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

by Bart D. Ehrman

In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom. That’s how the disciples interpreted Jesus’s resurrection. Moreover, that is why Jesus was understood to be the “first fruits” of those who had died (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:20): because he was the first to be raised, and all others were to be raised soon as well. In that sense his resurrection was the beginning of the general resurrection.

EVEN THOUGH HISTORIANS CANNOT prove or disprove the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, it is certain that some of the followers of Jesus came to believe in his resurrection.

My point in this chapter—indeed, in this book—is that belief in the resurrection changed everything Christologically.

But he was purely human. He was a great teacher, yes. A charismatic preacher, yes. And even the son of David who would rule in the future kingdom, yes. But he was a man. Born like other humans, raised like other humans, in nature no different from others, only wiser, more spiritual, more insightful, more righteous, more godly. But not God—certainly not God, in any of the ancient senses of the term.

That all changed with the belief in the resurrection. When the disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, they did not think it was a resuscitation such as you can find elsewhere among the Jewish and Christian traditions.

They believed Jesus had come back from

the dead—but he was not still living among them as one of them.

come back from the dead. So where was he? This is the key. The disciples, knowing both that Jesus was raised and that he was no longer among them, concluded that he had been exalted to heaven.

But it is important to remember: these Gospels were written by believers in Jesus decades later who already “knew” that Jesus had been exalted to heaven. As storytellers told the stories of Jesus’s earthly career, year after year and decade after decade, they did not separate who Jesus was after his death—the one who had been exalted to heaven—from who he was during his life. And so their belief in the exalted Jesus affected the ways they told their stories about him.

Before these storytellers began their work of recounting the words and deeds of this divine man, the earliest believers—as soon as they had visions of Jesus and came to believe he had been raised from the dead—thought he had been exalted to heaven.

As it turns out, the ascension is mentioned in only one book of the New Testament, the book of Acts.24

This

account is meant to emphasize yet further the real bodily

nature of Jesus after his re...

In that earlier tradition, Jesus’s resurrection was not simply a reanimation of a body that was then to be taken up into heaven. The resurrection itself was an exaltation into the heavenly realm. “God raised Jesus from the dead” was taken to mean that God had exalted Jesus from this earthly realm of life and death into the heavenly sphere. In this older understanding, Jesus appeared to his disciples by coming down briefly from heaven. This

In an even more real sense, he was God. Not God Almighty, of course, but he was a heavenly being, a superhuman, a divine king who would rule the nations.

It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. In no sense, in this early period, is Jesus understood to be God the Father.

He is not the One Almighty God. He is the one who has been elevated to a divine position and is God in a variety of senses. As I have been arguing and will argue extensively in the next chapter, whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God in what sense?

“But if I already have God in my life, why do I need Jesus?”

He later claimed that this was because he had had a vision of Jesus alive, long after his death, and concluded that God must have raised him from the dead.

features, but the clearest such traditions have most of them. First, these traditions tend to be self-contained units—meaning that you can remove them from the literary context we now find them in and they still make sense, standing by themselves.

There are other such preliterary traditions in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts. What is striking is that a number of them embody Christological views that are not exactly those of Paul himself, or of the author of Acts.

In this view, Jesus was not the Son of God who was sent from heaven to earth; he was the human who was exalted at the end of his earthly life to become the Son of God and was made, then and there, into a divine being.

In this letter Paul indicates not only that he was not the founder of this Christian community, but that he has never yet even visited Rome.

We don’t know who started the church or when.

Paul is writing the letter to the Romans in order to drum up support for his mission.

In fact, they seem to have heard some rather unsettling things about Paul’s views. Paul is writing the letter to set the matter straight. So his purpose is to explain as fully and clearly as he can what it is that he preaches as his gospel.

A1 Who was descended A2 from the seed of David A3 according to the flesh, B1 who was appointed B2 Son of God in power B3 according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

From this creed one can see that Jesus is not simply the human messiah, and he is not simply the Son of Almighty God. He is both things, in two phases: first he is the Davidic messiah predicted in scripture, and second he is the exalted divine Son.

The first is its emphasis on the human messiahship of Jesus as the descendant of David, a view not otherwise mentioned in the writings of Paul, our earliest Christian author.

The second key feature is that the creed states that Christ was exalted at his resurrection.

Paul would be quoting the creed, then, precisely because it was well known and because it encapsulated so accurately the common faith Paul shared with the Christians in Rome.

Luke himself believed that Jesus was the Son of God from his birth—or rather, his conception. But this is decidedly not what the preliterary tradition in Acts 13:32–33 says.

In this pre-Lukan tradition, Jesus was made the Son of God at the resurrection.

Acts. I might point out at this stage that one of the reasons we know that it was Luke who wrote the speeches of his main characters is that the speeches all sound very much alike: the lower-class, uneducated, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasant Peter gives a speech that sounds almost exactly like a speech by the culturally refined, highly educated, literate, Greek-speaking Paul. Why do two such different people sound so much alike? Because neither one of them is actually speaking: Luke is.

As it turns out, in Greek the term lord in each of these senses was the very same term as Lord used of God, as the “Lord of all.”

Once more, then, in an early tradition we find that Jesus’s resurrection was an “exaltation” specifically to “the right hand of God.”

But, as I have already pointed out, we know from ancient historians that the normal practice of an author was to write the speeches of the main characters himself, and the similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.

Humans abused and killed Jesus; God reversed that execution by raising him from the dead. Humans mocked Jesus and held him to be the lowest of the low, an inferior human being; God exalted Jesus and raised him to his right hand, making him a glorified divine figure.

Traditionally in discussions of theology this understanding of Christ has been called a low Christology because it understands that Jesus started off as a human being who was like other humans.

Sometimes this view is also referred to as an adoptionist Christology,

He was instead a human being who has been “adopted” by God to a divine status.

That other view indicates that Jesus was a preexistent divine being before he came into the world. That view is sometimes referred to as a high Christology—since in it Christ is understood to have started out “up there” with God in the heavenly realm.

He was elevated to an impossibly exalted state.

For this reason, I usually prefer not to speak of it as a “low Christology” or even as an “adoptionist Christology,” but as an exaltation Christology.

Which was the more important? Caesarion is a mere footnote in history; you’ve probably never heard of him. And Octavian? Because he was the adopted son of Caesar, he inherited his property, status, and power. You know him better as Caesar Augustus—the first emperor of the Roman empire.

This is why it was often the case that adopted sons were already adults when made the legal heir of a powerful figure or aristocrat.

When the earliest Christians talked about Jesus becoming the Son of God at his resurrection, they were saying something truly remarkable about him. He was made the heir of all that was God’s.

We may see why someone would call this a low Christology, but it certainly is not saying anything “lowly.” This is an exaltation Christology that is affirming stunning things about the teacher from rural Galilee who was exalted to the right hand of God, who had raised him from the dead.

This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate