D. Clint Burnett. Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context

In Christ’s Enthronement, D. Clint Burnett fills a genuine and somewhat surprising scholarly void in the field of New Testament and Pauline studies. The purpose of the book is to offer context for why Ps 110:1 was used so widely and voluminously by early Christians to depict Christ’s enthronement at God’s right hand. According to Burnett, there are twenty-one direct quotations and allusions to Ps 110:1 in first-century Christian texts. Additionally, its influence is likely felt in key confessions in Pauline texts (Rom 10:9; 1 Cor 12:3; Phil 2:9–11), making “Psalm 110:1 the most used verse from the Hebrew Bible among first century CE Christian documents” (p. 4). Burnett further observes that Ps 110:1 is alluded to in only one text from Second Temple Judaism (T. Job, 33:3), but is nowhere explicitly quoted. The sudden flurry of literary interest in Ps 110:1 surrounding the Jesus movement raises the question: Why?Burnett draws heavily on A. D. Nock’s seminal essay on Hellenistic and Roman imperial temple sharing in the Greco-Roman world to answer this question (see Σύνναος θεός, HCSP 41 [1930]: 1–62). For this reviewer, it is astonishing that it took ninety-one years for someone to draw a straight line from Nock’s essay to Ps 110:1 and Christ’s enthronement in the New Testament. Major kudos to Burnett for correcting our blind spot. One reason for this blind spot, according to Burnett, is that the dominant explanations for early Christian usage of Ps 110:1 are dependent on the dearth of Jewish literary comparanda (what Burnett calls the “fulfillment” and “functional” hypotheses [pp. 4–5]).In Greco-Roman literary and material culture, on the other hand, Burnett examines over thirty-two (possibly thirty-four) examples where Hellenistic or Roman rulers are portrayed as temple or throne sharing with a god. Notably, two thirds of this evidence comes from material culture, including the epigraphic record, coins, and statuary. While Burnett does not argue for a straight “genealogical link” between temple/throne sharing and Ps 110:1, he does argue that “royal and imperial temple and throne sharing contributed to widespread use of Ps 110:1 because they were cross-cultural rewards for pious, beneficent, and divinely approved monarchs” (p. 8). Burnett suggests that such a cross-cultural move by early Christ-confessors is comparable to the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek or Paul’s adoption of Stoic concepts in Romans 1:18–32 (p. 9). The cross-cultural resonance between Ps 110:1 and Greco-Roman temple/throne sharing also offers a stronger account for why Christ-confessors appealed to this text across the southern Levant.To test this hypothesis, Burnett offers three chapters on temple/throne sharing in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds before pivoting to an analysis of what he calls “conceptual similarities” between temple/throne sharing and two of our earliest Christian confessions in Phil 2:9–11 and Col 3:1–4. Chapter 2 corrects scholars who understand temple sharing (σύνναος) and throne sharing (σύνθρονος) as synonyms. Through philological analysis, Burnett shows that temple sharing “is the erection of a cultic statue of a being (divine or human) for limited cultic purposes inside the temple of another deity near the cultic statue of that god” (p. 35). Throne sharing, on the other hand, “is the placement of an enthroned statue of a being (divine or human), not necessarily for cultic purposes with humans, outside a temple and among already seated divine images” (p. 35). To make this distinction, Burnett surveys an impressive number of occurrences of σύνναος between the sixth century BC and the fifth century AD, where the word and motif of temple sharing occurs twenty times in literature, ca. 190 times in the epigraphic record, and ca. 115 times in papyri (p. 38).Chapter 3 offers a deeper panoramic of temple sharing in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Here, Burnett evaluates five examples of temple sharing in the Hellenistic world and eight examples in the Roman world, beginning with Julius Caesar and then members of the imperial family during the Principate. The chapter makes four important observations. First, Roman principes and female members of their families shared temples of deities of the corresponding sex (on Drusilla, see pp. 84–85; on Livia Augusta, see pp. 88–89). Second, the divine honors given to royal and imperial family members were limited because we have no evidence that “the temples and altars of the gods were rededicated to include the sovereigns in question” (p. 93). Put another way, temple sharing rulers were conceptualized as subordinate to the traditional god with whom the ruler was divinely associated (p. 93). Third, temple sharing took on a distinctively Roman flavor during the Principate, where the practice became an official part of posthumous honors conferred on divi via the state-sponsored Roman imperial cults.Chapter 4 overviews throne sharing in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Notably, throne sharing occurs less frequently in ancient sources—there are five instances of throne sharing among late Classical and Hellenistic kings and only three during the entirety of the Principate (Julia Livilla, Hadrian, and Julia Domna). Burnett also observes that “seven of the eight instances of royal and imperial throne sharing occur during the lifetime of the sovereign in question, seven cases are cultic and in one case the throne sharer is called a god” (p. 96). The criteria for throne sharing across this data was piety, beneficence, and good governance and thereby it became “a metaphor for divine approval of an autocrat’s reign” (p. 95). Burnett’s analysis of this data is judicious, including recognition that the porous relationship between royal and divine associations was not egalitarian (p. 110).Chapter 5 shifts from temple/throne sharing in antiquity to the exaltation imagery of Jesus in Phil 2:9–11. Of note, Burnett reads Phil 2:6–11 as pre-Pauline confessional material and interprets it as an early Christian interpretation of Ps 110:1. In contrast to scholars who’ve sought to elucidate the passage’s background through Second Temple Jewish or Greco-Roman literary sources, Burnett draws on material culture to “probe why the picture of the exalted and enthroned Christ in Phil 2:9–11 became widespread in earliest Christianity” (p. 120). The chapter offers a sophisticated and sober handling of the Roman imperial cults, reminding the reader of their regional and contextual diversity and, leaning