My book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul has been available for a little while now, from the publisher and other major sources, both in print and as an ebook (Nook, Kindle). Here I want to give a bit more of a sense of what the book is about and highlight some of the leading conclusions in respect of Paul’s christology and his mission. But this is not a straightforward chapter-by-chapter summary of the book, more a preface to it.
If you’re interested in doing a serious review of the book, either get in touch with Wipf & Stock or let me know and I’ll see what I can arrange. Be aware that it is part of an academic series of Studies in Early Christology. But be comforted, it doesn’t have much real Greek and Hebrew in it; it’s all mostly transliterated.
The good news about the risen Lord
To state the obvious, this is a study of Pauline christology, so we begin with the risen Lord. The core apostolic testimony was that the God of Israel had raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, had installed him at his right hand as his Son, and had given him the nations of the Greek-Roman world as his inheritance. The expectation was that sooner or later Jesus would come into that inheritance.
This is the overarching theme of Romans, for example, which opens with the assertion that a descendant of David has been made Son of God in power—this is the “good news” that Paul has to proclaim to the nations (Rom. 1:1-5)—and ends with an expression of the “hope,” grounded in scripture, that this “root of Jesse” would eventually rule over the nations (Rom. 15:12-13). Paul was the herald of an impending, empire-wide régime change. It’s as simple and as realistic as that. The day would come.
Jesus and the shemaʿ
This testimony immediately explains the distinction that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 8:6 between the “one God, the Father” and the “one Lord Jesus Christ.” It is commonly argued by proponents of an “early high christology” that in this passage Paul has adroitly included Jesus in the shemaʿ, Israel’s great and seminal confession of faith in one God: “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God is one God” (Deut. 6:4 LXX). Gordon Fee writes, for example:
What Paul has done seems plain enough. He has kept the “one” intact, but he has divided the Shema into two parts, with theos (God) now referring to the Father, and kyrios (Lord) referring to Jesus Christ the Son.1
This misrepresents Paul’s reasoning, I think. In the background is an emerging distinction in Jewish thought between two divine roles or functions: God as creator and God as judge and ruler. The first belongs to beginnings—the beginning which is creation, the beginning which is new creation. The second has to do with kingdom, with the politics of Israel’s troubled existence in the midst of the nations. The creator function is never assigned to another and remains definitive for Jewish monotheism. The work of judging and ruling, however, is readily shared with or delegated to Israel’s king:
The LORD says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” The LORD sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies! (Ps. 110:1–2).
In the passage, Paul has already affirmed the shemaʿ, which is a confession against idolatry: “we know that an idol is nothing in the world and that there is no god but one” (1 Cor. 8:4; cf. Deut. 6:4, 14). But then he introduces an eschatological novelty on the basis of what has happened. The function of judging and ruling over the nations—a theologically lesser function, but biblically more important—has been assigned to Jesus Christ as Lord, the Son seated at the right hand of God.
Jesus will exercise this function until the last enemy has been put under his feet, when finally he will give the kingdom back to God, so that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:24-28). The claim is extraordinary not because the “kingdom” role has been delegated but because it has been delegated to this particular “son of Jesse.”
How does Paul avoid compromising the oneness of God? How does he avoid “outright ditheism,” as Bauckham calls it? Not ontologically, by assimilating Jesus into the divine being or identity; not even relationally (pace Chris Tilling); but eschatologically, by having Jesus hand back an authority that was transferred to him only provisionally, only for as long as his people faced enemies. When sin and death have been finally eradicated, there is no need for judgment and rule, no need for kingdom, so the one God is only creator again.
That’s all in the book, but it was a bit of a digression here. So back to the historical context….
Waiting for his Son from heaven
In the early decades of the Pauline mission, Jesus was proclaimed both to Jews and to gentiles in Asia Minor and around the Aegean not as a wonder-working Jewish prophet from Galilee but as a heavenly Lord, a transcendent Spirit-person, who was known, venerated, and engaged with through the Spirit. Even Paul, in all likelihood, had only ever encountered the risen Christ.
