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Jesus – Son
of Yahweh?
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Unlike mainstream Judeao-Christianity,
the EFC does not consider the Old Testament to be an important part of our
religious tradition. This is because it is mainly the story of the ancient
Israelites as they developed into Jews and not that of the Anglo Saxon
English people. Parts of the Old Testament, especially the early parts of
Genesis, do contain elements of a wider mythology which may be of relevance
to us. And other parts may be useful simply to study. But it is not our
story. We see Jesus as the incarnate ‘Word’ (Logos) of
God. The Logos has spoken, and continues to speak, to all peoples in
different ways and by different means. But we do not equate ‘God’ with Yahweh
who we see as the tribal Guardian of the Israelites. Neither do we see Jesus
as the Jewish Messiah foretold in the Old Testament. |
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However, this approach does raise the important
question of Jesus’ relationship to the Old Testament and to Yahweh, the God
of Israel. Orthodox Christianity has gone to great lengths to show that Jesus
is not only foreseen in the Old Testament but that he is the awaited Messiah.
Indeed, Jesus’ actual name is derived from the Hebrew ‘Yehoshua’
or its diminutive ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Yahshua’.
The names means to ‘cry to God (Yahweh) for help’ or ‘Yahweh rescues or
delivers.’ Whilst only Matthew and
Luke have nativity stories, they both tell of an Angel instructing Mary that
the child must be called Yehoshua, so it must be
important. It certainly seems to support the Judeao-Christian theology that
not only is Jesus ‘God’, but that ‘God’ is Yahweh. Jesus is seen as
implacably a part of the Old Testament and the Old Testament a vital part of
the Christian religion and foreshadowing of the incarnation of Yahweh as
Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, the story may simply have been made up
specifically to make this link! But not all early Christians, or later ones for
that matter, accepted this link. One of the earliest and best known of these
was Marcion of Sinope who lived around 85 to 165
AD. He expressly and emphatically rejected that Yahweh was ‘God the Father’.
This was because he found that the teachings of Jesus were at odds with the
actions of Yahweh as written down in the Old Testament. Marcionites
rejected the Old Testament on the basis that its
God, Yahweh, was a violent, false God and even rejected large parts of the
New Testament on the same grounds. Furthermore, Yahweh is not the only ‘God of
Israel’ mentioned in the Old Testament. It also refers to ‘El’, who was
originally a Canaanite deity who came to be worshipped by the Israelites and
is well attested to in the Bible. Many
academics believe that parts of the Old Testament have been cobbled together
from two separate texts representing different traditions, the Yahwist and
the Elhoist. There is a great deal of evidence in the texts
to support this view. The very name ‘Israel’, which means ‘may El persevere’,
includes ‘El’ but not ‘Yahweh’. In Genesis 35: 9-15, we see Jacob being given
this name through the blessing of ‘El Shaddai’, that is God Almighty. There
are also many similarities between descriptions for El in the Canaanite texts
and those used for Yahweh in the biblical sources (1). In the oldest literary traditions of the
Pentateuch, there are more references to God as El than as Yahweh. El is
identified as the deity to whom many of the early patriarchal shrines and
altars were built. For example, in Genesis 33: 20, Jacob builds an altar in Shechem and dedicates it to “El, God of Israel”. In
Genesis 17: 1, it is written that “Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him:
“I am El Shaddai.” Exodus 6: 2-3 states, “I am Yahweh. And I appeared to
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, and I was not known to them by
the name Yahweh.” Furthermore, Yahweh was originally presented as
being subordinate to El. Deuteronomy 32: 8-9 presents Yahweh as merely one of
El’s council! “When the Most High (’elyôn)
gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated humanity, he fixed
the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of divine beings. For
Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted
heritage.” So, El is presented as the Most High who gave
each deity in the divine council their own nation. Israel was the nation that
Yahweh received. But Yahweh was allotted this nation by El, ‘the Most High.’
Yahweh is simply one of the deities within the divine council of El. Other
biblical passages support this view. Psalm 82: 1 speaks of the “assembly of
El.” Psalm 29: 1 enjoins “the sons of El” to worship Yahweh and Psalm 89: 6-7
lists Yahweh among El’s divine council. Over time, the Israelites came to see or depict
their tribal god as the supreme deity, even the only deity, and to absorb the
imagery of El into Yahweh. Even the name ‘El’ came to mean simply “God,” so
that Yahweh was then directly identified as El. Thus in Joshua 22: 22: “the
God of Gods is Yahweh” (’el ’elohim yhwh). The EFC does believe that the story of the
divine Council is a true revelation from God. Whilst it is possible that the Urgaritic people did have a direct revelation from the
supreme God in El, this does not necessarily follow. According to Marcion, the supreme God has not revealed His name.
However, it clearly shows that Yahweh is not that God! The EFC sees Jesus as the incarnation of the
one true God. We do not equate this God to either El or Yahweh. We do not
dispute that Jesus was born into a Jewish world, where Yahweh was equated
with the one God. ‘Yehoshua’ was actually a common
name in Judea in the time of Christ. As Yahweh was equated with the one God
in that culture, so the name had come to mean ‘Salvation through God’ as God
was understood in that time and place – Yahweh. The story in the bible about
the naming of Jesus simply reflects these cultural associations. 1.
See: F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of
the Religion of Israel (Harvard University Press 1973); M. Smith, The Early
History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Eerdmans
1990); and W. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel
(Eerdmans 2008). |
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