Witherington on Jesus as Wisdom

On page 204 of Jesus the Sage, Ben Witherington III states:

“What is especially daring about the idea of Jesus taking the personification of Wisdom and suggesting that he is the living embodiment of it, is that while a prophet might be seen as a mashal or prophetic sign, no one, so far as one can tell, up to that point in early Judaism had dared to [suggest] that he was a human embodiment of an attribute of God—-God’s Wisdom.  Indeed, as M. Hengel has remarked to me, no known person in early Judaism other than Jesus between the time of Alexander and Bar Kokhba was identified with the personification of Wisdom.  Some explanation for this remarkable and anomalous development must be given, and the best, though by no means the only, explanation of this fact is that Jesus presented himself as both sage and the message of the sage—-God’s Wisdom.”

According to Witherington, there are parts of the Q source in which Jesus identifies himself with wisdom, as when Jesus affirms that he is greater than Solomon, to whom a lot of wisdom literature was attributed.  Witherington believes that the association of Jesus with wisdom (which is different from simply saying that Jesus said wise things) could very well go back to Jesus himself, for others in early Judaism did not identify themselves with wisdom, and Q had to get from somewhere the idea that Jesus was that particular attribute of God.  I wonder why one couldn’t just say that Q decided to associate Jesus with wisdom.  The question would then be why it chose to do so.  What was it about Jesus that led some people to conclude that he was more than a mere holy man, but was actually wisdom itself, or even a divine sort of being?  And, if Jesus claimed that he himself was wisdom, what are the implications of that?  Are we placed in a variant of C.S. Lewis’ trilemma: that Jesus is who he says he is, or he is insane, or devilish?  Not many sane people, period, make the grandiose claim that they are the actual embodiment of wisdom, and such a claim would probably have been even more revolutionary or extraordinary in first century Judaism.

In his chapter on the hymns about Christ that are in certain New Testament books and epistles, Witherington says that wisdom helped people who were seeking a way to conceptualize Jesus without violating monotheism.  In wisdom literature, wisdom was a hypostasis or attribute of God, and hymns about Christ try to conceptualize Jesus’ pre-existent state in terms of that.  At the same time, Witherington argues that the hymns do not necessarily adopt the whole ideology of wisdom literature, for wisdom literature tended to regard wisdom as created, whereas Witherington appears to believe that the pre-existent Son was begotten, not made.  Consequently, Witherington interprets the statement in Colossians 1:15 that the Son is the firstborn of creation to mean, not that the Son was the first to be created, but rather that the Son is pre-eminent over creation.  Similarly, when God in Psalm 89:27 promises to make the king his firstborn, he’s referring to the king’s pre-eminence, not his origin before all things.

Where’d the Stoics Go?

Source: David Sedley, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 12.

“The pattern of post-classical survival largely represents the intellectual fashions that already prevailed in later antiquity, fashions which led to widespread circulation and study of both Plato and Aristotle, along with their most recent interpreters, while for example the writings of the early Stoics, just as easily reconcilable with Christianity, had largely vanished from view.”

But weren’t the later Stoics also reconcilable with Christianity? In Stoic Religion, I noted similarities between Stoicism and Colossians. Why weren’t they used? And why were Plato and Aristotle preserved, while the early Stoics were not?

Stoic Religion

Source: Glenn W. Most, “Philosophy and Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 315.

“The Stoics define god as ‘intelligent, a designing fire which methodically proceeds towards creation of the world’, but, differently from Plato, they stress that divinity does not transcend a world it creates once and for all, but instead is imminent from beginning to end as a self-fulfilling, self-directed teleological principle within this world, for it provides both a systematic orderliness as its structure and a meaningful life-history in the form of its providential evolution over time (hence the Stoics can equate god with nature, or with fate). Applied to the individual, the recognition that one is inevitably part of this divine structure and evolution must lead to the decision to live in accordance with it; thus ethics too attains its fulfillment as piety. This is a very ambitious and rather abstract view of god; but the Stoics’ firm conviction that all elements within the universe, however trivial or repugnant they might seem to uninformed eyes, must be capable of being recognized to embody at least partially the consummate rationality which governs the whole, leads them to insist upon salvaging what they can of traditional Greek religiosity rather than discarding it wholesale: they devote an extraordinary effort of highly sophisticated allegorical interpretation to the ancient myths and the established cults so as to demonstrate that, rightly understood, they are identical with their own doctrines.”

This quote is good because it summarizes Stoicism, which has been a continual topic in my classes on Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. It reminds me somewhat of Colossians, which contends that following Jesus is abiding by the order of the universe, since Jesus is the creator and fills all things. But I wonder why Christians suffer if they are truly living according to the order of the universe. Can “there’s an overarching plan” account for all the pain Christians experience? Maybe, in the sense that it builds character, but do Stoics believe in an afterlife where people get a reward for being righteous in the midst of adversity?

Another question about Stoicism: my impression from my studies is that the Stoics were rather ascetic. They believed in pursuing virtue, not really the other enjoyable things of life. But Stoics aren’t exactly Gnostics or Neo-Platonists, who are hostile to all things material. Rather, they praise the order of the universe as if it’s divine. So why were they opposed to enjoying the pleasures of life?