Brant Pitre
Absolutely. So, this passage, I dealt with it in a chapter called The Riddles of Jesus’s Divinity. And what I’m arguing in this chapter is everyone agrees that Jesus was a teacher of parables like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan, but what we tend to forget is that in ancient Hebrew, the word for parable, mashal, is also the word for a riddle or a puzzling saying. And that’s exactly what Jesus is doing here.
He’s acting as a riddler, and he’s posing a deliberately, intentionally puzzling question about the Jewish Scriptures. And he says, you know, on the one hand, the scribes say the Messiah is the son of David. On the other hand, if we look at the scriptures, we look at Psalm 110, David himself calls him Lord. And so Jesus poses in the form of a question the riddle: if David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?
And several of the synoptics say that the crowd listened with delight, because they love this kind of teaching, to pose a question where he doesn’t just give you the answer. You have to infer from the biblical text and the implications what he is trying to say about Christos, about the Messiah. Now what’s striking to me David is that this is the one passage in the Gospels where Jesus explicitly refers to ho Christos, the Messiah. We would go here if we want to get a sense of the Christology of Jesus himself. This passage from Matthew and Mark and Luke is kind of “Ground Zero”.
In this case, what is he doing? Some people will say, Oh, well, Jesus is rejecting the idea that the Messiah is the son of David. But he doesn’t reject anything. He just poses a question about it, namely, how can you say he’s the son of David? In other words, David’s descendant and presumably his inferior, and David speaks of him as his superior. And so, what I argue in this is that Jesus is not saying the Messiah is non-Davidic. He’s saying he’s super-Davidic. He’s making a claim that the Messiah is greater than David, and not just greater than David, but the figure described in Psalm 110 as sitting at the right hand of God, sitting at the right hand of the throne of God, which is very super-Davidic.
Because David’s throne is an earthly throne in Jerusalem, whereas the messianic figure that Jesus identifies as the subject of Psalm 110 is a heavenly Messiah who is basically co-sharing the throne with God. And commentators on Psalm 110 both look at the Hebrew but also look at its interpretation in Second Temple Judaism. And they recognize that enthronement with God implies co-regency with him and co-equality with him. The only person who gets to sit on the throne with God is someone who is equal in authority to God. So, it’s an implicit divine claim using an allusion to Jewish scripture. It’s not the same thing as we moderns would want. We want Jesus to say, “I’m equal with God.”
David Capes
We want it to be very clear. Tell me the answer. Don’t puzzle me with a question.
Brant Pitre
But Jesus is a Jewish teacher. So, he’s saying this in a Jewish way. He wants to invite his audience into the mystery of the heavenly and super-Davidic identity of the Messiah, and he leaves them there in that tension, and they love it, But the point here is that commentators have pointed out, (Ben Witherington did a great job on this text), saying that the implication of Jesus here is very, very important to draw. If Jesus thinks he is the Messiah, and if he identifies the Messiah as the Super-Davidic heavenly being by definition, he’s making a superhuman claim about himself. He’s claiming to be more than merely a human Messiah. He’s claiming to be a divine Messiah. He’s claiming to be a heavenly Messiah.
And this is where it gets really fascinating. If you look at early Jewish apocalyptic appropriations and interpretations of Psalm 110 like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, e.g. 11 Q Melchizedek, John Collins and other experts are going to recognize that in those texts. They’re going to take this Melchizedekian anointed figure from Psalm 110 and just use terms like Elohim, God to describe him. Even describe him in terms that imply that one who sits on the throne with God, like the Son of Man. And 1 Enoch and other apocalypse isn’t just heavenly. He’s a preexistent heavenly Messiah. Our getting into, in a sense, a metaphysical claim about the divine character of this Melchizedekian Messiah.
In other words, other Jewish texts, like 11 Melchizedek or 1 Enoch, could take some of this imagery and language that we find in Psalm 110, or in Daniel 7, and apply it to a preexistent, heavenly Messiah. Then for Jesus to use that same text to argue that the Messiah is super-Davidic and is heavenly, and can even be called LORD, kyrios by David, then who exactly is Jesus claiming to be? He doesn’t spell it out, but he leaves it for you to listen and you to spell it out, to come to your own conclusions, namely, that Jesus is implying that he himself is a preexistent, heavenly Messiah, the figure spoken of by David in Psalm 110.
