The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ, Richard Smoley

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The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ, Richard Smoley

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Smoley, Richard."The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ" Quest 103.4 (Fall 2015): pp. 130-136.

From an article^ adapted from Richard Smoley’s [then forthcoming] book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, since published in June 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin.

Smoley cites Philippians 2:6–9 and Galatians 4:14 and says -

the early Christians — those who wrote the New Testament — ... thought [Jesus] was the incarnation of an angel.

As NT scholar Bart D. Ehrman puts it:
“Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord — in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors” (How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. San Francisco: Harper One, 2014., chap. 7).
We might also be able to say which angel they thought Jesus was. ... I argue that, by some theories, there were originally two Gods in Israel: El, the high God, and Yahweh, God of Israel alone, sometimes known as the Angel of the Lord. Eventually, however, the Jews decided that Yahweh was not an angel; he was the high God himself; El and Yahweh were the same. This transition had probably been made by the sixth century BC.

But the Great Angel did not go away. He continued to survive in Judaism for centuries afterward. He was sometimes known as the Son of Man.

The first usage of “the Son of Man” in this sense appears in the book of Daniel, from the second century BC: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him” (Daniel 7:13).

Sometimes the Son of Man was called Metatron, a name that looks more Greek than Hebrew. That may be because it is. One theory (there are many) says this name comes from the Greek metà toû thrónou — the angel “with the throne” of God.

Metatron, the Great Angel, was known in other ways too, depending upon which text you look at. Here is a list of some names for him:
  • The Angel of the Lord
  • The Son of Man
  • The Son of God
  • The second God (deúteros theós in Greek)
  • The Name of God
  • The Logos = The Word
  • Wisdom

... It would be hard to overstate the importance of this concept to early Christianity.

Here it is: there is a kind of subordinate God, a “second God,” through whom the high God relates to the universe and through whom he created the universe. This subordinate God is actually an angel — the Son of Man, Metatron.

One text that sheds some light on the subject is the pseudepigraphical work, 1 Enoch:

.And at that time that the Son of Man was named, in the presence of the Lord of Spirits
And his name before the Head of Days.
And before the suns and the “signs” [i.e., constellations] were created
Before the stars of the heaven were made,
His name was named before the Lord of spirits - (1 Enoch 48:2–3; Idel, 20)

Exactly as in the verse from Daniel, there are two figures here: one is the Lord of Spirits, the Head of Days (or Ancient of Days), the high God, the Father. The other is the Son of Man. You will notice that the last line of the verse above emphasizes his “name.” This is important.

The ancient Hebrews saw a much closer connection between the word and the thing than we do. In fact, they used the same word for both: davar. This fact meant that God’s name was, in some way, equivalent to God himself. (To this day pious Jews sometimes refer to God as ha-Shem, “the Name.”)

The Name is a hypostasis. It is an attribute (usually of God) that takes on a life of its own and becomes a kind of independent entity, a person.

It’s even in the Bible. In Exodus the Lord says to the children of Israel,

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“Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, and provoke him not: for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him

(Exodus 23:20–21; [Smoley's] emphasis).

So the Son of Man is the Great Angel, the hypostasis of the Name. Why was he called the Son of Man? Here’s one answer: many of these texts are not just the results of imagination or theologizing. They sometimes represent real visionary experience. We have almost no idea of how this kind of experience was produced. But in it the angels often had the form of men ...

... Judaism at the time of Christ, and long before, had a notion of 'the Great Angel', the hypostasis of the divine Name. At some point he was identified with the patriarch Enoch, who had ascended to heaven and become the angel Metatron. This may be why Metatron was called the Son of Man.

Christianity took this idea over. The early Christians decided that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Great Angel, who had come down to earth. He had degraded himself to take on fleshly form in order to deliver us from our sins. God rewarded him by exalting him to a still higher level than he had had before.

This is what the passage above from Philippians [2:6–9] is trying to say.
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

6 Who, being in very nature [in the form of] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of [the form of] a servant, being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death —even death on a cross!

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

10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Here is another example, from the epistle of the Hebrews:

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God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir to all things, by whom also he made the worlds: who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high: being made so much better than the angels, as he hath [been allotted1] a more excellent name than they.

(Hebrews 1:1–4; KVJ, my emphasis)

1 the King James Version fails to translate one word in the Greek: έχει κατανεμηθεί (?), “has been allotted”. To say that Jesus was “allotted” his excellent name created some discomfort in light of later belief, so the word was left out.
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You may be reminded of the opening of the Gospel of John: “All things were made by him” — the Logos, the Word (John 1:3).

You’ll also have noticed that I put the Logos, the Word, on the same list as the Great Angel and the Son of Man. That’s because the name Logos was also applied to the Great Angel. The first man to do this (to our knowledge) was the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria.

Philo does know of the Logos:

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And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel.

(Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 146; Yonge, 247; [Smoley's] emphasis)
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There you have it. The “great archangel” is “the name of God” and “the Word.”

Smoley then elaborates on Lógos and Word -
when I think back to any Greek text I’ve read, “word” is almost never the best translation for lógos. It’s often best translated as “speech,” “argument,” “reason,” even “true story.” But its meaning goes far further still.

It’s no small feat to say what lógos meant over the course of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy. But here is the main idea: lógos is the structuring principle of consciousness. Or, if you like, consciousness as a structuring principle (Heidegger, chapter 2; Smoley, 165).

the root behind lógos [λογότυπα(?)] originally meant “to pick up” or “pick out.”

By the time of Philo, Greek philosophers had devoted a lot of attention to this idea. In his day, the Stoics were one of the dominant philosophical schools. They said that this lógos, this structuring principle of consciousness, was the basis not only of our experience but of all existence. This idea was extremely influential.

Philo wanted to connect traditional Jewish teachings with Greek philosophy. So he identified this lógos with the Name, the Great Angel.
At one point the Jewish sages decided that he had gotten too big for his britches. So they dethroned him.

We find out about this in 3 Enoch. It is a striking and revealing passage.

At one point a heretical rabbi ascends to heaven in a mystical vision. He sees Metatron on his throne and exclaims, “There are indeed two powers of heaven!” Then God dethrones Metatron. The angel Anapiel comes and, Metatron says, “struck me with sixty lashes of fire and made me stand to my feet” (3 Enoch 16:2–5; Charlesworth 1:268).

The passage suggests why Metatron was dethroned. It refers to the rabbi as Acher (the “other one”) — a contemptuous epithet: the Jews considered him an archheretic. His real name was Elisha ben Abuya, and he lived around the turn of the second century AD ...

If this is true, it tells us a great deal. The idea of “two powers of heaven” had been in Judaism for centuries. But the Christians used it to great effect: there was the Father, and there was the Son. They identified this Son with Jesus.
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