Michael Peppard's engaging book is a focused, extensively researched study of a title that has played a major role in the development of Christology. Scripture refers to Jesus as both “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” but Peppard notes that the latter descriptor has received more attention than the former. For many Christians, Jesus’ role as God's Son seems obvious. Orthodox doctrine teaches that he is uniquely “begotten” by and “of one substance” with God the Father—part of the triune deity. But, as Peppard points out, these beliefs, which many Christians now take for granted and affirm in creeds, were the outcome of over three centuries of debate, disagreement, and dissent. He claims that “scholarship on divine sonship in the New Testament has relied anachronistically on the philosophical and theological categories of the fourth century, especially the key distinction, “begotten, not made” (4). Peppard reasonably questions the wisdom of imposing fourth-century meanings on first-century terms and proposes instead that we try to understand what the first Christians might have been thinking when they called Jesus the “Son of God”?
Peppard believes that early Christians were inspired more by soteriology than philosophy. That is, for them Jesus’ power to save testified to his sonship. But by the fourth century, increasing theological reliance on Greek thought encouraged Christians to trace this power to the nature of his sonship. Influenced by the Platonic distinction between a realm of eternal ideals and a less real world of approximations, they posited a gulf between the absolute Creator and His creatures. This raised the issue of where Jesus belongs, and Nicene orthodoxy chose to stress his likeness to God. Jesus was not one of God's creatures; “the Son is, he did not become” (11).
Peppard suggests that Christians initially saw Jesus as God's son because they believed he had the power to make other “sons” for God. He was heir to a divine estate, a legacy that he generously offered to share with others. The Roman world offered these Christians a powerful “metaphor” for expressing this faith: “the metaphor ‘son of God’” (3). The title and the concept were familiar to Christians from both Hebrew and pagan sources.
Jesus and Octavian Augustus, the founder of Rome's first imperial dynasty, were contemporaries. Octavian ended a century-long civil war by establishing an empire behind the façade of Rome's Republic. The role he chose to play in the new system was traditional: a paterfamilias presiding over a familia. Unlike a modern “family,” the Latin familia could be a very large organization of people bound by blood and various kinds of economic and political dependence. Rome's Republic remained the official government, but it was now watched over by a paternal disciplinarian with the power to maintain order. He was the son of the deified Julius Caesar and a gens founded by the goddess Venus, but the peace, justice, and prosperity he provided for the Roman people were the chief signs of his divinity. Peppard urges us to take the cult of emperor worship seriously, for “divinity in the Roman world was not an essence or a nature, but a concept of status and power in a cosmic spectrum that had no absolute dividing lines” (31). Divinity was manifested by its effects: “gods don't first tell you they're gods; they show you, and then you tell them” (39).
In order for the empire's familia to survive, its paterfamilias needed an heir. Augustus failed to sire a son, but this was not an insurmountable problem. Roman aristocratic families had long resorted to adoption to ensure the continuity of their lines. The motive for adoption in the Roman world was the interest of fathers, not children. Adoption was intended to pass to a competent successor (usually an adult male) the power, status, and estate of the head of a familia. It remained the most common strategy for engineering the succession of Rome's emperors into the fourth century.
The transfer of imperial power by adoption helped Christians conceive of the means by which Jesus could be the son of a Hebrew God who did not procreate. The Hebrew scriptures also authorized such a metaphor. Psalm 2 quotes God telling Israel's king, “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” The Psalm mixed the metaphors of adoption and begetting, for in the ancient world an adopted son was in no way inferior in power, rights, or status to a natural son. But as social customs changed and Christian theology evolved, the tendency was more and more to separate adoption from begetting.
Peppard is fully aware that adoption is a term that invites misunderstanding. He cautions that the adoption metaphors of the first and second centuries should not be viewed anachronistically from the perspective of the kinds of questions about the human and divine in Christ that inspired the “adoptionism” debates of a later age.
For students of early Christian thought and of Roman history, who accept its reasonable ground rules, Peppard's book offers intriguing insights. It is particularly helpful for interpreting Mark's Gospel and scriptural passages relating to Jesus’ baptism, birth, family, and ancestry. Readers with an interest in patristics will find his concluding chapter, “Begotten and Adopted Sons of God—Before and After Nicea,” informative.
