Overview
Brant Pitre is a Roman Catholic scholar who is the Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology in the United States. He is the author of numerous books, including Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and Paul, a New Covenant Jew: Rethinking Pauline Theology.
The purpose of his major new book Jesus and Divine Christology is to argue that when the Gospels are read in the light of first-century Jewish thought they make clear that Jesus himself claimed to be God during his earthly ministry, and that it was in fact precisely this claim that was the cause of his crucifixion.
Martin's opinion
Jesus and Divine Christology is the most important book I have read in the past year. The issue of who Jesus was (and is) is of critical importance to Christianity. For the whole of Christian history the central belief of orthodox Christianity has been that God exists not only as God the Father, but also as God the Son and that at the behest of God the Father and by the operation of God the Holy Spirit God took human nature upon himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a single person who was and is both human and divine.
Furthermore, if we ask why orthodox Christians have believed that Jesus of Nazareth was and is divine as well as human, study of the history of Christian theology shows that it is because they have believed that this is what Jesus taught about himself in word and deed. As Pitre notes, however, since the beginning of the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ in the eighteenth century, many of those involved in this quest have argued that this is not what Jesus believed about himself, or taught about himself, and this is currently the majority position among contemporary scholars of the historical Jesus. If these scholars are right, then orthodox Christianity is wrong. The issue is as simple and fundamental as that.
It makes no sense to continue to hold that Jesus was and is God incarnate if that is not what Jesus himself believed and taught. The importance of Pitre’s book is that it presents a compelling argument that orthodox Christianity is not wrong because the evidence we have from the Gospels tells us that the historical Jesus did believe and teach that he was God. As Pitre points out, the various explanations that scholars have come up with to explain why the early Christians started believing that Jesus was God ‘all fail to reckon with the possibility that the earliest ‘high Christology’ has its roots in the divine messianism of the historical Jesus.’
Pitre concedes that he is not the first person to ‘propose such a hypothesis.’ However, what is new about his work is that he is the first scholar ‘to mount a comprehensive study of the evidence in all four first-century gospels and to use a triple context approach to evaluate the potential historicity of the relevant data.’ To put it another way, Pitre does the historical ‘heavy lifting’ necessary to establish the case that Jesus claimed to be the divine messiah. In his book Mere Christianity, C S Lewis famously argued that the evidence from the Gospels presents us with the challenge of deciding whether Jesus was mad, bad, or God.
What Pitre’s book tells us is that a detailed historical critical study of the Gospels in their first-century Jewish context reveals that this challenge remains in place. In Pitre’s words ‘When the evidence for Jesus’s divine self-claims is interpreted in its first-century Jewish context and the arguments for and against the historicity of each episode are weighed on the scales’ a ‘compelling case’ can be made out for the hypothesis that that the origin of all later Christology lies in the simple fact that Jesus identified himself with the one God of Israel. That is what Jesus believed about himself, that is what he taught, and that is why he died. As Lewis observes, what everyone has to decide is whether he was right.
Pitre’s book is one that all students of theology and all ministers should buy, read, and keep on their bookshelves or their e-readers for future reference.
To read/download the full review please click here.
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Martin Davie is a Latimer Trust Research Fellow. He teaches at Wycliffe Hall and is the author of various books, some of them can be found here. He writes regularly on his blog Reflections of an Anglican Theologian.
Views expressed in blogs published by the Latimer Trust are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Latimer Trust.