Today Have I Begotten You
Incarnational Multiplicity in Ancient Israel, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity
Christians habitually speak of Jesus as God incarnate, but are often unaware of the origins of their belief in incarnation, much less its implications. The belief that Jesus is a divine being in human form is common to many of the New Testament documents: Paul (Phil 2:6-11), the Synoptics (per the implications of the Transfiguration), and John (Jn 1:1-14) all express some conviction that in the human being Jesus is expressed a divine power, personality, and holiness, albeit variously expressed. For this reason, too, such a belief must have been—and was—conceivable for the Early Jews that wrote these texts, meaning that they could envision, drawing on Jewish resources, the idea of either a divinity becoming human or a human being becoming divine. The resources in question for conceptualizing this possibility are not difficult to find if one reads biblical literature carefully, well, and with the help of strong interpreters. Various kinds of incarnation can be triangulated from ancient ideas of divine embodiment, the pantheon of divinities known to ancient Jews, and the various possibilities for human deification, all outlined in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish literature.
YHWH was an embodied god, even a multiply embodied god.1 He had humanoid, superhuman, cosmic, and even supracosmic forms; celestial and terrestrial apparitions; anthropomorphic and theriomorphic qualities; solar features and occasional conflation with the sun disc; he could be embodied in the people of Israel, the Land of Canaan, the cult shrines lodged in the mountain crags, the city of Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Temple and its cult. He was so embodied that he had a wife, Asherah, in the First Temple period, with whom he constituted the divine power couple, as heavenly king, husband, and father to Asherah’s queen, wife, and mother; he was depictable in iconography and statuary, and by a variety of symbolic pictorial representations. But even when YHWH had absorbed the other gods of the ancient Israelite pantheon2—El, Baal, Shemesh, Asherah—and cult to them was officially suppressed, they resurfaced in the form of hypostatic, embodied extensions of YHWH: his malakh, “messenger” or “avatar”; his ruach or “breath”; his kavod or “radiance,” “glory”; his dvar, or “word”; his Chokmah, or “wisdom” (a rebirth of Asherah in an age after her formal suppression, with many afterlives in Judaism and Christianity). And, finally, YHWH was especially embodied in the person of his human avatar(s). In the Exodus narrative, that person is Moses, whom God makes God to Pharaoh (Exod 7:1), and whose deification was memorably depicted by Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagoge. Following Moses, a variety of prophets seem to act as divine messengers, avatars, embodied extensions in their words and actions to others: the prophetic theology is one where the prophet is not merely spokesman but the word of YHWH made flesh. In the royal theology of the Hebrew Bible, that avatar is the Davidic monarch, whom he begot as his divine son and representative on earth (2 Sam 7:1-17; Ps 2:7-9), such that the anointed king could even be spoken of as a god (Ps 45:6), or as enthroned alongside YHWH God (110:1), or as even in some sense a preexistent divine being (110:4). Ancient Israelites and Judahites, far from being unique among the ancient Near East and Mediterranean peoples they lived near, also believed in sacral kingship, in the idea that the king was a human extension and embodiment of the divinity, and they performed prostration (proskynesis)—worship—to him in the original cult (1 Chron 29:20), for it was none less than the king himself who sat on God’s throne (29:23).3 At the New Year festival in the Fall—the preexilic precedent for what would become the separate feasts of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, at which YHWH was ritually enthroned as cosmic creator and king in Israel—it was the king who ritually served and embodied YHWH in the liturgy.4 After the Exile and the disappearance of the monarchy, Priestly theology presented the office of the kohen hagadol, the high priest of Levitical, Aaronid, Pinchean, and Zadokite descent, as the king’s replacement, in a restructured cult that mitigated divine kingship but still left open the liturgical deification of the high priest in the course of the Temple Liturgy on Yom Kippur, when he would be vested, sophianized, and deified through entry to the Holy of Holies and emergence therefrom (read Sir 24, then 50; then, consider the Mareh Kohen poem of the Rabbinic Yom Kippur liturgy).5
Nor was YHWH, with his many varied extensions of embodiment, alone. In ancient Israel and Judah he was part of a vast pantheon in which he was originally second-in-command before his conflation with El and other gods; but even afterward, he continued to head a divine council of gods, angels, and other divine beings. Seraphim, winged serpents like the wadjets of Egypt or, farther afield, the nagas of India orbited the divine throne directly; keruvim, griffin-like, chimaeric sphinxes, guarded it and pulled it (like a chariot) directly. The elim and bnei elohim, “sons of gods” or “sons of God,” thronged about him like the princes, dukes, lords, and other nobles of aristocratic societies, basking in the divine glory and enjoying the privilege of life at court; some of these might be embodied in, or rule over, the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, also conceived as gods by ancient Jews. A variety of planetary and sublunary spirits and daimons unfolded from there, and every god and godling and angel and numen and monster of the ancient world found its place or its analogue in Jewish cosmography as it was progressively constructed from the surrounding Near Eastern and Greco-Roman models of the universe. Legions of such spirits—Watchers, archangels, angels—stood close to the concerns of humans, capable even of copulation with them and the production of hybrids (negatively, as in the descent of the Watchers in Gen 6:1-4 and the Book of the Watchers, 1 En. 1-36; positively, perhaps, in the timely visitations of the malakh YHWH to Sarah in Gen 18 and to the mother of Samson in Jdg 13, or the conception of figures like Noah in Early Jewish literature, for example). Like the ascent from encosmic gods to hypercosmic ones on the Neoplatonic scale, the heavenly hierarchy increased in abstraction from there. And in some sense, this divine panoply was capable of description both as myriads of individual entities as well as the increasingly complexified theophany of an increasingly infinite God.
