Pauline Christology

Pauline Christology refers to the understanding of Jesus Christ as expressed in the letters of the apostle Paul, the earliest surviving Christian documents. Written between approximately 50 and 60 CE — at least two decades before the first Gospel — Paul’s authentic epistles provide the oldest textual evidence for how early Christians conceived of Jesus’s identity, status, and significance. Paul never knew the earthly Jesus, yet his letters contain some of the most exalted claims about Christ found anywhere in the New Testament, including assertions of pre-existence, participation in creation, equality with God, and cosmic lordship. How these claims relate to Jewish monotheism, to the historical Jesus, and to the later Christological formulations of the church councils remains one of the central questions in New Testament scholarship.^{1, 3}

The significance of Pauline Christology extends far beyond the study of Paul himself. Because his letters predate the Gospels, they offer a window into Christological convictions that were already circulating within one or two decades of the crucifixion. Whether those convictions represent a dramatic innovation, a natural development from Jesus’s own claims, or a synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic ideas has been debated since the nineteenth century and continues to shape how scholars reconstruct the origins of Christianity.^{4, 16}

The pre-existence hymns

Two passages in the Pauline corpus are widely regarded as early Christological hymns or poems that Paul either composed or, more likely, inherited from pre-Pauline Christian worship: Philippians 2:6–11 (the so-called Carmen Christi) and Colossians 1:15–20. Both texts present Christ as a figure who existed before his earthly life and who holds a unique relationship to God and creation. Their hymnic structure, elevated vocabulary, and apparent independence from their surrounding epistolary contexts have led most scholars to conclude that they circulated as liturgical compositions before Paul incorporated them into his letters.^{13, 12}

The Philippians hymn describes Christ Jesus as one who, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6–7, NRSV). The hymn then narrates a downward arc of self-emptying (kenosis) culminating in death on a cross, followed by an upward arc of exaltation in which God bestows on Christ “the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11, NRSV). The closing lines deliberately echo Isaiah 45:23, a passage in which YHWH declares that every knee will bow to him alone — a striking application of a monotheistic text to Jesus. Ralph Martin’s landmark study Carmen Christi (1967, revised 1983) argued that the hymn reflects a pre-Pauline Christology already remarkably exalted, while Gordon Fee contended that Paul himself understood the passage as affirming Christ’s full divinity.^{13, 12, 7}

The Colossians hymn declares that Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created” and that “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:15–16, 19, NRSV). The language of “image” (eikōn) and “firstborn” (prōtotokos) draws on Jewish Wisdom traditions, particularly the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22–31 and Wisdom of Solomon 7:25–26, where Wisdom is described as present at creation and as a reflection of God’s glory. Whether Colossians is authentically Pauline is disputed — many scholars assign it to a later Pauline disciple — but the hymn itself may well predate the letter and reflect early convictions shared with Paul’s own circle.^{3, 8}

The critical question raised by both hymns is whether they assert genuine ontological pre-existence — the claim that Christ was a divine being who literally existed before his human birth — or whether they employ poetic and metaphorical language drawn from Jewish Wisdom speculation without intending to make a metaphysical claim. James Dunn argued influentially that the Philippians hymn describes an “Adam Christology” in which Christ is contrasted with Adam rather than identified as a pre-existent divine being, and that the Wisdom language in Colossians is a way of saying that God’s purposes, now revealed in Christ, were present in creation from the beginning. Against this, Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham argued that the hymns place Christ within the identity of God in ways that go well beyond Wisdom personification and that the early Christians who sang them understood Christ as genuinely pre-existent.^{3, 1, 6}

