Hi
@TheLightWithin –
Yes, it only became a heresy after the emergence of Christianity.
The Two Powers debate emerged in the 1970s with the publication of
Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism by the rabbinical scholar Alan F Segal (Leiden, Brill, 1977).
In that work he offers Biblical evidence and comments on early rabbinical traditions. He also cites Philo of Alexandria on the issue:
"And the sacred word ever entertaining holier and more august conceptions of Him that is, yet at the same time longing to provide instruction and teaching for the life of those who lack wisdom, likened God to man, not however, to any particular man. For this reason it has ascribed to Him face, hands, feet, mouth, voice, wrath and indignation, and over and beyond these, weapons, entrances and exits, movements up and down and all ways, and in following this general principle in its language it is concerned not with truth, but with the profit accruing to its pupils. For some there are altogether dull in their natures, incapable of forming any conception whatever of God as without a body, people whom it is impossible to instruct otherwise than in this way, saying that as a man does so God arrives and departs, goes down and comes up, makes use of a voice, is displeased at wrongdoings, is inexorable in His anger, and in addition to all this has provided Himself with shafts and swords and all other instruments of vengeance against the unrighteous. For it is something to be thankful for if they can be taught self-control by the terror held over them by these means. Broadly speaking the lines taken throughout the Law are these two only, one that which keeps truth in view and so provides the thought "God is not as man" (Num. 23:19) the other that which keeps in view the ways of thinking of the duller folk, of whom it is said, "The Lord God will chasten thee, as a man should chasten his son" (Dt. 8:5). Why then do we wonder any longer at His assuming the likeness of angels, seeing that for the succour of those that are in need He assumes the likeness of man? Accordingly, when He says, "I am the God who was seen of thee in the place of God" (Gen. 31:13) understand that He occupied the place of an angel only so far as appeared, without changing with a view to the profit of him who was not yet capable of seeing the true God."
(Segal,
Two Powers, p160, citing Philo,
De Somniis, Loeb, V, p421-423, tr. Colson and Whitaker.)
Segal's commentary:
"
An anthropomorphic divinity is thus one of the two basic ways in which God can be conceived by man. The other is through pure intellectual activity... Philo distinguishes the two understandings of God on the basis of two scriptural references ... Dt. 8:5, involves the description of God in terms appropriate to men, so that men may see him and the unsophisticated may learn of Him. The second, summarized in Nu. 23:19, is the conception of God available to those who have come to perceive Him truly, and is available only to those who are well enough trained by philosophical discipline to receive revelation. Philo takes these two contradictory ideas in scripture—figuring God as man, and knowing that He is not—as summaries both of man's knowledge of God and of the whole process of exegesis"
(ibid, p160-161
emphasis mine).
Heiser elsewhere says
"In my dissertation (UW-Madison, 2004) I argued that Segal’s instincts were correct. My own work bridges the gap between his book and the Hebrew Bible understood in its Canaanite religious context. I suggest that the “original model” for the two powers idea was the role of the vice-regent of the divine council. The paradigm of a high sovereign God (El) who rules heaven and earth through the agency of a second, appointed god (Baal) became part of Israelite religion, albeit with some modification. For the orthodox Israelite, Yahweh was both sovereign and vice regent—occupying both “slots” as it were at the head of the divine council. The binitarian portrayal of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible was motivated by this belief. The ancient Israelite knew two Yahwehs—one invisible, a spirit, the other visible, often in human form. The two Yahwehs at times appear together in the text, at times being distinguished, at other times not.
Early Judaism understood this portrayal and its rationale. There was no sense of a violation of monotheism since either figure was indeed Yahweh. There was no second distinct god running the affairs of the cosmos. During the Second Temple period, Jewish theologians and writers speculated on an identity for the second Yahweh. Guesses ranged from divinized humans from the stories of the Hebrew Bible to exalted angels. These speculations were not considered unorthodox. That acceptance changed when certain Jews, the early Christians, connected Jesus with this orthodox Jewish idea. This explains why these Jews, the first converts to following Jesus the Christ, could simultaneously worship the God of Israel and Jesus, and yet refuse to acknowledge any other god. Jesus was the incarnate second Yahweh. In response, as Segal’s work demonstrated, Judaism pronounced the two powers teaching a heresy sometime in the second century A.D."
Heiser
Two Powers in Heaven
