When we arrived in Jerusalem, the brothers welcomed us warmly. 18 The next day Paul went with us to visit James; and all the elders were present. 19 After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. 20 When they heard it, they praised God. Then they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the law. 21 They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. 22 What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. 23 So do what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow. 24 Join these men, go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law. 25 But as for the Gentiles who have become believers, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled[e] and from fornication.” 26 Then Paul took the men, and the next day, having purified himself, he entered the temple with them, making public the completion of the days of purification when the sacrifice would be made for each of them. –Acts 21
Why is it that in the earliest Christian writings, no one refers to Jesus as Yahweh? Paul never refers to Jesus as Yahweh. Yes, Paul believed that the resurrected Jesus was divine in some sense; that he has the power to save your soul; and maybe that he is equal to God in some aspects; but Paul never tells his readers that the God of the Old Testament and Jesus of Nazareth are one and the same being. Why is that?
And the same is true in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus never claims to be Yahweh in the Synoptics. Yes, he infers in one passage that he has the power to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, but Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy have been pronouncing God’s forgiveness of sins on penitent sinners in the confessional for two thousand years! Should we assume these men are Yahweh??
But the clear and unequivocal evidence that the earliest Christians did not believe that Jesus was Yahweh comes from the Book of Acts. If the earliest Christians believed that Jesus was Yahweh, why on earth were they still worshipping and offering animal sacrifices in the Temple more than TWENTY years after Jesus’ death?
Jesus is not God, folks. Not even the “eyewitnesses” believed that he was God. Even though these followers of Jesus believed that he had appeared to them after his death, this did not convince them that Jesus was God. His resurrection only convinced them that he was the Messiah. If Jesus was Yahweh, devout Jews would have referred to him as such. They would not have referred to him as “the Christ”, which is simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew “messiah”.
Even if the Resurrection occurred, it is not evidence that Jesus is God. If the (alleged) Resurrection did not convince the earliest Christians that Jesus was God, why the hell should anyone today accept it as evidence that Jesus is God??
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Escaping Christian Fundamentalism 
Just an FYI, the excerpt you used is Acts 21, not 26. 26 is the final verse you referenced in Chapter 21.
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Fixed. Thanks!
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Have you ever asked Ehrman on his blog about-
“why on earth were they still worshipping and offering animal sacrifices in the Temple more than TWENTY years after Jesus’ death”?
If you haven’t I think I might.
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No, I haven’t. Let me know what he says.
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Wouldn’t that be because most of the Jewish people did NOT accept Yeshus as the long-awaited Messiah? Thus, the temple sacrifices would still be in effect.
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That is the clear indication to me.
Some apologists will say that God used progressive revelation to slowly reveal the full divinity of Jesus to early Christians.
That is nothing but ad hoc BS.
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I thought it was referring to Jews who had become Christians but were still following the law and sacrificing.
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I misunderstood Nan’s question. Yes, Acts 21 is referring to Christian Jews. These Jews, like all other Jews, did not believe that Jesus was Yahweh. However, unlike the overwhelming majority of Jews, they did believe that he was the messiah.
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I misunderstood your question, Nan.
The fact that temple sacrifices were still occurring twenty years plus after Jesus’ death is certainly a strong indication that most Jews did not see Jesus as the messiah. But the point of my post is: why were the few Jews who did believe that Jesus was the messiah still worshipping and offering animal sacrifices in the Temple if they believed that Jesus was not only the messiah, but God himself (Yahweh), as modern Christians assert? I believe that the clear indication is that they did NOT believe that Jesus was Yahweh.
The conservative Christian apologists’ claim that the earliest Christians had a very high christology from the very beginning is blown out of the water by Acts 21—although that of course does not stop them from providing some very interesting spin in an attempt to reconcile this passage with their beliefs.
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Ahhhh. I see your point. And I agree. The sacrifices were being made to Yahweh — and would be unnecessary if they believed Jesus and God were one and the same.
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Since Christians have never agreed on exactly what the atonement is or how it works, could an evangelical say the early Jewish Christians just had not yet understood that Jesus death negated the need for sacrifices and following the law, even if they had a high Christology?
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I guess That would raise the question of why then Jesus allowed himself to be killed, I suppose.
