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I wrote this paper almost 10 years ago. I attempted to have it published at the time but was unsuccessful. It is a continuation of my work on early Christian linguistic creativity which resulted in short hand testimonia and verbal references to Old Testament proof texts and themes. This activity was obviously quite intense during the first decades of Christianity and most likely primarily among the first Jewish Christians, both Greek and non-Greek speaking. And many of these testimonia persisted with authority and continued to be used commonly for centuries following and were many were recorded and used in the New Testament in such a way that the evidence is clear. [1]
The word “acheiropoietos”, made without hands, is not found before the Christian era, but the idea expressed by this word is provided by the Old Testament contrast between the works of man and the work of God. And it has a particular application in the context of dismissing idols as worthless gods fabricated by the hands of men compared to God himself and also the contrast between God’s heavenly temple or mountain “made without (human) hands” and the various temples of idols or even God’s own temple made by Solomon which were made by hands of men.
And so this contrast and this word “not by human hands” came to signify God’s own unique power beyond any idol or even pious man, any creature at all. And this same power of God, which revivified the body of Christ, also revivifies those who have faith in him, and in this way the church is built and fills the entire earth, with Christ as the cornerstone. All of this is explicitly argued by Paul.
In summary, it is remarkable how dense the combination of all these ideas are already in the earliest days of the proclamation of the Christian gospel. This paper only scratches the surface as it follows the creation of this one word to capture and summarize major ideas that lie at the center of Christian message.
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- See my Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation and other papers for more detailed discussion of this topic here.