In my estimation this is THE best and most comprehensive exposition and defense of the biblical basis for the Deity of Christ. Every serious Trinitarian Christian student of the Holy Bible, apologist, and/or theologian must have this book in the library.

RITES: BAPTISM AND THE LORD’S SUPPER

So far we have examined ways that the early Christians honored Jesus Christ with religious service through words in such forms as benedictions, doxologies, and hymns. Another category of religious activity characteristic of religious service is that of rituals or rites. If the earliest Christians gave religious service to Jesus Christ, we would expect that their religious rites would honor Jesus Christ, and that is just what we find. The two primary such rites are baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Baptism is a religious rite of initiation, while the Lord’s Supper is a religious rite of remembrance. In baptism, the new believer expresses in a dramatic, religious rite his commitment to Jesus Christ. This is what it means when the book of Acts reports that the early Christians were baptized in the name of Jesus (Acts 2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5). These statements supplement rather than contradict Matthew 28:19, which speaks of baptizing new disciples “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Neither Matthew 28:19 nor the passages in Acts specify the words to say in a baptismal ceremony. In Matthew just as much as in Acts, the focus of disciple-making is commitment to Jesus Christ. Hence, in Matthew 28:18–20 new believers are to recognize his universal authority (v. 18), become Jesus’ disciples (v. 19a), be baptized in the Son’s name as well as the Father’s and Holy Spirit’s (v. 19b), observe all that Jesus taught (v. 20a), and live in the awareness of his presence (v. 20b).

The Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:20) is also a religious rite focused on Jesus Christ. Jesus himself instituted the rite on the Passover (Matt. 26:2, 18, 26–29; Mark 14:12–16, 22–25; Luke 22:8–20),³¹ the Jewish rite memorializing how the Lord God delivered Israel out of their bondage in Egypt (Exod. 12:21–27, 42–49; Deut. 16:1–8). The apostle Paul spoke of Jesus as “the Lord” honored in the rite that the Lord himself instituted:

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel: Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar? What do I imply, then? That food sacrificed to idols is anything or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? (1 Cor. 10:16–22 NRSV)

Table 6. Paul’s Contrast of the Lord’s Supper with Pagan Ritual Meals

While Jesus instituted the rite of the Lord’s Supper, which has its own religious background in the traditions of Judaism concerning the Passover, the Corinthians were for the most part converts from paganism who had yet to break free entirely from the temptations of idolatry in their polytheistic culture. Paul therefore sharply contrasts the rite of the Lord’s Supper with pagan rites that were superficially similar enough that some immature believers were apparently participating in both. In drawing these contrasts (see Table 6), Paul contrasts the Lord Jesus with the deities worshiped in the pagan rites (which Paul calls “demons”). Paul thus makes it clear that the Lord’s Supper is a religious rite in which the Lord Jesus is the presiding deity, the object of religious devotion or “service” for Christians.³²

In drawing a contrast between the Lord’s Supper and pagan ritual meals, Paul alludes to a crucial Old Testament passage about the exclusive worship demanded by Yahweh. Yet he does so in a way that attributes that exclusive demand to the Lord Jesus. Thus, where Deuteronomy quotes Yahweh (“the Lord,” Deut. 32:19) as saying that the Israelites “provoked” him by worshiping what are really demons and not God (Deut. 32:17, 21), Paul says that the Corinthians who participate in pagan ritual meals honoring other gods are likewise “provoking the Lord to jealousy” because those other deities are demons and not God (1 Cor. 10:20, 22). We know that “the Lord” here is Jesus because it is his blood and body, his cup and his bread, and his table (vv. 16–17, 21; cf. 11:23–29). Thus, Paul not only explains that the Lord’s Supper is a rite of religious devotion to Christ, but he also compares those who participate in that rite along with pagan rites to the Israelites who did not sacrifice exclusively to Yahweh (see Table 7).³³

Table 7. Provoking the Lord Jesus to Jealousy

Paul’s sharp contrast between religious devotion to God and the Lord Jesus on the one hand and to demonic powers on the other appears again in his later epistle to the same church in Corinth:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. (2 Cor. 6:14–16)

Here being united spiritually with Christ is set in contrast to being bound to Belial, a name for the devil used in the New Testament only here. In the literature of Second Temple Judaism, Belial had become a personal name for the archenemy of the Lord God. For example, the War Scroll (one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, numbered 1QM) states: “They shall bless, from their position, the God of Israel and all His works of truth, and they shall curse Belial there and all the spirits of his forces” (1QM 13.1–2).³⁴ Consistent with this usage, in 2 Corinthians 6:15 the Christ–Belial contrast parallels the God–idols contrast.

