For many ancient and medieval Christian apologists Jewish Scripture and tradition, rightly understood, indicated hope for a divine messiah within an implicitly Trinitarian Judaism. This position could still be defended in later debate, as in the Judgment of the ancient Jewish Church against Unitarians by the Huguenot Peter Allix (London 1699). In the specialised biblical study which then grew up Jewish messianism came to be separated as a subject from New Testament Christology; but vestiges of the older outlook, notably as regards conceptions of a heavenly messiah, could survive in work on both. This tendency was encouraged in the nineteenth century by the recovery of the book of Enoch (I Enoch), providing a messianic interpretation of the heavenly Son of Man in Daniel to set beside the similar interpretation in II Esdras (IV Ezra). In the twentieth century, likewise, recognition of ‘high’ messianism received fresh impetus from texts discovered in the Qumran caves, including fragments (11Q13) on Melchizedek as ‘god’ (elohim) who will ‘judge in the midst of gods’ (Belial and associates), in the words of Psalm lxxxii.
Yet a widespread modern conviction has been that Jewish expectation of a human rather than divine messiah was matched by an only gradual Christian development, reflected in the New Testament, from low to higher Christology. Thus Adolf Harnack stressed the importance for early Christian thought of speculation on the messiah found in Jewish apocalypses, but stressed equally that the view ascribed to Trypho the Jew by Justin Martyr (Dial. 49.1) and noted in this book was indeed representative; the messiah might be given a supernatural background, but remained no more than, in Trypho's words, ‘a man descended from men’, a human being with God in heaven. On the other hand, after the Second World War, in tune with fresh investigation of Israelite divine kingship, a heavenly messiah with divine attributes was again being detected by some interpreters in Jewish sources; and in the 1970s the view that a correspondingly high Christology appeared very early among Christians was reasserted by Martin Hengel on the basis of Pauline chronology. In the following decades this opinion was endorsed by many. Some (including this reviewer, whose viewpoint should be declared) have argued that high New Testament Christology should once again be considered as an aspect of Jewish messianism. Among Jewish scholars, David Daube's argument from the 1950s that divine begetting could be envisaged in ancient Judaism has been matched in recent years by Daniel Boyarin on early Christian high Christology as essentially Jewish.
Ruben Bühner commends this approach by returning, against the background of recent scholarship, to New Testament depictions of a superhuman figure. In each instance discussed, he urges, they represent a messianic high Christology; they reflect aspects of Jewish messianic hope not fully endorsed by Justin's Trypho and probably disputed among ancient Jews, but attested in Jewish sources of the Second Temple period. The selected New Testament passages picture the exaltation of Christ (Philippians ii.6–11), the heavenly Christ (Mark xiv.62, in response to the high priest), the virginal conception (Luke i.26–38), the enthroned Lamb (Revelation iv–v), and the divine Word (the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel). For fuller presentation of evidence on messianism readers are referred to the author's work Hohe Messianologie: übermenschliche Aspekte eschatologischer Heilsgestalten im Frühjudentum (WUNT II/253, Tübingen 2020). The New Testament texts discussed here in the light of such evidence confirm, he argues, that New Testament ‘high’ Christology is above all a manifestation of ‘high’ Jewish messianism.
This particular argument is paramount. The book is not intended to give an outline of Christian messianic hope as reflected in the New Testament. Yet there is an attempt to discern distinctive aspects of Christian messianism. This is made partly in reaction to Boyarin's view that, although identification of Jesus as messiah is new, all other New Testament messianic belief is inherited from Judaism. Thus the Johannine incarnation of a pre-existent Logos and the New Testament importance of Christ's suffering are judged by Bühner to lack clear Jewish precedent, and he argues that the New Testament, unlike second-century Christian literature, does not reflect Jewish views of the messiah as an angelic being, for Christ is not termed angelos.
The principal argument for viewing New Testament teaching on Christ as an aspect of Jewish messianism is made with cumulative force. Perhaps it is not always shown how close to biblical texts a ‘high’ messianic interpretation could remain. Thus a contrast is drawn here between the divine Melchizedek of 11Q13 and the human Melchizedek described in Genesis, but the author of Hebrews (vii.3) was probably not the first to notice that Melchizedek stands out in Genesis as fatherless, motherless, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.
More broadly, the very force of the main argument for ‘high’ Jewish messianic thought underlines the careful qualification which accompanies Bühner's claims for some New Testament Christological features as unprecedented. Thus the Johannine incarnation of the pre-existent Logos is presented here as not wholly paralleled in Jewish messianic thought, although still only a variant of it. One aspect taken as unparalleled is the predicative use of theos, without the article, to describe the Logos (theos was the Logos, John i.1); C. H. Dodd's view that ‘theos was Sophia’ would be unthinkable in Jewish wisdom tradition is surprisingly cited (p. 153) as applying also to Logos in Judaism, without reference to Dodd's further argument that, by contrast, John i.1 does recall Philo's claim that theos without the article can be given as a title to God's ‘eldest Logos’ (Somn. i. 229–30). This claim indeed suits Philo's philosophical distinction between the invisible true God and his sometimes visible Logos, but it also suits the biblical allusions to the godlike great angel of the patriarchs and the exodus. Philo describes the Logos as God's first-begotten, eldest of the angels, as it were an archangel (Conf. 146), and ‘his angel the Logos’ (Somn. i. 239); compare Wisdom (xviii.15–16) and Revelation (xix.11–13), both discussed here, on the Logos manifest as a warrior-angel. Bühner's further argument for the absence of angel-Christology recognises angelomorphic conceptions of Christ in the New Testament, but lays weight on the absence of ‘angel’ as a title. Yet arguably Logos-Christology, implying the thought of a great angel, is a kind of angel-Christology.
Finally, second-century and later Christology figures here mainly as offering contrasts with earlier material. Continuity as well as difference might have been easier to see if further Jewish and Christian evidence outside the Second-Temple period had been admitted. Yet this New Testament study does not profess to deal with later developments. It is a concentrated, telling and informative argument for the Jewish messianic character of early high Christology.
