JESUS IN EARLIEST CHRISTIAN DEVOTIONAL PRACTICE
Larry W. Hurtado
SNAPSHOTS
MICHAEL F. BIRD, SERIES EDITOR
Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice
Snapshots, edited by Michael F. Bird
Copyright © 2018 Larry W. Hurtado
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at permissions@lexhampress.com.
“Lord and God” by Larry W. Hurtado is reprinted by permission from the July 21, 2014, issue of The Christian Century. Copyright © 2014 by The Christian Century.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (rsv), copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Print ISBN 9781683590965
Digital ISBN 9781683590972
Series Editor: Michael F. Bird
Lexham Editorial Team: Eric Bosell, Derek Brown, and Jeff Reimer
Cover Design: Brittany Schrock
The Early Christian “Mutation”
Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice
Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs
When Professor Doctor Martin Hengel wrote his endorsement of Larry Hurtado’s book One God One Lord (1988),1 he made a rather prophetic statement. He wrote in the publisher’s blurb:
This very informative, interesting, and revolutionary book gathers in a masterly manner the results of scholarly experts in many countries who are in some way forming a new “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule.” I know of few recent books which promote our understanding of early Christology so much as this volume.
Now Hengel himself played a pivotal role in establishing this new history of religions school (religionsgeschichtliche Schule). For he argued persuasively in various publications that Judaism had been Hellenized for centuries before the birth of Jesus and that the Judaisms of late antiquity, not pagan religions, provided the rich soils into which the movement founded by and on Jesus had been planted and thrived.
Hengel’s words were prophetic first because he was speaking the truth; a sea change was taking place in New Testament studies. Prior to Hengel, scholars typically began with the assumption that pagan influences flooded into the “church” and became the key shaping factors in the community’s Christology. The latter school, however, in the decades following the Holocaust, took a different, more generous view toward the Judaisms of late antiquity. Rather than seeing Second Temple ...
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About Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional PracticeBefore the New Testament or the creeds of the church were written—the devotional practices of the earliest Christians show that they worshipped Jesus alongside the Father. Larry W. Hurtado has been one of the leading scholars on early Christology for decades. In Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice, Hurtado helps readers understand early Christology by examining not just what early Christians believed or wrote about Jesus, but what their devotional practices tell us about the place of Jesus in early Christian worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early Christian origins and scholarship on New Testament Christology, Hurtado examines the distinctiveness of early Christian worship by comparing it to both Jewish worship patterns and worship practices within the broader Roman-era religious environment. He argues that the inclusion of the risen Jesus alongside the Father in early Christian devotional practices was a distinct and unique religious phenomenon within its ancient context. Additionally, Hurtado demonstrates that this remarkable development was not invented decades after the resurrection of Christ as some scholars once claimed. Instead, the New Testament suggests that Jesus-followers, very quickly after the resurrection of Christ, began to worship the Son alongside the Father. Honoring the Son offers a look into the worship habits of the earliest Christians to understand the place of Jesus in early Christian devotion. |
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