Christ Before Bethlehem: Preexistence in Paul

Most stories about Jesus run in one direction: upward. A Galilean teacher lived, died, and was so revered by his followers that, over time, they lifted him higher and higher until they called him God. It is a story about a man being promoted. The striking thing about the apostle Paul—our earliest Christian writer—is that his story runs the other way. His Christ is sent from the Father; he “though he was rich… became poor”; he was “in the form of God” before he was “born in the likeness of men.” The movement in Paul is not up but down: a descent, then a return. This essay makes a bounded claim about that pattern—that Paul presents a preexistent Christ, one who was already himself before Bethlehem—and is careful about what the claim does and does not settle.

What the claim is, and is not

Two clarities first, because this is a place where both sides overreach. The claim here is preexistence: that in Paul’s letters Christ is not a man who began at his birth and was later exalted, but one who existed before he came. That is a narrower claim than full deity, and it should not be inflated into one. Preexistence alone does not say what kind of being preexisted—some scholars hold that Paul’s Christ was an exalted angel—which is why the essay goes on to show that Paul places this preexistent one on the Creator’s side of creation. So preexistence is a step toward the deity of Christ, not identical with it; the further step, that the preexistent one is included in the identity of the one God, is argued in the companion essays on the divine name and the New Testament’s witness.

This matters for how the strongest skeptic’s challenge is framed. It is tempting to cast the debate as “preexistence is late” versus “preexistence is early”—but that misstates it. The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, for instance, takes the earliest Christology to be one of exaltation, yet he also finds a preexistent Christ in material older than Paul; what he denies of that early figure is not his date but his rank—a subordinate being, God’s chief angel or a divinity of a lower order, rather than God.¹ So the live question this essay answers is the prior one: does Paul present Christ as preexistent at all? Ehrman’s disagreement, then, is not about dates but about what kind of being Paul took Christ to be. This essay answers that in part: Paul makes Christ the one through whom all things were made, and the one by whom every created thing was made cannot himself be one of the created things. The fuller case, including the earliest worship of Jesus, is taken up in the companion essays.

The downward arc

Paul never sets out to prove that Christ preexisted; he assumes it, in the offhand way a writer treats settled common ground. The conviction surfaces as a shape—a downward arc—pressed into letter after letter.

He is “sent.” “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman” (Galatians 4:4); “God has done what the law… could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3).² Taken alone, “sent” need not imply preexistence—prophets are “sent” too, and the honest reader grants it. But notice the sequence in Galatians: God sent his Son, and the Son was then “born of woman.” The sending is named before the birth, which reads awkwardly if the sending simply is the birth of an ordinary man.

He “became poor.” “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).³ The logic is a transition from a prior state: he was rich, and became poor. A man who was born poor did not “become” poor for anyone’s sake; the sentence presupposes a wealth held before the becoming.

He was “in the form of God.” The fullest statement is the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2—widely regarded as pre-Pauline material older than the letter, though this is debated (Gordon Fee argues Paul composed it).⁴ Christ “though he was in the form of God (morph&emacron; theou)… emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant (morph&emacron; doulou), being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6–7). The word morph&emacron; is the hinge: the same noun describes what he became—a servant—and his servanthood was no costume, so the “form of God” he began in is equally real.⁵ And the sequence—in the form of God, then taking a servant’s form, then born in human likeness—describes a transition from one condition to another. On the “emptied himself” that follows, a caution belongs, because it is easily misread: the Greek names no thing of which Christ emptied himself—grammatically he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant＊What “emptied himself” meansIs sayingChrist “emptied himself” by adding — taking the form of a servant and veiling his glory (the Greek names no thing he emptied himself of).Not sayingNot that he set aside, lost, or diminished his deity. He remained what he was and became what he was not., by adding humanity, not by subtracting deity (Fee).

He is the one “through whom” the world was made. In the reshaped confession of 1 Corinthians 8:6 there is “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist,” and in Colossians, “by him all things were created… and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17).⁶ Whatever else creation-agency implies, it requires that the agent not be among the created things—the one through whom the world was made stands, by the logic of the claim, before and outside it. (The New World Translation inserts the word “other” in Colossians 1:16–20—“all other things”—so that Christ creates everything except himself; but “other” is not in the Greek text at those points.)

Set these side by side and a single arc emerges that no one text has to carry alone: sent from the Father, rich before he was poor, in the form of God before he took a servant’s, the agent through whom all things were made—then born, obedient, crucified, and exalted. The trajectory is a descent and a return, not the elevation of a man who began at Bethlehem.

