Philo’s “second God” is not the gotcha
Let’s deal honestly with the text. Philo really does call the Logos the “second God.” An example of this is mentioned in “Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.62″, commenting on Genesis 9:6, Philo writes:
“For nothing mortal can be made in the likeness of the most high One and Father of the universe but (only) in that of the second God, who is His Logos.”
There it is. No need to hide it. Philo uses the expression deuteros theos. And yes, Philo also uses language that is strongly subordinating. The Logos is God’s intermediary. God is supreme. The Logos is described as God’s instrument. Philo calls him firstborn, image, Word, and mediator. In “Who Is the Heir of Divine Things” Page 205–206, Philo even describes the Logos as standing between Creator and creation. So, Jake concludes: “There you go. The Logos is subordinate. Therefore this has nothing to do with the later Christian doctrine of the Trinity.” But notice what has happened. The argument has successfully demonstrated that Philo is not Nicene. Nobody disagreed. What it has not demonstrated is that Philo is irrelevant to the history of Jewish and Christian Logos theology. Those are completely different claims.
Alan F. Segal’s “Two Powers in Heaven” is particularly important here. In his discussion of Philo, Segal observes that Philo “unabashedly calls the logos a ‘second God’” and argues that Philo’s system was attempting to preserve God’s transcendence and immutability while still accounting for divine interaction with the world. (OUP Academic). That is precisely the point. The question isn’t whether Philo is Nicene. The question is why a Jewish monotheist could use this kind of language in the first place. “Second God” does not automatically equal “polytheism”.
Here’s the elephant in the room. If ancient Jewish monotheism required an absolutely solitary conception of God in which no divine agent could ever receive divine terminology, Philo becomes extremely difficult to explain. But Philo is not sitting there worrying about our modern theological categories. He can speak of the Most High God while simultaneously describing the Logos as God’s divine intermediary. Segal explains the problem nicely. Discussing Philo’s approach to divine mediation, he writes that Philo was:
“reluctant to conceive of a pure, eternal God who participates directly in the affairs of the corruptible world.” (Two Powers in Heaven, page 165).
There is the key. Philo’s problem is not: “How can I invent another god?” His problem is: “How can the transcendent God interact with a corruptible creation without compromising divine transcendence?” His answer involves mediation through the Logos. That doesn’t give us Nicene Trinitarianism. But it certainly gives us something historically important. The Logos occupies an extraordinary position and Philo’s language becomes even more interesting when he says that the Logos is:
“neither being uncreate as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities.”(Who Is the Heir, page 205–206)
That is a fascinating statement. It seems like Jake wants to force Philo into a binary: God or creature…. But Philo himself gives us something more complicated. The Logos is neither simply identical with the transcendent God nor simply one ordinary creature among others. Whatever we ultimately make of Philo’s metaphysics, that is not modern Unitarianism! And this is where David Runia’s work becomes particularly valuable. Runia’s “Philo in Early Christian Literature” is not merely a collection of quotations. It is a detailed study of how Christian authors actually received and employed Philo. And Runia’s conclusion is worth quoting. He writes:
“The importance of Philo’s contribution to Patristic thought lies above all in his role as a mediator between the biblical and the philosophical tradition.” (Philo in Early Christian Literature, page 339).
That is a wonderfully useful sentence for this discussion. Philo was not a Christian. But he stood at an intellectual crossroads. Biblical Judaism on one side and Hellenistic philosophy on the other. And early Christianity emerged in that world. That doesn’t mean Christianity simply copied Philo. It means the intellectual soil was already there. The Logos was not an afterthought, but it seems like Philo repeatedly places the Logos within his account of creation. In “On the Creation” and related works, God’s Logos is associated with the divine ordering of the cosmos (Please keep this in mind!). Philo famously describes the Logos as God’s “shadow” and as the instrument through which the world is ordered. He writes:
“the shadow of God is his word, which he used like an instrument when he was making the world.” (Allegorical Interpretation 3.96).
Now compare the conceptual territory with John 1. John doesn’t simply say: “God existed.” No, John says: “In the beginning was the Word.” And then: “All things were made through him.” And finally, “The Word became flesh.” John is not merely repeating Philo. But neither is John speaking into an intellectual vacuum. He is taking categories already circulating in Jewish and Hellenistic thought and making a breathtakingly Christian claim about them.
