Following a bit of an exchange on Facebook, I have been looking again at the now widely accepted contention, associated especially with Wright, Bauckham and Fee, that in 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul has taken the extraordinary step of including Jesus in the Shema and therefore in the divine identity. The Shema reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4 LXX). The argument is that Paul has taken this traditional confession and divided it between the Father and the Son: “for us one God, the Father, from whom all things and we for him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things and we through him” (1 Cor. 8:5-6).
So, for example, Wright in his essay “Monotheism, Christology and Ethics: 1 Corinthians 8” in [amazon:978-0800628277:inline], 129:
There can be no mistake: just as in Philippians 2 and Colossians 1, Paul has placed Jesus within an explicit statement, drawn from the old Testament’s quarry of emphatically monotheistic texts, of the doctrine that Israel’s God is the one and only God, the creator of the world. The Shema was already, at this stage of Judaism, in widespread use as the Jewish daily prayer. Paul has redefined it christologically, producing what we can only call a sort of christological monotheism.
And Fee in [amazon:978-0801049545:inline], 90:
What Paul has done seems plain enough. He has kept the “one” intact, but he has divided the Shema into two parts, with θεός (God) now referring to the Father, and κυριός (Lord) referring to Jesus Christ the Son.
I argued in my review of Chris Tilling’s chapter in [amazon:978-0310519591:inline] that what we have in 1 Corinthians 8:6 is not a bifurcation of the Shema but a convergence: Paul brings together the Jewish monotheistic confession and the apocalyptic narrative about Jesus, who suffered, died, was raised, and was given authority to rule at the right hand of God. I am still inclined to hold to that view. What follows overlaps with other posts on this subject (see below), but I have tried to take greater account of the overall pattern of thought in the letter.
1. The statement “there is no God but one” in verse 4 looks like an allusion to the Shema, but kyrios, which occurs twice in the Shema, has already been dropped. Why has Paul not actually quoted the Shema in full here, especially if he means to divide it between “one God, the Father” and “one Lord, Jesus Christ”? Why should we not suppose that he has in mind to say one thing about God and another thing about Jesus.
2. In view of this, Paul’s argument about the oneness of God, who is the Father, is closer to Malachi 2:11-12 LXX than to the Shema—or perhaps more precisely, it draws on the Shema by way of the sort of argument against Jewish idolatry that we find here:
Did not one God create us? Is there not one father of us all? Why then did each of you forsake his brother, to profane the covenant of our fathers? Judah was forsaken, and an abomination occurred in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah profaned the sacred things of the Lord with which he loved and busied himself with foreign gods. The Lord will utterly destroy the person who does this until he has even been humiliated from the tents of Jacob and from among those who bring sacrifice to the Lord Almighty.
3. The further point could be made that the Malachi passage differentiates between the “father” who created Israel and the “Lord” who will “utterly destroy the person who does this”. It is the same God, of course, but it may suggest a plausible literary-conceptual background for Paul’s argument. Jesus as Lord is cast as the eschatological judge, as part of the apocalyptic narrative, in 1 Corinthians 4:4-5; 5:5; 11:32.
4. In 1 Corinthians 8:5 Paul asserts first that there are “so-called gods”, then that “there are many gods and many lords”. In the argument of verses 4-5, therefore, even though the Shema has seemingly been invoked, the kyrioi are introduced as a separate category—or perhaps a sub-category having in view deified rulers. In other words, the premise for verse 6 would appear not to be that God as Lord is one; it is that God is one, whom Israel is to love “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (cf. 1 Cor. 8:3), and there are also “lords” to be reckoned with.
5. Whether or not verse 6 reflects the Shema—I’m not ruling it out completely—we have to keep in mind that the affirmation that Jesus is kyrios is not simply a statement of identity but sums up a narrative. Jesus was raised as Lord (1 Cor. 6:14; 15:20). He has been given authority to reign at the right hand of the Father “until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25). At some point in the future he will be revealed to the world (1:7-8). Finally, he will give the kingdom back to the Father and be subjected to him (15:24, 28). [pullquote]This coherent apocalyptic narrative about Jesus as Lord presents him not as an integral part of the divine identity but as an independent agent.[/pullquote] If this agent is in any sense included in the divine identity, as Fee argues (91), it would appear that he must retain sufficient autonomy to renounce the title of “Lord” at the end. It is at best a temporary arrangement.
6. Fee insists that “there is nothing in this passage or in its surrounding context that would even remotely suggest that Jewish wisdom lies behind Paul’s formulation” (93). That raises too many questions to address here, but I will suggest that 1 Corinthians 8:6, nevertheless, has important points of contact with the particular argument that Paul puts forward earlier about the wisdom of God.
The cross is the wisdom of God, by which he is bringing “to nothing things that are” and causing the “rulers of this age” to pass away (1 Cor. 1:21-24, 28; 2:6; cf. 7:31). Because the weak and foolish Corinthians are “in Christ Jesus”, they will be instrumental in this eschatological process and will inherit the age to come (cf. 6:9).
The language that Paul uses to speak of this participation, however, anticipates the statement in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Or so it seems to me. On the one hand, it is from God (ex autou) that the Corinthians are “in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1:30). So later: “from whom (ex hou) all things and we for him”. On the other, Paul writes in a different context but still with reference to the foolishness of the wisdom of this age: “all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3:21–23). In other words, “all things” are through Jesus—indeed, those “called to be saints” in Corinth owe their very existence as such to him.
In neither case is the correspondence exact because the argumentative context is different, but when Paul speaks about the being of believers in relation to all things in language which (pace Fee) has been thought by many to echo a Jewish Wisdom theology, there seems to be a reasonable case for starting with the prior argument about the wisdom of God.
If we read 1 Corinthians 8:6 in the light of Paul’s wisdom argument—rather than of a general Wisdom theology—the “one God, the Father” may appear not as the original creator but as the one who is forming a new world by means of a foolish wisdom, and Jesus Christ is the one Lord through whose suffering the “all things” of this new world has become possible. In other words, Paul is making a statement about new creation, not about the original creation.
Here, though, as in Philippians 2:6-11, Jesus is Lord because he suffered, because he became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross”. It is this persistent narrative, rather than the Shema, as Dunn has argued, that determines the sense of the affirmation “for us… one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things and we through him”. It is the whole narrative—right through to the “end”—that accounts for, and sets limits to, the association of Jesus as Lord with God the Father.
I find this language a continual struggle. It appears to me that the ‘divinity’ of Christ Jesus is what is a stumbling block, yet frequently it is the humanity of Jesus that is a problem. E.g. the appointment of Jesus as Judge in this week’s readings that is laughed at in Athens yet affirmed by 1 Peter.
I am a Christian yet I often enjoy the teaching at the synagogue. The sages know the TNK and the Christians seem to be disconnected from their textual roots. Yesterday I had conversation around Moses and hearing G-d’s voice at the burning bush that I could never have had with anyone in my Christian congregation.
