How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?

Larry Hurtado, a leading historian of early Christianity, opens with a play on words. He calls the title — How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? — a “double entendre.” On one side, “how on earth” expresses astonishment. On the other, it signals his approach: historical inquiry, grounded on earth, in real time and place.

Hurtado is not asking whether early Christians were right to worship Jesus. He is not arguing for or against the theological claim. His question is strictly historical: how did this devotion actually emerge?

The time frame is narrow. Hurtado limits himself to the first century and the early second century. To capture his subject, he picks one deliberately broad word: “devotion.” The more familiar term, Christology, focuses mainly on beliefs about Jesus. Hurtado wants more. “Devotion” covers both what early Christians believed and what they actually did in worship.

The book has eight chapters in two groups. Chapters 1 through 4 began as the Deichmann Lectures, given at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in March 2004. Chapters 5 through 8 are revised journal articles he had previously published.

Hurtado then previews his main conclusion. Devotion to Jesus did not develop slowly. It was not, in his words, an evolutionary process. It was “explosive.” Within the lifetime of people who had known Jesus personally, full devotion to him was already in place. “Perhaps within only a few days or weeks of his crucifixion,” Jesus’s followers were claiming God had raised him from death and installed him in heavenly glory.

Joining the movement demanded more than mere assent. It demanded a radical conviction — that God himself willed this reverence for Jesus. The earliest Christians were not improvising. They believed the one God of Israel had personally directed them to honor Jesus alongside himself.

One last note on terminology. Hurtado uses the word “cultic” throughout the book. In everyday English, “cult” suggests something fringe or dangerous. He is not using it that way. He draws on the Latin root cultus, which means worship. By “cultic” devotion he means formal, corporate acts of worship — what a community does together when it gathers. There is no judgment in the term.

Around 112 C.E. — about eighty years after Jesus’s crucifixion — a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the emperor Trajan asking how to handle a strange new group called Christians. In that letter (Epistles 10.96), Pliny reports that Christians gathered before dawn and “chanted antiphonally a hymn to Christ as to a god.”

That sentence — written by a hostile outsider, not a believer — anchors the question Hurtado wants to answer. Pliny confirms two things at once. Jesus stood at the center of Christian worship. And the reverence Christians offered him was the cultic kind, the kind otherwise reserved for the God of biblical tradition. Christians refused to honor the pagan gods of their neighbors. They refused under threat of death. But they readily included Jesus as the recipient of devotion the pagan gods were denied.

How did that happen? Where did this devotion to Jesus come from? Scholars have answered in sharply different ways. Hurtado uses this opening chapter to map the main proposals before laying out his own.

The Bousset Tradition: Worship as Pagan Borrowing

The first major answer comes from a movement of German scholars in the early 1900s called the religionsgeschichtliche Schule (“history of religions school”). Its most influential voice was Wilhelm Bousset, whose 1913 book Kyrios Christos shaped the field for decades.

Bousset argued that the worship of Jesus did not begin among the original Jewish followers of Jesus in Palestine. It emerged later, in mixed Greek-speaking cities like Antioch in Syria, among anonymous “Hellenistic” Gentile Christians. According to Bousset, these Gentile believers drew their pattern from pagan religion — specifically from apotheosis, the practice of elevating a hero or emperor to divine status after death.

Bousset admitted the development was early. But he insisted it did not run back to Jewish Christians close to Jesus himself. He even called the Christ-cult a “regrettable deviation” — a complicating intrusion into “the simple belief in God.” Burton Mack, an American scholar of Christian origins, follows a similar trajectory. Maurice Casey, a British New Testament scholar, pushes the timeline even further. He places the full divinization of Jesus as late as the Gospel of John (around the 80s C.E.) and blames Gentile converts whose grasp of monotheism was, in his view, too thin to hold the line.

Hurtado flags the central weakness: the chronological and demographic data simply cannot sustain this picture. The full argument is the work of Chapter 2.

Horbury: Worship as Jewish Veneration

A second answer comes from William Horbury, a British scholar of ancient Judaism. In Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (1998), Horbury argues that the worship of Jesus is rooted not in Greek paganism but in Jewish tradition itself. He points to long-standing Jewish patterns of honoring royal figures, expecting messianic ones, and remembering martyrs.

Hurtado appreciates Horbury’s instinct to locate the origin inside Jewish tradition rather than outside it. But he pushes back on one key move. Horbury defines the word “cult” so loosely that any form of respect or reverence ends up counting. That, Hurtado argues, blurs exactly what needs to be sharpened. The radical novelty of earliest Christianity is not that Jews could honor exalted figures. They could, and they did. The novelty is that no figure in Second-Temple Judaism (the Judaism of roughly 500 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.) ever received the kind of corporate cultic devotion that Jesus received from his earliest followers.

Bauckham and Eskola: Worship as Logical Inference

A third answer comes from Richard Bauckham, a major British scholar of early Christology. In God Crucified, Bauckham argues that the worship of Jesus followed naturally from a prior conviction — the conviction that Jesus shared in the divine “identity,” that he was creator and ruler of all things alongside Israel’s God. Once a community holds that, worship is the only fitting response.

Timo Eskola, a Finnish New Testament scholar, makes a related case in Messiah and the Throne. For Eskola, the decisive conviction is that Jesus was enthroned in heaven at God’s right hand. Both scholars locate this development very early, and both root it firmly in Jewish soil.

Hurtado offers a two-part critique. First, neither Bauckham nor Eskola explains how those decisive convictions arose in the first place. Saying “worship followed from belief” still leaves you needing to explain where that belief came from — and the historical question stays unanswered.

Second, the logic of the inference does not quite hold. If worship were simply the natural corollary of believing a figure shares in God’s exalted status, we should expect to see analogous developments for other highly exalted figures in Jewish tradition. Divine Wisdom, God’s Word, the archangel Michael, the patriarch Enoch, Moses — all of them were exalted in the most astonishing terms. None of them received cultic devotion. There is a real threshold between honorific speech and cultic practice, and the inference model never quite explains how Jesus alone crossed it.

Hurtado’s Alternative: Practice First

So what does Hurtado propose? His own approach rests on four commitments (pp. 25–30).

First, devotional practice — what Christians actually did when they gathered — is the primary evidence. Not the titles they used for Jesus. Not the doctrines they later wrote down. What people did in worship tells you more than what they later said about it.

Second, Hurtado points to six specific devotional actions visible in the earliest Christian sources: (a) singing hymns about Jesus in corporate worship; (b) praying through Jesus and to Jesus; (c) calling on Jesus’s name in baptism, healing, and exorcism; (d) treating the shared meal as a sacred meal with Jesus as its Lord; (e) ritually confessing Jesus in worship; and (f) receiving prophecy as the oracles of the risen Jesus or his Spirit. Each of these actions is concrete. Each appears in the earliest layers of the New Testament. Together they form a pattern of cultic devotion offered to Jesus alongside God.

Third, Hurtado borrows a conceptual model from the social-scientific study of religious innovation. Major innovations within a religious tradition are characteristically tied to powerful revelatory experiences — visions, ecstasies, prophetic encounters — that reconfigure parts of the parent tradition. Innovation does not drift in slowly from outside. It often erupts from inside, sparked by an experience the community reads as a divine disclosure.

