I’ve discussed the fact before that the first Christians believed Jesus was secretly an angel who came down from heaven in the guise of a man (a conclusion with which even Bart Ehrman now concurs). Even if Jesus was a historical person they believed this (a key point in my new book Jesus from Outer Space). And even if semantically you dislike the word “angel” and imagine the first Christians employed some other term for what he was, still they believed he was an eternal being who descended from what they understood to be outer space. And this idea features as well-documented background information in my peer reviewed study On the Historicity of Jesus (index, “angels and angelology,” “Logos,” “Melchizedek,” and of interest to today’s topic, “Michael”). For articles on my blog covering this subject in more focus, see The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus, Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus?, and my two articles on Larry Hurtado’s bizarre attempt to deny this: The Bizarre Fugue of Larry Hurtado and The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist. Of course the Jehovah’s Witnesses have long claimed to have uncovered the secret truth that, in fact, Jesus was none other than the Archangel Michael, traveling under another name (one that just happens to mean God’s Messianic Savior, suggesting that name, in this case, is fabricated: Christ means Anointed ergo Messiah/Messianic; and Jesus, i.e. Joshua, i.e. Yeshua, means God’s Savior). And there is a good case to be made that they are right. And this case is most expertly laid out in Darrell Hannah’s doctoral dissertation, later revised and published by Moer Siebeck and then Wipf & Stock in 1999: Michael and Christ: Michael Tradition and Angel Christology in Early Christianity.

I have not thought this equation defensible enough to include as any premise in my work to date. I still consider it an intriguing possibility with some support in the evidence, but not something one can reliably “prove.” Although I think now, after having read Hannah, the case is better than I thought (even if still not iron clad). Hence in On the Historicity of Jesus I only mentioned it as a potential (not proven) path in thinking from Daniel 9 and 12 to the core originating Christian concept of Christ:

Even the original forgers of Daniel 9 were already imagining something along these lines [of connecting in some way the messiah who dies in Daniel 9 with the figure who returns to bring God’s final victory]. Modern scholars are generally agreed that its authors were saying that the then-high-priest Onias III was a Messiah (a Christ), and his death would presage a universal atonement, after which would come the end of the world—effected by the coming of the angel Michael. [Footnote: As explained in Daniel 12; Michael is not there called a messiah, but plays the role of what many Jews expected of the final messiah.] That’s already just one or two tweaks away from the Christian gospel. One of those tweaks would be simply equating the messiah who dies with the savior who returns to complete God’s plan (in other words, once again, combining the two figures into one): the second of which in Daniel is, again, the archangel Michael, called ‘the great prince’ in Dan. 12.1, whom a later interpreter could easily read as being the same ‘prince’ of Dan. 9.26-27 [Correction: 9.25] (the words are not identical but have a corresponding meaning), because the events of Dan. 12.9-12 are the same events, yet are assumed to follow the event of Michael’s ‘rising’ in 12.1 (which in the LXX employs exactly the same word used of Jesus’ resurrection in Mk 9.31 and 10.34). So it could appear Michael was meant to be the ‘prince’ in Dan. 9.26-27 [Correction: 9.25]. Because in Dan. 12.9-12 Michael is the one doing the things the ‘prince’ does in Dan. 9.26-27 [Correction: Michael is not the Prince in 9.26 but the Prince of 9.25 who, it is implied in 9.27, destroys the Prince of 9.26].

That this Michael is ‘the resurrected messiah’ would thus have been an easy inference for a later interpreter to make, in which event 9.25-26 could easily be read as being not about a Christ and a Prince but a Princely Christ, all one and the same person, who dies (9.26) and then rises from the dead (9.26-27 and 12.1). The Christian gospel is thus already right there in Daniel, the more so if Daniel 9 had been linked with Isaiah 52–53, which is exactly what [the Qumran Scroll] 11Q13 appears to do. But even without such a connection being made, the notion that a Christ was expected to die to presage the end of the world is already clearly intended in Daniel, even by its original authors’ intent, and would have been understood in the same way by subsequent readers of Daniel. [Added note: This is more or less also the conclusion of Israel Knohl’s The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (University of California 2000), Michael Wise’s The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (HarperOne 1999) and Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New Press 2012).] The notion of a dying messiah was therefore already mainstream, well before Christianity arose. That this messiah did not correspond to any specific definition of any specific kind of messiah is not relevant, since we know the Jews had many diverse notions of a messiah, and frequently innovated.

