Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.

• Author: Burkett, Delbert
• Position: Book Review

Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. By LARRY W. HURTADO. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 2003. Pp. xxii + 746. $55.

In this study, Larry Hurtado aims to offer "a full-scale analysis of the origin, development, and diversification of devotion to Christ in the crucial first two centuries of the Christian movement (ca. 30-170 C.E.)" (p. 2). By "devotion to Christ" he means not only beliefs about Jesus, but also related devotional practices. These include addressing Jesus in prayer; invoking and confessing Jesus as Lord; using Jesus' name in baptism, healing, and exorcism; communing with Jesus in the Lord's Supper; celebrating Jesus in hymns; and speaking prophetic messages attributed to Jesus.

Through this analysis, Hurtado wants to make three main points: 1) devotion to Jesus emerged at the beginning of the Christian movement, not as a secondary stage of development; 2) the intensity and diversity of this devotion to Jesus has no analogy in the religious environment of the time; and 3) this devotion to Jesus, which included reverencing him as divine, occurred within a stance of exclusivist monotheism, especially among the precursors of mainstream Christianity (p. 2). In arguing these points, Hurtado hopes to counter the views of Wilhelm Bousset, expressed in his influential book of 1913, Kyrios Christos. Specifically, Hurtado takes issue with Bousset's view that devotion to Jesus as a divine figure does not go back to Jesus' earliest followers in Palestine, but emerged with a "Christ cult" as a second-stage development among Gentile Christians, who were influenced by pagan analogies of divine heroes and cult deities. In actuality, Hurtado's book contains a great deal more than is necessary to interact with Bousset and reads for the most part as a survey of devotion to Jesus down to 170 C.E.

In opposing Bousset's theory that Jesus' divine status arose from pagan influence, Hurtado offers his own theory of the historical forces and factors that shaped devotion to Jesus as a divine figure (chapter one). He argues that early Jewish Christians, while adhering to monotheism, reconfigured Jewish monotheistic practice to include Jesus with God as a recipient of worship. This phenomenon had no analogy in the Jewish religion of the period, but constituted a new adaptation of the Jewish tradition from within. The constraint of monotheism caused this devotion to emerge in a pattern that was not...