The Monotheistic Context

To grasp the magnitude of the claim that Jesus is God, one must first hear it as a first-century Jew would have heard it. Israel's defining confession was the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). To this one God alone belonged worship, sacrifice, and the unspeakable Name YHWH; to give them to any other was the gravest of sins, punishable by death (Exodus 20:3—5; Deuteronomy 6:13). This was not a vague theism but a jealous, boundaried monotheism for which Jews had died under Antiochus and would die again under Rome. It is into this world — not the casual polytheism of Greece, where one more god was no scandal — that the first Christians, themselves observant Jews, began to worship a crucified Galilean as Lord and God.

Mediators of the One God#

Second Temple Judaism did possess a rich vocabulary for God's self-expression and agency — figures who stood close to God without being separate gods. The personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 is “with” God at creation; the Word by which the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6) is so exalted in Philo of Alexandria that he can call it a “second God” and God's instrument in creating the world; the Aramaic Targums repeatedly put the Memra (“Word”) of the LORD where the Hebrew has God Himself acting; and apocalyptic literature exalts a “Son of Man” who is brought before the Ancient of Days and given everlasting, universal dominion (Daniel 7:13—14). These categories gave the first Christians a ready vocabulary — but, as the next paragraph shows, the use they made of it shattered the mold.

Background Alan F. Segal's landmark study Two Powers in Heaven (1977) traced a Jewish “two powers” tradition with roots around 200 BCE, in which a second figure bears the divine Name and glory — for example the Angel of the LORD of whom God says “My name is in him” (Exodus 23:21). Philo's Logos as a “second God” (deuteros theos) and the Targumic Memra show that first-century Judaism already had room for a divine mediator who was neither a creature nor a rival deity. The rabbis only branded the “two powers” idea heretical in the second century — precisely as Christians were applying it to Jesus.

The Line the Son of Man Crossed#

Yet there was one line these exalted figures never crossed: not one of them was worshipped. Wisdom, the Logos, the Memra, the highest angels — however near to God — never received the cultic devotion reserved for YHWH alone; in the visions, the greatest angels expressly refuse it. This is the force of Richard Bauckham's analysis: Second Temple Jews defined their one God not chiefly by an abstract substance but by a unique identity — the only Creator of all things, the only sovereign Ruler over all things, the sole bearer of the Name YHWH, and the only rightful recipient of worship. To include Jesus within that identity — to confess Him as Creator, Lord of all, bearer of the Name, and recipient of worship — was therefore not to add a second god to a pantheon. It was to identify Jesus with the one God of Israel. That is exactly what the New Testament does, deliberately, and from the earliest layer of evidence we can reach.