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

by Bart D. Ehrman

A being is either God or not God. God is “up there” in the heavenly realm, and we are “down here” in this realm. And there is an unbridgeable chasm between these two realms.

Is he tlking about cnfisyians? bc otherwise this seems inaccurate. What about people who believe tbe earth js somehow dkvines?

What I have come to see is that scholars have such disagreements in part because they typically answer the question of high or low Christology on the basis of the paradigm I have just described—that the divine and human realms are categorically distinct, with a great chasm separating the two. The problem is that most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan—did not have this paradigm.

Divinity came in many shapes and sizes; the divine realm had many levels.

Unlike Christianity, Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion. Instead, religion was all about action—what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them.

When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?”

Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of “knowing.”

Whether Jesus is still alive today, because of his resurrection, or indeed whether any such great miracles have happened in the past, cannot be “known” by means of historical study, but only on the basis of faith.

History, for historians, is not the same as “the past.” The past is everything that has happened before; history is what we can establish as having happened before, using historical forms of evidence.

When I say that conservative evangelical Christians and fundamentalists are children of the Enlightenment, I mean that more than almost anyone else, thinkers among these groups are committed to “objective truth”—which was precisely the commitment that led to the demise of Christianity in the modern world in the first place, especially in Europe.

As storytellers told the stories of Jesus’s earthly career, year after year and decade after decade, they did not separate who Jesus was after his death—the one who had been exalted to heaven—from who he was during his life. And so their belief in the exalted Jesus affected the ways they told their stories about him.

In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians—Jesus’s disciples, for example—did not believe this. And there are clear historical reasons for thinking they did not. The earliest Christians held exaltation Christologies in which the human being Jesus was made the Son of God—for example, at his resurrection or at his baptism—as we examined in the previous chapter. John has a different Christology.

According to the Christian Gnostics, this view of the world was taught by Christ himself. Christ is the one who came into the world to teach heavenly secrets that can liberate the divine sparks entrapped in matter.

When I said that Constantine appears to have had a genuine conversion, I do not mean to say that he looked on the Christian faith from what we might call a purely “religious” perspective without a social or political element to it (I should stress that ancient people saw religion and politics so bound up together that they did not speak of them as different entities; there is actually no Greek word that corresponds to what we call “religion”).

Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status at his resurrection; to being a preexistent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him.

I especially resonate with the ethical teachings of Jesus. He taught that much of the law of God could be summarized in the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” He taught that you should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He taught that our acts of love, generosity, mercy, and kindness should reach even to “the least of these, my brothers and sisters”—that is, to the lowly, the outcast, the impoverished, the homeless, the destitute.

But it is important to realize that the reasoning behind his moral teaching is not the reasoning most of us use today. People today think that we should live ethically for a wide variety of reasons—most of them irrelevant to Jesus—for example, so we can find the greatest self-fulfillment in life and so we can all thrive together as a society for the long haul. Jesus did not teach his ethics so that society could thrive for the long haul. For Jesus, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it.

To make sense of Jesus, I have recontextualized him—that is, made him and his message relevant in a new context—for a new day, the day in which I live.

Most Christians today do not realize that they have recontextualized Jesus. But in fact they have. Everyone who either believes in him or subscribes to any of his teachings has done so—from the earliest believers who first came to believe in his resurrection until today. And so it will be, world without end.

What is arguably most significant is that in the fourth century, when these disputes had come to a head, the Roman emperor Constantine had converted to the faith. That changed everything. Having a Christian emperor on the throne—one who believed and propagated the belief that Christ was God—had radical implications for the various interactions between orthodox Christians and others.

Once the emperor became Christian, it is fair to say that everything changed with respect to Christian relationships with pagans and with the Roman government. Rather than being a persecuted minority who refused to worship the divine emperor, the Christians were on the path to becoming the persecuting majority, with the emperor as the servant of the true God who encouraged, directly or indirectly, the citizens of the state to join in his Christian worship.

Jews came to be legally marginalized under Christian emperors and treated as second-class citizens with restricted legal rights and limited economic possibilities. Jewish beliefs and practices were not actually made illegal, in the way pagan sacrifices were at the end of the fourth century, but theologians and Christian bishops—who now were increasingly powerful not only as religious leaders, but also as civil authorities—railed against Jews and attacked them as the enemies of God. State legislation was passed to constrain the activities of Jews.