The arguments of my Divine Heartset include more than half-a-dozen proposals for new translations of some unusual Greek language that Paul employs in his letter to the Philippians. Outside of the Christ Hymn, my favourite appear in the passage where Paul tees up his praise of Christ.

Here is my translation of 2:1–4, with new translations highlighted:

2:1 So if there is any comfort in Messiah, any consolation of love, any participation in the Spirit, any visceral affection and mercies, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, soul-united and minded to one thing. 3 Do nothing out of venal corruption (κατ’ ἐριθείαν) or vainglory, but in humblemindedness, regarding each other as superior to yourselves. 4 Let each of you be focused not on the interests of their own people, but rather everyone one of you on the interests of everyone else (μὴ τὰ ἑαυτῶν ἕκαστος σκοποῦντες ἀλλὰ [καὶ] τὰ ἑτέρων ἕκαστοι).

At 2:3, the word ἐριθεία is nowadays usually translated “selfish ambition,” “self-seeking,” occasionally “faction(s), factiousness,” “partisanship,” or “party-spirit.” The word is rare, appearing only twice (in Aristotle’s Politics) before it is used a few times by NT authors. (See also Phil 1:17; Rom 2:8; Phil 1:17; 2:3; 2 Cor 12:20; Gal 5:2; Jas 3:14, 16).

I argue (Divine Heartset chapter 11, §3.5) there is no evidence that it has anything to do with selfishness. No classicist, as far as I can tell, gives it that sense in Aristotle’s Politics. Epigraphic data (some of it not considered before) and a careful reexamination of the meagre literary evidence shows that ἐριθεία denotes a kind of corrupt corporate or civic behaviour, for which the best English equivalent would be “venality”. (Though the word ἐριθεία and its cognate verbs and adjective conveyed meanings peculiar to ancient discussions about civic virtue and forms of corruption that were perceived as a threat to community life in the Greek city). This meaning is attested in the Ancient Greek lexica (Hesychius and the Suda), was known to a few nineteenth century commentators, and has at last resurfaced in the Cambridge Greek Lexicon entry for the verbal form, “ἐριθεύομαι mid. vb . . . app. to put oneself up for hire; (pejor. of a person seeking public office) . . .” (CGL 599). My arguments are anticipated also by the work of Angela Standhartinger who translates ἐξ ἐριθείας 1:17 and κατ’ ἐριθείαν in 2:3 as “aus korrupten Motiven” (see her Philipperbrief, 98, 107, 138).

The fact that Paul warns in 2:3 against a kind of venal corruption fits also with a better translation of 2:4. There, too, it is usually thought that Paul urges regard for others, rather than for oneself, even a form of radical altruism: “Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others”). But Paul’s Greek is peculiar in ways that many commentators miss. It is better translated, as I have done above. So Paul teaches his readers to not be blinded by any allegiance to a particular group, whether that be one created by ethnic, caste, profession or some other index of social value. He wants everyone to love everyone, just as Christ came for all humanity (Phil 2:7).

The idea that Paul teaches against selfishness (here, in Romans 2, 2 Corinthians 12 and Gal 5) is, I contend, a relatively recent interpretative overlay that misses his real concerns. 

In this letter (and elsewhere) Paul is incredibly ambitious—for his own and others’ conformity to Christ (3:7–14) and for their receipt of divine glory and praise (1:11; 3:21). Indeed, in much of the letter Paul appeals directly to his readers’ knowledge of, or wise discernment of, their own best interests (see Divine Heartset chapter 11).

We are back!

The fruit of 10 years research on the Christology of Paul’s letter to the Philippians (and the meaning of Christ Hymn in Phil 2:6–11 + 3:20–21) is now published (www.divineheartset.com).

If you are interested in joining a Reading Group with other scholars who will be working their way through the book, starting in February (that is being organised by Dr Logan Williams), message us at [email protected].

You can hear me discussing some of the ideas at the heart of the Jesus Monotheism project on a just-released The Bible Project podcast, here:

https://player.fm/series/the-bible-project-1401633/did-jesus-really-think-he-was-god-feat-dr-crispin-fletcher-louis

Tim and John are doing wonderful job bringing recent and cutting edge scholarship to the masses, so it was a privilege and to spend time with them.