WHY JESUS IS NEVER OFFERED SACRIFICE

Although those of us who are evangelical Protestants do not view the Lord’s Supper as itself a sacrifice, Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 10 establishes that it is just as much a religious rite as were the sacrifices under the Mosaic covenant. Moreover, Paul’s analogy is apropos because the Lord’s Supper is a memorial of the sacrifice that the Lord Jesus Christ made on our behalf by dying on the cross, as Paul expresses in various ways in the same epistle (1 Cor. 11:23–26; cf. 5:7–8; 15:3).

If we understand these things about the Lord’s Supper and its religious significance, we will not be disturbed by the argument that the first Christians did not actually “worship” Jesus Christ as deity because they never offered him sacrifices. James McGrath argues at some length that “sacrificial worship” was the decisive issue for Jews in the New Testament period.³⁵ On this basis, finding no evidence of sacrifice to Jesus in Paul’s epistles, McGrath concludes that Paul regarded Christ as having “the supremely exalted status of God’s unique eschatological mediator,” rather than the status of God.³⁶ One obvious problem with this line of reasoning is that by this standard most of the Christians to whom Paul wrote his epistles never “worshiped” God. Gentile converts in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, or Thessalonica would not have participated in the Jerusalem temple sacrifices to Yahweh any more than they would have offered burnt offerings to Jesus Christ.

Moreover, based on the gospel that Paul had preached to them, they would have seen no need to offer sacrifices, because Christ had offered the definitive sacrifice for sins by his own death on the cross, which Christians commemorated whenever they participated in the Lord’s Supper. This understanding of Christ’s death is clear enough in Paul’s writings, though it receives its most thorough exposition in the epistle to the Hebrews.

It is quite true that the New Testament authors use the language of “sacrifice” and “offering” metaphorically in reference to living in a way that honors God (Rom. 12:1; Eph. 5:2; Phil. 4:18; 2 Tim. 4:6; Heb. 13:15–16; 1 Peter 2:5). It is also true that the word “sacrifice” is not used explicitly in connection with Christ.³⁷ However, the absence of the word does not prove the absence of an idea or concept. Such an argument from silence, which in this case depends on such a small number of texts in which God is the recipient of Christian “sacrifice,” is too weak to prove anything.

More telling is the fact that other language descriptive of sacrificial service is used with Christ as the recipient. As we pointed out earlier, Revelation calls the redeemed “firstfruits for God and the Lamb” (Rev. 14:4) and says that those in the first resurrection “will be priests of God and of Christ” (Rev. 20:6).

And then there is Paul’s statement that he is “a minister [leitourgon] of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service [hierourgounta] of the gospel of God, so that the offering [prosphora] of the Gentiles may be accept able, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:16). Here the apostle describes himself as a priestly minister³⁸ of Christ, serving him in the religious work of bringing Gentiles into the faith. In this context the “offering of the Gentiles” is what Paul does as Christ’s priestly minister. Yes, Paul calls the message he takes to the Gentiles “the gospel of God,” but just a couple of sentences later he also calls it “the gospel of Christ” (15:19). The point, then, is not that Paul served in a priestly fashion for Christ rather than for God, but that his service could be described as done on behalf of both Christ and God. The rest of what Paul says in this immediate context makes this quite clear. He says that his work is for God (15:17), and yet he also says that his focus is on what Christ is doing through him, on the gospel of Christ, and on making known the name of Christ (15:18–20).

By any reasonable definition of “worship” that might apply to early Christianity, then, the early Christians did regard Jesus Christ as worthy of worship. The first disciples literally bowed down to the glorified Christ when he appeared to them after his resurrection, and the New Testament authors affirmed that all people and all angels were summoned to worship him. The earliest Christians composed liturgy that honored Jesus Christ. Benedictions attributed divine blessings to him. Doxologies praised his great divine attributes. Hymns extolled his divine acts of salvation. The religious rite of the Lord’s Supper centered on the Lord Jesus and commemorated his sacrificial death on their behalf. Moreover, we have found evidence for these various expressions of the worship and religious devotion to Jesus Christ across the canon of the New Testament—in all four Gospels, in Paul’s epistles, in epistles by other first-century Christians, and in the book of Revelation. The full, religious worship of the Lord Jesus Christ as a divine object of devotion is therefore an integral aspect of the Christian faith.

