“Lord” before the Spirit, and Christ as an angel

There is, further, a suspicious contradiction between Paul’s own statement and what is reported in the story of his repentance on the Damascus road. He writes that no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.¹

Yet in the dramatic story of his repentance, before he had received the Holy Spirit, Paul already addresses the mysterious entity that appeared to him as “Lord” (κύριε, kýrie). That is a serious awkwardness in the consistency of his own claim.

3διὸ γνωρίζω ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐδεὶς ἐν πνεύματι θεοῦ λαλῶν λέγει· Ἀνάθεμα Ἰησοῦς, καὶ οὐδεὶς δύναται εἰπεῖν· Κύριος Ἰησοῦς εἰ μὴ ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ.

3Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.²

The story adds that a man named Ananias came only three days later to tell Paul that he would be “filled with the Holy Ghost.”³ So before that he did not have the Spirit. If his own words are true, how could someone who had not received the Holy Spirit say “Jesus is Lord”?

Stranger still, the words Paul spoke at the time were “Who art thou, Lord?”, which shows plainly that he himself did not know who the shining being was. The address “Lord” was therefore an empty expression addressed to an unidentified unseen entity.

Isma’il al Faruqi traced both titles to the same misreading. In the Aramaic world of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, “son of man” meant a well-bred and noble man, and “Lord” was a form of address that “implies respect and honor but not divinity, since it can be and is usually applied to any honored man”.⁴ Only in the Gospel of John and in Paul’s letters, he observed, does sonship become something mysterious and metaphysical, and “This fact bears evidence of the foreign Greek source of the new meaning imposed upon the Hebrew/Aramaic word.”⁵

Of “Lord” his judgment was shorter: “If Paul and other men with Hellenized minds misunderstood the term as meaning God, the fact tells about him, not about Jesus.”⁶

Christ as an angel

Beyond the unseen manifestation at Damascus, Paul’s view of the identity of Christ produces significant confusion. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that they received him “as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.” He is recalling how the Galatians welcomed him when he was ill:

ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἄγγελον θεοῦ ἐδέξασθέ με, ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν

allʼ hōs angelon theou edexasthe me, hōs Christon Iēsoun⁷

14καὶ τὸν πειρασμὸν ὑμῶν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου οὐκ ἐξουθενήσατε οὐδὲ ἐξεπτύσατε, ἀλλὰ ὡς ἄγγελον θεοῦ ἐδέξασθέ με, ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν.

14And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.⁸

A reader used only to modern translations may take the verse as two separate comparisons: first that Paul was received as an angel of God, second as Christ Jesus. In the Greek text the structure hōs … hōs … refers syntactically to a single referent.

In other letters of Paul the same structure describes one subject under two aspects, never two different entities.⁹ The more reasonable interpretation is that Paul equated Christ with the angel of God himself, a heavenly being made manifest, and no ordinary man.

In 1 Corinthians, for instance, Paul writes that he could not speak to them as to spiritual people but as to carnal, “even as unto babes in Christ.”¹⁰ “Carnal” and “babes in Christ” refer to one group under two descriptions, not two groups. In 2 Corinthians he says they speak “as of God, in the sight of God … in Christ,”¹¹ again two expressions for one reality.

By the same method, the statement that Paul was received “as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus” can be understood as an identification: Christ himself is the angel of God.¹² The passage suggests that Paul saw Christ as a heavenly being sent to bring salvation, neither a mere man nor absolute God.¹³

That understanding shapes how Paul presents Christ: a heavenly creature, an archangel commissioned to save the world. If Paul did equate Christ with an angel, a large question follows: was the being he “met” at Damascus truly ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, or a heavenly entity later given the name “Christ”?

In first-century Jewish thought, belief in heavenly beings as messengers was nothing foreign. It is no surprise that Paul, with his Hellenistic education, matched Christ with ideas such as the Logos, a pre-existent being mediating between God and humanity.¹⁴

That view later developed into the teaching of Arius, who rejected the absolute divinity of Christ. Arius taught that Christ was a created being raised in rank by God, who obtained his special standing through perfection and obedience, and not through any eternal divine nature.¹⁵

The tendency to interpret Christ as a pre-existent entity is what opened the way to interpretations based on Greek philosophy. The Logos concept associated with Jesus in Johannine theology, and indirectly in Paul’s teaching, was raised into a form of absolute divinity.

That departs from its philosophical origin in the Greek tradition, where the Logos was only the ordering principle of nature, an impersonal rationality acting as the law of cosmic order, never a self-subsisting being, still less an incarnate God. The adaptation shows how far outside philosophy shaped Paul’s doctrine and drew it away from tawḥīd (توحيد, “the oneness of God”).

Modern discussion of this statement of Paul shows that the interpretation is still studied seriously. Many ask whether Paul raised Christ to the rank of a kind of “archangel,”¹⁶ in line with Jewish belief in mediating beings such as the Angel of YHWH,¹⁷ the Logos, or post-biblical entities such as Metatron.¹⁸

The difference between “exaltation” and “incarnation” matters too. Paul leans toward the view that Christ was a heavenly being sent down, and away from a man raised to divine rank.¹⁹

That interpretation reflects Paul’s theological leaning toward Christ as a heavenly being, and it raises a more basic question: where did such a view come from? If Paul did not inherit it directly from ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, it is very likely that his frame of thought was shaped by other sources influential among Hellenistic Jews of his time. Here we find the traces of the Talmud, rich in theological speculation and religious legend.

1. 1 Corinthians 12:3. ↩
2. 1 Corinthians 12:3 (SBLGNT; KJV). ↩
3. Acts 9:17. ↩
4. Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: ABIM, 1983), pp. 11, 13. ↩
5. Ibid., p. 11. ↩
6. Ibid., p. 13. ↩
7. Galatians 4:14. Greek text and transliteration from Nestle-Aland, 28th edition. ↩
8. Galatians 4:14 (SBLGNT; KJV). ↩
9. Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 274–278. ↩
10. See 1 Corinthians 3:1. ↩
11. See 2 Corinthians 2:17. ↩
12. Susan R. Garrett, No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 11–14. ↩
13. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014), pp. 257ff. ↩
14. ibid., pp. 258–259. ↩
15. Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), pp. 55–58. ↩
16. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, p. 257; see also Garrett, No Ordinary Angel, pp. 11–14. ↩
17. A term in the Tanakh for a divine messenger who speaks and acts in God’s name, sometimes described as if identical with YHWH himself. ↩
18. A post-biblical figure in Jewish mystical tradition regarded as the chief of the angels; possibly the ʿUzayr mentioned in the Qurʾān, Sūrah al-Tawbah 9:30. ↩
19. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus is Michael the archangel, sent as savior; the view aligns with the concept of pre-existence but rejects the absolute divinity of Jesus. ↩