Jewish Agency

What is this concept?

In ancient Jewish law, an agent — a shaliach (Hebrew, "sent one") — is someone who acts with the full legal authority of the person who sent them. The agent doesn't represent the sender in a vague or symbolic way. The agent is the sender, for all practical and legal purposes. When the agent speaks, the sender speaks. When the agent acts, the sender acts. When the agent makes a deal, the deal is binding on the sender.

This is not a metaphor. It is a legal institution, widely attested in Jewish literature, with precise rules and boundaries. The agent can do only what the sender authorised. The agent does not become the sender. But within the scope of the mission, there is no functional difference between dealing with the agent and dealing with the sender directly.

Where does it come from?

The foundational principle appears in the Mishnah, the earliest major compilation of Jewish oral law (codified around AD 200 but reflecting much older traditions):

"A man's agent is as himself."

— Mishnah Berakhot 5:5

But the concept is far older than the Mishnah. It runs through the entire Hebrew Bible, shaping how Israel understood God's relationship with the figures who spoke and acted on his behalf. Three examples stand out.

First, Moses. God tells Moses directly: "I have made you God to Pharaoh" (Exodus 7:1). Moses does not become YHWH. But in his role as God's agent to Pharaoh, he carries divine authority and speaks divine words. The title "God" is applied to the agent because of the mission, not because of ontology.

Second, the Angel of YHWH. This figure appears throughout Genesis, Exodus, and Judges with a remarkable pattern: the angel is "sent by" YHWH, yet speaks as YHWH in the first person, and is sometimes called YHWH by the narrator. In Genesis 16:7-13, the angel speaks to Hagar, and she calls the one who spoke to her "YHWH." In Exodus 3:2-6, the angel appears in the burning bush, yet it is God who speaks from the bush. The angel is not YHWH. The angel is sent by YHWH. But the angel speaks as YHWH because that is what agents do — they carry the sender's identity within the scope of the mission.

Third, the judges of Israel. In Psalm 82, God stands in the divine assembly and addresses the judges as elohim — "gods." These are human beings exercising judicial authority on God's behalf. They bear the title because they carry God's delegated authority, not because they are divine beings.

Seeing the principle before the theology

Agency is easiest to see in a passage where nothing theological is at stake. Matthew and Luke both record the healing of the centurion's servant, and they tell it differently.

In Matthew, the centurion comes to Jesus himself and speaks in the first person throughout: "Lord, my servant is lying paralysed at home… I am not worthy to have you come under my roof… I too am a man under authority" (Matt 8:5–9). Jesus answers him directly.

In Luke, the centurion never appears. He "sent elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and heal his slave"; the elders make the request; Jesus goes with them; and before he arrives the centurion "sent friends" to say "I did not presume to come to you" (Luke 7:1–8). Two sets of intermediaries, and the principal stays at home.

Read as modern reportage, these accounts contradict each other. Read as Hebrew narrative, they do not: what the agent says, the principal has said. Matthew names only the principal; Luke names both. Neither evangelist thought he was being imprecise, because within the convention neither was. The same pattern appears again with the request of the sons of Zebedee, made by their mother in Matthew 20:20–21 and by the sons themselves in Mark 10:35–37.

This matters methodologically. Before agency is invoked to explain anything about Jesus, it can be shown operating in the Gospels' own narrative technique, in a story about a Roman officer and a sick slave. Whatever else is disputed, the convention is not in doubt.

How does it appear in the New Testament?

Jesus states the principle himself, and does so at volume. In the last week of his life, John records that "Jesus cried out and said, 'Whoever believes in me does not believe in me but in him who sent me; and whoever sees me sees him who sent me'" (John 12:44–45). The sentence is close to paradoxical on any reading that collapses agent into principal — belief in Jesus is explicitly redirected past Jesus to the one who sent him — and it is exactly what the agency convention would produce.