It must be stressed, moreover, that this was always a forward-looking state of affairs. Paul was not saying only that Jesus had been raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of God—thereby setting a mind-bending puzzle for future generations of theologians to solve. That was not the good news. The message carried the prophetic-apocalyptic conviction that sooner or later the impious and morally bankrupt pagan order would be judged (cf. Rom. 1:18-2:16), that Jesus would be revealed to all peoples as Lord and King in a parousia event, that the nations would turn from their idols to serve the living God, and finally that the persecuted apostles and churches would be vindicated and glorified.
The scope and orientation of the message about Jesus is captured in Paul’s summary of the “faith” of the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 1:9-10). The premise is that Jesus was raised from the dead—that is the starting point, for all intents and purposes. He is with God in heaven. He will deliver them from the wrath that is coming upon the idolatrous Greek-Roman world, and they will share in the glorious age of Christ-honouring monotheism to come.
The need for a backstory
It was necessary, however, for the apostles to add a solid backstory to the prophetic-apocalyptic message about this heavenly heir apparent to Caesar’s throne, for three main reasons.
So now we start engaging with the question of pre-existence in earnest.
First, it needed to be shown that this vibrant, Spirit-inspired belief in the heavenly lordship of Jesus was a proper outworking of Israel’s story—the realisation “in the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) of hopes articulated in the Psalms and Prophets especially, but also in second temple Jewish writings. This was Paul’s own view as a Jew himself, in the first place; but it was also demanded by the hostile reaction of the synagogues to the preaching of the apostles.
Therefore, Jesus is described as the Son “sent out” to Israel—born of woman, born under the Law—much as Moses and the prophets had been “sent out” to Israel (Gal. 4:4), to call for righteousness and mediate between the people and a “wrathful” God. When the ordinary Jewish humanity of Jesus is emphasised, it is in contrast not to an implicit heavenly pre-existence but to an explicit heavenly post-existence. That seems to me to be a key historical observation.
That Jesus was sent also, shockingly, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3) is Paul’s admission that the Righteous One had been condemned and executed as a Law-breaker, a threat to the integrity and security of Israel. Secondly, then, the apostles had to account for the offensive and implausible means by which the God of Israel now intended to establish his fame and glory among the nations. Both Jews and Greeks struggled to see the sense of such sweeping claims about a crucified messiah. The misunderstanding about pre-existence in Paul’s writings arises, to a large degree, because he drew on the Jewish wisdom motif in order to frame the suffering and death of Jesus as a deeply paradoxical act of new creation.
Thirdly, the experience of the apostles and of the churches was understood to replicate the experience of the historical Jesus. Their suffering was validated by the fact that the transcendent Son at the right hand of the Father had previously suffered and died in a thoroughly human fashion in obedience to the eschatological vision. They have the Spirit of the Son who cried out, “Abba! Father!” in distress at the prospect of suffering and death.
So from the perspective of the apostolic mission in the Greek-Roman world, the necessary and inescapable backstory was the earthly life of Jesus in Roman Palestine. This is what I mean by the pre-existence of the exalted Christ.
Before before?
If we ask, incidentally, what the backstory was from the perspective of the writers of the Synoptic Gospels, it is remarkable that it is even harder to establish a doctrine of heavenly pre-existence—though we should, of course, look at Simon Gathercole’s The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke sometime. What is seen, looking back in time from Jesus’ prophet-like, Moses-like mission to Israel, is the experience of subjection to foreign powers—think of Zechariah’s prayer that “that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us” (Lk. 1:71); and for this the motif of a “son of man” figure coming on the clouds of heaven to receive kingdom and glory becomes the interpretative key.
That’s for another day, though I do look in some detail at Paul Holloway’s argument that the template for Paul’s conception of the pre-existent Christ is a supposed angelic Son of Man figure, found in Daniel and the Similitudes of Enoch.
Being in the form of a god…
The apostolic story about Jesus, which first looks forwards and then looks backwards, is encapsulated in different ways in the two encomia—not “hymns”—in praise of Christ in Philippians 2:6-11 and Colossians 1:15-20. The particular question addressed in the book is whether these texts presuppose or affirm the heavenly pre-existence of the earthly Jesus. The question is worth asking given the strong support for the idea of pre-existence that is found across the scholarly spectrum, from Bultmann to Bauckham, but I suggest that closing the door on that presumption opens up a far more compelling historical vista.
