Rev. Dr. Christiaan Kappes
In my previous article “Follow up…” on Justin Martyr, I highlighted how contemporary scholars often abandon concentrating on narratives of Justin’s supposed subordinationism in contemporary-scholarly translations of Justin. Still there is literature out there by legitimate scholars that assumes Justin to be subordinationist, mainly due to projecting crude philosophical distinctions onto Justin, especially Justin’s description of Jesus as the minister (subordinate) of the Father’s will. This short article will show how today’s technological advances make it easy to see that supposed subordinationism of Justin is based on a projection of meaning into Justin that cannot stand. Some scholars’ previous assumptions and their poor guesses for the origin of Justin’s argument are fairly typical problems prior to the computer age and will even continue afterwards, especially as some prefer their opinions over conclusions in reaction to where the data leads. For his part, Justin was thoroughly familiar with the Greek Bible, especially Old Testament, and with certain veins of contemporary Jewish thought. The biblical worldview explains adequately and sufficiently Justin’s unique terminology – called at one time or another subordinationist – not Greek philosophy (typically referred to a Middle Platonism). We begin by citing Justin’s allegedly incriminating passage.
For I have proved that it was Jesus who appeared to and conversed with Moses, and Abraham, and all the other patriarchs without exception, ministering to the will of the Father (tôi tou patros thelêmati hyperetôn); who also, I say, came to be born human by the Virgin Mary, and I lives forever. For the latter is He after whom and by whom the Father will renew both the heaven and the earth; this is He who shall shine an eternal light in Jerusalem; this is he who is the king of Salem after the order of Melchizedek, and the eternal Priest of the Most High. (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho,113)
Where did Justin get the idea that the “visible” Jesus who had been seen with human eyes in the Old Testament and who was physically born human (man) from a human being (Mary) as a minister or subordinate or administrator of the Father’s will? Notice that this entire phrase is in context of mentioning the Book of Joshua, the Torah, and Jesus’s identity and vocation as in the letter to the Hebrews:
This “Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, met Abraham as he was returning from defeating the kings and blessed him,” and to him Abraham apportioned “one-tenth of everything.” His name, in the first place, means “king of righteousness”; next, he is also king of Salem, that is, “king of peace. “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life but resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever.(Hebrews 7:1-3)
Justin explicitly cites Hebrews in Dialogue with Trypho 33.1-6, 63.3, 83.2-3 before he discusses “ministering to the Father’s will” (Dialogue with Trypho 113). Yet, the letter to the Hebrews does not use the phrase “ministering…to the will.” The same concept is there but not the same vocabulary. For example, Hebrews 10:7, 10:9, 10:36, and 13:21 speak of Jesus in the same vein but using the Septuagint/Old Greek Bible that says: “doing the Father’s will (poiôn to thelêma tou patros). This “Do” (poieô) + “will” (thelêma) would have been well known by Justin in the New and Old Testament, for it is also used in: 1 Kings 5:22-23, Ezra 9:9; Esther 1:8 and numerous Psalms, not to mention other places. The clear meaning in the Bible refers to a king or sovereign or Lord who has a decree or a wish that is carried out by his servant or slave. The context for “doing God’s will” occurs in the context of Master-slave, King-subject, Creator-creation dichotomies.
Now Justin’s different language is strange in that it is unbiblical. It, therefore, is not the Jewish-Greek of the Septuagint or Old Greek Bible.[1] Justin’s unfamiliar Greek phrase isn’t simply Greek phraseology, whether we read ancient or first-century commonly spoken Greek of the Roman empire. It is something allusive to the Old Testament but with nuances never seen in either the Jewish-Greek Bible or in secular authors before Justin. Greeks would have say: “I do the will of ‘x’,” or “do my will,” as this is something a Hebrew foreigner would clumsily say in atypical Greek and Justin was not a native Hebrew speaker. How do we account for Justin omitting the ever present “doing the will” and preferring the statement “ministering to the will”?