OHJ, pp. 78-79

In case you missed it, notice again that in Daniel 12:1 Michael is said to “stand up” (a concept strongly associated with resurrection) and then raise up the righteous dead; and the Christians were, like the Qumranites before them (and in many ways a lot like them), searching the scriptures for hidden meanings exactly like this (an established approach called pesher: see OHJ, Element 8, Chapter 4). Since anyone believing this text must have been referring to an event under Roman rule had to be re-reading Daniel 9:25-26 as referring to only one person, and not two Anointed ones as originally intended, creating a new link between this and Daniel 12 would be natural: both the person killed in 9 and the person rising in 12 are then called a Prince or Ruler, and the latter fulfills the expectations of the final eschatological Messiah. So it is entirely plausible this is a “secret meaning” they took from the text, inspiring their entire “dying-and-rising” savior mythology as a hidden message predicted by God in his holy scriptures: the Anointed who dies in Daniel 9:26 is the Ruler who rises in Daniel 12:1. It therefore cannot be claimed this didn’t happen or that it was impossible. It was possible. And it could well have happened. The alignment of input and result is far too apposite to discount it. So we can’t rule it out.

This would have been reinforced by Daniel 12 saying Michael will arise to usher in the general resurrection (and the corresponding doom for Israel’s enemies) and that the intervening tribulation period would last “1,290 days,” in other words “half a week of years,” exactly matching Daniel 9:27, “from the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up” to the completion of Michael’s task. Someone trying to find a secret pesher hidden in all this could therefore have easily associated everything happening in 12 with what happens at the end of 9, and linked the two messianic figures into one, and thus “discovered” that God had predicted a dying-and-rising messiah all along. This is an even more sound a hypothesis than supposing the first Apostles just “thought it up all on their own” as a response to their Rabbi’s unexpectedly getting killed (or anything else). Far more likely they’d have discovered it in a pesher of scripture, exactly as they tell us they did. And this is by far the most obvious place to have found it (as also in Zechariah 3 and 6 and Isaiah 52 and 53, and so on, all of which texts can be linked by the same pesher logic as referring to the same events: see OHJ, Elements 5-9 and 16-17, Chapter 4). It’s a text they clearly were using to predict the messianic future. And despite its original authors’ intentions, it can easily be read the way the first Christians would want it to.

Now, all of that is plain enough. But there is a second step that then follows: if this is the case, then it means the first Christians did indeed believe Jesus was the archangel Michael, incarnate and in disguise (per 1 Cor. 2:7-8 and Philp. 2:7-8). Modern Jehovah’s Witnesses have actually adduced additional arguments for this conclusion, a couple of which do hold up as inferences of medium weight: Michael’s name means “Who Is Like God” (mikha–el) which is an appellation quite evocative of Jesus (who is the “image” and “glory” and “form” of God, ergo the one most “like” God); and early Christian literature (and, as it happens, much Jewish literature) portrays Michael as the commander of God’s angelic armies (e.g. Rev. 12:7), which corresponds to Jesus (Rev. 19:11-16, 2 Thess 1:7), since surely there can’t be two angelic hosts with different commanders. When the Pauline and Gospel apocalypses say Jesus will come with his army of angels to effect the end-times, in Jewish lore it was usually Michael doing this; the fact that they removed Michael and inserted Jesus suggests perhaps they were in fact equating them.