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The bigger question is: Why did none of them refer to Jesus as Yahweh if they had the highest christology?
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When you were a believer, how did you approach this issue?
Very interesting post by the way, Mister G. Something I have previously not considered.
I’ll be surprised if you get a straight answer from David Marshall though!
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Actually, I was not aware of this issue when I was still a believer. I probably would have eventually bought into the most common Christian harmonization (spin) for this passage: the disciples in Jerusalem were thick headed, uneducated dopes who could not completely detach themselves from their Jewish rituals. It took the educated, more “spirit-filled” Paul to break Christianity from those false practices.
One has to then ask: Couldn’t Jesus, the all-knowing Creator of the universe, have found and selected more intelligent disciples?
More than twenty years after his death, and his original disciples still did not realize that he was Yahweh!
Oy veh!
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It’s especially amazing when Acts, in the first chapter, tells us after his resurrection Jesus spent 40 days with the disciples teaching them, yet none of these major issues seems to have come up. Forty freakin days!! The entire plan could have been laid out, along with instructions about what to write in their gospels and letters about the answers to all the questions that were going to come up and split churches down through the millennia. But nope. Nothing. What did he teach them for the remaining 39.9 days after the couple things Acts records?
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According to the anonymous author of the Book of Acts, even after spending 40 days with the resurrected Jesus, the disciples were still expecting Jesus to overthrow the Romans and set up the New Israel. Jesus had 40 days to make this clear to them, yet they still did not get it?? Notice too in the following passage, how Jesus puts the time table of future events into the hands of “the Father”. Jesus was not the final authority on these issues. Does that sound like something Yahweh would say??
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. —Acts 1
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it’s unfathomable to me that a group of 12 guys could hang out together with Jesus for a couple years of his ministry and then another 40 days after and still seems so clueless about it everything. Even if there was one or two just so slow they couldn’t pick up on anything, what about the other 10 or nine or whatever?
The only sensible conclusion is that Jesus was not some great teacher like people love to claim, and probably really didn’t have much of a message outside the idea that the end is near, sprinkled with a few parables and sayings.
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The all-knowing Creator of the universe, Yahweh the Almighty, chose 12 special men to spread his message of eternal salvation to the entire world. Yet out of all the men in the world, he selected 12 morons who were as dense as fence posts.
Jesus was Yahweh the Creator? Yea, right…and I’ve got some land in the Everglades to sell you.
Jesus was not an all-knowing god. He was a delusional fool.
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In Romans 1: 1-4, Paul explains with typical theobabble that Jesus became elevated to sonship at his resurrection. He, Jesus, is less than this prior to the resurrection (there’s evidence Paul sees him as a highly placed angel; see Galatians 4:14 – Ehrman talks about this here: https://ehrmanblog.org/pauls-view-of-jesus-as-an-angel-for-members/ ) Paul also makes a clear distinction between The Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (in 1 Corinthians 8: 5-6 for example) demonstrating he did not regard the two as the same.
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If any first century Jew believed that Yahweh himself had come to earth in the flesh, this would have been a major BOMBSHELL to their reality. Yet, if this is what the Jewish disciples of Jesus and Paul believed about Jesus, not one of them ever explicitly commented on this fact nor referred to Jesus as Yahweh. Only when we get to the last gospel written, the Gospel of John, does anyone refer to Jesus as “God”.
This should be very, very troubling to Trinitarian Christians.
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Be honest …. back in the day, did it trouble you, Mister G?
Indoctrination dulls many of the senses, including common-sense.
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It did trouble me.
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And … what did your pastor, fellow Christians tell you?
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There is always a rationalization/harmonization for every alleged contradiction in the Bible. Jesus can’t be wrong.
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There are people like Norman Geisler who write many books explaining how the alleged contradictions are not contradictions at all. At the height of my Christian belief I would probably have been in full agreement with him, as an ex Christian, I would throw up in my mouth if I had to wade through his books. My criterion now for people like Geisler is would they accept those kind of explanations from a Mormon or a Muslim justifying contradictions in their own books- I doubt they would. In fact they would dismiss with the wave of the hand the obviously poor attempts by other religions- the way that Licona dismisses Muslims and Mormons and JWs on his site.
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