Christ as kyrios

The title kyrios (“Lord”) is Paul’s most frequent Christological designation, appearing over 180 times in the Pauline corpus. Its significance is both social and theological. In the Greco-Roman world, kyrios was an honorific applied to rulers, patrons, and slave-owners; in the emperor cult, it was used of the Roman emperor as a divine figure. Paul’s insistence that “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3) therefore carried an implicitly counter-imperial charge. But the title’s deepest resonance is with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, where kyrios renders the divine name YHWH over six thousand times. When Paul applies Old Testament YHWH texts to Jesus — as he does in Philippians 2:10–11 (echoing Isaiah 45:23), Romans 10:13 (quoting Joel 2:32), and 1 Corinthians 1:31 (echoing Jeremiah 9:24) — he positions Jesus within the functional identity of Israel’s God.^{1, 7, 9}

Richard Bauckham argued that Paul’s kyrios Christology constitutes a “Christology of divine identity”: rather than placing Jesus on a spectrum between human and divine, Paul includes Jesus in the unique identity of YHWH by attributing to him the activities that define God as God — sovereignty over all things, the reception of universal worship, and the bearing of the divine name. This is particularly clear in 1 Corinthians 8:6, where Paul reworks the Jewish Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”) into a bipartite formula: “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Paul splits the Shema’s affirmation of divine unity between “God” (the Father) and “Lord” (Jesus Christ), distributing the creative and sustaining roles of YHWH across both persons while maintaining the monotheistic confession of “one.”^{6, 7, 10}

The Aramaic phrase marana tha (“Our Lord, come!”), preserved in its original language in 1 Corinthians 16:22, provides important evidence that the application of kyrios to Jesus was not Paul’s innovation but was already established in the Aramaic-speaking Palestinian church. Since this invocation was addressed to Jesus in a prayer context — a context Jews reserved for God alone — Hurtado and others have argued that the cultic veneration of Jesus as Lord must have begun within the earliest years of the movement, not as a later Hellenistic development as the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (History of Religions School) proposed in the early twentieth century.^{1, 2, 11}

The “last Adam” typology

Paul develops an extended typological contrast between Adam and Christ in Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20–49, designating Christ as the “last Adam” (eschatos Adam) or “second man” (deuteros anthrōpos). In this framework, Adam is the head of the old humanity, through whose transgression sin and death entered the world, while Christ is the head of a new humanity, through whose obedience and resurrection righteousness and life are made available. Paul writes: “For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19, NRSV). The parallelism is not symmetrical — Paul insists that the gift of grace far exceeds the trespass (Romans 5:15–17) — but the structural correspondence is central to his soteriology.^{8, 15}

In 1 Corinthians 15:45–49, Paul extends the typology into a contrast between two modes of existence: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.” The “first Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” This passage has been read in sharply different ways. Dunn argued that it reflects an Adam Christology in which Christ is understood primarily as the representative human being — the one who fulfills Adam’s intended destiny — rather than as a pre-existent divine figure who descended from heaven. On this reading, the “from heaven” language refers to Christ’s resurrection body and future coming, not to a prior heavenly existence. N. T. Wright similarly interpreted the Adam-Christ typology as Paul’s way of articulating what God has done in and through a human being, though Wright affirmed that Paul held a robust view of Christ’s pre-existence elsewhere. Against Dunn, Fee and Hurtado argued that the designation “from heaven” presupposes pre-existence and that Paul’s Adam Christology and his pre-existence Christology are complementary, not contradictory.^{3, 12, 9}

Paul’s understanding of the resurrection

The resurrection of Jesus is the non-negotiable foundation of Paul’s Christology. He states the point with characteristic directness: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14, NRSV). In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, Paul transmits what he explicitly identifies as received tradition (paradidomi): “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” The creedal formula is widely dated to within a few years of the crucifixion, making it the earliest known Christian statement of belief.^{14, 21}

