Chapter 1, “Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome” in Bart D. Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of the Jewish Preacher from Galilee examines how people in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean understood the divide between deity and humanity. He proposes three models: (1) gods who temporarily become human; (2) divine beings born of a god and a mortal; (3) a human who becomes divine.
Ehrman uses several example: Apollonius, believed to be the Son of Zeus in the third century CE (pp. 11-15); the myth of Jupiter and Mercury visiting Phrygia in the image of humans thought actually gods (pp. 18-21); Hercules; Alexander the Great (pp. 21-24); Romulus; Julius Caesar; Caesar Augustus and many who would be honored in the Emperor Cult; the philosopher Peregrinus (pp. 24-39). All of these figures are examples that fit into the above categories. Some were truly gods who were perceived to be human. There is an early Christology to match that —Docetism. Some were humans who became gods. There is an early Christology to match that — Adoptionism. Some were born of god and mortal, which is how some interpret the virgin birth narratives, though as Ehrman notes:
In none of the stories of the divine humans born from the union of a god and a mortal is the mortal a virgin. This is one of the ways that the Christian stories of Jesus differ from those of other divine humans in the ancient world. It is true that (the Jewish) God is the one who makes Jesus’s mother Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1: 35). But the monotheistic Christians had far too an exalted view of God to think that he could have temporarily become human to play out his sexual fantasies (p. 24).
What we can see is that as the early Church wrestled with how to speak of Jesus as divine there were models available. There were those who spoke of Jesus as merely appearing human. There are those who spoke of him as truly human, but becoming a deity. There are those who found him to be a human born of a divine father. Ehrman interprets the ancients to have understood the human-god divide as “two continuums” which “sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other (p. 39).”
Ehrman calls this “the Divine Pyramid” where there one can be a lower human, higher human, part human and deity, lower deity, higher deity. For Ehrman the question becomes, “How did Jesus move from being a human to being God— in any sense (p. 43)?” In his view the fourth century understanding of Jesus as “God” doesn’t quite match the earliest meaning of this language. He writes,
It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development (p. 44).
Quickly he anticipates the first rebuttal: so what if this is what people with a Hellenized worldview thought of gods and humans, Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews. To this he responds while ending this chapter:
…even though Jews were distinct from the pagan world around them in thinking that only one God was to be worshiped and served, they were not distinct in their conception of the relationship of that realm to the human world we inhabit. Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine (p. 46).
In my next post I will look at Chapter 2, “Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism” from Ehrman’s book before transitioning over to a couple of posts on Michael Bird’s chapters in the response book.
the archives near Emmaus 
Thanks for telling us about this book! I love Ehrman, but he is so prolific I have a hard time keeping track of what he’s written.
You’re welcome!
Reblogged this on James’ Ramblings.
More issues with Bart’s logic & chronology here:
1) The Old Testament has a “visible Yahweh” apparently in a human avatar in the text. He sits down and has a wing ding with Abraham for example. He wrestles with Jacob. He is evident in Ezekiel chapter 1 in glorified form as a human and Yahweh.
So, ANE Jews had a religious tradition of a visible, “human- creator God” combo at least via avatar unlike the Gentile divinization idea and Jesus fits that paradigm perfectly. We see Him as the creator of all things, not just another god. He’s the El Elyon.
Bart’s view that Gentile Christians later divinized Jesus, if true, would not be like the Hebrew Scripture tradition logically. Jesus would be closer to a Caesar type of divinized lower god.
If the oral/documented tradition of Jesus being Yahweh had not pre existed these 4th century Gentiles, no chance they would have dreamed it up.
IF Gentile Christians later on are said to have divinized Jesus in the Jewish tradition, that fact would militate against it being true.
If Jesus is said by latter day Gentiles to be in the Jewish “God-Man” tradition( which Bart must be claiming), it is most likely because these latter day Gentiles had learned about the Jewish God-Man tradition and Jesus’ being THAT from oral traditions of earlier on from……………. knowledgable OT thinking Jews!
