Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Brant Pitre on High Christology and Matthew 19:16//Mark 10:17//Luke 18:18

  

Option #2: Jesus Uses the Shema and the Decalogue to Imply He Is Equal with God

 

According to other scholars, however, Jesus is not denying that he is divine. Instead, he is actually using the allusions to the Shema and the Decalogue to invite the rich man to realize that Jesus is much more than just a merely human “teacher” (Matt 19:16; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18). In order to see this clearly, two key observations need to be made.

 

First and foremost: despite what is often claimed, Jesus does not actually deny he is good—much less that he is God. A closer look at the evidence shows that Jesus never says, “I am not good,” or “I am not God.” In fact, he does not say anything explicit about himself one way or the other. Instead, he simply responds to the rich man’s question about how to obtain eternal life by insisting that the one God alone is good and that it is necessary to keep the commandments. In other words, Jesus begins his response to the rich man with an “affirmation of monotheism.” This affirmation is particularly important, given what Jesus does next.

 

Second, Jesus adds a commandment to the Decalogue that is entirely focused on following him. In a first-century Jewish context, it is difficult to overestimate just how striking Jesus’s act of adding a requirement to the Decalogue would have been. In Jewish Scripture, the Ten Commandments alone are written by the very “finger of God” (Exod 31:18). As such, they have a unique and supreme place in the Mosaic Torah. Hence, for Jesus to presume to add anything to the Decalogue raises the question: Who does Jesus think he is? It is difficult to overestimate just how problematic “the extreme nature” of Jesus adding a requirement to the Decalogue is for those who argue that Jesus is denying both that he is good (and that he is God). if Jesus is actually denying that he is good, then how can he possibly make “following” him as a disciple a condition for obtaining “eternal life”? How could it be necessary for salvation to follow a sinful human teacher who insists that he is not even “good,” much less that he is not God?

 

In light of such observations, a strong case can be made that, far from denying his equality with God, Jesus’s response to the rich man is actually a riddle meant to lead the man to the realization of who Jesus really is:

 

When Jesus adds that no one is good but God alone, he does not make a direct statement about himself. What this statement means regarding Jesus’ identity is merely implied. . . . Jesus’ answer was intended to tease out the implications that Jesus was indeed equal with God . . . Jesus thus takes the place of God in giving absolute commandments. . . . He does not make a statement about himself, but provokes the audience to make their own judgment. (Grindheim, God’s Equal, 187)

 

If God alone is good and able to give commandments, then Jesus does so as well. By implication, then, he is also good. And he is good not in the sense implied by the rich man, but in the absolute sense, used by Jesus himself. (Simon J. Gathercole, The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006], 74.)

 

In other words, when it comes to the question of eternal life, following Jesus is essential. Indeed—and this is important—the only way to take Jesus’s declaration that no one is good but God alone as a denial of his divinity is to wrench his words completely out of context by separating his initial response from his final demand. Taken as a whole, Jesus’s response to the rich man functions as a riddle-like invitation to discover the truth about Jesus’s identity. (Brant Pitre, Jesus and Divine Christology [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2024], 135-36, italics in original; “Option #1” is “Jesus Denies That He Is God [and that He Is Good” [ibid., 134])

 

 


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