The phrase en morphēi theou hyparchōn (Phil. 2:6) is usually translated “being in the form of God.” It has been explained by theologians and biblical commentators in many different ways, which I discuss under four main headings—indeed, in four chapters: being in the form of God as the substance or essence or, more obliquely, glory of God (Lightfoot, Martin, O’Brien, et al.); being in the form either of Adam or of an anthropomorphic or human-shaped God (Dunn, Murphy-O’Connor, Cullman, Bockmuehl, Gieschen); being in the angelic form of God (Sanders, Horbury, Holloway, Vollenweider); and being in the form of a god (Zeller, Fredriksen).
I come to the conclusion, after a great deal of deliberation, that the only way to read the expression is “being in the form of a god” and that the encomium, therefore, reflects a distinctively pagan or post-pagan perspective on the life and behaviour of the earthly Jesus. Stories of a wonder-working Jesus, such as those told in the early chapters of Mark’s Gospel, would have brought to mind countless tales of gods appearing on earth or of “divine men” such as Heracles or Pythagoras. The apostles knew from first-hand experience how easy it was to be mistaken for one or other of the gods (Acts 14:8-18; 28:6).
The narrative in the encomium is highly condensed as we have it, perhaps because this is a summary of a longer text or oral tradition. At some point Jesus was confronted with a fateful decision. A great many commentators in recent decades have accepted the view of Roy Hoover that the clause “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (ESV) is an idiomatic expression that would imply that equality with God was already in the possession of the heavenly Jesus, more or less equivalent to “being in the form of God.” He chose not to cling to it but emptied himself of his divine capacity and became man. I scrutinise the Hellenistic texts that supposedly support this view and argue that the idiom suggests rather the unexpected presentation of an opportunity that must be quickly seized or lost.
In Jesus’ case, the opportunity was to fulfil the ambition of several prominent biblical rulers who aspired to a god-equal supremacy—the king of Babylon, the prince of Tyre, Antiochus Epiphanes—not to mention contemporary pagan kings, Caesar foremost among them. When was that opportunity presented to Jesus? In the wilderness, when Satan offered him rule over the kingdoms of the oikoumenē—the empire, in effect, Paul’s mission field—if Jesus would worship him (Luke 4:5-7).
Jesus declined the offer, quoting from the shemaʿ passage: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (Luke 4:8; cf. Deut. 6:13)… and “emptied himself”—I have a wonderful explanation for that mysterious statement. But having done so, he was bound, sooner or later, to lose his god-like appearance and be found instead as just another frail and fallible mortal, who in the end would suffer the degrading death of a slave, on a Roman cross.
Ironically, of course, it was just by way of this strangely inverted, sacrilegious “wisdom” that he would attain exactly what Satan had tempted him with—rule over the nations of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:9-11).
So some Hellenistic-Jewish writer (I have my suspicions) composed a eulogy in honour of Jesus, who, endowed with the Spirit of prophecy, wisdom, and power, was in the form of a god but did not seize at the fortuitous offer of a godlike rule over the nations—only to gain it by other means, which brings us to the final passage and the reconciliation of rule in heaven and rule on earth.
The image of the invisible God…
The opening lines of the Colossians encomium seem to speak unequivocally of the heavenly pre-existence of Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…” (Col. 1:15–16 ESV).
My argument, however, is that this is again a story about kingdom rather than about creation. This is evident, in the first place, from what precedes. The encomium praises the “beloved Son,” into whose kingdom believers have been transferred (Col. 1:13). Then, as “image” Jesus discloses the unorthodox methods by which the “invisible God” is bringing about the eschatological transformation. He is the “firstborn” king above, not before, every creature, through whom a new political-religious order has come about—not the normal things of creation, seas, mountains, trees, living creatures, etc., but thrones, dominions, sovereignties, and authorities (Col. 1:16). The author of the piece is very selective, for a reason.
