Abstract
The most recent works on the Christology of the New Testament (e.g., Bauckham, Rowe, Hays, Hutardo, Gathercole, Boyarin, and Fletcher-Louis) argue that the gospel narratives contain an early divine (high) Christology in which Jesus is depicted as the God of Israel. Contra to this “consensus,” Kirk, in his A Man Attested by God, develops the thesis that Jesus should be seen as an “idealized human figure/being.” According to Kirk, the Synoptic Gospels offer a rich description of Jesus as an idealized human figure: Jesus is the demonstration that God is with God's people, he enacts God's authority and forgives sins, and exercises dominion over nature and the spirts that are hostile to humanity. In all of this, Jesus is not depicted as divine; Jesus and God are consistently depicted as separate characters: God is in charge and Jesus is subordinate; God is father and Jesus is son; God is all-knowing and Jesus limited in some ways; God remains in heaven, and Jesus is crucified below. Jesus is the human through whom God's authority and identity are being put on display in the world. This, Kirk argues, is what it means for Jesus to be an idealized human figure: a non-angelic, non-preexistent human being who plays a unique role in representing God to the rest of the created realm, or in representing some aspect of the created realm before God. As such, the narratives of the Gospels speak not of a divine Christology, but of an idealized human Christology, or high, human Christology.
After putting his thesis forward in the Introduction, Kirk goes on to argue his case in Chapter 1, indicating that prior to Jesus there were innumerable people who were depicted in Jewish literature as idealized human figures, assigned with roles and attributes that are typically seen as being reserved for God alone. As examples he lists the Adam-figure, Moses, Elijah and Elisha (prophets), David and Solomon (kings), Melchizedek (priest), the Son of Man in Daniel, and the community of the elect. These idealized human figures, Kirk concludes, are clearly a wide-spread and wide-ranging reality in the literature of early Judaism; Judaism clearly maintained a special role for humans as God's idealized agents. These agents are identified with God in various ways (including God's sovereignty and receiving worship), and there is a notable absence of anxiety in this literature about applying divine attributes to idealized figures.
After arguing his case with the examples supplied in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 Kirk moves on to discuss the son of God title in the Synoptics. In the Synoptics, Kirk argues, the son of God is a Christological title that indicates that Jesus is king of the kingdom of God he is enacting in proclaiming it. In Mark, Jesus is son of God as the king who must suffer to come fully into his kingship; in Luke, Jesus is son of God as an idealized human figure who takes up the primordial call to rule the entirety of the created order on God's behalf, and in Matthew, the title refers to the entire community who seek to serve God by following Jesus and his teachings.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to a study of the title “son of man” in Mark. Again, Kirk comes to the same conclusion. In Mark, Jesus plays the role of son of man as an idealized human representative of God on earth. In Chapter 4, the focus is the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. Both these infancy narratives fit the idealized human paradigm. In Matthew's infancy narrative, Jesus is depicted as the Davidic king who must suffer as the son of Abraham to fulfill his identity of God's human agent enacting salvation on earth, and in Luke the narrative depicts Jesus as a second Adam, a human vicegerent who represents God's reign to the world and fulfills faithful humanness before God.
In Chapter 5, Kirk turns to Jesus' exorcisms, nature miracles, and healings. These deeds of Jesus, Kirk argues, again fit the idealized human figure paradigm: Jesus' ability to exercise power over demons, nature, and sickness demonstrates that God is at work through Jesus as his agent specially entrusted by God to demonstrate the advent of God's own reign. In the penultimate chapter of the book, Kirk finally turns to the issue of intertextuality by looking at the citations of or allusions to the Scriptures of Israel relating to Jesus. Do these allusions indicate Jesus' divinity? Kirk's conclusion is negative; the Gospels' deployments of scripture (e.g., Isaiah 6–9-10, 40:3, Psalm 110:1, 118:22–23, 26; 1 Kings 22:17) show how Jesus is God's agent at the time of eschatological fulfillment. In conversation with these Scriptures, Jesus is the idealized Human One, the suffering Davidic messiah, the new Moses, the ideal Israelite, the embodiment of Israel's story, and the bringer of salvation. This, Kirk concludes, is an exalted and rich human Christology which functions as an idealized human Christology.
Kirk's A Man Attested by God is thought provoking, and challenges mainline thinking and publications on the Christology of the New Testament. His thesis is convincing, and the debate it hopefully is going to create will be interesting to follow. It is my conviction that all future publications on the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels will have to take note of Kirk's refreshing look at Jesus as an idealized human figure. For those interested in the Christology of the New Testament, this is a must read.