The passage critiques the popular view that Paul reworks the Shema (Deut. 6:4) in 1 Corinthians 8:6 to include Jesus in the divine identity by assigning him the title “Lord” (kyrios). Instead, it argues that Paul is not referencing the Shema at all, but contrasting the one true God of Israel with the many gods and lords of the pagan world. Jesus is not assimilated into God’s identity but is portrayed as God’s appointed ruler within an apocalyptic narrative. His lordship reflects authority given to judge and reign, not intrinsic divinity, with Trinitarian theology developing later from Greek philosophical frameworks.
Here is the question. When Paul says, “for us one God the Father…, and one Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:6), are the terms “God… Lord” between them a reference to the shemaʿ: “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 8:6 LXX*)?
It has become a stock argument of those holding to an Early High Christology that Paul has assimilated Jesus into the divine identity by reassigning to him the designation kyrios in the shemaʿ. So, for example, Gordon Fee:
What Paul has done seems plain enough. He has kept the ‘one’ intact, but he has divided the Shema into two parts, with theos (God) now referring to the Father, and kyrios (Lord) referring to Jesus Christ the Son.1
I have worked through this in a number of posts (see below), probably not always ending up in quite the same place.2 What I will suggest here—not for the first time, but perhaps more firmly—is that it was a mistake to find the shemaʿ in the passage in the first place.
There is no God but one
Paul is dealing with a question about the consumption of food that has been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8:1). We have already had a straightforward and definitive statement about the non-existence of idols and the uniqueness of the God of Israel:
we know that there is no idol in the world and that there is no God but one. (1 Cor. 8:4*)
This may echo the Deuteronomic affirmations of one God:
the Lord your God he is God, and there is no other besides him (Deut. 4:35 LXX)
the Lord your God, he is God in the sky above and on the earth beneath, and there is no other besides him (Deut. 4:39 LXX)
the Lord our God the Lord is one. … Do not go after other gods from the gods of the nations around you, because the Lord your God, who is present with you, is a jealous god. Lest the Lord your God, being angered with wrath against you, destroy you utterly from the face of the earth. (Deut. 6:4, 14-15)
But there is no kyrios in verse 4, which seems odd if Paul had meant to include Jesus in the divine identity as expressed in the shemaʿ. Why drop the critical element that identifies the one God as the God of Israel when you are about to reassign it to Christ? The verse reads instead as a generic statement of the oneness of God in contrast to the plurality of the gods of Greece and Rome: “For although there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth…” (8:5).
Elsewhere in the Greek scriptures, the uniqueness of Israel’s God is asserted without reference to God as kyrios, as part of a polemic against idolatry, as in 1 Corinthians 8:4, 6a:
Thus says God, the king of Israel, who delivered him, God Sabaoth: I am first, and I am after these things; besides me there is no god. … You are witnesses whether there is a god besides me, and they were not formerly. (Is. 44:6, 8 LXX)
Did not one god create us? Is there not one father of us all? Why then did each of you forsake his brother, to profane the covenant of our fathers? Judah was forsaken, and an abomination occurred in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah profaned the sacred things of the Lord with which he loved and busied himself with foreign gods. (Mal. 2:10-11 LXX)
The last passage strikes me as especially relevant because it corresponds closely to the language and thought of 1 Corinthians 8:6 in a number of ways.
1. The prophet says that for “us” who are Israel there is one God, who is the “father of us all,” who created his people. Paul says that for “us” (who are renewed Israel in Christ) there is one God, the Father, who is the origin of this whole new state of affairs. The parallelism is compelling and has further consequences.
2. We see here that it is the threat to the integrity—and future life—of the community that elicits the creational language. Participation in idolatry does not compromise the cosmos; it compromises that people which God has created, and has now re-created through the foolish wisdom of the cross (cf. 1 Cor.1:18-31).
3. Both texts have a prophetic-apocalyptic orientation. Participation in idolatry and the worship of “foreign gods” is likely to bring judgment on the people which God has created:
The Lord will utterly destroy the person who does this until he has even been humiliated from the tents of Jacob and from among those who bring sacrifice to the Lord Almighty. (Mal. 2:12 LXX)
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. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? (1 Cor. 10:21-22)
So I conclude: “Jesus has been included not in the divine identity expressed in the Shema but in the divine purpose expressed in an intensifying narrative of conflict, judgment, and rule.”3 Such inclusion is expressed in terms of enthronement and authorisation, and ultimately it is contingent upon the need to judge Israel and defend them against their enemies.