So here’s the point. For a long time, the rule of God in heaven and the government of the nations on earth have been at odds with each other: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed” (Ps. 2:2; cf. Acts 4:26). By delegating to the heavenly Jesus rule over the peoples of the oikoumenē, God has brought a new civilisation into existence, “in which kings and emperors, governments and bureaucracies, economies and judicial systems, would be explicitly ordered under the rule of God through his Son at his right hand” (205). On earth as it is in heaven.
In conclusion
So it seems to me that Paul had no interest in speculating about what came before what came before. The practical circumstances of the mission in Asia Minor and around the Aegean had led to a preoccupation with the resurrected and exalted Lord who would one day rule over the pagan civilisation that opposed him.
It was important to show that this heavenly person had had a remarkable mission to Israel, as an ordinary Jewish male, born of a woman, born under the Law, ending in a wretched death on a Roman cross. But there was no practical or theological reason to posit a stage of pre-existence prior to that. When we read the texts from the perspective of Paul’s work among the gentiles, the presupposition of a heavenly pre-existence seems to evaporate.
Very helpful summary. I recently received the book in the mail and look forward to diving into the details soon.
When the ordinary Jewish humanity of Jesus is emphasised, it is in contrast not to an implicit heavenly pre-existence but to an explicit heavenly post-existence. That seems to me to be a key historical observation.
So from the perspective of the apostolic mission in the Greek-Roman world, the necessary and inescapable backstory was the earthly life of Jesus in Roman Palestine. This is what I mean by the pre-existence of the exalted Christ.
These paragraphs seem pregnant with a lot of thoughts… methinks I’m going to have to shell out some coin :)
Congrats on the new book! (I just came up for air after spending several days grading essays.) I already purchased a copy, and I’m betting it will be helpful on my PhD thesis.
Thanks for doing what you do, Andrew.
Excited to dive into this book. A query: some scholarship around Christology has expended itself on the question of sacral kingship in ancient Israel and Judah as a sociohistorical background to texts like Ps 2 & 110 and as the grounds for later divine messiahs in Early Jewish texts. Does your book interact with that work at all? I’m thinking of, for example, Collins and Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God, etc.
@David:
I don’t deal with “sacral kingship” extensively because the focus is on pre-existence, not on the exalted status of Christ as Son of God and king after the resurrection. But I discuss Horbury’s pre-existent royal messiah thesis, Psalms 2 and 110 in various contexts, and the Collins book gets a fair airing.
Your thesis, which aims to reinterpret Philippians 2:6–11 as a non-metaphysical encomium informed by Hellenistic and Greco-Roman narratives rather than a theological affirmation of Christ’s divine pre-existence, is intriguing in its literary creativity but ultimately fails to account for several critical exegetical, linguistic, and theological dimensions of the text. Your insistence on framing Paul’s Christology as exclusively shaped by shifting Greco-Roman perceptions rather than theological conviction rooted in Jewish monotheism and Scripture leads to a number of significant distortions. I will address your key claims accordingly.
First, your central assertion that the expression ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων (“being in the form of God”) must mean “being in the form of a god” and that this expression cannot be understood within a Jewish context is not sustainable. Your argument heavily depends on the claim that morphē always denotes visible appearance and that Jews never spoke of God as having morphē. But this is a false dilemma. While morphē can denote outward appearance, in philosophical and theological usage (including Hellenistic Jewish writings), it can also connote the essential mode of existence or nature of a thing. It is not a synonym for eidos or phantasma. The very structure of Philippians 2:6—with morphē theou parallel to morphē doulou—demands an ontological reading rather than a purely visual or perceptual one. Moreover, Paul is not importing pagan conceptuality but deliberately juxtaposing divine glory and servant humility. The morphē theou indicates Christ’s participation in the divine mode of being, just as the morphē doulou denotes real servanthood, not a disguise.
Your proposal that Greek hearers would have heard “in the form of a god” rather than “God” overlooks the monotheistic framework of Paul’s thought. Paul, a former Pharisee steeped in Second Temple Judaism, does not casually call Christ “in the form of a god” as though he were one divine man among others in the Hellenistic pantheon. You claim Jews would avoid morphē to speak of God, yet the Christian confession from its earliest days was that in Jesus the God of Israel was revealed uniquely and bodily (e.g., John 1:14; Col 2:9). Paul’s usage here must be interpreted in continuity with the Jewish theological tradition transformed by Christ’s self-revelation, not as a capitulation to pagan idioms.
