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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Stan Porter
I’m Stanley Porter and I’m the President and Dean and Professor of New Testament at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
David Capes
Dr. Stanley Porter, Stan. Good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Stan Porter
Thanks, David. Good to see you, too.
David Capes
It’s a pleasure to have you. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I got your book, The Origins of New Testament Christology, the one you wrote with Bryan Dyer. And I’m very excited to be chatting with you today about it. Because you know, I love Christology. I just resonate with it. But for those who don’t know you, who is Stan Porter?
Stan Porter
Well, that’s a good question. I have a lot of things I could talk about. One of my main interests is Greek language and linguistics. That’s how I started out my career. I’m originally from the United States, and was educated, at least in part there. And then I did my PhD in Britain, at the University of Sheffield. And I’ve taught at a lot of different places I taught in the States, I taught in Western Canada, and I taught in the UK. Now I’m in Canada. I’ve been in Canada since 2001, this last time. I’ve been at McMaster Divinity College, probably for the biggest part of my career, and it’s been great. I’ve been President at McMaster Divinity College, and we’ve had a great time working with a lot of great students in developing a lot of different programs. And they’ve been, I think, serving the church very, very well.
David Capes
Is there a denominational connection at McMaster, Stan?
Stan Porter
McMaster divinity College, we’re a Baptist seminary. We’re connected with the Convention Baptists. It’s a distinctly Canadian Baptist. We’re connected to the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec. About 10% of our students are a Convention Baptists, but we have a lot of other students. We have close to 40 different denominations, from a lot of different places around North America and around the globe.
David Capes
It’s a great school. I’ve known a number of people to have gone there over the years. And it’s got a fantastic reputation in part because of your leadership there. And you’ve got a brilliant faculty as well.
Stan Porter
Thank you, David. Yeah, we’ve worked hard to develop a good faculty.
David Capes
That’s a big factor. And that attracts some really good students, I would imagine over the years. Let’s talk about your book Origins of New Testament Christology. Here’s the subtitle, An Introduction to the Traditions and Titles Applied to Jesus. Now you wrote this, along with Bryan Dyer. How was it working with Bryan?
Stan Porter
Bryan’s a great guy. Bryan, I struck up a friendship and a working relationship. We edited a book on Paul and rhetoric. And I wrote this book on sacred traditions. Bryan contributed a chapter. And when we were working on that book, developing this notion of how important sacred traditions are, we got the idea of doing more, and that turned into the Christology book. It was a great experience working with Bryan.
David Capes
He’s a brilliant fellow. And I’m really grateful for him. Can you do a wrap it up in terms of the big focus of your book? (Now Christology means the doctrine of Christ, I guess is a simple way of putting it.) When you think about the person of Jesus, and the significance and those things, in a way you’re thinking Christologically. How does this book fit into other books about Christology? What’s the big idea of your book, Stan?
Stan Porter
Actually, it’s a pretty complex question, because Christology is a pretty complex issue. There are a couple of things, I think, to your question that I could address. The big idea is that we’re trying to get out how is Jesus Christ depicted in the New Testament for who he is? What are the New Testament writers doing? And what kinds of ways of depicting him do they use? How do they go about doing this? What are they saying by doing this?
And hence, we have used a form of the titles approach. There have been important Christology books. Cullmann’s book, you know, is a pretty well known Christology in some ways. We kind of patterned it after that. Or at least think of it in terms of serving academia and the church in a similar kind of way. In other words, going through and not doing an exhaustive and comprehensive treatment, but a good solid treatment. Especially for students in seminary, or advanced undergraduates, of key ways that Jesus is depicted, we pattern the book then both in terms of the history of research like Cullmann and some of the others. Even at the end, in the last chapter, we position it in relationship to what some people would call the second history of religion movement, or this idea of how Jesus became God and try to address how it fits in there. But our primary task is to say, let’s take what the New Testament presents and show how Jesus is depicted.
David Capes
And that’s done, like you said, through modified titles. Because you don’t just do titles you do traditions and titles together. I like that. In fact, I was concerned a few years ago, when people seem to be abandoning Christological titles for other things. Those other things were good. But I didn’t feel honestly that we could divorce the titles from some of those other things, particularly like narrative Christology, let’s say.
Stan Porter
Yeah, those are really good observations. David, I think you’re absolutely right. There was a push back against the tiles approach. And in some ways, I think it was warranted, because in a lot of treatments of titles, there tends to be a focus on particular wordings. And sometimes the wordings are not particularly Christological. And you get this problem of trying to do a kind of word theology that I think goes much too far. And it’s probably not a good responsible way of dealing with lexical items. And what we’re trying to do is to say you need some kind of an organizing principle. And yes, others have used other ways of doing that book by book narratively, etc.
But there are certain ways that Jesus is depicted or addressed by the New Testament authors. And we wanted to focus on those not trying to provide comprehensive treatments, for example, of every time a given lexeme appears in the New Testament. But when this particular set of wordings may be used, especially in these contexts that are theological, what is being meant by and that’s where the traditions part comes in. Because we found and are supporting the idea and trying to develop further, that a lot of these did not come from nowhere. But they are reflecting traditions that were found in the Jewish world in the Greco Roman world, and I don’t like to make a bifurcation between those two. But you know, within that wider thought world in which the New Testament was written in which Jesus lived. And we pick up on those particular kinds of wordings, and hence develop it along that way. That’s why it’s a bit of a modified titles approach, because the traditions help inform how this language came to be used and why it has significance in the New Testament.
David Capes
Sometimes people look at a particular word, and say I don’t find that word, therefore, the idea is not there. I feel like that’s overreaching. Yes, that word might not be there. But still, the same idea is being expressed, let’s say in the questions being asked, or the statements being made, to the claims being made about Jesus, for example.
Stan Porter
Yeah, absolutely. There’s that kind of thing, or just because a particular word might be used, I suppose you could say, I don’t know I’m just thinking for an example the word ‘son”. Every time son is used, it’s got to have some kind of theological significance to it. It’s a term that does sometimes in contexts have that theological meaning as we want to talk about that, but not do an exhaustive study of the lexeme. And all of its different uses.
