Two Powers in Heaven

A Year of Blogging (Almost)

MSH — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:11:01 +0000

I realized last night that I’ve been blogging for a year. This blog is neglected too often, and was shut down for a while–and I still got almost 26,000 visits! I need to do more here, and so …

April DeConcik has been posting away over on her Forbidden Gospels blog about how Jesus was invented (or something like that). I’ve decided I need to read through all her posts (she’s up to about 14 now, and some are pretty lengthy) to catch what she’s saying about the NT’s incarnate deity teaching. I’ll naturally be interested to see if April is aware of the two powers in heaven theology. I’m expecting she is. I’ll also be looking to see if she’s given any thought to its presence in the OLD Testament. I’m expecting she hasn’t, and that will be a real problem for what I’m guessing is her thesis (that the binitarian idea in Jewish monotheism was a late invention, as in, it’s a 2nd temple phenomenon that got applied to Jesus well after the first century). Anyway, that’s a guess. I only skimmed the first couple posts, so it’s time to get into them!

Technorati Tags: DeConick, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism

Hebrew Syntax and the Second Yahweh

MSH — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:47:05 +0000

I recently read a paper at the Pacific Northwest regional meeting of the society of Biblical Literature entitled “The Beth Essentiae (or, Beth of Identity) in Biblical Hebrew.” The paper was on a specific use of the Hebrew preposition beth (one letter; the letter “b”). For definition’s sake:

The beth essentiae “is used to indicate the predicate and especially of the predicative.” That is, at times beth + noun functions as the copula or serves to complement the subject of a clause.

To illustrate:

What’s interesting about this is where other possible uses of beth occur in the Hebrew Bible. I’m going to note two here. If beth essentiae is the correct interpretation of the preposition’s syntax below, a couple of passages have significant implications for the second power (second Yahweh) idea in the Hebrew Bible.

Isaiah 66:15 is a verse noted by Gesenius as an example of the beth essentiae:

See, the LORD (YHWH) is coming with fire-His chariots are like a whirlwind-To vent His anger in fury, His rebuke in flaming fire.

The red “with” is the Tanakh translation of the beth preposition. If we translate this predicatively, we get “See, YHWH is coming as fire . . .” The context clearly hearkens back to the Sinai imagery in passages like 68:18; Exod. 19:18; 24:17 (and possibly, Deut 33:1-2, which is rife with text-critical problems). Why is this significant? Because of the Angel of YHWH description and the burning bush in Exod. 3:1-2-

¹Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the ?mountain of God. ² ?And ?the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.

Once again, the red “in” marks the occurrence of the preposition beth. If we translate this predicatively we get: “the angel of the Lord appeared to him as a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. This would conceptually align YHWH coming as a fire in Sinai imagery with the Angel as fire at Sinai.

Technorati Tags: Angel of the LORD, Binitarian Monotheism, Exodus, Isaiah, lesser YHWH, two powers

Updated Article on Lady Wisdom

MSH — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:57:39 +0000

I’ve revised my article on Lady Wisdom I posted earlier (mostly for space, but also to tie in a Hebrew theme). Here is the new draft. I think it’s better.

Technorati Tags: Jewish binitarianism, Proverbs 8, Wisdom

Two Deities in Daniel 7

MSH — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:07:58 +0000

Readers of two powers material of course know the arguments for seeing both the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man as distinct deity figures. It is core to the two powers idea. My dissertation traced this back to the El-Baal co-regency of Ugarit.

I offer here another take on that, where the same conclusion is made, but from a different wellspring of ancient Near Eastern material. The author is one of my favorites, Julian Morgenstern, whose thoughts on Israelite religion are always provocative. I’m not sure I buy his angle here, but his work is testimony that even “way back” in 1961 there was a scholar not of the evangelical Christian flavor who saw clearly that the Son of Man was a deity figure. It would be nice if NT scholars paid attention to Israelite religion. Instead they want to explain away the “son of man” language as hardly indicative of any theological significance. That’s what you get when you ignore 3/4 of your Bible and its ancient Near Eastern context.

Technorati Tags: Binitarian Monotheism, Daniel 7, Israelite religion, son of man, two powers

Review of Daniel Boyarin’s Book, “”Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity”

MSH — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:28:11 +0000

Here’s a short review of Boyarin’s 2004 book. The review notes the two powers theology and Boyarin’s use of it in this work.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Boyarin, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism

Early Doctrine of the Holy Spirit

MSH — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:18:46 +0000

Fifty-two pages of chunky pneumatological goodness, by Michel Rene Barnes. The paper is the first chapter in a monograph on the theology of the Holy Spirit until the time of Tertullian and Origen. Its thesis is that early Christian pneumatology continues and develops Jewish pneumatology.