Fourth, Hurtado uses what he calls the mutation analogy. Like a biological mutation, a major religious innovation is both connected to its parent tradition and distinguishable from it. It arises from within. This matters because it means the worship of Jesus does not have to be imported from Greek paganism to be genuinely new. A thoroughly Jewish movement can generate a thoroughly new pattern of devotion — not by copying outsiders, but by mutation from within.

The closing line frames everything that follows. Devotion to Jesus, Hurtado writes, “can only be accounted for as a response to the strong conviction in early Christian circles that the one God of biblical tradition willed that Jesus be so reverenced” (p. 29).

This is the heart of the book. Hurtado lays out his positive case: earliest Christian devotion to Jesus emerged as a “binitarian mutation” within Second-Temple Jewish monotheism. The term binitarian describes a “two-ish” shape of worship — one God, but with Jesus included alongside the Father in actual devotional practice. Calling it a mutation signals that something genuinely new appeared, but appeared from within Jewish religious tradition, not by importing pagan material from outside.

Chronology matters

When did high devotion to Jesus actually begin? The answer matters enormously. The older evolutionary model needed decades for Greek influence to seep in and inflate Jesus’s status. If the timeline is much shorter, that explanation collapses.

Hurtado draws heavily on a key essay by Martin Hengel, a major German New Testament scholar (“Christology and New Testament Chronology,” in Between Jesus and Paul). Paul’s undisputed letters, dated roughly 50–60 C.E., already presuppose an exalted Jesus — Messiah, Lord, Son of God — and a full pattern of devotion treating him as in some sense divine. The gap between Jesus’s execution (around 30–33 C.E.) and Paul’s earliest letter is only about twenty years.

The chronology then tightens further. Paul’s conversion is datable within a very few years at most after Jesus’s execution — sometime in the early-to-mid 30s. And Paul says in Galatians 1:13–14 that he had been violently persecuting the Jesus movement before he joined it. Saul of Tarsus must have found something sufficiently outrageous to his Pharisaic sensibilities to warrant violent suppression. The most plausible cause was the level of reverence given to Jesus. Hurtado quotes Hengel’s verdict directly:

“In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subsequent seven hundred years of church history.” (p. 33)

Crucially, Paul never presents his Christology as innovative. In 1 Corinthians 15:1–11 he insists that he and the Jerusalem leadership share a common faith and devotional pattern. The high view of Jesus characterized “the very earliest circles of Jewish Christians, including those of the very first years (perhaps months) in Roman Judea” (p. 36).

The decisive corroboration is the Aramaic prayer-cry Marana tha (“O Lord, come!”), preserved untranslated in 1 Corinthians 16:22. This was already a standardized devotional formula in Aramaic-speaking circles before Paul was writing in Greek to Corinth. Other Aramaic carry-overs — Abba (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6), Amen — point the same direction. Hengel concluded that “the really crucial period” for the origin of remarkable beliefs about Jesus is “the first four or five years” of the early Christian movement (p. 37). Hurtado adopts the verdict:

“The chronological indicators seem instead to require us to think that the devotion to Jesus reflected in Paul’s letters came about more as an explosion than an evolution.” (p. 37)

Demographics: Who was actually in this movement?

The earliest Christian movement was overwhelmingly Jewish in its crucial first two decades. The named prominent figures — Peter, James, John, Mary, Paul, Barnabas, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila, Apollos, Andronicus, Junia — were all Jews. The Jerusalem leadership and the Diaspora missionaries alike. There is no basis for attributing pagan influence to these circles.

Some Diaspora Jews adopted Greek language and culture. But cultural adaptation did not mean adopting pagan religion. For Jews who self-identified with their ancestral tradition, scruple about the uniqueness of the one God was perhaps the most widely known and most fervently held feature of Roman-era Jewish piety. Philo of Alexandria’s polemic against the deification of rulers (in The Embassy to Gaius) illustrates the point sharply. Philo had no patience for emperor-worship. Neither did the early Jewish Christians who drew the same hard line. The demographics simply do not allow pagan influence to be the engine of earliest Jesus-devotion.

Monotheism in the New Testament itself

The third pillar moves from inferential argument to direct textual demonstration. Paul’s letters — aimed at Gentile converts where pagan accommodation might be expected — exhibit stridently Jewish-style monotheism.

1 Thessalonians 1:9–10, likely the earliest Christian writing extant, praises the Thessalonians for turning “to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.” The diction comes straight from Jewish monotheistic discourse. In 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 Paul rewrites the Shema (Deut 6:4) — Israel’s central confession — with two figures inside it: “one God, the Father, from whom are all things… and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” In 1 Corinthians 10:1–22 he absolutely prohibits participation in pagan cult meals, calling pagan sacrifice an offering “to demons and not to God.”

The monotheistic framework is never abandoned. Jesus is included within it in a novel way.

The principal-agent disanalogy

Hurtado now sharpens the puzzle. Second-Temple Judaism contained a wide cast of “principal agent” figures — beings exalted by God to extraordinary heights. He sorts them into three types: (1) personified divine attributes — Wisdom, the Logos (God’s Word); (2) revered ancestors from the biblical narratives — Enoch, Jacob, especially Moses; (3) particular angels — Michael, Yahoel.

The exalted descriptions are striking. Wisdom shares in creation and superintendence and sits beside God. The Logos is “a ‘second god’ through whom God reveals himself.” The angel Yahoel actually bears the divine name within him. Moses, in some Jewish traditions, is the one for whom the world was created. Michael is captain over all God’s other angels. Each functions as God’s vizier, distinguished from all other beings and second only to God.

This is the load-bearing point of the chapter. None of these principal-agent figures ever received cultic worship. The high honorific language is not accompanied by prayer, hymn, or public devotion directed toward them. As Hurtado puts it:

“None of the principal agent figures in the relevant Jewish texts functions in the way that Jesus does in the devotional practice of earliest Christians… Put simply, this worship of the risen/exalted Jesus comprises a radical new innovation in Jewish monotheistic religion.” (pp. 47–48)

This is the crucial distinction. Jewish writers were perfectly comfortable exalting figures sky-high in language while refusing to extend worship to them. There is a real threshold between honorific speech and cultic practice. The early Christians crossed it. None of their Jewish contemporaries did.

Binitarian monotheism: the two-ish shape

Hurtado calls this pattern a “binitarian” form of monotheism — emphatically still monotheistic in rejecting all pagan deities, yet including Jesus alongside God in cultic practice as a unique second figure. The term is chosen carefully. It registers the shape of the devotion (two figures) while preserving the early Christians’ explicit concern to avoid ditheism (two gods). Jesus’s divine status is consistently expressed with reference to the one God.

Three texts demonstrate the pattern.

1 Corinthians 8:5–6. Paul rewrites the Shema in a binitarian direction. All things are from (ek) and for (eis) “one God the Father.” All things are through (dia) the “one Lord Jesus Christ.” The Greek prepositions distinguish Jesus’s agency from God’s source-status. Exclusivist monotheism is preserved, but Jesus is now folded inside it.

Philippians 2:6–11. An early Christian hymn — corporate, liturgical, pre-Pauline — that gives Jesus “the name above every name” and applies Isaiah 45:23 directly to him. Isaiah 45:23 is one of Scripture’s most uncompromising claims of God’s uniqueness (“to me every knee shall bow”). Yet Phil 2:10–11 turns that universal acclamation into the universal acclamation of Jesus as Lord. The “name above every name” almost certainly is the divine Tetragrammaton — Kyrios functioning as the Greek substitute for YHWH. This is dispositive evidence that practice and not just rhetoric had shifted by the first two decades.

The Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). Explicit pre-existence, explicit deity. Yet the Word is the agent through whom all things are created — subordinate to the one God. The internal Johannine controversies (“making himself equal to God,” 5:18; “though only a human being, you are making yourself God,” 10:33) reflect early Jewish-Christian arguments about whether this binitarian pattern violated monotheism. The author insists it does not. Jesus’s high-priestly prayer (John 17) holds the tension perfectly: glory shared with God “before the world existed” (17:5), yet eternal life defined as knowing “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17:3).

The summary verdict closes the chapter:

“Their faith and devotional practice… represent what we may call a ‘binitarian mutation’ in Roman-era Jewish monotheism.” (p. 53)

Chapter 3 turns from the origins of Jesus-devotion to its cost. Hurtado’s claim is straightforward. The worship of Jesus generated quantifiable, multi-layered costs at every level — household, kin, civic religion, synagogue, and eventually imperial authority — and the very fact that the movement grew explosively despite these costs is itself a historical datum. Whatever religious experience and conviction underwrote Jesus-devotion had to be powerful enough to outweigh the costs documented in this chapter.

The Roman religious environment

Hurtado leans on Arthur Darby Nock, the great Oxford classicist whose 1933 book Conversion remains a standard reference. Nock argued that the Roman period was an era of unprecedented religious voluntarism, with extensive trade and travel diffusing cults across the Mediterranean. But — and this is the key qualification — joining a new cult did not require leaving the old. Most Roman-era religion was additive, not exclusive.

Christianity was the conspicuous exception. And only because it inherited this exclusivism from Second-Temple Judaism. As Hurtado puts it: “earliest Christian faith involved an exclusivist religious claim upon adherents… all other purported deities were regarded as mere ‘idols’ and worse” (p. 59). For pagans, conversion meant a radical break from prior religious associations. That was socially expensive in a world where civic identity, household life, and trade guilds were all knit through cultic acts.

Family tensions

The divisive sayings attributed to Jesus in Matthew 10:34–36 — “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” — likely reflect actual experience in early Christian communities. The “for my name’s sake” tag (Mark 13:9, 13) signals that devotion to Jesus specifically was the provocation.

Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:12–16 address Christians married to unbelievers. The Christian partner is not to dissolve the marriage; the unbelieving spouse may leave; the children are “holy”; there is hope of evangelism. 1 Peter 3:1–7 addresses Christian wives of pagan husbands, with the strategic advice to live exemplary lives “without a word.” Roman social expectation, captured in Plutarch’s Coniugalia praecepta (140D), required a wife to worship only her husband’s gods. Christian wives were defying that norm. The closing exhortation that wives not be ruled by fear (1 Pet 3:6) hints at the real possibility of intimidation by pagan husbands.

Christian slaves and the property of bodies

One of the chapter’s most distinctive sections draws on Jennifer Glancy, a scholar of slavery in early Christianity, whose 2002 study Slavery in Early Christianity Hurtado treats as essential. Romans regarded slaves as the economic and sexual property of their owners — referred to in Greek simply as sōmata, “bodies”:

“Slaves were the economic and sexual property of their masters and mistresses, mere ‘bodies’ to be used as their owners saw fit, for labor or for pleasure.” (p. 67)

For Christian slaves this generated an unbearable double-bind. Comply with a master’s sexual demand and commit porneia, violating Christian sexual ethics. Refuse and risk flogging or worse. Christian slave-life was substantially harder than Christian wife-life. The slave had no negotiating power.

Jewish opposition: Saul of Tarsus and the Phinehas tradition

The earliest firsthand witness to Jewish-on-Jewish-Christian opposition is Saul/Paul himself. Galatians 1:13–14, 1 Corinthians 15:9, Philippians 3:6 all converge: he persecuted the church violently. Hengel concluded that the Greek verb Paul uses (portheō, “ravage”) implies brute force, the same word used for Antiochus Epiphanes’ anti-Jewish violence. Paul’s self-description as a “zealot” alludes to Phinehas, the biblical priest celebrated for vigilante violence in defense of the Torah (Numbers 25; cf. 1 Maccabees 2:23–26; Josephus, Antiquities 4.145–58).

Why? Hurtado’s argument is precise. The Pharisaic Saul lacked the authority to act so forcefully over Torah-laxity disputes alone. The most plausible motivator was the level of reverence given to Jesus — a level that Saul read as compromising the uniqueness of the one God. Douglas Hare, in his Cambridge study of Jewish persecution in Matthew, reached the same conclusion: Jewish opposition to early Jewish Christians was provoked by reverence given to Jesus that fellow Jews saw as idolatrous.

The Acts narrative supplies further data — the stoning of Stephen (6:8–8:1), the synagogue exclusions referenced in John (9:22; 12:42; 16:1–3), Paul’s “five times forty-lashes-minus-one” (2 Cor 11:24). Each represents serious religious discipline. The fact that Paul submitted to those floggings five times shows he was determined to remain inside his ancestral community even as it disciplined him for the very Jesus-devotion he refused to abandon.

Political consequences and the Neronian pogrom

For most of the first few decades, political consequences were limited and largely affected visible leaders. Paul mentions escaping arrest by Aretas’s ethnarch (2 Cor 11:32). He was beaten with rods three times by Roman civil authorities. James the brother of Jesus was executed by the high priest Ananus around 62 C.E., on charges Josephus describes as “transgression of the Law” — language that, in Jewish legal tradition, points to idolatry or apostasy.

The Neronian pogrom (64 C.E.) was the watershed. Tacitus, the Roman senator and historian, gives the fuller account in Annals 15.44: Christians convicted on the charge of “hatred of the human race” and put to deaths “hideous: some were torn apart by dogs, others nailed to crosses, still others burned alive.” Suetonius confirms the basic notice. Pliny’s letter forty years later finds Christians refusing to recant on threat of death — and reports, almost as an aside, that the deserted pagan temples were beginning to fill again as his crackdown took hold. Christian abstention from sacrifice had economic effects on the temple trade. Civic religion, politics, and trade were one fabric, and Christian conversion frayed all three.

Why did this faith succeed despite the cost?

Two answers close the chapter. First, the early Christian community offered a “fictive family of meaningful intimacy” — brothers and sisters, the holy kiss, mutual practical care that even pagan critics commented on. Second, behind that corporate life lay a powerful religious experience — devotion to the one God of biblical tradition and to Jesus.

Two emblematic texts close the chapter. Paul’s confession in Philippians 3:10 — “to know him and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings.” And Polycarp’s words at his second-century martyrdom: “For eighty-six years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” (p. 82). The two passages convey, Hurtado writes, “something of what devotion to Jesus meant for early Christians, and why they were ready to accept the social and political consequences of serving him in the Roman world.”

Chapter 4 is the centerpiece of Part I — a sustained exegetical case study of Philippians 2:6–11, “the most important early Christological passage” in the New Testament. Hurtado’s thesis: this brief passage demonstrates in a single text that high Christology was already in place within the first two decades of the Christian movement.

A hymn? And what kind?

The dominant scholarly view, traceable to Ernst Lohmeyer’s 1928 study, is that Philippians 2:6–11 preserves or derives from an early Christian hymn or “Christological ode” used in corporate worship. Ralph P. Martin, the British New Testament scholar, surveyed the entire scholarly debate in A Hymn of Christ (formerly titled Carmen Christi), which remains the standard reference.

