Thank you.

Pitre’s dissertation PDF for $41 here.

Those aren’t what high christology means. High christology refers to the belief that Jesus was a prehistoric archangel who descended into a human body. See the source list in the article for more. The transfiguration exoterically represents a miraculous glory bestowed on Jesus, which is represented as an act of God at that moment. But it esoterically (as in, its concealed meaning that had to be explained orally to readers of sufficient rank) reveals his eternal nature (Philippians 2) and the true nature of the resurrection (1 Cor 15), making it a backshadow and a foreshadow (hence we will all “be like the angels,” Mark 12:25).

The Gospels are inherently concealing of most high-ranking mysteries of the faith (Mark says this explicitly). They have lots of allusions to those mysteries. But they never outright state or depict them.

For example, the Baptism “depicts” Jesus being adopted by God then, which is the exoteric message (standing in as a aetiological myth for Christtian baptism generally, since all Christians are declared the beloved sons of God at their baptism); but the esoteric message is that that backshadows the fact that God actually had declared Jesus the firstborn at the dawn of creation and foreshadows the fact that that eternal spirit enters the flesh of Jesus then and then departs at the crucifixion (where Mark says he expired, lit. the spirit left him, exepneusen), and thus the body was just a temporary vessel—the actual son of God is that spirit entity. Which is the thing Mark never explicitly says. It is everywhere implied but never stated.

The majority of scholars now (based on the last ten years of publications) agrees with all of this. The fact that you couldn’t find it explicitly in the Synoptics was the reason a trend arose to deny this (and high christology was sidelined as a religious dogma), which is now being corrected (as itself an overcorrection) by admitting the Synoptics are concealing it, not arguing against it (much less predating it). The explicit evidence is in the pre-Gospel epistles (and to an extent in a better understanding of Jewish theology which John 1 is actually in agreement with, not a blasphemy against, for example; but for decades it was thought the other way around).

Another that has come to my attention is Brant Pitre, professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute with a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Notre Dame and specializing in ancient Judaism, who finds the dying messiah element to be obvious already in Daniel 9 exclaiming that “it is inexplicable” why anyone disagrees with this observation: Brant James Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 402.

Merci. C’est très utile. J’ai vérifié ces exemples et je les inclurai dans mes futurs travaux.

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Thanks. This is very helpful. I have checked these examples and will include them in my future work.

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Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues and Commentary (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2001), 79, and Etienne Nodet, Le fils de dieu: procès de Jésus et évangiles (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 199–202.

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I’ll give you a more precise quote from Etienne Nodet:

“The purpose of the chapter is not to make an inventory of the various pre-rabbinic Jewish currents and their literature, but to present a precise point: the at least literary existence, shortly before Christianity, of a savior of divine rank who suffers the fate of the suffering servant of Is 53, i.e. who is put to death in the name of God by those he came to save in the name of the same God. The underlying thesis is that a language existed before Jesus, backed up by Scripture, to express what he was for the first apostles. It’s a sort of ‘missing link’ between the canonical Old Testament and primitive preaching.” (p. 167)

Can you identify a source where Blomberg says that—and does it also say that Isaiah 53 was interpreted as predicting the messiah’s death? (Because one could use the Targum to argue that those who took it as messianic, dropped the death component of the original text.)

Tabor’s presentation there is excellent and a model of how to do this. The only comment he makes I would correct is that he only briefs over the fact that 11Q13 cites a dying messiah expectation, and in wording a critic could pounce on as incorrect. (That scroll does not “quote” the dying messiah passage, it refers to it; and that it refers to it is a veritable certainty, but that requires unpacking, as discussed in my article above.)