Paula Fredriksen, “How High Can Early High Christology Be?” in Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, edited by Matthew V. Novenson (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 319:
What Paul thought, reconstructed historically, will always line up more closely with what any other first-century person thought even if that person were an Egyptian magical adept, a devotee of Cybele, a Roman senator, or the Jewish high priest—than with whatever Augustine thought, or what Luther thought, or what current theologians think. True, what Paul said about Jesus was, in its historical context, distinctive. So too, however, were the teachings about Sarapis, once his divinity manifested to his community in Alexandria. And Paul’s claims for Christ’s divinity, further, were indeed genuinely “new,” relative to claims that were made for, say, Augustus; but they were similar, also, in some ways, to claims that were made about Augustus. And Paul’s claims could be new only in a first-century way, not in a fourth-century way, or in a sixteenth-century way, or in a twenty-first-century way.
Theology refamiliarizes Paul’s letters. History defamiliarizes them—and should. This is because ancient people were not modern people, and they lived in a world utterly different from ours. We should mind the gap—and respect it.
The Amateur Exegete 