The Jewish Gospels (7 page)

Ancient Jewish readers might well have reasoned, as the Church Father Aphrahat did, that since the theme of riding on the clouds indicates a divine being in every other instance in the Tanakh (the Jewish name for the Hebrew Bible), we should read this one too as the revelation of God, a second God, as it were. The implication is, of course, that there are two such divine figures in heaven, the old Ancient of Days and the young one like a son of man.
¹⁰
Such Jews would have had to explain, then, what it means for this divine figure to be given into the power of the fourth beast for “a time, two times, and a half a time.” A descent into hell—or at any rate to the realm of death—for three days would be one fine answer to that question.

The Messiah-Christ existed as a Jewish idea long before the baby Jesus was born in Nazareth. That is, the idea of a second God as viceroy to God the Father is one of the oldest of theological ideas in Israel. Daniel 7 brings into the present a fragment of what is perhaps the most ancient of religious visions of Israel that we can find. Just as seeing an ancient Roman wall built into a modern Roman building enables us to experience ancient Rome alive and functioning in the present, this fragment of ancient lore enabled Jews of the centuries just before Jesus and onward to vivify in the present of their lives this bit of ancient myth.

The rest, as they say, is Gospel. But the point is that these ideas were not new ones at all by the time Jesus appeared on the scene. They are among the earliest ideas
about God in the religion of the Israelites, comparable to the ancient relationship between the gods
ʾ
El and Ba
Ê¿
al in which “Ba
Ê¿
l comes near in his shining storm cloud.
ʾ
El is the transcendent one.”
¹¹
Ê¿
El, the ancient sky god of all of the Canaanites (his name comes to mean just “God” in biblical Hebrew), was the god of justice, while his younger associate, named Ba
Ê¿
al by most of the Canaanites—but not the Israelites, who called him YHVH—was the god of war. In the biblical religion, in order to form a more perfect monotheism, these two divinities have been merged into one, but not quite seamlessly. The Israelites were a part of that ancient Canaanite community, differentiated to some extent by different ideas about God that they developed through their historical existence, but the idea of a duality within God was not easily escaped, however much certain leaders sought to enforce it. A God that is very far away generates—almost inevitably—a need for a God who is closer; a God who judges us requires almost inevitably a God who will fight for us and defend us (as long as the second God is completely subordinate to the first, the principle of monotheism is not violated).

The unreconstructed relic of Israel's religious past (if not her present as well) that we find in the two-thrones theophany of Daniel 7 was no doubt disturbing to at least some Jews in antiquity, such as the author of Daniel himself in the second century
B.C.
We know that other Jews adopted wholeheartedly, or simply inherited, the
doubleness of Israel's God, the old Ancient of Days and the young human-appearing rider on the clouds. These became the progenitors of the Judaism of Jesus and his followers.

The two-thrones apocalypse in Daniel calls up a very ancient strand in Israel's religion, one in which, it would seem, the
ʾ
El-like sky god of justice and the younger rider on the clouds, storm god of war, have not really been merged as they are for most of the Bible.
¹²
I find it plausible that this highly significant passage is a sign of the religious traditions that gave rise to the notion of a Father divinity and a Son divinity that we find in the Gospels.

Taking the two-throne vision out of the context of Daniel 7 as a whole, we find several crucial elements: (1) there are two thrones; (2) there are two divine figures, one apparently old and one apparently young; (3) the young figure is to be the Redeemer and eternal ruler of the world.
¹³
It would certainly not be wrong to suggest, I think, that even if the actual notion of the Messiah/Christ is not yet present here, the notion of a divinely appointed divine king over earth is, and that this has great potential for understanding the development of the Messiah/Christ notion in later Judaism (including Christianity, of course). The second-God Redeemer figure thus comes, on my view, out of the earlier history of Israel's religion. Once the messiah had been combined with the younger divine figure that we have found in Daniel 7, then it became natural to ascribe to him also the term “Son of God.” The occupant of one
throne was an ancient, the occupant of the other a young figure in human form. The older one invests the younger one with His own authority on earth forever and ever, passing the scepter to him. What could be more natural, then, than to adopt the older usage “Son of God,” already ascribed to the Messiah in his role as the Davidic king of Israel, and understanding it more literally as the sign of the equal divinity of the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man? Thus the Son of Man became the Son of God, and “Son of God” became the name for Jesus' divine nature—and all without any break with ancient Jewish tradition.

The theology of the Gospels, far from being a radical innovation within Israelite religious tradition, is a highly conservative return to the very most ancient moments within that tradition, moments that had been largely suppressed in the meantime—but not entirely. The identification of the rider on the clouds with the one like a son of man in Daniel provides that name and image of the Son of Man in the Gospels as well. It follows that the ideas about God that we identify as Christian are not innovations but may be deeply connected with some of the most ancient of Israelite ideas about God. These ideas at the very least go back to an entirely plausible (and attested) reading of Daniel 7 and thus to the second century
B.C.
at the latest. They may even be a whole lot older than that.