Philo’s rejection of incarnation proves exactly what it proves
The author makes much of Philo’s insistence that God does not descend into the realm of human senses but acts through divine Words and angels. Again, correct. Philo does not believe in the Incarnation. But Philo is not a Christian. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Jake has essentially discovered that Philo does not believe in Jesus and presented it as a problem for Christianity. That’s like discovering that Socrates didn’t believe in the resurrection and concluding that Paul therefore copied Socrates. What is key is that it is Philo’s transcendence theology actually helps explain the problem that Christianity later addresses. “How can the transcendent God reveal himself?” “How can the invisible God interact with creation?” “How can God’s Word be active in the world without compromising divine transcendence?” Philo answers: through the Logos.... but John also answers: through the Logos—and that Logos became flesh. That is development. Not necessarily invention. Not Bidah as Jake mentioned.
Two Powers in Heaven: the chronology matters
Now we get to the “Two Powers” material. And here we need to be more careful than either side sometimes is. I know a lot of times this concept is used to emphasize some understanding of early plurality and distinction within the One God. But it is important to understand that the rabbinic phrase “Two Powers in Heaven” belongs particularly to later rabbinic discussions. Ok, next point…no just teasing… Because it belongs to a later rabbinic discussion, we shouldn’t lazily take every Jewish reference to heavenly agency and throw it into a giant theological bucket labeled: TWO POWERS™ Historical theology deserves better than that. But the later rabbinic rejection is still extraordinarily significant. Why?
Because it demonstrates that Jewish interpreters eventually regarded certain understandings of heavenly plurality as sufficiently dangerous to require polemical exclusion. Segal’s argument is especially important here. He describes the “two powers” category as a very early category of heresy and devotes a substantial section of his work to Philo. He concludes that traditions involving a second heavenly figure were not simply invented by fourth-century Christians. (OUP Academic). And his discussion of Philo is devastating to the simplistic claim that such concepts were inherently impossible within Jewish monotheism. Segal explicitly notes:
“Real traditions of a ‘second God’ were present in Judaism as early as the time of Philo.” (Two Powers in Heaven, page 163–164).
That sentence needs to be taken seriously. Not because Segal has somehow proved the Trinity. He hasn’t. But because the historical argument being made against Philo requires precisely the opposite conclusion. The issue is not whether Philo was orthodox by later standards. This is where historical methodology matters. Suppose someone says that, “Philo wasn’t orthodox according to Nicene Christianity.” Fine. But that tells us almost nothing. Of course he wasn’t. The Nicene Creed did not yet exist. The Cappadocian terminology did not yet exist. The theological controversies that forced later precision had not yet occurred. We therefore have to resist what I like to call retroactive theological grading. Philo submits his first-century essay. Four centuries later, the professor writes that, “Unfortunately, Philo failed to use homoousios. 47%.”
That isn’t history. The proper question is: “What conceptual resources were available before Christianity and what did Christians do with them?” And Philo is extremely relevant to that question. The Christian reception of Philo is not accidental. Jake’s own evidence is fascinating. Clement admired Philo. Origen valued him. Eusebius quoted him extensively. Jerome incorporated him into his discussion of ecclesiastical writers. The author then says, essentially: “Yes, Christians liked Philo, but Philo wasn’t Nicene.”
Again: correct but irrelevant. The interesting question is why Christian theologians found Philo useful. Runia’s study is especially valuable here because he traces the actual reception of Philo among Christian writers. His research shows that Philo functioned for early Christians as a source of biblical interpretation, philosophical theology, and apologetic material. (IUScholarWorks). So, when Clement and Origen use Philo, we aren’t looking at random Christian men who accidentally discovered a Jewish philosopher on Amazon. They were working within a broader intellectual tradition.
Justin Martyr makes the comparison even more interesting
Once we move from Philo into Justin Martyr, the similarities become impossible to ignore. Justin speaks of the Logos in ways that distinguish the Logos from the Father while nevertheless giving the Logos divine status. In Dialogue with Trypho 56, Justin writes:
“There is, and there is a God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things.”
Justin then identifies this figure with the Logos and the divine messenger. Again, this is not Nicene Christianity. But it is also emphatically not modern Unitarianism (Just saying)… And that matters. The conceptual trajectory is becoming visible. Jewish Scripture gives us divine Word, Wisdom, Spirit, heavenly agents and exalted figures. Philo develops Logos theology within Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy. Justin identifies the Logos with Christ…. John identifies the Logos with the incarnate Christ. Later Christian theologians are then forced to ask: How can Father and Son both be spoken of as divine while Christianity remains monotheistic? And that question eventually contributes to the Trinitarian debates.
