Jesus and Divine Christology by Brant Pitre

Dr. Brant Pitre’s latest academic contribution to New Testament Christology tackles one of the most fundamental and debated questions in the field: *Did Jesus see himself as divine?* This question has long been a point of contention, with much of modern critical scholarship arguing that the notion of Jesus’ divinity was a later theological development rather than a self-understanding reflected in the historical Jesus’ own words and actions. Pitre, however, challenges this perspective head-on. He contends that the Synoptic Gospels—often viewed as presenting a lower Christology compared to John—as well as the Gospel of John itself, offer clear and compelling evidence that Jesus made implicit and explicit claims to his own divinity. More significantly, Pitre argues that these claims can be reliably traced back to the historical Jesus rather than being theological constructs of the early church.

What makes Pitre’s work particularly noteworthy is that it runs counter to the dominant scholarly consensus, which tends to treat efforts to demonstrate Jesus’ divine self-understanding as apologetics rather than serious historical inquiry. Many scholars who have previously attempted to argue for a high Christology rooted in the teachings of Jesus himself have been marginalized as “apologists” rather than recognized as critical historians. Pitre, however, is a widely respected Catholic scholar with a strong academic reputation, making his argument all the more significant in scholarly discourse.

One of the strongest testaments to the importance of Pitre’s work is the caliber of scholars who have endorsed it. Dale Allison—arguably the leading Jesus scholar of our time—offers high praise for Pitre’s study, lending further credibility to the argument that a divine self-understanding can indeed be traced back to Jesus himself. For laity interested in how historical Jesus studies intersect with faith, Pitre’s work offers a robust, academically rigorous case that bridges the gap between critical scholarship and traditional Christian belief. His approach challenges readers to reconsider assumptions about Jesus’ identity and invites both scholars and laypersons into a fresh engagement with the Gospels’ portrayal of Christ.

Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this debate by challenging the dominant scholarly assumption that belief in Jesus’ divinity was a post-Easter development. Instead, Pitre argues that the earliest evidence of divine Christology—what Hurtado describes as “binitarian” devotion—finds its origins not in later theological reflection but in Jesus’ own words and deeds. In doing so, he directly engages with Joseph Klausner’s historical principle of ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing comes from nothing”), demonstrating that the "smoke" of early Christian belief in Jesus' divinity was ignited by the "fire" of Jesus’ own divine messianism (330-331).

At the heart of Pitre’s study is a structured four-part analysis, in which he examines key Gospel episodes that provide evidence for Jesus’ implicit and explicit claims to divinity. The four sections—Epiphany Miracles, Riddles Concerning Jesus’ Divinity, the Apocalyptic Secret, and Charges of Blasphemy—each focus on three specific episodes from the Gospels, yielding a total of twelve case studies. Notably, ten of these twelve episodes come from the Synoptic Gospels, which are often seen as presenting a "low" Christology compared to John’s Gospel. This distribution itself challenges the conventional assumption that Jesus' divine self-understanding is primarily a Johannine construct.

Pitre’s methodology is both exegetical and historical. Rather than attempting to reconstruct an “original” version of each episode, he closely analyzes the substance of what Jesus said and did in its literary and historical context. He then applies the Triple Context Approach, developed by E. P. Sanders, which situates each episode within its Jewish, Roman, and early Christian contexts. This approach allows Pitre to examine not only the plausibility of Jesus making divine claims within first-century Judaism but also how such claims would have been received by both his followers and his opponents.

The result is a strikingly coherent picture: Jesus speaks and acts as if he is more than merely human in all four of his first-century biographies (40). More than that, Pitre argues that Jesus was not simply embodying the return of Yahweh to his people—he was, in fact, Yahweh embodied. And yet, he did not make his claims to divinity in a way that would be foreign to his Jewish contemporaries. Instead, as Pitre demonstrates, Jesus framed his divine identity within the language, categories, and expectations of Second Temple Judaism: “Jesus used riddles, questions, and, above all, allusions to the Jewish Scriptures to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his identity as the heavenly Son of Man, the divine Messiah, and the omnipotent Son of God” (329).

Some critics have dismissed Jesus and Divine Christology as more of an apologetic work than a historical one. But this critique misunderstands the book’s purpose and method. Pitre is not merely making a theological case for Jesus’ divinity—he is addressing longstanding methodological biases that have shaped historical Jesus research for over a century. The assumption that any claim to Jesus’ divinity must be a post-Easter invention has often been taken as a scholarly starting point rather than a hypothesis to be tested. Pitre directly challenges this assumption by re-examining the Gospel evidence with fresh eyes, applying rigorous historical methodology, and engaging critically with the biases that have shaped modern Christological debates.

What Pitre offers is a historically grounded, methodologically rigorous, and theologically significant contribution to the field—one that both challenges prevailing paradigms and invites further scholarly engagement. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, this book cannot be ignored by anyone serious about the study of Jesus and early Christology.

 

I received this book for free in exchange of an honest review.