Use of the Third Person for Self-Reference by Jesus and Yahweh: A Study of Illeism in the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Its Implications for Christology

Abstract

Seasoned Bible readers scarcely bat an eye every time Jesus speaks of himself as the Son of Man, but newer readers may well ask why he speaks of himself in the third person so often. While this is by far the most common example of “illeism” (the use of third-person forms by a speaker or writer for self-reference) in the Gospels, one also encounters “the Son” (in context often referring to the Son of God), “(the) Christ,” “the Lord,” “the king,” and, especially in John, entire phrases such as “the One whom the Father has sent,” “He who comes down from heaven,” and “He who comes from God.” Why does Jesus talk this way from time to time? More often than not, he uses typical first-person singular forms. Or if the language is attributed to the Evangelists, why do they occasionally portray Jesus as lapsing into illeism?In this published form of his Ph.D. dissertation completed at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Roderick Elledge, now adjunct professor at Southern, investigates these rarely asked questions. Of course, there was the day when Bultmann and others thought Jesus was talking about a coming Son of Man other than himself, but few today take this approach. Noting that only Andrew Malone, in a 2009 journal article, has studied the phenomenon of illeism in the Bible (and there only in the OT) at all systematically, Elledge proceeds to walk through almost every known use of the phenomenon in the OT with characters other than God and then surveys representative uses of the speech of Yahweh speaking illeistically. He similarly dips into representative examples of the speech-pattern in numerous ancient Near Eastern sources before finally turning to the use attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.Individual characters and contexts indicate multiple purposes for illeism, including adding solemnity to oaths, creating a summons to listen, distancing an individual from his or her experiences, showing deference or humility to a superior, and helping to characterize a speaker. By far and away the most common purpose, however, appears to be to indicate a person’s royalty or divinity. With these patterns in mind from the OT and the ancient Near East, Elledge finds that the same two explanations work best with the material ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. If Elledge’s analysis is at all accurate, then we may add Jesus’s use of illeism to a growing list of items of implicit (i.e., not necessarily titular) Christology that point to Jesus’s divinity.This is certainly a learned dissertation, given the corpora of ancient material Elledge canvasses and the breadth of secondary literature with which he interacts. One cannot fault it for too narrow a scope in what it investigates before ever turning to the NT. Where it is not exhaustive, the texts it investigates do seem representative. And this reviewer is certainly sympathetic to research that would reinforce his own research into the abundance of high Christology attributable to Jesus himself.But why did I just lapse into one sentence of illeism? I suppose to illustrate a certain kind of modesty, conventional in certain academic circles. I doubt that has anything to do with Jesus’s use. But the lapse illustrates the difficulty of analyzing this phenomenon. For someone who already has good reason to suspect Jesus had a robust divine consciousness, Elledge’s entire study seems manifestly plausible. As he has himself stressed, it is not as though illeism is widespread in any ancient corpus, as it is in some forms of modern scholarship. But a study of this kind can scarcely consider all the possible explanations of illeism, text-by-text, so one does wonder how someone less predisposed to the answers Elledge gives for the phenomenon might interpret the same texts.A few glaring mistakes such as “more broader” (p. 49) and “alter” for “altar” (p. 61) occasionally mar what is otherwise a very clear and well-written work. After all the build-up, one might have wished for a lengthier treatment of the material in the Gospels, which comprises just shy of one-fifth of the volume. But overall, this is a very creative, thought-provoking and welcome addition to the study of the Christology of Jesus.