King and Messiah as Son of God (2008 Yarbro Collins, Collins), book

King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature is a book by Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins.

Abstract

An expanded version of the Speakers Lectures given at Oxford in 2006, Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins here want to situate the concept of a divine Christ wholly within the fluid and changing Jewish conceptions of the messiah in Second Temple Judaism and drawn from Jewish antecedents about the "son of God" and the "son of Man." The book is divided in half – John Collins is responsible for the first four chapters; Adela Yarbro Collins for the final four.

"This book traces the history of the idea that the king and later the messiah is Son of God, from its origins in ancient Near Eastern royal ideology to its Christian appropriation in the New Testament." "Both highly regarded scholars, Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins argue that Jesus was called "the Son of God" precisely because he was believed to be the messianic king. This belief and tradition, they contend, led to the identification of Jesus as preexistent, personified Wisdom, or a heavenly being in the New Testament canon. However, the titles Jesus is given are historical titles tracing back to Egyptian New Kingdom ideology. Therefore the title "Son of God" is likely solely messianic and not literal. King and Messiah as Son of God is distinctive in its range, spanning both Testaments and informed by ancient Near Eastern literature and Jewish noncanonical literature."--Publisher description.

"The first part of the book is a continuation of John J. Collins' previous works, especially The Scepter and the Star, setting out the Biblical and second temple precursors to the notion of a divine messiah. While during the “Heyday of the monarchy” the king could be conceived of in mythological language as the son of God, it was only until the Hellenistic period when we begin to find strong claims about the divinity of the future king. Much focus is placed on the Dead Sea Scrolls, where we begin to see a “revival of messianic expectation,” where often the messiah is depicted as a son of God, as seen in 4Q174, 1QSa, and 4Q246. Most important to the concept of the divine messiah, however, was in the reinterpretation of messianic expectation in light of Daniel 7. The fact that the Similitudes of Enoch and 4 Ezra independently hold many common assumptions about the interpretation of Dan 7 points to a widespread interpretation tradition of Daniel around the turn of the era, an interpretation which would be followed by the Gospels. In the second part of the book Yarbro Collins begins by discussing Paul’s depiction of Jesus as son of God being closely connected to his status as the messiah. While he was aware of the concept of Jesus’ being interpreted as Daniel’s one like a son of man, he chooses to use the epithet son of God, which would have been more comprehensible to his gentile audience than son of Man. While Jesus is sometimes seen as preexistent in Paul’s letters, the Synoptic Gospels never portray him as such, even if he may be presented as a divine, heavenly messiah. John will go on to elaborate on the Synoptic notion of the divine sonship of Jesus by identifying him with the (Middle Platonic) Logos or preexistent Wisdom. Both the Gospel of John and Revelation agree that Jesus is a heavenly messiah, Son of God, Son of Man; and both associate Jesus with the tradition of preexistent Wisdom / Logos, but while the Gospel portrays Jesus as the philosophical Logos, the personified Wisdom as an emanation of God, Revelation chooses instead to portray Jesus along the lines of the LXX version of Prov 8:22, as the first creation of God, as God’s principal angel. The overarching purpose of the book is to show that all of the various depictions of Jesus in the New Testament have their roots in Jewish biblical and second temple literature, and that there is no need to look outside to the non-Jewish Hellenistic world for influences that led to the notion of Jesus as a divine messianic figure."–-Jason Zurawski, University of Michigan

Editions

Published in Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Contents

• 1. The King as Son of God
• 2. The Kingship in Deuteronomistic and Prophetic Literature
• 3. Messiah and Son of God in the Hellenistic Period
• 4. Messiah and Son of Man
• 5. Jesus as Messiah and Son of God in the Letters of Paul
• 6. Jesus as Messiah and Son of God in the Synoptic Gospels
• 7. Jesus as Son of Man
• 8. Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man in the Gospel and Revelation of John
• Conclusion

External links

Google Books (partial text)