I have spent much of the last couple of years revising my understanding of Phil 2:6–11. The journey has been uncomfortable. For the duration of the time you are forced to rearrange your mental furniture there can be nowhere comfortable to sit. But the rearrangement has been necessary and the end result has far reaching implications.

I figured a revision was necessary once I investigated carefully some of the passage’s language, and at the Cambridge New Testament seminar next Tuesday I will present some of my conclusions about the precise meaning of the expression τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ that Paul employs in Phil 2:6c.

These words are usually taken to mean an ‘equality with God’ and many have insisted this is only a status, not a nature or essence. The phrases is treated as a parade example of the conclusion that, across the earliest Christological texts, Christ’s divinity was not conceived in the anachronistic terms of later Patristic discussions of ontology, that were influenced by dialogue with Greek philosophy. However, remarkably no one has undertaken a thorough investigation of comparable Greek expressions and the arguments of many in the nineteenth century (and three German scholars in the twentieth) that the Greek cannot mean ‘equality with God’ have been ignored.

I have found more than 140 texts, from Homer down to the early third century C.E., that use ἴσος/ἴσα + θεός in ways that are comparable to Phil 2:6c, in five discrete syntactic constructions. Phil 2:6c should now be categorised as a rarely attested construction, but one which would probably sound Homeric in the first century, since it first appears in Iliad 5:441–2 and 21:315. Phil 2:6c is closest to a line in Homeric Hymns 5, line 214 (where ἶσα θεοῖσιν modifies an optative form of the verb εἰμί), but is similar also to a section of Pseudo-Perictione’s On the Harmony of Women (two texts which have not, until now, figured in the interpretation of Phil 2:6). According to the basic rules of Greek and, in keeping with these (and a few other) comparative texts, Phil 2:6c must mean ‘being in a manner equal with God’, or more precisely, ‘a/the being that is in a manner equal with God’s manner of being’ (as our nineteenth century forebears saw). The ἴσα θεῷ is an adverbial, ‘in a manner equal with God’, not an adjectival ‘equal with God’.

In several respects, however, the words τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ are unique and they have a precise two-fold purpose in this passage that has until now been missed by all commentators.

1.  The expression τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ has a strongly active, verbal, force. (This has been missed, in part, because commentators have not appreciated the fact that the Greek verb εἶναι can have a durative and active force—’to live, be alive, to dwell, be present, or be available’). This is fitting because, within the οὐκ … ἀλλά construction that orders the thought sequence in vv. 6–8, τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ is interpreted by Christ in his act of self-emptying and his becoming human in vv. 7–8. One burden of these verses is to say that, strangely and scandalously for Greco-Roman readers, Christ exegetes divine equality by his becoming human; by incarnation.

2. In verse 6c τὸ εἶναι is used absolutely, to denote ‘Being’. (In Greek τὸ εἶναι can be used either predicatively or absolutely, as in English also. In English ‘being’ can be used predicatively as in the sentence, ‘Being the brightest in her class she won the competition’, or it can be used absolutely, as in, ‘The mystic sat cross-legged and meditated on the nature of ‘Being’). So the first half of the hymn, in its description of the incarnation, uses language that is highly suggestive of the Platonic distinction between being and becoming, as can be seen in this English translation:

‘who being (ὑπάρχων) in the form of God, considered being (τὸ εἶναι) (that is) in a manner equal with God’s being, not harpagmos, but emptied himself, … becoming (γενόμενος) in human likeness … becoming (γενόμενος) obedient to death.

A two-fold being defines Christ’s pre-incarnate, heavenly, existence. A two-fold becoming describes his contingent, earthly, existence (that ended in death). This is the basic Platonic distinction between being and becoming. It is true that Plato usually uses the words (τὸ) ὄν and οὐσία for ‘being’. But the verb γίνομαι is the standard Platonic verb for becoming. Furthermore, occasionally Plato used τὸ εἶναι for ‘being’ and passages in Philo and Plutarch show that in the middle Platonism of the first century C.E. τὸ εἶναι was regularly used in this way and that the verb ὑπάρχω (and its nominal form) also figured in such contexts.

Plato and his followers insisted that ‘being’ cannot ‘become’. Paul’s Christ hymn describes, by contrast, the life of one who, in recent history, demonstrated a being equal to God’s being precisely in the act of his becoming human and mortal. The hymn most certainly describes Christ’s divine identity in ontological terms, though it does so to offer a new kind of dynamic, incarnational, divine ontology.

