The preceding chapters have been concerned with Paul's understanding of Christ as more than individual, and I have maintained that this is an early and important piece of evidence about the genesis of Christology. Quite independently of questions such as whether a title like ‘Lord’ came to be applied to Jesus early or late, in Gentile surroundings only or also in Jewish contexts, here is undeniably early evidence, in the earliest dateable documents of the New Testament, that at least one great Christian found himself describing his experience of Christ in what one might call ‘divine’ terms. For Paul, experience of contact with Christ takes very much the same ‘shape’ as the ‘shape’ of God in any theist's belief: he is emphatically personal, yet more than merely individual. The pieces of evidence for this are, no doubt, complex and various; but out of them all, the main pieces selected for examination were the ‘inclusion’ language and the body language.

But these are largely lacking from other parts of the New Testament. Are we to deduce from this that Paul's experience of Christ was not typical – perhaps even that it was abnormal; and are we correspondingly to discount his experience when estimating the ways in which Christology was generated? Even if Paul could be proved abnormal, his experience would still need to be accounted for. We should still find ourseves asking, Who is Jesus, if he thus impinges, thus early in the life of the Christian movement, on even one – and that, an unusual – person?

THE SON OF MAN

It is held by many scholars that the term, ‘the Son of Man’, meant a supernatural, apocalyptic figure and was first applied, as a title, to Jesus by the early Palestinian communities, who signified by its use their belief that Jesus was the dominant figure of an imminent apocalyptic climax. If Jesus used it himself at all, it was only – so this theory goes – with reference to a figure other than himself. It was not by Jesus himself but by Christians in the earliest period after the first Easter that it began to be used to designate Jesus.

Others hold that Jesus did apply the Semitic equivalent of this expression to himself, but only in certain limited connexions, whether as an oblique, idiomatic alternative simply for the first person pronoun – ‘I’ or ‘me’ – or as a more specific indication of himself as a frail mortal. Professor J. W. Bowker of the University of Lancaster, in particular, emphasizes the latter. He observes that, in the Old Testament, ‘Son of man’ occurs mainly in three contexts: in the vocative, as an address to Ezekiel; in Dan. 7, in the special context of that vision; and in a ‘scatter’ of texts such as Num. 23: 19 and Ps. 8: 4, which emphasize the contrast between frail mortal man and the angels, or God himself. This latter sense he is also able to illustrate impressively from Jewish literature outside the Old Testament.

There are aspects of the religious experience reflected in the Pauline epistles which make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Paul thought of the risen Christ in much the same way as a theist thinks of God – as personal but supra-individual. This, as we have seen, is what seems to emerge from an examination of Paul's incorporative language. By contrast, we have just seen that, for most of the other writers in the New Testament, Jesus, though transcendent and uniquely close to God, is conceived of in much more individualistic ways. And yet – and this is the point of this chapter and the next – there are certain assumptions, made in common by Paul and the non-Pauline writers alike, which, by implication, point to precisely that supra-individual aspect of Christ which the non-Pauline writers do not make explicit. In other words, my thesis is that Paul's ‘corporate Christ’ alone ‘makes sense’ of the experience reflected even by the writers who do not explicitly acknowledge it: their assumptions go further than their expressions.

It is two such assumptions that will now be considered. The first, in this chapter, is the assumption that the results of the death of Christ are available universally. The second, in the next chapter, is the assumption that Christ fulfils Scripture.

The scope of this book is strictly limited, and so is the equipment of the writer, as no one knows better than he. The inquiry is limited almost entirely to the New Testament documents, and the instruments employed are only those of ordinary New Testament investigation. But if anything that is cogent emerges from the argument, it will have an importance in the wider field of systematic theology, and so, ultimately, in the presentation and application of the Christian gospel. Therefore, although so far ‘behind the lines’, and although deliberately refraining from the discussion of recent work on Christology beyond the New Testament period, I refuse to believe that this activity has nothing to do with matters of contemporary urgency.

Indeed, it is, in a sense, a reply to a contemporary challenge. Apart from the more immediate incentive provided by sundry invitations to lecture, for which I have already expressed my gratitude, the main impetus behind these studies is the conviction, slowly generated over the years, that there are unexamined false assumptions behind a good deal of contemporary New Testament scholarship. Of these, the one I have particularly in mind is the assumption that the genesis of Christology – the coming into existence, that is, of the descriptions and understandings of Jesus which emerge in the course of Christian history – can be explained as a sort of evolutionary process, in the manner of the so-called ‘history of religions school’ of thought (die religionsgeschichtliche Schule).

INTRODUCTORY

After stating the thesis that development more satisfactorily describes the genesis of New Testament Christology than evolution, I proceeded to test it by re-investigating the origins of four terms applied to Jesus–‘the Son of Man’, ‘the Son of God’, ‘Christ’, and ‘Lord’. The conclusion reached was that, so far from their evolving away from what was there at the beginning, there was, in each case, evidence to suggest that the term was dictated by what Jesus himself was (due care being taken to use that question-begging phrase carefully), and not by extraneous factors entering the stream of tradition from elsewhere. So conservative a conclusion is, in the nature of the case, suspect, because it is liable to be biassed by vested interests. I have myself viewed it with suspicion; but, in spite of this, I find myself convinced by the evidence. It is for readers to see whether they agree.

But, in any case, there are other phenomena in the New Testament which are of Christological importance besides the use of such terms as have just been examined; and it is to one of these that the remainder of this study is chiefly directed. This phenomenon is what, for lack of a better term, I call an understanding and experience of Christ as corporate. In some measure, this bypasses the use of titles in Christology and affords an independent criterion for the nature of Jesus Christ; and it has the merit of being undeniably early and well-established, for the evidence is largely in those Pauline epistles which are widely agreed to be genuine.