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

by Bart D. Ehrman

As the burial tradition came to be told and retold, it possibly became embellished and made more concrete. Storytellers were apt to add details to stories that were vague, or to give names to people otherwise left nameless in a tradition, or to add named individuals to stories that originally mentioned only nameless individuals or undifferentiated groups of people.

In addition, we have clear evidence in the Gospel traditions that as time went on, and stories were embellished, there was a tendency to find “good guys” among the “bad guys” of the stories.

Sometimes Christian apologists argue that Jesus had to be taken off the cross before sunset on Friday because the next day was the Sabbath and it was against Jewish law, or at least Jewish sensitivities, to allow a person to remain on the cross during the Sabbath. Unfortunately, the historical

record suggests just the opposite. It was not Jews who killed Jesus, and so they had no say about when he would be taken down from the cross. Moreover, the Romans who did crucify him had no concern to obey Jewish law and virtually no interest in Jewish sensitivities.

But it is absolutely true that as far as we can tell from all the surviving evidence, what normally happened to a criminal’s body is that it was left to decompose and serve as food for scavenging animals.

It is unfortunate that we do not have from the ancient world any literary description of the process of crucifixion, so we are left guessing about the details of how it was carried out.

Jesus’s family did not have high connections;

Again, it is possible that Jesus was an exception, but our evidence that this might have been the case must be judged to be rather thin.

My third reason for doubting the burial tradition has to do with the Roman rule of Judea at the time. One of the chief regrets of any historian of early Christianity is that we do not have more—lots more—information about Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE, who, among many other things, condemned Jesus to be crucified. What we do know about him, however, all points in the same direction: he was a fierce, violent, mean-spirited ruler who displayed no interest at all in showing mercy and kindness to his subjects and showed no respect for Jewish sensitivities.

As Crossan dismissively states: “[Pilate] was an ordinary second-rate Roman governor with no regard for Jewish religious sensitivities and with brute force as his normal solution to even unarmed protesting or resisting crowds.”

On the other hand, we certainly do not know that the tradition is true, and there are, in fact, some very compelling reasons to doubt it. I personally doubt it. 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.

Given our suspicions about the burial tradition, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the discovery of an empty tomb.

I don’t subscribe to any of these alternative views because I don’t think we know what happened to the body of Jesus.

But simply looking at the matter from a historical point of view, any of these views is more plausible than the claim that God raised Jesus physically from the dead.

We don’t know what happened to most of the disciples in the end. We certainly have no evidence that they were all martyred for their faith. On the contrary, almost certainly most of them were not. So there is no need for talk about anyone dying for a lie.

died.) 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.

But all of this is beside the point, which is that we don’t know whether the tomb was discovered empty because we don’t know whether there even was a tomb.

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 e...

Some Christians doubted that the resurrection was a physical affair. The Gospels that made it into the New Testament—as opposed to a number that did not—stress that the resurrection was indeed the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body. These debates may have been raging in early Christian communities from the beginning. If so, then the empty tomb tradition not only worked to show unbelievers that Jesus was resurrected, it worked to show believers that the resurrection was not a matter just of the spirit but of the body as well.

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.

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.”

But as I argued in the analysis of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, the idea that Jesus rose on the “third day” was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information.

Here Paul stresses that Jesus rose from the dead in a spiritual body.

When Paul speaks of a spiritual body, then, he means a body not made of this heavy, clunky stuff that now makes up our bodies, but of the highly refined spiritual stuff that is superior in every way and is not subject to mortality.

The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret “knowledge” (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home. In this view, Jesus is the one who came down from the heavenly realm to provide us with this secret knowledge.

It looks as if Luke is emphasizing that Jesus’s resurrection was precisely in the body to counter those who wanted to argue that it was in the spirit. In doing so, he may have altered Paul’s views by emphasizing even more the very real fleshly character of Jesus’s body, not as transformed, but as in pure continuity with the body that died.

Paul’s stress that it was a different kind of body—one made of spirit instead of flesh and blood—came to be deemphasized with the passing of time.

I should stress that it was visions, and nothing else, that led the first disciples to believe in the resurrection.

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).

Only when Jesus appears to the disciples do they come to faith (24:13–53).

It would naturally and automatically involve precisely a bodily resurrection. That’s what “resurrection” meant to these people. It did not mean the ongoing life of the spirit without the body.

And even when they did come to be told and discussed, Christians realized that the empty tomb itself would not generate faith—as Mark, Luke, and John inform us. Something else did. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him alive after he had been crucified.

By “vision” I simply mean something that is “seen,” whether it is really there or not.

Scholars who study visions speak of those that are veridical—meaning that a person sees something that is really there—and of those that are nonveridical—meaning that what a person sees is not really there.

visions are almost always believed by the people who experience them.

Jesus does not appear to anyone in Mark’s Gospel, but he does in Matthew, Luke, John, and the book of Acts.

And then comes one of the most puzzling verses in all of the New Testament. In Acts 1:3 we are told that after his resurrection Jesus spent forty days with the disciples—forty days!—showing them that he was alive by “many proofs.” Many proofs? How many proofs were needed exactly? And it took forty days to convince them?

People who have visions really believe them.

One of these was almost certainly Peter, since reports about his seeing Jesus are found everywhere in our sources, including our earliest record of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5.

Paul too explicitly states that he had a vision of Jesus,

Mary Magdalene enjoys such prominence in all the Gospel resurrection narratives, even though she is virtually absent everywhere else in the Gospels.

These three people—Peter, Paul, and Mary, as it turns out—must have told others about their visions.

If historically only a few people had the visions, and not everyone believed them, this would explain many things. Mary didn’t doubt what she had seen, nor did Peter or Paul. But others did.

Still, as the stories of Jesus’s “appearances” were told and retold, of course, they were embellished, magnified, and even made up; so soon, probably within a few years, it

was said that all of the disciples had seen Jesus, along ...

It is especially striking that many of the people interviewed by the Guggenheims did not know that such a thing as After-Death Communication existed or had ever occurred—before experiencing it themselves.

Soon thereafter—and for some time to come?—some of them believed they had encountered him after his death. They were deeply comforted by his presence and felt his forgiveness. They had not expected to have these experiences, which had come upon them suddenly and with a vividness that made them believe that their beloved teacher was still alive.

My point is not that Mary really is appearing in these times and places, but that people deeply believe she is.

Protestant apologists interested in “proving” that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary.

In order for a vision to have its effect—to relieve guilt, to remove shame, to provide a sense of comfort, to make a person want to live again, or any other effect—it does not have to be veridical. It has to be believed. Some of the disciples wholeheartedly believed that they had seen Jesus after he had died. They concluded that he had been raised from the dead. That changed everything, as we will see. Whether Jesus was really there or not has no bearing on the fact that the disciples believed he was.