I've copied to MS Word the text of three articles at Hurtado's blog:
December 11, 2012 “Early High Christology”: A Recent Assessment of Scholarly Debate
December 12, 2013 “High/Early Christology”: An Emerging Consensus?
December 18, 2013 “Early High Christology”: Clarifying Key Issues and Positions
Then I tried to condense his prose into understandable units, with a great deal of difficulty. It seems that one must really read his book
One God, One Lord, Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (2nd ed 1998, 1988)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/188402388/Lar ... ook4me-org
to understand much of what he babbles about, and why he does it that way.
Larry Hurtado has a following, no question about it, especially among the "neo orthodox" (including a large contingent of young hip "gamers," so you old school gamers better watch out or they may jump you in a dark pericope somewhere). Over at the Review of Biblical Literature website there is nary a bad review of any of his books (I could not read the two or three in German). Reviewers praise his clarity and concise thinking, but when I read him I just kind of have to shake my head. He is quite dismissive of those who have come to differing positions, especially Vermes, who in his mind just doesn't "get" it.
What I think he is saying, is that because the undisputed Pauline letters use high Christology, no matter how defined, and Paul is traditionally believed to have written them pretty much as we have them now, we can thus conclude that high Christology precedes roughly 60 CE, which makes it "early" high Christology, or even "really early" if we assume, as he does, that Paul's Christology may not have differed significantly from that of the earliest followers of Jesus, say around 40 CE, at least as he imagines them to have been held. And he has a
very active imagination of what Jews might be willing to entertain about a divine-like being such as the Christ!
Hurtado is a huge fan, with reservations, of Wilhelm Bousset, especially his book
Kyrios Christos, (German, 1913; rev. ed. 1921, 1965; ET by John E Steely,
Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, 1970). Hurtado reviews it here:
http://www.ts.mu.edu/readers/content/pd ... 40.2.4.pdf
All I can say is his critique of the book in general, that "Although Kyrios Christos has proved enduring in its influence, the book also reveals the time-bound situation of its author, particularly his own religious convictions of a now quaint, Old Liberal bent," could just as easily be attributed to his own work, if only we substitute the words "Old Evangelical" for "Old Liberal."
Right now I am fatigued and need to go to sleep, but I'll offer some critique of his Dec 2012 and Dec 18, 2013 articles in the coming days. (sorry, no snoozing smiley)
DCH
Peter Kirby wrote:Larry "Bringing the Pain" Hurtado takes ante-Nicene doubters to task:
http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/ ... consensus/
“High/Early Christology”: An Emerging Consensus?
Almost exactly a year ago, I posted on a very informative and judicious (in my view) review of recent scholarly work on the emergence of “high” christology (which = Jesus regarded and treated as in some meaningful way “divine”) by Dr. Andrew Chester (Cambridge University), my earlier posting here. Given the tone of one or two recent comments, claiming, e.g., that any such view reflects some sort of theologically “conservative” cabal, I thought it well to point again to Chester’s article: Andrew Chester, “High Christology–Whence, When and Why?,” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22-50.
As Chester observes, it’s really the evidence that seems to require the conclusion that Jesus-devotion erupted rapidly and originated in circles of Jewish Jesus-followers in Judea. That conclusion (with variations in emphases) is now supported by a wide (and growing) spectrum of scholars. (I even recall being challenged about the matter by a retired Jewish professor of ancient history who emailed saying that it was incredible to think that this sort of Jesus-devotion could have been entertained by self-identifying Jews of the Roman period. I replied by asking him to read one or two of my own studies on the subject. A week or two later he emailed again, saying “I’ll be damned! There were Jews stupid enough to believe this!” I considered it quite an endorsement!)
As evident in the anecdote I’ve recounted, this historical judgment doesn’t require any prior religious stance, and doesn’t necessarily demand one. To reiterate Chester’s judgment, however counter-intuitive it seems at first, it’s just what the evidence seems to require.
Now, while history always needs to be driven first and foremost by the specific data available to us, it also needs to fit that data into a context and do the dirty Bayesian business of considering background probabilities (or so I'm told).
One way of taking this evidence is gobbling it up on the platter exactly as it has been served to us: some followers of Jesus, at least by the time Paul came around just a few years later, were already calling their crucified friend someone divine.
Another way of taking it requires a lot of salt. Along with all the other anomalous evidence, it could motivate someone to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Bobby "Fisher of Men" Price and the new Flying Dutchmen of Historical Criticism:
take the stone of strangeness that the scholars rejected and make it the cornerstone for a new edifice with a new configuration of Christian origins... where, not least of all, the Pauline letters are not nearly so early and un-pseudepigraphical as they are believed to be.
(Apologies to Joe "the Tornado" Wallack!)