Already, before Paul wrote to the Philippians, the earliest followers of Jesus were describing Jesus’ divine identity in terms of a kind nature or ontology—in terms of divine being.

An article has just been published that I reckon contains a breakthrough insight into the earliest understanding(s) of Jesus and the movement he started.

In his ‘Long Live the King: The Fourth Gospel’s Responses to Greco-Roman Suspicions Concerning Monarchy’, JGRChJ 13 (2017), pp. 189–212, Adam Booth contends that John’s gospel presents a problem for first century Roman readers who would be troubled by the presentation of Jesus as a king. Booth’s central insight rests on the fact that Romans were republicans whose founding stories and long history rejected the tyrannies of kingship in favour of a mixed constitution in which the power of the executive was shared out among a senate and the people. Even after the transition to imperial rule under Octavian (Julius Caesar’s adopted son), Romans continued to avoid the language of kingship for the Emperor (the Princeps) and continued to present their political system as republican in form and philosophy.

Having established that the Fourth Gospel has a kingship Christology (see John 1:49; 6:15; 12:13; 18:33–37; 19:1–5, 21–22), Booth offers a reader-response analysis that attempts to show that Jesus’ royalty is of a (unique) kind that in various ways would mitigate the concerns of a reader with republican commitments. His proposals in this section are fascinating and I look forward to hearing how others with a competence in John and Greco-Roman political philosophy judge them.

I applaud Booth’s piece because it breaks new ground in a way that ought to be an inspiration and challenge to others seeking to understand the nature of early Christology and Jewish messianism. The movement we call Christianity was birthed under Roman rule. And when it started its Jewish context—that more than any shaped its values, culture and political outlook—had had nearly two centuries’ exposure to the Roman world and its distinctive republican politics. The possibility that a republican philosophy was a factor in shaping both the Jewish political thinking and the early Christian worlds before John ought long ago to have been a subject of critical reflection. Surprisingly, that possibility has barely figured in modern scholarship. It might help explain the surprising lack of interest in a royal messiah in Jewish texts. It might also have been one reason that Paul only rarely uses explicitly royal language in his Christology and, with the possible exception of 1 Tim 1:17 and 6:15, he never speaks of Christ as “king”.

Behind those two historical phenomena there are more fundamental questions that go back deeper into Israel’s political self-understanding. The Bible has its own critique of kingship. Parallel to the story of the last king of Rome’s son (Sextus Tarquinius) raping the noblewoman Lucretia (c. 510 B.C.)—that provoked the overthrow of the monarchy—Israel had a story of a king abusing his power to have the woman he wanted (Bathsheba). And Israel had both prophetic (1 Sam 8) and legal (Deut 17) warnings against the self-serving power of kings—texts that are the negative correlate of those in which God’s spokespeople insist that power and property should be distributed throughout the nation. Might it be appropriate to speak in these texts of an “Israelite republicanism”? Or, more concretely, might it be that some Jews and early Christians read such scriptures and recognised in their own tradition a kind of republicanism analogous to Rome’s?

Booth frames his analysis of John as reader-response thought experiment—how would a reader (gentile or Jewish) with Roman republican persuasions read John? I suggest that his basic historical insight upon which that question is based should open up other, broader, lines of historical inquiry. Indeed, I will explore these questions in volumes 3 and 4 of Jesus Monotheism where I aim to show that a biblical and Jewish “republicanism” helps explains aspects of the earliest beliefs about Jesus.

On Monday of this week I gave a lecture at a Biblical Studies conference at the University of Birmingham entitled “Intertextuality and the Son of Man Problem”. It was an invited (“Keynote”) paper and, as I was asked to speak to the general topic of Intertextuality, the research and writing has helped me clarify my understanding of the Son of Man problem.

Richard Hays, the godfather of New Testament studies on all things intertextual (see his seminal Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [1989] and his The Conversion of the Imagination [1999] ) has recently published an important book on the use of the Old Testament in the Gospels (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels [2015]). It is an important book, elegantly written and full of fresh insights into the literary character and theology of the Four Gospels. It will surely be a landmark publication in the history of scholarship for its bold claim that all four canonical Gospels present Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel (a view for which I will also argue in volumes 2, 3 and 4 of my Jesus Monotheism).