The strongest objections, fairly stated

Dunn and the second Adam. The most serious challenge comes from James D. G. Dunn. In Christology in the Making he argued that the Philippians hymn is best read as Adam Christology, not the descent of a preexistent being. Adam, made in the image of God, grasped at equality with God and was condemned to death; Christ, the last Adam, faced the same archetypal choice, refused to grasp, obeyed unto death, and was exalted. On this reading every line contrasts two men, and the hymn need not assert that Christ personally existed before Bethlehem. Dunn held that the clearest statement of personal preexistence in the New Testament is in John’s Gospel, not Paul.⁷ His reading is argued from the text, so it is answered on the text.

Wisdom, and the metaphor worry. A related challenge notes that Judaism already personified God’s Wisdom as an agent of creation “before” the world (Proverbs 8) without meaning a second divine person—so Paul’s creation language may be Wisdom-poetry, and “sent” and “became poor” may be functional or metaphorical rather than a literal descent.⁸

“Firstborn” means first-created. Colossians calls Christ “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), which Jehovah’s Witnesses and others read as: the first and highest creature. And, the objection adds, Colossians’ own Pauline authorship is disputed, so its testimony may be later than Paul.

The reply—conceding what should be conceded

Take Dunn first, because everything turns on it. Many interpreters, Wright among them, hear Adam echoes in Philippians 2, and the strongest reply engages them rather than denying them—though Wright and Fee do so differently. Wright grants the genuine Adam echoes but argues they are woven into a frame the Adam reading cannot carry: a merely human second Adam was never “in the form of God” before “taking the form of a servant” and being “born in the likeness of men.” That last phrase is the one the Adam reading cannot absorb—to be “born in the likeness of men” is to come to be human, a transition the first Adam, human from the first, never underwent. Fee, more skeptical that the Adam parallel is even in view, adds that the paired morph&emacron; theou and morph&emacron; doulou resist being flattened into two merely human postures.⁹ And crucially, the case does not stand on Philippians alone—though not because the other texts are beyond dispute. Even if the hymn is read Dunn’s way, the same descent shows in other letters: “though he was rich… became poor” reads most naturally as a transition from a prior state, and “through whom are all things” places Christ on the maker’s side of creation. Each of these faces its own skeptical reading—a metaphor of earthly self-impoverishment, or a personification of divine Wisdom (the latter taken up next)—but those are separate challenges the Adam frame does not supply, so conceding Philippians does not concede the case. The weight rests not on any single uncontested proof-text but on the cumulative pattern, and on the named person—sent, made poor, crucified, raised—who is its subject throughout.

On Wisdom: the honest concession is that Wisdom-personification is a genuine part of the background, and Paul’s language is surely coloured by it. But Wisdom in Proverbs is a poetic personification of an attribute of God; Paul’s Christ is a person with a name, who is “sent,” who “became poor,” who was crucified and raised—a biography, not a personified quality. The Wisdom motif illuminates the creation language; it does not dissolve the personal subject who undergoes the descent. On “sent” being merely functional, the point is granted for that word taken alone—which is exactly why the argument is cumulative rather than resting on it.

On “firstborn”: the word (prot&omacron;tokos) marks priority and rank, not manufacture. Scripture uses it precisely that way of David—“I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27)—though David was the youngest of Jesse’s sons and, obviously, not literally born first. “Firstborn of all creation” names Christ’s supremacy over creation, and the very next verse blocks the created-being reading: “for by him all things were created” (Colossians 1:16)—the one by whom all created things came to be is not himself one of them.¹⁰ As for authorship: grant the dispute, and the argument does not fall, because the preexistence pattern runs through the letters no one contests Paul wrote—Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians.

What this establishes, and what it does not

Two honesties keep the case sound. The first is scope: this argument establishes preexistence, not, by itself, full deity. That Christ existed before Bethlehem is a long step from the popular “man later deified” story, and the creation texts already point beyond preexistence alone: the one by whom every created thing was made cannot himself be one of the created things. The full case that he is included in the identity of the one God is made in the divine-identity essays. The second is candour about the debate: the pre-Pauline dating of the Philippians hymn is contested (Fee), the meaning of harpagmos in that hymn is one of the most disputed words in the New Testament, and Dunn’s Adam reading is still held by respected scholars—which is why the argument, having answered it on the text, is built to survive even if the hymn is set aside.

What remains, when all of that is granted, is still remarkable. In the earliest Christian writings we possess—letters, and the older confessions they quote—the crucified Jesus is spoken of as one who was sent, who was rich before he was poor, who was in the form of God before he was born, the one through whom the world was made. That is not the language of a man being slowly promoted to heaven. It is the language of a descent—of a Christ who was already himself before Bethlehem. So the answer is yes: Paul’s Christ was personally preexistent, and the “man later deified” story does not fit our earliest Christian writer. We hold that the one who came down is, as Nicaea confessed, true God from true God. He is also the one who took a complete human nature to himself without ceasing to be God: full humanity, assumed by one who was already fully God. This argument does not prove that whole confession. It shows that Paul’s Christ came down before he was lifted up, and it places the one who came down on the Creator’s side of creation.