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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Of course, the Gospels contain nonhistorical information and stories that have been modified and exaggerated and embellished. These books do not contain the words of someone who was sitting at Jesus’s feet taking notes. They are nothing like that. They are books that are intending to tell the “good news” of Jesus (the word gospel means “good news”). That is, their authors had a vested interest both in what they were telling and in how they were telling it. They wanted to preach Jesus. They were not trying to give biographical information that would pass muster among critical historians living two thousand years later who have developed significantly different standards of writing history, or historiography. They were writing for their own day and were trying to convince people about the truth—as they saw it—about Jesus. They were basing their stories on what they had heard and read. What they had read was based on what the authors of these other writings had heard. It all goes back to oral tradition.

The question is how to ferret out the historically accurate information from the later alterations and inventions.

If a story is found in several of these independent traditions, then it is far more likely that this story goes back to the ultimate source of the tradition, the life of Jesus itself.

scholars are especially keen to consider whether traditions about Jesus can actually fit in a first-century Palestinian Jewish context. Some of the later Gospels from outside the New Testament portray Jesus teaching views that are starkly different from what we can plausibly situate in Jesus’s own historical and cultural milieu. Such teachings cannot obviously be accepted as ones that a first-century Palestinian Jew would have spoken.

Like most Jews, Jesus would have believed that there was one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, who had chosen Israel to be his special people and given them his law. Keeping the law of Moses would have been of paramount importance to Jesus, as it was to all religious Jews of his time.

One of the most important aspects of Judaism for understanding the historical Jesus is a widespread worldview shared by many Jews of his time that scholars have called apocalypticism.

It is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against (allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings 2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided, or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see. Jesus almost certainly delivered some such message. As we will see, this is a significant key for understanding who Jesus actually thought he was: not God, but someone else.

Jesus’s message was not altogether unusual for his day. Other Jewish preachers were declaring similar things.

In this saying of Jesus, however, people gain eternal life not because they have believed in Christ (they have never even seen or heard of the Son of Man), but because they have done good things for people in need. This is not a saying that early Christians invented. It embodies the views of Jesus.

What happened immediately after Jesus’s life? The Christian church started. His disciples started converting people to believe in him. And what did these early Christians believe? All of our evidence suggests that they too were apocalypticists. They thought that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. Our earliest Christian author, as I’ve pointed out, was Paul. He was thoroughly entrenched in apocalyptic thinking. He was so sure that the end was coming soon that he thought he himself would be alive when judgment day arrived

Christ is a title and is, in fact, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. Saying Jesus Christ means saying Jesus is the messiah.

Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.

Here is what many scholars take to be the most reasonable scenario. During his life, Jesus raised hopes and expectations that he might be the messiah. His disciples expected great things from him. Possibly he would raise an army. Possibly he would call down the wrath of God on the enemy. But he would do something and would be the future ruler of Israel. The crucifixion completely disconfirmed this idea and showed the disciples just how wrong they were. Jesus was killed by his enemies, so he wasn’t the messiah after all. But then they came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and this reconfirmed what had earlier been disconfirmed. He really is the messiah. But not in the way we thought!

Jesus’s followers must have considered him to be the messiah in some sense before his death, because nothing about his death or resurrection would have made them come up with the idea afterward. The messiah was not supposed to die or rise again.

Did he call himself the messiah? If so, what did he mean by it? And did he call himself God? Here I want to stake out a clear position: messiah, yes; God, no.

First let me go back to my earlier point about the disciples. They clearly thought and talked about Jesus as the messiah during his earthly life. But in fact he did nothing to make a person think that he was the messiah. He may well have been a pacifist (“love your enemy,” “turn the other cheek,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” etc.), which would not exactly make him a leading candidate to be general over the Jewish armed forces. He did not preach the violent overthrow of the Roman armies. And he talked about someone else, rather than himself, as the coming Son of Man. So if nothing in what Jesus was actively doing would make anyone suspect that he had messianic pretensions, why would his followers almost certainly have been thinking about him and calling him the messiah during his public ministry? The easiest explanation is that Jesus told them that he was the messiah. But what he meant by “messiah” has to be understood within the broader context of his apocalyptic proclamation.

So what were they to think when this outsider from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared in town, preaching his fiery apocalyptic message of the coming destruction of the armed forces and predicting that their own beloved temple would be destroyed in the violent overthrow of everything that was opposed to God? They surely did not take kindly to the message or the messenger, and they kept a steady eye on him. According to all our accounts, Jesus spent the week leading up to the Passover feast in Jerusalem preaching his apocalyptic message of coming destruction (see Mark 13; Matt. 24–25). It appears that he was gathering more and more crowds. People were listening to him. Some were accepting his message. The movement was growing. So the leaders decided to act.

The first is to reaffirm that we have no record of Jesus ever proclaiming himself to be the future king of the Jews, the messiah, in a public context. This is never his message. His message is about the coming kingdom to be brought by the Son of Man. He always keeps himself out of it. The second fact is that when the authorities arrested Jesus and handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the consistent report is that the charge leveled against him at his trial was that he called himself the king of the Jews. If Jesus never preached in public that he was the future king, but this was the charge that was leveled against him at his trial, how did outsiders come to know of it?11 The simplest answer is that this is what Judas betrayed.

