Who is the first and the last?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This is a contradiction the apologist can deflect in two directions, and both deserve a fair hearing. Path one: Jesus and the Father are the same God, so the title "first and last" applying to both is simply trinitarian identity in compressed form. Path two: the title applies in different senses — to YHWH cosmically and to Jesus as the firstborn of the new creation and the last word of redemption. Both moves have ancient pedigree. Richard Bauckham, in *Jesus and the God of Israel*, gives the strongest version: Revelation's deliberate transfer of Isaianic divine titles to Jesus is exactly the device by which early Christians "included Jesus in the unique identity" of YHWH without (in their own terms) abandoning monotheism. On this reading the shared title is not an embarrassment but the whole christological point — the seer means the reader to recognize that the one who says "I am the first and the last" in Isaiah and the one who says it in Revelation are one identity.

But Bauckham's resolution is not free, and it is worth weighing its cost against the source text. Deutero-Isaiah's entire rhetorical strategy in 41:4, 44:6-8, and 48:12 is to insist that no other deity exists. The Hebrew of 44:6 is uncompromising: *ʾani rishon va-ʾani ʾaḥaron u-mibalʿaday ʾeyn ʾelohim* — "I am the first and I am the last, and besides me there is no god." Joseph Blenkinsopp, in the Anchor Bible Isaiah 40-55, reads these declarations as polemical anti-Babylonian monotheism: Bel does not exist, Nebo does not exist, Marduk is nothing; the title "first and last" is itself a claim of unique, exclusive deity, framed so that nothing and no one else can share it. The exclusivity is the function of the phrase. When Revelation 1:17 places "I am the first and the last" (*ho prōtos kai ho eschatos*) on the lips of the risen Christ, and 22:13 stacks "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last" together, the Apocalypse is doing one of two things: either identifying Jesus with the one-and-only YHWH (Bauckham) or transferring to a second figure a title Isaiah constructed precisely to be untransferable. David Aune, in the Word Biblical Commentary on Revelation, documents the deliberate christological appropriation of the Isaianic and Danielic titles and does not minimize the theological stakes.

The critical reading is developmental. Isaiah's strict monotheism is the inheritance of late Second Temple Judaism; early Christology then had to accommodate the resurrection-exaltation tradition and the steadily elevated Jesus-language of Paul, Hebrews, and Revelation. The result is what Larry Hurtado called "binitarian" devotion: two figures, both somehow divine, within a tradition that continued to call itself monotheist. Alan Segal's *Two Powers in Heaven* and Daniel Boyarin's *Border Lines* argue that this configuration was always less stable than later orthodoxy admitted, and that rabbinic Judaism's condemnation of "two powers in heaven" was in part a reaction against exactly such title-sharing. Margaret Barker presses further, arguing that pre-rabbinic Judaism already harbored two-figure traditions that Christianity inherited. So the framing as a contradiction is a fair surface reading. The trinitarian harmonization genuinely succeeds — but only by granting the entire Nicene framework, on which Father and Son share one divine identity and therefore one set of titles without remainder. Absent that framework, Revelation is straightforwardly assigning YHWH's exclusive self-designation to a second figure, and Isaiah built that designation to forbid exactly that. The harmonization works inside Christian dogmatics and dissolves outside it.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable within trinitarian theology; on the plain historical reading, a real transfer of an exclusive divine title to a second figure, in tension with Isaiah's programmatic monotheism.