Jesus Is Lord of the Old Testament: Retrieving YHWH Christology

In Luke the resurrected Jesus offers one of the first recorded catechetical instructions for how to read the Jewish scriptures in a Christo-centric way: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27). ¹ This statement is commonly taken to mean that all scriptures have to do with messianic expectations, the restoration of the kingdom, and redemption in general and as such are in fact about Jesus who eventually fulfills them and therefore is anticipated in them typologically or otherwise. ² Such a view, however, may only be half the story. ³

What if the phrase “all the scriptures (πάσαις ταῖς γραφαῖς)” in Luke 24:27 really means that “all” the scriptures should be read as about Jesus “himself (ἑαυτοῦ)?” ⁴ In other words, not just the scriptures that address messianic expectations and/or the redemption of humanity, but also the scriptures that are about God—which after all is a significant portion. In order to imagine such a reading, I will present a specific hermeneutic from early Christianity known as YHWH Christology. This view sees Jesus in the Old Testament, not just in theological types or soteriological promises, but in the encounter with Israel's “Lord.” ⁵

In our contemporary world, many would deem attempts to see Jesus in Israel's scriptures as anachronistic and based on theological bias. Such readings, allegedly, rely on allegory that can let any text mean anything, and therefore allegory is not thought to be an intellectually honest or academically valid approach to studying scripture. In what follows, I will sidestep this question and instead depict what it looked like for early Christians to read the Old Testament as being “all” about Jesus. To do this, I will contrast two approaches to the Old Testament from the second century. The first approach is that of Marcion of Sinope, one of the most notorious figures from early Christianity. The second is that of Justin Martyr, the famous apologist who defended the faith. Marcion's approach virtually everyone agrees is unacceptable. ⁶ Justin's approach, virtually everyone claims, employed allegory in order to offer a Christo-centric reading of Israel's scripture. While this last point is true, I will focus on an often overlooked aspect of Justin's hermeneutic that is much more fundamental to his, and other early Christian, readings. After this brief contrast, I will show how Justin's approach was ubiquitous in early Christianity by reviewing a specific argument made by Augustine of Hippo.

Justin is the first instance where a Christian makes YHWH Christology explicit, and he does so ostensibly to explain this reading to his non-Christian Jewish interlocutors. The exchange instructs Justin's readers how to read Old Testament theophanies as Christophanies. Augustine of Hippo then offers a correction, not so much of Justin, but of anyone who would take YHWH Christology in any direction other than that required by Nicaea. In so doing, Augustine reviews virtually every theophany in the Old Testament, but he does so to attempt to find an alternative to YHWH Christology because he wants to offer instead a Trinitarian reading of said passages. His review of these theophanies will be instructive for our purposes at the very least because they provide case studies of how to read (or, how not to read) the Old Testament through a Christo-centric lens. His conclusions, moreover, demonstrate how widespread YHWH Christology was by his time and prove the difficulty of offering any other interpretation. Finally, I will conclude by considering some passages from the New Testament to see the precedent for such a view provided by the biblical authors themselves, followed by a few thoughts on the implications of retrieving this hermeneutic.

Marcion's Approach: Jesus and Israel's God

Marcion who was rejected by Christians in Rome in 144 CE represents the worst example of a heretical approach to the Old Testament. Allegedly, he rejected it altogether. ⁷ Next, allegedly, he reduced the New Testament to Luke and Paul's letters, in which all references to the Old Testament were removed. Tertullian summarized this endeavor memorably: Marcion edited “with a sword instead of a stylus.” ⁸ I begin with Marcion as an extreme example of “what not to do” when it comes to the Old Testament, because from his error, we can learn something about the early Christian concerns with how to read the scriptures. If Marcion is “the worst,” then his opposite may point us to the “best” of early Christian exegesis, or at least suggest to us what an ideal version of a Christian reading of the Old Testament might look like.

