The pre-existent Jesus of Psalm 110

 

Some might be puzzled by the idea that Psalm 110:1 portrays a pre-existent Lord seated alongside God. Pre-existent? It is common enough to find Christians, reading the verse with the eyes of faith, claiming to see a divine Jesus next to God the Father. It is also common to see that claim to divinity challenged, usually on the grounds that rabbis traditionally hold to an interpretation based on the grammar of different Hebrew words being used for the two “Lords” of 110:1, and that such interpretation goes back to times before Jesus of Galilee. (See my post here.)

But if we focus too narrowly solely on questions of grammar and tradition, we can miss two very important questions: does Jesus in the gospels have a distinctive interpretation of the verse? And does his interpretation suggest anything noteworthy other than divinity? Before anyone scoffs, I would ask you to consider two very different books recently published by Oxford University Press, one by Robert Cargill and another by Matthew W. Bates, which have something to say about this. What we find is that Jesus interrupts the tradition. This is stuff that you won't find in David Hay's landmark 1970s book on the psalm.[1] (See my review of Hay’s book here.)

Here are some things gleaned from their books.

 

Robert Cargill

Jesus makes a riddle out of Psalm 110:1 in Mark 12:35-7. In so doing, Jesus gives voice to a game-changing view of Psalm 110. Before Jesus, it was perfectly possible to think of it as an anonymous psalm about David, or about someone like David, called “my Lord.” Whereas Jesus (like the Targums) gives us a different interpretation based on the idea of David speaking it, David being the author, speaking about a Lord of David.

That is the basis for the game-changing interpretation, which the scholar Robert Cargill regards as a “misinterpretation” by Jesus (which rather suggests that Cargill thinks that there ought to have been a fixed normative interpretation throughout the centuries, which seems doubtful).[2]

And Cargill means a distinctively Christian view developed that 110:1 is about “an otherworldly messiah,” who is not King David (nor his Jerusalem-based descendants).

It is a view building on this Jesus tradition that David himself was the author of the psalm. The Jesus tradition resulted in the interpretation that David could not possibly have been talking about himself. So, David himself in the psalm “must be referring to an expected divine messianic deliverer.” Jesus’ own view, according to Cargill, referring to Mark 12:35-37, is thus: “If David composed the psalm, and therefore could not possibly have been referring to himself, he must have been referring to a third party, which Jesus claims is the eschatological Messiah … [which] requires that the Messiah exist prior to David, thereby prohibiting him from being a “Son of David.”” (Cargill 82-830).

I’m not sure that Cargill is right that it requires a Messiah existing before David, but the Jesus tradition leaves the door open to that. It does at least point to a Messiah existing at the same time as the author David, and remaining with God from the time of David to the time of the start of the gospel narratives. This is startling.

You may well ask why it points to a figure alive from David’s century to the first century. Well, let’s start with this figure being alive at the time of David. Whoever the author of the psalm is, it is about someone alive in the author’s time: ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand…”

There is no way that these words were intended to refer solely to someone who would only be born in the author’s vague future. That is, the subject of the psalm had already become David’s own Lord during David’s lifetime or earlier, which is a given if David wrote it. So for starters, this figure was alive in David’s century. But since this figure is now expected to visit as the Messiah, he has had an unusually long life.

That is the dramatic impact of viewing David as the author of the psalm, of viewing the “my Lord” as being alive both in David’s day and in gospel times, the view that Jesus gives voice to.

Surely the fertile soil for such thinking was already latent in the psalm, picturing someone who is surprisingly sat beside the divinity, who has a birth somehow unusual, and who is a priest “forever”: it is ripe for seeing the figure as somehow divine and alive in heaven for hundreds of years, at the very least, perhaps pre-existent before David. (Or at least living in a heavenly temporal status that bypassed our earthly concept of time).

Reading the psalm as written by David as the author, and reading the psalm as being about someone else with God living for hundreds of years, is one thing. It is also a reading coupled with another development, the divergence of equivalent terms in Greek and Hebrew - kyrios mou and adoni - away from each other: the divergence of the Greek Christian view of “kyrios mou” as being a divine being, splitting away from a Jewish Hebrew view of “adoni” as being a human being (Cargill 83-84). This linguistic divergence in how the word was read in Psalm 110:1 is crystallised on the Jewish side in the Masoretic Text which shows the vowels that turn the sacred consonantal Hebrew text ADNY to be pronounced as ‘adoni.’ And on the Christian side, the Old Greek version “kyrios mou” of 110:1 is crystallised as divine in a history of biblical commentary. See my post which explains the technicalities of this linguistic divergence in 110:1 here.

