Jesus: The Uncreated God

The lengthy excerpt which I present here is taken from Michael F. Bird’s Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World, published by Baylor University Press, Waco, TX in 2022], I. Jesus and Ancient Divinity, 2. The Search for Divine Ontology, pp. 59-70. All emphasis will be mine.

Absolute Deity Ascribed to Christ

If early Christology developed out of identifying Jesus with certain intermediary figures, or focused on Jesus’ divine functions rather than any divine nature, then when and why did various wings of the nascent churches suddenly start describing Jesus in philosophical categories? If descriptions of Jesus as divine by nature were a late Platonic import, when did this Platonic “big bang” of christological ontology happen?⁴² Not until the second or third century? Far more likely, an awareness of and concern about divine ontology was part of early Christian discourse from very early on in its discussion of Israel’s God, Jesus, and other spiritual entities.

To begin with, Jewish language for God made much of a distinction between the one God and “ail things,” which is based on an ontological distinction of Creator and creation that found its way into the New Testament (1 Cor 8.6; Rom 11.36; Heb 1.2-3; 2.10; Col 1.16-17; John 1.3).⁴³ Paul does not consider Greco-Roman deities/daemons to have a “nature” (physis) or “being” (ousin) comparable to God (1 Cor 8.4; 10.20; Gai 4.8). He contrasts idols with the “true and living God” (1 Thess 1.9; 2 Cor 6.16) and the images of mortal humans and animals with the “immortal God” (Rom 1.24; cf. 1 Tim 1.17).

In addition, Paul makes what are effectively ontological claims about Jesus by stating that Jesus exists in the “form of God” and is “equal to God” (Phil 2.6).⁴⁴ Udo Schnelle believes such a text marks “the beginnings of thinking of God and Christ as equals.”⁴⁵ Adela Collins takes Phil 2.6 to “mean that he [Christ] was god-like in appearance or nature, that is, a heavenly being as opposed to a human being.”⁴⁶ Put differently, Jesus exhibits the outward display of God’s being and glory, which itself expresses the inner reality of God’s nature.⁴⁷ Or, in Plutarchian language, the divine offspring is an image (eikôn) and copy (mimêma) of the divine being (ousia/ontos).⁴⁸ Josephus (Ag. Ap. 2.190-91, 248) connects God’s form (morphê) with God’s “nature” (physis) and “magnitude” (megethos). Philo and Justin believed that the “form of God” expresses the divine nature, which makes human deification and idol worship utterly inappropriate (Philo, Legat. 80, 95, 97, 110-11; Justin, 1 Apol. 9.1). It should be remembered that across Phil 2.6-11 is a combined affirmation of Christs preexistence, his divine being in terms of possessing the “form” and “equality” of God,” and inclusion of Christ within the monotheistic rhetoric of Isa 45.23. That Jesus exercises divine functions and receives a form of worship is merely the window dressing to the more astonishing claim that he shares in what sets Yahweh apart from other gods and creation: he shares in the divine name and exclusive monotheistic devotion. There is a Verbmdungsidentitàt (shared identity)⁵⁰ between God and Jesus only because there is also a Verbindungswesen (shared being). In fact, the Nicene description of Jesus as homootisios (“same substance”) with the Father is a theological explication of Pauline judgments about Jesus sharing the form, equality, glory, and name of the Father in language that ruled out Arian and semi-Arian duplicity on the subject.⁵¹

As an addendum here, Paul declares that Christ is the “image of God” (2 Cor 4.4; Col 1.15), which can refer to Jesus as an Adamic figure (Gen 1.27), God’s Wisdom (Wis 7.26),⁵² or else, like Philo’s Logos, a mediator between the uncreated God and the created realm after whom humanity is patterned (Philo, QG 2.62; Her. 205-6).⁵³ Paul writes too that in Jesus the “fullness of deity dwells in him bodily” (Col 2.9), which marks Jesus as inhabited by more than divine power, but by the abundance of a divine substance.⁵⁴

