King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature

Written by Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins Reviewed By Günther H. Juncker

This work began as a series of Oxford lectures in 2006 and represents collaborative effort by two of the brighter lights in the contemporary scholarly firmament. What makes the book unique and sets it apart from other recent studies on messianism is its avowed focus on “the specific question of the divinity of the messiah” (pp. x–xi) and how “Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus must be seen to have emerged in the context of the fluid and changing Jewish conceptions of the messiah around the turn of the era” (p. xi; cf. p. xiv). To that end, and playing to their respective areas of expertise, the book contains four chapters on the Old Testament by John J. Collins and four on the NT by Adela Yarbro Collins.

The first four chapters describe how pre-exilic Israelite religion viewed kings as divine, largely as the result of Egyptian influence, and how remnants of this thinking can be found in some of the royal psalms (ch. 1). The deuteronomists and prophets vigorously repudiated this view of the monarchy, though a trace of it survived in the otherwise anomalous depiction of king Hezekiah’s birth as a “mighty god” in Isa 9:6 (ch. 2). The LXX translators, influenced by the ubiquitous ruler cult, found the older view of kingship congenial and therefore translated the older divine kingship passages literally (e.g., Pss 2; 45; 89; 110); and the DSS (i.e., 4Q174; 4Q246) similarly ascribe divine status to the Jewish messianic king (ch. 3). This trend continues in the developing son of man tradition in which a variety of (sometimes amalgamated) angelic (e.g., Dan 7) and messianic figures are portrayed as having divine status (ch. 4).

The burden of the first four chapters is thus to show that kings in the ancient world were variously styled “god” or “son of god” or “begotten by god” and given divine honors; that Judaism, in spite of the vigorous repudiation of deuteronomists and prophets, likewise viewed its kings as divine; and that Judaism viewed the messiah as the superlative eschatological king (pp. 1–2, 42–43, 71). The upshot, with a proviso regarding the diversity and lack of “orthodoxy” within ancient Jewish messianic conceptions (p. 100; cf. p. 45), is that nothing could be more natural or Jewish than to view the messiah, qua king, as divine: “In the context of first-century-ce Judaism, it is not surprising or anomalous that divine status should be attributed to someone who was believed by his followers to be the messiah” (p. 100; cf. p. 206). The fact that substantial sectors of first-century Judaism apparently did react, precisely on this score, toward the apostolic kerygma with what might drolly be termed “surprise” is not explained, unless their reaction reflected “the dominant attitude in biblical tradition” (one is tempted to call it orthodoxy) that “insists on a sharp distinction between divinity and humanity” (p. 24; cf. p. 115).

The last four chapters describe how this trajectory continues into the NT such that to speak of a person as messiah is tantamount to affirming that person’s divinity. The NT contains a variety of formally contradictory “early christologies” (p. 149), yet all of them affirm Jesus’ divinity—a sort of common denominator between them. This remains the case whether Jesus is viewed as messiah (a divine king), son of man, or son of God—three epithets that are “equivalent” and interchangeable (p. 104; cf. p. 183)—or whether he is viewed as wisdom, the logos of Hellenistic Jewish speculation, an agent of God, or an angel (i.e., as the first and greatest creature of God). The upshot of these four chapters is, again, that nothing could be more natural or Jewish than viewing the messiah as divine: “In the Hellenistic ruler cults and especially in the imperial cults, men who were once human beings were honored and worshipped as gods.… Given the practices of the imperial cults, it is not surprising that Jesus was viewed as a god and that worship of him became an alternative to the worship of the emperor” (p. 174). The impact of this cultural environment on Judaism (cf. pp. 131–32) is especially conspicuous in the nativity stories, which are analogous to, inspired by, and evocative of Greek and Roman stories about gods “fathering sons by human women” (pp. 137–38, 145). These stories, however, were demythologized and “adapted to a Jewish context” (p. 138) in part by viewing the holy spirit (lower case) as an impersonal “divine force or power” (p. 136; cf. p. 145) and not as a divine person or “a heavenly being” (p. 190n67).

Alongside this vigorous insistence on the divinity of Jesus throughout the NT, two important caveats are noted. First, this does not mean that Jesus was God or that he was equal to God or that he was the second person of the Trinity (cf. p. 180n27). He was indeed “divine” but only to a lesser degree; and, correspondingly, he was not worshipped “in the full sense” but was given only relative worship or obeisance (p. 212; cf. pp. 100, 206–7). Second, while the NT pervasively affirms Christ’s divinity, the bulk of it does not portray Christ as preexistent. There is, for example, no evidence for his preexistence in the Synoptic Gospels (pp. xiii, 209) and none in the book of Romans (p. 121n74). Only once, in the prose hymn of Phil 2, does Paul clearly affirm Christ’s preexistence (pp. 116, 147).

Christ is surely preexistent in Phil 2, though the conclusion is obtained somewhat circuitously: Jesus was not “equal to God;” he existed, however, “in the form of God,” which is taken to mean that he had “a divine form” (p. 115) and was “the preexistent messiah” (pp. 148, 208), that is, a preexistent (divine) king. The proffered interpretation of Phil 2 would have benefited greatly from interaction with N. T. Wright’s definitive essay on the passage as well as from interaction with some of the major commentaries (none are referred to here). The same could be said of the proffered interpretation of Romans. The lack of such dialogue partners may be understandable in a lecture format but is less so in a published work, especially one containing what some might see as a number of remarkable, if not radical, assertions.

At a more systemic level, the book may also raise one or more of the following concerns for some readers: (1) The authors do not always avoid a certain kind of parallelomania (or trajectory-mania). The connections between different texts, traditions, corpora, layers of redaction, and variant readings occasionally appears to be stretched quite thin. (2) There is a fairly endemic definitional problem (pp. 22–24 and 213 notwithstanding) with reference to “divinity,” what it means to be God and not someone (or something) else, what it means to be “divine” as over against merely “divine-like” or divine “in some sense,” whether divinity permits of degrees, and whether a being who is more powerful or heavenly or transcendent or preexistent or supernatural than others is ipso facto more divine than others. (3) Finally, the book leads inexorably to the conclusion, de rigueur now in much contemporary scholarship, that Nicene (orthodox) Christianity has no real basis in the NT; but perhaps that is only to be expected when the christologies of the NT themselves are said to have no real basis in the life or teachings of Jesus, who saw himself only as a prophet and not as a king or as the messiah or as the son of man whose future coming he anticipated (pp. 166, 171–73) or, presumably, as divine in any sense of the word. Prophet that he was, on this view, one suspects that he might have vigorously repudiated both sets of subsequent developments as the speculations of those who (to borrow a turn of phrase) exchange the truth of the historical Jesus for a lie and worship and serve the creature.

The book remains quite readable in spite of its density and erudition and is must reading for anyone interested in the Old Testament and ANE view of kingship or in the christology (or christologies) of the NT. It would especially make profitable reading alongside the opposing construals of Hurtado or Bauckham, with whom there is, regrettably, all too little interaction (one paragraph). The book lays out a remarkable trajectory indeed, and readers of all kinds will doubtless be in for an interesting ride.


Günther H. Juncker

Toccoa Falls College

Toccoa Falls, Georgia, USA

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