You further argue that the key phrase οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ (“did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped”) does not presuppose pre-existence but reflects a dramatic choice Jesus made during his earthly ministry, perhaps in the wilderness temptation. This reading violates the logical progression of the passage. The participial phrase ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων introduces a precondition to Christ’s kenosis: he was already in the divine form before he emptied himself. The grammatical force of ὑπάρχων (present active participle) carries connotations of continuing existence and precedes the main clause. Thus, Paul presents a divine subject who already exists in the mode of God and then voluntarily refrains from exercising or asserting that status for his own benefit. Your proposal that the equality with God was something offered to him as a temptation undermines the syntax and rhetorical structure. Paul is not saying that Jesus refused a promotion to godhood, but that, although he already possessed divine status, he refused to exploit it for self-glory.
Additionally, your appeal to Roy Hoover’s interpretation of harpagmos as something not possessed but potentially seized fails to convince. Even if one accepts Hoover’s idiomatic proposal (which is debated), it still does not negate the pre-existent status of Christ. Whether Christ refrained from seizing or exploiting divine equality, the implication remains that he was already in a position to do so—that is, he possessed that status. As many scholars have noted (e.g., Ralph Martin, Gerald Hawthorne, Peter O’Brien), the phrase “being in the form of God” together with “did not consider equality with God…” forms a rhetorical crescendo that begins with pre-existence and moves downward through humility. It is not a story about moral restraint from grasping divinity; it is the self-emptying of one who is already divine.
Your claim that Paul is merely reflecting how Greeks “perceived” Jesus, not how Paul himself theologically understood him, makes the encomium radically incoherent within its epistolary context. Paul is not offering a sociological commentary on pagan perceptions of Jesus. He is exhorting the Philippians to humility by grounding it in the very mindset (phronein) of Christ himself, which presupposes the veracity of the Christ narrative. If Jesus only “seemed” divine to Greeks but wasn’t, then the entire exhortation collapses. The moral force of the passage depends on the ontological contrast: though he was divine, Christ emptied himself. This is not about Jesus rejecting a pagan illusion of divinity but about the true God assuming servanthood.
The functional reductionism in your treatment of 1 Corinthians 8:6 and 15:24-28 likewise fails to appreciate the deep theological implications of the kyrios title. You argue that Paul avoids “ditheism” by making Christ’s role as ruler provisional, eschatologically limited. But Paul explicitly distinguishes Christ from all other creatures by affirming that all things were created through him (Col. 1:16), a role that no mere human or exalted spirit shares. The creator/creation divide is not blurred by eschatology. The Lord who shares in divine prerogatives, receives worship (Phil. 2:10-11), and mediates all things is not a temporary functionary but the eternal Son.
Finally, your attempt to trace the kenosis and exaltation to Greco-Roman heroic narratives (e.g., Joseph, Heracles, Pythagoras) may provide literary color but not theological substance. While cultural resonances are always worth exploring, Paul’s thought remains anchored in Scripture and the worship life of the early Church. The parallel with Isaiah 45:23 in Philippians 2:10-11—a direct transfer of divine honors to Christ—completely contradicts your claim that this is not about divine identity. Paul’s appropriation of the shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6 and the application of YHWH’s prerogatives to Christ throughout his letters compel a high Christology grounded not in myth but in revelation.
In conclusion, your attempt to de-metaphysicalize Philippians 2 and reframe it as a piece of culturally conditioned praise literature devoid of ontological content fails to persuade on exegetical, grammatical, and theological grounds. Paul’s language, structure, and theological context all affirm the pre-existence, voluntary humiliation, and subsequent exaltation of the divine Son, not a wonder-working moral teacher mistaken for a god. The exalted Christ whom Paul preached, worshiped, and obeyed was not merely honored “as if” he were God—he is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
@József X:
József, thank you for this substantial and cogent critique. I will try to address a number of the main points briefly, though obviously there is a lot more detail in the book.
