Jesus, Yahweh, and the Temple

Insights from Margaret Barker’s Temple Themes in Christian Worship: Part III

In my last post on Barker’s Temple Themes, I looked at how the early Christians expected a new Temple to be built for them to worship in. Jesus had restored the true doctrines of the First Temple, and the Christians expected him to rebuild a new, pure temple after the corrupt temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed.  In this post, I will look at chapter 4, “LORD AND CHRIST.” This is a powerful chapter which looks at just who the Christians believed they were worshipping and what relationship Jesus had with Yahweh (the LORD), and with the Temple.

Worshipping Jesus

How could a group of Jews worship Jesus when the God of Israel was Yahweh? It is obvious from Christian tradition, art, and literature that Jesus was certainly considered worthy of worship.  Barker cites the Epistle to the Hebrews as an example:

And let all the angels of God worship him (Heb 1:6).
Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they (1:4).

Barker notes that the angels were not the object of worship. They themselves worshipped the Son because he was greater than they, due to the Name which he had inherited. What was the name that Jesus inherited? It was the sacred name Yahweh (Jehovah).  This explains why Christians worshipped Jesus.

In Greek,  the New Testament calls Jesus “Kyrios Iesous,” meaning “Jesus is LORD.” The early Christians confessed that Jesus is Kyrios (Rom 10:9). The significance of this confession is that in the Greek Old Testament texts, which the early Christians would have used, Yahweh is always referred to as Kyrios (LORD). The Hebrew phrase “Yahweh Elohim” becomes “Kyrios the God” (Gen 2:4).  When Moses has his vision of the Lord in the Burning Bush, it would say in the Greek:

2 And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Kyrios:
3 And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Kyrios was I not known to them. (Exo 6:2-3).

Barker explains:

The earliest Christian proclamation of faith was Jesus is Kyrios, Jesus is Yahweh (p. 74).

Barker gives a number of evidences of Christ being worshipped as Yahweh, the God of Israel, including the fact that Christians saw the Psalms as praising Jesus and foretelling events of his life. She emphasizes that this should not be seen as an attempt to re-interpret the Psalms, but that Christians understood them in their original sense, as praise to Yahweh, who was Jesus.

Worship of a Human Being?

On page 76, Barker ponders the complicated question of how a group of Jews could have worshipped a human being as God? When the Emperor Caligula had tried to set up a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem, according to Josephus (Jewish War 2:184-5), the Jewish nation met his army with fierce resistance. This can be seen as strong rejection on the part of the Jews to the worship of a human being as god. 

We must remember, however, that Jesus was not seen as any ordinary human being–Jesus was Yahweh incarnate. Christ also represented the Father on Earth. There was precedence for this type of worship in Jewish tradition. In ancient times, Yahweh was represented in the temple by the high priest, who wore the four letters of the Name on his forehead (Exod 28:36, but notice that in the current text it says Holiness to the Lord, not YHWH).

 Barker cites Hecataeus, a Greek writer, as describing Jewish temple tradition:

‘The high priest…is an angel to them of God’s commandments’ and when he spoke, the Jews ‘immediately fall to the ground and worship the high priest as he explains the commandments to them’ (in Diodorus Siculus XI 3:5-6).

She compares this observation to the Jewish description of Simon the high priest, written in Jerusalem in about 200 BC:

When he emerged from the holy of holies he was like the morning star, like the sun shining on the temple; his very presence made the court of the temple glorious. When he had poured the libation, the trumpest sounded and “all the people together…fell to the ground upon their faces to worship (proskunein) their LORD (Kyrios)…” (ben Sira 50:17). The most natural way to read this is that they were worshipping the high priest, or rather, Yahweh whom he represented (p. 77).

Besides the high priest, it is likely that Israel’s kings were also recognized as representing Yahweh. As evidence for this, she cites 1 Chron 29:23 and also 29:20:

23 Then Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king instead of David his father, and prospered; and all Israel obeyed him.

20 And David said to all the congregation, Now bless the Lord your God. And all the congregation blessed the Lord God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshipped the Lord, and the king. 