First, we should ask: Why would Marcion take such drastic actions? According to his opponents, Marcion did so for theological reasons. In his Against Heresies written around 190, Irenaeus of Lyon counters numerous sects of “Gnostics,” but at one point states that his line of reasoning is “principally against the followers of Marcion.” ⁹ “Principally” is Irenaeus's precise term, because Marcion believes in two “principles” or deities. He worships the supreme God of love encountered in Jesus, but he thinks “that the prophets were from another God,” a creator-god of judgement. ¹⁰ In sum, Marcion's fundamental error according to Irenaeus is theological dualism, and it is this error that Irenaeus attacks whenever Marcion is mentioned. ¹¹

If Marcion's error is to think of the God of the Old Testament as different from Jesus, then what is the “orthodox” view? Obviously, Marcion's opponents will do the opposite: they will confess Jesus to be the God of the Old Testament. While this answer was obvious to many early Christians, ¹² it seems that the answer is not so clear today. Today, most Christians—be they practicing believers or professional scholars—tend to read the Old Testament so as to assume that the God who appears therein is God the Father. In such an approach, Jesus may be in the Old Testament in that he is somehow foreshadowed, prophesied, or typologically indicated, but the Son of God is generally thought to appear only in the New Testament. This, it turns out, is the exact opposite of how ancient Christians like Irenaeus read their Old Testament. It is, arguably, a Marcionite reading.

Apart from groups like the Marcionites, most early Christians believed that the God appearing in the Old Testament was God the Son, not the Father. And this view, I contend, is something that needs to be retrieved. Justin can now help us see what it looks like when Christians read the Old Testament, believing Jesus to be the “Lord” of Israel.

Justin's Approach: Jesus Is Israel's Lord

The first instance where YHWH Christology is explained to an outsider, ¹³ and therefore made explicit and not simply implicit, is when Justin Martyr articulates it as part of his Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew (c.165). ¹⁴ There is an important point about the context of this treatise for our current discussion, since most scholars now agree that Justin wrote this treatise in Rome approximately one generation after Marcion left that city. ¹⁵ Marcion and other groups rejected any linkage of Jesus with the Creator God (or “Demiurge”) of the Jewish scriptures. Some scholars have even claimed that Justin's work, ostensibly written against “the Jews,” is in fact an anti-Marcionite treatise meant to defend the identification of Jesus with Israel's God. ¹⁶ One thing is for certain about the comparison of Marcion with the Jewish opponents described in Justin's work, they both reject the claim that Jesus is the God of Israel. ¹⁷

In his response to Trypho, Justin's argument takes a strange twist. After Justin laboriously and lengthily reviews the Hebrew prophets to demonstrate that the messiah would suffer and die, Trypho and his other Jewish friends, allegedly, concede this point and ask Justin to prove that Jesus is this prophesied messiah. ¹⁸ Justin, somewhat surprisingly, refuses to do so, but instead insists that he must first explain how the scriptures do more than speak of Jesus prophetically. The scriptures speak of Jesus in various ways, especially by speaking of him as God, that is, as the “Lord” (or, as modern translations would have it, “the LORD”). Justin states: “I will supply the proofs you wish [that Jesus is the prophesied messiah], but for the present permit me to quote the following prophecies to show that the Holy Spirit by parable called Christ God, and Lord of hosts and Lord of Jacob.” ¹⁹ The apologist then proceeds to review passages from the Septuagint, claiming that the theophanies therein are in fact the Word of the Lord, who is also called “Lord,” and who was later revealed in the flesh as Jesus. In other words, for Justin and his Christian community, when they read about the “Lord” appearing to Abraham, Moses, and other people in the Old Testament, they understood that one to be Jesus preincarnate. ²⁰

In response to Justin, Trypho does not hear Justin to say that Christians worship Jesus alone (and thereby adhere to some sort of modalistic monarchianism). He instead believes that Christians must think in terms of “another God besides the Creator of the world.” ²¹ Justin carefully avoids saying there are two gods, but does offer what he calls a “paradoxical (παράδοξος)” answer. ²² One key example is when the Angel of the Lord from passages like Genesis 18 and 19 turns out to be both sent from God and yet called “the Lord.” ²³ Another is Psalm 110:1/109:1LXX, where “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand…” ²⁴

To be sure, whenever a scripture passage speaks of God and any other immanent expression of God, Christian readers identified the Father with the former and the Son with the latter. Examples would include “the Glory of the Lord,… Son, or Wisdom, or Angel, or God, or Lord, or Word.” ²⁵ Alternatively, in passages that simply speak of “the Lord” (i.e., with no other immanent expression), Christians like Justin simply assumed that this was the preincarnate Christ. This is an especially important claim for Justin to make in dialogue with Jews, because he can insist: “For we Christians, who have gained knowledge of the true worship of God from the Law and from the Word which went forth from Jerusalem by way of the apostles of Jesus, have run for protection to the God of Jacob and the God of Israel.” ²⁶ In other words, for Justin and his community, Jesus is the Lord of Israel.