An absolute sense of divinity seems present in other parts of the New Testament and early Christian literature.⁵⁵ John the Elder refers to Jesus Christ as “true God and eternal life” (1 John 5.20), which postulates Jesus as possessing an absolute form of divinity. The terminology of “true God” came to influence the later church, for whom “true God” designated absolute deity apart from demons and lesser deities (see Justin, Dial. 55.2; 1 Apol. 6.1; 13.3; 53.6; Irenaeus, Haer. 3.8.1; 4.20.1; Minucius Felix, Oct: 26; Athanasius, Inc. 16.1; 45.4; 47.3; 55.5).⁵⁶ The author of Hebrews delves into ontological categories with his vivid description of the Son as “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb 1.3). Jesus is ontologically different from the angels as one who is above them as a divine being while also below them as a human being (Heb 1-2). The author later declares that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13.8; cf. 1.8-12), and this amounts to language about the future eternity of a true God.⁵⁷ If the language of divine sonship and begottenness (Heb 1.2, 5, 8; 4.14; 5.5) is combined with preexistence and eternality (Heb 1.1-14; 7.3,28; 13.8), it yields something analogous to eternal generation.⁵⁸

John the Evangelist portrays Jesus as the preexistent Word (John 1.1-2; 17.4-5), set apart from “ail things” as the instrument of creation (1.3), sent by the Father (5.36-37; 8.16-18), from heaven (3.13; 6.33, 38, 50-51), who takes on human flesh (1.14), becoming the “son of Joseph of Nazareth” (1.45), who is “one” with the Father to the point of mutual indwelling (10.30, 38; 14.8-11, 20; 17.11, 21-23), equal to God (5.18), possesses “life in himself” (5.26), makes himself God (10.33-34), who returns to the “glory” that he had with the Father before the creation of the world (17.5, 24; 20.17), who is honored as the Father (5.23), worshipped by a supplicant (9.38), and confessed by Thomas with the honorific acclamation of “my Lord and my God” (John 20.28). True, the accent falls on an economic Christology whereby the “only true God” is known exclusively in the mediatorship of the “only begotten” Son (1.14, 18; 17.3), who is the nexus between heaven and earth (1.51; 3.13), with emphasis on Jesus as the agent of revelation (1.18; 15.15; 17.6,26) and salvation (3.16; 4.42; 5.24,34; 12.47) par excellence. However, the journey from divine arche to inhabiting flesh in the world, and then going back to heaven is couched as a narrative of messianic revelation as much of ontological transformation of a divine being into human existence. Indeed, the jarring Johannine combination of divine oneness, creator-creature distinction, preexistence, perichoresis, begottenness, messianic testimony, incarnation-glorification, receiving worship, divine functions of judging and saving, presses into a theological and ontological direction that makes the Johannine Jesus’ divinity absolute if one is to describe who Jesus is and how he is divine?⁵⁹ According to Frey, the language describes “the Logos/Son sharing in the ‘quality’ and ‘divinity’ of the one God”⁶⁰ and the Logos possesses “divinity in the sense that the Logos clearly belongs to the realm of the creator, uncreated. He is divine in the sense that he is uncreated.”⁶¹ Or, as Ruben Bühner puts it, “the first two verses of the Gospel of John deal with Beginning before beginning. The Logos itself thus appears separate from the works of creation, as absolutely pre-existing, that is, as uncreated.”⁶²

Unfortunately many detect in Johns Gospel no interest in divine ontology; no interest in what God is, or what God, Jesus, and the Spirit are, seeing Johns Gospel concerned primarily with divine identity or believing epistemology.⁶³ In contrast, Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that John’s Logos is indebted to Stoic philosophy, with ail the ontological entailments that accompany it.⁶⁴ While I demur from Engberg-Pedersen on several points,⁶⁵ even so, the Stoic differentiation between the endiathetos logos (word in mind) and prophorikos logos (word displayed) may well express the transition from the preexistent Word to the incarnate Word that John introduces in his prologue. Several later authors arguably understood the incarnation this way (Ignatius, Eph. 3.2; Justin, Dial. 61.1; Athenagoras, Leg. 10.2, 3, 5; 24.2; Theophilus, Autol. 2.10, 22). Thus, Stoic philosophy, beside the Septuagint and Hellenistic Judaism, constitutes a useful framework in which the Johannine Logos could be understood, and it demonstrates that divine ontology can be read as native to the Johannine Gospel.⁶⁶