The implications matter. If Paul wrote Philippians around 60 C.E. and incorporated this passage with no introduction or explanation, the ode itself must antedate the letter. That pushes its origin back further — to within the first two decades of the movement. Paul did not need to explain it because his readers already knew it. They were singing it. As Hurtado puts it:

“Philippians 2:6–11 is strong evidence that what New Testament scholars call a ‘high’ view of Jesus’ significance and status had become reasonably widely shared within the short period between Jesus’s death and the date of the epistle.” (p. 87)

The structure: humiliation and exaltation

The passage divides into two halves. Verses 6–8 — Jesus is the subject of every verb, the agent of self-humbling. Verses 9–11 — God becomes the subject, Jesus the object, the agent of exaltation. The hinge is the opening word of v. 9, dio (“therefore”). Hurtado’s reading is precise:

“The emphasis here is not primarily that God’s exaltation reverses Jesus’s humiliation… Instead, the ‘therefore’ makes Jesus’s humiliation in some way a basis or grounds for God’s extraordinary exaltation of him.” (p. 90)

Hurtado then makes a methodologically shrewd move. Most exegetes start with the difficult verses 6–8 (where the puzzles cluster) and try to force vv. 9–11 into a parenetic framework about humility. Hurtado reverses the order. He starts with vv. 9–11 because there the allusions are textually unambiguous, and the conceptual framework clearer.

Isaiah 45:23 and the acclamation of Jesus

Verses 9–11 contain a clear adaptation of Isaiah 45:23. The Isaiah passage is, Hurtado writes, “unexcelled as a ringing declaration of the uniqueness of the God of biblical Israel.” Three refrains in a few verses insist there is “no other deity.” And the climactic claim — “to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to God” — is Scripture’s most concentrated assertion of God’s universal supremacy.

Phil 2:10–11 takes that concentrated YHWH-uniqueness language and applies it to Jesus.

“It is nothing short of astonishing… to find phrasing from this passage appropriated to describe the acknowledgment of Jesus’s universal supremacy… in what may be thought of as a distinctively ‘Christological midrash’ of this Isaiah passage, the universal acclamation of God is presented in Philippians 2:10–11 as taking the form of an acclamation of Jesus as ‘Lord.'” (pp. 91–92)

How did early Christians arrive at this move? Takeshi Nagata, in his unpublished Princeton dissertation, noted that the Isaiah 45:23 LXX wording contains a curious variation between first-person (“to me”) and third-person (“God”) references. That grammatical seam may have provided the textual opening for early Christian readers — already convinced that Jesus had been exalted by God to share divine status — to discover two figures inside the Isaiah text: God and “the Lord” Jesus. This is what Hurtado calls “charismatic exegesis”: Scripture re-read under the impact of religious experience.

The “name above every name” almost certainly refers to the divine Tetragrammaton (YHWH). The Greek Kyrios (“Lord”) in v. 11 functions as the standard LXX substitute for YHWH. As Hurtado writes:

“Astonishing as it may be, Philippians 2:9 must be taken as claiming that in some way God has given to Jesus (to share?) the divine name that was represented in Greek by Kyrios and represented in Hebrew by the tetragrammaton.” (pp. 94–95)

Yet Jesus’s exaltation never rivals God. The passage is “ringed” by God. It opens with God doing the exalting (v. 9). It closes with the universal acclamation directed “to the glory of God the Father” (v. 11). Jesus’s divine status expresses, never competes with, God’s glory.

“In the form of God”: the Adam Christology critique

Hurtado now turns to the harder verses, 6–8. The crucial phrase is morphē theou — “form of God.” Two main interpretations have competed for decades. The first, championed by James Dunn in Christology in the Making, reads morphē theou as equivalent to eikōn theou (“image of God”), the Genesis 1:27 phrase used of Adam. On this “Adam Christology” reading, Phil 2:6–8 portrays Jesus as the obedient Adam who refused the temptation Adam grasped at — to be “like God” (Gen 3:5).

The second reading takes morphē theou to indicate Jesus’s pre-existent divine mode of being prior to the Incarnation. Hurtado argues for the second view and mounts a six-pronged critique of the Adam reading.

First, the alleged equivalence of morphē and eikōn is lexically dubious. David Steenburg, in a careful 1988 study, showed the two Greek words are used distinguishably.

Second, Greek usage is decisively against the equation. The Septuagint, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and the New Testament all use eikōn theou for Adam allusions and consistently for Jesus when his Adam-typology is in view (2 Cor 4:4, Col 1:15, 1 Cor 15:49). Morphē never appears in any Adam allusion elsewhere in the New Testament. Morphē theou never appears in the Greek Old Testament or any other Jewish or Christian text where an Adam allusion is identifiable. Phil 2:6 on the Adam reading would be a unique case without precedent.

Third, the alleged allusion is incompetent. There is not a single word from the Greek of the Genesis creation or temptation accounts in Phil 2:6–7 — beyond the word for “God” itself. As Hurtado puts it, “that hardly seems like an effective effort at allusion.”

Fourth, the parallel “being equal to God” (einai isa theō) is never used elsewhere in any Adam allusion. Where ancient texts speak of seeking equality with God, they treat it as foolish hubris — typically applied to arrogant rulers, not to Adam.

Fifth, the serpent’s “you will be like God” offer in Genesis 3:5 was directed to Eve, not Adam. Subsequent Jewish references to Adam focus on disobedience and transgression — never on him as one who sought to “be like God.”

Sixth, and methodologically most telling, the author of Phil 2:6–11 demonstrates clear competence at marked allusion in vv. 9–11 (the Isaiah 45:23 wording, the divine name). If he had wanted to mark an Adam allusion in vv. 6–7, he was capable of doing so. He did not.

The conclusion: Phil 2:6–7 refers to Jesus as being in some way divine in status before becoming human. Morphē theou is pre-existence language. The “emptying” (kenōsis) is becoming human. As Hurtado argues, this means the pre-existence conviction was already present and familiar in Christian circles well before the Gospel of John — within the first two decades.

Implications

The hymn that Paul incorporated must have been composed for some other occasion than this letter. The actions described — pre-existent divine mode, kenotic incarnation, cosmic exaltation — are not actions believers can imitate, so the original purpose was not parenesis. The apex (vv. 9–11) is a doxological climax, not a moral example. The most plausible originating context is Jewish-Christian worship circles defending the binitarian devotional pattern from within their Jewish framework.

What Jesus refused to exploit — equality with God — is precisely what Jewish writers of the time condemned as the worst human hubris (especially in arrogant rulers who sought divine honors). The hymn places Jesus in deliberate contrast: he had what hubris seeks, and chose to lay it down. The closing line of the chapter:

“Philippians 2:6–11 may preserve for us one remarkable instance of earliest Christians discovering Jesus in the sacred scriptures of Second-Temple Judaism under the impact of powerful religious experiences of revelation and inspiration.” (p. 107)

Chapter 5, originally a 1998 article in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, defends Hurtado’s most basic methodological claim: that Greco-Roman Judaism was genuinely monotheistic. The challenge comes from a small but vocal minority who argue otherwise.

The challenge: was Second-Temple Judaism really monotheistic?

Peter Hayman, an Edinburgh scholar of Jewish studies, in a 1991 article titled “Monotheism — A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” argued that the term should be retired for Roman-period Judaism. Margaret Barker, in The Great Angel, made a parallel case for what she called Jewish “ditheism.” If they are right, then early Christian devotion to Jesus is not a striking innovation but merely an expression of an already-existing Jewish willingness to recognize multiple divine beings.