To recap, in Justin we find a pattern of reading scripture wherein the persona encountered in the Old Testament God is assumed to be, primarily, the Son. The exception to this arises whenever a passage of scripture differentiates an immanent expression of YHWH from the transcendent LORD himself, such as the angel, word, wisdom, or spirit of the LORD. Because of his debate (fictive or otherwise) with Trypho and the Jewish community, Justin had to articulate this pattern of reading the Old Testament explicitly. While there are few other such explicit articulations from the earliest Christian centuries, this same reading pattern can be found in many other ancient Christian sources. Justin's view represents a significant number of Christians, probably a majority view. This in and of itself will not be news to Patristic scholars, ²⁷ but it needs to be stressed just how widespread this reading pattern was in the early sources. ²⁸ It is so prevalent that later when Augustine tries to challenge, or at least nuance, this reading strategy, he admits that he is a lone voice among his party.

Augustine's Approach: The Trinity Is Israel's God

During Augustine's time as bishop of Hippo (395–430), he debated many Christian groups, such as the Manichaeans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians. It is not often remembered that Augustine also opposed the majority of Christians when it came to how to understand the theophanies of the Old Testament. Augustine disagreed with seeing the Son as the one encountered in the scriptures instead of the Father: he feared that such a reading could suggest that the Father is somehow unmanifestable, while the Son can become visible, making the Son mutable, less transcendent, and thereby less divine. In other words, Augustine fears there is a risk of “Arianism” or a subordination of the mutable and manifestable Word to the immutable and transcendent Father. ²⁹ (Yes, “Arianism” was still a threat during Augustine's era; the Arian Vandals besieged Hippo in 429 as Augustine lay dying, and they soon ruled all of North Africa and seized the key Christian basilicas.) ³⁰

While it is true that later Nicene Christians who were eager to promote the equality and consubstantiality of the Son with the Father adamantly deny any portrayal of the Son as inherently more manifestable than the Father, they will nevertheless continue to read their Old Testament in the same way as Justin so that the Son is the primary persona encountered in the acts of Israel's Lord. Thus, Augustine's response is telling because it illustrates just how ingrained and widespread this reading pattern was among ancient Christians. ³¹ Even when trying to correct the potential “Arianism”/subordinationism inherent in Justin's reading pattern, Augustine knows that the vast majority of “orthodox” Christians continue to use this approach. ³² As we review Augustine's treatment of Old Testament theophanies, we can see how YHWH Christology works, since he constantly acknowledges those who hold to this view in his attempt to replace it, or at least qualify it.

In his work On the Trinity, Augustine offers fifteen books attempting to articulate the doctrine of one God in three coeternal, consubstantial, and coequal divine persons. ³³ This work, written in stages in the early 400s, entails various subtopics, one of which is an examination of the scriptures to see how best to read them in light of the belief that God is triune. ³⁴ In doing so, Augustine admits that the scriptures do not speak uniformly and straightforwardly about God as triune: he notes “the difficulties presented by the holy scriptures in their multifarious diversity of form.” ³⁵

What is true of the triune God in general is also true of Christ in particular: the scriptures speak about Jesus in ways that at first seem to conflict. Augustine says Christian interpreters understand even Old Testament passages to speak of Jesus in a two-fold way, as divine and as human: “the form of God in which he is, and less than the Father by the form of a servant which he took.” ³⁶ This, for Augustine, is said to counter those who would use the passages about Jesus’ humanity as proof of his subordinate status to the Father. ³⁷ In fact, this debate proves to be central for Augustine, for he next sets out a series of questions to be put to the Old Testament regarding how the three divine persons are to be understood therein.

