1 Corinthians 8:6 → Deuteronomy 6:4

This is the most consequential reuse of the Shema in the New Testament. Confronting idol-food in Corinth, Paul grounds Christian freedom in the one-ness of God — and does so by rewriting the Shema itself. The LXX of Deut 6:4 reads κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν κύριος εἷς ἐστιν, holding theos ("God") and kyrios (the LXX's rendering of the divine name YHWH) together in the single confession that God is one. Paul takes those two divine designations and distributes them — "one God, the Father... and one Lord, Jesus Christ" — assigning theos to the Father and kyrios to Jesus, while preserving the Shema's predicate one (εἷς) for each. He even glosses each clause with creation language ("from whom are all things... through whom are all things"), placing Jesus on the Creator side of the Creator/creature line. Bauckham terms this "Christological monotheism": Paul does not add a second god alongside Israel's God, nor demote Jesus below God; he includes Jesus within the unique identity of the one God the Shema confesses. The dating is decisive — written in the mid-50s AD, this is among the earliest datable Christian texts, and it already presupposes the highest Christology as settled confession, not late development (Hurtado). The telos: the Shema is not abandoned but fulfilled and opened — the one God Israel adored is now known as Father and Son, so that to love the LORD with all the heart is to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6) and to find the one God supremely desirable in the Son through whom we exist.