An additional continuing struggle is how Christians read the OT and how we find Christ in its texts. We tend to impose (it is not difficult to do this) rather than to read with the obedience that Jesus presumably read with (learned/heard with). And we simply don’t ask the right kind of questions.
You raise a good question — how can one who is Lord, and who is given the Name that is above every name, refuse his own identity at the end? What roots in the OT resonate with this? It almost seems like groundless theological speculation. (Feeling grumpy — better take care).
Bob, I picked up on your last paragraph here.
As you have pointed out, the echoes of Malachi 2:10-12 in 1 Corinthians 8:6 are striking, with “one Father — one God” of Malachi 2:10 reappearing in 1 Corinthians 8:6 as “one God, the Father”. But then things become more complex. Instead of a straightforward echo, we have in 1 Corinthians 8:6 “one God, the Father” bracketed with “one Lord, Jesus Christ”. This takes us back to the divine identity, whether the Shema, or the Malachi passage (which also echoes the Shema) is taken as Paul’s reference. Jesus is explicitly being placed alongside God the Father in 1 Corinthians 8:6.
This does not rebut your interpretation of the passage according to an apocalyptic narrative, it simply says that the Kyrios identity of Jesus in the Corinthians passage makes him more than an “independent agent”.
In your previous discussion of this passage, I noted that Paul does something even more extraordinary in his ‘rewriting’ of the Shema. In exchanging the positioning of “one Lord” and “one God”, Paul is associating Jesus with YHWH (“one Lord”), and in the positioning of the title in the Corinthian passage, lest we should have failed to grasp the point, “one Lord” (Jesus/YHWH) stands where we would have expected to fine “one God”. The divine ifentity of Jesus is doubly reinforced.
Again, this is not to contradict your observation that “Lord” comes in when foreign deities or rulers (“lords”) are being opposed. But I do think it needs to be considered that in both the Shema and Malachi, foreign deities are in view, and the name YHWH (Lord/Kyrios) is given to contra-distinguish the “God” of Israel from all other “gods”. He is not only “God”, but he has a unique name — YHWH, Kyrios, or Jesus Christ.
@peter wilkinson:
Peter, I don’t see how this addresses the fundamental point that the close association of Jesus with God the Father has come about because God the Father raised the man Jesus and seated him at his right hand, bestowing upon him—temporarily—the authority to judge and rule the nations. This is certainly an authority that YHWH previously reserved for himself, but the point is not that Jesus is included in the divine identity. It is that God gives away something that previously belonged to the divine identity. Israel’s king is given the power to rule in the midst of his enemies; the Son of Man is given the kingdom that is taken from the fourth beast; Jesus is given the name which is above every name. The fact that he has been “placed alongside” God does not mean that he loses his independent identity. On the contrary, the continuation of the narrative strongly suggests that he keeps it: he comes to deliver his followers from wrath, and ultimately he gives back the authority to rule to God the Father.
By the way, the fact that kyrios is substituted for YHWH in the LXX doesn’t mean that YHWH and kyrios are simply interchangeable, which is how you deal with the terms. The background to Paul’s argument is not the substitution of kyrios for YHWH but a narrative about God and his king or God and his people.
I don’t understand your point about exchanging the position of “one Lord” and “one God” in the Shema:
Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. (Deut. 6:4 MT)
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. (Deut. 6:4 LXX)
@Andrew Perriman:
The more I look at this, I’m in less doubt that if Paul is echoing Malachi’s “one Father” … “one God” with “one God, the Father”, he is even more clearly than Malachi also echoing the LXX shema with “one God” … “one Lord”.
Since “one God, the Father” is followed by “one Lord, Jesus Christ” in 1 Corinthians 8:6, for which there is no parallel in Malachi, Paul was either being incredibly careless, or he was associating Jesus with the divine being, just as “one Lord” is associated with God in the LXX shema.
If LXX Malachi’s imprecation against idolatrous faithlessness to YHWH also substitutes Lord for YHWH, Paul’s meaning is confirmed from both Malachi and Deuteronomy: Jesus is Lord (Kyrios) as YHWH.
In the MT and LXX shema, the order is: YHWH (Lord) — God -YHWH (Lord). I was suggesting that Paul reversed the order, making Jesus, as Lord, stand in the place of the second term, which in the shema was God. He may have simply been following Malachi in this, but as I’ve pointed out, it’s difficult not to see that he goes beyond Malachi in bringing out the echo of the shema.
I don’t see why it is impossible to believe that God raised Jesus, the God/man, from the dead. The question of Jesus’s identity hangs over the whole story, which the idea of Jesus as an “independent agent” has not resolved. I think a great deal is read into 1 Corinthians 15:28 (assuming that’s what you are referring to) to make the reign of Jesus a temporary state of affairs. It suggests that Jesus was not subject to God in the interim, whilst becoming subject afterwards. There needs to be a better reading.
@peter wilkinson:
It looks to me as though you’ve completely avoided addressing my main point—that lordship is given to the man whom God raised from the dead. And if you can find a “better reading” of 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 that gets round the problem of the final subordination of the Son, let me know.
@Andrew Perriman:
The main issue of the thread is the inclusion or not of Jesus in the divine identity, so I suppose I could also say that you have avoided the main point of my last reply.
I do take note of your main point about lordship being given to the one raised from the dead, but that doesn’t seem to be the main point of lordship in the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4, to which lordship is also integral. I don’t think you can say that neither Malachi nor 1 Corinthians 8:6 has strong overtones of the shema.
I don’t see a problem with God the Father giving God the Son lordship after raising him from the dead. Jesus was voluntarily surrendering himself into the hands of God the Father on the cross; I don’t see that this necessarily means that he was therefore an “independent agent”.
I am closer to you on the political significance of that lordship than I used to be, but not at the expense of abandoning its wider and direct significance for creation, and the triumph of (God’s) life over Satan, evil, sin and death (major themes of the gospels). If that seems metaphysical, so be it. It seems very concrete and historically embedded to me.
My main point is that both Malachi 2:10-12 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 point back to Deuteronomy 6:4, and whilst I also agree with your striking observation that 1 Corinthians 8:6 takes in Malachi 2:10, I find that 1 Corinthians 8:6 has even stronger echoes of the shema than Malachi.
The only reservation I have about the Malachi passage is that “one father” might refer to Abraham as much as God. There is no doubt that Paul was referring to God in “one God, the Father”, of course.
Don’t take any of this as personal; I really do enjoy your posts, which I find invigorating and refreshing.
@peter wilkinson:
Hi Peter,
I have found this “splitting of the Shema” business one of the most desperate and creative attempts to get Jesus to be identical to YHWH. There are many reasons for it. But considering this novel attempt and applying it practically to the scripture recitals in ancient synagogues, the Universal Confession of Faith of the synagogue would become something like this:
Shema Yisrael, Yeshua Avinu, Yeshua echad.
Or in Greek,
Akoue Israel, Iesou ho Pater hemon, Iesou eis estin.
Or do you think those ancient Christians were able to completely compartmentalise their ideas or strain cognition to COMPLETELY ignore this subsequent confessional jibber-jabber?
