Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context

Download or read book Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context written by D. Clint Burnett and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the dearth of non-messianic interpretations of Psalm 110:1 in non-Christian Second Temple Jewish texts, why did it become such a widely used messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on why the earliest Christians first began to use Ps 110:1. The result is that these proposals do not provide an adequate explanation for why first century Christians living in the Greek East employed the verse and also applied it to Jesus’s exaltation. I contend that two Greco-Roman politico-religious practices, royal and imperial temple and throne sharing—which were cross-cultural rewards that Greco-Roman communities bestowed on beneficent, pious, and divinely approved rulers—contributed to the widespread use of Ps 110:1 in earliest Christianity. This means that the earliest Christians interpreted Jesus’s heavenly session as messianic and thus political, as well as religious, in nature.