If they are wrong — and Hurtado argues forcefully that they are — then the early Christian inclusion of Jesus in cultic worship really is a departure, and a historically unprecedented one. This chapter is the methodological keystone of the whole project.

Three methodological principles

Hurtado’s response begins with three commitments.

First, the inductive principle. Build the definition of monotheism from the actual practice of self-professed monotheists, not from a priori notions. Just as Protestants might find some Roman Catholic piety with the saints “complicated,” historical analysis must accept all three as varieties of Christian monotheism. The same applies to ancient Judaism: “we have no choice but to accept as monotheism the religion of those who profess to be monotheists, however much their religion varies and may seem ‘complicated’ with other beings in addition to the one God” (p. 114). The goal is description, not theological policing.

Second, the variety-and-development principle. Even within Greco-Roman Jewish monotheism there is flexibility, and across time periods change occurs. Pre-70 Judaism was less rigid about heavenly beings than later rabbinic Judaism became — quite possibly in response to Jewish-Christian Jesus-devotion and other developments.

Third — and this is the load-bearing principle — cultic and liturgical practice is the decisive criterion. Stop arguing about monotheism on semantic grounds (which titles? which adjectives?) and start watching what people did in worship. Sacrifice and corporate prayer are where monotheistic commitment is exhibited most sharply. As Hurtado puts it: “It should be recognized as a basic principle in the analysis of religious traditions that the real meaning of words, phrases, and statements is always connected with the practice(s) of the religious tradition” (p. 116).

The evidence for Jewish monotheistic profession

Hurtado synthesizes six prior studies. Samuel Cohon‘s 1955 survey of Jewish and pagan testimony to Jewish monotheism. Ralph Marcus‘s catalog of about 470 Greek-language theological expressions for God in Hellenistic Jewish texts — “God is variously represented as one and unique, as creator, ruler and king, residing in heaven, all-powerful, all-seeing.” Adolf Schlatter on Josephus’s God-language. R. J. H. Shutt supplementing Schlatter. H. J. Wicks on the apocrypha and apocalyptic texts. And Paul Rainbow, in his Oxford doctoral dissertation, who analyzed 200 passages from Greco-Roman Jewish texts and identified ten distinct forms of explicit monotheistic speech.

Two themes recur. God’s universal sovereignty — God created and rules all, even nations not acknowledging him; rebellious spiritual powers (Satan, Beliel, Mastema) are always portrayed as servants of God whose temporary opposition only serves God’s purposes. And God’s uniqueness over against idols — expressed by sharp contrast with the deities of the Roman religious environment, with the Deutero-Isaianic ridicule of idol-makers (Isa 40:18–20; 41:21–24; 45:20–21; 46:5–7) echoed throughout Hellenistic Jewish literature.

Philo of Alexandria captures the position with the classic line:

“Let us, then, engrave deep in our hearts this as the first and most sacred of commandments: to acknowledge and honour one God who is above all.” (Decalogue 65)

Worship practice as the decisive criterion

The cultic test is precise. Hurtado offers a careful definition. A “pattern of devotion” is the sum of overtly religious practices. Cultic actions are the prescribed and corporate ones — set within sacred place or liturgical occasion, intended to maintain the relationship between devotees and their deity. Sacrifice and formal corporate prayer are worship. Personal veneration may not be. The Greco-Roman Jewish pattern reserved worship for the one God of Israel.

The evidence from major Jewish institutions converges. The Jerusalem Temple offered sacrifice exclusively to the God of Israel — never to angels, patriarchs, or any other figure. The Qumran community, though dissenting from Jerusalem, had the same orientation: hymns to the one God, prayers to the one God. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (a Qumran liturgical text edited by Carol Newsom) presents angels worshipping God, not as recipients of worship. The Nash Papyrus (second century B.C.E.) preserves the Decalogue and the Shema in a devotional context. Studies of Second-Temple Jewish prayer by N. B. Johnson and J. H. Charlesworth confirm that all extant prayers are addressed to the God of Israel alone. Angels carry prayers and intercede, but they do not receive them.

The epigraphical evidence (Clinton Arnold’s study) confirms the same point. Angels figure prominently in Jewish belief — and in apotropaic invocations for protection. But there is no evidence of any organized Jewish devotional pattern of gathering “to adore, pray to, and worship angels.” Loren Stuckenbruck, in Angel Veneration and Christology, reaches the same conclusion: Jewish venerative language and practices involving angels did not amount to cultic worship.

Even the most exalted figures are not worshipped

The critical test case is the figure of Yahoel. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, Yahoel is an angel who actually bears the divine name within him and is described in theophanic language so vivid that human visionaries can mistake him for God. If any Jewish principal-agent figure should have been worshipped, it is Yahoel. Yet the angel acts only at God’s pleasure. He is God’s minister, not God’s rival. The same point holds for the patriarch Enoch, the angel Michael, and the figure of Metatron in later traditions. The descriptions can stretch as far as one likes. The worship never crosses over.

This is what Hurtado calls “the decisive criterion”:

“It is in fact in the area of worship that we find ‘the decisive criterion’ by which Jews maintained the uniqueness of God over against both idols and God’s own deputies.” (p. 129)

The historical payoff is enormous. The plurality of heavenly beings in Jewish texts does not undermine “monotheism” as a label, provided that the cultic distinction is maintained. Greco-Roman Judaism is best characterized as “exclusivist monotheism” — a high-god theology with the high god identified specifically as Israel’s biblical God and worship characteristically reserved for him alone.

Against this baseline, the early Christian inclusion of Jesus in cultic devotion stands out as exactly what Hurtado has been claiming all along: a “binitarian mutation” within Jewish exclusivist monotheism. The closing line of the chapter:

“It is in the explicit and programmatic inclusion of Christ with God in the prayer and worship practices of early Christianity that we see an apparent and major innovation in previous Jewish monotheistic religious practice.” (p. 132)

Chapter 6, originally a 2003 article in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, executes a tightly focused word study to answer one question: what is the relationship between the homage paid to Jesus during his earthly ministry and the cultic devotion of post-Easter Christian communities? Are the two simply continuous? Or does something genuinely new appear after the resurrection?

Hurtado’s tool is the Greek verb proskyneō (to bow down, do reverence, worship) — the most cultically loaded reverence-word in biblical Greek — tracked across all four canonical Gospels. The differential evidence is striking.

Mark’s restraint

Mark uses proskyneō only twice — both with deep narrative irony. In Mark 5:6 the Gerasene demoniac runs to Jesus and “reverences” him while the demonic voice acclaims “Son of the Most High God.” Mark has been threading a deliberate motif throughout (1:24, 34; 3:11): demons alone correctly recognize Jesus’s transcendent status, while disciples and enemies misunderstand. The demoniac’s proskyneō is a deliberate anachronism — a transparent prefiguring of post-Easter readers’ devotional practice projected back into a ministry-era scene.

The second use is the soldiers’ mock-worship of the crucified Jesus (Mark 15:19), within the elaborate coronation parody of the passion narrative. Mark’s Christian readers were expected to see the soldiers’ cynical mockery as unwitting expression of Jesus’s true status. They ignorantly act out the valid worship that the original community in fact offers. In every other Markan reverence scene — Jairus, the woman with the flow of blood, the Syrophoenician woman, the leper — Mark uses lower-intensity vocabulary appropriate to ordinary ancient homage, never the cultically loaded proskyneō.