The coiner of this “splitting of the Shema,” NT Wright, has concocted a most successful snake-oil blend!
@Jaco van Zyl:
Jaco — two things echo the shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6. The first is the LXX terms God and Lord (standing for YHWH), now applied to God (the Father) and Jesus in the Corinthians text. The second is the repetition of “one” applied to God the Father and Jesus. The one without the other might be inconclusive. Taken together, they reinforce the association.
Even supposing we are not meant to hear the shema in the language, there is a bracketing of God (the Father) with Jesus, in one God — one Lord, without qualification. If Paul had not wanted to us to notice this association as of equals, you’d have thought he would have made his meaning clearer.
As an acknowledgment to the narrative/historical interpretation, both shema and the Corinthians text include anti-idolatry polemic in their meaning.
@peter wilkinson:
Thanks Peter, but your response does not address the very obvious challenge to the “split Shema” proposal I posted above. What one ends up with is confessional gibberish, and it is simply unthinkable that Christians could settle for that, especially in the synagogue and in their public kerygma.
Furthermore, this “split Shema” gives an answer to the question, “Is there any God apart from Yahweh?” that would result in polytheism. According to you, Wright and Bauckham, you’ve got to answer YES! Because, in addition to Yahweh (kyrios) Iesou, there is the One God (not Yahweh, because Jesus is Yahweh) and that is the Father. What nonsense is that?
That is not all. Campaigners for this “split Shema” are committing the fallacy of necessity by insisting that the Shema and only the Shema could inform the text in 1 Cor. 8:6. Alongside the Shema, and in keeping with the theme of theocracy and rulership, Paul was contextualising the Shema using Ps. 110:1. Then there is no splitting of the Shema, there’s no permutation of kurios and theos, there’s no thought-terminating theological neologisms, and certainly no confessional gibberish. God, the Father, remains one (Shema), and Jesus, the glorified human lord executes His rulership (Ps 110 Session).
I’m afraid no amount of linguistic vagueness and logical acrobatics can satisfy the very obvious errors in this “split Shema” proposal. Sentiment and novelty have given it more popularity that it truly deserves. Sadly religion still is the area where Man behaves the least rational.
Thanks
@Jaco van Zyl:
I think it is vital that we look at how Paul employed the use of “Lord” elsewhere in his writings in order to ascertain if he applied YHWH of Deuteronomy 6:4 unto the Lord Jesus in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Since this passages appears in 1 Corinthians and for the sake of brevity this book alone will be in view.
1. In 1 Corinthians 1:2-3; 16:19, 22-23 Paul teaches that the Lord Jesus is the proper recipient of prayer — and prayer is due unto God alone. Elsewhere, He is worshiped as “Lord” (6:17; 7:22, 35 cf. v. 5; 10:21-22; 12:3).
The utmost importance that there is only one Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) cannot be divorced from the fact that He alone is to be prayed unto/worshiped.
a. NIDOTTE: Inside the covenant circle God demands of his people a completely exclusive worship (cf. 6:4) (3:938, Jealous, H. G. L. Peels).
b. For the Hebrews were “worshipers of the one God and of Him alone.” (“Monotheism” in The Jewish Encyclopedia of the Bible, see the first paragraph, the underlined is mine).
https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/tje/m/monotheism.html
c. Judaism 101: G-d is the only being to whom we should offer praise. The Shema can also be translated as “The L-rd is our G-d, The L-rd alone,” meaning that no other is our G-d, and we should not pray to any other.
If the Lord Jesus was the proper recipient of prayer/worship only 1 time in the Bible would demonstrate that He is YHWH. The fact that the Bible teaches He is the proper recipient of prayer/worship multiple times further strengthens the fact that He is YHWH.
2. As “Lord” His attribute is “glory” (2:8; cf. Psalm 24:10).
3. YHWH (LORD) of the Old Testament is applied unto the Lord Jesus several times.
a. 1:31 with Jeremiah 9:23-24.
b. 2:16 with Isaiah 40:13 - Notice that Paul applies YHWH of Isaiah 40:13 unto the Father in Romans 11:34 and unto the Lord Jesus in 1 Corinthians 2:16.
c. 10:21-22 with Malachi 1:7 and Deuteronomy 32:19-21.
d. 10:26 with Psalm 24:1.
4. 1 Corinthians 4:5 teaches that the Lord (in reference to Jesus) fully knows the hearts of all which demonstrates that He is omniscient (God).
5. In 1 Corinthians 4:19; 16:7 (cf. Hebrews 6:3) we see that the will of the Lord Jesus is supreme.
Andrew, insightful comments. With your thoughts here, there are deconstruction ramifications to modern evangelical Christology, and “Peter” shows us a typical reaction. Yet you have responded well to his knee-jerk thoughts that Jesus might somehow be “less than” God or not included in God’s identity. For first-timers, a shock to the system.
But again, the text presses in upon us to consider conclusions if we push past 4th-century creeds and take seriously the 1st-century context. Appreciate your bold presentation. Those of monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Islam) are beginning, in small circles I’m aware of, to take note, showing us that there may be more we have in common than we once thought. And one of Dunn’s concerns, which I share, is a reapproachment between Christianity and Judaism. At the same time, while there is much common ground, as Dunn states it, the clearest expression of God is in Christ (while being distinct from God). In my humble, this is a clear enough boundary to ensure a Christology for the new age that is robust to engage in inter-faith dialogue while continuing in the essential character of early Christianity and even modern Christianity. For your Christology as stated here opens itself to humanity’s deepest yearning for one God, and can include all Abrahamic faiths in its essential understanding.
Cheers, Charles
@Charles:
I’m not sure it’s quite as simple as that, but you make some important points. Thanks.
What obvious desperation from Trinitarian and “deity of Christ” theologians.
A New Testament verse which states explicitly that the one God is the Father — really states that the one God is two! — the Father and someone else.
And what Jesus called the greatest/chief commandment, that YHVH is one — really means that YHVH is three in one!
Remind us all, Trinitarian and deity of Christ believer, who are the brothers of YHVH that Paul mentioned in 1 Cor. 9:5?
While Paul does not quote the Shema verbatim, he intentionally echoes its structure and themes. The Shema declares, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD (YHWH) is our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4 LXX). Paul reformulates this by assigning “one God” to the Father and “one Lord” to Jesus:
- Shema: “YHWH (Kyrios) is one God (Theos).”
- 1 Corinthians 8:6: “For us, there is one God (Theos), the Father… and one Lord (Kyrios), Jesus Christ.”
The deliberate parallelism indicates that Paul is not presenting two unrelated points about the Father and the Son but rather including Jesus in Israel’s monotheistic confession. This is a clear example of how early Christians redefined monotheism to include Jesus within the identity of YHWH. In the LXX, Kyrios consistently translates the divine name YHWH. By applying Kyrios to Jesus, Paul identifies Him with the divine name and prerogatives of YHWH. His Jewish audience, familiar with the LXX, would have understood this as an intentional reformulation of the Shema.
