Jesus And The God Of Israel

Jesus and the God of Israel

Richard J.Bauckham is Professor of Emeritus New Testament Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Senior Scholar at Ridley Hall in Cambridge. His book consists of a series of articles based on the first of them, ‘God Crucified’. This is an exciting exposition of the thesis that the worship of Jesus as God was seen from the beginning by the earliest Christians as fully compatible with their Jewish mono-theism and that He participated fully in the divine identity of the one God of Israel. The seven other essays provide more detailed support for, and an expansion of, the claim that high Christology is both very early and very Jewish. Each is a self contained essay concentrating on Chapter 1.
The result makes for a rather patchy collection of writings, some of which are direct and straightforward and others are academic and opaque. This makes it rather difficult to assess who the readership is supposed to be. Nevertheless, the basic argument is clear enough and the evidence to support it thorough and scholarly. The resulting conclusion is certainly sensational enough. Jewish Monotheism of the Second Temple period is shown to be capable of accommodating the Jesus phenomenon and experience without having recourse to Greek philosophy and the Nicene and Chalcedonian definitions. There is no place either for semi-divine intermediary beings in intertestamental and philosophical literature common in contemporary circles. The key concept is the identity of the God of Israel, who God is rather than what divinity is. The unique identity of the one God is distinguished absolutely from all other reality. The fully Christological monotheism of the New Testament includes Jesus in that divine Reality, and that includes God’s Self-identification with the Godforsaken, as on the cross.
This insight applies equally to the idea of God crucified as to the idea of God humanised. Jesus is therefore seen as participating in the process of Creation equally as in the process of Eschatology. Jesus is intrinsic to the unique and eternal identity of God, not only as pre-existent and exalted but also suffering and crucified. The unique identity of Jesus as YHWH renders him as exclusively to be worshipped and not to be confused with any intermediate being. Rather, he participates in God’s unique sovereignty over all things and is given the divine name, all of this in the context of Second Temple absolute monotheism. Prayers, Doxologies and Hymns were appropriately offered to him from the beginning. He is also Word and Wisdom, both divine attributes rather than servants like angels and other intermediary beings.
The author particularly uses Paul, John, Hebrews and Revelation to illustrate his main thesis, and altogether makes an impressive contribution to New Testament Christological scholarship which is well worth close study and reflection.

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