Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God

295 Pages·2014·3.156 MB·English

by  M. David Litwa

The career of a Mediterranean deity— L
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What does it mean for Jesus to be “deified” in early Christian literature? Early Christians
did not simply assert Jesus’ divinity; in their literature, they depicted Jesus with the specific
and widely recognized traits of Mediterranean deities. Relying on the methods of the history

of religions and ranging judiciously across Hellenistic literature, M. David Litwa shows that
at each stage in their depiction of Jesus’ life and ministry, early Christian writings relied on
categories drawn not from Judaism alone, but on a wide, pan-Mediterranean understanding

of deity.
PRAISE FOR IESUS DEUS

“In Iesus Deus, M. David Litwa surveys six of the more significant ways in which early Christians
from the first through the third centuries ce drew on a common reservoir of ancient Mediter-
ranean conceptions of deity as models for expressing the ultimate significance of Jesus, namely I
his divine origin and deity. This is an extraordinarily well-written, nuanced, convincingly argued, E
and methodologically sophisticated comparative study which breaks new ground in understanding
S
a centrally important aspect of the formation of early Christology. The author makes use of an
impressive array of primary and secondary sources over which he has enviable control. This book U
gets four stars and should be required reading for all serious students of early Christian thought.”
S
DAVID E. AUNE

University of Notre Dame
D
“M. David Litwa’s Iesus Deus marks a major breakthrough in scholarship on early Christianity. The
E
book manages to overcome the scholarly apologetic segregation of early Christian beliefs about
Jesus Christ from Greek- and Roman-dominated Mediterranean culture and to demonstrate the fit U
of these beliefs in that Hellenistic context. A great deal of writing about the ‘purely Jewish’ Christ
crumbles with this book.” S
STANLEY K. STOWERS
Brown University
“This book is of interest to a wide readership. It will help historical critics understand what ‘divinity’
meant in the ancient world. It will also help theologians understand the origins of Christology.
I recommend it to students, scholars, and any reader curious about Jesus.”
M. David Litwa
ADELA YARBO COLLINS
Yale Divinity School
M. David Litwa currently teaches Greek at the University
of Virginia. He is the author of We Are Being Transformed: IESUS DEUS
Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (2012) and Becoming
Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture
(2013).
The Early Christian Depiction of
RELIGION / NEW TESTAMENT
Jesus as a Mediterranean God
IESUS DEUS

IESUS DEUS
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN
DEPICTION OF JESUS AS A
MEDITERRANEAN GOD
M. DAVID LITWA
Fortress Press
Minneapolis
IESUS DEUS
The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God
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Cover design: Tory Herman
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Print ISBN:978-1-4514-7303-2
eBook ISBN:978-1-4514-7985-0
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To My Wife
Whom I Love

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
The “Deification” of Jesus Christ
1. “Not through Semen, Surely” 37
Luke and Plutarch on Divine Birth
2. “From Where Was this Child Born?” 69
Divine Children and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas
3. Deus est iuvare 87
Miracle, Morals, and Euergetism in Origen'sContra Celsum
4. “Light Was That Godhead” 111
Transfiguration as Epiphany
5. “We Worship One who Rose from His Tomb” 141
Resurrection and Deification
6. The Name Above Every Name 181
Jesus and Greco-Roman Theonymy
Conclusion 215
Bibliography 225
Index 279
vii

Preface
The modern quest for the historical Jesus (in all its phases) is the quest for the
human Christ. We are enchanted by the human Jesus in an effort, it seems,
to understand our own humanness. Yet our quest demands that in many ways
we read the ancient Christian sources—in which the divinity of Jesus was of
supreme importance—against the grain.
If a divine Jesus is now “other” to “we historians,” we must still learn
to look full in the face of this other. We must learn to ask why in the very
places we espy a human Jesus, early Christians witnessed the light of divinity.
Admittedly, understanding the logic of Jesus’ deification is no less a (post-
Enlightenment) project of history—written for our purposes and governed
by our interests. Nevertheless such a project seeks to understand the human
throughadifferentlens;alensthatdoesnotmakehumannessdissolveasadrop
ofwineinanoceanofdeity,butonethatilluminesmorefully—evenifthrough
a mirror, darkly—the mystery of its nature, its needs, and its potential.
Thisbookexploreshow—andbyextensionwhy—somehumansinhistory
imagined and depicted a fellow human being as divine. The “why” is perhaps
morefullyaddressedinacompanionstudy(WeareBeingTransformed:Deification
in Paul’s Soteriology). Both books explore the same basic issue: how early
Christians came to assimilate and adapt larger Mediterranean discourses of
deification to suit their own revelatory experiences and theological traditions.
In We are Being Transformed, I showed how early Christians (specifically, Paul)
used aspects of the discourse of deification to formulate a vision of their own
eschatological destiny. In this book, I seek to describe how early Christians
employed the discourse of deification to describe the divine identity of he
whowouldbecomebothἄρχηγοςandarchetypeofChristiandeification:Jesus
of Nazareth. For both Christians and Christ, the logic of deification is akin.
Indeed, the discourse of deification in particular shows how christology can
sometimes appear as soteriology writ large.
Deification is the product of the human imagination as it works itself out
inspeechand,inthiscase,therhetoricallywroughtlanguageofearlyChristian
literature. By using the language of “deification,” I cast no aspersion on the
(eternal) reality of Jesus’ divinity confessed by faith. Indeed, this book can be
read as illustrating something of the logic of that faith in its ancient context:
Fides exhibens intellectum.
ix