One of the most important sources that we have for the most ancient stages of the religion of Israel are some
epic texts about the gods of Canaan that were found in an archaeological excavation in a place called Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) early in the twentieth century. These epics reveal a very rich ancient Canaanite mythology, especially in the elaborated stories of the gods
ʾ
El and Ba
Ê¿
al and their rivals and consorts. While, of course, the Israelite branch of the Canaanite group partly defined itself through the rejection of this mythology, much of the imagery and narrative allusions that we find in the works of the Israelite prophets, the Psalms, and other biblical poetic texts are best illuminated through comparison with these ancient texts. These fragments of reused ancient epic material within the Bible reveal also the existence of an ancient Israelite version of these epics and the mythology that they enact. Yale Divinity School scholar J.J. Collins has helpfully summed up the main points of comparison of Daniel 7 with Canaanite (Ugaritic) representations.
¹⁴
As he argues, “What is important is the pattern of relationships,”
¹⁵
namely, the fact that in Daniel there are two godlike figures, one old and one young, the younger one comes riding on the clouds, and he receives everlasting dominion.
¹⁶
Colpe has noted “the mythographical similarity between the relation of the Ancient of Days and Son of Man on the one side and that of El and Ba'al on the other, which fits into the broader conclusion that older material lives on in the tradition of Israel and Judah.”
¹⁷

The most persuasive reconstruction from the evidence
we have shows that in the ancient religion of Israel,
ʾ
El was the general Canaanite high divinity while YHVH was the Ba
Ê¿
al-like divinity of a small group of southern Canaanites, the Hebrews, with
ʾ
El a very distant absence for these Hebrews. When the groups merged and emerged as Israel,
¹⁸
YHVH, the Israelite version of Ba
Ê¿
al, became assimilated to
ʾ
El as the high God and their attributes largely merged into one doubled God, with
ʾ
El receiving his warlike stormgod characteristics from YHVH.
¹⁹
Thus, to restate the point, the ancient
ʾ
El and YHVH—a southern Hebrew equivalent in function (within the paradigm of relations between
ʾ
El and a young warrior god to the northern Ba
Ê¿
al)
²⁰
—apparently merged at some early point in Israelo-Canaanite history, thus producing a rather tense and unstable monotheism.
²¹
This merger was not by any means a perfect union.
ʾ
El and YHVH had very different and in some ways antithetical functions, and I propose that this left a residue in which some of the characteristics of the young divinity always had the potential to split off again in a hypostasis (or even separate god) of their own.
²²
This tension and resultant splitting manifests itself in the traditions behind the Daniel 7 theophany, where we see a new young one, apparently nameless until he comes to be called Jesus—or Enoch.
²³
As a medieval rabbinic hymn, still feeling that tension, would have it, YHVH is an “ancient on the day of judgment and a youth on the day of battle.”

This merger, if indeed it occurred, must have happened very early on, for the worship of only one God characterizes Israel, at least in aspiration, from the time of Josiah (sixth century
B.C.
) and the Deuteronomist revolution, if not much earlier. This merger leaves its marks right on the surface of the text, where the
ʾ
El-YHVH combination can still be detected in the tensions and doublings of the biblical text, available to be resurrected, as it were, by astute readers of a certain cast of religious mind as a second, young God, or as a part of God, or as a divine person within God (and all of these options have been adopted by perfectly “orthodox,” non-Christian Jewish theologians as well as by Christians).
²⁴

The young God in the original mythic text in Daniel is the figure who will redeem Israel and the world, not an exalted Davidic king.
²⁵
There is, as I have argued, nothing in this vision that suggests or even allows seeing the one like a son of man as an actual human being. Setting aside the internal explanation and just looking at the original vision, however, we do find that this divine figure will be given “the dominion, the glory, the kingdom and all of the peoples, nations, and languages will worship him, and his dominion will be eternal dominion which will not pass and his kingdom which will not be destroyed.” This mythic pattern of second God as Redeemer will be crucial, of course, in interpreting the Gospels and the pattern of religion proclaimed there and in which we will have
to try to understand better the relation of this divine Redeemer to the human one, the Davidic Messiah.

The general outlines of a theology of a young God subordinated to an old God are present in the throne vision of Daniel 7, however much the author of Daniel labored to suppress this. In place of notions of
ʾ
El and YHVH as the two Gods of Israel, the pattern of an older god and a younger one—a god of wise judgment and a god of war and punishment—has been transferred from older forms of Israelite/Canaanite religion to new forms. Here, the older god is now entirely named by the tetragrammaton YHVH (and his supremacy is not in question), while the functions of the younger god have been in part taken by supreme angels or other sorts of divine beings, Redeemer figures, at least in the “official” religion of the biblical text. Once YHVH absorbs
ʾ
El, the younger god has no name of his own but presumably is identified at different times with the archangels or other versions of the Great Angel, Michael, as well as with Enoch, Christ, and later Me
á¹­
a
á¹­
ron as well.
²⁶
Some of the ancient guises of the younger god found in Jewish texts of the Second Temple period and later, especially “the Little Yahu,” Yaho
ʾ
el,” indicate his extrabiblical identity as YHVH.
²⁷
It is the power of that myth that explains the continuing life of Jewish binitarianism into Christian Judaism and vitally present in non-Christian Judaism as well (Little Yahu as a name for the divine vice-regent; Me
á¹­
a
á¹­
ron appearing as late as the
Byzantine period in a Hebrew Jewish text). There are thus two legacies left us by Daniel 7: it is the ultimate source of “Son of Man” terminology for a heavenly Redeemer figure, and it is also the best evidence we have for the continuation of a very ancient binitarian Israelite theology deep into the Second Temple period. Although these are separate in Daniel (since that text contains no figure explicitly called the Son of Man), it is the not entirely successful suppression of this myth in Daniel and thus its strong association with the “one like a son of man” that will explain the later development of “Son of Man” as a title in the Gospels (as well as some other ancient Jewish religious texts such as the Book of Enoch).

The meaning of the term “Son of Man” and its usage within chapter 7 of Daniel is a bit of very precious evidence—all the more so as it is against the grain of the biblical theology itself—for the continued vitality of worship of an old God and a young God in Israel. This evidence helps clarify the historical ties of that pattern of religion to later forms of Judaism, including both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.
²⁸
I see it as very much a living part of Israel's religion both before and long after, explaining both the form of Judaism we call Christianity and also much in non-Christian later Judaism as well.
²⁹
If Daniel is the prophecy, the Gospels are the fulfillment.