on Ittai Gradel et al., the nuance between state sponsored posthumous divine honors in the Latin West and divine honors for living members of the imperial family in the Greek East. Burnett proceeds to animate Philippi’s Roman character as a Roman colony and catalogs Latin inscriptions that confer the title divus on Julio-Claudian family members (Table 5.3; 5.4); notably, 100 percent of the titles used for deified rulers are divus/diva in Roman Philippi and all of the imperial priests are Romans (p. 129).Burnett points to this nuance to push back against scholars like Adela Yarbro Collins and Gordon Fee who’ve overcooked the polemical parallelisms between the imperial cults and Phil 2:6–11 since inhabitants of Roman Philippi would not understand deus and divus as synonyms (p. 130). This nuance leads Burnett to conclude that the kyrios title in Phil 2:11 is a messianic title and “not a direct reference to the princeps . . . since kyrios/dominus was not an imperial title in the colony during the early Principate (p. 156). This point loses its gravitas, however, if one locates the pre-Pauline confession in the Greek East. Still, Burnett sees temple sharing and Ps 110:1 as a cultural and religious matrix through which Roman Philippi would resonate with the exaltation of Jesus due to his piety, beneficence, and divine approval. Burnett here is careful to offer three nuances: (1) no imperial family member is ever honored for the benefaction of death; (2) no imperial family member is ever exalted over cosmic forces or death itself; and (3) God exalts and ratifies Jesus’s exaltation rather than the Roman senate or a local council (p. 150).Chapter 6 opens with an overview of imperial divine honors in the Lycus valley in the cities of Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis, concluding that “a good case can be made that the Colossian Christ-confessors were familiar with” temple/throne sharing (p. 168). The remainder of the chapter is terse and redundant but makes a compelling case that temple/throne sharing offered a culturally resonant optic for early Christian usage of Ps 110:1 and its probable influence of Col 3:1–4. In my mind, Burnett’s most interesting contribution in this chapter is his discussion of the democratizing effect of Christ’s temple/throne sharing in Col 3:1–4, wherein Christ-confessors are portrayed as being raised with Christ through baptism and thereby have a share in God’s temple and throne. Burnett is certainly correct that “such an idea must have been astonishing for the Colossian Christ-confessors” (p. 78) amid their subordination to the imperial family in the hierarchy of Roman power.Christ’s Enthronement is a major contribution to Pauline studies and our understanding of the religions of the Roman Empire. The book adds to a number of recent studies that compare material culture with New Testament texts but goes further by drilling down into the epigraphic record in a way that is reminiscent of Frederick Danker. To this reviewer, Burnett ably proves his primary thesis that Hellenistic royal and Roman imperial temple/throne sharing helps to explain why early Christians across a wide geography gravitated to Ps 110:1 to portray Jesus’s heavenly exaltation. This thesis does not falsify the fulfillment or functional hypotheses, but it does offer a more complete picture and heretofore neglected cultural and material lexicon for understanding exaltation Christology.While Burnett goes out of his way to not be associated with the history of religions school, I found his overemphasis on the overlapping motifs between Christ’s exaltation and Greco-Roman temple/throne sharing to overshadow distinctives. For example, Burnett himself acknowledges that military victory and violent pacification was a common benefaction that led to temple/throne sharing (pp. 144–50); this precursor to divine honors would find resonance with the military heritage of inhabitants of Roman Philippi as Burnett suggests (see p. 150). Martial victory and the conferral of material benefits on subordinate subjects and their temples in the aftermath of war, however, is entirely lacking from the Jesus movement. Indeed, what kind of benefactor was Jesus in the Roman world? What was distinctive about Jesus’s euergesia? And if Paul is riffing on the scripts and topoi of temple/throne sharing and reorienting it around Christ’s self-sacrificial death and defeat of Death, what does this say about this pre-Pauline materials’ attitude toward imperial Rome and the machinery of a war economy? Paul’s language of “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited,” “emptied himself,” “taking on the form of a slave,” “being born in human likeness,” “humbled himself,” “obedient to the point of death” is not Roman imperial logics. This is a critical inversion of imperial logics and refusal of divine honors in a christological key. Here, I think more attention to the Hellenistic treatises on kingship, especially among neo-Pythagorean philosophers, would further supplement Burnett’s thesis and identify it as more polemical than this study suggests.This observation leads me to a small but deeper quibble. I’ve noticed a reticence among some New Testament scholars to draw a line in the sand with regard to their own interpretation of Paul’s attitude(s) toward imperial Rome. I get it—the hermeneutical land mines are real, the historical nuances demanding, and the secondary literature outspoken across the spectrum. But are we to seriously believe that these early confessions are apolitical? In Burnett’s own words, “Christ-confessors were participating in a wider Greco-Roman political discourse and articulating their own belief about who and what deity held sway over the oikoumenē and the cosmos” (p. 112). Statements like this are as far as Burnett is willing to push the issue, yet I think Burnett’s persuasive case for reading this confessional material through the lens of temple/throne sharing creates an obvious polemical parallelism with royal ideology that deserves more explicit consideration and reckoning. Admittedly, I’m imposing my own interests here, but I’d love to hear Burnett speak more to the Paul and politics debate in another book.To conclude, Burnett’s study is a must-read for scholars and classicists. In addition to original content, his methodology is an exemplar in its handling of the Roman imperial cults and should be studied and imitated carefully by subsequent scholars and PhD candidates investigating early Christianity’s negotiation of the built environment of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds

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