Many gods and many lords
Paul then observes that in the pagan world “there are many gods and many lords.” So rhetorically it is not the invocation of Israel’s foundational confession of the oneness of their God, whose name is YHWH, that introduces the term kyrios into the argument but reflection on the plurality of kyrioi in the pagan world.
It is this distinction between many gods and many lords in the pagan world that provides the rhetorical frame for the two part confession in verse 6. For those of “us” who believe that kingdom and lordship have been given to the crucified Jesus, there are not many gods but one God, who is bringing this whole new order to existence; there are not many lords but one Lord, through whose faithfulness unto death this whole new order is being created.
So to this point we have had no reason to think that the shemaʿ underpins the development of thought. Against Fee, Paul has not kept the “one” of the shemaʿ “intact”; he has controverted the “many” of the pagan acclamations. That is a quite different rhetorical manoeuvre.
Besides, the shemaʿ is not a two part thing to divide between God and Jesus. There is one “person”—yhwh ʾelohim, kyrios ho theos. If Paul splits theos from kyrios in 1 Corinthians 8:6, then we must infer that God is no longer kyrios, YHWH is no longer yhwh: God is the Father only, Jesus has become the kyrios. That is surely out of the question! Much better to assume that the shemaʿ was never there in the first place.
Lords who are kings
The field of reference for kyrios in such a context is easily illustrated. Darius is addressed by a Jew as kyrie basileu (“lord king”) (1 Esd. 4:46). Nebuchadnezzar is “lord (kyrios) of all the earth” (Jdt. 6:4; cf. 11:4). He is acclaimed by the Chaldeans, “O lord (kyrie), king, live forever!” (Dan. 3:8-9 LXX). A king, “who is lord (kyrion) of so many people,” is struck in the face by the daughter of his concubine (Josephus, Ant. 11:54). Josephus says of Antipater that he “desires the shadow of that royal authority, whose substance he had already seized to himself, and so hath made Caesar lord (kyrion), not of things, but of words” (War 2:28). If YHWH is called “God of gods and Lord of lords” (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:3; Dan. 2:47 LXX; 4:34 LXX), it is in recognition of the fact that there are many gods and many kyrioi in the pagan world.
So it was common enough in Hellenistic-Jewish usage for a king to be spoken of, even approvingly, as kyrios—a “royal epithet”; and this reflects wider Hellenistic usage. Augustus is called “God and Lord (kyrios) Caesar, Dictator”; Herod the Great is called “King Herod, Lord; likewise, Agrippa I and II are both kyrios basileus Agrippa (TDNT III, 1049-50).
We also have to take into account what is said about the Lord Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians. He was crucified; he was raised from the dead; he now has a new bodily form by the power of the Spirit (sōma pneumatikon), which his followers expect also to attain (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:13-5:5; Phil. 3:20-21); he has been installed as king, under whose feet all things have been subjected; he was revealed by God to Paul; his Spirit and power are active in the churches; he is confessed as Lord; he will be revealed to the world on a future “day of our Lord Jesus Christ”; he will judge on that day; and in the end, when there are no enemies left, he will give his royal authority back to the Father who bestowed it on him, he will step down, abdicate, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:24-28).
In the background, of course, is Psalm 109:1 LXX: the Kyrios who is YHWH and God said to the kyrios who is ʾadon and Davidic king, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet.” In the midst of the Nebuchadnezzars and Herods and Caesars of this world, Jesus has been established by YHWH as king to judge and rule, for the sake of his people, until the final enemy has been destroyed.
Nothing in this narrative hints at the assimilation of the person of Jesus to the personhood of the one God, the creator of all things and Father of Israel. Everything is explained by what I am calling the apocalyptic narrative.
A radical paradigm shift
However, because the messianic kingdom given to Jesus was so bound up with the defeat of the pagan nations, with their many gods and many lords, we can understand why a radical paradigm shift was required once that victory was attained. The apocalyptic vision slipped into the past, and the kingdom narrative was re-conceptualised in philosophical categories. Trinitarianism emerged as an accommodation to a classical (not Jewish) monotheism, not a repudiation of polytheism and idolatry. I have no problem with that.
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