While Malachi 2:10-12 does mention “one God” and a “Father” of Israel, its context concerns covenantal faithlessness and idolatry, not the monotheistic confession central to the Shema. There is no compelling evidence that Paul’s formulation in 1 Corinthians 8:6 is drawn primarily from Malachi rather than the Shema. The Shema, as the foundational declaration of Jewish monotheism, is the natural and obvious theological framework for Paul’s statement. Paul’s broader writings demonstrate his habit of reformulating and reinterpreting key Old Testament texts, especially the Shema, in light of Christ. For example, in Romans 10:13, Paul applies Joel 2:32—a call to invoke the name of YHWH—to calling upon the name of Jesus. Similarly, Philippians 2:10-11 applies Isaiah 45:23 (every knee bowing to YHWH) to Jesus. These patterns reinforce the conclusion that 1 Corinthians 8:6 reflects Paul’s Christological redefinition of the Shema.
While Jesus’ role as Lord includes eschatological judgment (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:25), this does not exclude Him from the divine identity. On the contrary, such functions belong exclusively to YHWH in the Old Testament (e.g., Isaiah 33:22, Joel 3:12). By attributing these roles to Jesus, Paul affirms His participation in YHWH’s unique divine authority. In Philippians 2:9-11, Paul states that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” explicitly citing Isaiah 45:23, which refers to YHWH. Such worship and acknowledgment of sovereignty would be idolatrous within Jewish monotheism unless Jesus shares in YHWH’s identity. The claim that Jesus’ role as Lord is temporary and separate from YHWH ignores the broader theological context. The Son’s eventual submission to the Father (1 Cor. 15:28) reflects relational subordination within the Trinity, not an ontological distinction. Jesus’ lordship, as Paul emphasizes, is intrinsic to His divine identity.
The distinction between “from” (ex ou) and “through” (di’ hou) reflects relational roles within the Godhead, not a difference in nature. In Trinitarian theology, the Father is the source of all things, and the Son is the agent through whom creation occurs. This is consistent with John 1:3 (“all things were made through Him”) and Colossians 1:16 (“all things were created through Him and for Him”). Creation is a divine prerogative, and the Son’s role as the agent of creation places Him on the “uncreated” side of the Creator/creature distinction. In Isaiah 44:24, YHWH declares, “I am the LORD who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself.” If all things were created “through” Jesus, then Jesus must share in YHWH’s identity as Creator. Otherwise, Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 8:6 would contradict the monotheistic assertion of Isaiah.
Paul’s writings are filled with implicit yet unmistakable affirmations of Jesus’ divinity. For example:
- In Romans 10:13, Paul applies Joel 2:32 (calling on YHWH’s name) to calling on Jesus.
- In Philippians 2:6-11, Paul describes Jesus as preexistent, equal with God, and the recipient of universal worship.
- In Colossians 1:15-20, Paul identifies Jesus as the “image of the invisible God” and the agent of creation.
These passages demonstrate that Paul consistently includes Jesus in the divine identity, even if he does not always make explicit theological statements. For Paul’s Jewish audience, the inclusion of Jesus in the Shema would have been radical but theologically coherent. By distributing the Shema’s titles (“God” and “Lord”) between the Father and the Son, Paul affirms Jesus’ divinity without violating monotheism.
The Shema’s affirmation of oneness (echad) does not preclude distinctions within the Godhead. The Hebrew word “echad” can denote a composite unity, as in Genesis 2:24 (“one flesh”) or Ezekiel 37:17 (“one stick”). Paul’s reformulation of the Shema reflects this unity-in-diversity, with the Father and the Son sharing the divine identity. Paul’s theology redefines monotheism to include Jesus within the divine identity. This is not a division of YHWH but an expansion of the understanding of His oneness to encompass the Father and the Son.
Paul’s focus in 1 Corinthians 8:6 is on the Father and the Son in the context of creation and redemption. This does not exclude the Holy Spirit but reflects the specific theological emphasis of the passage. Elsewhere, Paul includes the Spirit in Trinitarian formulations (e.g., 2 Corinthians 13:14, Ephesians 4:4-6).
@fghjk5678:
Hi, whoever you are, and thanks for the detailed response. I have explored this issue at greater length in In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul; and also see “How Paul can proclaim one Lord Jesus Christ and not compromise Jewish monotheism.”
Paul reformulates this by assigning “one God” to the Father and “one Lord” to Jesus….
The deliberate parallelism indicates that Paul is not presenting two unrelated points about the Father and the Son but rather including Jesus in Israel’s monotheistic confession.
I made the point in the article that there are texts other than the Shema that could be view here, but in any case if one part of the Shema has been assigned (as you say) to another “person,” that more plausibly means that the functionality of the one God has been divided than that two persons have been absorbed into one. Or so it seems to me.
So for example, if the monarch assigns responsibility for day-to-day government of the nation to his prime minister, that does not mean that the prime minister has been assimilated into the ontology of the monarch. It means that a non-royal has received the authority to act on the king’s behalf.
The critical point to recognise is that in later prophetic-apocalyptic Judaism and in the New Testament lordship is primarily political or, we may say, messianic (cf. Acts 2:36): it has to do with the government of Israel in the midst of powerful nations. Daniel 7 is determinative: authority over the nations is taken from the fourth beast and transferred to the figure in human form—to the loyal persecuted saints of the Most High. This is everywhere the argument about the kingdom of God: kingdom, authority, dominion, and glory have been given to the loyal Son who was crucified and raised from the dead (cf. Rom. 1:2-4).
While Malachi 2:10-12 does mention “one God” and a “Father” of Israel, its context concerns covenantal faithlessness and idolatry, not the monotheistic confession central to the Shema.
Precisely. In the context of 1 Corinthians 8-10, the theme of “covenantal faithlessness and idolatry” is far more relevant (“Now concerning (food) sacrificed-to-idols…,” etc.) than the covenant-foundation setting of the Shema. Your “not the monotheistic confession central to the Shema” begs the question.
So under the new regime and in the eschatological context operative in the New Testament, it is entirely appropriate to call on the name of the Lord Jesus rather than the Lord who is YHWH, but that’s because YHWH has delegated or assigned the particular authority to judge and rule to the Lord, Christ, King seated at his right hand after the manner of the Davidic king.
In effect, what Paul has done is not unite two persons in the Shema but divide the functionality implicit in the Shema—or better, in a text like Malachi 2:10-12—between two persons. Remember that the Shema predates the appointment of a king for Israel.
By attributing these roles to Jesus, Paul affirms His participation in YHWH’s unique divine authority.
Agreed. But the New Testament paradigm here is that of the heavenly court. God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand. In that respect, yes, Jesus was included in or participated in the “authority” of God—he received the authority to act on YHWH’s behalf, which is the only way to understand the pervasive dependence on Psalm 110:1-2.
It is only in a post-apocalyptic phase in the development of Christian thought that the heavenly drama dissolves into ontology.
The Shema’s affirmation of oneness (echad) does not preclude distinctions within the Godhead.