But there is more one can add. This apocalyptic role of Jesus in early Christian literature was also sometimes associated in related precursor literature to a cosmic lord identified as Melchizedek, which many scholars adduce good arguments for concluding was in fact another name of the archangel Michael (see Michael Flowers, “The Two Messiahs and Melchizedek in 11QMelchizedek,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 7 (2016): 194-227; Rick Van de Water, “Michael or Yhwh? Toward Identifying Melchizedek in 11Q13,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 16.1 (2006): 75-86; Joseph Fitzmyer, “Further Light on Melchizedek from Qumran Cave 11,” in Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament (Geoffrey Chapman 1971): 245-67; and, of course, Hannah’s Michael and Christ). Michael was also equated in some texts to the Metatron (the angel who communicated the voice and “presence” of God), who was known as having as many as “seventy names” (which would permit “Jesus,” a.k.a. “Savior of God,” to be one of them, as well as Emmanuel, “God Is With Us,” a.k.a. the “Presence” of God, a.k.a. the Metatron, a.k.a. Michael). But more importantly for our question is the fact that Hebrews also equated Jesus with Melchizedek, albeit covertly as a figure he was just like and in some sense replacing (OHJ, Element 42, Chapter 5, where I survey all the evidence connecting Jesus and Melchizedek), e.g. Melchizedek had “no father, no mother, no ancestry,” was never born, and is immortal, and was “made just like the Son of God” (Heb 7:3). But that they were in fact identical may have been the mystery being guarded (Ibid.); for concealing such secret angelic knowledge was not only part of the oath of the Essenes (who swore to keep secret “the names of the angels,” according to Josephus, Jewish War 2.145), but is also hinted at in the early Christian text of Ignatius and elsewhere in Christian literature. Which would also explain why we are never explicitly told Jesus and Michael are the same. Hence when we learn that at Qumran, Melchizedek would be the one who leads the heavenly host down to Earth to effect the final defeat of Satan and expiate the sins of the faithful—the very things Jesus is now imagined to do—that equation seems to be indeed one of the secret mysteries of the sect.

One reason Michael, Melchizedek, and Jesus were likely understood to be the same being is that all were said to be the High Priest of God’s Celestial Temple (the entire point of what is argued throughout Hebrews 5-9). As there can only really be one of those, it naturally follows that they were understood to all be the same entity, the Archangel of Many Names—precisely as Philo describes this same entity: God’s “firstborn Logos, the eldest of his angels, the ruling archangel of many names,” “the divine image,” God’s “Firstborn Son,” whose secret name is “rising” (take note of that), and who was “the High Priest” of God’s celestial temple, as well as God’s agent of creation, and the one whom God appointed lord over all the universe; and even keeper of the “Paraclete” (for passage citations in Philo see OHJ, Element 40, Chapter 5).

This is no trivial fact. For…

We know Jesus was also called the firstborn [son] of God, the Logos, and God’s high priest in the heavens, and the one through whom all things were made, and who was appointed Lord of the universe, and was the true image of God; and Christians were also called upon to try and emulate him and adorn themselves like him, just as Philo is calling us to do [with the archangel he is talking about]. This is far too improbable to be a coincidence.

OHJ, p. 201 (evidence establishing all these points there follows)

I there adduce evidence that Philo even thought “Jesus” was already known to be one of “the many names” of this archangel (this is debatable, though the case is not as weak as people who have never really examined it claim). But set that aside. Even if not (even if that name assignment was a Christian innovation), it is still undeniable that Philo’s Archangel of Many Names is exactly the angel the earliest Christians concluded Jesus had been—and thus still was. They are talking about the same angel. Notably Philo avoids ever explicitly naming any angels. He never mentions “Michael” or “Gabriel” for example; he always uses allusions and descriptives and code names, possibly for the same reasons the Essenes avoided it. So that he describes the Archangel of Many Names as God’s highest ranking angel and cosmic lord (who would thus be the principal commander of his armies) and his heavenly High Priest, it seems clear Philo would have understood this to mean Michael (as those were Michael’s defining roles). It thus follows so did the Christians—who simply didn’t explicitly say this, for the same reasons Philo didn’t.