The potential subordination of the Son is seen to be the crux of the matter in this series because of the common assumption that the Son (not the Father) is revealed in Old Testament theophanies: ³⁸ “Why, in that case, is the Father not said to have been sent in those other physical manifestations, the fire in the bush, the pillar of cloud and fire, the lightnings on the mountain, and whatever else occurred when he spoke to the fathers, as we learn from the evidence of scripture?” ³⁹ Augustine then proceeds to list the multiple questions that arise about Old Testament theophanies, such as the exact physical form they took and whether God used additional agents, like angels, in these various manifestations. ⁴⁰

Even in this discussion, a primary concern is to sort out which divine persons were manifested in order to avoid any subordinationism by showing that the Son is not the only one who was and is manifestable: “The first thing to be done in sorting out this tangled question is to ascertain, with God's help, whether it was the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit who appeared under these created forms to the fathers; or whether it was sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit; or whether it was simply the one and only God, that is the trinity without any distinction of persons.” ⁴¹ The assumption held by both Augustine and his interlocutors is that the Son is the primary divine person manifested in the Old Testament; only he refuses to accept that this is always the case because he seeks to debunk the notion that the Son is the only manifested, or manifestable, divine person. ⁴²

Augustine also must show that the Son's manifestations were not in any way incarnations. Instead, instances such as the burning bush and the pillar of cloud were each a “created bodily substance at the service of his power.” ⁴³ Thus, Augustine can remove the problem altogether by denying that the Son alone was manifested in the Old Testament. Neither the Son, nor the Father, nor the Spirit was manifested! They only appropriated “created bodily substance” in order to communicate with humans: “God has never shown himself to bodily eyes, neither the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Spirit.” ⁴⁴

Augustine then begins to review the examples from the Old Testament, starting with God's appearance to and communication with Adam in Eden (ref. Gen. 3). Augustine argues that this “God” speaking with Adam is the same who created by way of speaking (ref. Gen.1–2), and so this divine speaker should be interpreted as the Father. ⁴⁵ Augustine knows, however, that this argument runs contrary to the common Christian interpretation of the passage, for he must acknowledge how God's actions in Genesis 1–2 must be interpreted Christocentrically, for God “made all things through his Word.” ⁴⁶ Therefore, Augustine must admit what was the common Christian reading of Genesis wherein the Father spoke the Word into existence eternally (cf. Gen. 1:3) and then the Word created all things temporally (cf. John 1:1–2). In such a reading, it was the Word or Son manifested in the Garden: “it could be that scripture passes imperceptibility from person to person, and that while it describes how the Father said Let there be light (Gen. 1:3), and all the other things he is mentioned as making through his Word, it goes on to show us the Son speaking to the first man, not saying so explicitly, but hinting at it for those who are sharp enough to understand.” ⁴⁷ Augustine insists that the passage could be referencing the Father, but he must admit that such an interpretation is ambiguous at best given the commitments of Christian readers in his day.

The next passage Augustine reviews is the scene from Genesis 12 where “the Lord (Dominus)” appears to Abram and commands him to go to Canaan. Augustine still insists that any one of the three divine persons could be referenced here, but he admits that most Christians would assume this to be a manifestation of the Son. His statement is worth quoting at length:

But even here it is not stated in what guise the Lord appeared to him, or whether the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit appeared to him. Our friends may of course think it must have been the Son, because the text does not say “God appeared to him,” but “The Lord appeared to him”; and Lord would seem to be a name proper to the Son, on the evidence of the apostle: For even if there are those called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords; yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we in him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him (1 Cor 8:5). But God the Father is also unmistakably called Lord in many places—for example, The Lord said to me, My son are you, I today have begotten you (Ps 2:7), and Said the Lord to my Lord, Sit at my right hand (Ps 110:1). Indeed, so is the Holy Spirit unmistakably called Lord—where the apostle says, And the Spirit is Lord (2 Cor 3:17)… ⁴⁸

Augustine here again wants to stipulate that the passage in Genesis 12 is ambiguous enough to allow a reference to the Father, but he knows that the majority of Christians naturally read this as speaking of the preincarnate Son, since the “Lord would seem to be a name proper to the Son.”