But in 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul does not say that God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are one. He says quite plainly: “for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ…”—that is, two unitary persons. I am happy to affirm a post-biblical trinitarianism, but not on the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the New Testament narrative.
@Andrew Perriman:
Your response reflects a sophisticated subordinationist interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8:6 within an apocalyptic and political framework, but it ultimately fails to account for Paul’s deep theological reconfiguration of Jewish monotheism in light of Christ. While you acknowledge that Paul is doing something remarkable with the Shema, you resist the ontological implications by reducing Jesus’ lordship to a kind of functional delegation—a royal proxy rather than a divine person within the identity of the one God. This limitation arises from a category error: conflating representational exaltation with ontological identity, which the New Testament itself does not support.
First, your analogy of a monarch and his prime minister distorts the theological stakes of the text. The “Lord” in the Shema (YHWH) is not merely a ruler among others, but the unique, covenantal God of Israel—the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer. When Paul reformulates the Shema to speak of “one Lord, Jesus Christ,” he is not assigning a royal function in abstraction from divine identity. Rather, he is applying to Jesus the exclusive divine title κύριος (Kyrios), which in the Greek Scriptures (LXX) consistently renders YHWH. This is not a matter of delegated function but shared divine identity. The linguistic and theological context makes this unmistakable. As Richard Bauckham has argued, this is not a redistribution of roles but an inclusion of Jesus within the unique divine identity of the one God of Israel.
Second, the suggestion that Paul is working more with Malachi 2:10–12 than the Shema is unconvincing. The rhetorical and theological structure of 1 Corinthians 8:6 is deliberately framed to mirror the Shema’s foundational monotheistic formula. The contrast between “many gods and many lords” in verse 5 and the declaration of “one God… and one Lord” in verse 6 is precisely patterned to affirm a Christianized Shema. Paul is not simply talking about faithfulness in a covenantal or cultic sense; he is staking a claim about the very nature of God in Christian confession. Malachi’s concerns about intermarriage and idol-worship, while thematically relevant to idolatry, cannot account for the precise structure and theological depth of Paul’s statement.
Moreover, the argument that Jesus’ lordship is merely functional and eschatological, derived from Daniel 7 and Psalm 110, overlooks how these Old Testament texts are transformed in the New Testament. In Daniel 7, the Son of Man is given authority, but in the New Testament this figure is identified with Jesus in a way that transcends the narrative typology. Jesus does not merely share God’s authority externally; He is the agent through whom all creation came into being (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; 1 Corinthians 8:6). This cosmological role is never assigned to any angelic or royal figure in Second Temple Judaism. To act as Creator and Sustainer is not a functional role given to creatures but is intrinsic to God alone, as Isaiah 44:24 makes clear—YHWH created the world alone, and Paul affirms that all things exist through Christ.
Your assertion that “ontology” is a post-apocalyptic concern and that the New Testament operates within a purely narrative or functional framework ignores the ontological implications that naturally arise from Jesus’ roles. When Paul identifies Christ as the agent of creation, the one through whom all things came to be, he places Christ on the Creator side of the Creator/creature divide. This is not narrative accommodation or symbolic representation—it is a theological claim of the highest order. That Paul also uses temple language, divine titles, and liturgical confession (e.g., Romans 10:13; Philippians 2:11; 1 Corinthians 1:2) in relation to Jesus confirms that early Christians did not treat Jesus as a mere functionary of divine rule but as sharing the divine name, prerogatives, and glory.
Finally, your reading of 1 Corinthians 8:6 as distinguishing “two unitary persons” misses Paul’s broader theological vision. He does not say “one God, not the Lord,” or “one Lord, not God”—rather, he identifies both the Father and the Son within the framework of divine unity. This is precisely why he can distribute the Shema’s exclusive titles—Theos and Kyrios—between the Father and the Son without implying polytheism or division. The unity expressed in the Shema is not contradicted but reconfigured around the relational communion of Father and Son. That Paul does not say explicitly “they are one” in this verse is irrelevant, as his Christological statements throughout his epistles imply precisely this unity (cf. Colossians 2:9; Philippians 2:6-11; Romans 10:9-13).
In sum, your model of delegated royal function fails to do justice to the full range of evidence in Paul’s letters. The early Christian re-reading of the Shema in light of Christ was not a splitting of functions but an inclusion of Jesus in the very identity of Israel’s one God. This inclusion cannot be reduced to political kingship or covenantal agency—it reflects a divine ontology, affirmed in worship, creation, and salvific lordship. To deny this is to misread both Paul and the foundational Jewish texts he reinterprets in the light of the risen Lord.
@József X.:
I should really resist the temptation, but here’s a response to some of the points that you make.
it ultimately fails to account for Paul’s deep theological reconfiguration of Jewish monotheism in light of Christ.
The problem I have with this line of argument, which you use a lot, is its circularity. We are considering just those texts on which your particular “deep theological configuration of jewish monotheism” is purportedly based, and I’m finding that there are better ways of accounting for Paul’s language—notably the “apocalyptic and political framework.” There is no generalised christology in Paul apart from these texts unless we think it appropriate to retroject the later trinitarian categories into his worldview.
I think that the Fathers were historically right to reconfigure the apocalyptic paradigm in the way that they did, but we have to be very wary of using their linguistic and conceptual innovations to explain Paul.
Rather, he is applying to Jesus the exclusive divine title κύριος (Kyrios), which in the Greek Scriptures (LXX) consistently renders YHWH.
This is not the case, kyrios is not exclusively reserved for YHWH, as is clear from Psalm 109:1 LXX. Both YHWH and ʾadon are kyrios. Given the importance of the psalm for early christological development, it seems to me that the empowerment of the kyrios who is ʾadon by the kyrios who is YHWH goes a long way towards explaining the attribution of lordship to Jesus. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18).
We have a similar construction in the following, where the ʾadonis Abraham:
καὶ εἶπεν Κύριε ὁ θεὸς τοῦ κυρίου μου Αβρααμ… (Gen. 24:12 LXX; cf. 24:27, 35, 42, 48)
And he said, “O LORD (YHWH), God of my master (ʾadon) Abraham… (Gen. 24:12 ESV)
In both cases, the speaker (the psalmist, the servant of Abraham) looks up to two “lords,” both kyrios in Greek, but one kyrios is YHWH and God, the other (David, Abraham) is ʾadon in Hebrew. Likewise the early believers looked up to two Lords—one who was YHWH and God, sole creator of all things, one who was ʾadon and king, ruler of kings on earth.
Jesus is included in the divine court on the basis of the delegation of political authority. The Lord who is YHWH, who is God of Israel, remains one God—that in essence is the Shema, as it is affirmed in 1 Cor. 8:4: “there is no God but one.” But as is attested widely in the New Testament, he has given authority to his Son to judge and rule over Israel and the nations. Therefore, in a world in which there are many gods and many lords, it makes good Jewish sense to affirm that “for us” there is not only one God but also one Lord.
