David Capes
You and Bryan did 11 chapters on it. Let me just read the names of the chapters. And I’m going to ask in a second about the order you guys chose. Number one, Jesus the Lord. Number two, Jesus the Prophet. Number three, Jesus, the Son of Man. Number four, Jesus, the Son of God. Five, Jesus, the Suffering Servant. Six, Jesus, the Passover Lamb. Seven, Jesus the Messiah. Eight, Jesus, the Savior. Nine, Jesus, the Last Adam. Ten, Jesus, the Word and Eleven, Jesus, the High Priest. is there anything significant about that order, or was that just something you guys came up with as a way of getting all those titles and traditions represented,
Stan Porter
it’d be great and clever if we said that it’s really some kind of a hidden code that spells Bryan’s middle name or something, but it’s not! That’s a good question, David. We actually debated the order. We debated whether there should be other chapters in the book. And once you open that up, you can find lots of other possibilities. You’ll notice, for example, that in dealing with “Jesus as the word” I think we have wisdom in there. And we put those together. We maybe could have had a separate chapter or, do Moses or, there’s all sorts of things like that. But I think what we tried to do, and I’m not sure that you can ever do this in an entirely consistent way, was to have several different things going on. One starting with the broader and most well known kinds of titles.
And so especially with “Jesus is Lord”, that’s a really, really important one, especially throughout the New Testament. And then we start with that one, it has a lot of implications regarding who Jesus is, as God. They move on to some of the other ones that are perhaps more specialized, but often thought of really as important. Now “prophet” is interesting. Because if you say Jesus is Lord, well, then you have the prophets proclaiming the Word of the Lord. And so, you know, Jesus comes along and so “prophet” seems a natural thing. But then if you get into things like “Son of Man” and “Son of God”, “Son of Man” is pretty much a gospels only kind of title.
But when people think in terms of depicting Jesus, it seems to be the way that Jesus thought of himself often refers to that and is big in the Gospels. It needed to be probably pretty much near the top of things. “Son of God” is one of those that really reaches into the Greco Roman world, in a big way. It ties in with some of the traditions concerning how especially Eastern rulers were thought of. So there’s a long history there and we tried to tease that out. And then after that, you get into some of the perhaps even more specialized titles if you get into “Passover lamb”, there are a few places in the desert, but it’s predominantly John’s Gospel that depicts that and then you get some that are probably less overtly divine Christological titles. Some more human ones. You have the “Suffering Servant”, although that’s got some interesting things to it and “Messiah”, perhaps could have been put earlier.
But on the other hand, there’s a lot of debate about what were the theological implications of Messianism at the time. We tend to take a more diverse view of Messianism than a lot of people are doing these days. Right now, there’s a lot of depiction in terms of the Davidic line. And the King Jesus ideas, the way of defining Messiah. But we take a little bit of a broader view, recognizing that was probably broader terminology. So it fits then within certain other kinds of things. It will have some ties to priest, perhaps, as well. And so you have “high priests “there near the end, giving you a little bit of an idea of, at least how I can think of it in terms of once we settled on the order, but we did think about that.
David Capes
Yes, some distinguished between human titles, the human Jesus, his humanity and then the Divine. I don’t think there’s always such a good clean line, sometimes between those. Let me ask you this, because I’m curious. Among the earliest Christians, they’re trying to sort out Jesus in the first century, having not had a New Testament. But what they had was the Old Testament. What they had was their culture at the time. I’m wondering what you and Bryan are thinking about the doctrine of Christ today. Is it a settled matter? Has it been settled? Or do you see things in culture or maybe in the churches that seemed to be detracting from the person and the work of Jesus these days?
Stan Porter
It’s a live topic. It’s a hot topic. That’s part of reason we wrote the book and you’ll see that the way we framed it we talk especially in terms of adoptionism as one of the big issues. And I mentioned earlier some of those who’ve been discussing this whole concept of the “How Jesus became God” debate that’s tied in with that whole thing. I think we frame it near the end. There’s the question of, if that’s an issue how and when. And those are big, big debates, right? Was it something that took place much later and the church bestowed? Or was it something that was there from the start? And so in that sense, Christological issues, I think, are a very, very big issue, and are constantly being debated.
So if you have those that say Jesus became God, debate, some would say, yeah, it’s right from the beginning. There’s the sense in which Jesus was divine, and then the church was just unfolding. What that meant there, others would say, well, we can point to a place or a time in our process, or an event or something that occurred where the church decided, or some people decided, or it became evident that or from this place, or time on Jesus’s own perception was that this was the case. We don’t get as involved in that debate, as others have, as I said, in the final chapter, we try to place our work within that larger context.
Our primary focus is to see how the New Testament authors depict Jesus. And I think our own conclusions might be called and it’s traditionally been called a High Christology, emerges from that. From what we can see in the earliest documents, there’s a sense of Jesus being in some way divine. We want to take that seriously, and are less concern for teasing out the rest of it. So in that sense, we are not part of the adoption as a group, and no, we’re not. But we’re not overtly making an argument against it so much as trying to take the text as we see them. And then let others do that.
David Capes
I think you’re right. The other thing I’ve notice as I run into Christians who have a sense that Jesus was a prophet, he was this and that, but he wasn’t really God. That was just something that was added later. The other thing that I’m seeing, and I have noticed, it seems like there’s an abiding Gnosticism. That in the church, a sense that Jesus was never really fully human. And okay we get the divinity of Jesus, but the full humanity of Jesus was never really established. If you look up Gnostic Christianity, there’s websites where people today are still calling themselves Gnostics. And I don’t know if that’s a thing in Canada, if that’s just a thing down here in the States or not.
Stan Porter
I think you’ll find that in a lot of different places. But yes, you’re absolutely right. And I think some of the pushback that’s occurred in some circles, to the High Christology probably has gone too far. In emphasizing Jesus’ humanity, in an effort to make sure that we don’t forget that he’s human, I would like to think our book does address that, in some ways. All the titles probably fit into the larger picture of who Jesus is. And that overall is a High Christology, but not every one of them, is a way of naming him as God in the same way as all the others are. And so I think we’ve tried to maintain that balance, and so that you can appreciate fully his humaneness whilst seeing how that fits within the larger picture of his divinity.
David Capes
And these things the church does deal with and puzzles out, in a sense over many decades, centuries. They’re trying to sort out what they find there in the earliest texts themselves. We’re talking to Dr. Stanley Porter about his book with Bryan Dyer, The Origins of New Testament Christology: An Introduction to the tTaditions and Titles Applied to Jesus. It’s a brilliant book. I’m going use this as a textbook next time I teach Christology, because I think that it handles so many of the important issues. Dr. Stan Porter, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
A Nugget of Wisdom from Stan Porter
One of the things that I often talk with my students about is that we work in a discipline that tends to emphasize the individual scholar. But I’ve had great pleasure over the years of working collaboratively with somebody else. And sometimes we wonder why is it that science seems to make so much progress. And one of the things I observe is that scientists often work collaboratively and you get the dynamic and synergy and the kind of excitement that comes from a lot of people sharing the abilities that they have. And I would like to encourage a lot of us within the field of Biblical Studies to think of working together. And I think there’s a lot of potential and a lot of good that we can do in the work that we do if we think in those terms.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