It's plausible that Jesus claimed to be the messiah based on the documented fact that he was executed for the claim, but I don't find this section as persuasive as others in the book, I think because there aren't scripture quotes from Jesus directly addressing his messianic status.

He thought he was a prophet predicting the end of the current evil age and the future king of Israel in the age to come.

If Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming himself to be a divine being sent from God—one who existed before the creation of the world, who was in fact equal with God—could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important? And yet none of these earlier sources says any such thing about him. Did they (all of them!) just decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about Jesus? Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.

In the Hebrew Bible, and indeed in the entire Jewish tradition, we do have instances in which mortals—for example, a king, or Moses, or Enoch—were considered to be divine beings in some sense. But that was always what someone else said about them; it was never what they were recorded as saying about themselves. This is quite different from the situation that we find in, say, Egypt, where the pharaohs claimed direct divine lineage; or with Alexander the Great, who accepted cultic veneration; or with some of the Roman emperors, who actively propagated the idea that they were gods. This never happens in Judaism that we know of.

In the Hebrew Bible the prophets Elijah and Elisha did fantastic miracles—including healing the sick and raising the dead—through the power of God, and in the New Testament so did the Apostles Peter and Paul; but that did not make any of them divine. When Jesus forgives sins, he never says “I forgive you,” as God might say, but “your sins are forgiven,” which means that God has forgiven the sins. This prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven was otherwise reserved for Jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at the temple. Jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative, but not a divine one. And kings were worshiped—even in the Bible (Matt. 18:26)—by veneration and obeisance, just as God was. Here, Jesus may be accepting the worship due to him as the future king. None of these things is, in and of itself, a clear indication that Jesus is divine.

What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus is that his public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all. They were about God. And about the kingdom that God was going to bring. And about the Son of Man who was soon to bring judgment upon the earth. When this happened the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be brought into the kingdom—a kingdom in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering. The twelve disciples of Jesus would be rulers of this future kingdom, and Jesus would rule over them. Jesus did not declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God.

Probably the key point of the entire book

What is it that made Jesus so special? In fact, as we will see, it was not his message. That did not succeed much at all. Instead, it helped get him crucified—surely not a mark of spectacular success. No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection changed absolutely everything. Such a thing was not said of any of the other apocalyptic preachers of Jesus’s day, and the fact that it was said about Jesus made him unique. Without the belief in the resurrection, Jesus would have been a mere footnote in the annals of Jewish history. With the belief in the resurrection, we have the beginnings of the movement to promote Jesus to a superhuman plane. Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.

Even apart from the fact that they were written forty to sixty-five years after the facts, by people who were not there to see these things happen, who were living in different parts of the world, at different times, and speaking different languages—apart from all this, they are filled with discrepancies, some of which cannot be reconciled. In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

In sum, the common Roman practice was to allow the bodies of crucified people to decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers as part of the disincentive for crime. I have not run across any contrary indications in any ancient source. It is always possible that an exception was made, of course. But it must be remembered that the Christian storytellers who indicated that Jesus was an exception to the rule had an extremely compelling reason to do so. If Jesus had not been buried, his tomb could not be declared empty.

If the Romans followed their normal policies and customs, and if Pilate was the man whom all our sources indicate he was, then it is highly unlikely that Jesus was decently buried on the day of his execution in a tomb that anyone could later identify.

My point is that one could think of dozens of plausible scenarios for why a tomb would be empty, and any one of these scenarios is, strictly speaking, more probable than an act of God.

In this connection I should stress that the discovery of the empty tomb appears to be a late tradition. It occurs in Mark for the first time, some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus died. Our earliest witness, Paul, does not say anything about it.

We can know three very important things: (1) some of Jesus’s followers believed that he had been raised from the dead; (2) they believed this because some of them had visions of him after his crucifixion; and (3) this belief led them to reevaluate who Jesus was, so that the Jewish apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee came to be considered, in some sense, God.

For Jesus’s disciples, Jesus was raised into an immortal body and exalted to heaven where he currently lives and reigns with God Almighty. I say “some” of his followers because it is not altogether certain that all of the disciples came to believe this, for reasons I explain below. Our records are simply not good enough to allow us to know exactly which among Jesus’s closest followers came to accept this great miracle. Some obviously did, but our accounts were written many years after the fact, and we hear almost nothing about “the Twelve.”

What is certain is that the earliest followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had come back to life, in the body, and that this was a body that had real bodily characteristics: it could be seen and touched, and it had a voice that could be heard. Why did they come to think this, at the very beginning of the Christian tradition? What made them believe that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead? Something did. And I think we know what it was. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after he had been crucified.

I begin with our early records. The oldest tradition that we have of the resurrection faith is the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, which we examined in Chapter 4. This creed says nothing about an empty tomb and indicates that the reason the disciples came to believe in the resurrection was that Jesus appeared to them. The same thing is true of Paul himself: he believed because of a vision, not because he saw an empty tomb (Gal. 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 15:8).