Moreover, the verse is structured as a statement of two things, not of one thing:
for us one God the Father from whom all things and we for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom all things and we through him.
I don’t think that “one Lord” in 8:6 comes from the Shema, but if it did, the obvious conclusion would be not that Jesus has been included in the Shema but that the Shema has been distributed between two persons.
But I don’t think that’s the case. The Shema is the affirmation of the oneness of God, but this one God has made Jesus the Davidic messiah at his right hand, “Lord and Christ,” by his resurrection from the dead (Acts 2:36; Rom. 1:3-4).
In Daniel 7, the Son of Man is given authority, but in the New Testament this figure is identified with Jesus in a way that transcends the narrative typology.
I disagree. Yes, Jesus identifies himself with the persecuted righteous in Israel, but it is always used as an argument about kingdom, not about cosmology. Disloyal Israel is judged, the oppressor is overthrown, the persecuted are vindicated, kingdom is given to the Son of Man and those who have suffered with him.
My view is that the creational language reflects Paul’s belief that the creative wisdom of God, as widely understood in Hellenistic Judaism, has found traction in the career of Jesus to bring about a new political-religious order that can be described in new creation terms. I give my reasons in the book and elsewhere on this site.
People call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ because in the political realm, he is the kyrios to whom authority has been given to judge, save, and rule. He is the one who will come with the clouds of heaven (political imagery) to deliver those who turned to the living God in his name from the wrath to come (1 Thess. 1:9-10). That keeps Jesus firmly on the political side of the ontological divide.
He does not say “one God, not the Lord,” or “one Lord, not God”—rather, he identifies both the Father and the Son within the framework of divine unity.
Of course he doesn’t say that because it’s not the point he’s making. He’s not answering our questions, he’s dealing with the fact that in his world there are many gods and many lords. I argue in the book that when Paul references the Father and the Son together “with sufficient explanatory context to shed light on the nature or function of the relationship,” the distinction between their roles is always foregrounded. “In these more or less formulaic expressions the relationship is functionally asymmetrical” (41).
@Andrew Perriman:
Hi Andrew,
Thoughtful comments as ever. About the “split Schema” proposal, which I’ve heard first emerged in the 20th century, have you read Perry and Gaston’s excellent article on the subject? You can purchase it, here:
Christological Monotheism in: Horizons in Biblical Theology Volume 39 Issue 2 (2017)
Or you can read a version of the paper that Perry did on his own for free:
1 Cor 8:6 Monotheistic Christology
As the authors point out, one strange notion is the assumption that Paul would re-write the Schema in a way that divides the Father from his own name.
The authors add:
“Wright’s proposal also ignores the function of κύριος in the sentence. Given that κύριος is generally used to describe or address lords, masters, owners, deities, rulers, persons of rank, as well as the God of Israel, we need to know which use of κύριος we have in 1 Cor 8:6. If κύριος is being used descriptively of Jesus Christ, then it is not representing the name ‘YHWH’. YHWH is a proper name, but κύριος in 1 Cor 8:6 is not being used here as a proxy for this proper name precisely because it is modified by ‘one.’ The ‘one’ is in a semantic contract with the ‘many’ of v. 5, which in turn has the plural of κύριος. This in turn brings that plural into a semantic contract with the singular of v. 6. Thus, because the plural is functioning as a descriptive title, so too κύριος in v. 6 is functioning as a title and not as a proxy for the name ‘YHWH’. Accordingly, we can observe a symmetry between the two clauses; just as ‘God’ is not a proper name in ‘one God’ so too ‘Lord’ is not serving as a proxy for a proper name in ‘one Lord’”. (ibid), pp. 184 & 185
I think that’s an excellent point, and to it I would add another powerful bit of evidence against the ‘split Schema’ view: If we want to know how Jesus is Lord according to the early Christians, we should look to the Pauline and Peterine salutations, where we find the Father described as,
“the God and Father of our Lord”
No Jew could have heard those words and felt that Jesus was “Lord” in the sense of a proxy for the divine name, which would be equivalent to:
“the God and Father of Jehovah…”
The God of Jehovah? Such a phrase would have been like pieces of glass swirling around in their heads, causing blood to squirt from their ears.
This would have caused severe controversy to emerge, which would have had to have been dealt with quickly to mollify the intolerable cognitive dissonance that would have arisen. The fact that no such controversy emerged — indeed, not even so much as a mild concern was expressed — tells us clearly, in my judgment, that the early Christians didn’t hear what Wright, Bauckham, and others think they hear.
@Sean Kasabuske:
The proposal that Paul’s wording in 1 Corinthians 8 : 6 cannot be an intentional re‑articulation of the Shema because κύριος is used “descriptively” rather than as a surrogate for the Tetragram misunderstands both the semantics of κύριος in Second‑Temple Judaism and Paul’s own rhetorical strategy. In the Septuagint κύριος performs a double duty: it is indeed the routine translation of YHWH (e.g., Deut 6 : 4 LXX) and at the same time remains the ordinary Greek term for a superior, a ruler, or a deity. That polyvalence precisely equips κύριος to carry the force of Paul’s argument. By juxtaposing the plural κύριοι of v. 5 with the singular κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός of v. 6 Paul exploits the semantic range of the word: he simultaneously denies the legitimacy of the many pagan lords and asserts that for the Christian community Jesus occupies the unique position that the LXX regularly marks with κύριος when it translates the divine name. The symmetry of “one God … one Lord” is not an exercise in mere titling; it is a confessional antithesis that relocates Jesus inside the boundary otherwise reserved for Israel’s God.
Nor does the modifying εἷς (“one”) disqualify κύριος from functioning as a surrogate for YHWH. The Shema itself predicates oneness of YHWH, and early Jewish liturgical paraphrases repeat the structure: “One is God” / “One is his name” (e.g., Zech 14 : 9). Paul’s “for us … εἷς κύριος” is cast in exactly the same cadence; the singularity of the title is what marks the Lord as unique over against the plurality of pagan powers. The charge of circular logic—that scholars discover trinitarian theology only by assuming it—collapses once the intertextual dimension of Paul’s sentence is allowed its full weight. The question is not whether κύριος ever functions as an ordinary title (it certainly does), but whether Paul’s deliberate replication of the Shema’s polarities can be explained on any reading that leaves Jesus outside the divine identity. A descriptive honorific could have been supplied by ὁ χριστός, ὁ υἱός, ὁ σωτήρ; instead Paul chooses the term that, in Israel’s Scriptures, signals the covenant name.
Reference to the benediction “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” likewise fails to unsettle the argument. Second‑Temple Jewish monotheism had no difficulty placing the king whom God had enthroned at his right hand beneath the God who enthroned him. Psalm 110 provides the grammar: “YHWH says to my lord” distinguishes but does not divorce the two figures. Early Christian usage of “the God of our Lord” fits this biblical precedent. It is no more problematic than Exodus 15 : 2 (“my God, the God of my father”) or 1 Chronicles 29 : 20 (“bless the LORD your God”) where the God of Israel stands in relation to Israel’s human agent. What would have been dissonant, and what Paul consistently avoids, is the attribution of cultic devotion, creator status, or universal eschatological sovereignty to any figure other than YHWH—yet these are precisely the prerogatives Paul predicates of Christ (e.g., 1 Cor 1 : 2; 8 : 6; Phil 2 : 10‑11). That early believers could affirm both “the God of our Lord” and “every tongue confess, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ ” shows not a lack of controversy but the emergence of a christological monotheism able to re‑articulate Israel’s faith without surrendering its exclusivist core.