Technorati Tags: angels, Holy Spirit, Jewish binitarianism

The Holy Spirit and the Angel

MSH — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:37:54 +0000

Below are two interesting articles that relate some familiar Binitarian categories and terminology to the Holy Spirit. Naturally, there is much fodder here for triangulating (pardon the pun) to a tri-nitarian godhead, perhaps even in the Hebrew Bible. The author of both articles is Bogdan G. Bucur:

The Son of God and the Angelomorphic Holy Spirit: A Rereading of the Shepherd’s Christology (the article deals with the Shepherd of Hermas, a writing included in that body of ancient Christian literature known as the Apostolic Fathers)

The Angelic Spirit in Early Christianity: Justin, the Martyr and Philosopher

Technorati Tags: church fathers, high Christology, Holy Spirit, Jewish binitarianism

The Name in Ante-Nicene Christology

MSH — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:50:20 +0000

This is the title of very good article by Charles Gieschen that I recently found on the web. I have mentioned Charles Gieschen before as the author of a schoalrly work on Angelomorphic Christology. That book is extraordinarily expensive, but this article covers a lot of the same ground with respect to the Name.

Technorati Tags: Gieschen, the Name, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism

Malachi, Mark, and Two Powers

MSH — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:33:27 +0000

A colleague recently brought an interesting passage to my attention that has two powers implications (thanks to Steve Runge!). The passage is Mark 1:2-3 and its quotation of Malachi 3:1. More specifically, there is a change of grammatical person in the quotation that makes it interesting for our purposes. Here are the two passages, along with translation and coloring to highlight features of the discussion:

The passages are noteworthy in several respects.

1. In Malachi 3:1, there are clearly two actors. We learn from the rest of Malachi 3:1 that Yahweh is the speaker (”And the Lord ?whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and ?the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts“). Therefore, Yahweh is one of the actors. The other is Yahweh’s messenger / angel. It isn’t at all clear that “the” Angel, the Angel of Yahweh is intended, and so we should not read that into the text. It is certainly not the way Mark took it.

2. In Malachi 3:1, the messenger / angel is to prepare “the way” before YAHWEH (”before me . . . says the LORD of Hosts”). In the Markan quotation, however, the LORD sends the messenger / angel before “you”, and it is “your” way that is being prepared. The “you” and “your” are both singular. The context of Mark, of course, has the messenger as John the Baptist, the one who prepares the way for Jesus. As a result, the singular “you” refers to Jesus. The significance is that Jesus is inserted into the slot in Malachi 3:1 occupied by Yahweh.

3. The sender in BOTH Mal. 3:1 and Mark 1:2 is the LORD, the God of Israel. In Malachi 3:1 the sender (Yahweh: “I am sending”) is sending a messenger / angel to prepare the sender’s own way (”my way”). In Mark, the sender (Yahweh; “I am sending”) is sending a messenger / angel for Jesus, who replaces Yahweh in the second half of Mal. 3:1. Mark 1:2 transforms the two “Yahweh slots” of Mal. 3:1 into slots occupied by Yahweh and Jesus. The subsequent (Mark 1:2) quotation of Isaiah 40:3 about the messenger / herald preparing “the way of the LORD,” just after Mark has called the way “your [Jesus'] way,” heightens the identification of Jesus with Yahweh.

4. Scholars have long recognized that Paul frequently inserts Jesus into Old Testament passages occupied by Yahweh in the Hebrew text. For those interested in this phenomenon, see this book: Old Testament Yahweh texts in Paul’s christology (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament). That this same technique is found in the gospels deserves attention.

5. Lastly, all of this is yet more proof of a high Christology well before Nicea. One wonders how people like Bart Ehrman keep insisting that the deification of Jesus was foreign to earliest Christianity, since (I’m presuming here, since the view is so common) that Mark was among the earliest written material in the New Testament. How Ehrman can defend his adoptionist view of Jesus with respect to the textual variant in Mark 1:1 is understandable. This change in number in Mark 1:2 from Mal. 3:1 is not marred by a textual controversy, and so that notion is far less coherent here.

Technorati Tags: high Christology, Jesus, Malachi, Mark, Yahweh

Another New Book Of Two Powers Interest

MSH — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:37:22 +0000

Here’s the title:

Angelomorphic Christology and the Exegesis of Psalm 8:5 in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean: An Examination of Tertullian’s Reluctance to Attribute Angelic Properties to the Son of God

The abstract reads:

Angelomorphic Christology and the Exegesis of Psalm 8:5 in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean explores the reluctance of Tertullian of Carthage (160-220 A.D.) to predicate angelic properties of the Lord Jesus Christ. This fresh and insightful work suggests that one reason for this aversion to angelic or angelomorphic Christology was his hermeneutical approach to Psalm 8:5.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, Jewish binitarianism, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism