Did the First Christians Worship Jesus as God?

Somewhere around the year 55, a Jewish follower of Jesus named Paul preserved, untranslated, a prayer his Greek-speaking congregations had received from the first believers in Judea: Marana tha — “Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22).¹ He was a monotheist to the marrow, raised on the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). And yet here he is, and the churches before him, calling on a crucified Galilean to come — the way Israel’s Scriptures call on the LORD. That is not a title, or an argument about his nature. It is an act of worship. And it is old.

This is the question that stands behind the doctrine: not first “how can Jesus be God?” but the plainer, historical one the New Testament scholar James Dunn put as a book title — Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?² — and answered, cautiously, that worship was characteristically offered to God through Jesus rather than to Jesus as such. The popular answer goes much further: that Jesus was revered as a great teacher and only slowly, over generations of Hellenistic drift, inflated into a god to be worshipped — the divinity a late arrival, the worship later still. The evidence points the other way. The devotion is early, it is Jewish, and it crosses the one line Second Temple Judaism guarded most jealously of all.

What worship meant — and where the line was drawn

To feel the force of the evidence you have to see the line clearly, because it is easy to misplace. The line was not the mere posture of homage. Israelites could and did bow low before a king as well as before God — 1 Chronicles 29:20 uses a single verb of prostration for both the LORD and King David in the same breath.³ Bowing, kneeling, honouring: these could be offered to prophets, kings, and angels without blasphemy. What Jewish monotheism guarded jealously for God was not the posture of homage but the substance of worship — sacrifice, invocation, prayer. Angels, prophets, and kings could be honoured, but the angels of Second Temple Jewish literature characteristically refuse worship and redirect it to God.⁴ The nearest thing to an exception is worth naming, because critics of an early high view of Jesus press it. In the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71) the Son of Man sits on the throne of glory to judge; all who dwell on earth fall down and worship before him (48:5), and the kings of the earth petition him for mercy (62:5, 9). Richard Bauckham, who argues for the strict line this essay follows, calls it the one exception which proves the rule, and stresses that the figure’s inclusion is partial and equivocal: it lies in the future, at the last judgment, with no share in creating the world (though he is named before creation, 48:3, 6). Many specialists now date the Similitudes to around the turn of the era, though the date is disputed and they are not attested at Qumran. Even taken at full weight, what they describe is end-time homage before God’s appointed judge, from all the earth and joined to praise of the Lord of Spirits, and the pleas of the defeated kings, not a community’s present prayer, invocation and hymn.⁵

The New Testament itself draws the line in exactly that place. In the book of Revelation, when John falls down to worship the angel who has shown him the vision, the angel recoils — twice: “You must not do that!… Worship God.” (Revelation 19:10; 22:9). Even the highest created messenger refuses the worship due God alone.⁶ That refusal is the control case: it tells us precisely what the earliest Christians thought they were — and were not — free to do. And it makes what they did with Jesus all the more startling.

They gave that worship to Jesus

Consider what the sources actually record the first believers doing. They prayed to Jesus. Marana tha is not the homage due a vice-regent; it is an invocation, calling on the risen Lord to come. Stephen dies with a prayer on his lips — “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59) — entrusting his spirit to Jesus exactly as Jesus had entrusted his to the Father (Luke 23:46). And Paul can define the whole church, in a single phrase, as “all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:2), taking up the Scriptures’ own idiom for invoking YHWH by name (Joel 2:32; Romans 10:13).⁷

They sang of him — and, as an outsider would soon report, to him. The hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2 gives Jesus “the name that is above every name” and applies to him Isaiah’s oath that to YHWH alone “every knee shall bow” (Philippians 2:9–11, quoting Isaiah 45:23).⁸ And the worship of Jesus is attested even from outside the church: reporting to the emperor around AD 112, the pagan governor Pliny records that those he interrogated — some of them former Christians — described meeting before dawn and singing “a hymn to Christ, as to a god” (carmen Christo quasi deo, Pliny, Letters 10.96) — hostile testimony that, by the early second century, worshipping Jesus was already the settled, customary practice of the churches Pliny encountered.⁹ The evidence reaches beyond what the texts say, too. The earliest Christian copyists wrote a small set of sacred words in a special abbreviated form, and the earliest and most consistent of them are the words for God and Lord and the names Jesus and Christ; Larry Hurtado read the practice as one more expression of the same pattern of devotion to Jesus together with God the Father.¹⁰ A mosaic in a prayer hall at Kefar ‘Othnay, near Megiddo in northern Israel, records that a woman named Akeptous offered the table “to God Jesus Christ” as a memorial; the excavators date it to the third century, though the date is debated.¹¹ And on the Palatine Hill in Rome, scratched into a plaster wall around AD 200, a Roman hand drew a man lifting his hand toward a figure hanging on a cross, a figure with the head of a donkey, and wrote beneath it, “Alexamenos worships his god.” It is a jeer at a Christian for adoring a crucified man.¹²

And they worshipped him where they refused to worship anyone else. In Revelation the whole created order sings to “him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb” the same blessing and honour and glory, and the elders fall down in worship (Revelation 5:13–14) — in the very book whose angel twice refuses that worship for himself. Hebrews goes further still: God commands the worship — “Let all God’s angels worship him” (Hebrews 1:6) — in words whose Old Testament source directs that worship to the LORD.¹³ The Lamb receives what the angel forbids.

Matthew frames the point with a deliberate irony worth pausing on. Early in the Gospel the devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he will “fall down and worship” him, and Jesus refuses with Scripture: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (Matthew 4:10, quoting Deuteronomy 6:13). Worship belongs to God alone; Jesus says so himself. Yet the same Gospel ends with the disciples worshipping the risen Jesus — “and when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17; cf. 14:33) — and Jesus does not refuse it, as the angel of Revelation does. The Greek verb here (proskyneō) can by itself mean no more than homage — the very posture that, as we saw, could be offered to a king — so the force of the scene lies not in the word but in the frame Matthew builds around it: the same Gospel that has Jesus refuse Satan’s demand for proskynēsis by quoting “him only shall you serve” closes with the risen Jesus receiving it from his disciples and answering, not with the angel’s refusal, but with a claim to all authority in heaven and on earth. The worship Jesus refused to give the devil, because it belongs to God alone, he received from his disciples, without a word of protest.¹⁴ The candour of “some doubted” is worth noting: Matthew is not concealing the difficulty. He is recording worship offered, and worship received.

The decisive point: it was early, not late

The one thing a “slow development” story cannot accommodate is the timeline, and the timeline is where this case is strongest. The most explosive evidence is also the earliest. Marana tha is Aramaic — a fossil of devotion in the original language of the Palestinian church, carrying us behind Paul’s Greek to the first Aramaic-speaking believers in Jerusalem in the 30s. The Philippians hymn is widely regarded as pre-Pauline material, older than the letter that carries it (this dating is debated — Gordon Fee argues Paul composed the hymn himself — but the worship of Jesus it expresses stands either way). The historian Larry Hurtado devoted a major study to exactly this question and concluded that a “binitarian” pattern of devotion — worship offered to Jesus together with God the Father — emerged “amazingly early,” within the first two decades of the movement, among Jews who would have regarded worshipping any creature as blasphemy.¹⁵ The development was in the articulation, not in the worship: the words the church later coined to explain the devotion came slowly; the devotion itself was there at the beginning.

The strongest objection: was he only a supreme agent?

The most serious challenge comes from those who affirm the Bible but deny that Jesus is God by nature — Jehovah’s Witnesses and biblical Unitarians among them. Their key tool is the Jewish principle of agency, the shaliach: “a man’s agent is as the man himself.” An ambassador is honoured, obeyed, even received as though he were the king — without being the king. On this reading everything above is the dignity of a supreme agent: Jesus is honoured because the Father appointed him, addressed as the one who perfectly represents God, given a kind of worship as God’s exalted vice-regent. It is true that in the Hebrew Bible an emissary can bear the sender’s name and authority, and the reading should be met on its merits, not caricatured; its most rigorous scholarly form is the New Testament historian James F. McGrath’s.¹⁶

But agency has a ceiling, and the worship evidence crashes through it. No shaliach in Jewish thought ever received the cultic devotion — the prayer, the invocation, the hymn offered to a god — that the sources give Jesus. Agency conferred authority; it never conferred that adoration. This is exactly why the angel in Revelation, himself God’s messenger and agent, refuses the very worship the Lamb accepts. An agent represents the sender; Jewish piety characteristically did not pray to him or sing him the hymn offered “to a god.” Even Dunn, whose survey is the most cautious of the major treatments, grants that the earliest devotion is real and must be reckoned with; the question is whether “agency” can bear its weight, and at the altar it cannot. Nor is Dunn’s “through Jesus” pattern the whole of it: Paul pleads directly with the Lord whose power he calls “the power of Christ” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9), Stephen commits his spirit to him (Acts 7:59), and the church is defined as those who call upon his name (1 Corinthians 1:2). McGrath’s version meets the same limit at the altar: grant that God’s name and functions could be entrusted to a supreme agent, and the worship itself still could not be. So the agency reading does not hold.

“But surely the worship grew over time”

The developmental thesis gets its best-known popular statement from the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, who — it should be said plainly — rejects the crude “Constantine invented it” story and grants that devotion to Jesus began strikingly early. His subtler claim is that early reverence is not yet the later dogma: that an initial “exaltation” devotion grew, over time and reflection, into the full worship of Jesus as God in the same sense as the Father.¹⁷ The concession comes first, because part of this is true. The church’s formal vocabulary for what it was doing — the fourth-century language of “one essence” — genuinely did develop later＊What “developed later” meansIs sayingThe technical creedal vocabulary and systematic formulation (Nicaea’s “one essence,” Chalcedon’s “two natures”) came later, as the church’s articulation of what it was already doing.Not sayingNot that the worship of Jesus, or his deity, was a later human invention. The devotion — prayer to Jesus, the hymn sung of him, invocation of his name — is present from the earliest layers we can reach., and no informed Christian need pretend otherwise. But the datum this essay rests on is not the vocabulary; it is the practice, and the practice is in the earliest layer we can reach. Marana tha, the Philippians hymn, the pattern Hurtado documents: these are not the top of a slow climb. They are the bedrock. The refinement was in how the church explained the worship of Jesus, never in whether it offered it. With Ehrman, though, the disagreement is not really about dates — he himself finds a pre-existent Christ in material older than Paul’s letters — but about what kind of being the earliest Christians took Jesus to be. Whatever room Judaism had for exalted intermediaries, its angels characteristically refuse worship, as we saw, while the earliest Christians were praying to Jesus and singing hymns about him within the first two decades. That is exactly why Hurtado calls the worship of Jesus a startling “mutation” rather than an unremarkable promotion.

What this establishes — and what it does not

The reach of the argument should be stated plainly, because overstating it is how a true case turns brittle. It does not, by itself, prove that the worship was warranted — that Jesus is in fact God, and rightly adored. That is the separate work of his resurrection and of his own words and deeds, argued elsewhere in this Library. Nor does it hand us the developed metaphysics of the fourth-century councils, which the honest case concedes came later. And the sharpest scholarly framing of the evidence — Richard Bauckham’s thesis that the New Testament writers deliberately include Jesus within the unique divine identity of the one God — is influential but genuinely contested: Dunn, and from another angle McGrath, question how sharply that boundary can be drawn, and Hurtado himself, broadly an ally, preferred to frame the data as devotional practice rather than in Bauckham’s identity categories.¹⁸

What it does establish is enough to dissolve the “slow development” myth. The first Christians — Jewish monotheists who would die before bowing to an idol — prayed to Jesus, sang of him, called on his name, and worshipped him where they refused to worship even an angel; and they did so from the earliest years of the movement, not after centuries of drift. They held, in one breath, that God is one and that the crucified Jesus was to be worshipped. That is not the reverence a great teacher accumulates over generations. It is worship, offered at the start — and worship, in a Jew, is a confession about who God is. We hold that this worship is rightly placed — that the one they prayed to is, as Nicaea confessed, true God from true God, one God with the Father and the Spirit, a mystery we confess rather than a formula we have mastered. The one so worshipped is the eternal Son who took a complete human nature to himself without ceasing to be God: fully God and fully man, two natures in one person. That case is argued from Scripture and the resurrection, and it begins where this one ends.

Frequently asked questions

Did the first Christians worship Jesus as God?

Yes — and early, not after centuries of drift. Jewish monotheism guarded the substance of worship (sacrifice, invocation, prayer) jealously for God, and its angels characteristically refuse worship — in Revelation an angel twice refuses it for himself. Yet the earliest believers prayed to Jesus (the Aramaic Marana tha, “Our Lord, come!”, from Aramaic-speaking believers of the earliest years; Stephen; “call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”), sang of him (the Philippians hymn, widely regarded as pre-Pauline) and, as Pliny reports from outside the church by c. 112, to him, and worshipped him where they refused to worship an angel. The devotion is in the earliest layer we can reach.

Couldn’t Jesus just be God’s supreme agent, honoured but not worshipped as God?

No. The agency motif Jehovah’s Witnesses and biblical Unitarians appeal to is genuinely present in the Hebrew Bible — an emissary can bear the sender’s name and authority — but it cannot bear the weight they put on it: no agent (shaliach) in Jewish thought ever received the cultic devotion — prayer, invocation, the hymn offered to a god — that the sources give Jesus. Honour and authority an agent could hold; that adoration he could not. It is exactly why the angel in Revelation, God’s own messenger, refuses the worship the Lamb accepts. Grant, for the sake of argument, that the framework explains the titles; it still breaks at the altar.

Does this prove Jesus is God?

No, and it is not meant to. This essay answers a narrower, historical claim — that the worship of Jesus developed slowly over centuries — by showing the devotion is in the earliest layer we can reach. Whether that worship was warranted — whether Jesus is in fact God — is a further question, argued from his resurrection and his own words and deeds, and treated in the companion essays. Nor does it hand us the fourth-century councils’ precise vocabulary, which the honest case concedes came later. We hold that this worship is rightly placed — that the one they prayed to is, as Nicaea confessed, true God from true God.

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