The language of sending saturates the Gospel of John. Jesus describes himself as "sent" — using both apostellō and pempō (Greek, "to send") — over forty times. This is not casual language. It is the technical vocabulary of agency. Jesus is the shaliach of God.

The agency logic is explicit. Jesus states the principle directly:

"Whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me."

— John 13:20

This is a chain of agency. The Father sends Jesus. Jesus sends the disciples. To receive the disciple is to receive Jesus. To receive Jesus is to receive the Father. The logic is identical at every level — and no one argues that the disciples are ontologically identical to Jesus.

The same framework illuminates one of the most striking statements in John:

"Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."

— John 14:9

Read through the lens of agency, this is not a statement of identity — "I am the Father" — but a statement of faithful representation: "I so perfectly represent the Father that to see me at work is to see the Father at work." Jesus himself clarifies the distinction moments later: "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28).

The sending language extends further. In John 20:21, the risen Jesus tells his disciples: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." The same verb. The same structure. The disciples become agents of Jesus as Jesus is the agent of the Father. If "sent" implies ontological equality with the sender, then the disciples are ontologically equal to Jesus — a conclusion no tradition accepts.

Jesus also invokes Psalm 82 directly in John 10:34-36. When accused of making himself God, he responds: "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came — and Scripture cannot be broken — do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" His defence rests precisely on the agency precedent: if human judges could be called elohim, how much more can God's supremely authorised agent bear exalted titles?

Do the miracles settle it?

A related argument runs through the miracles: Jesus stills a storm, raises the dead, heals at a distance, feeds thousands, and knows what is in people's hearts. Only God does such things; therefore Jesus is God.

The difficulty is that the Hebrew Bible attributes almost the entire list to prophets. Elisha raises a dead child (2 Kgs 4:32–35), multiplies food for a hundred men (2 Kgs 4:42–44), heals a leper at a distance by a word relayed through a servant (2 Kgs 5:10–14), knows the private counsels of a foreign king (2 Kgs 6:12), and parts a river (2 Kgs 2:14). Nobody has ever concluded that Elisha was divine.

The stilling of the storm is often held back as the exception, since the Psalms make control of the sea a divine prerogative. But the same Psalter has God say of the Davidic king: "I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers. He shall cry to me, 'You are my Father, my God, and the rock of my salvation.' And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth" (Ps 89:25–27). Authority over the sea is there conferred on a human king who calls God his Father — the exact configuration the agency framework describes.

The New Testament's own accounting of the miracles points the same way. Peter's Pentecost sermon calls Jesus "a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him" (Acts 2:22). And the same book uses the same vocabulary of the apostles: "many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles" (Acts 2:43), "God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul" (Acts 19:11). When John the Baptist sends to ask whether Jesus is the coming one, Jesus answers with a list of miracles — and the list is a quotation of Isaiah 35:5–6 about the messianic age, offered as evidence of office, not of nature (Matt 11:4–5).

The Trinitarian reply is that the comparison misses a difference in mode. Elisha prays and God acts; Jesus commands and it is done. He forgives sins on his own word, tells the sea "Peace, be still," and says "I will; be clean." The prophets are conduits; Jesus acts as principal. That is a genuine distinction in the narrative texture, and it is where the argument should be joined — not on whether miracles as such prove deity, since Scripture's own answer to that is plainly no.

Shared titles and shared functions

One of the most frequently used arguments for the deity of Christ is that titles and functions reserved for YHWH in the Old Testament are applied to Jesus in the New. God alone is Saviour (Isa 43:11) — and Jesus is Saviour. God is the shepherd of Israel (Ezek 34:11–12) — and Jesus is the good shepherd. God is judge of all the earth (Gen 18:25) — and all will stand before Christ's judgement seat.