Luke’s “periodization”

Luke is even more careful. He uses proskyneō with Jesus as recipient just once in his Gospel, and only after the resurrection: Luke 24:52, where the disciples worship the risen Jesus and return joyfully to Jerusalem. For every pre-Easter reverence scene, Luke deliberately substitutes lower-intensity vocabulary — falling on one’s face, falling at Jesus’s feet, kneeling. He “periodizes” reverence linguistically: ministry-era homage is one thing, post-Easter cultic worship another, and Luke marks the boundary in his diction.

John’s paradigmatic scene

John uses proskyneō with Jesus as recipient once in the entire Gospel: John 9:38, where the man born blind, healed by Jesus, declares “I believe, Lord,” and bows in worship. J. Louis Martyn, the Union Seminary scholar, established the now-standard reading of John 9 as a metaphorical narrative of the Johannine community’s own experience. The healing of the blind man stands in for the illumination of all who recognize Jesus’s true significance and reverence him with the same honor given to the Father (cf. John 5:23). Readers are to see “their own rescue from the darkness of ignorance and unbelief” in the story, and “in his dramatic gesture of adoring reverence they were sure to recognize their own devotional practice registered.”

Matthew’s programmatic heightening

Matthew is the dramatic exception. He uses proskyneō 13 times — second only to Revelation in the New Testament. And 10 of those 13 uses describe homage offered to Jesus, with 8 in scenes where the earthly Jesus receives reverence.

The pattern is most clearly exposed in Matthew’s redaction of his Markan and Lukan parallels. Where Mark/Luke describe the leper “begging” or “falling on his face,” Matthew has him “reverence” Jesus (Matt 8:2). Where Mark/Luke describe Jairus “falling at Jesus’s feet,” Matthew has him “reverence” Jesus (Matt 9:18). Where Mark describes the Syrophoenician woman “falling at his feet,” Matthew has her “reverence” Jesus (Matt 15:25). The mother of the sons of Zebedee “reverences” Jesus (Matt 20:20, Matthew’s addition). The disciples after the walking-on-water scene “reverence” Jesus and confess “Truly, you are the Son of God” (Matt 14:33). The Magi “reverence” the infant Jesus (Matt 2:2, 8, 11, three times).

And — critically — Matthew omits proskyneō from the two Markan scenes where Mark used it ironically. The Gerasene demoniac becomes ordinary in Matthew (Matt 8:28). The soldiers’ mock-reverence becomes mere kneeling in Matthew (Matt 27:29). Matthew reserves proskyneō for sincere reverence of Jesus.

The classic German redaction-critical study of Bornkamm, Barth, and Held already concluded that Matthew uses proskyneō “only in the sense of genuine worship of Jesus.” Ulrich Luz, the Swiss biblical scholar, draws out the implication for the walking-on-water scene: instead of a past miracle, Matthew “lays before the eyes of the [Christian] congregation her present possibility of meeting with the miracle-working Lord.” The boat scene becomes “an image of the congregation of the risen Lord.”

Matthew’s strategy is invitational. Readers are to identify with the supplicants approaching Jesus and find their own worshipping community in the boat. But notice: even Matthew distinguishes pre-Easter from post-Easter. The decisive theological claim — Matthew 28:18, “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” — comes from the risen Jesus, not the earthly one.

Considerable further elevation, not continuity

The differential evidence reinforces, rather than weakens, Hurtado’s overall thesis. The Evangelists themselves distinguish pre-Easter homage from post-Easter cultic devotion. The far more intense devotion of post-Easter Christian circles “was not simply the continuation of the pattern of homage given to the historical Jesus, and it cannot be accounted for adequately by reference to Jesus’s ministry” (p. 149).

The closing line states the conclusion plainly:

“The latter represents a notable development beyond the time of Jesus’s ministry, and this development can be accounted for historically only by invoking additional factors, including powerful experiences of new ‘revelation’ that helped to generate the remarkable ‘binitarian pattern’ of devotion characteristic of earliest Christianity.” (pp. 150–51)

This sets up Chapter 8 directly. If continuity-from-ministry-homage cannot explain the binitarian pattern, then what can? Hurtado’s answer: powerful revelatory religious experiences.

Chapter 7, originally a 1999 article in the Journal of Theological Studies, addresses a potential objection to Hurtado’s thesis. If early Jewish Christians were genuinely treating Jesus as divine and including him in their worship, they should have generated immediate and severe Jewish opposition. Do we have evidence of this?

Hurtado’s answer: yes. Clear, early evidence. And the character of that opposition confirms that Jesus-devotion was perceived as a serious religious threat — not merely a social oddity. The opposition presupposes, and therefore dates, the high Christology that provoked it.

The pivotal question

The chapter opens with the specific question that drives the inquiry. The Gospel of John (90s C.E.) clearly reflects sharp late-first-century conflict between Johannine Jewish Christians and synagogue authorities over Christological claims. Since J. L. Martyn’s seminal study, scholars have read John on a “two-level” plane — Jesus vs. “the Jews” in the surface narrative, the Johannine community vs. its parent synagogues underneath. But:

“When did ‘non-Christian’ Jews first begin to suspect that Christian reverence of Jesus was blasphemous and incompatible with Jewish (monotheistic) commitment to the uniqueness of God, and not simply peculiar, annoying, ridiculous, or disturbing?” (p. 153)

Saul of Tarsus and the Phinehas tradition

The earliest evidence is Paul’s own testimony to his pre-conversion violence. Galatians 1:13–14, Philippians 3:6, and 1 Corinthians 15:9 all converge: he was “violently persecuting the church of God and trying to destroy it.” Hurtado focuses on the Greek verb portheō (“ravage”) in Galatians 1:13, 23. Following Hengel’s The Pre-Christian Paul, he stresses that the verb signifies “much more than disputation” — it is “the use of brute force.” The same verb describes Antiochus Epiphanes’ anti-Jewish violence (4 Macc 4:23; 11:4). Saul’s actions involved physical force against fellow Jews.

Why? Paul calls himself a zēlōtēs (“zealot”) for his ancestral traditions (Gal 1:14), an allusion to Phinehas. Phinehas was the biblical priest celebrated in Numbers 25 for vigilante violence in defense of God’s uniqueness — and the model invoked in 1 Maccabees 2:23–26 and Josephus (Antiquities 4.145–58) for similar later actions. Torrey Seland, in his analysis of the Phinehas tradition, concludes that the kind of action Phinehas inspired was reserved for four crimes: idolatry, apostasy, seduction by false prophets, and perjury. Saul of Tarsus must have read the Jewish-Christian movement as guilty of one of those four — most plausibly the first.

This is the key reversal. Standard accounts treat Paul’s pre-conversion violence as evidence that Jewish Christians were Torah-lax. Hurtado argues the opposite. Pharisees lacked authority to act so forcefully over Torah-laxity disputes alone. The most plausible motivator was the level of reverence given to Jesus — devotion that Saul interpreted as a serious compromise of the uniqueness of the one God, a violation of the First Commandment. As Arland Hultgren‘s analysis confirms, early Jewish Christianity was not anti-Torah; what scandalized Saul was the Christology, not the law-laxity. High Christology produced persecution because it was already high. Persecution does not date the Christology — it presupposes it.

