Book Notes: God Crucified by Richard Bauckham

If you are unfortunate enough to know anyone who takes Dan Brown remotely seriously, this little book may be the antidote! This book actually pre-dates the Da Vinci Code, and so is not written as a direct response to it in any way. In fact, it does not address many of the issues raised by that film and book (such as it's reliance on discredited sources, and historical innacuracies). The link between the two is that while Brown forwards the line that Jesus was only worshipped as divine when Constantine sought to forward the Trinitarian view for political reasons; Bauckham shows that the deity of Christ was proclaimed by the earliest Christians.

Bauckham goes about this task by demonstrating that amongst some of the earliest Christian texts, such as passages in the Synoptic gospels, 1 Corinthians and others; there is a growing use of divine names, functions and adoration applied to Christ; by Jewish believers, who also maintained Old Testament Monotheism, and Monolatry. This tendency grows in the later New Testament, John's gospel, Colossians and Hebrews especially. Bauckham, who is New Testament prof at St Andrews, includes a special study of the early Christian's use of the last sections of Isaiah (deutero, and Trito -if you dig those distinctions!). He shows that the first Christians vocabulary about Jesus is directly raided from Isaiah's words about God. As this is done in a monotheistic way, Bauckham shows that the New Testament presents inherent Trinitarianism, awaiting the technical vocabulary that the debates of later centuries gave it.

This book is a transcript of the 1996 Didsbury lectures which Prof Bauckham was invited to give, and is published in the UK by Paternoster.

The later documents, gnostic gospels and the like, present a move away from these early ideas - and the recasting of the gospel story in Hellenistic terms. In 97, nicely written pages, Bauckham calls us back to the source, the original and authentic Jesus.