In his discussion of the imperial cult in Paul and the Faithfulness of God Tom Wright notes that Domitian liked to be addressed as dominus et deus (“lord and god”)—a phrase “familiar to readers of John’s gospel” (341).
Domitian was emperor from AD 81-96. He revived the imperial cult, which had languished under Vespasian. Among other self-aggrandizing projects, he constructed an imperial temple at Ephesus, where, according to Wright, “fragments of what must have been a positively enormous statue of Domitian have come to light”. He also came down hard on foreign religions. Suetonius records that the tax on the Jews was “levied with the utmost rigour” (Suet. Dom. 12.2), and according to Eusebius, Domitian “became a successor of Nero in his hatred and enmity toward God”: he was “the second that stirred up a persecution against us” (Eus. Hist. eccl. 3.17). Tertullian accused Domitian of a rather half-hearted approach to persecution:
Domitian, too, a man of Nero’s type in cruelty, tried his hand at persecution; but as he had something of the human in him, he soon put an end to what he had begun, even restoring again those whom he had banished. (Tert. Apol. 5.4)
Suetonius maintains that Domitian was himself deviously responsible for the “lord and god” innovation:
With no less arrogance he began as follows in issuing a circular letter in the name of his procurators, “Our Master and our God bids that this be done.” And so the custom arose of henceforth addressing him in no other way even in writing or in conversation. (Suet. Dom. 13.2)
That Domitian actively encouraged the practice is sometimes disputed, but it is at least clear that it was customary for supplicants and sycophants to address him in this fashion:
For [Domitian] even insisted upon being regarded as a god and took vast pride in being called “master” and “god.” These titles were used not merely in speech but also in written documents. (Dio Cassius Hist. 67.4.7)
When he was on the point of being condemned, he begged that he might speak to the emperor in private, and thereupon did obeisance before him and after repeatedly calling him “master” and “god” (terms that were already being applied to him by others), he said…. (Dio Cassius Hist. 67.13.4)
Since the majority view is that John’s Gospel was written in Ephesus (see Irenaus Adv. Haer. 3.1.1) towards the end of Domitian’s reign, it is certainly worth considering whether Thomas’ exceptional confession “My Lord and my God” (ho kurios mou kai ho theos mou: Jn. 20:28) was not intended as a direct rebuttal to the popular, blasphemous and self-serving acclamation of Domitian as “my lord and my god”. In that respect it would be similar to the centurion’s ambiguous pronouncement following the death of Jesus: “Truly this was the son of God / a son of a god” (theou huios: Matt. 27:54).
The point of this observation is not that the Christological conclusion that Jesus is divine is thereby brought into question. It is rather that our Christology—our understanding of the “divinity” of Jesus—should take the polemical construction of the belief into account. There is a historical dynamic to the confession—and therefore a degree of contingency—that I think a narrative-historical theology might usefully preserve. Christology is confession before it is metaphysics, and confession is a political act.
Andrew,
Have to disagree with you here. I think, as many scholars are finally coming around to, is that every NT document was written prior to AD 70. For example, see John A.T. Robinson’s book, “Redating the New Testament”. See also Kenneth Gentry’s book, “Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation”.
- Rich
@Rich:
It seems to me that the jury is still out on the dating of John. I don’t have much to go on at the moment, but this article by Stegall seems reasonably balanced—and inconclusive. Köstenberger is clearly not persuaded by Wallace’s argument about the present estin in John 5:2. The likelihood that the Gospel contains earlier traditions would account for much of the difficulty in dating it, and it may well be that Thomas’ confession was inserted at a late stage in the process as a direct counter to Domitian’s pretensions.
@Rich:
I think this is far from true. Evangelical scholars still hold that the books attributed to John come from c.95. It’s only the other books they generally agree came before 70. Critical scholarship, however, has consistently placed everything but the ‘authentic’ letters of Paul to a range of 70-110. J.A.T. Robinson was an anomaly, and his book barely made an impact on critical scholarship. Gentry’s book has weighty arguments, but is really only defended by other preterists. In general, both conservative and critical scholars agree Revelation was written c.95. What is slowly being considered is that (some of) the book’s content may have originated pre-70, but was written down during or after a couple of decades.
@Rich:
Gentry is full of holes and frequently misquotes and misrepresents his sources. His use of gematria is also odd, becasue he fails to take into account the rules of Jewish numerology, as in when the letter Nun appears a second time in a word, it is known as a “Final”, and takes the value of 700. So to be precise, NRWN QSR actually adds up to 1316 and not 666, which unfortunately for preterists supporting this error, can find no comfort in this argument at all, and if they do, they do so by being historically and etymologically inept. Robinson affrims the gospels as being circulated before 70 AD, but he never fully admits Revelation to have been written before then. He slyly nudges his way back into the prevailing views of a later date when he attempts to insert John’s banishment on Patmos while “Domitian” was co-regent for Vespasian after the temple had been destroyed.
On the topic of the phrase ‘lord and god’, I would recommend the article ‘ “Our Lord and God’ ” in Rev 4,11’, by Floyd O. Parker. He suggests the phrase has little relation to imperial claims of divinity, and instead simply go back to old testament sources where the two titles are frequently used of God. I think his final point was that the appearance of the two titles cannot be used to date the Revelation (or GJohn) with any certainty.
@Mark Edward:
Thanks for the helpful comments, Mark.
It’s been amply demonstrated that much of the characteristically “Christian” language that we find in the New Testament can be mapped against both the Old Testament and Hellenistic-imperial discourse: gospel, son of God, salvation, etc. The words “Lord” and “God” obviously have an Old Testament background, but I think we have to assume that they would have had distinct pagan resonances too.
