Abstract
Anyone familiar with sculptures of pagan deities would assume that a bodily actualization of God was endemic to the pre-monotheist world but was swept away by the arrival of Judaism, and then later reinforced by Christianity. When we read in the Bible about the ‘hand of God’ or the ‘face of God shining’, Jews assume that these are metaphors and do not suggest divine corporeality. The Church asserted that God took on human form when on earth in the body of Jesus, but this was just in a limited and time-bound human context. The body of Jesus did not reflect the physicality of God, and the Council of Chalcedon unequivocally repudiated the notion of ‘a heavenly flesh of Christ’. Yet this may be far from an accurate reflection of earlier beliefs, according to Christoph Markschies, who takes us on a scholarly journey through ancient sources to stress-test this assumption.
Following the American biblical scholar Benjamin Sommer, Markschies suggests that the Bible did indeed have a literal understanding that God had a bodily form. After all, is it not stated that humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1.27)? This is not necessarily contradicted by the injunction against creating graven images (Exodus 20.4), as that verse just proscribes prayer to the depiction of the body of God and does not deny that God does possess a body.
If this were the case originally, when did the transition away from such a view occur, and why? For Markschies, the key moment is the Hellenistic period, with its move to rationalization and ‘from mythos to logos’. It is Philo of Alexandria, whose writings so influenced both Jewish and Christian thought, who states that God has no countenance. This is hammered home by Origen, although his adamant opposition to the corporeal view of God indicates that it was still a common, if not prevalent, view two centuries later. This was voiced not only in what were seen as heretical writings, such as those of Marcion, but by respected figures within the Christian orbit, such Tertullian, although the latter does not envisage the divine body as analogous or identical to the human one, but composed differently, such as being of fire and ether.
Markschies certainly achieves his aim of reminding us that so much religious energy has gone into the notion of the Trinity and the person of Christ that the bodily actualization of God the Father has been glossed over and initial controversies ignored. But this is not just a historical debate, for notions of the corporeality of God have been adopted at the fringes of the Church in recent times, in the form of Mormonism, which explicitly refutes an allegorical interpretation of the flesh and bones of God.
It should be noted that this book is not for the casual reader but requires us to be well versed in both classical and Judeo-Christian sources. For those who are, it is a treasure chest of theological arguments and counterclaims, reminding us of how today’s beliefs can differ markedly from those of early adherents to both faiths.