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

by Bart D. Ehrman

This is very surprising, given the fact that as far as we can tell, Jesus did nothing during his life to make anyone think that he was this anointed one.

So why did his followers so commonly designate him by a title that suggested that he had done one of these things?

may already have inferred from what I have said to this point. 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.

My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of great strength who overwhelmed the enemy and set up God’s kingdom; but Jesus was squashed by the enemy. For most Jews, this was decisive enough. Jesus wasn’t the messiah, more or less by definition.

messiah,

The only plausible explanation is that they called Jesus this after his death because they were calling him this before his death.

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.

Here I want to stake out a clear position: messiah, yes; God, no.

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. This is where Judas Iscariot comes in.

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.

Judas was one of the insiders to whom Jesus disclosed his vision of the future. Judas and the eleven others would all be rulers in the future kingdom. And Jesus would be the king. For some reason—we’ll never know why—Judas became a turncoat and betrayed both the cause and his master.12 He told the Jewish authorities what Jesus was actually teaching in private, and it was all they needed. They had him arrested and turned him over to the governor. Here was someone who was declaring himself to be king.

So he is not saying that he is identical with God. But he is saying that he is equal with God and has been that way from before the world was created. These are amazingly exalted claims.

These divine self-claims in John are part of John’s distinctive theology; they are not part of the historical record of what Jesus actually said.

few comments in Paul (including several quotations from Jesus’s teachings), Mark, Q, M, and L, not to mention the finished Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In none of them do we find exalted claims of this sort.

Instead, they may be traditions assigned to Jesus by later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence and significance. Recall one of the main points of this chapter: many traditions in the Gospels do not derive from the life of the historical Jesus but represent embellishments made by storytellers who were trying to convert people by convincing them of Jesus’s superiority and to instruct those who were converted.

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.

Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that God was soon to intervene in human affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom here on earth. As we have seen, this view was not unique to Jesus but could be found in the teachings of other apocalyptically minded Jews of his day.

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.

Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.

You will notice that I have worded the preceding sentences very carefully. I have not said that the resurrection is what made Jesus God. I have said that it was the belief in the resurrection that led some of his followers to claim he

was God. This is because, as a historian, I do not think we can show—historically—that Jesus was ...

To be clear, I am not saying the opposite either—that historians can use the historical disciplines in order to demonstrate that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I argue that when it comes to miracles such as the resurrection, historical scie...

In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

First, we are not dealing with eyewitnesses. We are dealing with authors living decades later in different lands speaking different languages and basing their tales on stories that had been in oral circulation during all the intervening years.

Second, these accounts do not simply have minor discrepancies in a couple of details; they are clearly at odds with one another on point after point. They are not the kinds of sources that historians would hope for in determining what actually happened in the past.

One reason for restricting the original pre-Pauline creed to just these three verses is that doing so produces a very tightly formulated creedal statement that is brilliantly structured.

The first section is all about Jesus’s death, and the second is all about his resurrection. The

First, if it is right that the second statement of each section is a “theological interpretation” of the statement of “fact” that precedes it, then the idea that Jesus was raised on the third day is not necessarily a historical recollection of when the resurrection happened, but a theological claim of its significance.

I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.

There is a widespread view among scholars that the author of this statement is indicating that in his resurrection on the third day Jesus is thought to have

fulfilled the saying of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hos. 6:2). Other scholars—a minority of them, although I find myself attracted to this view—think that the reference is to the book of Jonah, where Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights before being released and, in a kind of symbolic sense, brought back from the dead (see Jonah 2). Jesus himself is recorded in the Gospels as likening his upcoming death and resurrection to “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39–41). Whether the reference is to Hosea or Jonah, why would it be necessary to say that the resurrection happened on the third day? Because that is what was predicted in scripture. This is a theological claim that Jesus’s death and resurrection happened according to plan.

Second, it is important to realize that all the statements of the two sections of the creed are tightly parallel to one another in every respect—except one. The second section contains a name as part of the tangible proof for the statement that Jesus was raised: “He appeared to [literally: “he was seen by”] Cephas.”

But Paul never says anything about anyone discovering an empty tomb, and he doesn’t mention any resurrection appearances to women—either here or in any other passage of his writings.

On the first point, for many years scholars have considered

it highly significant that Paul, our earliest “witness” to the resurrection, says nothing about th...

8). This has led some scholars, such as New Testament expert Daniel Smith, to suggest that these two sets of tradition—the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only later—for

for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.5 If this is the case, then the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded, embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years.

The view I stake out here is that if historians, or anyone else, do believe this, it is because of their faith, not because of their historical inquiry. I should stress that unbelievers (like me) cannot disprove the resurrection either, on historical grounds.

This is because belief or unbelief in Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of faith, not of historical

knowl...

The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts, have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions.

Historians maintain that some of the things in the past (almost) certainly happened, other things very probably happened, others somewhat probably happened, others possibly happened, others probably did not happen, others almost certainly did not happen, and so on.

What historians want, in short, are lots of witnesses, close to the time of the events, who are not biased toward their subject matter and who corroborate one another’s points without showing signs of collaboration. Would that we had such sources for all significant historical events!

Moreover—and here is where the rubber meets the road—it is not appropriate for a historian to presuppose a perspective or worldview that is not generally held.

The supernatural explanation, on the other hand, cannot be appealed to as a historical response because (1) historians have no access to the supernatural realm, and (2) it requires a set of theological beliefs that are not generally held by all historians doing this kind of investigation.

What is not a plausible historical conclusion is that God raised Jesus into an immortal body and took him up to heaven where he sits on a throne at his right hand. That conclusion is rooted in all sorts of theological views that are not widely shared among historians, and so is a matter of faith, not historical knowledge.

In my judgment, we cannot know that Jesus received a decent burial and that his tomb was later discovered to be empty.

Mark himself said that at Jesus’s trial, which took place the previous evening, the “whole council” of the Sanhedrin (not just some or most of them—but all of them) tried to find evidence “against Jesus to put him to death” (14:55). At the end of this trial, because of Jesus’s statement that he was the Son of God (14:62), “they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). In other words, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus’s death just the night before he was crucified. Why, after Jesus is dead, is he suddenly risking himself (as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage) and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus’s corpse?

But if different traditions (speeches, for example) come from different sources, there is no guarantee that they will stand in complete harmony with one another. If they do not stand in harmony, it is almost always because someone is changing the stories or making something up.