Book review: One God, One Lord - Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism by Larry W. Hurtado
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc/2015 (third edition)/250 pages/$36.95 paperback (Amazon.com price)
Reviewed by Jim Burns on 12-24-2025
Dr. Larry Hurtado begins his book with the banner bible verse of The Unitarian Paulician Church of Christ: Although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth - as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords” - yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (1 Corinthians 8:5-6). In these lines the apostle Paul summarizes the distinctive nature of early Christian devotion. Paul distinguishes Christian devotion from other varieties in the Greco-Roman world of his day. He does so by rejecting the plurality of deities otherwise almost universally accepted in varying ways among his pagan contemporaries as legitimate manifestations of “the divine,” insisting that for Christians there can be only “one God.” This strict monotheistic stand, offensively strict in the eyes of most pagans of that time, was nothing but the common position taken by Judaism - something to which Paul as a Jewish Christian would have happily elevated as proof that he was truly serving the God of his fathers.
Paul’s statement also distinguishes early Christian faith from the Jewish background by linking Jesus with God and conferring on him a title of divine honor, “Lord.” Hurtado informs the reader that although we do not have first-century Jewish documents informing us what Jewish religious leaders thought of Christian devotion, there seems to be every reason to assume that the attitude was probably very much like the one reflected in later Jewish sources which apparently reject cultic devotion to Jesus as constituting an example of the worship of “two powers in heaven,” that is, the worship of two gods. (The author’s footnote references a book addressing the ancient Jewish criticism of “two powers” heretics written by A.F. Segal). He goes on to state that it is likely that Paul’s persecution of Jewish Christians (Gal. 1:13-14; 1 Cor. 15:9) prior to his conversion experience was triggered partly by the reverence they gave to Jesus. Subsequently, Paul describes his change of heart as brought about because God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me” (Gal. 1:16). Early Jewish Christians, like Paul after his Damascus road experience, apparently felt thoroughly justified in giving Jesus reverence in terms of divinity and at the same time thought of themselves as worshiping one God.
The challenge that Hurtado encountered when doing the scholarly research for his book: How did the early Jewish Christians accommodate the veneration of the exalted Jesus alongside their ancestral tradition of one God without the influence of the succeeding four centuries of Christian theological discussion which led to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity? The author proposes that early Christianity drew upon important resources in ancient Judaism and also developed a somewhat distinctive “mutation” or innovation in this monotheistic tradition. Additionally, the author asserts that the question of how the veneration of Jesus began in early Christianity cannot be answered by invoking the influence of pagan polytheism in Christian circles insufficiently familiar with the monotheistic tradition of the first Jewish Christians. The chronological data concerning early Christian belief and devotion do not permit this approach.
Hurtado believes that the evidence suggests strongly that, well before these later Nicene Christian developments, within the first two decades of Christianity, Jewish Christians gathered in Jesus’ name for worship, prayed to him and sang hymns to him, and regarded him as exalted to a position of heavenly rule above all angelic orders. Additionally, they appropriated titles and Old Testament passages originally referring to God, sought to bring fellow Jews as well as Gentiles to embrace him as the divinely appointed redeemer, and in general redefined their devotion to the God of their fathers so as to include the veneration of Jesus.
In the main body of the book Hurtado makes the case that:
Ancient Judaism provided the first Christians with a crucial conceptual category for accommodating the exaltation of Jesus to God’s “right hand,” through traditions labeled “divine agency.”
Early Christian religious experiences produced a somewhat distinctive modification of these traditions involving the cultic veneration of God’s chief agent, in this case the risen Christ. These powerful religious experiences included Jesus being exalted to heavenly glory and legitimated by God himself as an object of their devotion.
The beliefs of “parent” traditions can undergo significant reconfigurings or “mutations.” Sometimes these mutations are rejected by the majority in the parent tradition as unacceptable and incompatible with the tradition, and the mutation becomes a separate religious movement. This is what the author proposed as a model for the eruption of early Jesus-devotion.
Although the author labels this early Christian devotion and its relationship to the religious context of ancient Judaism in which it first appears as “binitarian” in shape, it is obvious that he hints at a unitarian theology as indicated by these two statements: 1) Page 14: “The term “lord” in either language does not automatically connote divine status. But the use of the title in such cultic actions implies much more than simple social superiority of or respect for the figure to whom it is given.” 2) Page 15: “All evidence indicates, however, that those Jewish Christians who made such a step remained convinced that they were truly serving the God of the Old Testament.”
Gerald Bray, a professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School and editor of the Anglican theological journal Churchman, wrote this insightful review which appeared in The Gospel Coalition Themelios: “With great care he (Hurtado) takes us through the various types of divine agent which can be found in Judaism - personifications of divine attributes, exalted patriarchs and ministering angels. In each case he shows that the Jews were never tempted to abandon their traditional monotheism, and always regarded these agents as subordinate to the being of God himself. Then he devotes himself to what he calls the early Christian ‘mutation’, showing how this went well beyond anything which had come before. In all this it is clear that Hurtado is confronting the tradition, developed by Brousset and preserved by a host of disciples, which denied that the worship of Jesus was ever an authentic part of Jewish Christianity. In particular, he makes it plain that this development has nothing to do with the apostle Paul, who took it over in an already existing state.”
Bray concluded: “But what was it that made the first Christians take this great and decisive step? Here Dr. Hurtado is less satisfactory, suggesting that it was a combination of reflection on their part and a common experience of worship. The idea that Jesus himself might have taught his disciples that he was God is still not seriously considered, with the result that we are presented with a great event which seems to have an inadequate cause. The discussion of Christian origins has nevertheless been enhanced by this book.”
My final comments: Dr. Larry Hurtado was an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He served as Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh before passing away in 2019. His works, along with the publications of James Dunn and Jarl Fossum, have had a huge influence in the study of Christian origins and early Christology. Although unitarians will be able to formulate systematic theology textbooks by referring to the works of these men, there are more recent publications by James McGrath which do a better job of fleshing out the theology involved. Yet I still give One God, One Lord a 5 out of 5 rating for the foundational framework it has laid for Christological theology.