The agency reply is not to deny the pattern but to observe that it is not unique to Jesus. The Hebrew Bible already transfers these titles to human beings whom God commissions, and does so without any suggestion of divinity:

• Saviour. "The LORD raised up a deliverer (mōshiaʿ, LXX sōtēra) for the Israelites, who saved them" — of Othniel and Ehud (Judg 3:9, 15). Nehemiah's prayer says God "gave them saviours who saved them from the hand of their enemies" (Neh 9:27). Stephen calls Moses "both ruler and redeemer" (lytrōtēn), sent by God (Acts 7:35).
• Shepherd. God is Israel's shepherd, and God appoints David as shepherd over his people (Ezek 34:23) in the same oracle.
• Judge. Paul says God "will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, having given assurance by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:31) — the judgement is God's, executed through his appointed man.
• God's own hand. When Aaron stretches out his staff over the Nile, God says "I will strike the water… with the staff that is in my hand" (Exod 7:17–20). The agent's hand is described as the principal's.

The Biblical Unitarian conclusion is that the inference "performs God's functions, therefore is God" fails as a general rule, because Scripture itself applies these functions to commissioned agents. The English translations partly obscure this: mōshiaʿ is usually rendered "deliverer" when used of a judge and "Saviour" when used of God, which conceals that it is the same word.

Trinitarian scholars answer that the argument was never a bare syllogism about individual titles, and that stating it that way is a straw man. The claim is cumulative and concerns a specific class of texts: not that Jesus is called "saviour," but that passages describing YHWH's incommunicable prerogatives — the exclusive worship of Isaiah 45:23, the divine name of Joel 2:32, the creation of all things — are applied to Jesus. No judge of Israel receives the worship of Philippians 2. Richard Bauckham's argument in God Crucified turns precisely on this distinction between functions God delegates and identity-markers he does not.

That is a real narrowing of the claim, and it is where the argument should be joined — text by text, over which prerogatives are genuinely incommunicable. What it concedes is that the broad version of the argument, the one most often encountered in popular apologetics, does not survive contact with the Hebrew Bible's own usage.

Why does it matter for the debate?

Agency is the hinge concept in the Christological debate because it offers a coherent explanation for the "high" language applied to Jesus in the New Testament — without requiring the conclusion that Jesus is ontologically God.

If the Angel of YHWH can be called YHWH without being YHWH, then Jesus can be called "Lord" — and even "God" (as in John 20:28, Thomas's exclamation "My Lord and my God!") — within the same Jewish framework. The title describes the agent's role and authority, not his metaphysical nature.

The question, then, is whether the New Testament stays within this framework or breaks out of it — whether Jesus is an agent (however supreme) or something the category of agency cannot contain.

What do the different traditions say?

Trinitarian: Agency is real and genuinely present in the New Testament, but it is insufficient to account for the full range of data. Jesus does things no previous agent ever did. He receives proskyneō — bowing, honour, reverence — in contexts that go beyond what any previous agent received (Revelation 5). He is identified as the creator of all things (Colossians 1:16, John 1:3). He forgives sins on his own authority (Mark 2:5-7). He shares the divine throne (Revelation 22:1,3). The category of agent breaks at these points. The early Christians were not simply extending the shaliach model — they were including Jesus within the identity of the one God of Israel. Scholars like Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado have argued that the "Christ-devotion" of the earliest church goes beyond anything precedented in Jewish agency.

