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

by Bart D. Ehrman

JESUS WAS A LOWER-CLASS Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state. Yet not long after his death, his followers were claiming that he was a divine being. Eventually they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth. And so the question: How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?

Moreover, 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. This claim was not unique to Christians. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that we know about in our world, numerous people in antiquity, among both pagans and Jews, were thought to have been both human and divine.

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.

In the ancient world it was possible to believe in a number of ways that a human was divine. Here are two major ways it could happen, as attested in Christian, Jewish, and pagan sources (I will be discussing other ways in the course of the book): By adoption or exaltation. A human being (say, a great ruler or warrior or holy person) could be made divine by an act of God or a god, by being elevated to a level of divinity that she or he did not previously have. By nature or incarnation. A divine being (say, an angel or one of the gods) could become human, either permanently or, more commonly, temporarily. One of my theses will be that a Christian text such as the Gospel of Mark understands Jesus in the first way, as a human who came to be made divine. The Gospel of John understands him in the second way, as a divine being who became human. Both of them see Jesus as divine, but in different ways.

Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who predicted that the end of the age was soon to arrive, when God would intervene in history and overthrow the forces of evil to bring in his good kingdom.

belief in the resurrection—based on visionary experiences—is what initially led the followers of Jesus (all of them? some of them?) to believe that Jesus had been exalted to heaven and made to sit at the right hand of God as his unique Son.

a different set of Christological views that developed later and that maintained that Jesus was not simply a human who had been exalted to the level of divinity, but a preexistent divine being with God before he came to earth as a human. I show the key similarities and differences between this “incarnation” view of Christ (in which he “became flesh”—the literal meaning of the word incarnation) with the earlier “exaltation” Christologies.

The debates over the nature of Christ were not resolved by the end of the third century but came to a head in the early fourth century after the conversion of the emperor Constantine to the Christian faith. By then, the vast majority of Christians firmly believed that Jesus was God, but the question remained, “in what sense?” It is in this early fourth-century context that battles were waged in the “Arian controversy,” which I explore in Chapter 9. The controversy is named after Arius, an influential Christian teacher of Alexandria, Egypt, who held to a “subordinationist” view of Christ—that is, Jesus was God, but he was a subordinate deity who was not at the same level of glory as God the Father; moreover, he had not always existed with the Father. The alternative point of view was espoused by Arius’s own bishop, Alexander, who maintained that Christ was a being who had always existed with God and that he was, by nature, equal with God. The ultimate denunciation of Arius’s view led to the formation of the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in churches today.

the Apostle Paul, who wrote more of the books of the New Testament than any other author? Or is it best to start with the Gospels, which, while written after Paul, discuss the life of Jesus, who lived before Paul wrote his letters?

Scholars have had to investigate the Gospels of the New Testament with a critical eye to determine which stories, and which parts of stories, are historically accurate with respect to the historical Jesus, and which represent later embellishments by his devoted followers.

The eastern half of the empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture—so much so that the common language of the eastern empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written, was Greek. And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds. Jews of the time had many distinctive views of their own (see the next chapter), but in many key respects of concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors.

This beautiful and moving tale of love in life and death is also a tale of gods who temporarily become—or appear to become—human, and humans who become gods. When Philemon and Baucis are worshiped as gods, it is not because they are now as mighty as great Jupiter and Mercury. They are thought of as very low-level divinities, mortals who have been elevated to the divine plane. But divine they are. This is a key and important lesson for us. Divinity came in many shapes and sizes; the divine realm had many levels.

Even though Apollonius was understood to be a preexistent god come in the flesh, this was not the normal Greek or Roman way of understanding how a divine human could be born of a mortal. By far the more common view was that a divine being came into the world—not having existed before birth—because a god had sex with a human, and the offspring then was in some sense divine.

many people believed that Alexander was one of Zeus’s offspring.

The tale of Amphytrion and Alcmena, of course, is a myth, and it is not clear that anyone actually “believed” it. It was instead a great story. Still, the idea behind it—that a mortal woman could give birth to a child spawned by a god—was plausible to many people of the ancient world. It would not be unusual for them to think that some of the great beings who stride the earth—great conquerors like Alexander, for example, or even great philosophers with superhuman wisdom such as Plato6—may well have been conceived in ways different from us mere mortals.

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.

In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as deification—the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods.

Considering a living ruler to be divine was not unheard of in the ancient world.

So-called bad emperors (there were a number of them) did not receive divine honors at death, but the good ones did.

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. From this perspective, the emperors—both dead and living—were indeed treated in the ways gods were treated, sometimes in virtually identical ways.

God is wholly Other compared with everyone and everything else and is on an entirely different plane, by himself. But not for most ancient people.

When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level.

The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots of what we might call religious tolerance.

The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions. If displeased, they could do harmful things. It was important to keep them happy by paying them their due in reverence and worship.

For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.

