using the language as best as they could to state their experience as strongly as they could. They didn't have access to Trinitarian terminology, that sort of thing, because it hadn't been invented yet. But there was, in fact, a lot of continuity. I think there is a lot of continuity. Let me say something just very briefly to the point, if I can, with two ways of phrasing the question. I think there has been a tendency at times, or there has been a tendency at times, to say, how do we get from the Christology of the New Testament to the early councils? Is there continuity or is that a replacement of one thing by something quite different? And earlier I mentioned Oscar Coleman's work on the Christology of the New Testament.

[61:09]

Coleman spoke of the Christology of the New Testament as a functional Christology, the significance, the work of Christ is what's reflected there. And he thought that the movement from that to the early councils was an aberration, a movement away from the function to speculative thinking. Typically Catholics did not accept that value judgment. But they did see the issue as one, how do you account for the step from biblical terminology to the Christology of the early councils? Now, Karl Rahner took the position that the question, that question has shifted in recent years. That the real question is how do you get from Jesus to the Christology of the New Testament? And if you can do that, the type of question you're getting at, if other people said this of him, how did they know?

[62:10]

What justification do they have for what they were saying? Reiner's position is that if you can justify that step, then the further movement to the conciliate terminology is not that difficult a problem. It's not that the movement isn't there. but that you're so far along in that direction that there's not only continuity but there's a thrust pointing there, that one.

[62:37]

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