God and Glory and Paul, Again: Divine Identity and Community Formation in the Early Jesus Movement

This essay, which revisits the theme of the author’s monograph Paul’s Glory Christology, examines Paul’s characterization of Jesus as the glory of God. It is argued that this motif was one of the ways in which Paul and his churches were in the process of becoming self-consciously Christian, a faith community distinct from pagans on the one hand and Jews on the other. If the Septuagint translators’ choice of Greek doxa to translate Hebrew kavod was “staying Jewish” while “going Greek,” then Paul’s choice to identify the risen Jesus as the glory of Israel’s god was “becoming Christian” by “transgressing monotheism.”