Second Temple Monotheism: What It Permitted

What is this concept?

Every argument on this site eventually runs into the same question. The New Testament writers were Jews, writing within a few decades of the crucifixion, in a religious culture defined by the confession that YHWH alone is God. So what could a person in that culture say about a figure alongside God without ceasing, in their own eyes and their neighbours', to be a monotheist?

This matters because both sides of the Christological debate make claims about it, often without evidence. One side says: no Jew could have called a man "God" or given him divine worship, so the New Testament's high language must mean something other than what it appears to. The other says: no Jew could have called a man "God" or given him divine worship, so the fact that the earliest Christians did means they had concluded something extraordinary about Jesus.

Notice that these are the same premise with opposite conclusions. Both depend on a claim about what Second Temple Judaism permitted — and that claim is testable, because a substantial body of Jewish literature from the period survives.

What the sources actually contain

The literature of the period — roughly the third century BC to the second century AD — is populated with figures who occupy remarkable positions in relation to God. Four categories are relevant.

Principal angels who bear the divine name. The Hebrew Bible already has an angel of whom God says "my name is in him" (Exod 23:21). The Apocalypse of Abraham (late first or early second century AD) develops this into a named figure, Yahoel — a name compounded from the divine name itself — who is described as the one in whom God's ineffable name dwells, and who leads the worship of heaven. Michael appears in Daniel and at Qumran as "the great prince." The Qumran text 11QMelchizedek presents Melchizedek as a heavenly deliverer who executes God's judgement and to whom elohim texts are applied.

Personified divine attributes. Wisdom is with God at creation, is his "master workman," and speaks in the first person (Prov 8:22–31); in Sirach 24 she comes forth from the mouth of the Most High and pitches her tent in Israel; in Wisdom of Solomon she is "a breath of the power of God" and "a spotless mirror of the working of God." Philo of Alexandria calls the Logos God's "firstborn," the "second God" (deuteros theos), and the instrument through whom the world was made. The Aramaic Targums use Memra ("Word") where the Hebrew has God acting directly.

Exalted human beings. This is the category most readers find surprising. In the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian (second century BC), Moses dreams of a great throne on Sinai reaching to heaven; the noble figure seated on it rises, hands Moses the sceptre and crown, and bids him sit on the throne — whereupon the stars bow before him. Enoch is translated and, in the Similitudes of 1 Enoch, the Son of Man figure is seated on the throne of glory and receives obeisance. Later still, though well outside our period, 3 Enoch has Metatron enthroned and called "the lesser YHWH" — a text usually dated to the fifth or sixth century AD, which is why it cannot bear weight for the first, though it shows where the trajectory ended.

Enthronement in the Hebrew Bible itself. Solomon "sat on the throne of YHWH as king in place of David his father" (1 Chr 29:23). Israel's judges are addressed by God as elohim (Ps 82:6). Moses is made "God to Pharaoh" (Exod 7:1). And Psalm 110:1 seats a figure at YHWH's right hand.

"Two powers in heaven"

The decisive scholarly contribution is Alan Segal's Two Powers in Heaven (Brill, 1977), which examined the rabbinic polemic against a heresy the rabbis called "two powers in heaven." Segal's finding was that the rabbis were arguing against a real and once-tolerated position — that alongside God there is a second figure who shares his throne and name — and that the polemic hardened only in the second century AD and after. That is to say: the boundary the rabbis later enforced was not obviously in place in the first century.

Daniel Boyarin has pressed this further, arguing that what became "Christianity" and what became "Judaism" were not two religions in the first century but overlapping options within one, and that a form of binitarianism — God and his Word — was a Jewish possibility before it was a Christian one. On his account, the rabbis' "two powers" heresy and the church's Logos theology are two outcomes of a single earlier Jewish debate.

This has an implication worth stating plainly, because it is uncomfortable for both sides. It means the flat assertion "no first-century Jew could have thought that" is not available — about a second figure sharing God's throne, bearing God's name, or receiving obeisance. Some evidently did. But it equally means that the existence of such a figure does not by itself establish co-equality or consubstantiality, because none of the Jewish sources says anything of the kind.

Where was the line?

If the category of exalted mediator was available, the question becomes what — if anything — was not available. Three answers dominate the field.

Richard Bauckham: the line was drawn at divine identity, not at mediation. Bauckham argues that Second Temple Judaism was quite relaxed about intermediary figures but absolutely firm about two things that marked out who YHWH is: he alone created all things, and he alone rules all things. Angels and exalted humans are on the creature side of that line and never cross it. His claim is then that the New Testament places Jesus on the God side — as agent of creation and sharer of the eternal throne — which is a different move from exalting a mediator, and one for which he finds no Jewish precedent.

Larry Hurtado: the line was drawn at worship. Hurtado's emphasis falls on cultic practice rather than conceptual categories. Jews could speculate freely about heavenly figures; what they did not do was worship them. Angels in this literature characteristically refuse worship — a motif that appears twice in Revelation itself (Rev 19:10; 22:8–9). Hurtado's argument is that the earliest Christians did include Jesus in their devotional practice, very early and among Jews, and that this constitutes a genuine mutation.

