Part 39: The Apostles Proclaimed that Jesus is Lord

Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 55 AD, is loaded with indications that the early Christians worshipped Jesus as the divine Lord. For example, in I Corinthians 16:22, Paul preserves for us a one-word prayer in Aramaic, which was the native, Galilean tongue of Jesus, the apostles, and the very first Christians. That word is Maranatha (“Come, O Lord”). Here is evidence that the earliest, Palestinian followers of Jesus prayed to him as “Lord.”

Part 39: The Apostles Proclaimed that Jesus is Lord

By Robert Stackpole, STD

In this weekly web series, Dr. Robert Stackpole, emeritus director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy, leads us step-by-step through the life of the Founder of Christianity, from Bethlehem to Galilee to Jerusalem. Along the way, we pause to consider in-depth the historical debate over the gospel stories of the virginal conception and nativity of Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, his embrace of persecution and death on the Cross, and his glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, we plunge into the great mystery of the Incarnation, and show how it actually shines through the whole gospel story from beginning to end. Read the series from the beginning.

As we have seen earlier in this web series, fifty days after the Resurrection of Jesus, the apostle Peter proclaimed to the people of Jerusalem: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).

We know that “Christ” is simply the Greek word used throughout the New Testament for “Messiah.” But what did St. Peter mean by calling Jesus “Lord”? 

Lord and My Lord
Most likely, he was using the title in the same way that it was used in the psalm he had just quoted in Acts 2:35, that is, Psalm 110:1 : “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand ….” So, “The Lord” (God) had invited the Messiah (“my Lord”) to reign with him in heaven. Peter had already said in Acts 2:33 that after his resurrection and ascension, Jesus had been “exalted at the right hand of God.”

In short, in that passage the title “Lord” was explicitly used for Jesus simply as another way of saying “the reigning Messiah.” Still, why would St. Peter say in Acts 2:36 that “God has made him both Lord and Christ” if the two titles in this context essentially meant the same thing? On its own, therefore, Acts 2:36 is rather ambiguous.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, however, we find Jesus referred to not just as “Lord and Christ” but as “the Lord.” (e.g. Acts 8:16; 9:17, 16:31; I Cor 2:8; 11:23; II Cor 4:14; I Thess 4:1, 15-18; Jas 2:1). While the word “lord” in Greek (kyrios) could be used in a secular sense to refer to someone merely as “master” or “ruler,” to call someone “the Lord” was tantamount to ascribing to them the divine name.

In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the title “the Lord” (o Kyrios) was used in place of God’s exclusive name Yahweh, just as in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, Adonai (the Lord) had been used whenever Yahweh appeared in the text, because God’s special, chosen name, Yahweh, was not to be spoken by mere sinful mortals.

Indeed, the ancient Jewish historian Josephus tells us that many Pharisees were executed by the Romans for refusing to use the title “Lord” for the Roman governors of the Holy Land. After all, to call someone “the Lord,” or even just “Lord” in a supremely exalted sense, was to acknowledge them as one’s highest authority and first loyalty. But only God, the Creator of the world and Redeemer of Israel, deserves to be called “the Lord” in that way.

Divine title
The question then naturally arises: how early in the life of the Church did Christians begin calling Jesus not just “Lord” in the sense of “Master” or “Messiah,” but “Lord” or “the Lord” as a divine title?

Throughout much of the twentieth century, a clear majority of biblical scholars and New Testament historians held the view that ascribing to Jesus' divine lordship, that is, divine functions and titles, was a very gradual invention of the emerging Gentile majority in the Church, late in first century. It simply fit better with the expectations of Greco-Roman culture to have as the central figure of one’s religion a god who had become a human being, just as some of the Greek and Roman gods, such as Apollo and Zeus, had temporarily assumed human form, and some ancient (mythical) human beings had been exalted to divine status after their death, such as Asclepius, and Oedipus. Indeed, the “divine-man” was said to be a familiar figure in ancient Greco-Roman religion.

Moreover, there was an early Jewish-Christian group in Syria called the Ebionites who resisted the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Divinity of Jesus Christ because they felt that these doctrines were distortions of the original gospel. 

Even those scholars who disputed the idea that the divinity of Christ was imported into Christianity from Greco-Roman paganism still tended to admit that the doctrine was initially only implicit in the recorded words and deeds of Jesus, and it may have taken many decades, and perhaps even several generations, for the full truth about the divinity of Christ to unfold and become explicit in the consciousness of the Church.

