When Jesus is accused of blasphemy after
claiming ‘I and the Father are one’ in John 10:30, he cites Psalm 82 in
response to this accusation levelled by his potential executioners: συ ανθρωπος
ων
ποιεις σεαυτον θεον
(‘you, being a man, are making yourself God’—10:33). This charge lies at the
heart of later christological controversies for which John’s Gospel is adduced
as an instructive resource. The question in these controversies and to a large
degree in John 10 is this: how can Jesus exist as both human and God? the
fourth evangelist does not provide in his narrative a Trinitarian formula in
reply, of course. In his final words to the Jews in the entire Gospel—whose hands
are clutching stones—Jesus gives warrant to his explicit self-identification
with the one God of Shema by appealing to Psalm 82, already noted in this study
as the most important deification text in patristic theology.
It is not written in your law, ‘I
said, you are gods’ [εγω ειπα θεοι εστε]?
If he called them ‘gods’ [θεους] to whom the word of God [ο λογος του θεου] came (and the
scripture is not able to be broken), how can you say of whom the Father
consecrated and sent into the world, ‘you blaspheme’, because I said, ‘I am a
son of God?’ (Jn 10:34b-36)
The appeal to Psalm 82 associates Jesus
not so much with the one God of Israel (with whom he has just identified
himself in 10:30), but with a more general category of divine being: θεοι (LXX, Ps. 81:6).
These gods appear in the Psalm as a plurality, and Jesus maintains the collective
nature of their identity (note the plural εκεινοι/those). What I will argue below is
that Jesus is drawing on a Jewish tradition associated with Psalm 82 that not
only legitimates his own claim to divine status, but also indicates that his
coming into the world will result in the plural, collective deification of a
new people. (Andrew J. Byers, Ecclesiology and Theosis in the Gospel of John
[Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 166; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017], 186-87)
After discussing the 1st-century interpretation of Psalm 82:6 (see Jerome H. Neyrey on the use of Psalm 82:6 in John 10:34-35), Byers writes:
. . . The
use of Psalm 82 in John 10:34-36 [is] not just to provide a christological
apology for Jesus’ supposed blasphemy in John 10:3, justifying Jesus’ claim to
divinity; the citation reaffirms the developing ecclesial vision in which a new
society is created by the divine revelation provided by Jesus. The standard
christological interpretation of John 10:34-36 among Johannine scholars follow
the line of a ‘from the lesser to the greater’ method of argumentation: if
mortal beings can in some way be referred to as ‘gods’ and ‘sons of the Most
High’ (a phrase parallel to ‘gods’ in Ps. 82:6), then a fortiori surely
Jesus in his unique vocation as ‘the Son of God’ and consecrated divine
agent can be legitimately designated as ‘god’.
My own
proposal here is that the citation of Psalm 82 allows Jesus to make an ecclesiological
statement as well as a christological one. He is indeed a divine
being, but in citing Psalm 82 with its likely connections to the scene at
Sinai, he highlights not only his divine status, but also the divine status
granted to those who receive him as the definitive revelation of God (see
John 1:18). The ecclesial significance of this psalm in John’s Gospel is noted
by Käsemann, for whom the ’community under the Word’ is a ‘heavenly reality’:
This idea
is expressed in the most astonishing form in 10.34f. There the statement of Ps.
82.6, ‘You are gods,’ is justified through the reception of the Word. To be
sure, this verse has a christological slant, but it cannot be limited to Christology
only, since it already had validity for the community of the old covenant. The
accepted Word of God produces an extension of heavenly reality on earth, for
the Word participates in the communion of Father and Son. This unity of Father
and Son is the quality and mark of the heavenly world. It projects itself to
the earth in the Word in order to create the community there which, through
rebirth from above, becomes integrated into the unity of Father and Son. (Käsemann,
Testament, 69)
Käsemann,
however, understands the evangelist’s ecclesiological use of Psalm 82 to betray
a ‘frightening understanding of the Johannine community’ that amounts to ‘gnosticising’
and claims that ‘his interpretation of the Old Testament is also gnosticizing’
in regards to Psalm 82 and elsewhere. (Ibid., 70) Though he discerns some loose
idea of a participatory ecclesiology, Käsemann enlists the citation of Psalm 82
as another example of the Fourth Gospel’s aberrant trends towards Docetism and
Gnosticism. Recognizing John’s Jewish milieu and the Jewish interpretive traditions
likely affixed to Psalm 82 leads to different conclusions. The participatory ecclesiology
in view is that of a renewed Israel established by the faithful reception of
the supreme revelation of Israel’s one God.
The
foregoing discussion affirms that Psalm 82 was not employed in John as a
haphazard christological proof text. Bultmann, John, 389) At a critical
point in the narrative where the clash with the Jews has reached a climactic
pinnacle, the citation of this psalm—freighted with connections to the giving
of Torah—provides a summative reflection on the ecclesial narrative script
established in the Prologue. The Word of God—Jesus—has appeared in history as
the ultimate disclosure of divine reality whose rejection leads to death, but
whose acceptance leads to filiation and deification (‘you are gods’ and ‘sons
of the Most High’). Just as Israel’s inception was associated with receiving
the words of Torah at Sinai, the faithful reception of the words of Jesus, who
is himself the Word, creates a new people of God who enjoy the divine gift of
eternal life. If the deification and fall of Adam is also evoked by John’s use
of Psalm 82, a possible resonance with this psalm as discussed above, it would
suit well the theme of new creation climactically depicted in Jesus’
re-enactment of Genesis 2:7 by breathing his breath/Spirit into his disciples
in John 20:22, thereby forming a new humanity. And this new humanity consists
of the ‘children of God’, that is, those ‘to whom the Word of God came’ and who
received him; conversely, those ‘to whom the Word of god came’ but who rejected
him will ‘die in [their] sins’ (8:24); or, as Psalm 82:7, puts it, they will ‘die
like humans’ (Ps. 82:7).
In sum, the
evangelists’ use of Psalm 82 makes this statement about believers: ‘you are
gods’. (Ibid., 194-96)
