Texts (Philippians and John, and the Synoptics) that Call for a new Paradigm.
Volume 2, Part 1 will: 1. summarise and consider the implications for Christological origins of the interpretation of the Christ Hymn in Philippians presented in The Divine Heartset (2023);2. review recent advances in scholarship (since the publication of Jesus Monotheism Volume 1); 3. survey the texts in the Synoptic gospels which express a divine and incarnational Christology, 4. set out the historical and theological questions which have yet to be satisfactorily answered by all those working in the field.
Volume 2, Part 2 will present substantially new data that points towards a whole new paradigm to account for the origins of a belief in Jesus’ divine identity (as the incarnate LORD and Son of the Father), as it is expressed, for example, in Philippians 2. This will include new interpretative proposals in a series of discrete textual case studies: the christologically focused material in Mark 8:27–9:13 (Caesarea Philippi and the Transfiguration); Luke 10:17–42; 17:20–37 and John 5. One chapter will summarise the arguments (set out in detail in a separate volume, see below) for thinking that the author of the Philippians Christ Hymn and Paul himself in his writing of that letter are indebted to the Gospel of John, which should therefore be dated to the early 50s A.D.
Part 2 will include gospel evidence that Jesus put forward a new interpretation of the first verses of the Shema (Deut 6:4–5) in which he identified himself with the Yhwh-Kyrios of Deut 6:4. So, it was Jesus’ own, “christological,” interpretation of the Shema that warranted the creation of the rewritten Deut 6:4 in 1 Cor 8:6. There will also be an exploration of gospel evidence that Jesus interacted creatively with Greco-Roman categories and patterns of belief in a way insufficiently recognised by the scholarship that has produced an emerging consensus that there was a very early high Christology (reviewed in Jesus Monotheism, Volume 1).
The review of existing scholarship (in Part 1) and the new data (in Part 2) lay the ground for the presentation of the new paradigm in the third and fourth volumes of the Jesus Monotheism series. It does that in two ways. The data and arguments of Parts 1 and 2 point to Jesus’ self-understanding and his claims as the decisive factor in origins of a divine Christology. Equally, some of the arguments and findings of Volume 2, Parts 1 and 2 pose new questions and problems which have hitherto not featured in the quest to understand the origins of a divine Christology.