Larry Hurtado

Larry Weir Hurtado FRSE (December 29, 1943 – November 25, 2019) was an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He served as Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh from 1996 to 2011. Hurtado headed the School of Divinity from 2007 to 2010 and directed the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins until August 2011.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 29, 1943, Hurtado studied at Central Bible College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While at TEDS, he majored in New Testament studies and earned a Master of Arts in New Testament in 1967. He completed his Ph.D. in 1973 at Case Western Reserve University under Eldon Jay Epp with the dissertation Codex Washingtonianus in the Gospel of Mark: Its Textual Relationships and Scribal Characteristics.

Hurtado received his first academic appointment at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he taught from 1975 to 1978. Before moving to Canada in 1975, he pastored a church in Skokie, Illinois. He then joined the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, was promoted to full professor in 1988, and remained at the university until 1996. During this period he founded the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities and served as its first director from 1990 to 1992. After his appointment at the University of Edinburgh, he established the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, which focuses on Christianity in the first three centuries.

Hurtado was elected to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1984 and received the Rh Institute Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship and Research in the Humanities in 1986. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2008 and served as President of the British New Testament Society from 2009 to 2012. He secured research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). He gave invited lectures in many universities in the UK and other countries and was a visiting fellow at Macquarie University in Australia in 2005.

The School of Divinity announced that Hurtado had died of cancer in his sleep on November 25, 2019. The University of Edinburgh created a postgraduate scholarship fund for candidates studying Christian origins in his honor. Holly J. Carey, Professor of Biblical Studies and Department Chair of Biblical Studies at Point University, wrote an obituary in his honour for Christianity Today.

Hurtado argued that religious experiences gave the decisive impetus to the early devotion to Jesus within Jewish monotheism. Reviewing that work, Crispin Fletcher-Louis concluded that the place Hurtado gives to religious experiences "is both without clear evidence and, for other reasons, highly unlikely".

Hurtado's scholarly reputation rests chiefly on his account of how devotion to Jesus arose in the earliest Christian movement. Where most discussion of early Christology had focused on theological ideas, texts and titles, Hurtado centred his inquiry on devotional practice, the corporate and public reverence actually paid to Jesus. The pattern he identified included singing to and about Jesus, prayer to him, invoking and confessing him, baptism and prophecy in his name, and a cultic meal centred on his death. He argued that this devotion emerged remarkably early, within the first years of the movement, that its intensity and diversity were unparalleled in the surrounding religious world, and that it nevertheless took place within a monotheistic framework.

The account was framed against Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos (1913), which had explained the worship of Jesus as Lord as a product of Hellenistic influence on Gentile Christian communities separated from their Jewish roots. Hurtado answered that the full devotional pattern was established in the earliest, Jewish circles of the movement, particularly as reflected in Paul's letters, so that devotion to Jesus is a fundamentally Jewish phenomenon rather than a Hellenistic accretion. Jewish traditions about principal agents of God, such as angels, exalted patriarchs and personified Wisdom, supplied part of the conceptual background, but Hurtado stressed that no such figure received cultic devotion in pre-Christian Judaism. He therefore described the inclusion of Jesus alongside God in devotion as a "mutation" of Jewish monotheism, and the devotional pattern itself as "binitarian" in shape.

He set out the case first in One God, One Lord (1988) and at full scale in Lord Jesus Christ (2003), which surveyed the evidence from Paul and Judean Jewish Christianity through the Gospels and other early Jesus books to the second century. How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (2005) restated the argument in a more accessible form, its opening chapters deriving from public lectures. Hurtado resisted reading this material as a slow, staged development. He explicitly rejected any unilinear, multi-stage model of christological development for the earliest period, treating the emergence of devotion instead as a sudden eruption in the post-Easter period, and he held that belief in the pre-existence of Jesus arose very early, already presupposed in Paul's letters, while the basis given for reverencing Jesus was consistently God's exaltation of him.

To explain how devout Jews could come to reverence Jesus in this way within a few years, Hurtado gave a central place to religious experience. He proposed that revelatory experiences of several kinds, including visions of the exalted Jesus and prophetic oracles, together with inspired songs and what he called "charismatic exegesis" of the Scriptures, generated the conviction that God required Jesus to be reverenced, and that such experiences were themselves shaped by the recipients' Jewish religious tradition. Where religious experiences ordinarily reinforce prior convictions, he argued that some experiences reconfigure them, and it was experiences of this reconfiguring kind that he held responsible for the novelty of Jesus-devotion.

Hurtado also insisted that the impetus did not come through a single founder figure. The earliest circles appear in the sources as Spirit-endowed communities in which revelation could come through multiple believers, and he found no direct indication of a major split among the earliest believers over Jesus-devotion itself, the sharp disputes of the period concerning instead the terms on which Gentiles were admitted. He likewise argued that Jewish opposition to the movement was provoked principally by its devotion to Jesus, noting how often the sources portray believers as suffering "for my name's sake".

Hurtado's earliest work was in New Testament textual criticism. In Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text (1981), he subjected Codex Washingtonianus, P45 and Family 13 in the Gospel of Mark to quantitative measurement of their agreements, confirming a significant relationship among these witnesses while arguing that the commonly held view of them as reflecting an early stage of the Caesarean text-type was erroneous.

