The title ‘Son of Man’ is best known by most readers of the scriptures as the title which Christ most often applies to himself in all four of the Gospels, a rare thread running through all four with utter consistency. In fact, other than references to the Old Testament and a single instance in the Acts of the Apostles, this title occurs in the New Testament only as a form of self-reference by Christ. When Christ uses this term, however, he is drawing on an Old Testament tradition which was already by that time well-defined. Further, from this Old Testament tradition, the idea of a particular divine figure had formed within Second Temple Judaism, and many of Christ’s references are…
Famously, the prologue of the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel speaks of the Logos, who has existed eternally with God from the beginning, and is God. It became extremely common to read these statements in the prologue philosophically. To read them as an attempt by St. John to philosophically represent the deity of Jesus Christ in relationship to the God of Israel as a Jewish monotheist. Philo of Alexandria’s mention, as a Jewish Middle Platonist, of the divine Logos as an emanation of the one true God is seen as either a parallel or a precursor by this view. Others looked to the idea of the logos in Stoic philosophy. This line of thought has so permeated patristic studies…
There is within the Christian world, even among Orthodox Christian writers and scholars, a certain presupposed narrative regarding the ‘development’ of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity within Christianity. It is presupposed that the people of the Old Testament were Unitarian monotheists, that they believed that only one God existed, and that that God was a single person. It is then presupposed that through his teaching and deeds, culminating in his resurrection and ascension into heaven, early Christians came to believe that Jesus is also divine in some sense. The development of Christian belief over the next several centuries is then seen in evolutionary terms, in which early ‘low’ Christology in which Christ is seen to be divine, but not…
The phrase “women disciples of the Lord” is enough of a commonplace in Orthodox hymnography that it moves past the modern ear with little notice. It seems simply obvious at even a surface reading of the gospels that Christ had a number of followers, and that some of them were women. Contained within this brief phrase, and in the use of the word disciple, however, is a massive transformation in the way in which women were viewed in the ancient world, and their perceived role within the Christian community. As in a previous post, in the person of Jesus Christ, priesthood is reunited with masculinity as a calling, so too in the revelation of Jesus Christ attested by the New…
The theme of priesthood in the scriptures begins at the very beginning. The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis draw heavily on the literature and traditions of the surrounding nations, though always with alteration, and in some cases even inversion, of the pagan themes found therein. The most obvious example of this is the story of the flood, which existed in many forms in the Ancient Near East before Genesis was written, and so Genesis both corrects these accounts, and serves as an apologetic for the true God of scripture against the various Near Eastern deities. This is also true of the story of the creation of Adam itself. In the Ancient Near East, the various pagan cultures…