It was possible and desirable to take one’s place among that host, as famed figures like Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the Patriarchs, Moses, David, Elijah, and others did in ancient Jewish imagination and apocalyptic literature, and as figures like the speaker of the “Self-Glorification Hymn” (4Q471B) from Qumran did. It was also possible to find among their number divine humans or human divinities, like the Son of Man of Daniel 7:9-14 or Parables of Enoch (1 En. 37-71), or Melchizedek of 11Q13, who would act as eschatological warriors, judges, and kings when one was dissatisfied with the theocratic rule of the high priests, upstart kings, or foreign governors under Persian, Macedonian, Hasmonean, Herodian, or Roman rule. Or one could opt for the more humanistic, but still divinely super powered, Davidic messiah of, say, Psalms of Solomon 17:21-46, who would simply liberate Judea and Galilee from Roman rule and resurrect the dynasty in perpetuity. For the righteous, postmortem translation to angelic life, in the celestial or cosmic temple, was the reward for fidelity to God’s Torah and commandments, or perhaps eschatological resurrection, or (one imagines, though rarely are both represented together in this way) some combination of the two. And what is an immortal life of beatitude, glory, and as-yet unexperienced power if not that of a god?
It is in this context that the New Testament claims about Jesus as divine incarnation should be assessed. This is not a novel observation, but it is one frequently ignored in the day-to-day homiletics, apologetics, and polemics which constitute the ordinary discursive experience of religion for most normal people. Paul’s Jesus, the clear deuteros theos to the One God, the Jewish God (1 Cor 8:6), preexisting “in the form of a god” (en morphe theou, without the definite article; Phil 2:6), and present to the Israelites in the Exodus (1 Cor 10:1-4), undergoes a temporary demotion (kenosis) that leads to his hyper-exaltation (hyperhypsosis) to the reception of the Divine Name, YHWH, itself (Phil 2:7-11), and therefore standing at the pinnacle of power in the universe. The Synoptic Jesus is revealed as a divine being at the pivotal moment in the narrative of all three Gospels, the Transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36)—answering Petrine doubt about Jesus’ forthcoming suffering with a revelation of superhuman power to stress, as the Byzantine kontakion for the feast says, to the volition behind the Passion—but the logic behind his antecedent, revealed divinity differs between Mark on the one hand and Matthew and Luke on the other. In Mark, the implication of the Gospel narrative seems to be that Jesus is invested with divinity at his baptism (Mk 1:9-11); that this might also be simultaneously a revelation of Jesus’ divine identity as Son of God could be understood as problematizing the notion that for Mark this is the point at which Jesus becomes divine, but the whole question may also simply violate the logic of deification itself, which, for ancient people, often presumed that one’s ultimate divine identity was somehow already antecedent even if not always obviously manifest and even sequentially realized.6 In the infancy narratives of Matthew (Matt 1:21-2:12) and Luke (Lk 1:1-2:52), Jesus’ divine identity is the product of his pneumatic conception and virginal birth from the descent of God’s spirit (not yet a hypostatic Holy Spirit of later Trinitarian theology) on Mary, who is in Luke anyway narratively compared to the Ark of the Covenant (the use of the verb episkeuazein for the spirit’s descent; her travel into the Judean hills; John’s dancing in the womb at the sound of her voice; etc.). The Synoptic Jesus also displays his divinity through his capacity, as a kind of portable source of divine holiness (kedushah), to ritually purify by miraculous healings, as Matthew Thiessen recently argued: Jesus is like a portable Temple, bringing God’s presence to those otherwise cut off from it and restoring them to a state fit for intimacy with God in God’s precincts.7 It is only in John’s Gospel that the straightforward statement that Jesus is the Logos of God made flesh (Jn 1:14; see 1:1-18) is offered, but interestingly, John has no infancy narrative, and instead focuses on the revelation of the divine Logos in and through Jesus’ “glory,” deeply associated with his Passion in John (e.g., Jn 12:23). John’s Apocalypse consistently portrays Jesus in the imagery of various figures from Early Jewish literature whose liminality between God, gods, and angels is only further complicated by the special status Christ possesses for the author.8 All of these authors further describe Jesus as a Davidic messiah; each of them, with the exception of Paul, makes some explicit connection between Jesus and the figure of the Son of Man (though Paul’s description of the parousia in 1 Thess 4:16-18 may owe something to Dan 7:9-14); and some of them accrue titles, activities, and prerogatives to Jesus that properly belong to God or one of his hypostases (Lord; Logos; etc.).