Hannah points out further (pp. 22-25, 33, etc.) that the entire gamut of angelic roles most commonly assigned to Michael are the same ones assumed by Jesus: “angelus interpres,” the one who interprets God to man, their primary mediator, “intercessor for humanity,” the one who pleads on behalf of human beings and rescues them from evil, “leader of the heavenly armies” and high priest of the celestial temple (as just noted), “judicial defender and opponent of Satan” (he’s the guy usually arguing with and posing against Satan in God’s court, and beyond; and in the end, Satan’s ultimate vanquisher), “Israel’s…protector and angelic champion” and indeed the mediator of a future and final covenant with Israel (hint, hint), the “Prince of Light,” the highest ranking of all angels, and the one who takes on “the task of transporting the souls of the righteous to paradise” (and as we saw in Daniel, supervising the end-times—both destruction and resurrection). And it’s important to note that nowhere in Christian literature is there any theology of how Michael was deposed and demoted, or to what duties he was reassigned; in fact Michael is never mentioned in Christian literature alongside Jesus as a separate person. If the radical teaching of the Christians was that the greatest of all angels—Michael himself—was deposed and replaced by Jesus, it’s hard to imagine how they never spoke of this, never developed its story (think of all the stories woven about Satan’s demotion). This starts to look like evidence.

Hannah also explores to what extent the authors of Daniel, or the earliest Christian interpreters of Daniel, took the One Like a Son of Man, a celestial superbeing who is granted an “everlasting kingdom,” to also be a reference to Michael. It seems pretty obvious Christians read it as referring to Jesus, from the very beginning. Indeed it could easily have inspired their incarnationist doctrine, as we see from Jesus being made “Like a Man” and having “the Likeness of Men” in the Philippians creed, to Jesus being modeled as the “Son of Man” in the allegories constructed by Mark. But since Michael (and no one else) is the one who “rises” to resurrect the dead in Daniel 12, the lord and master of the universe described in Daniel 7 could hardly have been imagined to be someone else than the figure playing that role there. So again, the obvious inference is that Christians took both as referring to Michael. And in support of this Hannah assembles some evidence this equation was understood among Jews even before Christians got a hold of the text. And this would entail Christians recognized Michael as Jesus, their “Savior.” Likewise Hannah finds Jewish traditions in which Michael is the gate-keeper to Paradise and holds “the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” so it seems an odd coincidence that Jesus is the one holding those keys in the Gospels (and thereby able to hand them over to Peter).

Finally, clinching the matter are early Christian Patristic texts (ranging from Tertullian to Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria), in which Hannah finds all the same substitutions, and in ways that forestall a demotion or replacement theology (e.g. pp. 112-13, 163ff.). For example, Jewish tradition identified the burning bush, the leader of the angelic delegation of “three men” to Abraham, and the angel who wrestled with Jacob all as manifestations of Michael (or sometimes as the Metatron, but as we have just seen, it is not obvious that was ever thought to be a different person: e.g. pp. 118-21, etc.); but Christians, as manifestations of Jesus. Likewise, Michael was God’s agent of creation; for Christians, that was Jesus. Which means everywhere Michael was reputed the agent, Christians were now calling him Jesus. So it is not as if Jesus assumes the roles of Michael after his resurrection; Jesus has been assuming those roles throughout all history. That means Jesus didn’t replace Michael; Jesus has always been Michael. But these same sources might still speak of Michael in these roles without mentioning Jesus, leaving an ambiguity. Was one the exoteric and the other the esoteric teaching?

Consequently, any equation between them would still have to have been a mystery teaching; not only because we never explicitly hear about it (nor, either, are Jesus and Michael ever explicitly distinguished), but also because the only two references to Michael in the New Testament (Jude 9, paraphrasing a lost scripture, and Revelation 12:7-9, casting a mystical allegory) evade mention that they are really talking about Jesus (and one can find similar examples in the early Church Fathers). Hannah concludes these texts do not equate them, but only by adopting certain assumptions not innate to the text; I see the matter as much less decided. I occasionally disagree with Hannah’s reasoning elsewhere, such as when he joins the usual mistaken exegesis of Hebrews’ discourse on how Jesus is “as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs” as an argument that Jesus is not an angel, when obviously it is an argument that Jesus is an archangel—in fact, the archangel. A position these exegetes strangely never consider. The only texts that actually run counter to Jesus being equated with Michael afford only weak evidence at best: the mysterious treatment of a poorly articulated distinction between Jesus and Melchizedek in Hebrews; and the fact that in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul regarded “the rock” that followed Moses as Christ, while (as Hannah shows) Jewish tradition regarded the Pillar of Smoke and Fire that preceded Moses as Michael. But we have no further commentary on these distinctions, and we cannot know what mystery teachings attended them. The remaining evidence is more overwhelming, such that the preponderance of evidence supports an early esoteric Christian equation of Jesus and the archangel Michael.

