A Jewish Incarnation

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.  John 1:14  NASB

Became flesh – Millard Erickson’s book The Word Became Flesh is an exercise in Trinitarian justification.  No effort is spared to prove that Jesus is the Second Person of the Godhead, equally God and fully human.  Erickson’s view is that this doctrine stands at the very heart of Christianity and has done so since the revelation of the Christ.  Without it, there really is no “Christian” faith.

However, it seems that even the earliest Christian thinkers weren’t quite so sure.  Justin Martyr, who was ultimately responsible for the invention of “heresy” precipitating the separation of Jewish practice from Christian theology, recognizes the Jewish interchangeability of terms associated with the Logos.  “God has begotten as a Beginning before all His creatures a kind of Reasonable Power from Himself, which is also called by the Holy Spirit the Glory of the Lord, and sometimes Son, and sometimes Wisdom, and sometimes Angel, and sometimes God, and sometimes Lord and Word” (Dialogue, 61:1).”  You will note that Justin does not describe this “Reasonable Power” as something separate from God, that is, as a different divine being, but rather as another way of expressing the characteristic of God’s manifestation in the human world.  It took another iteration of Christian orthodoxy to invent the Trinity.  According to this comment, all these terms are still God, the only God.  But Justin wanted separation and so he proceeded to attribute the powers associated with God in the Jewish world to the person of “Jesus,” thus initiating the Trinitarian trajectory.

Daniel Boyarin argues that we must read the Prologue of John from this Jewish perspective. “When the text announces in verse 14 that the “Word became flesh,’ this advent of the Logos is an iconic representation of the moment that the Christian narrative begins to diverge from the Jewish Koine and from its own nascent Christian kerygma, proclamation. . . The characteristic move that constructs what will become orthodox Christianity is, I think, the combination of Jewish messianic soteriology with equally Jewish Logos theology in the figure of Jesus.”[1]

“When the incarnate Logos speaks, he speaks Torah.  This point both ties the Gospel [John] as a whole much more tightly to the Prologue and supports the interpretation of the coming of Christ as a supplement to the Torah.  For John, as for that other most ‘Jewish’ of Gospels, Matthew—but in a very different manner—Jesus comes to fulfill the mission of Moses, not to displace it.”[2]

Boyarin’s point is that John’s Gospel is not only midrashic, it is completely Jewish.  There is no support whatsoever for Christian supersessionism or for Trinitarian theology.  “Jesus” is God’s second Moses, tasked to fulfill the original purpose of the first Moses, chosen as a divine agent displaying in “flesh and blood” what it means to live Torah.  Some not insignificant number of Jews in the first century recognized this and proclaimed him as the expected Messiah.  Some did not.  But even some Church fathers knew that Yeshua was an emissary of God, bringing Wisdom into the world once again.

It’s difficult to come to grips with this change in perspective.  The shift is enormous.  That the Messiah is a man, called like his predecessor Moses to God’s purpose, and not a divine being sent from heaven is difficult enough.  That he is Jewish in history, culture, and thought adds to the burden.  But once we recognize this crucial difference, we can perhaps answer the lingering question, “What is the role of the Messiah if he is not God?”

Boyarin replies, “to fulfill the mission of Moses.”  What is that mission?  Well, we’ll have to examine the entire Pentateuch in order to find the answer.  It certainly does not start with Matthew.

Topical Index: incarnation, Moses, became flesh, Boyarin, John 1:14

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 104.

[2]Ibid., p. 105.