Dismantling Adoptionist Christology

In some quarters of scholarship, it is thought that the earliest christology of the church was “adoptionist.” Such a view contends that Jesus was not originally God or the Son of God but he became the Son of God/Divine at some point, like his baptism, resurrection, or ascension.

Bart Ehrman argues for something like this although he calls it exaltationist christology and he detects it in places like Mark 1:9-11 and Rom 1:3-4. Some even allege that the earliest Jewish Christians, whether in Jerusalem or the Ebionites of the second century, also had an adoptionist christology. Now I wrote a whole book explaining why I think this does not work and a fully orbed adoptionist christology does not emerge until much later in the patristic era.

So I was happy-surprised to see two recent scholars argue for something similar, namely, that our earliest sources do not attest an adoptionist christology. What is even more interesting, is that they both wrote independently of each other, and yet published their articles in the very same issue of the same journal. What a crazy coincidence!

So here is the vodcast and podcast version of the interview I did with Dr. Michael Kok and Jeremiah Coogan on “Adoptionism: Dismantling a Dubious Christological Category”:

BTW, subscribe to the you.tube channel and/or the podcast if you get the chance!

Further Reading

Michael F. Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017).

Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman world: divine sonship in its social and political context (Oxford: OUP, 2012).

Jeremiah Coogan, "Rethinking adoptionism: An argument for dismantling a dubious category," Scottish Journal of Theology 76 (2023): 1-13.

Michael Kok, "The utility of adoptionism as a heuristic category: The baptism narrative in the Gospel of the Ebionites as a Test Case," Scottish Journal of Theology 76 (2023): 153-63.

Peter Ben-Smith, "The end of early Christian adoptionism? A note on the invention of adoptionism, its sources, and its current demise," International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76 (2015): 177-99.