The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God (1992 Barker), book

The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God (1992) is a book by Margaret Barker.

Abstract

Seeking to trace the origins of early Christian Christological and Trinitarian theology, Margaret Barker sets forth a bold thesis which demonstrates that the polytheistic traditions of Ancient Israel never fully died from the Jewish religious tradition religious but instead became reemployed, albeit in a modified way, in Christianity. Rather than seeing a Greco-Roman religious or philosophical influence on early Christianity, as most scholars had previously done, she situates the roots of Christology and Trinitarian thought squarely within a Jewish milieu. Employing evidence from the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, rabbinic writings, and patristic authors, she argues that the Trinitarian division between Father, Son (Logos), and Spirit (Sopia) had its origins in the ancient Israelite tradition that saw a distinct separation between El Elyon (the high God), and his son Yahweh (with both a male and a female aspect). In between the time of ancient Israel and the rise of early Christianity, she show how the early traditions of Yahweh were preserved within the Second Temple Period through intermediary angelic figures, such as the 'Son of Man,' but also, and most importantly, through the figures of Sophia and Logos. Implicit in her argument is that both the Pre-Exilic Period and Second Temple Period Judaism were not as monotheistic as scholars have suggested them to be. The works of Philo of Alexandria, and especially his discussions of Sophia and the Logos, provide the crowing jewel of her argument, as she herself puts it: "Philo shows beyond any doubt that the Judaism of the first Christian century acknowledged a second God" (131). Having advanced a provocative thesis, Barker's work continues to stimulate conversation and debate even today. ~Deborah Forger

_______________________________________

In this groundbreaking book, Barker claims that pre-Christian Judaism was not monotheistic and that the roots of Christian Trinitarian theology lie in a pre-Christian Palestinian belief about angels derived from the ancient religion of Israel. Barker's beliefs are based on canonical and deutero-canonical works and literature from Qumran and rabbinic sources. (Google Books)

Table of contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Son of God
• 3. The Evidence of the Exile
• 4. The Evidence of the Old Testament
• 5. The Evidence of Wisdom
• 6. The Evidence of the Angels
• 7. The Evidence of the Name
• 8. The Evidence of Philo
• 9. The Evidence of the Jewish Writers
• 10. The Evidence of the Gnostics
• 11. The Evidence of the First Christians
• 12. The Evidence of the New Testament

External links

• Google Books (partial text)