How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
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Other Jewish texts speak not only of angels (or even God) as becoming human, but also of humans who become angels.
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Noah. But what is most striking is that when Enoch was 365 years old, he passed from this earth—but without dying: “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Gen. 5:24).
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Recall: stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they.
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To summarize our findings to this point: the Angel of the Lord is sometimes portrayed in the Bible as being the Lord God himself, and he sometimes appears on earth in human guise. Still other angels—the members of God’s divine council—are called gods and are made mortals. And yet other angels make their appearances on earth in human form. Still more important, some Jewish texts talk about humans becoming angels at death—or even superior to angels and worthy of worship.
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In other words, if humans could be angels (and angels humans), and if angels could be gods, and if in fact the chief angel could be the Lord himself—then to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form.
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The word Nephilim means “those who have fallen.”
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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.
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The book of Daniel is something like a Hebrew Bible version of the book of Revelation—a book that modern fundamentalists think sets out a blueprint of human history, down to our own time. Critical scholars see it as something very different indeed, as a book of its own time and place. The ostensible setting of the book of Daniel is in the sixth century BCE—although scholars have long been convinced that the book was not actually written then, but centuries later in the second century BCE.
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messiah—a term we will consider more fully in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that it comes from the Hebrew word for anointed and was originally used of the king of Israel, God’s anointed one (i.e., the one chosen and favored by God).
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In this somewhat later view, it is a man, a mere mortal, who is exalted to this supreme position next to God.13 As this exalted being, the Son of Man is worshiped and glorified by the righteous.
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willing to bow down and prostrate yourself in the presence of an earthly king, then surely it’s appropriate to do so in the presence of the cosmic judge of the earth.
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“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Why is God speaking in the plural: “us” and “our”?
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Elsewhere, even within the book of Exodus, it is explicitly stated that no one can see God and live (Exod. 33:20). Yet they did see God and they did live. They must, then, have seen the second power, not God.
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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.
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simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them. Possibly the closest common term meaning roughly the same thing would be personification—but even that doesn’t quite get it, and it too isn’t a word you normally hear as you stand in line at the grocery store.
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As it turns out, some Jewish thinkers imagined that Wisdom was just that, a hypostasis of God, an element of his being that was distinct from him in one sense, but completely his in another.
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The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8.
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This passage can be read, of course, without thinking of Wisdom as some kind of personification of an aspect of God that exists apart from and alongside him. It could simply be a metaphorical way of saying that the world is an astounding place and that the creation of it is rooted in the wise foreknowledge of God, who made all things just as they ought to be. Moreover, if you understand the wisdom of the way things are made, and live in accordance with this knowledge, you will live a happy and fulfilled life. But some Jewish readers read the passage more literally and took Wisdom to be an ...more
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The book is attributed to King Solomon himself—who is acclaimed in the Bible as the wisest man ever to have lived—but it was actually written many centuries
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after he had been laid to rest.
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In a sense, then, Wisdom could be seen as an angel, even a highly exalted angel, or indeed the Angel of the Lord; but as a hypostasis it is something somewhat different. It is an aspect of God that is thought to exist alongside God and to be worthy, as being God’s, of the honor and esteem accorded God himself.
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In some ways the most difficult divine hypostasis to discuss is the Word—in Greek, the Logos.
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Pleasure simply makes us long for more and keeps us attached to matter. We need to transcend matter if we are to find true meaning and fulfillment, and this means accessing the Logos of the universe with that part of the Logos that is within us.
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The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.
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writing earlier than Paul, but none of their works survive. The problems with Paul are that he didn’t actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn’t tell us very much about Jesus’s teachings, activities, or experiences.
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To begin with, they are not written by eyewitnesses.
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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.
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They probably wrote after Jesus’s disciples had all, or almost all, died.
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The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death.
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Telling stories was the only way to communicate in the days before mass communication,
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The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’s words and deeds. Everyone knows what happens to stories that circulate this way. Details get changed, episodes get
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invented, events get exaggerated, impressive accounts get made even more impressive, and so on.
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Does this mean that the Gospels are useless as historical sources? No, it means that we need to have rigorous historical methods to help us examine books that were written for one purpose—to proclaim the “good news” of Jesus—to achieve a different purpose: to know what Jesus really said and did.
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We do not have any accounts of Jesus from Greek or Roman (pagan) sources of the first century, no mention even of his name until more than eighty years after his death. Among non-Christian Jewish sources we have only two brief comments by the Jewish historian Josephus. We do have other Gospels from outside the New Testament, but these were all written later than the New Testament Gospels and as a rule are highly legendary in character. There are a couple of Gospels that may provide us with some additional information—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, both discovered in ...more
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The question is how to ferret out the historically accurate information from the later alterations and inventions.
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Jewish apocalypticists were dualists—by which I mean that they believed there were two fundamental components of reality: the forces of good and the forces of evil.
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Jewish apocalypticists were pessimistic about the possibilities of improving things in this current evil age.
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But apocalypticists believed that when things got just as bad as they possibly could get, God would intervene in a mighty act of judgment.
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But they were very near the end.
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First, in the sayings about the “Son of Man” that I quoted above, there is a peculiarity that many people gloss over without thinking about it.
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Look again at the sayings given above. In none of them is there any hint that Jesus is talking about himself when he refers to the Son of Man coming in judgment on the earth.
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Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes from heaven. Nothing in this saying makes you think that Jesus is talking about himself.
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My second example is from one of my favorite passages of the entire Bible, the story of the last judgment of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46; this is from M).
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It is a spectacular passage. And it almost certainly is something very close to what Jesus actually said. And why? Because it is not at all what the early Christians thought
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about how a person gains eternal life. The early Christian church taught that a person is rewarded with salvation by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
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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.
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My third example of a saying that almost certainly passes the criterion of dissimilarity is an apocalyptic saying that will be important for our discussion later in this chapter. In a saying preserved for us in Q, Jesus tells his twelve disciples that in the “age to come, when the Son of Man is seated upon his glorious throne, you also will sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28; see Luke 22:30).
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But he chose to associate with an apocalyptic preacher of coming destruction. It must have been because he agreed with his message. Jesus started out his ministry as an apocalypticist.
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apocalyptic framework in particular, as fuller studies have shown.8 My interest in this book, however, is on a theological/religious question of how (and when) Jesus came to be thought of as God. And my argument is that this is not what Jesus himself spent his days teaching and preaching during his public ministry.
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glorious time. It appears that some Jews who had this expectation of the future messiah saw him in political terms: as a great and powerful king who would bring about the restored kingdom through military force, taking up the sword to dispose of his enemies. Other Jews—especially of a more apocalyptic bent—anticipated that this future event would be more miraculous: as an act of God when he personally intervened in the course of history to make Israel once more a kingdom ruled through his messiah.