Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE QUESTION OF JESUS' SELF-UNDERSTANDING §16.2
what follows we must be even more cautious lest the echoes we hear from the elements
of the Jesus tradition now to be examined are audible only as the reverberations
from the echo-chamber of subsequent Christian faith.
16.2. God's Son
The caution just voiced is of particular relevance on this subject. For in Christian
tradition, Jesus is no less than 'the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only begotten,
that is, from the substance of the Father . . . begotten not made . . .'. 5 It
was by thus affirming and defining his divine sonship ('begotten') that Christ's
deity and status in relation to God the Father were clarified and catholic orthodoxy
distanced itself from the lesser Christologies of Gnostic and Arian. 6 With
the Council of Nicaea, in other words, 'Son of God' became the key title for
Christ. 7 For Christianity thereafter, 'the Son of God' had only one referent — Jesus
Christ.
But the Nicene Creed represents the crystallization of a process stretching
over nearly three centuries. Our concern here is with the beginning of that process.
Already within the NT itself we see that process under way, with the sonship
of Jesus to God as Father becoming more prominent. Whereas in Mark and
Q Jesus speaks of God as Father only three or four times, in Matthew we find
more than thirty such references, and in the Fourth Gospel about one hundred instances.
8 Evidently, then, there was a growing tendency to introduce such references
into the Jesus tradition, thus indicating that the concept of Jesus as God's
Son was already becoming more important in the first century. Why so, and
when did the process begin?
As with so much of Christology, the decisive stimulus is frequently traced
to the resurrection. Indeed, a neat line of development can readily be drawn, tracing
the origin of Jesus' divine sonship, the moment of his begetting, steadily further
back in time: from resurrection (Acts 13.33; Heb. 5.5), to baptism/Jordan
(Mark 1.11 pars.), to conception/birth (Matt. 1.20/Luke 1.35), to pre-existence
(John 1.14, 18). 9 That looks to be more analytically pleasing than natural. But it
certainly poses the issue as to whether there is anything in the pre-Easter Jesus
5. The creed of Nicea (AD 325), following J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (London:
Longmans, 2 1960) 215-16.
6. See further Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 231-42.
7. In what follows I will be drawing on my Jesus and the Spirit ch. 2, and Christology
ch. 2. At this point note the exchange with Maurice Wiles in the Foreword to the second edition
of the latter (xxviii-xxxi).
8. Jeremias, Prayers 29-30; details above, chapter 14 n. 35.
9. As I suggested in Christology 61.
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