Stanley E. PORTER and Bryan R. DYER, Origins of New Testament Christology: An Introduction to the Traditions and Titles Applied to Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023. ix + 278 pages, $30.49 pb. ISBN 9780801098710. Reviewed by Elvir CICEKLIC, Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach FL 33401.

How did Jesus become God? This controversial question dominates the field of New Testament Christology. But it misses the point. It is actually an impossible question to ask, especial from the perspective of historical method. A better question to ask concerning the New Testament’s depiction of Christology is, “how did Jesus and his followers express his divinity by means of these sacred traditions?” (236). The question of how Jesus became God insinuates a metaphysical claim that requires hermeneutical tools and questions that extend beyond historical premises. Rather, we can only ask the epistemological question of how did Jesus and the early church express their beliefs about Jesus’s divinity. This is the task of Stanley E. Porter and Bryan R. Dyer’s new work Origins of New Testament Christology.

This work serves a dual function of being an introduction for students (i.e., it is in the subtitles) into the scholarly world of New Testament Christology and an academic argument that contributes to and can be properly situated within the larger conversation regarding Christology. This is an ancient conversation made modern that revolves around the fundamental question was Jesus divine or not? The answer to this question and its warrant ranges ontologically, functionally, or relationally on a spectrum of low (so called “adoptionism”) to high (so called “orthodox”) Christologies. Where one begins the conversation depends on their suppositions.

The authors enter into the conversation by unpacking eleven Christological titles that either have been attributed to Jesus himself or by others. These titles include lord, prophet, Son of Man, Son of God, suffering servant, paschal lamb, messiah, savior, last Adam, Word, and high priest. The methodology by which they expound on these titles are through sacred and cultural traditions. They write, “In this book we ask the question of what traditions or previous cultural thought the New Testament writers drew from as they attempted to address the question of Jesus’s identity” (xx). The two worlds of tradition that they explore in their analysis of New Testament Christology are the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman backgrounds. Some titles refer more or solely to one world than the other (e.g., suffering servant relies on the traditions in the OT and its relation to the suffering of the messiah in Second Temple Jewish thought because of its distinctive theme), while other titles rely heavily, if not equally, on notions from both world traditions (e.g., Jesus the Word referring to the Logos tradition in the Greco-Roman world and the Sophia tradition in Jewish Wisdom literature).

This work provides readers with many biblical and theological gems throughout. The most precious of all is the conviction that the church throughout history, going as far back as its earliest applied traditions, has seen Jesus as God. The questions of when or how Jesus became God is not prevalent for the New Testament writers. They saw that Jesus is God, and they searched their sacred traditions (Jewish world) and appropriated the culture they were embedded (Greco-Roman world) to provide a language to describe who Jesus is. There are many different uses of this book for many different Christians. It can be used as an entry point to Christology for students, or serve as an interesting interlocutor for a biblical scholar, or each chapter can serve the pastor of a church who intends to preach on the identity of Jesus the Christ to their church. But above all, this book can serve the theological purpose, like many of the early Christological debates in the past, of moving the church into a deeper contemplation and worship of the triune God. For the identity of Jesus as God expresses a profound truth that impacts the rest of reality: “[Jesus] is one with the God of Israel” (228).