John the Seer’s apocalypse contains two strategically placed announcements where the Lord God says of himself, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the one “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty,” and “the beginning and the end” (Rev 1.8; 21.6). Quite amazingly Jesus later refers to himself with the same theophanic language, saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev 1.17; 22.13). This is allusive of Isaianic monotheistic rhetoric, such as “I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god” (Isa 44.6; cf. 41.6; 48.12). Similar sentiments were extant in Hellenistic Judaism, where God “is the beginning and end of all things” (Josephus, Ant. 8.280; Ag. Ap. 2.190; Philo, Plant. 93). It is reminiscent too of the Derveni papyrus (ca. 350 BCE) containing a poem declaring that “Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle, ail things are filled by Zeus,” and Plato’s remark that “God... holds the beginning and the middle and the end of all things” (Plato, Leg. 4.715e; cf. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.25.5; Hippolytus, Ref. 19.6; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.22; Origen, Cels. 6.15; Sib. Or. 8.375-76).⁶⁷ By using these words, the Seer stresses the absolute sovereignty and power of both God and the risen Jesus,⁶⁸ but also identifies Jesus with the God “who transcends time [and] guides the entire course of history because he stands as sovereign over its beginning and its end.”⁶⁹

We might note too Ignatius’ letter to the Ephesians, where Jesus is described as “begotten” (gennetos) with respect to his humanity and “unbegotten” (agennetos) with respect to his divinity, a major terminological shift that signals absolute deity (Eph. 7.2; cf. Pol. 3.2).⁷⁰ This continues into a later period with the Epistula Apostolorum designation of Jesus “being unborn yet born among humans” (… Ep. Ap. 21.2) and Origen, who calls the Son “the unborn first-born” (ton ageneton prototokon; Cels. 6.17). Justin accepted that God’s nature is “indivisible and inseparable” and there can be no division in the “essence of the Father,” yet Christ is neither an excision of the divine nature nor a created angel, but properly “begotten from the Father” as “fires kindled from fire”: “distinct” and yet “remain[ing] the same” (Dial. 61.2; 128.3-4; cf. Tatian, Or. 5). Irenaeus provided a strong defense of the incarnation as different from an emanation and an inhabitation, with the imperishable and immortal Word becoming human (Haer. 3.19.1-3). Clement of Alexandria described the human Jesus as the “divine word” who was "truly most manifest deity... made equal to the Lord of the universe, because he was his Son, and the Word was in God” (Protr. 10).

Among the apologists Athenagoras systematically thinks through God’s ingenerate nature, God’s distinction from creation, including from various gods and angels, with the Son and Spirit concomitantly united with God in his being. He identifies the Logos as God’s eternal mind, with the Father and Son mutually indwelling in each “by a powerful unity of Spirit” while “distinct in order,” and carefully distinguished from the multitude of angels and ministering spirits (Leg. 10.2, 5; 24.2). Some gods are made by the bestowal of honor, or else they are demigods born through begetting. In either case they are no different to matter, because they are created (Leg. 18.1-19.3). Similarly, in the Epistle to Diognetus, the author highlights the Son’s absolute divinity in contradistinction to various intermediary figures. The author declares that God the Creator did not send “some subordinate, or angel, or ruler or one of those who manage earthly matters, or those entrusted with the administration of things in heaven.” Instead “the Designer and Creator of the universe” sent the one

by whom he created the heavens, by whom he enclosed the sea within its proper bounds, whose mysteries all the elements faithfully observe, from whom the sun has received the measure of the daily courses to keep, whom the moon obeys as he commands it to shine by night, whom the stars obey as they follow the course of the moon, by whom ail things have been ordered and determined and placed in subjection, including the heavens and the things in the heavens, the earth and the things in the earth, the sea and the things in the sea, fire, air, abyss, the things in the heights, the things in the depths, the things in between—this one he sent to them! But perhaps he sent him as one might suppose to rule by tyranny, fear, and terror? Certainly not! On the contrary, he sent him in gentleness and meekness, as a king might send his son who is a king; he sent him as God; he sent him as a human to humans [alla en epieikeia kai prautèti hôs basileus penipôn huion basilea empempsen, hôs theon epempsen, hôs anthrôpon pros anthrôpon epempsen], (Diogn. 7.2-4)

Then, in the homily, the Word is clearly identified as an eternal deity: “the Eternal One, today considered to be a Son” [Diogn. 11.5).

