Two Powers in Heaven

A colleague recently brought an interesting passage to my attention that has two powers implications (thanks to Steve Runge!). The passage is Mark 1:2-3 and its quotation of Malachi 3:1.  More specifically, there is a change of grammatical person in the quotation that makes it interesting for our purposes.  Here are the two passages, along with translation and coloring to highlight features of the discussion:

The passages are noteworthy in several respects.

1. In Malachi 3:1, there are clearly two actors. We learn from the rest of Malachi 3:1 that Yahweh is the speaker (”And the Lord ?whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and ?the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts“). Therefore, Yahweh is one of the actors. The other is Yahweh’s messenger / angel. It isn’t at all clear that “the” Angel, the Angel of Yahweh is intended, and so we should not read that into the text. It is certainly not the way Mark took it.

2. In Malachi 3:1, the messenger / angel is to prepare “the way” before YAHWEH (”before me . . . says the LORD of Hosts”).  In the Markan quotation, however, the LORD sends the messenger / angel before “you”, and it is “your” way that is being prepared. The “you” and “your” are both singular. The context of Mark, of course, has the messenger as John the Baptist, the one who prepares the way for Jesus. As a result, the singular “you” refers to Jesus.  The significance is that Jesus is inserted into the slot in Malachi 3:1 occupied by Yahweh.

3.  The sender in BOTH Mal. 3:1 and Mark 1:2 is the LORD, the God of Israel. In Malachi 3:1 the sender (Yahweh: “I am sending”) is sending a messenger / angel to prepare the sender’s own way (”my way”).  In Mark, the sender (Yahweh; “I am sending”) is sending a messenger / angel for Jesus, who replaces Yahweh in the second half of Mal. 3:1. Mark 1:2 transforms the two “Yahweh slots” of Mal. 3:1 into slots occupied by Yahweh and Jesus. The subsequent (Mark 1:2) quotation of Isaiah 40:3 about the messenger / herald preparing “the way of the LORD,” just after Mark has called the way “your [Jesus'] way,” heightens the identification of Jesus with Yahweh.

4. Scholars have long recognized that Paul frequently inserts Jesus into Old Testament passages occupied by Yahweh in the Hebrew text. For those interested in this phenomenon, see this book: Old Testament Yahweh texts in Paul’s christology (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament).  That this same technique is found in the gospels deserves attention.

5. Lastly, all of this is yet more proof of a high Christology well before Nicea. One wonders how people like Bart Ehrman keep insisting that the deification of Jesus was foreign to earliest Christianity, since (I’m presuming here, since the view is so common) that Mark was among the earliest written material in the New Testament. How Ehrman can defend his adoptionist view of Jesus with respect to the textual variant in Mark 1:1 is understandable. This change in number in Mark 1:2 from Mal. 3:1 is not marred by a textual controversy, and so that notion is far less coherent here.

Technorati Tags: high Christology, Jesus, Malachi, Mark, Yahweh

I just received information from a book wire about a new Brill title (so start applying for a loan):

Bogdan Gabriel Bucur, Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and Other Early Christian Witnesses

Here’s the Brill abstract:

This book pursues the occurrence of angelomorphic pneumatology in early Christian literature—that is, the use of angelic imagery in early Christian discourse about the Holy Spirit—by taking as its entry-point Clement of Alexandria’s less explored writings, Excerpta ex Theodoto, Eclogae propheticae, and Adumbrationes. Clement’s angelomorphic pneumatology occurs in tandem with spirit christology, within a theological framework still characterized by a binitarian orientation. This complex theological articulation, supported by the exegesis of specific biblical passages (Zech 4:10; Isa 11:2-3; Matt 18:10), reworks Jewish and Christian traditions about the seven first-created angels, and constitutes a relatively widespread phenomenon in early Christianity. Evidence to support this claim is presented in the course of separate studies of Revelation, the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, and Aphrahat.

The clear mention of binitarianism leads me to believe this would be a worthy contribution to two powers research . . . but I think I’ll wait till SBL to even think about buying it.

Technorati Tags: angels, church fathers, Holy Spirit, Jewish binitarianism

Here’s another article that delves into Jewish Binitarian monotheism, though not as deeply as Hurtado (with whom the article interacts) or myself: Paul A. Rainbow, “Jewish Monotheism as a Matrix for New Testament Christology: A Review Article,” NovTest 33:1 (1991): 78-91

Technorati Tags: Jewish binitarianism, Rainbow