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Originally Posted by Vorkosigan In this period the belief in "two powers in heaven" was a jewish variant belief that even crops up in the Bible and was not uncommon at all. Alan Segal at Columbia has done a great deal of work on this. Intermediary powers are common in Judaism. Note that while Paul has to put a great deal of effort into defending Jesus against false Jesus-s and against misunderstandings, he never has to apologize for believing in a second power in heaven.

In this study of the rabbinic heretics who believed in Two Powers in Heaven, Alan Segal explores some relationships between rabbinic Judaism, Merkabah mysticism, and early Christianity. Two Powers in Heaven was a very early category of heresy. It was one of the basic categories by which the rabbis perceived the new phenomenon of Christianity and one of the central issues over which Judaism and Christianity separated. Segal reconstructs the development of the heresy through prudent dating of the stages of the rabbinic traditions. The basic heresy involved interpreting scripture to say that a principal angelic or hypostatic manifestation in heaven was equivalent to God. The earliest heretics believed in two complementary powers in heaven, while later heretics believed in two opposing powers in heaven. Segal stresses the importance of perceiving the relevance of rabbinic material for solving traditional problems of New Testament and gnostic scholarship, and at the same time maintains the necessity of reading those literatures for dating rabbinic material.

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver I dunno, considering how often people in general are in fact wrong about so many things. However . . . if Christians' belief in the early second century were the only relevant datum, I'd probably give them the benefit of doubt and side with historicity. There are other data, though, and when they're all taken into consideration, historicity looks improbable to me.

Enoch and Moses, however, are the most important non-Christian figures of divinization or angelic transformation. For instance, Philo describes Moses as divine, based upon the word God used of him in Exodus 4:16 and 7:1. Thus Sirach 45:1-5 compares Moses to God in the Hebrew or "equal in glory to the holy ones", in the Greek version of the text. Philo and the Samaritans also expressed Moses' pre-eminence in Jewish tradition by granting him a kind of deification. In the Testament of Moses, Moses is described as the mediator or arbiter of his covenant" (1:14)...

Philo can speak of Moses as made into a divinity in several places. In exegeting Moses' receiving the Ten Commandments, Philo envisions an ascent, not merely up the mountain but to the heavens, describing possibly a mystical identification between this manifestation of God and Moses by suggesting in his Life of Moses and Questions and Answers on Exodus that Moses attained to a divine nature through contact with the divinity...

The surviving text of Ezekiel the Tragedian also hints at a transformation of an earthly hero into a divine figure which he relates that the venerable man (phos gennaios) handed Moses his scepter and summoned him to sit upon the throne, placing a diadem on his head. Thereafter the stars bow down to him and parade for his inspection. Since stars and angels are identified throughout the biblical period, there can be no doubt that Moses here is depicted as the leader of the angels and hence above the angels. This enthronement scene with a human figure being exalted as a monarch or divinity in heaven resembles the enthronement of the "Son of man"; the enthronement helps us understand some of the traditions which later appear in Jewish mysticism and may have informed Paul's theology and mystical ascent in 2 Corinthians.