Saturday, August 26, 2017

Margaret Barker on Eusebius and Psalm 91:9


Eusebius also knew that the second God was the one whom Philo had called the Logos (Preparation XI.14).

In his Proof he began by stating his case:

Remember how Moses calls the Being, Who appeared to the patriarchs and often delivered to them the oracles written down in Scripture, sometimes God and Lord and sometimes the Angel of the Lord. He clearly implies that this was not the Omnipotent God but a secondary Being, rightly called the God and Lord of holy men, but the Angel of the Most High His father. (Proof I.5)

The Lord was the visible second God:

And if it is not possible for the Most High God, the invisible the Uncreated, and the Omnipotent to be said to be seen in mortal form, the being who was seen must have been the Word of God, Whom we call Lord as we do the Father. (Proof I.5)

Eusebius knew, then, the tradition apparent in several texts, that both Father and Son could be called Lord, just as the gnostics knew that both could be called Father. He distinguishes throughout between God Most High and another Lord, and shows in his treatment of Ps 91 that God Most High was the Father addressed by Jesus (Proof IX.7). The psalmist had addressed the second God, later manifested as Jesus, when he spoke of the Lord who had made his refuge with God Most High. Eusebius here has read the Hebrew more accurately than modern translations since the text of Ps. 91.9 does actually say:

You, O Yahweh, are my refuge,
You have made Elyon your dwelling place.

which clearly distinguishes Elyon from Yahweh, God Most High from the Lord. As has happened so often, translators have altered the text in order to give what they think it should have said. (Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992], 198-99)