THIS VIEW OF THE divine realm did not change significantly until later Christians changed

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.

the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God. People saw Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, and even a prophet. Some people thought of him as the (very human) messiah. But he was born like everyone else and he was “like” everyone else. He was raised in Nazareth and was not particularly noteworthy as a youth. As an adult—or possibly even as a child—he became convinced, like many other Jews of his time, that he was living near the end of the age, that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in a good kingdom here on earth. Jesus felt called to proclaim this message of the coming apocalypse, and he spent his entire public ministry doing so. Eventually Jesus irritated the ruling authorities during a trip he made to Jerusalem, and they had him arrested and tried. He was brought before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and after a short trial he was convicted on charges of political insurgency: he was claiming to be the Jewish king when only the Roman overlords who were in charge of Palestine and the rest of the Mediterranean could appoint a king. As a political troublemaker he was condemned to a particularly ignominious death, by crucifixion. And as far as the Romans were concerned, that’s where his story ended.

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.

Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God. Could this be a historical accident? How could it be an accident? These were not simply parallel developments. This was a competition.

Being his people meant following the law he had given them—the law of Moses, which is now found in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which together are sometimes called the Torah (the Hebrew word for law).

WITH THE STRESS ON the oneness of God throughout scripture, how is it possible to imagine that Jews could have something like a divine pyramid?

Note how the commandment is worded. It does not say, “You shall believe that there is only one God.” It says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This commandment, as stated, presupposes that there are other gods. But none of them is to be worshiped ahead of, or instead of, the God of Israel. As it came to be interpreted, the commandment also meant that none of these other gods was to be worshiped alongside of or even after the God of Israel. But that does not mean the other gods don’t exist. They simply are not to be worshiped.

The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

even within Judaism there was understood to be a continuum of divine beings and divine power, comparable in many ways to that which could be found in paganism.

Here again, then, we have divine beings appearing as humans; and what is more, we have them generating yet other superhuman beings. This is a Jewish version of the pagan myths.

The rabbis of the second, third, fourth, and following centuries CE condemned any such notion as a heresy. But, again, the fact that they condemned it shows that it was a view held by other Jews, and since the rabbis condemned it so thoroughly, it was probably held by a large number of Jews. Segal argues that this heresy can be traced back to the first Christian century and to Palestine itself. He maintains that one obvious target for such views were the Christians, who elevated Christ—as we will see—to the level of God. But it wasn’t only Christians who held to the two-powers heresy. Non-Christian Jews did as well, on the basis of their interpretation of passages from the Hebrew Bible.

Stoics believed that Logos—reason—was a divine element that infused all of existence. There is, in fact, a logic to the way things are, and if you want to understand this world—and more important, if you want to understand how best to live in this world—then you will seek to understand its underlying logic. As it turns out, this is possible because Logos is not only inherent in nature, it resides in us as human beings. We ourselves have a portion of Logos given to us, and when we apply our minds to the world, we can understand it. If we understand the world, we can see how to live in it. If we follow through on that understanding, we will indeed lead harmonious, peaceful, and enriched lives. But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.

God, in this thinking, is pure spirit. But how can something that is pure spirit have any contact with what is pure matter? For that to happen, some kind of link is needed, some kind of go-between that connects spirit and matter. For Platonists, the Logos is this go-between. The divine Logos is what allows the divine to interact with the nondivine, the spirit with matter.

As we have seen, in Egyptian and Roman circles, there were levels of divinity, and so too in Jewish circles. Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the king of Israel, terms that may surprise readers who think—on the basis of the kind of thinking that developed in the fourth Christian century—that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God and humans. Nonetheless, here it is, in the Bible itself, the king is called both Lord and God.

Here then we see Moses called what the king of Israel is called—and what, in a different context, the emperor of the Romans was called: god.

Here, then, is a close Jewish analogy to what we have found in pagan sources: a powerful, wise, and great man rewarded after his life by being made divine.

It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists. But even as they believed that there was only one God Almighty, it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases. Moreover, there was some sense of continuity—not only discontinuity—between the divine and human realms. And there was a kind of spectrum of divinity:

This did not mean that they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God. Thus, even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity.

Jesus is hardly ever, if at all, explicitly called God in the New Testament. I realized that some of the authors of the New Testament do not equate Jesus with God. I had become impressed with the fact that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were found only in the Gospel of John, the last and most theologically loaded of the four Gospels. If Jesus really went around calling himself God, wouldn’t the other Gospels at least mention the fact? Did they just decide to skip that part?

Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.

Our very first Christian author is the Apostle Paul, who was writing twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s death.

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.

the followers of Jesus, as we learn from the New Testament itself, were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews from Palestine. These books are not written by people like that. Their authors were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation. They probably wrote after Jesus’s disciples had all, or almost all, died. They were writing in different parts of the world, in a different language, and at a later time. There’s not much mystery about why later Christians would want to claim that the authors were in fact companions of Jesus, or at least connected with apostles: that claim provided much needed authority for these accounts for people wanting to know what Jesus was really like.

The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death.