Bauckham's "Jesus and the God of Israel" 4B (Doxologies and Hymns)
In my previous post, I began discussing chapter 4 of Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the God of Israel on the worship of Jesus in early Christianity. That section focused on calling on the name of the Lord, the eschatological impulse of early Christian worship, and proskunesis and what that means. In this section, we turn to doxologies and hymns as evidence of early Christian worship. B turns to doxologies and hymns because they are the most pervasive types of evidence. He claims that doxologies constitute unambiguously divine worship appropriate only for God in an unbroken tradition from NT to Nicaea. Is it broken thereafter? He does a form analysis of doxologies, differentiating “strict” and “acclamatory” doxologies. Strict has four parts: (1) person praised in dative; (2) word of praise (doxa); (3) time (“forever”); (4) Amen. They usually form the conclusion to a prayer, sermon, letter, but are occasionally within. While benedictions are more common in Judaism, doxologies a...