Stephen, James, and the synagogue floggings

The supporting evidence converges. The execution of Stephen by stoning (Acts 6:8–8:1) — narrated with dramatic heightening but reflecting the kind of violent response that high Christological claims could generate. The execution of James the brother of Jesus by the high priest Ananus around 62 C.E., recorded in Josephus’s Antiquities 20.197–203, on charges of “transgression of the Law” — a Jewish legal category that, by the punishment of stoning, points to idolatry or leading Israel astray.

Paul’s “five times forty-lashes-minus-one” (2 Cor 11:24) is a window into ongoing community discipline. The Deuteronomy 25:2–3 punishment was synagogue discipline applied to a willing Jewish member. That Paul submitted to it five times is itself remarkable. He was determined to remain inside his ancestral community even as it was disciplining him for the very Jesus-devotion he refused to abandon.

Matthew, Luke-Acts, John on Jewish-Christian conflict

Matthew’s persecution texts cluster around devotion to Jesus specifically. Douglas Hare, in his classic Cambridge study, concluded that the kind of opposition Matthew narrates was “provoked by the kinds of reverence directed to Jesus by Jewish Christians, which must have struck many other Jews as idolatrous.” The blasphemy charge (Matt 9:3; 26:65), the sorcerer charge (9:34; 12:24), the deceiver charge (27:63) all converge on a single source: the Christology and the cultic practices it produced.

Acts repeatedly centers conflict around Jesus’s name. The Jerusalem disciples are forbidden to speak in Jesus’s name (Acts 4:17–18; 5:40). Miracles are performed by ritual use of the name (3:6, 16; 4:10, 30). Baptism is “in Jesus’s name.” The Jewish Christians Saul targets are characterized simply as “those who invoke (epikaleō) Jesus’s name” (Acts 9:14, 21) — language that echoes Old Testament “calling on the name of the Lord.”

John’s references to synagogue exclusion (9:22; 12:42; 16:1–3) reflect real historical conflicts, even if narrated on Martyn’s two-level plane.

The Anathema Iēsous formula

The most direct piece of evidence is Paul’s contrast in 1 Corinthians 12:3 between “Kyrios Iēsous” (“Jesus is Lord”) and “anathema Iēsous” (“Jesus be cursed”). With a number of scholars, Hurtado argues the curse-formula reflects real Jewish practice: opponents cursed Jesus and placed him under divine judgment. Justin Martyr later explicitly alleges Jewish cursing of Jesus and Christians. Pliny notes that cursing Christ was used as a forensic test for Christians — intelligence very plausibly derived from observed Jewish synagogue practice. Mark 14:71 — Peter’s cursing in the courtyard scene — almost certainly belongs to the same complex.

The maximally negative Jewish response is most adequately explained by the maximally exalted view of Jesus held in Christian devotion.

Conclusion

From every layer — Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts, John, and especially Paul — there is evidence of sharp pre-Johannine, indeed pre-70 C.E., conflict between Jewish followers of Jesus and Jewish religious authorities. The opposition was not random. It was concentrated on the Christology and the cultic practices that flowed from it. Christians took the additional step that scrupulous Jews “characteristically drew back from” — they accompanied honorific rhetoric with open cultic devotion. Their practice, not just their words, communicated the binitarian mutation. The closing line of the chapter is striking:

“It may be that Jewish religious opponents saw earlier and more clearly than the Jewish Jesus-devotees themselves that their devotion was a significant ‘mutation’ in Jewish monotheistic practice.” (p. 178)

Chapter 8, originally a 2000 article in the Journal of Religion, is the methodological keystone of the book — the “how” behind the explosion. Hurtado’s claim is straightforward. Major innovations in religious traditions are characteristically generated by powerful religious experiences that the recipients understood as new revelations. For earliest Christianity, the cultic veneration of Jesus is exactly such an innovation, and the resurrection appearances and subsequent visionary experiences are exactly such a triggering cause.

The disciplinary problem

Hurtado opens with disciplinary self-criticism. New Testament scholarship has been “shaped and driven mainly by theological interests,” focused on doctrinal genealogies. Religious experience itself was treated as derivative — either deflated by skeptics or quietly bracketed by traditionalists. Hermann Gunkel‘s study of the Spirit in Paul was a watershed in the early twentieth century. Adolf Deissmann insisted that “early Christianity was foremost a religious movement of worship and religious experience and that it should not be approached as primarily a doctrinal development.” But after World War I, dialectical theology pushed scholarship back toward doctrines.

The renewal of interest came in the late twentieth century, partly through Pentecostal and charismatic movements. James Dunn‘s Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970) and his Jesus and the Spirit are the indispensable studies. Gordon Fee‘s 967-page work on the Holy Spirit in Paul’s letters is the comprehensive treatment. Seyoon Kim has portrayed Paul’s Damascus-road experience as a Christophany — a visionary revelation of Christ in glorious form that conveyed both his sense of mission and the basics of his message.

The methodological resistance

Hurtado names the resistance to his view directly. Paul Rainbow rejected the proposal, arguing that “religious experiences can only confirm previously derived beliefs and convictions and are not themselves causative factors in the emergence of new or altered beliefs and devotional practice.” A Canadian grant-application reviewer described Hurtado’s view as “problematic,” asserting that religious experiences “are themselves generated by socio-religious changes and so function as legitimating devices to ease the transition from the old to the new.”

Hurtado’s response is patient. He marshals corroborating witnesses. Dunn warns against “discounting the creative force of religious experience” — Paul’s faith was forged in “a furnace which melted many concepts in its fires and poured them forth into new moulds.” Philip Almond grants that experiences can “lead to the creative transformation of a religious tradition” and “are capable of generating new interpretations of the tradition.” Carl Raschke argues that revelation experiences involve “an insight accruing from the transposition of certain meaning systems.” Terence Donaldson applies Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts” model to Paul’s Damascus experience as a “remapping” of his “convictional world.”

The social-scientific case

Hurtado then turns to social science, where deprivation theory has long dominated — religious experience as the symptom of stress or pathology. But three social-scientific allies allow revelations a causal role.

Anthony F. C. Wallace, in his classic essay “Revitalization Movements,” describes “mazeway reformulation”: the restructuring of religious belief-elements that “usually happens in the mind of a prophet figure abruptly and dramatically as ‘a moment of insight.'” His empirical claim is striking:

“With few exceptions, every religious revitalization movement with which I am acquainted has been originally conceived in one or several hallucinatory visions by a single individual.” (Wallace, quoted on p. 188)

And — important to the methodological point — Wallace concedes that “the religious vision experience per se is not psychopathological but rather the reverse, being a synthesizing and often therapeutic process.”

Rodney Stark, the prominent American sociologist of religion, categorizes religious experiences into four types — the rarest being the “revelational.” Stark grants that such experiences can “contradict and challenge prevailing theological ‘truths'” and can generate “new theologies, eschatological prophecies, or commissions to launch social reforms.” In a follow-up article he asks “the most fundamental question confronting the social scientific study of religion: How does new religious culture arise?” He answers, in part, by analogy: revelation as a kind of creative reception, like the experience of composers (Mozart, Gershwin, Ellington) who reportedly “heard” complete melodies “from out there.” Stark grants the genuine possibility “that revelations actually occur.”

The interim conclusion: “it appears to be either ideological bias or insufficiently examined assumptions that prevent some scholars from taking seriously the idea that there are revelatory religious experiences that can directly contribute to religious innovations.”

The early Christian case: 1 Corinthians 15

Hurtado now applies the framework. 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, written in the early 50s C.E. — scarcely twenty years into the movement — preserves a “sacred tradition” that Jesus died redemptively, was raised “on the third day according to the scriptures” (v. 4), and appeared to a series of named witnesses. The list of appearances functions as evidentiary support — these are the experiences that grounded the claim.

The cognitive content of these appearances was specific and unprecedented. Hurtado identifies four immediate convictions they generated. First, God had released Jesus from death — Jesus is alive, “not merely his memory or influence.” Second, Jesus has uniquely received “a glorious new form of existence, an immortal and eschatological bodily existence” — distinct from all the elect, including honored ancestors like Moses, Abraham, and Elijah, who await resurrection at the Last Day. Third, Jesus has been “exalted to a unique heavenly status, presiding by divine appointment over the entire redemptive program.” Fourth, his followers are “divinely commissioned to proclaim Jesus’s exalted status.”

These convictions, Hurtado insists, “are unprecedented and clearly not appropriated from the religious matrix of the early Christian movement.” They are an innovation in religious belief. And the earliest tradition attributes that innovation to revelatory experiences taken as appearances of the risen Christ.

“Whether one chooses to consider these experiences as hallucinatory, the projections of mental processes of the recipients, or the acts of God, there is every reason to see them as the historical ignition points for the Christological convictions linked to them.” (p. 194)

The visionary micro-culture

Paul’s own revelatory experiences are everywhere in his letters. Galatians 1:13–17 attributes his conversion to God’s revelation of “his Son.” 1 Corinthians 9:1: “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 describes being caught up to Paradise, hearing “things that are not to be told.” 2 Corinthians 4:6 — God shining “in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” — almost certainly draws on Paul’s own Damascus-road illumination. Galatians 2:2 mentions a Jerusalem trip taken “in response to a revelation,” likely a guidance vision about the conference. The cumulative picture: “within at least some circles of early Christianity there seems to have been a religious ‘micro-culture’ that was both receptive to visions and revelations and highly appreciative of them as sources of direction in religious matters” (p. 197).

The cultic mutation specifically

Hurtado then re-asserts the central claim:

“In terms of the religious scruples of the Jewish tradition, the most striking innovation in earliest Christianity is the treatment of the glorified Jesus as an object of cultic devotion in ways and terms that seem otherwise reserved for the God of Israel.” (p. 197)

He repeats his six-fold list of diagnostic cultic actions: hymns sung in worship, prayer to Jesus and in his name, ritual use of Jesus’s name in baptisms and exorcisms, the corporate sacred meal as the “Lord’s Supper,” ritual confession of Jesus, and prophecy uttered in his name. None of these existed for any other Jewish principal-agent figure. All of them existed for Jesus from the earliest Christian decades.

What could move Torah-conscious Jews to extend such devotion, breaking the deepest scruple of Second-Temple piety? Hurtado’s answer:

“I judge that the only option is to think that those members of the early Christian movement among whom there emerged the cultic devotion to Jesus that I have described must have felt compelled by God to reverence Jesus in ways otherwise reserved for God alone.” (p. 198)

The supporting NT texts come into focus. Stephen’s vision (Acts 7:55–56) — “the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” Stephen’s prayer to the heavenly Jesus (vv. 59–60) — the very sort of cultic devotion otherwise reserved for God in Jewish tradition. The Transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8 and parallels) — likely reflecting post-Easter visionary experience whatever its tradition-history. And Revelation 4–5, the most explicit literary exhibition: hymnic adoration of God on the throne (4:8–11) and parallel hymnic adoration of the Lamb (5:8–14), with universal worship offered jointly to both.

The Revelation argument: a hostile-witness datum

Hurtado is precise about what Revelation 4–5 does and does not show. By the time of Revelation, the binitarian innovation was already deeply established. The vision is not creating the pattern. It is reflecting it. But here is the methodologically critical point: the author of Revelation is “belligerently conservative” toward cultic innovation. He attacks the worship of the beast. He condemns those in the churches advocating accommodation with civic and pagan cult (“the teaching of Balaam” at Pergamum, Rev 2:14; “Jezebel” at Thyatira, Rev 2:20–23). And in Revelation 19:10 and 22:8–9, the seer twice refuses angel worship — exactly what the Jewish prohibition would require.

This is the hostile-witness move. The author who polices syncretism most aggressively is the same author who confidently orchestrates worship of the Lamb. The worship of Jesus in Rev 5 cannot be dismissed as syncretistic drift. It is being defended by an author whose entire instinct is anti-syncretistic. The worship of Jesus, on this evidence, was already very traditional and very early.

Conclusion: speed and source

Hurtado closes by re-stressing the speed and the social location of the innovation:

“Within the early Christian circles of the first few years (perhaps even the first few weeks), individuals had powerful revelatory experiences that they understood to be encounters with the glorified Jesus.… Through such revelatory experiences, Christological convictions and corresponding cultic practices were born that amounted to a unique ‘mutation’ in what was acceptable Jewish monotheistic devotional practice of the Greco-Roman period.” (p. 203)

Methodologically, Hurtado closes with his characteristic agnostic guardrail. To grant the historical adequacy of revelatory experiences as a causal factor “does not require that one accept the validity of either these convictions and this ‘mutation’ or the claims of those whose religious experiences were taken as divine revelations.” The cognitive content of revelations varies across innovation-cases — he names parallels in the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness, Muhammad, Bahá’u’lláh, and Guru Nanak — but “there seems to be a sufficient phenomenological similarity” in efficacy.

For earliest Christianity, the powerful revelatory experiences in view are the resurrection appearances of Jesus, the subsequent visionary experiences within early communities, and the ongoing experience of the Spirit understood as the Spirit of the risen Jesus. Through these experiences a distinctive and historically significant “mutation” in Jewish monotheistic devotion took place — within years, perhaps within weeks, of Jesus’s execution.

Hurtado closes the volume with a brief retrospective. He restates the book’s central thesis: a remarkable level of devotion to Jesus erupted in the earliest years of the Christian movement, within circles of Jesus’s followers shaped by Second-Temple Jewish traditions. In its earliest manifestations, devotion to Jesus must be approached as “a notable religious innovation within Second-Temple Jewish religion.” The eventual rejection of the innovation by the main body of Roman-era Jews led to Christianity’s emergence as a distinct religion, but in its earliest stages, Jesus-devotion belongs to the history of Roman-era Judaism as well.

He recalls the social cost theme — that conviction came with serious consequences within Jewish communities and for Gentile converts. The intensity that motivated such persistence comes through “in passages such as Philippians 2:6–11,” where readers catch “a glimpse of the religious intensity that motivated believers in the early decades.”

The closing register is unusually warm. Christians may find the historical inquiry “somewhat unsettling… at least initially,” Hurtado writes, but he hopes they “will see that a historical appreciation of the emergence of devotion to Jesus need not pose a challenge to continuing to revere Jesus as rightful recipient of devotion with God.” To non-Christian readers he commends the inquiry as “an interesting adventure (perhaps almost equally unsettling, though for different reasons).” The two-track posture is preserved to the end: rigorous historical investigation that does not preempt confessional or theological judgment, but does constrain its starting point. The closing sentence:

“Devotion to Jesus has certainly proven to be one of the most significant and influential religious innovations in human history, helping to shape all subsequent Christian belief and practice.” (p. 206)