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

by Bart D. Ehrman

On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.

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 h...

In Chapter 1 I discuss the views that were widely held in the Greek and Roman worlds outside both Judaism and Christianity.

Somewhat more surprising may be the discussion of Chapter 2, in which I show that analogous understandings existed even within the world of ancient Judaism.

After I have established the views of both pagans and Jews, we can move in Chapter 3 to consider the life of the historical Jesus.

These first three chapters can be seen as the backdrop to our ultimate concern: how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers’ belief that he had been raised from the dead.

And so, in Chapter 4 I deal with what I think we as historians simply cannot know about the traditions

surrounding Jesus’s resurrection.

In Chapter 5 I turn to what I think we almost certainly can know. Here I argue that the evidence is unambiguous and compelling: some of Jesus’s disciples claime...

These beliefs were the first Christologies—the first understandings that Jesus was a divine being. I explore these “exaltation” views of our earliest surviving sources in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 7 I move to 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.

Chapter 8 deals with some of the heretical “dead ends” taken by Christian theologians of the second and third centuries.

It is in this early fourth-century context that battles were waged in the “Arian controversy,” which I explore in Chapter 9.

Finally, in the epilogue, I deal with the consequences of these particular theological disputes after they were resolved.

But they could not kill his soul.

I have been referring to a man named Apollonius, who came from the town of Tyana. He was a pagan—that is, a polytheistic worshiper of the many Roman gods—and a renowned philosopher of his day. His followers thought he was immortal. We have a book written about him by his later devotee Philostratus.

Apollonius lived some years after a similar miracle-working Son of God in a different remote part of the empire, Jesus of Nazareth.

Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud.

As a philosopher Apollonius taught that the human soul is immortal; the flesh may die, but the person lives on.

What is striking is that they were not the only two. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that people know about today, there were lots of people like this in the ancient world.

As will become clear, I’m not dealing with whether or not they were really divine; I’m saying that’s how they were understood.

But as we will see, Jesus was not originally thought of in this way—any more than Apollonius was during his lifetime. It was only after his death that the man Jesus came to be thought of as God on earth.

But most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way. The divine realm had numerous strata.

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.

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.

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.

After major claps of thunder, Romulus was enveloped by fog. When the fog lifted, he was nowhere to be seen.

Romans heartily and enthusiastically embraced the divinity of the man Romulus.

As New Testament scholar Michael Peppard has recently pointed out, to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.” Other people were, to be sure, named after their divine fathers: son of Zeus, son of Apollo, and so on. But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.

The Egyptians had long revered their pharaohs as living representatives of deities, and the conqueror Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier, was offered and accepted the kind of obeisance reserved for the gods.

Moreover, despite his reluctance, Octavian was hailed as the “Son of God” as early as 40 BCE—years before he was emperor—and this title is found on coins as early as 38 BCE.

Normally, the emperor was officially declared a god at his death by a vote of the Roman Senate.

And sacrifices were made to the image of the emperor, just as to the gods. Still, in this former view of things the emperor was a lower-class divinity, and the worship of these human divinities was restricted to those who had already been deified at their deaths.

If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.

To this point, in exploring humans who were thought to have become divine, I have focused principally on powerful rulers. But other great humans also had this capacity.

In ancient philosophy being a Cynic did not mean simply being cynical; it was a style of philosophy. Cynic philosophers were adamant that you shouldn’t live for the “good things” in life.

As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing; humans are another—and never the twain shall meet.

But not for most ancient people. Apart from Jews in the ancient world—whom I will address in the next chapter—everyone was a polytheist.

Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense.

It will become clear in the following chapters that 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.

Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.

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.

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is 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.

In the Hebrew Bible, for example, there are angels, cherubim, and seraphim—attendants upon God who worship him and administer his will (see, for example, Isa. 6:1–6). These are fantastically powerful beings far above humans in the scale of existence. They are lower-level divinities.

The point is this: 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.

We know that some Jews thought it was right to worship angels in no small part because a number of our surviving texts insist that it not be done.

Within Judaism we find divine beings who temporarily become human, semidivine beings who are born of the union of a divine being and a mortal, and humans who are, or who become, divine.

Thus angelic beings, children of God, can be called gods. And in a variety of texts we find that such beings become human.