For Paul, the resurrection is not simply a miraculous resuscitation but an eschatological event: it inaugurates the general resurrection of the dead, of which Christ is the “first fruits” (aparchē, 1 Corinthians 15:20). This agricultural metaphor implies that Christ’s resurrection is the initial harvest of a larger crop that will follow at his return (parousia). The resurrection also functions as the basis for Christ’s exaltation to lordship: it is through being raised that Jesus is “declared to be Son of God with power” (Romans 1:4). N. T. Wright’s extensive study The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) argued that Paul’s resurrection language is consistently bodily and transformative — not a metaphor for spiritual survival or subjective experience — and that this conviction is best explained by something having actually happened to Jesus’s body. Ehrman, by contrast, argued that the earliest Christians may have experienced visions of the risen Jesus that they interpreted as resurrection, and that Paul’s own encounter on the Damascus road (Galatians 1:15–16) was visionary rather than physical.^{14, 4, 8}

Paul’s resurrection theology also shapes his understanding of the believer’s existence. Baptism is participation in Christ’s death and resurrection (Romans 6:3–4). The Spirit is the “first installment” (arrabōn) of the resurrection life to come (2 Corinthians 5:5). And the resurrection body will be a “spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon) — not immaterial but animated and transformed by the Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:44). The entire Pauline vision of salvation, ethics, and hope is oriented around the conviction that God raised Jesus from the dead and will raise those who belong to him.^{8, 14}

Jewish context and divine agency

Paul’s Christological thinking did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged from within Second Temple Judaism, a tradition that, while rigorously monotheistic, had developed sophisticated ways of speaking about divine intermediary figures. Jewish texts from the Second Temple period describe angels, personified Wisdom, the Logos (Word), and exalted human figures in terms that sometimes approach divine status without crossing the boundary of ontological identity with YHWH. The Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible acts and speaks as God (Exodus 3:2–6; Judges 6:11–24). Wisdom is personified as God’s companion at creation (Proverbs 8:22–31; Sirach 24; Wisdom of Solomon 7:22–8:1). The “Son of Man” in Daniel 7:13–14 receives universal dominion. The angel Yahoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham bears the divine name within him. These traditions of divine agency provided conceptual resources that the earliest Christians could deploy in making sense of their experience of Jesus.^{11, 19, 18}

The category of “angel Christology” — the proposal that early Christians initially understood Jesus as an angelic being — has been explored by Charles Gieschen and others. Gieschen argued that “angelomorphic Christology,” in which Christ is described using language and imagery drawn from angel traditions, is visible in several New Testament texts and was an important early way of expressing Christ’s heavenly status. However, Hurtado and Bauckham have both resisted the idea that angel Christology was the primary or originary framework. Hurtado pointed out that no angel in Judaism receives the kind of cultic devotion that Christians offered to Jesus from the very beginning; Bauckham argued that the decisive move was not placing Jesus among the angels but including him within the unique identity of YHWH, a step that goes beyond anything said about angels in Jewish tradition.^{19, 1, 7}

E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) transformed the study of Paul’s relationship to Judaism by arguing that Paul should be understood within — not against — the pattern of “covenantal nomism” that characterized Palestinian Jewish religion. Sanders demonstrated that Judaism was not the legalistic religion of “works-righteousness” that earlier Protestant scholarship had assumed, and that Paul’s Christology emerged from a thoroughly Jewish matrix. This insight has been foundational for subsequent work on Pauline Christology, reinforcing the point that the exalted claims Paul makes about Jesus must be understood as Jewish theological innovations, not as importations from pagan religion.^{15, 9}

The “high” versus “low” Christology debate

One of the most consequential debates in New Testament scholarship concerns whether Paul held a “high” Christology — one that identifies Jesus with God in some robust sense — or a “low” Christology that regards Jesus as an exalted human or subordinate divine agent. The terminology is imprecise, and most scholars recognize that the spectrum is more nuanced than a simple binary, but the debate has real consequences for how one understands the trajectory from earliest Christianity to Nicene orthodoxy.^{3, 4}

James Dunn, in Christology in the Making (1980, revised 1989), argued that genuine pre-existence Christology — the claim that Christ literally existed as a divine being before his birth — is not found in Paul or anywhere else in the New Testament before the Gospel of John. Dunn read the Philippians hymn as an Adam Christology (Christ as the ideal human who succeeds where Adam failed) and the Wisdom language as a way of saying that God’s creative purpose is now embodied in Christ, not that Christ was a pre-existent hypostasis. On Dunn’s reading, Paul’s Christology is “high” in the sense that it attributes supreme eschatological significance to Jesus, but it does not yet make the ontological identification of Jesus with God that would later characterize Nicene theology.^{3, 8}

Larry Hurtado, in Lord Jesus Christ (2003) and earlier works, challenged Dunn by arguing that the cultic devotion offered to Jesus in the earliest Christian communities — prayer to Christ, hymns sung to Christ, baptism in Christ’s name, the Lord’s Supper as a meal of communion with Christ — constitutes a “mutation” in Jewish monotheistic practice that demands explanation. Hurtado coined the term “binitarian worship” to describe this pattern: two figures (God and Christ) receiving the devotion that Jewish monotheism reserved for God alone. For Hurtado, this devotional pattern was established within the first two decades of Christianity and cannot be explained as a gradual evolution; it represents an eruption of something genuinely new, triggered by the resurrection experiences and revelatory encounters of the earliest believers.^{1, 2, 11}

Bart Ehrman, in How Jesus Became God (2014), proposed a developmental model in which different early Christians held different Christologies simultaneously. Some held an “exaltation Christology” in which the human Jesus was raised to divine status at his resurrection (visible in Romans 1:3–4 and Acts 2:36); others held an “incarnation Christology” in which a pre-existent divine being became human (visible in the Philippians hymn and the Johannine prologue). Ehrman argued that Paul himself held both views at different moments, and that the overall trajectory of early Christianity moved the point of Jesus’s “becoming divine” progressively earlier: from resurrection, to baptism, to birth, to pre-existence, and finally to eternal co-existence with God. Chris Tilling’s Paul’s Divine Christology (2015) offered a different approach, arguing that Paul relates to Christ in the same way that Old Testament texts describe the proper relationship between Israel and YHWH, and that this “relational” evidence for divine Christology is more significant than the disputed exegesis of individual proof texts.^{4, 20}

Development from Paul through the Synoptics to John

The relationship between Paul’s Christology and that of the later New Testament documents is complex and non-linear. The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke), written between approximately 70 and 90 CE, present Jesus primarily through narrative — his teachings, healings, conflicts, death, and resurrection — rather than through the theological reflection that characterizes Paul’s epistles. Mark, the earliest Gospel, contains no birth narrative and no explicit pre-existence theology; it presents Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God whose true identity is progressively revealed and fully disclosed only at the cross (Mark 15:39). Matthew and Luke add infancy narratives that attribute Jesus’s conception to the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18–25; Luke 1:35), but neither Gospel develops a pre-existence Christology comparable to what is found in the Pauline hymns.^{5, 21}

The Gospel of John, written around 90–100 CE, represents the fullest development of New Testament Christology. Its prologue declares that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), and that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). John’s Jesus makes explicit claims to pre-existence (“Before Abraham was, I am,” John 8:58) and to unity with the Father (“I and the Father are one,” John 10:30). Thomas addresses the risen Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). These statements go further than anything in Paul’s letters in making explicit what Paul’s language arguably implies.^{5, 21}

C. F. D. Moule argued in The Origins of Christology (1977) that the development from Paul to John should be understood as “evolution” rather than “revolution” — as the unfolding of implications already present in the earliest Christological convictions rather than the introduction of fundamentally new ideas. On this view, Paul’s inclusion of Christ in the Shema, his application of YHWH texts to Jesus, and his pre-existence hymns contain in seed form everything that John would later articulate more explicitly. Others, including Dunn and Ehrman, see greater discontinuity, arguing that John represents a qualitative leap — a full incarnation theology — that is not yet present in Paul and that required decades of theological reflection and debate to emerge.^{16, 3, 4}

