>>19842986>Christ is LORD"Lord" is how Christians and jews refer to Yahweh. This sort of statement was meant to be taken literally: Jesus is Yahweh.
This is one piece of evidence that Jesus is not actually a historical character, because stories about him were meant to be understood literally as the life and adventures of an incarnation of Yahweh.
Let me be clear: the earliest Christians did not think Jesus was the son of Yahweh or that Yahweh was God the Father, rather this was a continuation of the ancient understanding that Yahweh was the son of elohim, part of a pantheon. The notion that Jesus is the firstborn son of God comes directly from Gen 1:26-27. You have to understand that pre-Christian jews were reading those verses as if they were about Yahweh, because after they establish that some "man" was made in the image and likeness of God, they noticed that Yahweh was introduced in in Gen 2. So they thought an anonymous divine man was made in Gen 1:26-27 who was then called Yahweh in Gen 2 and proceeded to make the first humans from dirt unlike Yahweh who was made of divine substance.
Yahweh walks the garden around like a regular Joe in Genesis. He was imagined as an incarnated god with finite knowledge and power from the very beginning. Then we have encounters with various anonymous divine "men" in Genesis such as the elohim who wrestled Jacob. These were often interpreted as Yahweh in disguise.
This is why early Christians kept talking about Christ in the Old Testament as if Jesus was a character in jewish literature from the very beginning. Well, technically he was, just by a different name. They reinforced this idea with a system of abbreviations called nomina sacra.
Lord God, κύριος ό θεός was sometimes abbreviated ΚΣ ΘΣ or ΚϹ ΘϹ
Christ Jesus Χριστός Ιησούς ΧΣ ΙΣ / ΧϹ ΙϹ.
And an alternative spelling of κύριος: χύριος so that ΧΣ literally meant Christ and Lord simultaneously, hence "Jesus is Lord"
