AI says:
Paul's reference to the "third heaven" and "paradise" in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4 describes a mystical ascent, which many scholars link to early Jewish apocalyptic literature and embryonic
- Merkavah Connections: The experience fits with early forms of Jewish Merkabah mysticism, which sought to ascend through celestial palaces to behold the divine Chariot-Throne (kavod).
- The Third Heaven: In 2 Corinthians 12:2, Paul describes being caught up to the "third heaven," which he directly equates with "paradise," the dwelling place of God.
- Early Jewish Mysticism: Such heavenly journeys, often involving seven heavens (like in the Testament of Levi or Secret Knowledge:
Similar to practitioners of Merkavah mysticism, Paul hears "inexpressible words" or "unutterable things" in paradise that are not permitted for humans to repeat
Similarly, biblical scholars Alan Segal and Daniel Boyarin regard Paul the Apostle's account of his conversion experience and his ascent to the Heavens (2 Corinthians 12:2–4) as the earliest first-person literary account of a merkabah mystic in Jewish or Christian literature.
These wheel angels, which are described as "a wheel inside of a wheel", are called "ophanim" אופנים (lit. wheels, cycles or ways). These wheels are not directly under the chariot but are nearby and along its perimeter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah_mysticism
by constructing “Two Powers in Heaven” as
heresy, at just about the same time that bishops were declaring the
belief in “One Power in Heaven”—“Monarchianism”—a leading
heresy of Christianity.5 The Rabbis, by defining elements from within
their own religious heritage as not Jewish, were, in effect, producing
Christianity, just as Christian heresiologists were defining traditional
elements of their own religious heritage as not Christian and thereby
producing Judaism. The Christian heresiologists, as was their wont,
were more explicit about naming the “heresy” as Judaism, while the
Rabbis, as theirs, were more circumspect....
I would thus rewrite Segal’s sentence in my own
terms in the following way: There is significant evidence (uncovered
in large part by Segal) that in the first century many—perhaps most—
Jews held a binitarian doctrine of God.12 This Jewish doctrine was
named minut by the Rabbis as an important part of the project of
constructing Jewish orthodoxy as separate from Christianity.1
“Two Powers in Heaven”—“binitarianism”—of which one major
manifestation was traditional Jewish Logos theology.15 I would sug-
gest that this issue of the doctrine of God is one archaeological site
where making the distinction between the (metaphorically) excavated
Synagogue and the House of Study16 or between rabbinic and other
forms of Jewish piety in the rabbinic period becomes crucial.17
they constructed their own “orthodoxy” by
excommunicating the Jewish Logos from within their midst. As
Hayward put it, “The Logos is an intermediary, and Abelson rightly remarks that the Rabbis repudiate all intermediaries.”
(“The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr’s Conversion as a Problem of ‘Hellenization,’” in Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages [ed. A. Grafton and K. Mills; Rochester,
N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, forthcoming])
In her 2003 essay, Rebecca Lyman challenges the traditional "Hellenization" narrative of early Christianity by analyzing Justin Martyr’s conversion as a complex cultural negotiation rather than a simple philosophical adoption. Lyman argues that Justin’s intellectual engagement with Greek thought was a strategic, political effort to define Christian identity in a competitive Roman environment, which in turn contributed to the development of early heresiology
The politics of passing: Justin Martyr's conversion as a problem of "Hellenization"
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the patriarchal narratives and the Exodus, there is frequent confusion, if not conflation, between the Angel of H’ and H’ himself, ...in the early years of Judaeo-Christianity, for many of these very passages served as the origin and prooftext for Logos theology, as manifested in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue on nearly every page.
H’ smote every first-born in the land of Egypt” [Exod 12:29]: I might
have understood by means of an angel or by means of an agent, there-
fore Scripture teaches: “And I have smitten all of the first-born” [Exod
12:12]; not by means of an angel and not by means of an agent. (Mek.,
Pis˙a 13)35
Precisely the sort of ambiguity that would lead to the theological
ambivalence and the production of notions of a fully divine angel is
thoroughly repulsed by the rabbinic midrash...“not by means of the
Logos [rbydh ydy l[ al].”
It is the passage from Daniel that is alluded to, but not cited, in the
anti-“heretical” discourse, the “Son of Man” passage so pivotal for
the development of early Christology, that is the real point of con-
tention here and the reason for the citation of Exod 20:2.
the two appearances of God, as youth and elder, are two modalities of the same person—dynamic Modalism—and not two persons, thus refuting the “heretics.”
The tacit contention with the Logos theology of the Targum appears
especially strong when we remember that in targumic texts, we can
find the Son of Man identified as the Messiah.42 Furthermore, in a
talmudic passage to be discussed below (b. Óag. 14a), Rabbi Aqiva
himself is represented as identifying the “Son of Man” with the heav-
enly David, and thus with the Messiah, before being “encouraged”
by his fellows to abandon this “heretical” view. This would suggest
the possibility that there were non-Christian Jews who would have
identified the Messiah himself (necessarily incarnate) as the Son
of Man.
“Are you the Messiah? I am and you shall see ‘the son
of man’ sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven”
(Mark 14:62). Hence, his objector’s taunt, “Until when will you make the Divine
Presence profane,” thus implying that the Son of Man has become incarnate in the
human figure of the Davidic Messiah or, perhaps, that the human David has been
divinized through his presence on the second throne
Daniel 7 was given a messianic reading and that there was tension
between the Messiah of Daniel 7 and the Messiah of Zecharia 9, between the
Messiah as a divine figure and the Messiah as a humiliated human being
mystical circles that embrace such theological notions
See Daniel Boyarin, “Is Metatron a Converted Christian?” Judaïsme Ancien – Ancient Judaism
1 (2013): 13–62.
connection between the transformation of Enoch into the Son of Man in 1 Enoch 71, Enoch’s angelic transformation in 2 Enoch 22, and the transformation of Enoch into the archangel Metatron in Sefer Hahekhalot.
