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The virtues of this superb book lie as much in its critique as in its constructive proposal. In a thin volume—compressed from his Didsbury Lectures at the British Isles Nazarene College, slightly revised and lightly annotated—Richard Bauckham lays out the outlines for a decisive shift in contemporary approaches to New Testament Christology. The compression of Bauckham's argument comes at a cost. He leaves out the fuller marshalling of textual evidence to support his claims, and he promises a volume that will take up that task in the near future. Yet there is a sense in which this support is not necessary to the central theses of his argument, because the argument does not primarily depend on bringing new evidence to bear on an old problem. Rather, Bauckham proposes a new—clearly superior—way of reading the evidence about the relationship between the New Testament's claims about Jesus' identity and the identity of God as understood within the context of Second Temple Judaism.

Over the past generation, the most common way of presenting New Testament Christology has been a History of Religions approach, which seeks to relate the New Testament's claims about Christ to conceptions of monotheism current in early Judaism. On this view, the more strict the monotheism of the Second Temple period, the more difficult it becomes for the first Jewish followers of Jesus to attribute real divinity to him.

The solution, from a History of Religions standpoint, lies in revising our understanding of Jewish monotheism at this time by attending to the numerous semi-divine intermediary figures who appear in Jewish literature of the period. Such an approach reveals that early Judaism did not conceive of monotheism as strictly as one might think. Hence the first Christians could rely on views about these intermediary figures for the conceptual and theological tools they would need to fashion their accounts of Jesus' connection to God. The New Testament's claims about Jesus' divinity, then, are not all that radical. Rather, they represent a sort of ratcheting up of the already existing notion of semi-divine intermediary figures.

Bauckham proposes a radical departure from this way of approaching New Testament Christology by focusing on the way God's identity was perceived. "What has been lacking in the whole discussion of this issue has been an adequate understanding of the ways in which Second Temple Judaism understood the uniqueness of God," he writes. "By acquiring such an understanding, we shall be able to see that what the New Testament texts in general do is take up the well-known Jewish monotheistic ways of distinguishing the one God from all other reality and use these precisely as ways of including Jesus in the unique identity of the one God as commonly understood in Second Temple Judaism."

As Bauckham presents the problem of relating Jesus and Jewish montheism, the key issue has little to do with intermediary figures. Rather, the crucial first step is characterizing the unique identity of the God of Israel. A full account of God's unique identity would be beyond the scope of Bauckham's work here. His account, however, is sufficient to advance the several key claims.

First, two features were primarily characteristic of God's identity: "the one God is the sole Creator of all things and. … the one God is the sole Ruler of all things." Further, worship of this one God corresponds to God's identity. Worship entails recognition of God's unique identity and can only be offered to the Creator and Ruler of all, not to any created subject beings. Finally, as the intermediary figures are clearly created and subject, they are unambiguously distinct from God's identity. They can in no way provide a bridge over which New Testament thinking about Christ can inch its way toward divinity.

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