Embodied image

Were one to ask what allows such remarkable claims to be made about the new possibilities for human life, the Christians would tell of Jesus as the one who was the image of God. In some contrast to modern understandings of the word image, they did not mean that Jesus “reflected” God as if he were a copy of some other reality. They meant instead that precisely as the human that he was—and in the “scheme” of the human life that he thus lived—he enfleshed the God who made the world (see Phil 2:2, 5–11). The Lord of Israel has come as the Lord in the life of Jesus. When Luke speaks of the Lord of all, he means both the Lord of heaven and earth and the resurrected Jesus (Acts 4:24; 10:36; 17:24). And for Justin [Martyr], God’s very Word has taken flesh in Jesus; the speech of the Lord of Israel turns out to be the human life of the Nazarene.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 218–19