Early High Christology

In the early twentieth century, the History of Religions School, epitomized by Wilhelm Bousset's 1913 work Kyrios Christos, proposed that Jesus was originally viewed as a human teacher or eschatological prophet, gradually elevated to Lord and eventually to incarnate God under the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions and Roman imperial ruler-cult as the movement spread beyond its Jewish origins into the Gentile world.

This model dominated critical scholarship for decades and still echoes in popular accounts of Christian origins, including some versions of Bart Ehrman's work, which pictures a step-by-step development from an exalted human figure to a fully incarnate divine being.

Larry Hurtado reframed the debate by focusing not primarily on doctrinal statements but on devotional practice — what early Christians actually did in worship. In Lord Jesus Christ, he catalogs prayer to Jesus, hymn-singing, baptism in his name, and the Aramaic invocation 'Marana tha' as evidence of a 'binitarian' devotional pattern present from the movement's earliest, Jewish, Aramaic-speaking phase.

Hurtado's key methodological point is that religious historians should attend closely to what a community does in worship, since practice often reveals convictions more reliably, and earlier, than formal doctrinal statements, which take longer to develop precise technical vocabulary.

Richard Bauckham complemented Hurtado's practice-focused argument with a text-focused one, arguing that the earliest Christians included Jesus within, rather than alongside, the unique identity of the God of Israel, through texts like 1 Corinthians 8:6, which restructures the Shema itself. Bauckham's category of 'divine identity' bypasses debates over later Greek metaphysical categories (like 'nature' or 'substance'), focusing instead on Jewish categories of exclusive divine prerogatives such as creation and eschatological judgment.

This approach lets Bauckham argue that inclusion within the divine identity, evident from the earliest strata, already constitutes the substantive content later councils would articulate with greater philosophical precision, even though the technical vocabulary of homoousios came centuries later.

Central to both scholars' arguments is the observation that Second Temple Judaism guarded exclusive worship of YHWH with considerable seriousness, rejecting devotion even to exalted angelic mediators in numerous surviving texts. This context makes the emergence of cultic devotion to Jesus within a Jewish movement a genuinely remarkable and, on the evolutionary model, somewhat puzzling development.

Critics such as James Dunn have pushed back, arguing Second Temple Judaism contained more fluid categories for intermediary figures (Wisdom, Logos, exalted patriarchs like Enoch) than Hurtado and Bauckham allow, potentially making room for a more gradual and less dramatic development.

A crucial element of the debate concerns timing. Hurtado and Hengel argue that the compressed timeline — high Christological content already present in material datable to within two to five years of the crucifixion — leaves insufficient time for the kind of gradual religious syncretism the evolutionary model requires, especially given the movement's Jewish, not Hellenistic pagan, origin point.

Bart Ehrman's more moderate contemporary position accepts an early 'exaltation Christology' (Jesus becoming divine at his resurrection) within the earliest years, while still describing a subsequent development toward full incarnational theology over the following centuries. This position narrows, without eliminating, the gap between evolutionary and early-high-Christology models.

The debate has not produced full scholarly consensus. Disagreements persist over how to interpret specific texts (functional agency versus ontological deity), how rigid Second Temple Jewish monotheism actually was in practice, and how much weight to give arguments from silence about internal controversy in the earliest decades.

Even scholars broadly sympathetic to Hurtado and Bauckham, such as N.T. Wright, sometimes frame the historical data differently, emphasizing narrative and messianic categories over comparative religious-history methodology, showing that 'early high Christology' functions less as a single unified thesis and more as a family of related arguments.

The stakes of this debate extend beyond academic history. If early high Christology is correct, it substantially narrows the plausible window for purely naturalistic legendary development, requiring skeptical explanations to account for an extraordinarily rapid and theologically radical development within a resistant religious context. If the evolutionary model is correct, it supports a picture in which orthodox Christology represents a substantial later development from more modest origins.

A historically honest treatment recognizes that both models remain live scholarly options, argued by serious historians using careful methods, and that the evidence, while suggestive, does not compel certainty in either direction regarding the ultimate theological truth of the claims involved.