Book Review: Putting Jesus in His Place

The case for the deity of Christ does not rest on a few proof-texts. The popular notion that some fourth-century Christians decided to impose on the church a belief in Jesus as God and wrenched isolated Bible verses from their contexts to support their agenda is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. The framers of the orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity did have an agenda, but it was not to replace a merely human Jesus with a divine Christ. Their agenda was to safeguard the New Testament's clear teaching of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ in a way that did equal justice to three other clear teachings of the Bible: there is only one God; Jesus is the Son and not the Father; Jesus is also a human being. In this book, we have touched at various places on the biblical evidence for these three teachings, while our focus throughout has remained on establishing the truth of the deity of Christ.

from the conclusion of Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ
Authors: Robert Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski
Format: Paperback, 392 pages
Publisher: Kregel Publications (August 31, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0825429838
ISBN-13: 978-0825429835

Before you begin reading this book review, I want to tell you that it's somewhat controversial. Questioning the deity of Jesus can be a very difficult thing for people to read about or talk about. I don't pull any punches in this review. That's one of the reasons I created this blog; to question assumptions and ask hard questions. I just thought you should know this before proceeding.

Bowman's and Komoszewski's book has exactly one purpose: to prove, from the New Testament text, that Jesus is God the Son, one part of the Trinity, and that his followers and disciples were aware of this during his earthly existence and especially very shortly afterward, as Peter, Paul, and the other disciples were spreading the Good News throughout the Greek-speaking nations.

Do they prove their case? In fact they do, but there are a couple of caveats:

The authors prove their case if you are already convinced of the deity of Christ without reservation, and are looking for an in-depth analysis of the proof-texts in the New Testament (the book is written so it could be used in a Bible class on this topic, as well as a reference).

The authors prove their case if you believe in the total inerrancy of the entire Bible as we have it today, and believe that the New Testament we can purchase in any bookstore and online, was indeed written by the individuals who are commonly attributed to be the authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter...).

If you have no doubts and particularly no serious doubts regarding the deity of Christ, and you believe the Bible and specifically the New Testament, contains no ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies, believe that all content in the NT is the original content, was not erroneously copied by later scribes and translators, and no content was added, removed, or changed in the decades or centuries subsequent to their original authorship, then I think Bowman and Komoszewski have a strong case.

But that's saying a lot.

The book was written with the assumptions I listed above. The authors are already convinced of their point and, as instructors at Fuller Theological Seminary and Dallas Theological Seminary respectively, support the basic tenets of those institutions relative to the inerrancy of the Bible. This is the first book addressing the New Testament and the deity of Jesus I've read that so strongly assumes these positions. My previous readings (though limited to only three other books so far) all provide supporting evidence that many of the NT texts were written later than their assumed dates, and not by the authors attributed to them. Further, the authors I've read, as well as a larger body of NT scholars, believe that the Gospel of John, may have been specifically written and/or edited by a group of Gentile Christians, popularly known as the Johannine Community, who may have developed the documents attributed to the Apostle John with a strong pro-deity bias that likely wasn't found among Christ's original Jewish disciples. This could have resulted in Gentiles supporting Christ's deity being removed from the Jewish/Christian synagogue, as well as being one of the issues that contributed to the larger Gentile/Jewish schism in the early church. There are also questions about the authenticity of some of Paul's letters as well as Peter's missives which further erodes documented support of the deity of Jesus.

Note: The books I've previously read on this topic are When Jesus Became God by Richard E. Rubenstein, Jesus, Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman, and From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God by Maurice Casey.

I can't comment much further along this line, at least in a truly scholarly fashion, because I am merely a lay person without the educational background in theology and New Testament studies to be able to give a more educated opinion on the matter. But I have to consider some things.

According to Bowman and Komoszewski, John's Gospel is the only one that mentions that Jesus is God more than once and, if you factor out the Gospels and Epistles that NT scholars consider to be questionable, then a lot of this book's source material supporting Christ's deity goes away.

The trick is, it doesn't all go away, at least for that particular reason. However, all of the efforts the authors make at jiggling the translation of Greek to English in the Gospel of John for example, becomes perhaps more effort than it's worth.

