Thursday, April 22, 2021

Martin Parsons on Prayers to Jesus Christ in the New Testament: Evidence of "High Christology" Being Early

 

 

Prayer to Christ

 

In the NT, prayer is typically addressed to God the Father. However, it appears

that Jesus was also addressed in prayer in two ways:

 

Firstly, a range of NT books including Pauline epistles, 1 Peter and Jude speak of prayer or praise being offered to God through Jesus Christ. (Rom.1:8; 5:11; 7:25; 16:27; Col.3:17; Heb.13:15; 1 Pet.2:5; 4:11; Jude:25.) Illustrative of these is Jude’s closing doxology:

 

to the only God our Saviour be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen. (Jude:25)

 

However, a small number of other texts appear to indicate prayer being made

directly to the heavenly Jesus:

 

Peter’s Pentecost speech begins with a recitation of Joel’s prophecy that ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’. However, by the end of Peter’s speech, it is the name of Jesus that he urges the crowd to call on in order to be saved. (Acts 2:21,38)

 

Stephen’s dying prayer ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit’ (Acts 7:59f ) is not only unequivocally directly addressed to Jesus, but also appears deliberately to echo Jesus’ dying prayer, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Luke 23:46).

 

Acts also records Ananias’ prayer to ‘the Lord’, who in a vision told him to visit Saul. His subsequent comment to Saul that ‘the Lord Jesus’ has sent him indicates that ‘the Lord’ Ananias addressed in prayer was Jesus. (Acts 9:10-17)

 

In Paul’s account of his prayers to ‘the Lord’ about his thorn in the flesh, ‘the Lord’ almost certainly refers to Jesus, as the Lord’s reply ‘my power is made perfect in weakness’ is specifically stated in the following verse to be ‘Christ’s power’. (2 Cor.12:7-9)

 

The Aramaic prayer Maran-atha – ‘come Lord’, used by Paul in 1 Corinthians, is almost certainly addressed to Jesus, as the NT is consistent in only anticipating the eschatological coming to earth of Jesus. The synonymous Greek expression at the end of Revelation accords with this, by being specifically addressed to Jesus. (1 Cor.16:22; Rev.22:20) Interestingly, the NT indicates that the early church preserved two Aramaic prayers: one – Abba, being addressed to God the Father, while the other – Maranatha - was addressed to Jesus.

 

As well as these prayers solely addressed to Jesus, prayer was also made jointly to Jesus and the Father. In 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13 Paul asks ‘our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus’ (Αυτος δε ο θεος και πετηρ ημων και ο κυριος ημων 'Ιησους) to establish and strengthen the church, a prayer he echoes in 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17, but in reverse order, addressing it to ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father’ (Αυτος δε ο κυριος ημων 'Ιησους Χριστος και ο θεος ο πατηρ ημων).

 

Interestingly, the Fourth Gospel records Jesus’ teaching during the final Passover meal, that his disciples should both pray to the Father in Jesus’ name, and that Jesus himself will grant them whatever they ask in his name to glorify the Father. (Jn 14:13-14; 16:23-24) This portrays Jesus as both the means of access to the Father and the one who enacts the response to the prayer, a description that the Logos christology of the prologue makes understandable.

 

Significantly, Colossians 3:17 appears to echo the Fourth Gospel’s account of this teaching of Jesus, when it urges that all worship practices, including thanksgiving prayer, should be done ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him’. Hurtado observes that this characteristic offering of prayer to God, through Jesus occurs both in the NT and other early Christian sources.

 

In fact, it is hard to see how the NT’s affirmation of prayer to both God and Jesus could have been held together with the explicit affirmation of monolatry, without the presupposition of something approximating to a Logos Christology underlying it. (Martin Parsons, Unveiling God: Contextualizing Christology for Islamic Culture [Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2004], 123-24)