Biblical Unitarian: Agency is the primary interpretive framework, and it explains all of the so-called "high" language without remainder. Each of the Trinitarian claims can be addressed directly. (1) Proskyneō: Jesus receives bowing and reverence, but so do kings and prophets throughout Scripture. In 1 Chronicles 29:20, the assembly bows (proskyneō in the LXX) to YHWH and to King David simultaneously — yet no one concludes David is God. In Daniel 2:46, Nebuchadnezzar falls prostrate before Daniel and even commands offerings be made to him, recognising that God's power works through his agent. The sons of the prophets bow before Elisha (2 Kings 2:15). The word covers a wide spectrum. (2) Creator of all things: the preposition dia ("through") marks Jesus as the agent, not the source; God remains the one "from whom" (ek) all things come (1 Corinthians 8:6). Philo uses the identical prepositional framework for the Logos as God's instrument in creation. (3) Forgives sins: Jesus forgives as God's authorised agent, not on independent authority. The paralytic is healed "so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" (Mark 2:10) — this is delegated authority, granted precisely so that people will know it has been delegated. (4) Shares the divine throne: Revelation 3:21 explicitly explains how Jesus came to sit on the throne — "as I also overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne." He sits there because of his faithfulness, not because of eternal co-equality. The throne is his Father's; he is invited to share it. Scholars like Anthony Buzzard and James McGrath argue that every "high" text falls naturally within the agency model when the Jewish background is properly understood. Dale Tuggy's entry on the Trinity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reinforces this by demonstrating that "God" and "the Father" co-refer throughout the New Testament — if God simply is the Father, then Jesus bearing God's name and authority is agency, not identity. The resources at BiblicalUnitarian.com, operated by Spirit & Truth Fellowship International and drawing on the work of John Schoenheit, Mark Graeser, and John Lynn (authors of One God & One Lord), treat agency as a foundational interpretive key across the New Testament.

Sean Finnegan (Restitutio, ep. 521) traces how the Jewish agency framework was lost as the church became predominantly Gentile. In Greco-Roman culture, "god" meant something very different than in Judaism — the cultural translation from Jewish agency to Gentile ontology drove the development of deity claims about Jesus. When Greek-speaking converts heard that Jesus bore the divine name, exercised divine authority, and received proskyneō, they lacked the shaliach framework that would have made sense of these claims without ontological identification. The shift from a Jewish to a Gentile majority church was not merely demographic — it was hermeneutical.

Logos Christology: The Logos is the supreme agent — genuinely divine, but divine by derivation from the Father, not by co-equal self-existence. The Logos is the one through whom God creates, reveals, and redeems — a real divine being, not merely a human agent, but still distinct from and subordinate to the Father. This view draws on Philo of Alexandria's concept of the Logos as God's principal agent and on Justin Martyr's "second God" theology. The Logos is more than a shaliach but less than the later Nicene formulation.

Modalism: The agency model is partly right — Jesus does indeed represent God fully and bear God's name and authority. But this is not because Jesus is a separate agent sent by God. It is because Jesus literally is God in the flesh. The distinction between "sender" and "sent one" dissolves when the agent is the same God manifesting in human form. When Jesus says "whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), he means it without remainder — not that he perfectly represents a separate divine person, but that the Father himself is present in this human body. The shaliach framework assumes two parties; Modalism insists there is only one God who has entered human existence directly. Colossians 2:9 — "in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" — is not agency language. It is identity language. David K. Bernard (The Oneness of God) argues that the agency model, while capturing something real about Jesus's mission, ultimately understates the case: Jesus is not God's representative but God himself, operating in the mode of incarnation. Tertullian's Against Praxeas preserves the original Modalist argument: Praxeas taught that the Father himself suffered on the cross (patripassianism), because there is no second person to suffer in his place.

Go Deeper

The following works explore Jewish agency and its implications for New Testament Christology in rigorous detail:

• Peder Borgen, God's Agent in the Fourth Gospel
• Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism
• Anthony Harvey, Christ as Agent
• James McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context
• Dale Tuggy, "Trinity" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Dale Tuggy, What is the Trinity? (2017)
• Sean Finnegan, Restitutio, ep. 521: "The Deity of Christ from a Greco-Roman Perspective"
• BiblicalUnitarian.com — comprehensive encyclopaedia of unitarian exegesis

See how agency shapes the interpretation of specific texts:

• John 20:28 — Thomas's "My Lord and my God"
• Acts 2:22 — "A man attested to you by God"
• 1 Corinthians 8:6 — One God, one Lord
• John 14:28 — "The Father is greater than I"