Cargill also looks at another possible divergence between Jewish and Christian interpretation in verse 110:3. Cargill argues that, without any corruption of the sacred consonantal text, the rabbis deliberately vowelised 110:3 so as to distinguish its meaning away from Christian interpretation, and the Masoretes preserved the rabbis’ efforts in the MT (84). Cargill’s argument rests on the lack of correspondence of multiple words in the ancient Old Greek translation of verse 3 compared to the later MT's vowelised reading, and posits that alternative vowel-pointing is sufficient to explain the alternatives explored by the Greek text. That is, the OG is faithful to an earlier pronunciation (and reading) of the Hebrew consonantal text of 110:3 as it may have been understood in pre-Christian times, which was ripe for a Christian “virgin birth” interpretation. But later the rabbis’ MT vowel-pointing conveniently steers away from that trajectory, cleverly to avoid mention of the womb, of the begetting of the Messiah (110:3), and of the eternal priesthood (110:4): all things that the OG permits but the vowelisation in the MT does not. For example, Hebrew consonants in 110:3 are capable of being read either as “the day of your power” or “the day of your birth” (85), depending on alternative vowelisations, so the room for rival interpretations is obvious. Using the OG as a guide, Cargill discards some of the MT vowelisation, and produces this translation of 110:3-4 directly from the Hebrew:

“With you is dominion on the day of your birth;
in my majesty, holy from the womb;
from the dawn, go forth because I have begotten you.
YHWH has sworn and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever according to
what I have spoken, my righteous king.”

This erases the name of Melchizedek (which is part of Cargill’s thesis) and gives us a priest-king, something alien to the time of David and the kings who followed him, but favourable to Christian interpretation.

Where is all this leading? As Jesus seems to read it, he seems to take it that David has already called Jesus “Lord.” And it follows thus: in Jesus’ reading, the seating at the right hand had already taken place when David said it. And it means Jesus has been Lord for centuries at least, from David’s time to gospel times; and as such it does not really fit so well to call this figure “son of David.” Jesus leaves the mystery hanging but lays fertile soil for the Christian account of this being a figure with an enigmatic begetting, an eternal existence, and an eternal priesthood, an “ancient of days” kind of figure.

Whereas it is generally thought that 110:3 is absent in New Testament interpretation, one is certainly tempted to look again to see whether there is in fact allusion to this constellation: “day of your birth… holy from the womb… from the dawn… I have begotten you”! Would that be why the discourse in Mark 12:35-37 drags the question of sonship into Psalm 110:1? That's a question for another time!

Cargill isn’t the only scholar to see what is latent in Jesus’ reading of the text as being authored by David and addressed to a pre-existent Lord Jesus alive at the time of David. He is one of two contemporary authors published by Oxford University Press thinking this way. It’s worth saying that neither Cargill nor Matthew Bates cite each other’s work in the two books I am referencing here. They appear to have come to overlapping conclusions independently.

 

Matthew W. Bates

So, it's not just Cargill who explores this trajectory. Matthew W. Bates looks at Jesus’ reading of Psalm 110 as consistent with an early Christian technique of gleaning from the Hebrew Scriptures any texts that can be read as “theo-drama,” in which one of the characters in an Old Testament narrative gets interpreted as being Jesus.[3] This isn’t a new idea. Irenaeus, for example, definitely read passages in Hebrew Scripture that way. (See, for example, 48-49 in Irenaeus’ On the Apostolic Preaching.[4] See Bates, 70-71 on this.)

These are what Bates calls “divine dialogues” in the Old Testament and one of the parts in it is attributed to Jesus. Psalm 110 is one of those that Bates reviews. (Others in the same chapter, which covers the theme of pre-existence, include Psalm 2:5-9; Isaiah 55:3 with Psalm 16:10; and Isaiah 42:1.) In this Psalm, Jesus is seen as having a silent part, with God the Father doing the talking (to Jesus). David as author and reciter plays the part of narrator as well as speaking God’s part.

Bates makes the point that when Jesus makes a riddle out of Psalm 110:1 (Mark 12:35-7), he is doing more than merely trying to catch his opponents out (Bates, 44). It has a deeper meaning than a gotcha. It relies on the Old Greek (LXX 109:1). It is about who YHWH/Kyrios is addressing, and why this person is called “my Lord.”

And Bates points out the crucial wider context of the controversies Jesus is dealing with.

First Jesus is asked what to do with a coin bearing the image of Caesar and presumably an inscription that translates as “Augustus Tiberius Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus.”