In my Birmingham paper I adopted a modified version of Hays’ approach to intertextuality to offer some new observations on aspects of the Son of Man problem. I adopt Hays approach to the use of the Israel’s scriptures in the NT to explore the ways Gospel writers would likely have in mind the whole of Daniel 7 when they use the language of Dan 7:13. However, Hays’ approach to Dan and the Gospel’s evocation of Dan 7 needs to be modified in one important respect.

Several commentators have criticised Hays for a lack of attention to the ways in which Israel’s scriptures were being interpreted in the first century Jewish world; in the immediate historical context, that is, of early Christian texts. A particularly incisive criticism of Hays on this point appears, remarkably, in the published doctoral dissertation of one of Hay’s students (Leroy Huizenga, The New Isaac: Tradition and Intertextuality in the Gospel of Matthew [2009]). As Huizenga points out, traditional Jewish interpretations of Old Testament texts often help to explain the distinctive ways in which those texts function in the Gospels. (The fact that Huizenga challenges so clearly his doctoral supervisor on this point is surely a testimony to the greatness of the character of Duke’s George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament).

Hays’ treatment of Daniel 7 in relation to the Gospels provides a valuable illustration of the importance of a modification to Hay’s methodology (along the lines laid out by Huizenga). Hays several times says that “in its original context/setting” the “one like son of man” of Dan 7:13 is symbolic representation of the nation of Israel (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, pp. 34, 143, 332). This is a well-established interpretation, of course, but no everyone agrees.

In my Birmingham paper I set out the evidence for a well-established and broadly consistent tradition of interpretation of Daniel 7 in Second Temple Judaism, that shows that nobody interpreted Dan 7:13 the way Hays and others think its author originally intended it. Some of the evidence for this tradition of interpretation is well-known (4 Ezra 13 and 1 Enoch 37–71), but one vital witness to it has been all but ignored (the paraphrastic translation of Dan 7 in the Old Greek [OG] dating from c. 100 B.C.E.), and in the last fifteen years a new consensus has concluded that 1 Enoch 37–71 is pre-Christian, not, as some have supposed, from the late first century C.E. So we in fact have evidence for continuous tradition of interpretation of Dan 7 (and, esp. of v. 13) in the Jewish world contemporaneous with the New Testament. These three texts agree that the “one like a son of man” is an individual figure, not a symbol for Israel, and that he has a strongly “divine” character.  They also show that Daniel 7:13 was typically interpreted with a sensitivity to its immediate literary context in a way that suggests that when Jewish readers of the Gospels heard the expression “the Son of Man” they would recall the rest of Dan 7.

There are interesting differences between the three texts, but there is also considerable agreement among them. Furthermore there are Gospel texts that confirm the impression given by these three non-Christian texts: Daniel’s “one like a son of man” is a divine, messianic figure and several passages show the Gospel writers used the expression “Son of Man” with an intertextual consciousness. Among them, John 5:19–30 has a virtual citation of Dan 7:13–14 (at v. 27) and multiple echoes of other parts of Dan 7 and 12 (as J. Frey, B. Reynolds and S. Mihalios have shown). Son of Man passages in Matthew, John and the Book of Revelation all show that the OG was a particularly important version of Daniel for some members of the nascent Christian movement.

In the last forty years it has often been said—against the older views of C20th New Testament scholars—that there was no apocalyptic Son of Man concept. Gospel Son of Man sayings, it has been asserted, do not show that Jesus was identified with a figure of popular Jewish eschatological expectation (“the Son of Man”). I demur. It may well be that expression “the Son of Man” was not used as a title in the first century Jewish world, but the evidence of OG Daniel 7, the new dating of 1 Enoch 37–71, and the considerable conceptual continuities between the OG, 1 Enoch 37–71 and 4 Ezra 13 all show that there was a lively interest in the meaning of Dan 7 in Jesus’ Jewish world. Furthermore Jewish interpreters in the first century CE were consistent in thinking the Dan 7:13 figure was a divine individual or messiah. That interpretation surely guided and inspired the way the expression “Son of Man” is used in the Gospels. Consistency of interpretation—of Daniel’s reception history—may also point to a definite “Son of Man concept” in the first century C.E.