Hurtado Books on Jesus-Devotion

After mentioning the reduced prices on Kindle editions of three of my books recently (here), some readers have asked for me to give some information on the basic focus of several of my books on the origins of Jesus-devotion.

My first book on this research-programme is not included in this holiday special, as it’s from another publisher:  One God, One Lord:  Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (original edition, Fortress Press and SCM, 1988; 2nd edition Edinburgh:  T&T Clark, 1998; 3rd edition London:  Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015).  In this book, I explore what conceptual resources there were in ancient Jewish tradition that earliest Jesus-followers may have had available for accommodating a second, distinguishable figure alongside the one God of biblical tradition.

I identify ancient Jewish traditions of what I call “divine agency”, distinguishing three types:  (1) personified divine attributes, such as Wisdom and Philo’s Logos; (2) “exalted patriarchs”–Enoch, Moses, and others; and (3) “principal angels” including Michael and others.  I contend that these all are variant forms of what we can call “chief agent” tradition, in which God is pictured as having a particular figure acting as God’s plenipotentiary or vizier.  I further propose that the early christological statements appear to portray Jesus as God’s unique agent, and so likely drew upon these traditions.

But the striking new feature of the Christian “mutation” of these traditions is that Jesus is accorded a level of reverence that we don’t find given to any of these other figures.  In the final chapter I lay out quite specifically the devotional actions that are reflected already in our earliest Christian texts.  These form a constellation or devotional pattern that seems novel.  I originally referred to this as a “binitarian” devotional pattern (God and Jesus both reverenced), but in more recent publications have preferred the term “dyadic” (because despite my rather clear explanations of how I was using “binitarian” some critics read into it metaphysical categories of much later centuries).

On the cover of the Fortress edition of this book, the late and great Martin Hengel famously referred to it as signalling the emergence of “a new religionsgeschichtliche Schule” (“history of religion school”).  The book certainly drew upon the work of other scholars, both of earlier decades and my contemporaries.  In the 2nd (1998) edition, I added a 5,000 word preface engaging scholarly developments between 1988 and that 2nd edition.  In the 3rd edition (2015), I also added a 20,000 word epilogue in which I discuss developments from roughly 1998 to the date of the 3rd edition.  I consider this book foundational for the ensuing body of my publications on early Jesus-devotion.  I am pleased that it received a positive reception from fellow scholars, and continues to be cited appreciatively.

I turn now to the books in the Eerdmans holiday special price sale.  At the Origins of Christian Worship:  The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Eerdmans 1999) originated as a short public lecture series in the British Isles Nazarene College (Manchester).  I discuss the wider “religious environment” of earliest Christian circles, especially worship practices, and then survey characteristics of early Christian worship, and the specific features that gave it a “binitarian shape.”  As the lectures were addressed to a mainly Christian audience, I also have a short concluding chapter on “reflections for Christian worship today.”

My research programme on early Jesus-devotion that began in the late 1970s with the longer-term aim of producing a study on the level of Wilhelm Bousset’s classic work, Kyrios Christos (1913), eventuated in my larger work, Lord Jesus Christ:  Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans 2003).  In One God, One Lord, I was, so to speak, looking “upstream” from earliest Christian practices to explore precedents and resources in the ancient Jewish tradition.  In Lord Jesus Christ, I explore “downstream”, so to speak, tracing the origins and development of expressions of Jesus-devotion from its beginnings down through the mid-second century CE.  This book received widespread notice (I know of over 50 reviews, nearly all of them positive) and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean.  Whatever its flaws, it is the only work of this breadth and depth of treatment of the evidence.

How on Earth did Jesus Become a God?  Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Eerdmans, 2005) developed from a lecture-series by this title given in Ben Gurion University (Beeersheva, Israel) in 2004, prompted by the publication of my book, Lord Jesus Christ.  The first four chapters are essentially the four lectures in that series.  I compare my own approach to that of some other scholars, emphasize the distinctive profile of Jesus-devotion in the context of ancient Jewish “monotheistic” piety, underscore the social and political consequences of early Jesus-devotion, and offer a detailed analysis of Philippians 2:6-11.

I was asked to add material to these lectures for the book, and the remaining four chapters are previously published essays relating to the book’s focus.  These include my essay on “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament,” which originated as the 1998 T.W. Manson Lecture.  My Ben Gurion lectures inaugurated the Deichmann Annual Lecture Series in Ben Gurion University, and were published also in Hebrew by Ben Gurion University Press.  It has also been translated into Hungarian and Chinese.  The book isn’t a digest of Lord Jesus Christ, but more a gathering of treatment of some related issues.

I should also mention my little book, God in New Testament Theology (Abingdon Press, 2010), thanks to the publishers failing to get the book out for reviews one of the best kept secrets in recent publishing history!  In this book I explore how “God” is portrayed in the NT, what consequences for “God” there are in the place of Jesus in early Christian circles.  I also try to place these developments in the context of the Roman-era world, with particular attention to the Jewish matrix in which the Jesus-movement erupted.  I recommend the book for a larger overview of how Jesus-devotion fitted into early Christian beliefs and worship of “God.”

In addition to these books, over the past several decades I have also produced a goodly number of essays in journals and multi-author volumes addressing various issues in the historical study of early Jesus-devotion.  Most recently, I was invited to gather up a bundle of these previously published essays for a book-collection:  Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion:  The Context and Character of Christological Faith (Baylor University Press, 2017).  This book comprises thirty-two essays that appeared over some forty years of research, addressing quite a wide range of questions about the “scholarly context” (interacting with some other key scholars), and the ancient Jewish context, offering some explanations for the eruption of Jesus-devotion, and treating a number of texts and other expressions of devotion to Jesus in the early Christian circles.

So, there you have a brief summary of the book-length products of some forty years of research work on what is surely one of the most interesting, and also one of the most influential, developments in the history of religions.