The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology by Andrei Orlov

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology by Andrei Orlov Adiel Schremer andrei orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology (Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 31; London: T&T Clark, 2019). Pp. xiii + 224. $120. This book explores various theophanies described in ancient Jewish and early Christian texts, in which God appears alongside a second, divine figure. It points at a process, common to these texts, whereby God’s visual attributes are transferred to the second figure, who is also bestowed with God’s Glory (Hebrew kābôd), while God withdraws into an aniconic aural mode and becomes invisible. This process, according to O., is one of the major characteristics of the NT accounts of the baptism and the transfiguration of Jesus. He suggests that Jesus’s divine identity was developed in the NT materials through the bestowal of God’s visual attributes on Jesus, and that the earliest christology emerges from the creative tension of the ocularcentric and aural theophanic molds, in which God abandons the divine corporeal profile so as to release it for the second figure, “who from then on becomes the image and the glory of the invisible God” (p. 190). Part 2, which is the book’s real focus, is devoted to “Two Powers in Heaven Traditions in Early Christian Accounts.” As frequently noted in previous scholarship, “Already within the earliest Christian testimonies preserved in the Pauline corpus, one can see clear tendencies toward the promulgation of the glory language” (p. 79), and a “predisposition to transfer the attributes and functions of the divine Glory to Jesus” (ibid.). O. adds that “the refashioning of the second power’s theophanic makeup goes hand-in-hand with the deity’s abandonment of its visual, corporeal dimension and its withdrawal into the aniconic aural mode” (p. 83). In his opinion, these two inverse conceptual dynamics “proved to be of paramount significance for the development of early Christology” (ibid.). To facilitate this analysis O. suggests looking at the NT material through the prism of Two Powers in Heaven traditions found in early Jewish texts, and part 1 is devoted to this task. O. begins with the well-known passage in Dan 7:9–14 and proceeds to other Second Temple Jewish texts, including the extrabiblical apocalypse known as the Book of the [End Page 345] Similitudes, and to some later Jewish texts, such as the Primary Adam Books, the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian, 2 Enoch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and the Ladder of Jacob. Then he turns to a discussion of “Theophanic Molds in Rabbinic and Hekhalot Two Powers Debates,” where the well-known Pardes story is given much attention and is treated at some length. The relevance of these texts is not simple, however, and, as O. himself notes, they do not represent a single picture. In the ocularcentric theophanies (where both powers are fashioned in ocularcentric mode), as found in the first three texts (Primary Adam Books, Exagoge of Ezekiel, and 2 Enoch), God appears first. In contrast, in the theophanies attested in the other two texts—the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Ladder of Jacob—the second power is depicted first, “followed by the aural epiphany of the first power, which manifests itself as the hypostatic voice” (p. 88). This raises the question of how much of the Jewish material is really relevant to the understanding of the theophanic narratives in the NT. It seems, however, that the main problem with the book lies in its very application of Two Powers in Heaven terminology to the NT material. The key term, “Two Powers in Heaven,” is entirely absent from the above Jewish texts, and the early rabbinic sources in which it is found do not use it in relation to a theophany of whatever kind. Moreover, the rabbinic sources never refer to a specific figure who might be considered a “second power.” Rather, they use it as a general theological concept, according to which there is more than one God. Of the identity and characteristics of the “second power” they say virtually nothing...