Tribute to Martin Hengel

Before the year ends, and before Christmas begins, I want to honour the memory of Martin Hengel, without doubt one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the past century, if not of several centuries, who in many ways has re-written major areas of NT sholarship. His particular contribution was to underline the very early development of Christology in a fundamentally Jewish matrix, as against the previous view that it was a late development in a Hellenistic milieu.

Martin Hengel died on 2 July, 2010, at the age of 82. I visited him during my brief sabbatical in Tuebingen in January/ February 2006, and sat in one of his studies, a room perhaps 30' long and 10' high, lined with books. Peter Stuhlmacher, a colleague of his at Tuebingen, said that he had 'perhaps the finest private library in Europe.'

In 1974 (!), his Judaism and Hellenism (two volumes: one of text, one of notes) instantly blew apart the long-held distinction between the two supposedly quite distinct categories of thought which had so long dominated NT research. Instead, he noted that the Palestine of Jesus had been under Hellenistic rule for over 350 years, and in consequence that 'Jewish Galilee was not more but less Hellenized than Jerusalem (Between Jesus and Paul, 1983, 7), that 'Syria... had the strongest Jewish Diaspora,' and that 'virtually all the Gentile-Christian missionaries of the first twenty-five years were Jewish Christians' (Between Jesus ahnd Paul, 45).

His monographs The Son of God (1976), Crucifixion (1977) and The Atonement (1981) are all brief stunning scholarly works. 'Paul's conception of the Son of God...was certainly not his own creation but goes back to earlier community tradition' (Son of God, 15). 'In the Son, God himself came to men and was involved with their deepest distress, therein to reveal his love to all creatures. Only as the broken figure on the cross was Jesus - paradoxically - the exalted one...' (76)

Crucifixion is a detailed historical study of a barbaric form of execution -the 'supreme Roman penalty' (and reportedly being used currently against Christians in Sudan). 'The heart of the Christian message...ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people' (Crucifixion, 5). 'The one thing which made Paul's preaching the offensive 'word of the cross' was the fact that in it the apostle interpreted the death of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. of a specific man, on the cross, as the death of the incarnate Son of God and Kyrios, proclaiming the event as the eschatological event of salvation for all men' (20). On p. 50 he quotes Quintilian to the effect that crosses ought to be set up on the busiest roads as a blunt, obscene deterrent to everyone. 'That this crucified Jew, Jesus Christ, could truly be a divine being sent on earth, God's Son, the Lord of all and the coming judge of the world, must inevitably have been thought by any educated man to be utter "madness" and presumptuousness' (83).

The Atonement considers ancient forms of self-sacrifice, both Greek and Jewish. Hengel then investigates the origins of the doctrine in the NT, particularly with reference to Isaiah 53, and writes: 'That the man Jesus died meant little, for many men were crucified in Jewish Palestine at that time; incomparably more astonishing was the confession that this man Jesus, executed as a criminal, was raised by God' (40).

Taking up elements of his major early study of The Zealots (ET 1989; original German 1961, revd. ed. 1976!) in his The Pre-Christian Paul (1991), Hengel rejected another false split (that between politics and religion) by showing that Pharisaism was easily combined with zealotry, indeed that Pharisaism (in aspects of its origins), as a movement for the purifying of the land ('the ritual sanctification of everyday life in Eretz Israel', 30), was precisely the foundation and motivation of Paul's own persecution of the early believers in Jesus. The 'typically Palestinian phenomenon' of 'zeal for the law' 'between the time of the Maccabees and 70CE' 'is...attested in our sources only for Jewish Palestine' (41). The zealots - like the Taliban - intentionally combined theology and politics. This required Paul's theology and politics alike to be radically overthrown by the appearance of the risen Jesus to him.

In his essays in Between Jesus and Paul (1983), Hengel continued to press back the origins of early Christology. In one of his most significant sentences he writes (39-40): 'the christological development from Jesus as far as Paul took place within about eighteen years, a short space of time for such an intellectual process. In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subequent seven hundred years of church history.' 'The multiplicity of christological titles does not mean a multiplicity of exclusive "christologies" but an accumulative glorification of Jesus' (41). And so: 'It is astonishing how quickly the post-Easter christology of the Greek-speaking community...interpreted this "sending" of Jesus in terms of an eschatological sending of "the Son of God" (Gal. 4:4f., Rom. 8:3f). This is a pre-Pauline formula...which probably already developed in the first ten years of earliest Christian history (178, n. 76).

His Studies in Early Christology (1995) includes a long esay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' (1-72) in which he overturns the assumptions of a century and more concerning the 'non-Messianic' nature of Jesus' ministry and 'self-consciousness'. For him, Paul's understanding of God and Christ did not originate with Paul, but is 'ultimately rooted in Jesus' own self-understanding' (ix). Before Jesus, there was no firmly-established conception of what the Messiah would do or be (33) - only a whole range of ideas based on different passages from the Old Testament. Additionally, 'Jewish eschatology knows no genuine "transcendence", one might also say, no clear distinction betwen "immanence" and "transcendence". The earthly and heavenly world formed one continuum, were bound together and continually influenced one another.' (35-6)

(A recent volume by Michael Bird: Are You the One Who Is To Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Baker, 2009) is at least partly indebted to the writings of Martin Hengel.)

The essay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' closes with words that seem apposite for this season of Advent and Christmas, and I will conclude with them: 'The Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, became the Messiah of Israel in order to fulfil the promises made to the fathers, and he became for us, who have come afterwards from all the nations of the earth, "the author of our salvation", because we experience in him what the love of God is, that we might, for the sake of such grace, praise as our Father, the God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ' (72).

In memoriam aeternam!