Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Was Jesus the Incarnation of an angel? Anniversary post number 13 by Bart Ehrman Most people had real trouble with the view I set out in this post from April of 2025. Most reading it now probably will still, but I stick by it. So here is anniversary post number 13 for many years I was puzzled by Paul's Christology, his views of Christ.
[00:00:27] All the various things he said about it didn't seem to add up to a coherent hold to me, even though I thought and thought and I thought about it. But finally I found the piece that, when added to the puzzle, made it all fit together.
[00:00:39] I think now I can make sense of pretty much every Christological statement in Paul's letters.
[00:00:45] That's not because I myself finally figured it out, but because I finally read some discussions that actually made sense and saw that they're almost certainly right. Here's what I say about it in the book Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something numerous times over and over and not having it register.
[00:01:07] I have read Paul's letter to the Galatians literally hundreds of times, both in English and in Greek, but the clear import of what he says in Galatians 4:14 simply never registered with me until, frankly, a few months ago.
[00:01:22] In this verse, Paul calls Christ an angel. The reason it never registered with me is because the statement is a bit obscure and because I had always interpreted it in an alternative way.
[00:01:33] Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways in the context of the verse. Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst, and they helped restore him to health.
[00:01:47] Paul writes, even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God as Jesus Christ.
[00:02:00] I'd always read the verse to say that Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state, the way that they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ himself.
[00:02:11] In fact, however, the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different, as Charles Gaishen has argued and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel in the New Testament by New Testament scholar Susan Garrett. The verse is not saying that the Galatians receive Paul as an angel or as Christ.
[00:02:32] It's saying that they received him as they would an angel such as Christ. By clear implication, then, Christian is an angel.
[00:02:42] The reason for reading the verse this way has to do with the Greek grammar when Paul uses the construction, but as as he's not contrasting two things, he's stating that the two things are the same thing. We know this because Paul uses this grammatical construction in a couple of other places in his writings, and the meaning in those cases is unambiguous.
[00:03:04] For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul says, Brothers, I was not able to speak to you as a spiritual people, but as fleshly people as infants in Christ.
[00:03:15] That last bit the but as as indicates two identifying features are the recipients of Paul's letters. They are fleshly people and they are infants in Christ.
[00:03:26] These are not two contrasting statements. They modify each other.
[00:03:30] The same can be said of Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 2:17, where which also has this grammatical feature.
[00:03:37] But this means that in Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ to an angel, he is equating him to an angel.
[00:03:47] Garrett goes a step further and argues that Galatians 4:14 indicates that Paul identifies Jesus Christ with God's chief angel.
[00:03:59] If this is the case, then virtually everything Paul ever says about Christ throughout his letters makes perfect sense.
[00:04:06] As the angel of the Lord, Christ is a pre existent being who is divine. He can be called God, and he is God's manifestation on earth in human flesh.
[00:04:18] In my book How Jesus Became God from this point on, I show how Paul's understanding that Christ was an exalted angel who became a human and was then exalted even higher to a level of equality with God makes sense of everything he says about Jesus. Based on that Key to all passages Christological In Paul Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 to 10 and in thinking about this, it helps to know that angel simply refers to a supernatural or divine being in the heavenly realm who performs God's will on earth. There are lower levels and higher levels of angel, and possibly one at the very highest level.
[00:04:53] Many early Christians believed that Jesus was a divine being but not fully equal with God. What kind of being would he be then? For many he was God's angel, the angel of The Lord described for example, in Exodus chapter 3.
