Cover of Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice

Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice

by Larry W. Hurtado, Michael F. Bird

105 pages2018Lexham PressISBN 9781683590972
Self-Help

About this book

Before the New Testament or the creeds of the church were written—the devotional practices of the earliest Christians indicate that they worshipped Jesus alongside the Father. Larry W. Hurtado has been one of the leading scholars on early Christology for decades. In Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice, Hurtado helps readers understand early Christology by examining not just what early Christians believed or wrote about Jesus, but what their devotional practices tell us about the place of Jesus in early Christian worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early Christian origins and scholarship on New Testament Christology, Hurtado examines the distinctiveness of early Christian worship by comparing it to both Jewish worship patterns and worship practices within the broader Roman--era religious environment. He argues that the inclusion of the risen Jesus alongside the Father in early Christian devotional practices was a distinct and unique religious phenomenon within its ancient context. Additionally, Hurtado demonstrates that this remarkable development was not invented decades after the resurrection of Christ as some scholars once claimed. Instead, the New Testament suggests that Jesus--followers, very quickly after the resurrection of Christ, began to worship the Son alongside the Father. Honoring the Son offers a look into the worship habits of the earliest Christians to understand the place of Jesus in early Christian devotion.

Publication Details

Publisher
Lexham Press
Published
2018
Pages
105
ISBN
9781683590972
Language
en

About Larry W. Hurtado

Larry W. Hurtado (December 29, 1943 – November 25, 2019) was a New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity and Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (Professor 1996–2011). He was the Head of the School of Divinity 2007–2010, and was until August 2011 Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, at the University of Edinburgh. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943, he completed his PhD at Case Western Reserve University in 1973. His first academic appointment was at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he taught from 1975 to 1978. Prior to moving to Canada in 1975 he pastored a church in Chicago's most Jewish suburb, Skokie, Illinois. Thereafter he moved to the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where he was promoted to full Professor in 1988 and taught until 1996. During his time there, he established the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities and served as initial Director from 1990 to 1992. Shortly after his appointment at the University of Edinburgh, he established the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, which focuses on Christianity in the first three centuries. He made significant advances in understanding Jewish Monotheism and early Christian devotion to Jesus. He was an authority on the Gospels (esp. Gospel of Mark), the Apostle Paul, Early Christology, the Jewish Background of the New Testament, and New Testament Textual Criticism. He was perhaps most well known for his studies on the early emergence of a devotion to Jesus expressed in beliefs about Jesus sharing God's glory, and in a "devotional pattern" in which Jesus features prominently. Hurtado argued that this Jesus-devotion comprises a novel "mutation" in ancient Jewish monotheistic practice. In his later publications, he also urged greater awareness of the historical value of earliest Christian manuscripts as key physical ar

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