Relationship to Nicene orthodoxy

The Nicene Creed (325 CE, expanded at Constantinople in 381 CE) declares that the Son is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance (homoousios) with the Father, through whom all things were made.” This language goes well beyond anything Paul explicitly says, yet the council fathers at Nicaea understood themselves to be articulating what Paul and the other New Testament authors had taught. The question of how Paul’s Christology relates to Nicene orthodoxy is therefore both a historical and a theological one.^{9, 7}

Several elements of Paul’s thought provided raw material for Nicene theology. His attribution of creation to Christ (“through whom are all things,” 1 Corinthians 8:6; “in him all things were created,” Colossians 1:16) is directly echoed in the Creed’s “through whom all things were made.” His inclusion of Christ in the Shema anticipates the Creed’s insistence on the Son’s unity with the Father. His language of Christ as “the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4) contributed to later reflection on the relationship between the Father and Son. And the Philippians hymn’s claim that Christ was “in the form of God” (en morphē theou) was cited repeatedly in the patristic debates as evidence that the Son shares the divine nature.^{12, 10}

At the same time, Paul’s Christology contains elements that sit uncomfortably with later orthodoxy. His language is often subordinationist in tendency: Christ is the one “through whom” all things exist, while the Father is the one “from whom” all things exist (1 Corinthians 8:6). Paul speaks of Christ handing over the kingdom to the Father “so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), a passage that was exploited by Arians in the fourth century to argue that the Son is subordinate to the Father. Paul never uses the term theos (God) unambiguously as a title for Christ — Romans 9:5 is grammatically ambiguous and has been translated both as applying “God” to Christ and as a separate doxology to God the Father. The Nicene formulation required philosophical categories (ousia, hypostasis) that Paul did not possess and addressed questions — about the metaphysical relationship between Father and Son — that Paul did not explicitly raise.^{5, 8, 9}

N. T. Wright argued in Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013) that Nicene Christology is best understood as a later conceptual articulation of what Paul was already doing in practice: including Jesus in the identity of the one God of Israel. The Creed’s philosophical language is not a distortion of Paul but a translation of Pauline convictions into the idiom of fourth-century theology. Whether that translation preserved or transformed the original remains a question on which scholars of different theological commitments disagree.^{9, 7}

Summary of scholarly positions

Major positions in the Pauline Christology debate^{1, 3, 4, 6, 20}

Significance

Pauline Christology occupies a pivotal position in the history of Christian thought. Because Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents, they provide the only direct window into Christological convictions that were forming within two decades of the crucifixion — before the Gospels were written, before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, and before Christianity had fully separated from Judaism. What Paul says and does not say about Jesus therefore constrains every reconstruction of how Christology developed. If Paul already held a “high” Christology that included Jesus in the identity of YHWH, then the trajectory to Nicaea is relatively short and continuous. If Paul’s Christology was more modest — an exaltation Christology or an Adam Christology that later generations inflated — then the development was longer and more discontinuous, and the question of when and why Jesus “became God” requires a different answer.^{1, 4, 16}

The debate is unlikely to be resolved because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous. Paul was a pastoral theologian, not a systematic one; he wrote occasional letters to specific communities facing specific problems, not treatises on the nature of Christ. His Christological language is embedded in arguments about ethics, community, suffering, and hope, and it resists the kind of systematic extraction that later theologians attempted. What is clear is that Paul, writing within twenty years of the crucifixion, was already making claims about Jesus that would have astonished most of his Jewish contemporaries: that a recently crucified man was the Lord to whom every knee would bow, the agent through whom all things were made, and the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Whether those claims amount to “calling Jesus God” depends on what one means by that phrase — a question that Paul’s letters pose with unmatched urgency but do not, in their own terms, definitively answer.^{6, 8, 20}