Augustine next turns to the scene from Genesis 18, where three men appear to Abraham and yet the singular “Lord” addresses him. ⁴⁹ Augustine here knows that most Christians interpret the one spokesperson as the preincarnate Son, while the two other “men” with him are angels. ⁵⁰ Augustine, however, thinks this reading is faulty because the two “angels” who depart from Sodom are later addressed by Lot as “Lord” in the singular. ⁵¹ Augustine concludes that the three who appeared to Abraham were the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while the two who appeared to Lot were the Son and Spirit. All the divine persons, however, can be spoken of in the singular (“Lord [domine]”) because of their one shared substance. Augustine's treatment of this passage is idiosyncratic, and it again indicates that most Christians instead read the persons involved as the Son and two angels. It is worth noting that Augustine's argument only works with the Septuagint, for the original Hebrew word is adonai, not the Tetragrammaton. Therefore, the more common reading of the passage by other ancient Christians, wherein the two angels are not divine persons, remains more faithful to the original Hebrew referent, which can be used honorifically to refer to any person of respect (e.g., Gen. 23:11), such as a master (Gen. 24:14), a husband (e.g., Judg. 19:26), or a king (1 Sam. 16:16). ⁵² In short, Augustine argues that Genesis 18–19 is ambiguous enough to allow for his interpretation, but his interpretation is obviously special pleading.

Next, Augustine turns to the passage in Exodus 3 where God appears to Moses in the burning bush. ⁵³ He first notes how “the angel of the Lord (angelus Domini)” ⁵⁴ appeared to Moses in the flame (Exod. 3:2) and yet how “the Lord (Dominus)” (3:4), that is, the “God (Deus)” of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is in fact the one who speaks from the burning bush (3:4 and 3:6). Contrary to Justin and the majority of other early Christians, Augustine does not think that the “angel of the LORD” necessarily refers to the preincarnate Christ. In another strained argument, Augustine contends that this could be a reference to the Holy Spirit or even to the Father. His argument is further complicated by his insistence that this was not an actual appearance of God but an accommodation of fire or air or some “created thing (creatura),” ⁵⁵ which is simply called an angel or messenger. If this is the case, Augustine admits, then this would more than likely refer to the Son or the Spirit since both are said to be sent from the Father and so they would most appropriately accommodate “messenger” status.

Augustine at this point begins to move more quickly through various Old Testament theophanies, always applying his same axiom: the reference is ambiguous and therefore could be to any of the three divine persons or even to all three as one God. In so doing, to return to Augustine's primary aim, the bishop can thereby argue that no passage can be used to demonstrate the Son's (or the Spirit's) subordinate status as manifestable, visible, or mutable, while the Father remains transcendent. Augustine argues this way for the pillar of cloud/fire, the cloud on Mount Sinai, and the “face-to-face” meetings with Moses. ⁵⁶ He devotes additional lengthy exposition of the scene where God placed Moses in the rock and passed by him (Exod. 33), concluding that such physical appearances (e.g., God's “backside” in Exod. 33:23) cannot relay information about God's actual substance and so must instead be interpreted as an allegory about how God relates to Israel. ⁵⁷

At this point, Augustine concedes that none of the surveyed theophanies definitively and unequivocally manifest the Father. ⁵⁸ Nevertheless, he repeats his argument that even if these theophanies refer to the Son or the Spirit, they operate via accommodation of created substances, such as fire, and therefore cannot be used to claim that the Son's or the Spirit's substance is mutable and less than the Father's.

Augustine's one real coup de grâce finally comes when he cites the appearance of the Ancient of Days in Daniel (Trin. 2.33; cf. Dan. 9:7–14). There, both the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man appear together, which of course Christians interpret as the Father and the Son, respectively. Thus, Augustine has found one clear instance where the Father is manifested in the Old Testament. Even so, this “appearance” occurs in a vision that Augustine must address at greater length (Trin. 2.34), thereby tacitly admitting the weakness of his argument. For our purposes, it is worth noting that the Tetragrammaton is nowhere used in Daniel's apocalyptic vision. Therefore, while Augustine has proven that the Father can also be manifested in the Old Testament (at least in an apocalyptic vision), he has not found any way to disprove the common reading of “Lord” in the Old Testament as referring primarily to the preincarnate Son.

