Jesus’ Divinity as Embellishment or Doctrine

An owl, who may or may not be reading the Q document.

An owl, who may or may not be reading the Q document.

Wintery Knight has a good summary-type of post on the view of early church on Jesus’ divine nature, using the 1 Corinthians and Phillipians letters, Mark’s gospel, and then hitting the Q document.

One of the strongest historo-logical (?) arguments, I think, against the Jesus’ divinity is that if you put crucial passages in chronological order, they show a progressively more “divine” Jesus. I’m actually not too familiar with the arguments for either/or, but WK’s post is the pro-doctrine side:

Check out Philippians 2:5-11.

5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

6Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

7but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!

9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,

10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The date for Philippians is 60-61 AD. Still within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, and written by an eyewitness who was in contact with the other eyewitnesses, like Peter and James, whom Paul spoke with numerous times on his journeys to Jerusalem.

An important thing to keep in mind, using just some verbal logic, comes from knowing that the New Testament writers were documenting things as they saw them and for certain audiences who shared the same base knowledge and cultural assumptions (other Jews). They weren’t writing as modern historians for modern historians, making sure that they met the proper criteria for historical inquiry. To expect those books to read like present-day accounts of recent events is the wrong approach to take.

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