31. See pp. 556–59 for more on Christ’s institution of the Lord’s Supper.

32. See Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 146.

33. See also Costa, Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters, 135–39.

34. In Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, trans. Michael O. Wise, Martin G. Abegg Jr., and Edward M. Cook, rev. ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2005), 162.

35. McGrath, Only True God, 29–36.

36. McGrath, Only True God, 54 (see 50–54).

37. J. Lionel North, “Jesus and Worship, God and Sacrifice,” in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, ed. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North, Early Christianity in Context, JSNTSup 263 LNTS (London: Continuum/T. & T. Clark, 2004), 199–200, followed by Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?, 56.

38. See BDAG, s.v. “leitourgos,” 1.b.

JESUS DIES FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS (MATTHEW 26:28)

According to the three Synoptic Gospels and Paul, on the night before his death Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper (which Christians also call Communion or the Eucharist) to commemorate his impending death (Matt. 26:2, 18, 26–29; Mark 14:12–16, 22–25; Luke 22:8–20; 1 Cor. 11:23–25). Let us first review what all four passages say. All of them agree that Jesus instituted this rite the night before his crucifixion and death. The Synoptic Gospels report Jesus informing his disciples around the time that he instituted the rite that one of them was going to betray him (Matt. 26:20–25; Mark 14:17–21; Luke 22:14, 21–23), and Paul says that it was “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23). Jesus “took bread,” blessed it or gave thanks, and said, “This is my body” (Matt. 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19a; 1 Cor. 11:24). He also took a “cup” and said that it is “my blood” of the “covenant” (Matt. 26:27–28; Mark 14:23–24; Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25a).

The basic historicity of this event should not be in question. E. P. Sanders comments, “The passage in general has the strongest possible support. . . . There are two slightly different forms, which have reached us through two independent channels, the synoptic tradition and the letters of Paul.”²⁴ In general, the accounts in Matthew and Mark are verbally very close, whereas the accounts in Luke and Paul are quite close to each other. Academic disputes over these accounts—and the relevant literature is voluminous—have focused mainly on their slight verbal differences from one another and what these might reveal about Jesus’ original intentions in the rite.²⁵

The Gospels all present Jesus’ last night with the disciples as occurring at or about the time of the Passover. To this day the Passover or paschal meal is one of the most important annual observances in Judaism, commemorating their escape from Egypt led by Moses (Exod. 12:21–27, 42–49; Deut. 16:1–8). There is a much-discussed question as to whether the meal that Jesus and his disciples had on that night was properly speaking a Passover meal. This question is bound up with the question of whether Jesus was crucified on Passover or the day before, arising from differences between John and the Synoptics. The Synoptics rather clearly refer to the meal as the Passover (Matt. 26:17–19; Mark 14:12–16; Luke 22:7–13). On the other hand, certain statements in John seem to indicate that the Last Supper and even Jesus’ trials were before the Passover (John 13:1; 18:28, 39; 19:14). Four main views have emerged on this vigorously debated issue:

1. The Synoptics are right that the meal was the Passover meal, but John presents the Last Supper as taking place the day before Passover (and implicitly not a Passover meal) and Jesus’ death on Passover at the time the paschal lambs were slaughtered, in order to symbolize Jesus as the Lamb of God.²⁶

2. John correctly presents Jesus dying on the day that Jews ate the Passover meal, while the Synoptics either mistakenly placed the Last Supper on that day²⁷ (which of all the views we consider the weakest) or they are describing a pre-Passover meal eaten the day before the official Passover.²⁸

3. John’s references to the “Passover” have different meanings: John 13:1 refers to the Passover meal (and is meant to refer to the same event narrated beginning at 13:2), while his later uses of the term refer to the Passover peace offering eaten the following day (18:28) and to the Passover week (19:14).²⁹

