worship & christology L. W. Hurtado

Along with my recent study of Richard Bauckham's work on the early Christianity I have also been reading Larry W. Hurtado works on early devotion to Jesus Christ. A couple of days ago he posted an essay on his blog which you will find here. Here is quote from page 6-7.

... the exalted claims and the unprecedented devotional practices that reflect a treatment of Jesus as somehow sharing divine attributes and status began among Jewish believers and within the earliest moments of the young Christian movement. This astonishing Jesus-devotion was not the product of an incremental influence of the larger pagan religious environment or the growing influx of Gentile believers in the latter decades of the first century CE.[1]

[1] EARLY DEVOTION TO JESUS: A REPORT, REFLECTIONS AND IMPLICATIONS L. W. Hurtado, University of Edinburgh  Expository Times 122/4 (2010): 167-76.