The real problem is the false binary. It seems to me that Jake’s argument repeatedly assumes: Either the Father and Logos are the same person, or they are two gods. But Christianity’s entire theological project is built around rejecting that binary. Father and Son are distinct. Yet there is one God. The New Testament itself forces the Church to hold these truths together. The Father sends the Son. The Son prays to the Father. The Father glorifies the Son. The Son shares divine glory. The Spirit is sent. The Spirit searches the depths of God. The Spirit can be grieved. The Church therefore has a theological problem long before it has a technical vocabulary. Nicaea didn’t invent the problem. Nicaea tried to answer it. And now Philo becomes historically interesting
Philo doesn’t solve the Christian problem. But he demonstrates that a Jewish thinker could speak about God’s Logos in remarkably exalted terms without concluding that Judaism had abandoned monotheism. That is the point. The author wants Philo’s subordinationism to function as a refutation of Trinitarian development. But subordinationism actually tells us something more nuanced. It shows that Jewish monotheistic thought was already discussing distinction and divine agency. The later Christian debate was not: “Can God have any kind of distinction whatsoever?” That question had already been encountered. The Christian question became: “What exactly is the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit, and how can these distinctions be articulated without dividing the one God?”. That is a much more complicated question.
We should also resist overstating Philo… And here I want to give Jake one point (PING!). Philo should not be turned into a secret Trinitarian. He isn’t. His Logos is subordinate in ways that later Nicene theology explicitly rejects. His metaphysics are shaped heavily by Middle Platonism. His understanding of divine transcendence is not identical to the biblical doctrine of the Incarnation. His “powers” cannot simply be equated with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So if somebody says: “Philo proves the Trinity,” the answer should be; “Nope…. He doesn’t”. But if somebody says: “Philo proves that ancient Jewish monotheism had absolutely no conceptual room for an exalted divine Logos distinct from God,” that is equally indefensible.
The Old Testament question is therefore still open…. This also means the argument from silence about the Old Testament doesn’t work. The Old Testament does not contain the Nicene Creed. Of course it doesn’t. Nobody expects Moses to have written: “We believe in one God eternally existing in three co-equal, co-eternal persons…” That is not how doctrinal development works. The question is whether the Old Testament contains the raw materials later interpreted christologically. And here we encounter:
The Angel of the Lord. The divine Word. Divine Wisdom. The Spirit of God. The divine Name (Psalm 110; Daniel 7). The heavenly council. Exalted heavenly figures. These texts do not independently prove Nicene Trinitarianism. But they create precisely the kind of exegetical questions that later Jewish and Christian interpreters had to address. So what does Philo actually prove? Let’s keep our claims disciplined. Philo does not prove that he was a Trinitarian. Philo does not prove that Moses explicitly taught Nicene theology. Philo does not give us homoousios. Philo does not give us the Cappadocian distinction between ousia and hypostasis. And nobody needs him to. What Philo does demonstrate is considerably more modest, and considerably more useful.
A Jewish monotheist could speak of: God’s Logos. God’s image. God’s intermediary. God’s creative Word. A “second God.” A divine agent standing between Creator and creation. And he could do so without simply abandoning his commitment to the supreme God. That is historically important.
Development is not invention
This is ultimately where the argument goes wrong. The existence of later doctrinal development is repeatedly treated as evidence that the doctrine itself was invented later. But those are not the same thing. A doctrine can be developed in terminology without being invented in substance. The Church needed new vocabulary because old controversies forced increasingly precise answers. That’s why homoousios became important. That’s why the Cappadocians became important. That’s why later Trinitarian theology became much more technically sophisticated. The vocabulary developed because the questions were already there. The final irony is that Jake has uncovered much of the evidence needed for the more nuanced conclusion! Let me show you how… Let’s take Philo; he speaks of the Logos. Places the Logos in relation to creation. He calls the Logos God’s image. Describes the Logos as mediator. He calls the Logos “second God” and distinguishes the Logos from the transcendent Father. And is subsequently read with enormous interest by Christian theologians. Then comes the conclusion:
“Therefore Philo doesn’t help.” Well… he doesn’t give us the Trinity. But that’s not what he needed to do. Philo gives us something Christianity actually needed; a Jewish-Hellenistic conceptual vocabulary for discussing God’s transcendence and his active self-expression through his Logos. Then John takes that vocabulary and detonates it….. “In the beginning was the Word.” And then comes the Christian thunderbolt…. “The Word became flesh.” That is where Philo stops. Philo’s idea is simply a bridge! That is where Christianity makes its radically Christian claim. So if the argument is that “Philo was not a fourth-century Nicene Christian,” I happily agree. But if the argument is rather that “Therefore Second Temple Judaism contained no conceptual space for a distinction involving God’s own Word, agency or heavenly identity, and therefore Christian high Christology must have been invented centuries later,” then the evidence simply refuses to cooperate. Philo isn’t the roadblock. He’s one of the roads.
