Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice

Before the New Testament or the creeds of the church were written—the devotional practices of the earliest Christians show that they worshipped Jesus alongside the Father. Larry W. Hurtado has been one of the leading scholars on early Christology for decades. In Honoring the Son, Hurtado helps readers understand Christology by examining not just what early Christians believed or wrote about Jesus, but what their devotional practices tell us about the place of Jesus in early Christian worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Christian origins and scholarship on New Testament Christology, Hurtado examines the distinctiveness of early Christian worship by comparing it to both Jewish worship patterns and worship practices within the broader Roman-era religious environment. He argues that the inclusion of the risen Jesus alongside the Father in early Christian devotional practices was a distinct and unique religious phenomenon within its ancient context. Additionally, Hurtado demonstrates that this remarkable development was not invented decades after the resurrection of Christ as some scholars once claimed. Instead, the New Testament suggests that Jesus-followers, very quickly after the resurrection of Christ, began to worship the Son alongside the Father. Honoring the Son offers a look into the worship habits of the earliest Christians to understand the place of Jesus in Christian devotion.

Publisher: Lexham Press
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9781683590965

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Larry W. Hurtado is Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is the author of many books and articles, notably Destroyer of the Gods and Lord Jesus Christ.

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‘When I was taking a course on the history of New Testament interpretation in 1990, we read Wilhelm Bousset's book on the emergence of the worship of Jesus as Deity as the landmark work. In the same course today, we would be reading Bousset alongside Larry Hurtado, often in point-counterpoint fashion. Hurtado's work on this key issue—how Jesus came to be recognized as divine—is of central importance not only to students of early Christianity but indeed to all who worship Jesus, and it is with great excitement that I hold in my hand so accessible a summary of his decades of sifting through the evidence, a book I can recommend not only to my seminary students but to everyone in my congregation who ever asks the question.’ David A. deSilva, Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek, Ashland Theological Seminary