Which makes the oral tradition real close to 1st century Jews, IMO. There’s NO chance Jews who didn’t believe that early on decided to come up with that falsely so they could be persecuted for it.
2) Has Bart forgotten to consider the NT? I know he thinks some of Paul’s epistles are frauds, does he think all the NT is fraudulent changed by Gentiles in the 4th century as well?
The NT is a first century set of documents and it’s clear in many sections the Jewish authors said Jesus was the creator God of the OT Genesis 1. Not only John chapter 1 either, Paul often states Jesus is the creator who made all things, for Him, through Him, by Him.
I’m going through the book slowly so I haven’t gotten to Ehrman’s discussions about early Jewish and Christian thought yet. Notice that this post is only about Chapter 1.
Patrick –
I would challenge a few of your points. First, the “human avatar” interpretation Genesis 18–19 only works if we read the Hebrew Bible through Nicene lenses. When given the opportunity to operate on their own terms, the many texts in the Hebrew Bible that describe God’s own appearance to, and interactions with, humanity attest to a view of God as primarily corporeal and anthropomorphic (see, for instance, Hamori, “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature; Friedman, “Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication,” in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash; and Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel). The main alteration to his appearance would be the muting of his overpowering and brilliant glory, which is conceptualized as fatal in the Hebrew Bible’s main stream of tradition (e.g., Exod 33:18–23). The angel of YHWH is later interpolated in some of these pericopae specifically to obscure the earlier notion that God physically interacted with humanity (not only in the MT, but also within the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and most thoroughly in the Targumim).
None of these conceptualizations should be understood as a “human-creator God combo,” but rather just God and then at a later point, God’s divine agent, authorized by the possession of his name and thus his identity and authority (cf. Yahoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham). That communicable divine agency is a much better context for understanding Christ’s identification with God, but it has nothing to do with ontology or being. It has to do with function and authority. Samuel Meier’s book The Messenger in the Ancient Semitic World shows the close relationship of the Hebrew Bible’s notion of angels to the wider ancient Near Eastern paradigm. In all of this, the Israelite/Jewish concepts are drawn from the same conceptual matrix that informs the rest of the western Levant.
Next, I don’t think it’s important that’s Christ’s conceptualization be like the Hebrew Scripture tradition. The only thing that conceptualization has to be like is the particular understanding of that tradition held by those who are doing the conceptualizing, and there are innumerable different ways to interpret the Hebrew Bible. I would also say that it’s a bit off the mark to say there’s no logical way to get from a “Caesar type of divinized lower god” to Nicea’s doctrine of homoousia. The progression of ideas can be quite easily charted from Paul to John to Justin to Tertullian, etc. In fact, that’s one of Ehrman’s primary topics.
Lastly, I don’t agree that the New Testament identifies Jesus as “the creator God of the OT Genesis 1.” Rather, I think the New Testament identifies him as a divine agent of the creator God. The simultaneous identification of agents with, and distinction from, their divine patrons is a common theme in several cultures in the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world. It’s not exclusive to Christianity, nor is the New Testament conceptualization of Christ’s relationship to God. Acknowledging the operation of Christianity and its ideologies within a broader cultural matrix provides for much more logical and supported answers to these questions. The real disconnect from the broader Semitic world did not take place until the second century, when Greco-Roman philosophical frameworks took over the conceptualization of Christ and his relationship to God.
Daniel, Thanks for the very detailed and helpful response to Partick’s comment. And Patrick, as to your point 2), without having read this book by Ehrman, I can assuredly say, from reading several of his and hearing many of his lectures, he would not be either ignoring the NT and holds to no poorly-informed or flimsy views of how and when the NT docs may have been “changed”. One might accuse him, in a place or two at least (I’ve certainly not read all his books!), of seeming to overstate the amount of early textual variation, but his work is overall very careful and well-documented. He’s not sucked into easy generalizations or careless interpretation of data. His arguments re. “forgery” of Pauline or other books in and out of the NT are pretty careful and detailed in “Forged”, although he is not attempting to do thorough argumentation re. each book’s authorship and dating there. He is clear re. his thesis, and to my judgment, supports it well.