Finally, the suggestion that Paul might have written something more explicit—“two who are our one God and Lord”—anachronistically measures his language against later conciliar formulas. Paul did not possess the technical terms of fourth‑century Trinitarian dogma. What he did possess was Israel’s scriptural repertoire. By grafting Jesus into the Shema, by ascribing to him Joel’s salvific name theology (Rom 10 : 13), by applying to him Isaiah’s oath of universal allegiance (Phil 2 : 10‑11), and by describing creation itself as δι’ αὐτοῦ, Paul achieved—within the thought‑world of Second‑Temple Judaism—what later theology would systematise: the inclusion of the Son in the unique identity of the one God. The absence of a pre‑Nicene creed in 1 Corinthians 8 does not weaken the argument; it confirms that high Christology was already embedded in the exegesis and worship of the earliest communities, not retrospectively imposed by later Hellenistic abstraction.
@József X. :
As I’ve pointed out now several times, I have no interest in attempts to interpret the biblical writings according to the presupposition of Trinitarianism. That approach is anachronistic. If this is of interest to you then you should focus on engaging in discussions with people who share that interest.
As for the article by Perry and Gaston and the one Perry did on his own, they didn’t misunderstand the semantics of “Lord.” They are spot on in the observations they offered. I’ve shared the links, and people can read the articles and decide for themselves which view is more compelling.
About this:
“Finally, the suggestion that Paul might have written something more explicit—’two who are our one God and Lord’—anachronistically measures his language against later conciliar formulas.”
You’ve misunderstood my point. I wasn’t measuring Paul’s language against later formulas; rather, I was pointing out that for Paul’s language to be consistent with the “split Shema” chimera, then it would have been worded differently, because Paul’s actual wording is inconsistent with your desired reading. The chimera itself is what is anachronistic, as it grew from a desire to conform Paul’s thought with later formulas.
@Andrew Perriman:
It seems to me that if Paul wanted to “split the Schema” between God and Jesus in a way that would be compatible with later ideas, then he could have written the Greek equivalent of something like this:
“yet for us there are two who are our one God and Lord, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live, and his Son Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
@Andrew Perriman:
The difficulty with your proposal is not that it turns to Psalm 110 or to the political horizon of apocalyptic texts; the earliest believers certainly did both. The problem is that, having acknowledged Paul’s deliberate echo of the Shema and his polemic against “many gods and many lords,” you then detach those echoes from the very logic that made them powerful for a Second‑Temple Jewish audience. In that setting κύριος was not an elastic label that could be stretched across the whole spectrum of created authority. Precisely because the LXX had standardised κύριος as the surrogate for the Tetragram, the title had become the linguistic marker of Israel’s unique, covenant‑making God. That use did not exclude lesser adonîm, but it fenced them off from the divine name. When Psalm 110 juxtaposes the two lords—YHWH and David’s ʾădôn—the Greek translator preserves the distinction by adding ὁ θεός to the first kyrios: «εἶπεν ὁ κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῷ κυρίῳ μου». The strategy is transparent: one of the kyrioi is the God of Israel, the other is not.
Paul’s sentence in 1 Cor 8 : 6 will not let us map that distinction onto Father and Son. He inserts no qualifying phrase—no «ὁ θεός»—after κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, even though he has just denied that the many pagan kyrioi have any standing for “us.” Instead he distributes the single, undivided confession of Deut 6 : 4 across two referents, giving to each an exclusive predicate that in the Old Testament belongs only to YHWH. Creation is “from” the Father and equally “through” the Son; believers live “for” the Father and equally “through” the Son. A hierarchy can be heard only if we import a metaphysic that Paul does not supply. His antithesis is not between one uncreated God and one exalted creature; it is between the one God/Lord of Christian confession and the plurality of powers worshipped in the Greco‑Roman world. To maintain the contrast he has to place Jesus on the divine side of the line he himself has drawn.
The same manoeuvre recurs wherever Paul reads Israel’s scriptures christologically. Romans 10 : 13 transfers the Joel text verbatim; what Joel predicates of YHWH, Paul predicates of Christ with no adjustment of syntax. Philippians 2 : 10‑11 sets Isaiah 45 : 23 in the mouth of God and insists that the universal homage be paid “to the glory of God the Father.” It is precisely doxological monotheism—God will not yield his glory to another (Isa 42 : 8; 48 : 11)—that forces the conclusion that the crucified and risen Jesus is included within that glory, not merely deputed to reflect it. Early Christian exegesis cleaves to the grammar of Israel’s radical distinction between Creator and creation: because God alone creates and God alone receives cultic acclamation, the Son who is agent of creation and object of cult cannot be located among the δυνάμεις or ἀρχαί that populate the lower register of apocalyptic cosmology. The Fathers later gave metaphysical articulation to this insight, but the insight itself is Paul’s.
Your argument finally rests on the claim that Paul’s “apocalyptic and political” framework resists ontological implication. Yet in Jewish apocalyptic literature kingship and judgment are never detached from the question “who is truly God?” Isaiah’s vision of Babylon’s fall, Daniel’s vision of the beasts, and the Qumran Hodayot all link eschatological sovereignty to the Creator’s unique prerogatives. When Paul identifies Christ as the one “through whom are all things,” he does what Second‑Temple monotheism had hitherto reserved for YHWH alone (cf. Isa 44 : 24 LXX, Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ Θεός ὁ ποιήσας πάντα). The eschatological scene of 1 Cor 15 : 24‑28 presupposes the same ontology: the Son can deliver the kingdom to the Father and subject himself precisely because he shares the Father’s side of the Creator/creature divide; otherwise the final act would be apostasy, not victory.
None of this collapses Father and Son into a modalist singularity, nor does it deny the asymmetry of source and agent. What it does deny is that the “one Lord” can be placed among the many. Paul’s re‑voicing of the Shema is therefore not a distribution of its clauses but an expansion of its subject. The God whom Israel confesses as one now embraces within that unity the crucified Messiah whom God has raised and enthroned. That is the “deep theological reconfiguration” already at work in Paul’s letters and elaborated, not “invented,” by the later Trinitarian tradition.
@József X. :
When Psalm 110 juxtaposes the two lords—YHWH and David’s ʾădôn—the Greek translator preserves the distinction by adding ὁ θεός to the first kyrios: «εἶπεν ὁ κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῷ κυρίῳ μου». The strategy is transparent: one of the kyrioi is the God of Israel, the other is not.