In The Earliest Christian Artifacts (2006), he argued that the physical features of the earliest Christian manuscripts are themselves evidence for the character of early Christian piety. Christians strongly preferred the codex for writings they regarded as scripture, and features of format and layout, including aids for readers, indicate that many copies were prepared for public reading, so that these texts were already functioning as scripture in the second and third centuries. He treated the nomina sacra, the reverential abbreviations of a small set of sacred words, as a Christian scribal innovation expressing in material form the "binitarian shape" of the earliest Christian piety, and he read the staurogram, the tau-rho monogram used in writing the words for cross and crucify, as a stylized visual representation of Jesus on the cross, and thus as evidence for the importance of Christ's death in Christian faith from at least the second century.

In Destroyer of the Gods (2016), Hurtado argued that early Christianity thrived in the Roman world because of, and not despite, features that made it seem distinctive and objectionable to its neighbours. The features he singled out included its refusal to take part in the cults of other gods, a religious identity detached from ethnicity and open across ethnic lines, an unusually "bookish" culture centred on producing, copying and reading texts, and ethical demands that reached into areas of conduct, including sexual behaviour, where Roman religion typically made few demands. Reviewing the book, John S. Kloppenborg called the chapter on Christian book culture perhaps its most innovative contribution, while judging that Hurtado was better at outlining the distinctive features of the movement than at accounting for its success.

Lord Jesus Christ attracted extensive engagement on its appearance. Hurtado counted well over sixty reviews of the book by scholars around the world, noted colloquia devoted to it in the United States and Europe in 2005, and recorded that translations had appeared in several languages, among them Spanish and French. Thomas R. Schreiner described it as an "erudite and mammoth study" and judged that the views of "Bousset and his ilk" had received a "deathblow" from it. William Klein called it a "tour de force" and a "truly erudite analysis".

The most extensive critique was Crispin Fletcher-Louis's forty-five page review article of 2009. Fletcher-Louis credited Hurtado with demonstrating the devotional pattern, writing that "the onus is now on those who would argue against" the view that a high Christology was very early, essentially Jewish and widespread. He nevertheless concluded that the account remained a multi-stage model despite its presentation as a single eruption, that it overstated the case for Jewish opposition to Christ-devotion, and that the place it gave to religious experience lacked clear support in the primary texts. Maurice Casey had earlier charged that the book proceeded by "evangelical rather than analytical categories", and Adela Yarbro Collins offered a counter-proposal in the essay collection published in Hurtado's honour in 2007. Hurtado replied to Fletcher-Louis in the same journal in 2010, denying that he held the three-stage schema attributed to him and dismissing the claim that he had endorsed Lessing's separation of history and faith as a red herring.

Fletcher-Louis noted that Martin Hengel had identified Hurtado as a contributor to a new "history of religions school" urging a radical rethink of christological origins. He concluded that after Hurtado's work, discussion of early Christology could no longer proceed purely through theological ideas and texts, because the devotional practices behind the texts themselves demanded explanation. Rohintan Mody likewise judged that students of Christian origins were in Hurtado's debt for the manuscript studies collected in The Earliest Christian Artifacts.

• Hurtado, Larry W. (1981). Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark. Studies and Documents. Vol. 43. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802818720. OCLC 7206722.
• ——— (1988). One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. ISBN 9780800620769. OCLC 17234318.
• ——— (1990). Mark. New International Biblical Commentary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. ISBN 9780943575162. OCLC 20693882.
• ——— (1999). At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion, the 1999 Didsbury Lectures. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press. ISBN 9780802847492. OCLC 44133065.
• ——— (2003). Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802860705. OCLC 51623141.
• ——— (2005). How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802828613. OCLC 61461917.
• ——— (2006). The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802828958. OCLC 70668672.
• ——— (2010). God in New Testament Theology. Library of Biblical Theology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. ISBN 9781426719547. OCLC 891464651.
• ——— (2016). Destroyer of the Gods: early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. ISBN 9781481304733. OCLC 950202343.
• ——— (2016). Why on Earth Did Anyone Become a Christian in the First Three Centuries?. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. ISBN 9781626005044.
• ——— (2018). Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press. ISBN 9781683590965.

• ———, ed. (2006). The Freer Biblical Manuscripts: fresh studies of an American treasure trove. Text-Critical Studies. Vol. 6. ISBN 9781589832084. OCLC 69423242.
• ———; Owen, Paul L., eds. (2011). 'Who is this son of man?' the latest scholarship on a puzzling expression of the historical Jesus. Library of New Testament studies. Vol. 390. London & New York: T & T Clark. ISBN 9780567521194. OCLC 670507593.

• ——— (1997). "Greco-Roman Textuality and the Gospel of Mark: A Critical Assessment of Werner Kelber's The Oral and the Written Gospel". Bulletin for Biblical Research. 7: 91–106. doi:10.2307/26422322. JSTOR 26422322.
• ——— (1999). "New Testament Studies at the Turn of the Millennium: Questions for the Discipline". Scottish Journal of Theology. 52 (2): 158–78. doi:10.1017/S0036930600053606. S2CID 170502319.
• ——— (2003). "Homage to the Historical Jesus and Early Christian Devotion". Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. 1 (2): 131–46. doi:10.1177/147686900300100201.
• ——— (2018). "Observations on the "Monotheism" Affirmed in the New Testament". In Beeley, Christopher A.; Weedman, Mark E. (eds.). The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. pp. 50–70. ISBN 978-0813229959.