Two Powers in Heaven

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

I refer to Dr. Larry Hurtado, whose books I have mentioned before. Here’s a link to an old article on first century (CE/AD) Jewish monotheism by Hurtado (he is now teaching at the University of Edinburgh). Larry and I have some disagreements. For example, I think he defines worship too narrowly, and his approach of defining deification by that narrow understanding isn’t the right track to proceed on with respect to binitarianism. At any rate, he is always worth reading and I recommend him to you.

Technorati Tags: Hurtado, Jewish binitarianism