These statements are perhaps the most densely packed precursor to Nicene Christology in ail Christian literature pre-325 CE. They refer to God’s incomparability; the Son is not an intermediary nor part of creation, but he is the divine instrument for creation. He comes “as” God and “as” human, an eternal Son, which sounds very much like creedal formulas of Jesus’ dual consubstantiality in deity and humanity (i.e., vere deus et vere hotno—or “Gottheit und Menschheit vereinen,” as a famous German hymn says). An identical sentiment occurs in Irenaeus, who likewise differentiates the Word from intermediary figures [Haer. 1.22.1; 3.11.1-2; 4.7.4; 5.18.1) and identifies the Logos as “true God and true man” [Haer. 3.19.1-3; 4.6.7). The Father and Son share in the lordship and divine being because “that which [is] begotten of God is God” [Epid. 47). Athenagoras, Irenaeus, and Diognetus make explicit what is implicit in the New Testament, namely, that the Son is an absolutely divine intermediary who is not divine in the sense of other intermediaries (Phil 2.9-11; 1 Cor 8.6; Col 1.15-20; Heb 1.1-4; 2.10; John 1.1 -3; Rev 5.1-14).⁷¹ For the apologists, while God remains transcendent and the source of ail, the Logos is the immanent aspect of the divine manifested in the created order, a heavenly agent of creation, revelation, and redemption, “whose very being derived from the one, true God.”’⁷² Or, in the language of Athanasius, Jesus is the "true Son of the Father” who is “true God, homoousios with the true Father” (Or. adv. Ar. 1.9).

Ontological commitments to Christology were also prominent in “other” Christianities outside the proto-orthodox churches. In the late first and early second centuries, adherents to docetic Christologies, which denied Jesus came in the flesh (1 John 4.2-3; 2 John 7; Ignatius, Trall. 10.1; Smyrn. 2.1; 3.1-3; 4.2; 5.2; 7.1; 12.2; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.24.2; Tertullian, Carn. Chr. 24), as well as separatist Christologies, which distinguished the divine Christ from the man Jesus (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.26.1; 1.30.13; 3.9.3; 3.11.7), were arguably trying to insulate Jesus’ absolute “divinity” from either matter or suffering.⁷³ They did this by denying Jesus’ physical body or else by erecting a buffer between a divine Christ and a human Jesus.⁷⁴ On these views, the humanity of Jesus raises a significant problem for the divine nature of the Christ, yielding docetic interpretations. Irenaeus alleged that Saturninus of Antioch said the Savior was “unbegotten, incorporeal, and shapeless” and “was seen only as a man in appearance” (Haer. 1.24.1).

Irenaeus attributed to the Valentinians the view that the unbegotten Father begat Monogenes, who is “similar and equal to him who had produced him” (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.1.1). Monogenes in turn produced Christ, who, like the aeons, is “a being of most perfect beauty, the very star of the Pleroma, and the perfect fruit of it,” and who shares the same nature as the angels (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.2.5-6). Jesus is, on this scheme, the perfection of the divinity within the pleroma, even if inferior to the divinity of the unbegotten and incomprehensible Father. Clement of Alexandria recorded Excerpts of the Valentinian teacher Theodotus that constitute an intense account of Christ’s divinity. He stressed that the Logos of God is the same as the Logos of Christ, so that the “essential Logos is God in God [ton en tautotëti lagon theon en theô], who is also said to be ‘in the bosom of the Father,’ without separation or division, one God” (Exc. 8.1). The Son who descended is the same as the Son who ascended (Exc. 7.3-4). The incarnation was a divine-human conjunction, not an admixing, so that the divine nature is not divided or denigrated by its union with humanity (Exc. 17.4).

In the Valentinian Gospel of Truth⁷⁵ the author appears to invest ontological meaning in Jesus possessing the “name" of the Father (perhaps amplifying the emphasis on a divine “name” in John 1.12; 3.18; 17.6, 11-12, 26; cf. Ap. John 7.27-29). The Son bears the name of the Father, which came forth from the Father (Gos. Truth 38.7-14; cf. Gos. Phil. 54.5-10), and the Son functions as the name of the Father (Gos. Truth 30.24-26; 40.26). The Son bearing a divine name (e.g., Acts 2.38; 1 Cor 6.11; Phil 2.10-11; 1 John 3.23) and Jesus revealing the Father (Matt 11.27; Luke 10.22; John 15.15) are common enough in the New Testament. Yet between the familiarity of the concept and the obscurity of the language, Harold Attridge picks up on the christological significance: “On the one hand, the name is external to the thing named. Hence, the Son, as name, is distinct from the Father whom he names. On the other hand, the name is the essence of the thing named and is thus identical with it. Hence, the Son, as name, is identical with the Father… The two contrary affirmations about the status or function of the Son as name are simply ways of speaking about the intimate relation of Father and son.” Accordingly, “The Son is the name of the Father in the first sense (i.e., the visible pointed to the invisible reality of the Father) because he does indeed come forth.’” But more significantly: “The Son is the name of the Father in the second sense (i.e., is the essence of the Father), because that which comes forth from the Father is the Father himself. In the language of later Christological dogma, the Son is homoousios (i.e., one in being) with the Father.”⁷⁶

A similar view of the consubstantiality of the Father and Son appears in the Tripartite Tractate, where the self-begotten Father begets “a Son, who subsists in him” (Tri. Trac. 56.23-24). The uniqueness of the Son among other intermediaries is made clear: the Son as “firstborn” has no one who exists before him and as “only son” has no one who exists after him (Tri. Trac. 57.19-22). The Son too is “unbegotten and without beginning” (Tri. Trac. 58.7-8). Finally, in the Sethian scheme, Christ is the preexisting and self-existing son of Barbelo (Ap. John 6.10-8.28).