1. Where did you get that text from? The LXX reads Εἶπεν ὁ κύριος τῷ κυρίῳ μου…. Rahlfs doesn’t have the variant.
2. But what does it prove anyway? The point is that in a verse that would be of cardinal importance for New Testament christology, a distinction is made between the kyrios who is YHWH and god and the kyrios who is ʾadon and king. That distinction is not obliterated in New Testament usage; neither kyrios is qualified.
Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, having received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father, he poured out this which you yourselves see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, “[The] Lord said to my lord, Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know for certain that God made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you had crucified. (Acts 2:33-36*)
The ontological hierarchy is clear: God raises Jesus, God sets him at his right hand, God will subdue his enemies, as he would do for Israel’s king, the psalmist’s ʾadon. Jesus has been made Lord in the same way that he has been made Israel’s messianic ruler. “Lord” and “messiah” are same order terms.
@József X. :
Instead he distributes the single, undivided confession of Deut 6 : 4 across two referents, giving to each an exclusive predicate that in the Old Testament belongs only to YHWH. Creation is “from” the Father and equally “through” the Son; believers live “for” the Father and equally “through” the Son. A hierarchy can be heard only if we import a metaphysic that Paul does not supply.
1. “Distributes… across two referents” is what I’ve been saying. If the Shema holds at all in 1 Corinthians 8:6 (I’m not sure it does), the functions of the one God of Israel have been distributed between God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That is very different from saying that Jesus has been incorporated into the Shema. The one God remains creator of all things and Father of his people Israel, but he has delegated lordship over the nations, sovereignty in the political domain, to Jesus, who by virtue of his resurrection is both Lord and Christ.
2. What is the “exclusive predicate”? “One”? What is odd for believers in Jesus, many of them former pagans, in a multinational context, in which there are many lords, affirming their allegiance to “one lord”?
3. “From” and “through” are not “equally.” One refers to source, the other to agency or means.
4. How is the relationship between Father and Son not hierarchical? YHWH is Father to Israel. Israel is the son, the king is the son, the servant of YHWH is Jacob or Cyrus. Jesus is the son sent to do the work of a servant, he is the kyrios (Lk. 19:16, 18, 20, 25) who goes away to a distant country to receive a kingdom from a higher authority, he is the descendant of David who will rule the nations. YHWH is both God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:3; 11:31). Hierarchy is everywhere.
@Andrew Perriman:
Precisely this linguistic convention lies behind the force of Paul’s reformulation of Deuteronomy 6:4 in 1 Corinthians 8:6. In the surrounding argument (vv. 4‑5) Paul contrasts the polytheistic environment of “many gods and many lords” with the Christian confession. He then produces a balanced, bipartite sentence in which each half echoes a clause of the Shema: εἷς θεός … καὶ εἷς κύριος. The deliberate symmetry invites the reader to hear the whole verse as a Christianized Shema, not merely as a convenient diptych of creator and mediator. Paul allows κύριος to stand unqualified as the title of Jesus, despite having just denied legitimacy to every non‑YHWH κύριος. The rhetorical effect is unmistakable: to name Jesus κύριος inside a confession that deliberately echoes the Shema is to position him on the YHWH side of Israel’s most jealously guarded boundary.
This observation is not undermined by noting a functional differentiation between ἐξ οὗ and δι’ οὗ. Second‑Temple Jewish monotheism was happy to speak of hypostatised attributes—Word, Wisdom, Spirit—as the means or instrument through which God creates (cf. Prov 3:19; Wis 9:1‑2; Sir 24:3‑9), but it never adjoined such figures to the Shema. Paul’s “distribution” therefore does more than assign complementary roles. The agent of creation, in Jewish Scripture, sits strictly on the Creator’s side of the ontological divide (Isa 44:24; 42:5; 45:18). When Paul locates all things δι’ Ἰησοῦ and at the same time confesses a single κύριος, he crosses the very boundary that his own polemic against pagan lords was designed to assert, unless Jesus shares the unique divine identity.
Acts 2:33‑36 preserves the same logic. Peter distinguishes between the God who raised Jesus and the Jesus who is thereby made Κύριος καὶ Χριστός. Yet the proof‑text he cites—Psalm 110—belongs originally to the cultic vocabulary of YHWH’s lordship. The point is not merely that God has installed a vice‑regent but that God authenticates Jesus precisely by seating him on the throne that Psalm 110 associates with divine kingship. Early Christian preaching could happily speak of Jesus’ exaltation as a historical making without implying that this conferred a creaturely lordship. An act of enthronement in time reveals the status that belongs to the Son in eternity (compare John 17:5).
Hierarchy does operate in the New Testament—but not the kind your argument presupposes. The Father is arche, source; the Son is agent; the Spirit perfects. That taxis belongs to intra‑divine relations, not to the ontological gulf between Creator and creation. Joseph’s governance of Egypt or Cyrus’s rule by divine decree supplied biblical models for viceregal agency; but the apostles consistently drive beyond those analogies. No Israelite king, no angelic prince, ever bears the name above every name (Phil 2:9‑11), receives universal proskynesis “to the glory of God the Father,” or functions as the indispensable medium of creation itself (Col 1:16‑17; Heb 1:2‑3). When Jewish monotheism’s liturgical prerogatives—invocation (Rom 10:13), confession (Phil 2:11), doxology (2 Pet 3:18; Rev 5:13)—are directed to Jesus, we have passed beyond delegated rule to shared divine identity.
Nor does the coordinate confession of “one God” and “one Lord” qualify as a merely pragmatic affirmation for Gentile converts. Pagans could and did pledge exclusive loyalty to a sovereign deity; mystery cult initiates hailed a single saviour‑lord without thereby abandoning polytheism. Paul’s confession differs precisely because it fuses Israel’s monotheistic symbolics (Shema language; Creator prerogatives) with an exalted human figure. The scandal is not the numerical restriction but the inclusion of the crucified Jew in the divine prerogative reserved by Isaiah’s polemic: “I am YHWH, and there is no other” (Isa 45:6). Paul’s answer to that polemic is christological, not merely political.
You worry that ontology is a later metaphysical imposition. Yet Jewish apocalyptic rhetoric itself trades on ontological distinctions. The vision of Daniel 7 works because the Ancient of Days is not simply a higher throne than Caesar’s but the transcendently divine judge; the Son of Man receiving worship (λατρεία in the Theodotionic Greek) poses a problem that theology must address. Paul addresses it by letting christological worship stand—and by anchoring it in Scripture. The post‑Nicene debates that forged technical vocabulary did not invent Christ’s inclusion in God’s identity; they laboured to defend it.
In short, the New Testament does sustain a functional asymmetry between Father and Son, but that asymmetry unfolds within the single divine life. To defend Israel’s monotheistic confession while offering cultic devotion to the risen Jesus, the apostles did not dilute the Shema; they discovered, to their astonishment, that the Shema was broad enough to hold the Father and the Son together. Any reading of Paul that honours his Scripture‑soaked language, his polemic against pagan worship, and the cultic practice of his churches must do justice to that discovery. A merely representational lordship cannot.
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