And once we follow that road through Jewish Wisdom traditions, divine agency, the Angel of the Lord, Daniel 7, Psalm 110, apocalyptic traditions, Philo, John, Justin and the early Christian Fathers, the historical landscape becomes considerably more complicated than just to say “One God means one divine person, therefore Trinity impossible.” That argument sounds tidy.
History, unfortunately, is rarely that cooperative. And Philo is one reason why. The Problem once more is that Jake repeatedly turns qualified scholarly observations into conclusions the scholars themselves do not warrant. And there is a rather amusing problem here: Jake wants to argue that the Jewish material is simultaneously too Jewish to be Trinitarian and yet so irrelevant that we can simply ignore the fact that it supplied the conceptual world in which early Christian high Christology emerged. That is doing quite a lot of historical gymnastics.
The Historical Reality Check…
Alright, buckle up, because this particular take on Philo and “Two Powers” needs a serious historical reality check. Jake’s argument here is basically this: if we cannot find Jews before Christ who believed in the fully articulated Nicene doctrine of one God in three co-equal, co-eternal Persons, then we have good reason to conclude that neither Moses nor the Old Testament taught anything that eventually developed into Trinitarian theology. Well… yes. If the question is, “Can we find a Jewish man before Christ who could have walked into Constantinople in AD 381, picked up a copy of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and said, ‘Yep, that’s exactly what I’ve always believed’?” …. obviously not. But that isn’t the historical question. And this is where Jake’s argument repeatedly shifts the goalposts. The historical question is whether Second Temple Judaism contained conceptual categories, exegetical traditions, divine agents, hypostatized Wisdom/Word traditions, exalted heavenly figures, and “two powers” patterns that provided genuine Jewish categories for the later Christian identification of Jesus with the unique God of Israel. That is a very different question. And on that question, the evidence is considerably more interesting than Jake lets on.
Jake repeatedly establishes a test that virtually guarantees the conclusion he wants. Was Philo Nicene? No. Was a Second Temple Jew Nicene? No. Did Second Temple Jews formulate homoousios, eternal generation, three Persons, one essence, and the precise metaphysical distinctions hammered out in the fourth century? No. But nobody seriously researching the development of Christian theology should expect them to. Ludwig Ott actually makes this point rather well when he says:
“As the Old Testament Revelation is but a shadowy picture of the New Testament … so in the Old Testament there is no clear communication of the Mystery of the Trinity but merely indications.”
That isn’t an admission of defeat. It distinguishes revelation from later theological formulation. My friend, James White makes the same methodological distinction when he writes that:
“The mystery of the Trinity is not revealed in the Old Testament; but the mystery of the Trinity underlies the Old Testament revelation, and here and there almost comes into view.”
And Dr. White’s point is important. Christianity does not claim that Moses sat down with a theological dictionary and wrote: “God is one essence existing eternally in three consubstantial Persons.” That would be a rather impressive Pentateuch. The Christian claim is instead that the biblical revelation provides the data from which later Christian theology recognizes and formulates the doctrine more precisely. That distinction matters enormously. The doctrine’s later formulation does not mean the underlying theological claims were invented at the Council of Nicaea.
But… But …There were no Trinitarian Jews, Rudolph!