Second, in Mark 12:24-27 Jesus answers about the resurrection, and Jesus enigmatically declares that his Father is “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” such that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were still alive to God in Moses’ day (Bates, 46-48). Is there a gospel hint that Jesus is the Son of God who will live again?

Third, Jesus turns the tables and asks a question. Here comes his usage of Psalm 110:1. Again, it is important not to read it as if David were saying, as it were prophetically, “The Lord will say to my Lord.” It doesn’t say that. Rather, “The Lord [has already] said to my Lord.” Jesus presents this as a conundrum: if David had already said that to his Lord way back, then how are they waiting for a descendant, “a son of David,” now? Jesus calls on 110:1 to problematise the “son of David” idea, and creates a puzzle that his opponents are presumably stumped by, and he doesn’t tell them the solution. How will this son of David be living centuries after David has already called him Lord? What kind of life is this? And what bearing does this have on it: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive to God. Jesus is deliberately making heads spin. Abraham and sons are dead to men but still alive to God; and David’s Lord is still living from David’s day through to gospel times. Jesus sees something more unusual in Psalm 110:1 than simply the enthronement of a temporary Israelite king in Jerusalem. His reading is a radical departure from such a simple enthronement, because, Bates argues persuasively, we see Jesus portrayed “as speaking of his own preexistence and divine begottenness” (49-50).

To an extent, Bates’ reading depends on the assumption that Jesus in invoking part of the psalm is summoning the whole of it to the listener’s mind (just like hearing a snatch of a pop song we know by memory can bring the rest of the song flooding into our consciousness). There is evidence of this sort of thing (53 n.23). So, by reciting the first line, Jesus will stir up the memory of the next lines too, and Jesus is implying that they would apply to himself just as much as the first line does (52). As Jesus has presented the first line as a riddle, his listeners would mentally reach for the following lines to solve the riddle (53). This includes 110:3 where the Old Greek, in the version known to Irenaeus, enables Jesus to be spoken of as begotten “before the morning star” (Irenaeus 48, On the Apostolic Preaching).

Moving on to 110:4, which is directly addressed in Hebrews (not in Jesus’ words), Bates notes that again David as the reciter plays the part of narrator and also speaks God’s part, while Jesus has the silent part (spoken to) (54-55). In this theo-drama with one part attributed to Christ, the eternal priesthood is given to the pre-existent Christ “before the dawn of time.” (Bates is blending 110:3 and 110:4 and taking his inspiration from the Old Greek, LXX 109, because the biblical authors also did.) Bates notes that the notion of something/someone existing before the creation of the world has examples in rabbinic and Second Temple Judaism (55).

In terms of this having a meaning from the time of David and a meaning from the time of Christ, it’s a bit complicated. We have “a theodramatic reported speech at the time of the enthronement harking back to an earlier theodramatic setting” (162-63). So we have theodramatic setting A and setting B. Bates: “The Father’s first speeches to the Son occurred sometimes earlier than these reports  - the reports look back to a much earlier time in the theodrama – the time before time, theodramatic setting “A”.” At that time, the Father spoke of then-present and future things (“you are a priest forever” and “I will make the nations your heritance” (167). And there is theodramatic setting B, the Son’s enthronement after the resurrection “at which time the Father speaks (e.g. “sit at my right hand…)… and at which time the reports of the earlier speeches are given” (167).

So from Jesus explicit use of 110:1 and implied use of the following verses, together with Hebrews’ use of 110:4, a picture of a pre-existent Christ emerges, a picture of which Christ is aware.

 

Conclusion

Of course, if Jesus indicates his pre-existence, this plays into discussion of his divinity. But of course, Jesus in the gospels enigmatically leaves the puzzle hanging. The important takeaway is to remember that discussion of whether Jesus is thought of as divine in Psalm 110:1 is not a discussion that can be settled by reference to Hebrew grammar and tradition, because Jesus’ words interrupt this tradition. He treats David as the author of the psalm, not the subject of it, and this has all sorts of consequences. Something to ponder on.

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[1] David Hay, Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm 110 in Early Christianity. Atlanta: SBL, 1989. (SBL in 1989 took over the copyright from this 1973 Abingdon Press book.)

[2] Robert R. Cargill, Melchizedek, King of Sodom: How Scribes Invented the Biblical Priest-King. Oxford University Press, 2019.

[3] Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament & Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament. Oxford University Press, 2015. For opposition to Bates on linguistic grounds, see Peter J. Gentry, “Psalm 110:3 and Retrieval Theology” in SBJT 25.3 (2021), 149-168.

[4] St Irenaeus of Lyon, On the Apostolic Preaching. Trans. John Behr. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood NY, 1997.