How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

by Bart D. Ehrman

(an apocalypse is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities),

Nephilim means “those who have fallen.”

anointed you With the oil of gladness

sounds like porn

To begin with, they are not written by eyewitnesses. We call these books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they are named after two of Jesus’s earthly disciples, Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple, and two of the close companions of other apostles, Mark the secretary of Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul. But in fact the books were written anonymously—the authors never identify themselves—and they circulated for decades before anyone claimed they were written by these people. The first certain attribution of these books to these authors is a century after they were produced.

Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.

apocalypse, which means a “revealing” or an “unveiling.”

(since when he’s praying, he is not talking to himself).

All prayer is talking to yourself. Or he's mentally ill.

Faith is not historical knowledge, and historical knowledge is not faith.

His body did indeed come out of the grave. But when it did, it was a transformed body, made of spirit, and raised immortal.

So he was Casper the Friendly Ghost and believers will be when they are raised.

It was in fact often the case that a person who was a son by adoption in the Roman world was given a greater, higher status than a child who was a son by birth.

Hurtado sees Christianity as developing a binitary worship—in which Jesus was worshiped as the Lord, alongside God, without sacrificing the idea that there is only one God.

Imagine that. People are able to live with illogical ideas.

As a Christian living centuries later, Matthew read the book of Isaiah not in the original Hebrew language, but in his own tongue, Greek. When the Greek translators before his day rendered the passage, they translated the Hebrew for word young woman (alma) using a Greek word (parthenos) that can indeed mean just that but that eventually took on the connotation of a “young woman who has never had sex.” Matthew took the passage to be a messianic tradition and so indicated that Jesus fulfilled it, just as he fulfilled all the other prophecies of scripture, by being born of a “virgin.” It does not take too much thought to realize, though, that Matthew may have been giving “scriptural justification” for a tradition he inherited that originally had a different import: like Luke’s tradition, the one that came to Matthew may originally have spoken of Jesus as the unique Son of God because he was born of a virgin, with God as his father.

The only way they could pass on the story of Jesus was by word of mouth. And so they told the stories to one another, to their converts, and to their converts’ converts. This happened year after year, until some decades later, in different parts of the world, highly educated Greek-speaking Christians wrote down the traditions they had heard, thereby producing the Gospels we still have.

Didn’t Christology develop from a “low” Christology to a “high” Christology over time?

Sounds like both always existed but waxed and waned in popularity over time.

He spends all of chapter 17 praying to his Father, and, as I pointed out earlier, he is not talking to himself.

Isn't all prayer talking to yourself?

Or was it a cosmic disaster and inherently evil?

That's an interesting if dark thought.

Literally, the word orthodoxy means right belief. The word heresy literally means a choice—that is, a choice not to believe the “right belief.” A synonym for heresy is heterodoxy, which literally means different belief—that is, different from the belief that is “right.”

For if I must be myself my son, who am also a father, I now cease to have a son, since I am my own son. But by reason of not having a son, since I am my own son, how can I be a father? For I ought to have a son, in order to be a father. Therefore I am not a son, because I have not a father, who makes a son. (Against Praxeas 10)

Why is it God is all powerful and then bound by logic/reason /physics when it suits his apologists?

internally inconsistent and contradictory—how can Christ be God and God the Father be God if there is only one God? And how can Christ be fully divine and fully human at the same time? Wouldn’t he need to be partly human and partly divine?

Because it's a load of bullshit.

Justin is keen to explain this textual conundrum in Christological terms.

More logically it's because numerous versions of the story got combined or there were typos. And it's all bullshit.

God the Son, then, is the one to whom God the Father is speaking in the Old Testament

Or he's talking to himself

It is sometimes said—quite wrongly—that Constantine made Christianity the “official” religion of the empire. This is not at all the case. What Constantine did was to make Christianity a favored religion. He himself was a Christian, he promoted Christian causes, he gave money to build and finance Christian churches, and on the whole, it became a very good thing to be a Christian.

The religion is all about oneness, unity.

So is the Chinese Communist Party