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

Daniel Boyarin is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. Like Alan Segal before him, he is a Jewish scholar with a special interest in the two powers “heresy”. I’ve attached a PDF of his important Harvard Theological Reivew article, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John” (John 1:1-14). It’s a terrific piece of scholarship that demonstrates that John primarily got his doctrine of the Logos from the Old Testament and his own Jewish context, not pagan Greco-Roman thinking.

It’s scholarship like this that makes me (and others) groan when people like Bart Ehrman want to argue that the idea of Jesus being God was a late invention of the early church.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Boyarin, Jewish binitarianism, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism