A major debate in early Christian dogmatics was over whether the pre-existent Christ could be classified as “a creature”
Not in the first generation. There was no dispute that he was a creature then (hence
Colossians 1:15, though a late first century forgery yet still reflecting Pauline belief: Jesus was the firstborn of all creation, i.e. the first created being; this is also discussed in Philo regarding the archangel of many names).
The idea that he wasn’t created was a much later sectarian-dogmatic development that culminated in the Council of Nicea. The best brief on this story I ever read was Ehrman’s chapter on it near the end of his book
How Jesus Became God. Pretty much all scholars who aren’t fundamentalists concur.
Note that nothing in the New Testament says otherwise. For example, careful readers of
John 1:1 will note “the Logos was God” is in the past tense. This refers to standard Jewish emanation theory, whereby all the archangels (including the Logos) began as parts of God and were separated out of God (“emanated”) into specific creatures, “the archangels.” Thus all archangels were once God, as in, were once a part of his ontological substance, but at that time they weren’t archangels, they didn’t exist as separate beings. The moment they did come to exist as separate beings, as archangels, they no longer were “in God” and thus no longer God. So John 1 isn’t saying anything any Jewish angelologist would have objected to.
If Word means the rational order of the cosmos, analogous to the laws of physics, it is confusing and wrong to describe these laws as an entity.
Jewish angelology, deriving from Zoroastrian angelology (ditto their demonology), tracked pagan polytheism: each “god” (i.e. “angel” or “archangel,” since monolatry forbade assigning them the honorific term “god” but ontologically there is no difference between angels and other subordinate gods in any pantheon) had “an assignment.” Each commanded some aspect of the universe, and indeed their names often indicated their sphere.
The atheistic view that these are just metaphors for mindless forces and the like was scorned as sacrilegious by the believing (there is a really good survey of this fact in Plutarch’s
On Isis and Osiris; Plutarch likewise scoffs at the atheists and sides with the theological realists). Among believers, these were actual real personifications taking charge of those forces and things. This is why Paul speaks of “the elements of this world” as intelligent, demonic entities. He means that literally. I have a whole section on this in
OHJ with citations and examples, and scholarship cited (Element 36 and 37, Ch. 5).
So, the Logos, as Philo explains, is not just a metaphor for God’s “Reason,” God actually emanated it into an actual entity, “caused it to rise up as his firstborn son,” who is assigned top-ranking roles: commander of the cosmos, high priest of the celestial temple (the true one on high that the Bible says God showed Moses and that Moses used to construct the tabernacle as a cheap copy), and so on.
This entity was sometimes linked to Michael (whose name means “Who is like God,” i.e. the Image or Form of God) and the Metatron (see
Was Jesus-Is-Michael an Early Christian Mystery Teaching?). Hence for example, Jewish angelology typically held that all the cases where God is seen or physically interacted with in the Bible (the burning bush, the man Jacob wrestles originating the very name Israel, “he who wrestles with God,” the entity whose backside Moses peaks at on the mountain; yes, these are all things that actually happen in the Bible) that is actually The Angel of the Presence (Metatron), variously assumed to be Michael or Gabriel, whom God “speaks through” or “acts through” like a musical instrument.
The high theology of monotheism is about providing a consistent and coherent systematic explanation of reality.
That didn’t exist in antiquity. It was largely an invention of the medieval scholastics. In antiquity, in Judaism God is a being who lives in an actual house in outer space, somewhere in between the orbit of Saturn and the outer stars, and who only deigns to interact with the worlds below through agents he operates kind of like Cylons or Surrogates, called “angels” (messengers). There really was a rebellion of these angels (one legion of them under Satan), they really were cast down and locked out of higher orbits by crystal gates that require passwords to open. And so on.
This is not the abstract theism of modern Christianity. No such thing even existed then. Ancient monotheism was a bizarre menagerie of weird, incoherent superstitions and whackadoo beliefs. That is what Christianity began as.
So no, when the Christians say Jesus was the firstborn and Lord of all creation, they don’t mean an abstract concept or a metaphor. They mean a literal actual person, with physical location, and supernatural powers. As Philo explains, God can’t deign to get his hands dirty doing stuff, so he delegates. That’s why he made the angels. And thus when Paul says (as Philo says) the first angel created the world, they mean that literally: the entity described as carrying out the acts of creation in Genesis is not God directly, but this angel, carrying out God’s orders.
Likewise, when Paul says the rock that followed Moses in the wilderness was Jesus, he means that literally: Jesus came down to Earth back then and led the Jews as living water from a rock. And so on. (Note that among Jewish exegetes then, that rock was called Mary’s Well, after the sister of Moses, Mary; so the idea of Jesus emanating from Mary is already realized in Paul.)
This is why Marcion could come along and flip the script and claim this angel was actually Yahweh and bad, and the true God above was Jesus trying to break through to us to correct his delegate Yahweh’s mistakes; hence Marcion held that Jesus was the delegator, not the delegatee. This exactly reverses Paul’s theology, which was common Jewish theology, and converts it into a literal anti-semitic Christian sect whereby the Jewish God is essentially evil. These weren’t metaphors. Marcion meant all this literally. So did Paul mean his version literally. And everyone else then.
Richard Carrier January 22, 2023, 8:26 pm