The Jewish Roots of Divine Christology | Discussion with Dr. Daniel Boyarin
Daniel chapter 7 - sees TWO thrones... a young man divine figure and an old man
see First Enoch - "the Son of Man" - worshiped as God...
"There were Jews who were expecting a Divine Human...."
Do not follow those Jewish traditions that understand Genesis 1 as describing a creative Word, a Memra, a Logos, separate from God, say the Rabbis implicitly, as is
their wont, but rather understand that God (I was almost tempted
to write “the Father”) is the only creator, and his word is no more
separate from him than any speech from its speaker. In an aston-
ishing convergence, however, Nicene orthodoxy also effectively “cruci-
fies the Logos.” While not ceasing to speak of the Logos, in the
move to a trinitarian theology within which the entire trinity is both
self-contained and fully transcendent, Athanasius and his fellows insist
that God alone, without a mediator, without an angel, without a
Logos, is the creator. Logos theology is, ultimately, as thoroughly
rejected within Nicene Christianity as within orthodox rabbinism...
Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, not made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Figurae;
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
the pressure against “Rabbi Aqiva’s” position was generated by the hardening of Logos
theology and its variants into Christology as that was beginning to take place in the second century. “Orthodox” Jewish versions of this theological option must then be “corrected”—not incidentally with many of the techniques which Christians in the post-Nicene era were to use in order to produce the “Fathers” as speaking with one theological voice
In the late-ancient mystical text known as “The Visions of Ezekiel,” a secondary divine figure, Metatron, is posited on the grounds of Dan 7:9f. This is the same figure who in other texts of that genre is called “The Youth,” r[n, i.e., that figure known by other Jews (e.g., the Fourth Evangelist) as the “Son of Man”!7
Isaiah 53 already believed in a "suffering servant" as the Messiah...stories in the Talmud of the Messiah sick and ailing with bandages on waiting to save the world.
Mark 7 is about purity rules - not about kosher rules...
kosher is food itself while impure food can be kosher. Impure "happens" to the kosher food...it can still be eaten but not by the priests in the Temple....all food is current impure by Jewish standards... because the loss of the original Temple...
It seems hardly irrelevant that it is on this very page of the Talmud that we are told that “the world was created with ten Words,”
Logos theology was a once-accepted but now rejected theologoumenon within rabbinic circles is constituted by remnants (almost revenants) of that very theology within the texts.
Thus, the theology of “Two Powers in Heaven” (a High God and an intermediary for
creation, revelation, and redemption, as we still find in the Memra theology of the Targums) was once, at least, an acceptable theological current within the circles from which the Rabbis and their theologies grew, but was offered up, as it were, in the dual production of
rabbinic Judaism as Judaism and patristic Christianity as Christianity.
a virtual “conspiracy” between the Rabbis and the Christian discourse of orthodoxy, I would adduce the apparent fact it is in Justin Martyr that we find for the first time hairesis in the sense of “heresy” attributed to Jewish usage as well.
some Jewish teachers, those whom Trypho himself would refer to as an hairesis, have offered but cannot prove: that God was speaking to angels.
By naming the traditional Logos or Memra doctrine of God a heresy, indeed, the heresy, “Two Powers in Heaven,” the rabbinic theology expels it from the midst of Judaism, hailing that heresy at least implicitly as “Christianity,” at the same time that in a virtual cultural “conspiracy” the emerging Christian orthodoxy embraces the Logos theology and names its repudiation “Judaism.” We have seen this historical, socio-cultural process being virtually enacted within Justin’s Dialogue.
It is this supersession of the Logos by Writing that arguably gives birth to rabbinic Judaism and its characteristic forms of textuality
Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
, edited by František Ábel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2025 (Hardcover, 542 pages), examines how Paul’s Jewish-context message was reinterpreted into non-Jewish, Greek, and early Christian contexts. It features contributions from international scholars, focusing on the "Paul within Judaism" perspective
Daniel Boyarin argues that Logos theology—the concept of a second, divine, mediating figure (Logos/Memra/Wisdom)—was a core part of1st-century Jewish, not just Christian, belief. He contends this "binitarian" (not trinitarian) thought was a natural Jewish progression, making early Christian beliefs about Jesus less a pagan deviation and more a development of earlier Jewish theology
AI summary above
Origen Has the Mind of Christ, Daniel Boyarin
Enoch or Jesus? The Quest of the Historical Metatron with Q &A
In another iteration of this argument I hope to show that it is precisely that which is common to Paul, Clement, Origen that constitutes something that is definitive (by privation) of rabbinic hermeneutics (Daniel Boyarin, “Origenists Aren’t the Only Christians,” manuscript, 2003).
“Paul was as much a Platonist as Clement”—or Origen. he question is surely not, then, whether it is the case that “whatever Origen learned from the Platonists it was not the art of commentary” (Edwards, Origen against Plato, 145) but whether the art of commentary itself is subtended by Platonistic structures of understanding of world and Word. I submit that it is,
Paul’s reference to “gifts” here as an allusion to the Torah, and he is, therefore, producing the earliest version of a Christian hermeneutical theory of allegorical reading, one that insists that scripture can only be interpreted with the direct aid of the Holy Spirit, identified with the mind of Christ who alone knows the mind of the Lord and can, therefore, interpret the Torah as “a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.”
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