Thus, whatever differences there were between proto-orthodox and heterodox Christologies, it was not over functional vs. ontological Christology; rather, it was mostly over competing species of divine ontological Christology and its entailments.

In each of the instances examined above, the language of being, eternity, authenticity, immortality, and unbegottenness indicate that an absolute ascription of deity, often distinguished from other heavenly beings, is attributed to Jesus. In my mind, this blows apart the notion that divinity in the Roman world “was not an essence or nature, but a concept of status and power in a cosmic spectrum that had no absolute dividing lines”—that is demonstrably false.⁷⁷ As I will show below, divinity was relative, but only to the point of absoluteness!⁷⁸ The idea of an absolute deity was well known and forms the background to Jewish and Christian discourse. More importantly, absolute divinity was attributed to Jesus. The significance of this is spelled out by Boccaccini: “The Crossing of the boundary between the ‘created’ and the uncreated’ distinctively set the Christian messiah apart and brought Jesus to an unprecedented level of exaltation, from an inferior divine being to a Jewish God.”⁷⁹

⁴⁷ Cf. Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007), 378-79; Andrew Ter Ern Loke, The Origin of Divine Christology (SNTSMS 169; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 14,35-36; and Michael Wade Martin and Bryan A. Nash, “Philippians 2.6-11 as Subversive Hymnos: A Study in the Light of Ancient Rhetorical Theory,” JTS 66 (2015): 116-17. See in contrast Carolyn Osiek (Philippians, Philemon [Nashville: Abingdon, 2000], 61): “when applied to persons in this very status-conscious culture, it [isos] is more likely to mean equality of status or importance in a hierarchical order. It is not likely to mean what modem interpreters would want to read into the hymn, namely, equality of nature or substance with God. In other words, it is not a metaphysical but a social statement.” Also, Joseph H. Hellerman (“Morphe Theou as a Signifier of Social Status in Philippians 2.6,” JETS 52 [2009]: 784) sees this as entirely honorific, referring "to visible appearance, with no indication, one way or another, of any corresponding inward quality.” His view is refuted by Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, ““The Being That Is in a Manner Equal with God’ (Phil 2:6c): A Self-Transforming, Incarnational, Divine Ontology,” JTS 96 (2020): 581-627. (Ibid., p. 60)

⁵¹ David S. Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” STR 45 (2002): 379-80; cf. Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish Hellenistic Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1976), 76; and Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 59. Clement of Alexandria saw in Phil 2.6 “the merciful God exerting himself to save humankind” (Protr. 1). Basil (Adv. Eunomium 1.18) regarded the morphê of God as equivalent to the ousia of God. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, "How beautiful you appear to the angels, Lord Jesus, in the form of God, eternal, begotten before the daystar amid the splendeurs of heaven, the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of his nature, the unchanging and untarnished brightness of eternal life!” (cited from Markus Bockmuehl, “‘The Form of God’ [Phil. 2.6]: Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism,” JTS 48 [1997]: 23). According to George Hunsinger (Philippians [BTCB; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2020], 38): “The idea of ‘the form of God’ (morphê theou) anticipates the later idea of God’s ‘being’ (ousia). From this point of view, the divine morphê is a conceptual precursor for the idea of divine essence or substance.” (Ibid., p. 61)

⁵⁴ M Schnelle (Apostle Paul, 398) sums up Paul’s divine Christology this way: “Paul understanding of the relation of Jesus Christ to God can best be expressed by saying that they belong to the same category. Jesus Christ is at the same time subordinate to the Father and fully incorporated into his essence and status.” (Ibid., p. 62)

Further Reading

Philo’s Logos Theology

John’s Logos Christology

Philo’s and John’s Logos

Tatian, Irenaeus, Cyril on the Trinity

MORE ON JUSTIN MARTYR’S CHRISTOLOGY

Athenagoras, Theophilus, Diognetus on the Trinity