Another area that I found difficult, was the book's proposal that either Jesus must be God or he had to be an ordinary human being. One of the book's assumptions was that, in order to be the Messiah, Jesus had to be God. This is really peculiar, since Judaism doesn't have that assumption and, as far as I know, it never did have that belief. While the authors extensively quote from the Old Testament as part of supporting their arguments, they don't make much of an attempt to see their position from the point of view of Christ's primary audience: 1st Century Jews, nor do they look at the Old Testament sources from a Hebraic perspective. The overall lens by which they view the Bible and by which they expect their readers to examine their book, is an Evangelical Christian lens. This isn't to say that they were completely unmindful of the affect of Jewish monotheism relative to declaring Jesus as God, but the authors state that the New Testament writers had to take care in how they documented Christ's deity in order not to offend Jewish monotheists!

Critics of the doctrine of deity of Jesus often ask why, if Jesus is God, the New Testament does not refer to him more often as God. The answer is twofold. First, the New Testament writers were generally very careful to avoid making statements that would have implied that Jesus was the Father. While affirming Jesus' divine status in many ways, they maintained a clear distinction between the persons of the Father and the Son. Since they commonly applied the name "God" to the Father, they tended not to use that name for Jesus except in ways that did not confuse the two persons.

I'll say more on this in a bit, but here's the critical part I want to present:

The second reason is that the theological and religious roots of the New Testament were deeply monotheistic, and its authors sought to affirm Jesus' deity in ways that people would not perceive as undermining their Jewish monotheistic heritage.

Bowman and Komoszewski refer to R.T. France's The Worship of Jesus: A Neglected Factor in Christological Debate in forming this opinion. France calls any mention of the deity of Jesus from a 1st century Jew's perspective "shocking language" and further states that the "wonder is not that the NT so seldom describes Jesus as God, but that in such a milieu it does so at all."

This is an extremely disturbing statement to me, but not for the reasons the authors might think. It seems like, if the deity of the Jewish Messiah is a natural and logical part of Jesus being the Jewish Messiah, first, there would be a much greater indication of this in Old Testament sources (as well as the Talmud, which the authors ignore), and that it would be more natural and likely for monotheistic Jews to understand and accept that the Messiah, in order to be the Messiah, must also be God. Additionally, from their first point, if the authors thought it would be confusing to try and distinguish between God the Father and God the Son (not much is mentioned about God the Holy Spirit in this book) for 1st and 2nd century Christians who were so much closer to the original people and events that surrounded Jesus, what about those of us living in the 21st century?

I mentioned before that the authors assume that Christ could only be either an ordinary man or that he had to be God, but they do not consider the possibility that the Messiah could be a unique and divine being, with many supernatural attributes, but still not literally be God. The authors cite (and dismiss) arguments based on how Wisdom is personified in the Tanakh (Old Testament), but they ignore the Jewish concept of a pre-existent and personified "Torah" that is the source of Creation (the "Word became flesh", if you'll forgive the Johannine quote), and yet Jews don't consider the Torah to be God, even though it was with Him and is thought of as the mechanism by which the universe was created.

Again, I lack the scholarly credentials to fully analyze and critique this book in more detail and further, space doesn't allow me to do a point-by-point review of each area where the authors cite support for Christ's Godhood, but I think the book's evidence is far from a "slam dunk" as far as unequivocally establishing Jesus as God.

I'm not saying that it's impossible and, as I previously stated, there are points in the book that I cannot speak to that are used to support Christ's deity. The very best and fairest statement I can make, based on my reading of Bowman and Komoszewski, as well as my previous ventures into NT material, is to say "the jury is still out".

I know this means that I must fly in the face of virtually all of Christianity as well as most of the Messianic world, and certainly the vast majority of reviewers on Amazon (as well as individual Christian reviewers) will disagree with me (though not 100% of them), but given the extreme biases presented by the authors, both in terms of their personal belief structure, their backgrounds, and their view of Biblical inerrancy, the credibility of their overall case is somewhat doubtful.

That said, every author who writes on this (or any) subject has a bias, a personal belief structure, and a background, so perhaps Bowman's and Komoszewski's book is also no less credible than some of the others I've read. In that case, how can I ever be convinced one way or the other on the deity issue? For that matter, how can anyone?

My only answer right now, is that I'll continue to read, to search, and to learn.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.