I have been working through Brant Pitre’s rather too methodical and, in my view, tendentious (I know, the pot calling the kettle black) Jesus and Divine Christology, in which he makes a case for reading divine identity into certain of the words and deeds of Jesus.

One of the supposed “riddles” discussed in the previous post was Jesus’ saying “No one is good except God alone.” In a comment, Gerard Jay makes the point that Matthew shifts the emphasis from the questionable goodness of Jesus to the unquestionable goodness of the Law—from the person to the action.

It is Brant Pitre’s argument in Jesus and Divine Christology that the intrinsic divinity of Jesus is revealed in the Gospels either through actions and events or through certain cryptic sayings. His divinity is a secret, a hidden reality, that may sometimes be glimpsed breaking through revelatory or “apocalyptic” cracks in the human exterior.

The third “epiphany miracle,” after the two sea miracles, is the transfiguration or “metamorphoses” (metemorphēthē) of Jesus in the presence of Peter, James, and John, on the mountain.

The second “epiphany miracle” discussed by Brant Pitre in his book Jesus and Divine Christology is Jesus walking on the water (Matt. 14:22-33; Mk. 6:45-52; Jn. 6:16-21).

Chapter two of Jesus and Divine Christology is about the “epiphany miracles.” Brant Pitre states the main purpose of the chapter quite bluntly: it is to “demolish the modern scholarly myth… that Jesus is not depicted as divine in the Synoptic Gospels” (40).

There are three such miracles: the stilling of the storm, the walking on the sea, and the transfiguration. It is Pitre’s view that

I have just started reading Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology (2024), in which he sets out to show that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine because “Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime”—only he did so in a very Jewish way, “using riddles, questions, and allusions to Jewish Scriptures to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity” (12, italics removed). So a “divine messianic secret” sort of thing.