Did Jesus BECOME the Son of God? The Christology of Acts

[00:00:01] Did Jesus become the Son of God? The Christology of Acts Written by Bart Ehrman in broad terms, there were two major kinds of Christology in the early church. One of them could be called an Incarnation Christology, since it maintains that Christ was a pre existent divine being who became a human, as explicitly stated in John 1:1, 18 or in Philippians 2, 6, 11. [00:00:28] That's the view, of course, that most Christians have always held and is often referred to as a high Christology, where Christ starts out up above with God as divine himself. [00:00:40] The other could be called an exaltation Christology, sometimes called a low Christology or a Christology from below, where Jesus started out as a human nothing more, but came to be exalted by God to become His Son, the Lord at some point in his existence. As I tried to show in my book How Jesus became God. This was the oldest view among the Christians and can be found in fragments of creeds and confessions that were later quoted by authors of the New Testament, so that in terms of raw chronology, they were formulated well before the New Testament was written. [00:01:15] Romans 1, 3, 4 is just one such case where Paul quotes a confession that indicates that whereas Jesus was the human messiah from David's seed, he became the Son of God in power at the resurrection. This is not exactly Paul's own view, but it's close enough that he can quote the confession. He probably quotes it at the very beginning of Romans because he's writing the letter to demonstrate to the Christians in the Roman Church that he is completely orthodox, contrary to what they may have heard, and that he agrees with the very premises of the faith they hold, as seen in this older creedal statement. [00:01:52] The idea that at the resurrection God exalted Jesus to a new divine status can be found in other pre literary fragments quoted by New Testament authors. And here pre literary simply means they were in circulation prior to the literary texts in which they were quoted. This is especially in the case of the Book of Acts. [00:02:13] Scholars have long realized that the speeches in Acts are not the speeches that the apostles themselves would have delivered. [00:02:19] Whatever Peter may actually have said on the day of Pentecost, as in Acts chapter two, no one was taking notes so that Luke would have been able to reconstruct it accurately 50 years later when he wrote his account. [00:02:32] Where did the speech come from then? Luke made it up. [00:02:36] This is not a radical view. It's the standard view among critical scholars of the New Testament. And it's not only a highly sensible view, it's it's the view that handed down to us by ancient sources as well. [00:02:49] The famous Greek historian Thucydides flat out tells us the historians had to make up the speeches of their main characters. [00:02:57] They, of course, did so as best they could, trying to figure out what a person like so and so would likely have said on such and such an occasion. But really it was just guesswork, even if it was intelligent guesswork. [00:03:10] Luke was a kind of Christian historian, and it shouldn't be expected that he would operate any differently from other historians in the ancient world who did not have databases and retrieval systems, or for the most part, even research libraries to help them out. [00:03:25] And the libraries that did exist were of almost no use for this sort of thing anyway, because there were no Christian libraries yet. And so they composed the speeches of their main characters themselves. [00:03:37] So that explains how a very important feature of the speeches of the Book of Acts. About one quarter of the book are speeches, which is about average for an ancient history like this. [00:03:48] And what is striking is that if you didn't know who was giving the speech, you'd have almost no way to tell from what is being said. That is to say, the lower class, uneducated peasant fisherman Aramaic speaking Peter in his speech in chapter two sounds almost exactly like the highly educated, rhetorically effective intellectual Greek speaking Paul in his speech in chapter 13. [00:04:14] Why does Peter's speech sound like Paul's speech? Because neither Peter nor Paul wrote their speeches. Luke wrote them both. [00:04:22] But as scholars have also long recognised, there are elements in these speeches that show that Luke did not make up the speeches out of whole clothes, but he incorporated earlier materials into them. [00:04:34] And this is especially the case in the speech of Peter in chapter two and that of Paul in chapter 13, where a Christological view is set forth that in fact stands at odds with what Luke himself actually thinks. [00:04:47] In both speeches we find an exaltation Christology comparable to what is offered In Romans, chapter 1, verses 3 to 4, where at the resurrection God made the man Jesus into a glorified being. [00:05:01] Thus, in chapter two, verses 22 to 36, Peter speaks of Jesus as a man who did wondrous things, but was crucified, but whom God raised. And the resurrection is the key to understanding who Jesus is. Now, after detailing the resurrection, Peter says, let all the house of Israel therefore know with assurance that God has made him both Lord and Christ. This Jesus whom you crucified. There it is. It was at the resurrection that God made Jesus the Lord and made him the Messiah. This is an exaltation Christology. [00:05:36] So too, Paul's speech in chapter 13, verses 16 to 41, which again focuses on Jesus, death and resurrection, in the climax of which he says, and we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, meaning the Jewish ancestors, he has fulfilled to us their children, by raising Jesus as also it is written in the second Psalm, you are my son, today I have begotten you. Here it is again. Look at it closely. God has fulfilled his promises by raising Jesus from the dead, and when he did so, he fulfilled the words of Psalm 2, today I have made you my son. [00:06:14] It's at the resurrection today, today that Jesus becomes the Son of God again. This kind of exaltation Christology embedded in these fragments quoted in the speeches do not coincide completely with Luke's own theology, since he thinks Jesus was the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God during his life. As is clear from other passages, the fact that he quotes them shows that they are older than his writing. They represent some of the earliest Christological views that we have access to. In these views, Jesus was exalted by God at the resurrection, and at that point he became God's glorified son, the Lord, the Messiah.