Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. By Larry W. Hurtado. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003. xxii + 746 pp. $55.00 cloth (original) (raw)

Church History, 2005

Abstract

When I was a student at Basel, Oscar Cullmann once told me that New Testament studies were incomplete without a corresponding appreciation of early church history. If Professor Cullmann's remark is correct, much New Testament study seems very incomplete indeed! One could not, however, make that claim of Larry Hurtado. In this history of devotion (by which Hurtado means "the beliefs and related religious actions that constituted the expressions of religious reverence of early Christians" [3]) to Jesus in earliest Christianity (ca. 30-170 C.E.), the breadth of the material discussed is truly monumental and impressive, ranging from the earliest Christian sources (Paul) to Justin Martyr, from the canonical Gospels to Secret Mark, the Infancy Gospels, and the Nag Hammadi texts. However, Cullmann's remark also signified a belief that the relation between the New Testament texts and the later (central/orthodox) tradition of the early church was primarily one of continuity, not one of discontinuity. Perhaps the most important historical contribution of this massive work by Hurtado is that the claim for continuity has here received a substantive and very broad-based justification. Hurtado concludes: "I contend that... earliest Christianity (ca. 30-170 C.E.) provided the major convictions, and the parameters of belief and devotional practice as well, that shaped the subsequent developments in Christian tradition, which in turn came to be dominant and which form our picture of classical Christian faith" (649). Of course, such a view has many and significant detractors, which provide the scholarly context for the importance of this book. Still influential, although with multiple modifications of it in later studies, is the comprehensive work of Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (German: 1913, 1921; Nashville: Abingdon, 1970). A major figure of the History of Religions School, Bousset claimed a fundamental discontinuity between an earliest "primitive community" of Palestinian Jewish Christians and a later (although still first-century) Hellenistic Gentile Christianity in which Jesus was worshipped as a divine Lord by way of syncretistic influences from the surrounding pagan environment. Paul was converted into this Gentile Christianity, and the later, yet still early, Christian figures such as Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus more fully developed this Gentile pattern of Christian faith as it developed into the classic, patristic faith of dogma and institution. While fully respectful of Bousset's work and the prodigious scholarship it both reflected and spawned, Hurtado intentionally seeks to replace Bousset's book as the standard account of the history of early Christian belief and devotional practice. After a brief, but fair, summary of Bousset's argument, Hurtado makes the judgment that Bousset made serious errors in his portrayal of the first Jewish Christian community and in his description of the devotion of Paul and of his churches: "These alone are major reasons to set aside Kyrios Christos as an account of the development of Christ-devotion" (5-26, quotation 23).

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