Correct. And… so what? This is one of the strangest arguments in Jake’s chapter. He reasons that if no pre-Christian Jew was a fully developed Trinitarian, then the Trinity cannot represent the teaching of the Old Testament. But that argument would only work if Christians claimed that the Old Testament contains the doctrine in its fourth-century conceptual form. And it doesn’t… Christian theology has always distinguished between what Scripture reveals and how later theology articulates that revelation. The analogy is actually quite straightforward. The Old Testament doesn’t give us a Nicene doctrine of creation either. It doesn’t discuss creatio ex nihilo using fourth-century philosophical vocabulary. That does not mean Christians invented creation theology in the fourth century. Likewise, the fact that Second Temple Jews did not use the terminology of ousia, hypostasis, homoousios, and so forth does not mean they lacked the theological categories from which later Christian reflection developed. And this is exactly why the Two Powers discussion matters. Another point is that the phrase “Two Powers in Heaven” does not mean that Second Temple Jews had secretly discovered the Nicene Creed and misplaced it somewhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The point is much more modest and historically much more significant. Jewish traditions expressed God’s heavenly rule through another figure who could exercise divine authority, bear divine names or attributes, appear in divine theophanies, participate in creation, function as God’s unique agent, and sometimes be described in remarkably exalted terms. That is not controversial. The debate concerns how we should interpret those traditions and how directly they relate to Christian Christology. And here Jake’s treatment becomes selective. Alan Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven is absolutely crucial because Segal does not simply say, “The rabbis encountered a Christian invention.” His famous conclusion is much more interesting:
“It became clear that ‘two powers in heaven’ was a very early category of heresy, earlier than Jesus, if Philo is a trustworthy witness, and one of the basic categories by which the rabbis perceived the new phenomenon of Christianity.”
Segal is not arguing that Philo was Nicene. He is arguing that the category itself cannot simply be dismissed as a Christian invention. That distinction is enormous. The rabbinic polemic against “two powers” is evidence that the question of heavenly plurality was a real Jewish theological problem. And that means we have to ask why. A rather obvious historical question arises. Why would rabbinic Judaism need to condemn “two powers in heaven” if Jewish theology had never entertained anything remotely resembling such a concept?
The existence of the polemic does not automatically prove Christian Trinitarianism. Of course not. But here is the point worth considering, guys! Does it not demonstrate that Jewish speculation concerning heavenly figures and divine plurality was sufficiently significant to require theological policing? And this is precisely where Peter Schäfer becomes particularly important. Jake quotes Schäfer’s language about “two gods” and “higher rank” as though this settles the matter. But notice what Schäfer actually describes. He writes:
“The title of this examination, Two Gods in Heaven, is pointedly based on the rabbinic phrase ‘two powers in heaven’ … which clearly implies two divine authorities side by side.”
And then:
“Scholarship has developed the term ‘binitarian’ to describe this juxtaposition of two powers or gods, analogous to the term ‘trinitarian’ associated with Christian dogma.”
Now, does Schäfer think this is identical to Nicene Christianity? No. But that isn’t the question. The question is whether ancient Judaism contained two-heavenly-authority patterns. Schäfer’s answer is obviously yes. And his description becomes even more interesting: “The want for a second God is unmistakable.” That is hardly evidence for the claim that Jewish theology had no conceptual space for a differentiated heavenly divine figure.
Schäfer (and Orlov) actually makes Jake’s argument more complex….
Jake quotes Schäfer saying that one God is “of higher rank” and that the second figure can be described as a “lesser” or “younger” God. Fine. That’s real. But then Jake treats this as though it destroys the Christian argument. It doesn’t. It simply demonstrates that some Jewish two-power traditions contain subordinationist structures. Nobody needs to deny that. In fact, Christians should be perfectly comfortable admitting it. Why? Because the existence of subordinationist Jewish traditions does not establish that every subsequent Christian articulation of the Father-Son relationship must reproduce their ontology. Development involves precisely this sort of thing.
Early Christian writers inherited Jewish categories, reinterpreted them around Jesus, and eventually had to clarify questions concerning identity, deity, distinction, generation, and equality. That’s why Nicaea happened. Nicaea did not invent the Father and Son. It was attempting to answer the question “What exactly does it mean to confess the Son as truly divine?” That is a very different historical claim. Andrei Orlov is particularly useful here because he observes that these traditions involve a complex relationship between divine identity and hierarchy. Orlov writes:
“Such theophanic qualities … often create boundaries between the respective powers, signaling their proper place in the divine hierarchy.”
And he continues:
“the second power suddenly assumes the features formally attributed to the first power”
and describes this as signaling an “ever-changing status” of the second authority. Notice what Orlov is actually doing. He is describing a process of divine identification and differentiation. The second figure is not simply another pagan god standing alongside Yahweh. Nor is the figure simply an ordinary angel. The second figure occupies a strange and fascinating middle ground in which divine attributes, authority, identity, and theophanic functions can be transferred, shared, represented, or appropriated. That is precisely why these texts became important for the history of Christology. The point isn’t: “Second Temple Jews believed the Nicene Creed.” The point is: “Second Temple Judaism contained categories capable of generating serious questions about how God’s unique identity could be expressed through another heavenly figure.” That is historically significant.
