Why did Bart D. Ehrman write a book—How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of the Jewish Preacher from Galilee—on Jesus’ divinity (or lack thereof)? We can speculate all day about this or that motivation, but I chose to focus upon one thing: the question(s) he asks. At the end of the day it is the questions and the answers that matter most here. For Ehrman there is one central, nagging question:
How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God (p. 1)?
Ehrman is not a confessing Christian. He is agnostic. There is no reason for him to start with the Church’s Creeds (most Evangelicals don’t give much attention to the Creeds either) or with a pneumatology that proposes that the Spirit has guided the Church in her theologizing. For Ehrman, the first and final authority is a historical-critical reading of the sources. This is where Bird, Evans, et al., have decided to engage Ehrman (presumably, since I haven’t read it yet, but I doubt they begin with dogmatics) in their response book How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature —A Response to Bart D. Ehrman. This shared methodology will determine whose views are found to be more persuasive. According to Ehrman:
As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God (p.2).
This is an interesting way of framing it. While it may be theologically true that God became a man it is being proposed that this question isn’t in view at all. For Ehrman that idea is off the table. The present theological truth isn’t in what he wants to discuss. It is the historical question that he seeks to answer. Jesus’ divinity was something that came to be embraced by his followers, so how did they get there, and why did they come to believe this? Ehrman states, “…what people personally believe about Christ should not, in theory, affect the conclusions they draw historically (p. 3).” In other words, he seems to leave the door open for one to continue to confess that Jesus is somehow God, theologically, but he isn’t as interested in that question as whether or not one can explain how his followers came to believe this using the sort of restrictive epistemology and methodology that might be used to explain how someone like Caesar Augustus or Alexander the Great came to be deified.
Of course, we’re assuming a lot here when we speak of Jesus as “God”. What does it even mean to speak of Jesus as a god. Does it mean something similar to what people meant when they spoke of the aforementioned rulers of the ancient world as being deified or something else? According to Ehrman,
…to understand this claim in any sense at all will require us to know what people in the ancient world generally meant when they thought that a particular human was a god— or that a god had become a human (p. 3).
Ehrman’s argument hinges on this important assertion: while moderns may speak of God as “up there”, alone, completely distinct from us humans “down here” this is not something ancients affirmed. Rather, the relationship between gods and humans may go something like this:
There were those whose humanity was closest to the animals and there were those whose humanity was closer to the highest of the high gods, but it wasn’t always either-or, either human or deity. Ehrman writes:
The problem is that most ancient people— whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan— did not have this paradigm. For them, the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap (p. 4).
There were two main ways a human could be divine: “by adoption of exaltation” or “by nature of incarnation”. Interesting, Ehrman understands early Christians to have understood it both ways stating in passing that the Gospel of Mark presents adoptionistic Christology and the Gospel of John incarnational.
This is Ehrman’s introduction. The questions have been asked. The hypotheses have been presented. As Ehrman summarizes the chapters to come he does note that he understands early Christian worship and deification of Jesus to be connected to their belief in the resurrection; therefore, Jesus’ burial and resurrection will be central to the discussion. Then as he ends his introduction he restates the driving question(s):
…the key Christological question of them all: How is it that the followers of Jesus came to understand him as divine in any sense of the term? What made them think that Jesus, the crucified preacher from Galilee, was God (p. 10)?
Reblogged this on James’ Ramblings.
The fact they believed in the resurrection I think drove everyone into that idea. Then they studied their old scriptures and all these passages we think point to Jesus popped out at them.
Ehrman’s thesis seems a good try at another explanation. Best one I ever read and still it is implausible.
I might add implausible among other reasons, because no Jewish human in 33 AD, regardless of the life led by Jesus, could or would want to imagine any fellow Jewish man is really Yahweh that got himself murdered at the hands of the “goyim” and remained dead.
Not even the pagan Gentile could agree to this, they divinized heroes, not big time weak losers as Jesus surely appeared hanging on that cross to all. He was crucified in weakness after all.
No Jew expected Messiah to be Divine anyway.
That thought is unthinkable from the perspective Bart sees it. If what he proposes happened, we would never have heard the name, Jesus.
As good as Bart’s research can be, he sure doesn’t get some Jewish culture in 33 AD real well.
Going around telling folks in Jerusalem in 33 AD that Jesus was alive when they knew better and the listeners could have visited the grave with Jesus’ dead cadaver in it wouldn’t start a new religion. It would get you laughed out of the city .
Then we have James, Jude , Thomas and Paul who converted post resurrection of course.
That will be Ehrman’s next discussion: whether or not Jews would have thought this way. It seems like he will say that yes, some Jews could have because not all Jews thought alike. I think Bird in his rejoinder will argue the other direction.
Patrick,
Going around America in the 19th century telling people that he had found new books of the Bible written on Golden Plates which he refused to show to anyone got Joseph Smith laughed out of many towns. Nevertheless, there are fourteen million Mormons in the world less than 200 years later. It doesn’t matter whether most people would have found the early Christian ideas ludicrous if enough people to get things started believed them. The fact of the matter is that an awful lot of people did find the message palatable without any evidence other than the word of the person who told them about it. Arguments based on the premise that nobody would have believed something are always problematic in that there is always somebody who will believe almost anything.
@vinny: I tend to agree that the evolution of Mormonism does seem to undermine, or at least severely limit, the argument that Christianity couldn’t have emerged unless “true”. A better argument is that Christianity (and Mormonism) couldn’t have emerged unless people were convinced of the truth of what was being proclaimed, but you are correct, this doesn’t mean that their beliefs weren’t wrongheaded. Often we Christians point to the suffering of early Christians, but early Mormons were persecuted as well, so that doesn’t seem to hold water for those who want to argue that Christianity’s roots prove its truthfulness while simultaneously denying that this should be applied to Mormonism. Although there may be a major difference between these two origins accounts that I’m overlooking.
Another debate debate between Bart and Simon Gathercole here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5C8hWsXyo
There have been other failed Jewish Messiahs and one in particular whose failure was turned into a religious mystery. Sabbatai Zevi. Many seventeenth century Jews thought he was the Messiah until he was betrayed, captured and subsequently converted to Islam to avoid death. But *some* continued to believe he was the Messiah and naturally came to believe that apostasy was a religious mystery. They mimicked his conversion while secretly continuing with their Jewish faith. Most Jews would not break the law to follow such an obvious failure. But some did. That may illustrate the power of charisma and the difficulty in coming to terms with an apparent failure.
It is far easier to answer how Jesus came to be identified as “God” by professed Christians than it is to identify when and how he became “god” for we know conclusively that he was not officially elevated to “God” status until after the original founders of Christianity – the Apostles and their associates – had died. The beginning of the debate is seen in the writings of the earliest fathers, but was not fully formed until the creeds were codified at Nicea and Constantinople. There we have a relatively clear record showing the process in which Jesus was turned into “God,” a view still held by most Evangelicals. They rarely question this belief because they do not know the history and assume that what they believe has always been the belief of professed Christians. (e.g. ‘only wacko cults question whether Jesus is God’).