Connecting Jesus to Social Justice by Hughson Thomas;Hughson D Thomas;

Author:Hughson, Thomas;Hughson, D Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Gospel according to John

Everything depends on who Christ is. Inquiry has to begin by considering the whole, gradually developing New Testament answer to Jesus’s query to his closest followers, “Who do you say that I am?” Who is Jesus the Christ? On the New Testament and subsequent conciliar answers hinge the originality and inescapable, yet always scandalous, novelty of Christianity. After direct, explicit answers in familiar terms of a prophet and the Son of God located by the New Testament in Jesus’s public ministry, a subtly emergent answer completes Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus.

For some time, and still in some opinions today, the emergence of belief in Jesus’s divinity occurred in a series of stages. It sometimes happens that someone will assert that that faith-understanding of Jesus as divine was a late development in John that followed an earlier Synoptic picture of Jesus of Nazareth in full humanity. According to Hurtado, Wilhelm Bossuet’s history of religions analyzed the development starting from a stage interpreting Jesus in Palestinian Jewish concepts. A second stage in Antioch’s Hellenized Gentile Christianity was influenced by ideas about deified humans that circulated also through Paul’s writings. Finally, in a third stage, the Gospel according to John professed Christ as divine Word made flesh.[12] Hurtado’s critique of Bousset’s reconstruction of the origin of devotion to Jesus in association with the God of Israel has changed the landscape.

Hurtado ends the credibility of a scenario featuring a series of stages in belief and gives new grounds for a more traditional interpretation of Philippians in implied reference to John 1:14 on the Word becoming flesh. J. D. G. Dunn’s The Making of Christology had adopted a minimalist reading of Philippians. For Dunn, a Pauline new-Adam framework did not assert or imply Incarnation of a preexisting divine Word. Hurtado abstains from judgments on whether the content in early followers’ veneration of Jesus was true or not but establishes that (and when) a novel movement internal to Jewish monotheism took place. The best explanation lies in new revelatory religious experience of Jesus, particularly after the resurrection. The disciples of Jesus entered into new experience whose meaning was that Jesus is one with God in a way no other human being or creature is. On that very early belief, Christianity and salvation through Jesus stand or fall. The identity of Jesus as divine marks and forms Christianity.

At least one connection between John and the Synoptics can be noticed. The communities on whose varying traditions the evangelists drew all believed in and followed Jesus. There was significant unity in Christocentric faith among the many New Testament churches and their diverse strands of faith-understanding. The New Testament can be read as a whole without ignoring the evident kinds of literary and theological difference. John 1:1–14 fulfills the answer to a question Mark 8:29 posed, “who do you say that I am?” In Mark, Peter replies, “You are the Christ,” while in Luke 9:21 Peter says, “the Christ of God,” to which Matthew’s Gospel at 16:15 adds, “the Son of the living God.

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