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Jesus – Son of
Yahweh?
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Mainstream, formal Christianity considers the
‘Father’ of the Holy Trinity to be Yahweh or Jehovah, the Old Testament God
of Israel. Indeed, some theologians consider Yahweh to be not just the
Father, but the entire Trinity. To support this view, they attempt
theological acrobatics to show that Jesus was himself revealed in the Old
Testament prior to his incarnation on the New. Whichever view you take on
this particular theological conundrum, Jesus is the
Son of Yahweh in Orthodox Christianity. |
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But not all early Christians, or later ones for
that matter, accepted this. 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. Whilst some theologians attempt to show
that El and Yahweh are one and the same, and they certainly do seem to have
been conflagrated, the evidence clearly suggests that this was not originally
the case. 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). This is not to say that the Father is El or
that El is actually the most High God. This is
itself just a belief of certain people at a certain time. According to
Marcion, the supreme God has not revealed His name. In fact, this is the
wrong question to ask and the wrong terminology to use. The ‘Father’ in
Christian terms is just a term used for the revelation of God to Israel and
then through Jesus to all nations. But the supreme ‘God’,
like the Vedic concept of Brahman, is ultimately unknowable, except through
his revelations to us. And he has been revealed to us in many ways, shapes and forms, each appropriate to a particular people,
place and time. Yahweh is just the tribal god of Israel. Jesus was and is one with the Logos or Word of
the unknowable supreme God, however you view their precise relationship. However,
that Supreme God is not Yahweh, even though he may have been revealed to the
people of Israel as such. 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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