In sum, Augustine has in fact returned to the position argued by Justin in that any description of God in the Old Testament which includes both a higher/transcendent and a lower/immanent expression of God implies for Christians a reference to both the Father and the Son. The Ancient of Days and Son of Man fit the same pattern found with God and God's Angel, or Word, or Wisdom, etc. Writing in the aftermath of the fourth-century debates, Augustine wishes to destabilize this pattern so that it cannot be used to support subordinationism. Nevertheless, his exegesis still acknowledges how most ancient Christians accepted this pattern when the text demanded references to both the Father and the Son while also assuming that more straightforward passages about the Lord in the Old Testament refer to the preincarnate Christ. Augustine's case is especially telling because he writes in direct response to the fourth-century controversies wherein YHWH Christology is recognized as having potential problems, and yet despite his best efforts, Augustine can find no alternative interpretation. He instead must concede to this reading of the Old Testament while insisting that such a reading does not imply subordinationism.

Conclusion: Implications of YHWH Christology

To conclude let us point to some implications of this approach. Justin and Augustine are just two examples of what is normative for early Christian readings in what is commonly called the postapostolic period. While this reading was ubiquitous and normative from the second century on, one should inquire about the first century and in particular what about the texts that would form the New Testament. Obviously, a complete treatment cannot be given here, but a brief hypothesis is in order.

I suggest that many, but not all, New Testament authors also held to some form of a YHWH Christology. This claim is not disputed with a text like the Gospel of John, wherein Jesus is the “I Am” who existed before Abraham (John 8:58) ⁵⁹ and even since the beginning (John 1:1). Jesus is the one whom Isaiah saw enthroned in glory (cf. Isa. 6:1) according to John 12:41. While this is not disputed for John, virtually no scholar asserts that the same is true for the Gospel of Mark. ⁶⁰ Why not? Mark opens by citing Isaiah's call to “Prepare the way of YHWH” (Isa 40:3 in Mark 1:3), and then John prepares the way for the Lord Jesus. Then, Mark's second chapter shows that Jesus is the “Lord of the Sabbath” (2:23–28). Who is the Lord of the Sabbath in Jewish thinking, if not YHWH? Jesus's theophanic self-revelation especially becomes clear in Mark 6:45–52 when he “walks on the sea (περιπατῶν ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης),” since only YHWH can do so, according to Job 9:8, 38:16, and Sirach 24:45 (which use virtually the same Greek phrase in the LXX). ⁶¹ Mark also describes how Jesus “intended to pass them (his disciples) by.” ⁶² This is theophanic language recalling how God protected Moses on Mount Sinai and “passed him by.” ⁶³ Similarly, when God encounters Elijah on Mount Horeb, God tells Elijah to go stand before YHWH on the mountain, and YHWH will “pass by” him. It seems clear that a significant tradition exists in which theophanies involving the God of Israel “passing by” his appointed messengers. In each of the passages noted above, the Septuagint uses the verb παρέρχομαι, which is the same verb used in Mark 6:48 to describe Jesus’ intent to pass by his disciples. ⁶⁴ When the disciples cry out at Jesus’ appearance, he answers by using the phrase ἐγώ εἰμι. While one might read this text and simply conclude that Jesus is saying “it is I,” readers well versed in the Septuagint would likely see a direct parallel in Jesus’ reply to that of YHWH's self-identification at the burning bush or in Isaiah (LXX). ⁶⁵ Mark, it seems, has a YHWH Christology, in which Jesus is the God encountered in the theophanies of old, now present “in the flesh” (to borrow Johannine language). ⁶⁶

The same could be said of numerous other texts from the New Testament. To name just a few examples, consider Paul's use of the monotheistic claims from Isaiah 45:23 in his Christ hymn (Phil. 2:6–11) so that Jesus is the “Lord” who has the “Name above all names”; Jude's claim that it was Jesus who lead the people out of Egypt and through the wilderness as a pillar of cloud (Jude 5); and Revelation's depiction of Jesus as “the first and the last” who looks like both Daniel's Son of Man and Daniel's Ancient of Days. ⁶⁷

