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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Sometimes this view is also referred to as an adoptionist Christology, because in it Christ is not thought to be a divine being “by nature.” That is, he did not preexist before he was born in the world, he was not a divine being who came to earth, he was not of the same kind of “essence” as God himself. He was instead a human being who has been “adopted” by God to a divine status. Thus he was not God by virtue of who he was, but by virtue of the fact that the Creator and Lord of all things chose to elevate him to a position of prominence, even though he began as a lowly human.

If the earliest Christians held such elevated views of Jesus as the exalted Son of God soon after his resurrection, it is probably already at this early stage that they began to show veneration to him in ways previously shown to God himself.

The reality is—and Brown would not have disagreed with this—views of Jesus did not develop along a straight line in every part of early Christianity and at the same rate. Different Christians in different churches in different regions had different views of Jesus, almost from the get-go.

But even if the original apostles had been forward-looking and concerned about the needs of posterity (or at least the longings of twenty-first-century historians), they would not have been able to write a Gospel. 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.

It is in the Gospel of John, and only in John, that Jesus says such things as “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58) and “I and the Father are one” (10:30). In this Gospel Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And in this Gospel Jesus talks about existing in a glorious state with God the Father before he became human (17:5).

Scholars have long held that the view of Christ in the Gospel of John was a later development in the Christian tradition. It was not something that Jesus himself actually taught, and it is not something that can be found in the other Gospels. 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.

Exaltation Christologies became transformed into incarnation Christologies as soon as believers in Jesus came to see him as an angelic being who performed God’s work here on earth.3

And as it turns out, as recent research has shown, there are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion. Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors. Later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel—even the chief angel—but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth.

Paul, then, saw Christ as a kind of second Adam who reversed the sin, condemnation, and death brought about by the first Adam.

One of the most striking features of John’s Gospel is its elevated claims about Jesus. Here, Jesus is decidedly God and is in fact equal with God the Father—before coming into the world, while in the world, and after he leaves the world.

I wonder if the author intentionally restates points like this ad nauseam or if it's a writing/editing quirk. Some repetition of fairly complex theology is useful, but it can be a bit much.

But the Prologue of John has an even more elevated view of Christ. Here, Christ is not an angel of God, who was later “hyperexalted” or given a higher place than he had before he appeared on earth. Quite the contrary, even before he appeared, he was the Logos of God himself, a being who was God, the one through whom the entire universe was created.

As we will see, eventually incarnation Christologies developed significantly and overtook exaltation Christologies, which came to be deemed inadequate and, eventually, “heretical.”

If Christ really was God, and God the Father was God, how could Christians claim that there was just one God? Aren’t there two Gods? And if the Holy Spirit is also God, aren’t there three Gods? If so, aren’t Christians polytheists instead of monotheists? Many of the struggles in the period after the New Testament period were over this precise issue.

This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies. We have seen this movement already with the exaltation Christology that was the original form of Christian belief. By the second century it was widely deemed heretical.11 Later understandings of the second century were acceptable and dominant in their day, but they too came to be suspect and even spurned.

Most people in these congregations were not literalists: they did not think either that the Bible was literally true or that it was some kind of infallible revelation of the word of God. And even though they said the traditional Christian creeds as part of their worship services, many of these people did not believe what they said—as I learned from talking with them. Moreover, many people never gave a passing thought even to what the words meant or why they were in the creed in the first place.

With respect to Christology, as we will see in this chapter, it was concluded that Christ was a separate being from God the Father, who had always existed alongside God, who was equal with God and always had been equal with God, who became a human, not in part, but completely, while not abandoning his status and power as God. This view seems 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?

And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition.

They gathered and just...decided what was true. 300 years after Jesus’ death. You almost have to laugh at the faux certainty required.

At this point in the book, I officially lost track all the different Christological variants and their purveyors. The key takeaway for me now is the continued progression of the theology and what was considered orthodox as we get further chronologically from Jesus’ death.

the Roman emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity in the same year Arius was ordained (312 CE) and who, in the years that followed, became increasingly committed to seeing that the Christian church should become unified, in no small measure because he saw the church as a potentially unifying force in his fragmented empire. By 324 the church was not at all unified,

Since its inception, Christianity had periodically been persecuted by Roman authorities. For more than two hundred years, these persecutions were relatively infrequent and sporadic, and they were never promoted from the highest levels, the imperial government in Rome. That changed in 249 CE, when the Roman emperor Decius sponsored an empirewide persecution to isolate and root out the Christians.8 Fortunately for the Christians, Decius died two years later, and the persecution by and large ceased, for a brief time.

Constantine the Great became emperor in the year 306. He was born and raised a pagan, but in 312 he had a conversion experience and committed himself to the Christian God and the Christian religion. Scholars have argued long and hard over whether this conversion was “genuine” or not, but today most maintain that it was indeed an authentic commitment on Constantine’s part to follow and promote the Christian God. The next year Constantine persuaded his co-emperor, Licinius, to issue a joint decree ending all persecution of Christians. From then on, things changed drastically for the Christian movement.

The best scholarly estimates indicate that at about the time of Constantine’s conversion, something like 5 percent of the empire’s sixty million inhabitants called themselves Christian. When the church went from being a persecuted minority to being the hottest religious item in the empire, conversions increased dramatically. By the end of the century, something like 50 percent of the people in the empire were Christian.

Constantine thus wanted to heal the theological division in the church in order to make the Christian faith more useful in bringing religious and cultural unity to the empire. A second reason sometimes suggested for Constantine’s concern relates more closely to his pagan inheritance. It had widely been believed for many centuries that the gods oversaw the best interests of Rome when they were properly acknowledged in cultic practices of the state. Worshiping the gods in the proper and prescribed way earned their good favor, and their good favor was manifest in their kind treatment of the state—for example, in winning its wars and in prospering during times of peace. Constantine inherited this perspective and may well have brought it with him into his Christian faith. Now he worshiped not the traditional gods of Rome, but the God of the Christians. But this God too must be worshiped properly. If there are serious divisions in the worshiping community, however, this could not be pleasing to God. Christianity was far more focused on “theological truth” than traditional Greek or Roman religions and placed greater emphasis on “sacrificial practice.” It was important, in the Christian faith, to know and practice the truth. But widespread disagreements about the truth would lead to deep rifts in the Christian community, and God could not be pleased with that state of affairs. For the good of the state, which was overseen ultimately by God, it was necessary that these rifts be hea...

But it is important that the creed emphasizes that Christ is of the “same substance” as God the Father. This is a way of saying that God and Christ are absolutely equal. Christ is “true God,” not a subordinate deity secondary to God the Father. And as the anathemas indicate, it is now a heresy to claim there ever was a time when Christ did not exist (or before which he did not exist), or to say he was created like everything else in the universe “out of nothing,” or that he does not share God’s very substance.

Christ was coeternal with God the Father. He had always existed. And he was “of the same substance” as God the Father, himself truly God, from back into eternity. The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God.

To use the older terminology, in early Christianity the views of Christ got “higher and higher” with the passing of time, as he became increasingly identified as divine. 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.

The short story is that 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.

But the major leap was made in those twenty years: from seeing Jesus as his own disciples did during his ministry, as a Jewish man with an apocalyptic message of coming destruction, to seeing him as something far greater, a preexistent divine being who became human only temporarily before being made the Lord of the universe.