What bothered ancient Jews about the Jesus Movement’s claims about Jesus was not so much the character of the claims themselves, given this background, still less any anxiety about a compromised monotheism (whether because there were so many divine intermediaries and extensions or because, in such a universe full of divinity, God’s unity was never thereby effaced), but simply the claims that these things were true of Jesus, specifically understood as a messiah. Indeed, had the Jesus Movement simply claimed for Jesus a specialized divine status that was non-messianic, it is entirely possible that his veneration as a sage or deified prophet alongside other such figures of Jewish Tradition may have been preserved (not least because the very possibility of human deification or divine humanization would not have become such a point of contention between Christians and Jews).
That many of these kinds of features of Ancient Israelite, Judahite, and Early Jewish religion fell afoul of the approval of some of the sources and redactors of the Hebrew Bible, the early rabbis in Babylon, and some Church Fathers means very little. And in both Judaism and Christianity, there are long and rich afterlives of this diversity of human-inclusive divine embodiment, even as official metaphysics came to posit that God qua God had no body. Indeed, the infinite, nondual vision of God simply pluralized the significance and possibilities of incarnation. Incarnation is present in the Two Powers controversy and the Hekhalot literature that, while officially rejected by the rabbis of the Bavli, went on to influence the formation of the Shi’ur Qomah and kabbalistic traditions, with their meditations on the Divine Body (partially in objection to Maimonides); and the divine human being endures in Jewish consciousness in more traditional forms as, for example, the tzaddik gamur of Hasidism or the nondual God advocated in many progressive circles touched by Jewish Renewal. In Christianity, the hypostasis of Jesus Christ becomes the principle locus of divine humanization and human deification, but for that reason, the mystery of Christ’s embodiment is increasingly phrased in Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Ps.-Dionysios the Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor, and John Scotus Eriugena as a cosmic mystery of God’s becoming the world even as the world becomes God in creation and deification.9 And surely, the cultic deification of baptism, the imposition of hands in chrismation or confirmation, and the eucharist—the mysteriological foundation of the communio sanctorum that justified cultus also to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints, and the angels—surely means that the language of Christians as Christ’s “body” must be more than purely metaphorical (1 Cor 12:27), as is the language of the body as “temple of the Holy Spirit” (6:19). In Islam, the rejection of any one particular divine incarnation is paradoxically the basis, in Sufi tradition, for the confession of the world and the self as nothing other than God as the ultimate truth of tawḥīd, in, for example, the episode of al-Hallaj and the philosophical tradition of waḥdat al-wujūd.10
There’s much to do with these observations, but I will content myself with this for now: the incarnational identity of Jesus for Christians, on the very ground of the resources the earliest Christians drew on to construct it, has to be in some sense inclusive and open to the mystery of incarnation beyond the physical person of Jesus. That might well provide a Christological basis for interfaith dialogue and comparative theology that is often a track not taken in Christian thinking on other religions: that Jesus, as incarnate, is the very principle for the mystery of incarnation anywhere else we might encounter it.
See Benjamin Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mark S. Smith, Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Christoph Markschies, God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019); Andreas Wagner, God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God of the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark, 2019); Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York: Knopf, 2022).
See Smith, The Early History of God: YHWH and the Other Deities of Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); more recently, Theodore J. Lewis, The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
See Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 1-24.
See, e.g., Marc Zvi Brettler, "God's Coronation on Rosh Hashanah" TheTorah.com (2014).
See Dalia Marx, "Mareh Kohen: Ben Sira’s Description of Simon the High Priest" TheTorah.com (2021).
See M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 181-214, for a conversation on how theonymy often reveals not just the new name of the god but also, in some sense, the name the god has always had. See also David Bentley Hart, who has recently argued the philosophical implications of this at length in You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (South Bend: UND Press, 2022).
See Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity in First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2022).
Really can’t plug this book enough: see Jordan Daniel Wood’s The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Deification in Maximus Confessor (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022).
See, e.g., Litwa, Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 134-143.
It would be great if you could do an interview with Margaret Barker. Your topic here reminds me of her writings, especially her book The Great Angel. I don't think you can have proper grasp of the Gospel without understanding the history of human divinization in the temple traditions.
Fascinating stuff. I’m reminded of something Balthasar says in his book on Maximus. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it’s something along the lines that for Maximus, as people are added to the body of Christ, the incarnation continues and Christ is progressively “built into reality.”