I recently learned of the death of Larry Hurtado. It hit me hard because I had greatly enjoyed his book, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.
Larry Hurtado was an American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, and Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Hurtado’s research, set out in Lord Jesus Christ … and other books, persuaded me that the followers of Jesus very early came to a veneration, even worship, of him as son of God. I have a very high Christology and Hurtado’s research seems to me to support the historicity of that belief within the early church.
That belief in Jesus as God, a binitarian understanding, was present in what Jesus’ disciples taught the apostle Paul after Paul’s conversion within a very few years of Jesus’ death. Paul wrote the earliest New Testament book (First Thessalonians or Galatians) around the year 50 A.D. roughly twenty years or less after Jesus’ death. Mark, the earliest of the Gospels to have been written, would have followed in the next decade or two, in the 60s or 70 A.D
Skeptics and scoffers have tried to argue that one of the problems with Christianity is that it comes out of an oral tradition. Therefore, they say, we cannot be sure of anything about Jesus and the early (apostolic) church. It was, they say, a very long time between the life and death of Jesus and the gospels and books written about him.
Funny thing about that … no one takes issue with Buddhism on those grounds even though it was 500 years after the death of Buddha before anyone bothered to write about him and his teachings in an organized or biographical way.
The oral tradition around Jesus did not have to be transmitted for very long before being written down. Also, of course, Richard Bauckham argues (in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony) that the testimony about Jesus in the Gospels came from eyewitnesses, at least some of whom would have been alive at the times of writing.
Larry Hurtado lays out his case for an early high Christology in several places on YouTube … how did Jesus become a God? … is Jesus God? … devotion to Jesus in earliest Christianity, … when did Jesus’ followers first believe that he was God? … no doubt there are more …