I don’t know the article you mention, but Suetonius’ dominus et deus noster seems to provide a closer parallel to ho kurios kai ho theos hēmōn (Rev. 4:1) than anything I can find in the Old Testament. In fact, it’s an exact parallel, given that Latin doesn’t have a definite article.
@Andrew Perriman:
Here’s the article online, if you would like to read it: http://www.bsw.org/Biblica/Index-By-Authors/-Our-Lord-And-G…
Andrew,
Have you considered this text from Philo in relation to Thomas’ confession?
“For he [Moses] also was called the god and king of the whole nation, and he is said to have entered into the darkness where God was; that is to say, into the invisible, and shapeless, and incorporeal world, the essence, which is the model of all existing things, where he beheld things invisible to mortal nature; for, having brought himself and his own life into the middle, as an excellently wrought picture, he established himself as a most beautiful and Godlike work, to be a model for all those who were inclined to imitate him.”
Life of Moses 1.155-158
Perhaps John understands ‘God’ as a title bestowed upon Jesus after he underwent his glorification. This seems to be how Hebrews 1 uses Psalm 45 to describe the Son’s enthronement as ‘God’ after making purification for sin. Like Moses on Sinai then, Jesus entered into the presence of God by means of his death, resurrection, and exaltation. In that experience he “established himself as a most beautiful and godlike work.”
Virtually every time “my God” is employed in Scripture it always refers to the true God with only 2 examples of this expression referring to idols (Isaiah 44:17; Daniel 4:8). Being raised a monotheistic Jew Thomas would have known full well that by referring to the Lord Jesus as “my God” he placed Him in the category of the true God in opposition to any idol.
The argument suggesting that Thomas’s confession in John 20:28—“My Lord and my God”—is merely a polemical rebuttal to the blasphemous cultic language surrounding Emperor Domitian, and not an actual affirmation of Jesus’s divinity, fails both exegetically and theologically. While it is historically interesting to observe that Domitian demanded the titles “dominus et deus,” and while it is plausible that early Christians were aware of such imperial pretensions, the contextual and linguistic evidence within John’s Gospel does not support the notion that Thomas’s words are merely a political or rhetorical counterclaim. Rather, they are a theologically charged and unambiguous confession of Christ’s divine identity.
The text plainly states that Thomas said to him (εἶπεν αὐτῷ), indicating that the entire declaration—“My Lord and my God”—was directed to Jesus himself, not to God the Father, and not to the emperor in implicit contrast. There is no indication in the grammar or narrative that this utterance was a generalized reaction to the resurrection, nor is there any hint that Thomas was offering two separate invocations, one to Jesus and one to God the Father, as some have speculated. The use of the nominative forms ὁ κύριός μου and ὁ θεός μου as vocatives is entirely consistent with Koine Greek usage, particularly in scriptural and Semitic-influenced contexts, where the nominative often functions in direct address with article for solemnity. This syntactical structure is widely attested in both the Septuagint and New Testament.
The suggestion that the confession carries merely symbolic or polemical weight—reminiscent of the centurion’s ambiguous statement in Matthew 27:54—underestimates the literary and theological crescendo in John’s Gospel. Thomas’s statement is not an ambiguous marveling at divine agency through Jesus; it is the Gospel’s climactic affirmation of what was declared in its prologue: “the Word was God” (John 1:1). The narrative trajectory from the Logos being with God and being God (1:1), becoming flesh (1:14), and finally being seen, touched, and worshipped as “Lord and God” by Thomas (20:28), is deliberate and integral to the author’s Christology. Jesus’s response—“Because you have seen me, you have believed”—does not rebuke Thomas for confusion or blasphemy but affirms the correctness of his confession. This is significant in a Jewish monotheistic context where calling anyone other than YHWH “my God” would be unthinkable unless the person being addressed is YHWH.
Furthermore, the use of Psalm 35:23 (אֱלֹהַ֖י וַאֲדֹנָ֣י, “My God and my Lord”) in the Hebrew Bible, and its Aramaic parallels in the Targum and Peshitta (e.g., Marei w-Alahi), shows that this phrase structure was reserved exclusively for direct address to the God of Israel. It was not used as a casual or reactive phrase, nor would a devout Jew in first-century Palestine risk violating the third commandment by uttering the divine name or its titles irreverently or flippantly. This context makes it all the more decisive that Thomas’s words were not merely political protest or literary device, but genuine religious confession.
To reduce Thomas’s declaration to a political act that only acquires theological significance secondarily is to invert the priority clearly set by the Gospel writer himself. John states explicitly his purpose: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). The confession of Thomas is the apex of that narrative and theological arc. To read it as merely anti-Domitianic rhetoric is to impose a speculative historical grid onto a text that is overtly theological. That such a confession may have had polemical resonance in a culture steeped in imperial idolatry is true; but that resonance is secondary to the primary theological force of the text: that Jesus is recognized, by one of his closest Jewish followers, not as a god, not as a lord, but as his Lord and his God—in the full, monotheistic, Jewish sense of those terms.
In conclusion, the confession of Thomas cannot be relegated to a political parody of Domitianic hubris without undermining the literary, theological, and linguistic structure of the Gospel of John. Thomas, a monotheistic Jew, sees the risen Christ and addresses him with language reserved for YHWH alone. That Jesus not only receives but blesses this confession reveals the evangelist’s intent to present Jesus not as a mere emissary of the divine, but as the personal, incarnate embodiment of the God of Israel. That is not a polemic; it is revelation.
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