First, I do not entirely dismiss “theological conviction rooted in Jewish monotheism and Scripture.” The second stanza of the encomium celebrates the triumph of Jewish monotheism over pagan empire (cf. Is. 45:22-46:2), gained through the obedience of Jesus. The language of Philippians 2:6, however, is not at all the language of “Jewish monotheism and scripture.” With the possible exception of the reference to a “slave,” it is the language of pagan conviction.
I’m not alone in stressing that morphē invariably signifies outward appearance. This is now quite widely accepted in the scholarship.
You need to provide an example of morphē connoting the “essential mode of existence or nature of a thing.”
My argument works perfectly with morphē doulou. Jesus was neither a god nor a slave, but as a miracle worker he had the outward appearance of a god, as a victim of crucifixion he had the outward appearance of a slave.
Paul does not deliberately juxtapose “divine glory and servant humility.” Morphē means neither glory nor humility. It means outward appearance, “form.” He juxtaposes divine form and slavish form.
The framework of Paul’s thought is obviously monotheistic, and he certainly does not himself think that Jesus was “one divine man among others in the Hellenistic pantheon.” That’s not what I’m suggesting. Rather he understood that to the Greek mind the earthly Jesus would have had the outward appearance of a god. Greeks would have reacted to him initially in the same way that the pagans in Lystra reacted to the apostles when the lame man was healed—and in the same way would have thought him worthy of divine honours. Jesus rejected that temptation in the same way that Paul and Barnabas did.
Neither John 1:14 nor Colossians 2:9 says that “in Jesus the God of Israel was revealed uniquely and bodily,” but if you don’t mind, I won’t address those passages here.
The point you make about the “logical progression of the passage” is a fair one. My response would be 1) that Jesus was empowered at his baptism to perform the sort of deeds that would might get him (and the apostles) mistaken for gods, before the testing in the wilderness (hence Satan’s “if you are the Son of God”); and 2) the fundamental satanic temptation persisted in some form throughout his career.
The scope of the participle hyparchōn is determined by the context. It can mean that he was in the form of a god up until the moment that he took a different path, or that he continued to be the form of a god even after he rejected the temptation in the wilderness. Also morphē theou cannot possibly mean “mode of God.”
It is surprising how little Hoover’s argument is debated.
You can assert that there is a “rhetorical crescendo” between “being in the form of God” and “did not consider equality with God,” but my point is that Greek usage does not support that. Hoover’s idiom suggests not an innate possession but an opportunity presented that needs to be seized in the moment. The adverbial isa theōi strongly points to how humans respond rather than to inherent ontology or identity. My interpretation fully accommodates the proper sense of all these expressions, in my view.
Of course Paul is not offering a “sociological commentary on pagan perceptions of Jesus.” That’s twisting an argument that you have otherwise presented rather well. My approach actually makes the encomium more relevant in context. The Philippians are not being called to imitate the second person of the trinity; the are being urged to imitate the Spirit-empowered Paul (cf. 3:17), who has chosen suffering, who imitates the Spirit-empowered Christ, who chose suffering, etc. The argument about the self-emptying of God’s people in the wilderness from Philo further reinforces the parenetic relevance of the encomium.
Paul is reflecting back to the Philippians their own journey of understanding the significance of Jesus because, as a community, they must make much the same journey.
My contention regarding the “transfer” of lordship to Jesus is that this is conceived in the limited sense of a transfer of lordship over the nations—it is operative in the political sphere, not the creational or cosmic sphere. It is a very straightforward delegation of divine authority. The Lord who is YHWH instructs the Lord who is ʾadon to sit at his right hand until his enemies are made his footstool (Ps. 110:1). Jesus has been given kingship or lordship over the nations, and this will result in the recognition by the idol-worshipping nations that there is one God who made the heavens and the earth.
Finally, the demand for “theological substance” comes from theologians, not from the text, but I would argue that what my interpretation powerfully brings out is the apocalyptic and eschatological substance of the encomium. That gets us to the heart of the New Testament.
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