Still, this conclusion remains inconclusive. There are ambiguities. And we have no smoking gun. So this still cannot be relied upon as an established premise. It is, however, a very plausible and tantalizing possibility. But even if not specifically equated with Michael, what is beyond dispute is that Jesus was believed to have replaced Michael (so what happened to Michael?), and to have been a celestial being so notable and eternal that he either most definitely was an archangel or he was a superangel: a being even more cosmic and divine than an angel, a being who effected even the creation of all the angels, and had ruled over them since the beginning of time. Ordinarily we would just call that an archangel: the chief, the one who sits above, the angels. No other term is suggested in the New Testament or anywhere else in Christian literature, so there really is no other basis for insisting on any other. Denying the appellation becomes mere semantics at that point. For whatever you think Jesus should be called, if not archangel, it would have to be something even more eternal and fantastical. Something pretty well approximating, in fact, a god. Though still not the God, as Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation,” who chose not to equate himself to God, and though he created everything else, he himself remains a created being, a subordinate to whom God assigns his various powers and prerogatives.

After the first century, as Hannah documents (pp. 163ff.), it is less clear how Christian belief evolved, not least because most sectarian streams of thought have been destroyed from the record, so we often don’t know. What evolved eventually into the politically-backed “Orthodoxy” of the 4th century definitely headed in a direction away from any angelological interpretations of Jesus. But this was against the trend of numerous contemporary sects. Thus one can find evidence (some clear, some ambiguous) of Christians distinguishing Michael from Jesus (or else opposing the belief that Jesus was an archangel), and evidence (some clear, some ambiguous) of Christians equating them (or at least, regarding Jesus as an archangel). But this does mean we do have clear declarations from the second-through-fourth centuries that Jesus was, indeed, one of the seven great archangels, and obviously, the first of them—both chronologically and by rank, and thus in respect to power and divine favor. Not all Christians agreed—as theologies and christologies evolved in diverse ways. But there is definite evidence for at least one through-line of believing Jesus was, and always had been, the supreme archangel. Which in Jewish traditions (even as attested in Christian sources!) was almost always identified as Michael.

The Shepherd of Hermas affords a particular example (Hannah, pp. 187-92): cryptically constructed, thus signaling a secret meaning only the wise are meant to discern (thus supporting the notion that any angelological understanding of Jesus was a mystery teaching and not something to be directly admitted to), yet carefully arranged with parallelism and code words to clearly indicate, to anyone discerning, that the archangel Michael and Jesus Christ the Son of God are one and the same. Hannah shows the moves by which this is effected and he’s definitely right. And he cites a slew of experts on Hermas who agree. That the proto-orthodox sect moved away from angelological christology thus likely explains why it gradually and quietly demoted the Hermas as scripture, such that it never made it into the canon; and by the end of the fourth century it was all but forgotten. Hannah has his own hypotheses about the chronological arc of the angel-Christ equation, although they hinge on some of the things I think he gets wrong (such as confusing Hebrews’ discourse against Jesus being a mere “angel” as somehow excluding him from the category of “archangel”). But he does agree the first century already sees every variant of angel Christology he examines, and these variants continue to evolve and battle each other in subsequent centuries. The prevailing of non-angelic Christology by the fourth century was a result therefore of politics rather than any evidence-based faithfulness to what the original Apostles imagined or believed.

So that’s what we know. It’s a bit more than I knew when I wrote On the Historicity of Jesus. And though it’s still not enough to promote an original equation of Jesus and Michael as fact rather than possibility, it does push that possibility higher in the echelons of probability. Even if we can’t prove it, it’s worth taking seriously. And regardless, that Jesus was from the very start regarded as an archangel (in fact the first of them all, from the beginning of time), in actual fact or in semantic equivalence, remains well-established.