James McGrath and others: the line was more permeable than either allows. McGrath argues in The Only True God that the boundary was drawn around sacrifice specifically rather than around honour or reverence broadly, that Jewish sources do show mediator figures receiving obeisance, and that the New Testament's language about Jesus consistently keeps him on the agent side — honoured because God appointed him, with the glory terminating in the Father.

Why does it matter for the debate?

Because it changes what counts as evidence. If the Second Temple context contained no category for an exalted figure alongside God, then every high statement about Jesus is startling and requires a startling explanation. If it contained such categories in abundance, then high statements about Jesus are evidence that he was placed in one of those categories — and the argument has to move to which category, and whether the New Testament's language exceeds all of them.

This is also where the strongest and weakest arguments on both sides live. The weakest are the flat assertions: "no monotheist could say that" and "any Jew would have understood that as blasphemy." The sources do not support either as a blanket claim. The strongest are the careful ones — Bauckham on creation and rule, Hurtado on cultic devotion, McGrath on sacrifice — which are arguments about a specific boundary, made from specific evidence, and can be tested.

One consequence deserves particular notice. Because the Jewish categories were real, a first-century writer could say something very high about Jesus without meaning what a fourth-century writer would mean by the same words. That is not a Unitarian conclusion — it cuts against loose Unitarian readings too — but it is a caution about reading later precision back into earlier language. See Anachronistic Reading.

What do the different traditions say?

Trinitarian: The Second Temple background makes the New Testament's claims about Jesus more remarkable, not less. Bauckham's argument is that Jewish monotheism was defined not by a list of attributes but by the identity of the one who created and rules all things — and that the New Testament writers deliberately place Jesus within that identity, applying to him the creation texts and the throne of God. No Jewish source does this for Michael, Yahoel, Wisdom or Moses. Hurtado adds that the devotional practice appeared within a few years, among Jews, without any recorded controversy about its propriety — which is very hard to explain unless the first Christians believed something had changed. Michael L. Brown's work on the theophanies argues that the Hebrew Bible itself already shows God appearing in human form (see Theophanies), so the incarnation is not foreign to the categories.

Biblical Unitarian: The evidence shows precisely the framework needed to read the New Testament's high language without ontological identification. Agency, exalted mediation, name-bearing and throne-sharing were all available, all Jewish, and all applied to figures nobody regarded as God (see Jewish Agency). Solomon sits on YHWH's throne; Moses is enthroned in the Exagoge and receives the stars' obeisance; Yahoel bears the divine name. When the New Testament seats Jesus at God's right hand and gives him the name above every name, it is speaking a language that already existed. On Bauckham, Dale Tuggy's response is that "inclusion in the divine identity" is either numerical identity — which Bauckham denies, since he does not say the Son is the Father — or something weaker, in which case it is a new label rather than an argument. And the New Testament itself keeps the asymmetry: the glory terminates in the Father (Phil 2:11), and the Son finally hands back the kingdom (1 Cor 15:28).

Logos Christology: This is the position the evidence fits most directly, and it is the one that requires the least adjustment. Philo's deuteros theos, the Targums' Memra, and Wisdom's role at creation describe a genuinely divine mediating figure who is neither the Father nor a creature. Boyarin's argument that binitarianism was a Jewish option before it was a Christian one is, on this reading, exactly what one would expect: the earliest Christians did not invent a category, they identified Jesus with one that was already there. Segal's "two powers" is the same phenomenon seen from the other side, after the rabbis closed the door on it.

Modalism: Oneness readers are the least served by this material, and generally say so. If the Second Temple background supplies a second figure alongside God, that is a problem for strict Oneness theology rather than a resource, since it suggests a genuine duality in the heavenly world. The Oneness response is to read the mediator traditions as manifestations of the one God rather than as distinct beings — the Angel who bears the name is God appearing, the Memra is God speaking — and to treat the rabbinic condemnation of "two powers" as sound instinct wrongly applied to Jesus.

Go Deeper

• Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Brill, 1977) — the foundational study
• Richard Bauckham, God Crucified (1998) and Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008) — the divine-identity argument
• Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord (1988) and Lord Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2003) — the cultic-devotion argument
• James McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
• Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Penn, 2004), and "The Gospel of the Memra," Harvard Theological Review 94 (2001)
• Andrei Orlov, on Yahoel and the divine name traditions — papers at Marquette
• Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 2: Theological Objections (Baker, 2000)
• Dale Tuggy, "On Bauckham's Bargain," Theology Today 70:2 (2013)
• Primary texts: 1 Enoch 37–71 (the Similitudes); Apocalypse of Abraham 10–11; Ezekiel the Tragedian, Exagoge 68–89; 11QMelchizedek; Philo, Questions on Genesis 2.62 and On the Confusion of Tongues 146

See also The Shema & Jewish Monotheism, Jewish Agency, Theophanies, and Worship and Proskyneō.