And now for the Boyarin Bomb….
Daniel Boyarin is another scholar whom Jake quotes, but the quotation actually creates a problem for his argument. Boyarin writes that:
“many of these very passages served as the origin and prooftext for Logos theology”
as manifested in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue. That’s important. Why? Because it means that the early Christian Logos tradition was not simply parachuted into Judaism from Mars. Christian writers were reading Jewish Scriptures through Jewish interpretive traditions. And this is precisely what we would expect if Christianity emerged from Second Temple Judaism. Boyarin even argues that:
“the ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene.”
Now, Jake wants to respond by saying: “But Boyarin also criticizes Nicene Christianity’s Logos theology.” My answer would be … “Yes…. And?”. That doesn’t erase the first claim. A scholar can simultaneously argue: A. Second Temple Jewish traditions provided conceptual resources later used by Christians; and B. Nicene Christianity eventually transformed or rejected aspects of earlier Logos theology. Those propositions are perfectly compatible. In fact, they’re exactly what we’d expect from doctrinal development. This is one of the most fascinating quotations Jake gives us. Boyarin argues that:
“Nicene orthodoxy also effectively ‘crucifies the Logos.’”
His point is that Nicene Christianity ultimately insists that God creates without requiring a subordinate intermediary. But notice what this demonstrates. It demonstrates development within Christian Logos theology. It does not demonstrate that the Logos tradition was irrelevant. Quite the opposite. You don’t “crucify” something that never existed. Boyarin’s argument presupposes that there was a significant Logos tradition to begin with and that Nicene theology transformed the way that tradition functioned. And that actually fits the historical picture remarkably well. The second-century Christian writers did not simply wake up one morning and invent the Logos. They inherited John’s Logos, Jewish Wisdom traditions, Philonic categories, biblical divine-agent traditions, and broader Jewish speculation concerning God’s heavenly agency. Then they began asking increasingly precise questions about the identity of Christ. That is development….
Dr Hurtado is not the witness Jake thinks he is!
The Late Dr. Larry Hurtado is probably the most important corrective Jake introduces because Hurtado absolutely refuses to collapse Jewish intermediary figures into Christian worship of Jesus. And Christians should listen to him. Hurtado writes:
“The readiness of ancient Jews to include exalted figures, especially ‘principal agent’ figures, in their conceptual schemes of God’s sovereignty provides us with useful (though limited) analogies and valuable background for the early Christian conceptual accommodation of the risen/exalted Jesus as God’s designated plenipotentiary.”
That sentence is devastating to the simplistic version of Jake’s argument. Why? Because Hurtado explicitly says that Jewish principal-agent traditions provide “valuable background” for early Christian Christology. But Hurtado also says there is a crucial difference. Ancient Jews generally did not incorporate such figures into the same cultic worship given to God (Important point, readers!). Exactly. That’s an important difference. But it actually makes the historical question more interesting, not less.
This is where Hurtado is particularly helpful. He argues that the early Christian innovation was not simply belief in a heavenly intermediary. Rather, it was including Jesus within the devotional pattern directed toward the God of Israel. Hurtado says:
“The innovation was in modifying more characteristic Jewish cultic practice by accommodating Jesus into their devotional pattern, joining him with God as a recipient of their cultic devotion.”
That is an enormously important distinction. Jake repeatedly argues: “The Jewish intermediary figures weren’t Nicene.” I’m… yes….that is fine. But that doesn’t refute the Christian claim. The Christian claim isn’t that Jesus is merely another Jewish intermediary. The claim is that something happened to the Jewish categories when the early Christians encountered Jesus. And Hurtado himself calls the result:
“a novel innovation in Roman-era Jewish religious practice.”
And that is exactly the point.
Early Christian Claims were wild!
This is where Jake’s argument occasionally attacks a position nobody needs to defend. The Christian claim is not, “Look! Jews believed in Two Powers, therefore they believed in the Trinity.” That would indeed be terrible history. And yes, I know that is how some polemicists use these concepts. The better argument is:
Second Temple Judaism supplied categories for thinking about God’s heavenly agency, Word, Wisdom, principal agents and divine figures; the early Christians then made the astonishing claim that Jesus belonged within the unique divine identity and devotional pattern of Israel’s God.
Hurtado’s work is enormously important precisely because he recognizes the novelty. He writes:
“the worship of the glorified Jesus as divine marks a major and singular development in the context of Jewish monotheism.”
