Wilfred L. Knox

The “Divine Hero” Christology in the New Testament

[I am deeply indebted to Professor A. D. Nock for his kindness in reading this paper in its first draft and for his invaluable criticisms and suggestions.] In the Christology of the New Testament we are faced with two distinct methods of expressing the belief of the Church as to the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Of the belief that He was merely a great human teacher we find no trace; the Church would never have come into being, if it had not believed that He had risen from the dead. As we all know, the Christology that prevailed was that which saw in Him the Incarnation of the divine Word or Wisdom, which was at once the divine and living pattern of the cosmos, the agent by which the cosmos was created, and the divine mind immanent in the cosmos and more particularly in the mind of man. It was inevitable that this cosmogony should triumph in the end, since it was the only one which could, with whatever difficulty, be formally reconciled with Jewish monotheism; moreover it transferred the Lord from the realm of eschatology, which meant nothing to the Greek convert, into the sphere of cosmogony which was one of the central problems of the semi-Gnostic philosophy and theology of the hellenistic age, as we meet it in the Corpus Hermeticum.

Jewish Liturgical Exorcism

Professor C. H. Dodd in The Apostolic Preaching and its Development has drawn attention to the importance of the “Kerygma” as a more or less formal statement of the Christian Gospel, lying behind the earliest Christian documents; it determines the structure of Mark, the speeches in Acts and the form of the Creeds. This conventional form seems to be derived from Judaism. A statement of the mighty works of God in creation and the history of mankind, more especially in the deliverance of his people from Egypt, is a recurring feature of Jewish literature in the post-exilic era; perhaps the most notable example is Ps. 136; cf. Nehemiah 9. 6 ff., Is. 63. 7 ff. Such a recital of the mighty works of God in delivering His people was obviously necessary if the religion of Israel was to be changed from a primitive Semitic tribal cult into a system of monotheism, centred on the national deity, identified with the one God of Heaven; it was specially necessary to find an aetiological myth for the principal festival of the Passover. The emphasis on this deliverance reflects the process by which vague legends of a migration from Egypt have been conflated with the return from Babylon to form the biblical picture of the Exodus.

The Ending of St. Mark's Gospel

In The Gospel according to St. Luke the late Professor Creed accepted the view of Welhausen and Meyer that the original version of Mark was intended to close with the words ἐϕοβοῦντο γάρ. The view avoids the difficulty of explaining the fact that neither Matthew nor Luke knows any other ending; it is certainly hard to see how a document could have gained so wide a circulation that the authors of these two Gospels knew it, and yet had at some previous date been so little known that the only surviving copy had lost its original ending.