The answer comes unsurprisingly from someone mentioned in one of previous articles (The Definitive Case against St. Justin Martyr’s Supposed Subordinationism). Justin the Martyr was heavily reliant on a first-century Jewish author, Philo the of Alexandria (around AD 50). Justin’s vocabulary is another case where the only predecessor to Justin can be found in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (or largest database of published Greek writings in the world). Nowadays, unlike the early 1990s and before scholars have easy access to a huge Greek database for definitively excluding literary influences and for definitively demonstrating plagiarism. This technology take a lot of guess work and merely impressionistic scholarship out of the mix. We have the criterion of exclusivity, that is, we can definitely exclude all Greek authors in history for being an influence on St. Justin’s vocabulary, except for Philo of Alexandria (and perhaps the book of Wisdom). Philo wrote the following:
(201) And he was inspired, and full of the spirit of prophecy, and spoke to them as follows: “A fertile plain has been granted to mortal men, which they cut up into furrows, and plough, and sow, and do everything else which relates to agriculture, providing the yearly fruits so as to enjoy abundance of necessary food. But it is not one portion only of the universe, but the whole world that belongs to God, and all its parts obey their master, supplying/administering (hyperetêsonta) everything which he desires (thelê) that they should supply.(Philo, On the Life of Moses,XXXVI.196)
The computer data base (TLG) can show that no other ancient contemporaries or predecessors use a root word for the “human will” (thel-) plus a form of “serve/administer” (hypêreteô) except Justin, and then Philo immediately before him. But where would the philosophically inclined Philo get his own terminology? The answer, as provided by the world’s largest search engine finds the influence on Philo from the somewhat philosophically-inclined book of Wisdom, or a deuterocanonical book of the Bible:
For creation, serving you who made it, exerts itself to punish the unrighteous and in kindness relaxes on behalf of those who trust in you. Therefore at that time also, changed into all forms, it served/ministered to (hypertei) your all-nourishing bounty, according to the desire/will (thelesin) of those who had need. (LXX Wisdom 16:24-25)
What can we learn from the influence of something like the book of Wisdom on Philo and the subsequent influence of Philo on Justin? Each one refers to the temporal or created things in the world. Justin refers to the visible things seen by Joshua and the flesh born of Mary. These are creatures (physical appearances to the eyes and a physical body crucified). The point of Philo is that what ministers to the Father’s will or his desire is the subordinate created world. The background for this is that the book of Wisdom declares that all creation, including forms of creatures, serve God’s will.
Conclusion: Jesus as Melchizedek is Minister of the Father’s Will
What we should undestand from all this, in light of Justin’s sources and language and its remote biblical background (“doing the Father’s will”) and proximate literary background (the Book of Wisdom and Philo of Alexandria and the Letter to the Hebrews), is that Justin the Martyr means to convey that all created elements (whether the created aspects of the Old Testament precursors to Jesus – like the vision seen by Joshua) or the new Testament flesh and blood of Jesus are creatures that serve his will. This is a clear testimony to the fact that one of two realities in the whole Jesus Christ is flesh and blood, that is, a human nature. This human soul in a human body, as the Council of Constantinople III (AD 680) emphasized, means that Jesus did not merely have the will of the Father as in John’s Gospel the will of the Father is in some real way the will of the Son:
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” (John 5:19)
So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me.” (John 8:28)
Jesus follows up saying: “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30) and “You, Father, are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21). Were it not for “doing the Father’s will” and “administering to the Father’s will,” then a Monophysite or even Docetic interpretation becomes more susceptible whereby the fully human nature of Jesus Christ might be doubted. Since Jesus utilized creatures in the Old Testament theophanies and, more importantly, united himself to the created soul and body born from Mary in the New Testament, he does not merely have a divine will and divine thoughts: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). It is this very same emphasis by St. Justin on Jesus’s incarnation and his citations from Hebrews that show that Justin correctly adopts the premise that Jesus in the world had a human will, obedient to the Father’s will, not merely that Jesus has one divine will possessed by both the eternal Father and pre-Incarnate eternal Son. The implications are of dyothelitism, that is, two wills of the one Jesus Christ – unlike a mere human – being possessed of both a human and divine will, even if one will is subordinate as a created will to the divine will. Ministering to the Father’s will is the work of the Son of Man, the nature born of Mary, and metaphorically this is the role of all creation to function in an obedient and subordinate manner to its creator, as did the appearance of Captain of Armies to Joshua, the burning bush in Moses, and the angelophanies of the Old Testament. To finish, I present a citation representative of the most dyotheltie author in history, who boasts of one of the highest Christologies (or exalted notions of Jesus’s divinity) in human history; we quote Maximus the Confessor (died AD 662) who could easily be mistaken for Justin Martyr: But in the subsequent parts [of a letter by an accused Monothelite Honorius, he] renders [his understanding of the natural human will in Christ] more clearly, as his discourse is only about the will subject to the passions, but not to define the natural will in the Savior. And that indeed, even in the natural and the human [will] [Christ] corresponded to the divine will, the will from the Father, having nothing of resistance to that different will, and giving Himself to us as a model, He voluntarily subjected His personal will, and confirmed the will from the Father. (Maximus, Letter to Ma
[1] Old Greek means the untainted or oldest layer of the Septuagint. The Septuagint as we now have it is often if not usually a combination of several Greek translations that are fused into one combined text after third-century Christians started mixing them together.
[2] For translation, see page 76 of “Love that unites and vanishes…”
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