To return to Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, it just may be that Luke (and Jesus, and for that matter, most early Christians) meant that “all the scriptures” refer to Jesus himself, both those describing him as the promised messiah and those describing him as the “Lord” who created heaven and earth. All the scriptures are about Jesus. Such a claim, I should stipulate, is not novel. In the recent rise of scholars endorsing early high Christology, ⁶⁸ many scholars will now come close to this position. They say that authors like Mark and Luke identify Jesus “with” YHWH or depict Jesus “as” YHWH. ⁶⁹ I think we can press this further: authors like Mark and Luke, like their later readers Justin and Augustine, claim Jesus is YHWH.

What would a retrieval of such a view mean for contemporary exegesis and catechesis? Here, I can only offer some general possibilities. ⁷⁰ First, on the negative side: a Marcionite reading would be wholly avoided. While few Christians actually reject the Old Testament today, many Christians can still treat the Old Testament as a relic of a primitive past where the Father was acknowledged and worshipped, but the true character of God was not known until Jesus’ appearance in the Gospels. Few Christians find Old Testament texts as relevant to their faith, except for possible anemic moral lessons or shadowy figural readings. If we reclaim YHWH Christology, we can be rid of such functional Marcionism.

Second, on the positive side, YHWH Christology offers the possibility of reconciling biblical and historical theology. No longer do Christian theologians and ministers have to be embarrassed about later developments from the fourth Christian century. ⁷¹ Rather than conceding that Nicene theology is the result of Greek metaphysics, we can claim with intellectual integrity that the use of Greek metaphysical concepts was the Nicene way of retaining the notion that Jesus is YHWH. The Pro-Nicenes insisted that Jesus was as “fully God” as the Father, for who would doubt that YHWH who appeared in the scriptures is “fully divine?” While it is still true that the Old Testament never explicates how there can be two (or three) figures called “Lord,” early Christians are left to grapple with the various ways in which this second figure relates to the first, such as the Angel of the Lord, or the Word or Wisdom of the Lord. Even so, such exegetical grappling was present from the earliest days of Christianity, so that Christians professed faith in one God, while simultaneously worshipping Jesus as Lord and baptizing new believers in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. ⁷²

Finally, I would suggest that retrieving a YHWH Christology offers a reading of the scriptures in a way that is exegetically sound even by the standards of modern sentiments. In modernity scholars attempted to read the “Hebrew Bible” in a so-called objective way, meaning Christian, Jewish, and even agnostic commentators could and should agree on conclusions. In this way of thinking, imposing Christian doctrine onto ancient Jewish texts is a sign of Evangelical bias and it does violence to the text. ⁷³ YHWH Christology, perhaps counterintuitively, could in fact offer a way beyond this impasse. Of course, Jews will not agree with Christians that Jesus is Israel's Lord incarnate, just as they do not agree that Jesus is Israel's messiah. Nevertheless, YHWH Christology offers a way of reading Israel's scriptures in a Christo-centric way that is intellectually honest: these texts are about the covenant made between “the Lord” and his people. There is no interreligious conflict over how to read such texts. The disagreement comes when deciding whether that same Lord later came in the flesh.

How then should we proceed with such readings? Suffice it to say that much still needs to be considered, ⁷⁴ but I suggest that such a reading be retrieved since it proved vital to the Christians of the early centuries of the common era—the era that birthed the canon and formulated all the fundamental dogmas of the faith. Bogdan Bucur has suggested that such a retrieval would renew biblical study itself: “With face turned toward theophany, biblical exegesis can once again become mystagogy: an account of and a guide into the experience of God.” ⁷⁵ Perhaps so. Perhaps, we should follow the example set out in Luke 24:27. In our exegetical, catechetical, and homiletical work, we too should “begin with Moses and all the prophets” and “interpret… all the scriptures” as being about Jesus himself. If we did, we could do so with the hope that our recipients will say: “Were not our hearts burning within us while…[they were] opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 28:32).