The principal milestone of this development of doctrine was said to be the Gospel written by St. John, allegedly around 90 AD. Before that, these scholars claimed, there was no clear teaching about the divinity of Christ in the apostolic Church.

Scholarly consensus
Today, however, that 20th century scholarly consensus no longer seems secure. To begin with, historians of antiquity have discovered that the divine-man figure in Greco-Roman religious culture only arose in the 2nd and 3rd centuries: It was not in place in the first century AD, where it might have exerted influence on the early development of Christianity. Moreover, the pagan “divine-man” figure was always (at most) an earthly embodiment of one of the gods, not an incarnation of the infinite Creator of all.

Furthermore, contemporary research tends to show that the Ebionites were just an early Jewish-Christian group that refused to go along with the apostolic decision that Christians need not keep the Mosaic Law in its entirety. In other words, the Ebionites did not preserve the original teachings of the Christian mainstream; rather, they were a fringe group and a disgruntled minority taking their own path from the beginning, perhaps from the very time of the apostles onward.

Most importantly, some scholars, such as Larry Hurtado, have done more extensive research on the beliefs and practices of the early Christians, and found that the confession “Jesus is Lord,” expressed in a way that ascribes divinity to Christ, was present, and even at times explicit, from the earliest days of the Church.

Maranatha!
For one thing, Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 55 AD, is loaded with indications that the early Christians worshipped Jesus as the divine Lord. For example, in I Corinthians 16:22, Paul preserves for us a one-word prayer in Aramaic, which was the native, Galilean tongue of Jesus, the apostles, and the very first Christians. That word is Maranatha (“Come, O Lord”; a prayer also found in Aramaic in Rev 22:20). Here is evidence that the earliest, Palestinian followers of Jesus prayed to him as “Lord.”

We see another example of this in Acts 7:59, when St. Stephen prays to Jesus as his “Lord” just before his death: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Just calling Jesus “Lord, of course,” does not necessarily indicate that one thinks of him as fully divine, but to pray to someone while using that title surely implies it, and such a practice was likely seen as blasphemous by the ancient Jews.

In I Corinthians 2:8, St. Paul refers to the crucified Jesus as “the Lord of glory” (or, more literally, “the Lord, the glory”). For the Jews, God’s glory belongs to him alone (Is 42:8), so for someone to be equated with the glory of God, or called “The Lord of glory,” is to ascribe to him a divine prerogative (and the same title is given to Jesus in James 2:1).

In I Corinthians 8:5-6 the apostle picks apart the daily prayer of all Israelites, called the Shema in a way that includes Jesus on the divine side of the equation. The Shema begins “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt 6:4). But St. Paul divides this prayer into two parts:

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn comments on this passage:

What is so striking here is that Paul seems to be taking up the Shema, Israel’s creed …. As already noted, in its fuller form the Shema confesses “The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Dt 6:4). But Paul seems to have pulled apart the confession of one God as one Lord into a twofold confession of one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. [1]

In other words, St. Paul has put Jesus on the same, divine level as the God and Father of all — and he has done this in the context of the most thoroughly Jewish prayer of all, not a Gentile one!

Designation
In his Epistle to the Romans (written ca. 58 AD), St. Paul again indicates that the early Christians confessed that Jesus is their divine Lord. For example, in Romans 1:3-4, he writes that Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh, and was designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord ….” “Designated” here seems to mean “declared to be, or acknowledged as,” and he is said to be not just God’s Son in the sense of the Davidic Messiah (which was affirmed separately at the start of verse 3), but in addition “Son of God in power,” in other words, declared to be in a state where he exercises divine power.

Moreover, “the Spirit of holiness” who raised him from the dead seems likely to be an Aramaic way of speaking of the Holy Spirit — which, again, pushes this early Christian mini-creed back to the earliest days of the Church.

In Romans 10:9-13, St. Paul writes of Jesus: “[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord … you will be saved.… [T]he same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” Here, again, St. Paul encourages Christians to pray directly to Jesus as “the Lord.”

Coming on Monday, Sept. 1: Part 40: Though He was Rich, yet for Our Sake He Became Poor.
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Note
[1]  James D.G. Dunn, New Testament Theology: an Introduction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), p. 62.
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