Did Jesus not seize at divine honours (Philippians 2:6)?

The last time I wrote about Crispin Fletcher-Louis’ “monster book” The Divine Heartset: Paul’s Philippians Christ Hymn, Metaphysical Affections, and Civic Virtues I got a ticking off for not having read the whole book. I have since ordered the whole book—all 954 pages of it—but it’s lost in delivery, so I am still dependent on the 20% that can be previewed on Google Books. I need to get a book chapter finished this month and I would like to address a couple of issues that he raises. The question about the acquisition of divine honours is one of them, because it is a key part of my argument that Philippians 2:6 is a political-religious statement, not a theological statement.

It has sometimes been argued, Fletcher-Louis observes, that the assertion that Christ Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6 ESV) has in view the practice of Hellenistic or Roman rulers who either sought or declined divine honours. Samuel Vollenweider is quoted, translated from the German: “The self-humbling Christ is portrayed in Phil 2:6-11 as a counter-image to the type of the self-exalting ruler” (78 n. 63).

So, on the one hand, bad rulers thought that “they could assert for themselves a divine identity or status”; on the other, good rulers were commended because “they did not aggressively seize a divine status” (78).

Fletcher-Louis recognises the force of the argument. It makes good sense in a letter written to a church in a Roman colony at a time when Augustus’ policy of refusing “state-sanctioned divine honours” (recusatio) was being flagrantly disregarded by some vainglorious emperors. We might then think that

Christ is praised as one who did not grasp at a divine identity (that which is “being equal with God”), but he received it from God after a life of humble service and obedience, in fulfillment of his contemporaries’ expectations of legitimate “divine” rulers. (79)

However, he makes the point that although the harpazō word group appears frequently with reference to the general rapacity of tyrannical rulers, “such words do not appear in any of the texts that criticize rulers, or other mortals, for their inappropriate claims to divinity” (his italics). Kings will “seize” all sorts of things—their subjects’ property, for example—but they do not “seize” equality with a god.

Instead, we typically find reflexive expressions: Caligula “likened himself” to the gods, “began to deify himself,” “deemed himself” to be worthy of divine honours; Heraclitus says that he has been accused of “making myself” into a god. And when good rulers refuse divine honours, they say something along the lines of Claudius’ response to the citizens of Thasos:

I approve the […] of your zeal and devotion, all of it in common but, considering that the temple befits only those who are gods, I decline (paraitoumai) it; though admitting other honors which are suitable for the best leaders. (81)

Fletcher-Louis says that the verb paraitoumai was “conventional in such contexts and may have followed a diplomatic formulation created by Augustus.” So why don’t we find this sort of language in Philippians 2:6? He concludes:

…Phil 2:6 lacks first-century language that was employed to speak to the question of whether or not (and in what ways) an individual ruler should rightfully be accorded a divine identity or status. The absence of such language and the author’s choice of another, rarer, word (ἁρπαγμός [harpagmos]) should cause us to wonder whether, after all, the point of verse 6 is really to say that Christ refused to snatch at divine honors, as if he were, at last, the ruler for whom the world had long been waiting. (81)

So where does this leave my argument that behind the harpagmon clause lies the story of Jesus’ rejection of Satan’s offer of a god-equal kingship in the wilderness? Well, I’m pretty sure I can dodge this.

First seize kingship, then receive divine honours

I would point out, first, that it is people who are already kings or emperors who either arrogantly seek or politely refuse divine honours. Jesus in the wilderness is not a king; he is the anointed Son or servant of YHWH, empowered by the Spirit. At this stage, Satan may well have imagined that Jesus would seize at political power, for which harpazō would be a fitting verb. For comparison: Antipater complains that Archelaus is seeking the “shadow” of kingship, the substance (sōma) of which he has already “seized (hērpasen) for himself” (Josephus, War 2:28).

But then in the apocalyptic worldview already evoked by the demand to do obeisance before Satan, to possess all the political power and glory of the kingdoms of the oikoumenē (Lk. 4:5-7) meant also to receive honours equal to those accorded to the gods. First seize kingship, then receive divine honours.

Jesus refuses—in apocalyptic effect—to become the “man of lawlessness,” whose parousia is “according to the working of Satan in all power and with signs and wonders of falsehood,” who “opposes and exalts himself: against every being called god or object of worship, with the result that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming that he himself is a god” (2 Thess. 2:4). Here we have exactly the reflexive language that Fletcher-Louis identifies: this blasphemous ruler exalts himself and proclaims himself to be a god.

The case of Heraclitus is different. He is not a king wanting to deify himself. He set up an altar and inscribed on it, “To Heracles the Ephesian.” Euthycles misread it as “To Heraclitus the Ephesian” and so accused him of having written his own name on the altar, thereby making himself a god. The circumstances are so irregular that there’s little we can draw from it beyond the reflexive verb (theopoiōn… emauton).

First seize the opportunity to become king…

But then the argument needs to be nuanced slightly. I agree with Roy Hoover that “did not consider… something to be seized at” (ouch harpagmon hēgēsato) reflects an idiomatic usage—for that matter, something of a romantic Hellenistic trope—that strongly suggests opportunism, especially in narrative and dramatic contexts. I know Fletcher-Louis has a rather different take on the meaning of the expression (something to do with ”erotic abduction”), but I think that there are good linguistic and literary grounds for postulating a scenario in which a person must consider whether or not to seize an opportunity presented in the moment.

So the question is not whether Jesus would seize divine honours directly; it is whether he would seize an opportunity presented to him that would result in the reception of divine honours. It is not a problem, therefore, that we do not find here the language conventionally associated with the theme.

Now when might that have happened?

If the author of the encomium knew of the story about the testing of Jesus in the wilderness, we have a straightforward way of filling out the highly compressed argument of Philippians 2:6.

Jesus is the anointed Son of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit to do marvellous things (Lk. 3:21-22)—a person “in the form of a god,” in the eyes of the Greeks. Satan determines to test the boundaries of this newly acquired status: “If you are the Son of God…” (Lk. 4:3, 9). He offers Jesus supreme rule over the nations of the empire, with all the honours—divine or otherwise—that came with the job.

But Jesus does not consider this opportunity something to be seized at, because what is written is clear: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (4:8). What prevents him from taking up the Satanic offer of empire-wide kingship and receiving cult worship is loyalty to the fundamental Jewish-monotheistic confession, articulated in the wilderness, of which the shemaʿ is the principal expression (Deut. 6:4, 13).

Here, finally, is the confirmation that through the extreme asceticism of the wilderness experience he has emptied himself of the sort of “selfish ambition” and “vainglory” that were undermining the integrity of the community in Philippi (Phil. 2:3).