David Capes
Yes, it’s a fascinating passage. I love that term, super-Davidic. You know, he’s not just a Davidic. He is super-Davidic. That’s why David refers to him as Lord, right? Because he recognizes that.
Brant Pitre
I don’t know if I coined that term, but I certainly found it helpful. I was trying to grasp it. What exactly is he saying here? And that’s the term that really, I think, best expressed. Jesus is it not a non-Davidic Messiah. He’s just more than David.
David Capes
More than that. More than that. Toward the end of the book, you know, you talk a little bit about Nicaea. We’re coming up on the anniversary, 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea. And a lot of people who don’t know the history or the background have said that this is the point at which Jesus is recognized as being divine. But they haven’t understood Nicaea, and they’ve just assumed that it took a long time for the church to sort all this stuff out. But what are the questions that were really on the table at the time of Nicaea? They weren’t saying is Jesus divine or not? They were reckoning with other maybe philosophical questions, metaphysical questions.
Brant Pitre
Yeah, this is a great question you’re raising here. Let me just say one last point before we talk about that. One of the things you and I talked about before the interview was how I use the language of divine Messiah, just divine. And one of the things I wanted to emphasize is that the reason I’m using that is because I want to make clear that Jesus is never denying His humanity. He’s a divine Messiah. The Messiah is an anointed human figure. But he’s not merely human. He’s more than human. He’s a divine Christ, so to speak, to use your language. He’s a divine Christ but I didn’t want to steal your titles.
David Capes
Oh, that’s okay! Feel free, as long as you give me credit.
Brant Pitre
Absolutely, anyway, so let’s go to Nicaea. As I was reading in the research for the book, one of the things I encountered was a claim by Paula Fredrickson, who’s made a lot of wonderful contributions to Pauline studies and Jesus studies and others. But she made a claim that was troubling to me, because what she said was, if Jesus himself had claimed to be divine, if the divine Christology went all the way back to him, then there would have been no need for the Council of Nicaea to come together. It shouldn’t have taken 300 years for the church to come together, to define and to affirm that he was in fact divine, if it would have been stated in a radically unambiguous way from the beginning.
But what I would respond to that argument would be to show that actually that’s not true. If you look at the Council of Nicaea itself, everyone at the Council of Nicaea thought Jesus was God. Even Arius calls Jesus God. He used the term Theos to refer to him. The question that Nicaea is wrestling with is not whether Jesus is divine, it’s in what sense is he divine, and in particular, is he the eternal Son of the Father, or is he the created Son of the Father? Arius famously expressed this by saying there was a time when the Son was not. In other words, sure, he’s the Son of God, he’s divine. You can even call him God. But what Arius was saying was that he’s not the eternal Son, because there was a time when he didn’t exist and he came into being from things that were not so he’s the created Son. And that was the metaphysical question, the question of the eternality of the Son that the fathers of Nicaea were debating.
They’re not debating the divinity of Christ as we would understand it. It’s the question of in what sense he was divine. For someone to say that the Council of Nicaea was not necessary because it defined the divinity of Christ is just a misunderstanding of what Nicaea was even about. And you can see this, David, at the end of the book. I quoted the Nicene Creed, which most people are familiar with the basic articles of the creed. But what they tend to forget is the anathemas at the end of the creed. At the end of it, they tell you what the issues were, because the first anathema was regarding those who say there was a time he was not, let them be anathema. And there are several other anathemas too, none of which anathematized those who say Jesus wasn’t God, because that wasn’t the question on the table.
David Capes
This is a fascinating book. It’s entitled Jesus and Divine Christology. The author, Brant Petri, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Brant Pitre
Thank you, David, for having me. I hope people check out the book, and I really enjoyed talking with you about this. Thank you.
A Nugget of Wisdom from Brant Pitre
One nugget of wisdom that I found helpful in my own spiritual life comes from that great Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis. And one of the things that he says in that book that really hit me was this quote, “Let our principal study be meditation on the life of Jesus Christ”. And for me personally, that emphasis on daily meditation on the life of Christ as the principal study for us as Christians is crucial. I think many Christians can be faithful to praying each day, to reading their Bible, but to remember that it’s not just scripture reading, it’s not just prayer, but meditation on the life of Christ that really should center us and orient every single day of our life. So that we can be like the person
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