4. The differences between John and the Synoptics are the result of Jesus’ group and the Jerusalem Jewish establishment following different calendar conventions. On one such view, Jesus and the disciples held the Passover meal according to the same convention as the Qumran community (who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls) based on a solar calendar instead of the Jerusalem priestly convention based on a lunar calendar.³⁰ According to an alternative view, Jesus and the disciples ate the Passover, as the Synoptics indicate, because they followed the convention of a day beginning at sunrise, while the Jerusalem establishment ate the Passover the following day because they followed the convention of a day beginning at sunset.³¹

We do not need to settle on one of these views to conclude, as most of these interpretations agree, that the Last Supper was a Passover meal. The evidence for this fact puts it almost beyond reasonable doubt.³² Once this is understood, the significance of the rite that Jesus instituted that night becomes clear. The Passover commemorated the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt when the blood of the lambs that they killed and ate that night was smeared on their door frames to distinguish them from the Egyptians (Exodus 12, see especially 12:7, 22–27). In all four accounts of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus referred to the cup of wine as representing his blood, which he associated with a covenant. The accounts report him saying, “This is my blood of the covenant” (Matt. 26:28a; Mark 14:24a), or “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20b; 1 Cor. 11:25a).³³ Just as Jews partake to this day of various elements of the Passover meal (the seder) and recite expositions of what those elements represent, Jesus instructed his disciples to partake of the bread and the wine and gave them expositions of what those elements represent: his body and his blood. In this context, there can be no doubt that he is referring to his impending death, which in fact took place the next day.

Jesus’ reference to the “(new) covenant,” in this context of instituting a new rite, alludes to the “new covenant” prophesied by Jeremiah:

“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “For this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord: “I will put My law within them and write it on their heart; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their wrongdoing, and their sin I will no longer remember.” (Jer. 31:31–34 NASB)

Here the Lord speaking through Jeremiah contrasts the “new covenant” with the one that he had made with Israel when he brought them out of Egypt, referring to a sequence of events that began at Passover. In this new covenant, the Lord says that he “will forgive their wrongdoing” and “will no longer remember” their sin (Jer. 31:34). Thus, forgiveness of sins is a key aspect of the new covenant. In Matthew, Jesus explains the significance of the cup by saying, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Only in Matthew’s account do we find this reference to “the forgiveness of sins,” but the idea is implicit in Jesus’ reference to the new “covenant,” found in all four accounts.

In short, the Lord’s Supper represents the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross as the beginning of a new covenant through which the Lord will forgive people’s sins. Jesus not only forgave people’s sins during his public ministry, but he also provided himself as the sacrificial “lamb” by shedding his blood for the forgiveness of sins. These two ideas are not contradictory. We may think of Jesus forgiving people before his death on the cross as a kind of “debt resolution” in advance based on an imminent “payment.”

24. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 263.

25. For an exhaustive discussion, see I. Howard Marshall, “The Last Supper,” in Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus, ed. Bock and Webb, 481–588.

26. E.g., Keener, Gospel of John, 2:1100–1103; Michael R. Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 151–67.

27. E.g., Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 2 vols., ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 2:1350–78.

28. E.g., Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 554–55.

29. E.g., Roger T. Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 289–96; Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 251–373.

30. Annie Jaubert, The Date of the Last Supper, trans. I. Rafferty (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1965 [1957]); Stéphane Saulnier, Calendrical Variations in Second Temple Judaism: New Perspectives on the ‘Date of the Last Supper’ Debate, JSJSup 159 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

31. E.g., Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan— Academie Books, 1977), 65–114; Hoehner, “Chronology of Jesus,” 3:2339–50; with some differences, Colin J. Humphreys, The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); see also Marshall, “The Last Supper,” 541–60, and his foreword to the book by Humphreys (ix–xi).

32. In addition to the works just cited, see Andreas Köstenberger, “Was the Last Supper a Passover Meal?” in The Lord’s Supper: Remembering and Proclaiming Christ until He Comes, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Matthew R. Crawford, NAC Studies in Bible & Theology (Nashville: B&H, 2010), 6–30; Joel Marcus, “Passover and Last Supper Revisited,” NTS 59, no. 3 (2013): 303–24.

33. A small yet noteworthy group of manuscripts omit Luke 22:19b–20, which parallels Paul but not Matthew and Mark, but most textual critics accept this passage as part of the original Luke. See Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 148–50; and esp. Marshall, “Last Supper,” 529–41.

FURTHER READING

Which Day Was Christ Crucified?

THE EUCHARIST AS THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST PT. 1, PT. 2