Michael Bird - Jesus Among the Gods

OnScript

Episode: Michael Bird turns the well-rehearsed scholarly tale about how Jesus came to be described as divine on its head. Jesus didn't become God through the application of Greek metaphysical categories in the third and fourth centuries. Rather, Jesus was depicted as divine within our earliest sources on the basis of first-century categories of ontology. Co-hosted by Matt Lynch and Matt Bates.

The Book: Michael F. Bird, Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2022). After several centuries of controversy, the early church came to an uneasy consensus that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. In his divinity, orthodox Christianity claimed, he shared fully in the nature of the uncreated creator God. But was this doctrinal position crafted from whole cloth in the era of the great ecumenical councils? How did earlier Christ-followers understand Jesus in light of their convictions about the one supreme deity and in the context of a cultural milieu saturated with gods? In Jesus among the gods, Michael Bird gives renewed attention to divine ontology―what a god is―in relation to literary representations of Jesus. Through comparison with representative authors such as Philo and Plutarch, and a comprehensive analysis of Jesus and various intermediary figures from Greco-Roman religion and ancient Judaism, Bird demonstrates how early accounts of Jesus both overlapped with and diverged from existing forms of religious expression. Among the gods, Jesus stood in clear relief, a conviction that may have been refined over time but that belongs to the emerging heart of Christian confession. (Publisher's description, abridged).

Guest: Michael Bird is Academic Dean and lecturer in theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. Mike has published in both New Testament Studies and in Systematic Theology, and his many publications include Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology, Evangelical Theology, and The Saving Righteousness of God. Mike runs a popular theological studies blog called “Euangelion” and can be followed on twitter @mbird12. Mike and his wife Naomi have have four children.

OnScript's Review: When we say "Jesus is God," who and what we mean by "God" matters. Contrary to merely functional accounts of Jesus's divinity, Bird shows that the first-century world had a robust ontology of the divine. Jesus is indeed a very specific God: the one God who revealed himself to be the eternal creator, the life-giver, and the promise-keeper within ancient Israel. A masterwork of historically informed theology, Bird's Jesus Among the Gods will compel scholars to revise the standard narrative of how Christology developed. -- Matthew W. Bates, author of The Birth of the Trinity; Professor of Theology, Quincy University

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