Well, yes. That is exactly what the Christian texts claim. The early Christians weren’t saying: “Jesus is an interesting angel.” They were saying something radically more difficult: Jesus belongs on God’s side of the Creator–creation distinction. That is why the early Christian material is so historically explosive. That is also why Jake’s use of Hurtado becomes problematic when “novel” gets turned into “unrelated.” Those aren’t the same thing. A novel development can arise from existing conceptual resources. In fact, that’s normally how intellectual history works. The iPhone was novel. It did not therefore have nothing to do with telephones. The Reformation was revolutionary. It therefore had nothing to do with medieval Christianity. And Christian high Christology was a remarkable Jewish development. That doesn’t mean it had no Jewish background. Hurtado himself explicitly speaks of Jewish conceptual resources as part of the background. So, Jake cannot simultaneously appeal to Hurtado’s rejection of a complete Jewish precedent and then pretend Hurtado has demonstrated that there was no Jewish conceptual matrix for early Christian Christology. He hasn’t.
But the 2nd Power is subordinate!
Yes. And here’s where Jake’s argument needs another historical reality check. Subordination is not the same thing as non-divinity. This distinction becomes absolutely critical when discussing early Christian Christology. There is a difference between order, function, and ontology when discussing these things. The fourth-century controversy did not arise because Christians suddenly discovered that the Son was divine. The controversy arose exactly because Christians were already confessing Christ in extraordinarily exalted terms and then had to determine what kind of deity was being confessed. This is why the development of Christian theology is so important. The early Christian writers inherited multiple categories that did not always fit together neatly. And that is why you see subordinationist language. And eternal language. And Logos language. And Wisdom language. And generation language. And agency language. And equality language. And eventually the creedal clarification. That’s not evidence that nothing happened. That’s evidence that something very significant happened and Christians were trying to work out exactly what it meant.
This is where Marian Hillar is useful as a control. Hillar’s From Logos to Trinity explicitly traces the intellectual development from Greek philosophical concepts and Jewish Logos traditions through Justin, the Christian apologists and Tertullian. Cambridge’s description of the book states that Hillar examines the development of Trinitarian thought through the interaction of biblical material with the philosophical and religious ideas of the Hellenistic world. (Cambridge University Press)
And notice the structure of Hillar’s work. He has chapters specifically devoted to: “The Logos in Judaism,” “The Development of Hellenistic Christian Doctrine,” “Justin Martyr and the Logos,” “Justin Martyr and the Metaphysical Triad,” and “Tertullian, Originator of the Trinity.” (Cambridge University Press). Now, Hillar is certainly not writing as a Nicene apologist. But that’s precisely why he is useful. He recognizes that there is an identifiable intellectual trajectory involving Logos traditions, Jewish thought, Hellenistic philosophy, and early Christian theology. So once again, the historical question isn’t: “Was Philo secretly Athanasius?” No. The historical question is whether Philo belongs to the intellectual environment from which early Christian Logos Christology emerged. The evidence says an emphatic yesssh!.
Jake repeatedly treats the following proposition as though it were a devastating syllogism: Second Temple Judaism does not equate to Nicene Christianity. Correct. But nobody disputes that! The interesting historical question is seen in that Second Temple Judaism becomes a bridge for early Christian Christology, which then becomes later Nicene formulation. That is a historical-development question. And development does not require identity at every stage. In fact, if every stage had to look identical, there would be no need for theological development in the first place. The New Testament itself is the earliest Christian witness we possess to the claim that Jesus is somehow included within the unique divine identity of Israel. Then the second century begins wrestling with how precisely to understand that. Then the third. Then Nicaea. Then Constantinople. That’s not Christianity admitting: “Oops, we invented this yesterday.” It is Christianity attempting to clarify an inherited confession under intellectual pressure. So, what does the Two Powers theory actually prove?
Well, with this concept being used everywhere except to prove the existence of Schrödinger’s Cat, we need to be more cautious… They do not prove that Second Temple Jews believed the Nicene Trinity. They do not prove that Philo was a Christian. They do not prove that every Jewish “two powers” tradition involved two co-equal eternal divine Persons. And they do not provide a complete Christian doctrine of the Trinity. But they do establish something Jake’s argument desperately needs to reckon with: “Ancient Jewish monotheism was more conceptually complex than the simple equation “one God equals one person.” There were heavenly figures. There were divine agents. There were Wisdom traditions. There were Logos traditions. There were principal angels. There were exalted patriarchal figures. There were theophanic traditions. There were debates over heavenly plurality. There were Jewish texts wrestling with how God’s transcendence and God’s interaction with creation could be reconciled. And the rabbis eventually had to identify “two powers in heaven” as a theological problem. That’s not Trinitarianism. But it is most certainly fertile soil for the emergence of Christian high Christology.