God, But Not Most High

It is quite clear that humans could represent God on earth and even were worthy of some sort of worship or reverence as if they were God (representing him). But how could Jesus represent God if he was God? And why do we have Christians making statements to the effect that no one had seen the Father (John 6:46), and that the Jews had never heard the Father’s voice nor seen his form (John 5:37)? According to Barker:

John was emphatic that the One who appeared in the Old Testament was not God the Father but Jesus, before his incarnation (p. 79).

Barker then launches into a wonderful discussion of what she calls the “binitarian” nature of early Christian worship, referring to the fact that Christians worshipped both Jesus/Yahweh and the Father/God Most High. The root of this worship is the understanding that in Old Testament times, both deities were worshipped. This is the way in which the Christians read the Old Testament: as a record of God Most High and his Son Yahweh (see p. 79). She cites Philo, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus, as he expounded on Gen 31:13:

For just as those who are unable to see the sun itself see the gleam of the parhelion and take it for the sun, and take the halo round the moon for that luminary itself, so some regard the Image of God, the Angel His Logos, as His very Self (On Dreams 1:239)(p. 79).

Philo was correcting some who had mistakenly identified the Logos as God Most High. For Philo, the Logos could be called God, but was the Second God (for much more on Philo, see related chapter in Margaret Barker’s The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (Louisville: W/KJP, 1992), which is an excellent book and was my introduction to M. Barker).

Barker explains how our current version of Deut 32:8 has been altered in a way that it no longer reflects the original belief concerning the sons of God. Our current version tells of how God Most High divided up the nations “according to the number of the children (sons) of Israel.” According to a Hebrew text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran (The Song of Moses, see here), the nations were divided up according to “the sons of Elohim.” This agrees more fully with the Greek Old Testament (LXX) version which has “the angels of God.” Barker notes:

When God Most High assigned the nations to the sons of God, he gave Jacob into the care of Yahweh. This implies that Yahweh was the Son of God most High. (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Eusebius, a Christian historian writing in the fourth century, understood this verse in the same way:

In these words (Moses) names first God Most High, the Supreme God of the universe, and then as LORD, his Word, Whom we call LORD in the second degree after the God of the universe (Proof of the Gospel IV:9)(p. 80).

In Clementine Recognitions II:42, Peter explains the role of the sons of God:

For every nation has an angel to whom God has committed the government of that nation; and when one of these appears, although he be thought and called God by those over whom he presides, yet being asked he does not give such a testimony to himself. For the Most High God, who alone holds the power of all things, has divided the nations of the earth inot seventy two parts and over thse he has appointed angels as princes. But to the one among the archangels who is the greatest, was committed the government of those who, before all others, received the worship and knowledge of the Most High (p. 80).

Christ was seen as the greatest of the angels, who was given Israel as his jurisdiction by God. This Angel was known as both Yahweh and “the Angel of Yahweh” in the Old Testament. This is the Being who had appeared to the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel. Justin explained:

Then neither Abraham nor Isaac nor Jacob nor any other man ever saw the Father and Ineffable LORD of all things and of Christ Himself; but (they saw) Him who according to his will, is both God his Son, and his Angel from ministering to his will (Trypho 127)(p. 81).

Origen knew that Christ, the Son, was “not simply an angel, but the Angel of Great Counsel” (Celsus 5:53). This was no Christian innovation–the Jews also knew this figure, and, according to Eusebius, knew that the Angel of Great Counsel was the Messiah (Preparation VII:14-5). In Isaiah 9:6, where the promised child is called in the Hebrew Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, etc., the Greek version simply calls him “the Angel of Great Counsel.”

Barker notes:

There is no doubt that Jesus was recognized and proclaimed as Yahweh, the LORD, the Son of Gopd Most High…According to Eusebius, the Hebrews had believed that the Angel of Great Counsel was the Messiah; the difference between Jews and Christians was that the Jews did not accept that Jesus had been the Messiah, that the Angel had already come. This implies that belief in the Second Person was not uniqe to Christian; the problem was the identity of the Second Person.

This understanding was prevalent in early Christianity, and Barker gives many more examples of how Christ was seen as the God of the Old Testament, but separate and subordinate to the Most High God, His Father. Again, she goes into great depth on this topic in her earlier book, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God.

Representing the Heavenly on Earth: The Temple (to be continued…)

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