Hence early Jewish Christians of Palestine could not have taken over such a title allegedly used of Yahweh in Jewish circles and applied it to the risen Christ. Rather, Bultmann alleged, “the Kyrios-cult [of Jesus] originated on Hellenistic soil.”38 Accordingly, the title Kyrios would have been picked up by Christian missionaries as they carried the message about Christ from Palestine into the contemporary Greco-Roman world, where gods, emperors, and other illustrious persons were sometimes called
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