Our first Gospel is Mark; it records the “fact” that the tomb was empty, but strikingly, no one is said to come to believe that Jesus was raised because of it. Even more striking, in Luke’s account the report that the tomb was discovered to be empty was dismissed as “an idle tale” and is explicitly said not to have led anyone to believe (24:11). Only when Jesus appears to the disciples do they come to faith (24:13–53).

The same view is advanced in the Gospel of John. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb and is confused, but she does not believe. She instead thinks someone has moved Jesus’s body to a different location (20:1–13). Not until Jesus appears to her does she comes to believe (20:14–18).

These stories show what should have come as a logical surmise even without them: if someone was buried in a tomb and later the body was not there, this fact alone would not make anyone su...

Excellent point because Jesus said nothing during his life which would make his disciples think he would later be resurrected!

But for people who are not suffering from mental disease and are not ingesting LSD, visions appear to occur with particular frequency among those who are experiencing bereavement or religious awe and expectation.

A significant amount of research has been done on visions caused by bereavement. One of the most striking features of this research is that those who experience such visions almost always assume, and wholeheartedly believe, that they are veridical. The person who has died really has come back to visit. Outsiders tend to see these visions as hallucinations.

At the end of the day, belief in Jesus’s resurrection “works” whether the visions were veridical or not. If they were veridical, it was because Jesus was raised from the dead.23 If they were not veridical, they are easily explained on other grounds. The disciples were bereaved and deeply grieving for their dearest loved one, who had experienced a sudden, unexpected, and particularly violent death. They may have felt guilt about how they had behaved toward him, especially in the tense hours immediately before his death. It is not at all unheard of for such people to have an “encounter” with the lost loved one afterward. In fact, such people are more inclined to have just such an encounter.

Before the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection, they thought he was a great teacher, an apocalyptic preacher, and, probably, the one chosen to be king in the coming kingdom of God. Since they followed him wholeheartedly, they must have subscribed to his teaching wholeheartedly. Like him, they thought the age they were living in was controlled by the forces of evil, but that God would soon intervene to make right all that was wrong. In the very near future, God was going to send a cosmic judge over the earth, the Son of Man, to destroy the wicked powers that were making life so miserable in this world and to set up a good kingdom, a utopian place where good would prevail and God would rule through his messiah. The disciples would sit on thrones as rulers in the coming kingdom, and Jesus would be seated on the greatest throne of all, as the messiah of God. But he was purely human. He was a great teacher, yes. A charismatic preacher, yes. And even the son of David who would rule in the future kingdom, yes. But he was a man. Born like other humans, raised like other humans, in nature no different from others, only wiser, more spiritual, more insightful, more righteous, more godly. But not God—certainly not God, in any of the ancient senses of the term. That all changed with the belief in the resurrection. When the disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, they did not think it was a resuscitation such as you can find elsewhere among the Jew...

It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. In no sense, in this early period, is Jesus understood to be God the Father. He is not the One Almighty God. He is the one who has been elevated to a divine position and is God in a variety of senses. As I have been arguing and will argue extensively in the next chapter, whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God in what sense? It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and “of the same essence” as the Father.

we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement.

Arguably, Paul’s greatest contribution to the theology of his day was his hard-fought view that this salvation in Christ applied to all people, Jew and gentile alike, on the same grounds: faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Being Jewish had nothing to do with it. To be sure, Jews were the “chosen people,” and the Jewish scriptures were a revelation from God. But a gentile did not have to become a Jew in order to have salvation through the death and resurrection of the messiah.

These particular preliterary traditions are consistent in their view: Christ is said to have been exalted to heaven at his resurrection and to have been made the Son of God at that stage of his existence. In this view, Jesus was not the Son of God who was sent from heaven to earth; he was the human who was exalted at the end of his earthly life to become the Son of God and was made, then and there, into a divine being. The Exaltation of Jesus WE FIND THIS VIEW of Christ in what is arguably the oldest fragment of a creed in all of Paul’s letters, as well as in several of the speeches of Acts.

We don’t know who started the church or when. Later tradition said that it was founded by the disciple Peter (allegedly the first bishop there, hence the first “pope”), but this seems unlikely: Paul’s letter provides us with the first surviving evidence for the fact that a church existed in Rome at all, and in it he greets the various people he knows there. But he never mentions Peter. This is hard to imagine if Peter was there—especially if he was the leader of that church.

In fact, the tradition appears to be one of the oldest statements of faith that survives in our earliest Christian writings. Several features of this creed make it look very ancient indeed. The first is its emphasis on the human messiahship of Jesus as the descendant of David, a view not otherwise mentioned in the writings of Paul, our earliest Christian author.

The view here is clear. Jesus was “appointed” (or “designated”) the “Son of God” when he was raised from the dead. It was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Son of God.

But he started out as a human and nothing more. You will notice that in the preliterary traditions I have discussed there is no talk about Jesus being born of a virgin and certainly no talk of him being divine during his lifetime. He is a human figure, possibly a messiah.