Here's today's morning insight. I've found myself reading into some of the Old Testament apocrypha - not just the deuterocanonical books that are in the Catholic OT, but even going beyond that into some of the documents that pretty much everyone leaves out of their OT. Today I'm reading in 2 Esdras, which is a first century apocalyptic book (so it's not from before Jesus, but it is from a Jewish context, though perhaps with Christian additions). So keep in mind this is not considered inspired Scripture...

Anyway, it's interesting that when the archangel Uriel comes to Ezra to explain his visions and teach him things, the archangel speaks for God in the first person ("my judgment," etc.) and Ezra speaks to the archangel as though speaking directly to God ("my Lord," etc.). This is very much like when the three visitors come to Abraham and he treats one of them as divine - but the difference is that in Genesis the Church fathers could say, well that's the pre-incarnate Christ, the Logos, and that makes sense. But here it's clearly not - it's an angel.

In any case, it does show that Jews (at least those more mystically-minded) were ready for the idea of an agent of God speaking as the voice of God, by the first century. Of course this is what Christ is - the agent of creation, the Word of God. But with Christ, he is divine, so we as the Church needed to clarify the doctrine of the Trinity to make sense of that.

Another way to go (and one that a certain faction did choose) would have been to say that Jesus himself was an angel or archangel (i.e., not divine). This became a form of adoptionism called angel christology, and of course it was a heresy. But I think we can see the seeds of that already in this Jewish apocalyptic document. And I believe it also manifests in the document known as The Shepherd, by a certain Hermas, in the second century. So we can see in 2 Esdras a kind of christological fork in the road, so to speak. And for what it's worth, Paul's opponents known as the "Judaizers" would also have taken this other path that leads to adoptionism.