Digital Logos Edition
Larry Hurtado’s One God, One Lord has been described as ‘one of the most important and provocative Christologies of all time.’ The book has taken its place among works on Jesus as one consistently cited, consistently read, and consistently examined in scholarly discourse. You will expand your knowledge of the early cultic devotion to Jesus through a range of Jewish sources. Hurtado outlines an early ‘high’ Christological theology, showing how the Christ of faith emerges from monotheistic Judaism. The book has already found a home on the shelves of many in its two previous editions. In this new Cornerstones edition Hurtado provides a substantial epilogue of some twenty-thousand words, which brings this ground-breaking work to the fore once more, in a format accessible to scholars and students alike.
“How did the early Jewish Christians accommodate the veneration of the exalted Jesus alongside God while continuing to see themselves as loyal to the fundamental emphasis of their ancestral tradition on one God, and without the benefit of the succeeding four centuries of Christian theological discussion which led to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity?” (Page 2)
“I propose that early Christianity drew upon important resources in ancient Judaism and also developed a somewhat distinctive ‘mutation’ or innovation in this monotheistic tradition.” (Page 2)
“But the evidence suggests strongly that, well before these later developments, within the first two decades of Christianity, Jewish Christians gathered in Jesus’ name for worship, prayed to him and sang hymns to him, regarded him as exalted to a position of heavenly rule above all angelic orders, appropriated to him titles and Old Testament passages originally referring to God, sought to bring fellow Jews as well as Gentiles to embrace him as the divinely appointed redeemer, and in general redefined their devotion to the God of their fathers so as to include the veneration of Jesus.” (Page 12)
“Was there anything in the religious heritage of the first Jewish Christians that furnished them with resources for accommodating the exalted position of the risen Jesus, in heaven and in their devotion? Can we determine with any precision how these Jewish Christians viewed Jesus’ status alongside God, a status that both merited Jesus the kind of cultic devotion characteristic of early Christian groups and yet also did not apparently threaten God’s uniqueness and importance in their faith and life?” (Page 15)