Overview

As inheritors of Platonic traditions, many Jews and Christians today do not believe that God has a body. God is instead invisible and incorporeal, and even though Christians believe that God can be seen in Jesus, God otherwise remains veiled from human sight. In this ground-breaking work, Brittany E. Wilson challenges this prevalent view by arguing that early Jews and Christians often envisioned God as having a visible form. Within the New Testament, Luke-Acts in particular emerges as an important example of a text that portrays God in visually tangible ways. According to Luke, God is a perceptible, concrete being who can take on a variety of different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes. Given the corporeal connections between God and Jesus, Luke's depiction of Jesus's body also points ahead to future controversies concerning his divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed, questions concerning God's body are inextricably linked with Christology and shed light on how we are to understand Jesus's own visible embodiment in relation to God.In The Embodied God, Wilson reframes approaches to early Christology within New Testament scholarship and calls for a new way of thinking about divine-and human-bodies and embodied experience.

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9780190080822

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Reviews

Does God have a body? Can one see God? Probing the narratives of Luke and Acts as a test case, Brittany Wilson's engaging new book The Embodied God challenges us to rethink conventional historical and theological assumptions about divine embodiment and offers fresh insight into the interrelatedness of early Christian and (other) Jewish ways of representing the divine. In lucid and inviting prose, Wilson makes an important, and provocative, contribution to the field. This is a must read for students of Luke and Acts, and it will be of interest also to those who wish to explore the emergence of ideas about God and about Jesus within early Christianity. -- John T. Carroll, Union Presbyterian Seminary With The Embodied God, Britany Wilson has joined the emerging conversation among biblical (mostly Hebrew Bible) scholars regarding the presentation of the corporeality of God in the Jewish Scriptures. In helping us see these representations of God and Jesus, Wilson challenges the age-old assumptions that the Divine in the early church was disembodied and imperceptible. 'Blessed are the eyes that see. . . .' -- Mikeal C. Parsons, Baylor University If you think that God does not have a body, think again. Brittany Wilson shows that indeed the early Christians who wrote and read the Gospel of Luke and Acts thought that God is a being who is both corporeal and visible, especially when it comes to the body of Jesus. Her brilliant analyses shows that divine embodiment is an old tradition entangled in the Jewish scriptures and Greco-Roman sources, only to be veneered with Greek philosophical arguments about divine transcendence by later Christian writers. -- April D. DeConick, Rice University

Does God have a body? Can one see God? Probing the narratives of Luke and Acts as a test case, Brittany Wilson's engaging new book The Embodied God challenges us to rethink conventional historical and theological assumptions about divine embodiment and offers fresh insight into the interrelatedness of early Christian and (other) Jewish ways of representing the divine. In lucid and inviting prose, Wilson makes an important, and provocative, contribution to the field. This is a must read for students of Luke and Acts, and it will be of interest also to those who wish to explore the emergence of ideas about God and about Jesus within early Christianity. -- John T. Carroll, Union Presbyterian Seminary With The Embodied God, Britany Wilson has joined the emerging conversation among biblical (mostly Hebrew Bible) scholars regarding the presentation of the corporeality of God in the Jewish Scriptures. In helping us see these representations of God and Jesus, Wilson challenges the age-old assumptions that the Divine in the early church was disembodied and imperceptible. 'Blessed are the eyes that see. . . .' -- Mikeal C. Parsons, Baylor University If you think that God does not have a body, think again. Brittany Wilson shows that indeed the early Christians who wrote and read the Gospel of Luke and Acts thought that God is a being who is both corporeal and visible, especially when it comes to the body of Jesus. Her brilliant analyses shows that divine embodiment is an old tradition entangled in the Jewish scriptures and Greco-Roman sources, only to be veneered with Greek philosophical arguments about divine transcendence by later Christian writers. -- April D. DeConick, Rice University

Author Information

Brittany E. Wilson is Associate Professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School. Her previous book is Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts, which received the Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise.

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