AND THIS IS WHERE THE CHRISTIAN CLAIM BECOMES INTERESTING
The Christian claim isn’t: “Judaism already had the Trinity.” The Christian claim is much more historically provocative in saying that: “The God of Israel revealed himself decisively in Jesus the Messiah, and the earliest Christians came to include Jesus within the divine identity and worship of Israel’s one God. That is the historical phenomenon that requires explanation. And interestingly, Hurtado, whom I actually knew and loved, whom Jake uses repeatedly—actually agrees that this represents something remarkable. He writes that:
“no one has in fact been able to show this judgment to have been incorrect”
when it comes to his argument that the early Christian pattern of incorporating Jesus into cultic devotion represents a novel development within Roman-era Jewish religion (Scribd). Fine. But here’s the kicker: Novel does not mean inexplicable. The early Christian worship of Jesus was novel within Judaism, but it arose from Jewish Scripture, Jewish messianism, Jewish divine-agent traditions, Jewish Wisdom speculation, Jewish Logos traditions, and Jewish monotheistic convictions. That combination is precisely what makes early Christianity so historically interesting.
Something to consider about the Two Powers
And this, I think, is where we can finally put the argument in its proper historical box. If someone says: “The Two Powers doctrine is the Trinity.” That’s sloppy. And if someone says: “Philo proves he believed the Nicene Creed.” That’s even sloppier. But if someone says:
“Second Temple Jewish traditions involving divine agency, Logos, Wisdom, heavenly figures and Two Powers provide important Jewish conceptual background for understanding the emergence of early Christian high Christology.”
Now we’re talking history. And that position is not some fringe apologetic invention. It is precisely the sort of historical question scholars such as Segal, Boyarin, Orlov, Schäfer, Runia and Hurtado have spent decades investigating. Orlov’s study, for example, explicitly examines “Two Powers in Heaven traditions and early Christology,” and his analysis emphasizes how the second power can be represented through divine attributes and theophanic patterns while simultaneously being distinguished within a celestial hierarchy. (Perlego). Runia’s study likewise demonstrates the enormous importance of Philo as a mediator between biblical and philosophical traditions in subsequent patristic thought. (IUScholarWorks). And Hillar’s work traces the development from Jewish and Greek Logos traditions into early Christian Logos theology and eventually Tertullian’s Trinitarian formulation. (Cambridge University Press). So, yes: the Two Powers traditions are not the Trinity. But Jake’s attempt to turn that observation into: “Therefore they contribute nothing to the historical trajectory toward Christian high Christology” simply does not follow.
The Historical Reality Check
So where does this leave us? If the question is: “Did Second Temple Judaism possess the fully developed Nicene doctrine of the Trinity?” No. But if the question is: “Did Second Temple Judaism possess theological categories in which God’s unique sovereignty could be expressed through another extraordinarily exalted heavenly figure?” Absolutely. If the question is: “Did Jewish thinkers such as Philo speak about God’s Logos in astonishingly exalted ways?” Yes. If the question is: “Did Jewish traditions wrestle with heavenly plurality and divine agency?” Yes. If the question is: “Did early Christians inherit and transform these Jewish categories?” Yes. If the question is: “Was the Christian worship of Jesus simply identical to earlier Jewish intermediary traditions?” No…. and Hurtado is right to emphasize the extraordinary novelty here.
And finally: Does the fact that the Second Temple material is not Nicene prove that Christianity’s later Trinitarian confession is historically disconnected from Second Temple Judaism? No. That is the leap Jake needs to prove, and the evidence doesn’t get him there. The irony is that the very scholars Jake invokes actually give us a much more complicated—and much more interesting—story. The Second Temple Jewish world was not waiting around for Nicaea. But neither was it a theological vacuum in which the idea of differentiated divine agency was completely unthinkable. Philo is not Athanasius. Segal is not Nicaea. Schäfer is not Constantinople. And “Two Powers” is not the Nicene Trinity. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But neither should we pretend that Jewish Logos, Wisdom, theophanic and heavenly-agent traditions suddenly became irrelevant the moment Christianity appeared. That is not historical development. That’s historical amnesia. And that, unfortunately, is exactly where Jake’s argument keeps getting itself into trouble.
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