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

by Bart D. Ehrman

that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation. In Brown’s view this chronological sequencing of the Gospels may well indeed be how Christians developed their views.

that there were two fundamentally different Christological views: one that saw Jesus as a being from “down below” who came to be “exalted” (the view I’m exploring in this chapter), and the other that saw Jesus as a being originally from “up above” who came to earth from the heavenly realm (the view I’ll explore in the next chapter). But even within these two fundamentally different types of Christology, there were significant variations.

This appears to be the view of the Gospel of Mark, in which there is no word of Jesus’s preexistence or of his birth to a virgin.

This voice does not appear to be stating a preexisting fact. It appears to be making a declaration. It is at this time that Jesus becomes the Son of God for Mark’s Gospel.11

If one always has to ask “in what sense” is Jesus divine, for Mark, Jesus is divine in the sense that he is the one who has been adopted to be the Son of God at his baptism, not later at his resurrection.

In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul’s writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament. What we have are later copies—in most instances, copies that were made many centuries later. These various copies all differ from one another, often in small ways, but sometimes in rather significant ways.

Maybe Luke simply wanted to stress that Jesus was the Son of God at all the significant points of his existence: birth, baptism, and resurrection.

In this Gospel, Jesus was born of Mary, who had never had human sex. She had never had divine sex either, exactly, but it was God, not a human who made her pregnant.

In a very physical sense the Holy Spirit of God is to “come upon” Mary and “therefore”—an important word here—the child she bears will be called the Son of God. He will be called the Son of God because he will in fact be the Son of God. It is God, not Joseph, who will make Mary pregnant, so the child she bears will be God’s offspring.

Instead, according to Matthew, the reason Jesus’s mother was a virgin was so that his birth could fulfill what had been said by a spokesperson of God many centuries earlier, when the prophet Isaiah in the Jewish scriptures wrote, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and his name shall be called Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14). Matthew quotes this verse and gives it as the reason for Jesus’s unusual conception—it was to fulfill prophecy (Matt. 1:23).

Whether this is the case or not, I should stress that these virginal conception narratives of Matthew and Luke are by no stretch of the imagination embracing the view that later became the orthodox teaching of Christianity. According to this later view, Christ was a preexistent divine being who “became incarnate [i.e., “human”] through the Virgin Mary.” But not according to Matthew and Luke. If you read their accounts closely, you will see that they have nothing to do with the idea that Christ existed before he was conceived. In these two Gospels, Jesus comes into existence at the moment of his conception. He did not exist before.

resurrection. Unfortunately, we almost certainly never will. Jesus’s disciples were lower-class, illiterate peasants from remote rural areas of Galilee, where very few people could read, let alone write, and let alone create full-scale compositions.

We don’t know of a single author from that time and place, Jewish or Christian, who was capable of producing a Gospel even had she or he thought of doing so.

The first followers of Jesus probably never thought of doing so. They, like Jesus, anticipated that the end of the age was imminent, that the Son of Man—now thought to be Jesus himself—was soon to come from heaven in judgment ...

had no thought of recording the events of Jesus’s life for posterity because in a very real sense, there w...

The only way they could pass on the story of Jesus was by word of mouth. And so they told the stories to one another, to their converts, and to their converts’ converts. This happened year after year, until some decades later, in different parts of the world, highly educated Greek-speaking Christians wrote down the traditions they had heard, thereby producing the Gospels we still have.

If the views I have presented in this chapter are anywhere near correct, this imagined Gospel would look very different from the ones we have now inherited—and its view of Jesus would not at all be the view that came to be dominant among later theologians when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman world.

Instead, this Gospel would tell in detail, probably from eyewitness reports, what happened during the last week of Jesus’s life, when he made a pilgrimage with some of his followers to Jerusalem and enraged the local authorities with his outburst in the temple and his incendiary preaching of the imminent coming of judgment—a cataclysmic destruction that would be directed not only against the Roman oppressors, but also against the ruling authorities among the Jews, the elite priests and their followers.

The great highlight of the Gospel, though, would come at the end.

No, he became the Son of God when God worked his greatest miracle on him, raising him from the dead and adopting him as his Son by exalting him to his right hand and bestowing upon him his very own power, prestige, and status.

my students’ Christological views tend to be drawn more from the Gospel of John than from the other three,

such self-claims are not made by Jesus in Matthew, Mark, or Luke.

In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians—Jesus’s disciples, for example—did not believe this.

Here, Jesus is not understood to be a human who is elevated to a divine status; instead, he is a heavenly being who condescends to become temporarily human.

I have already made the case that followers of Jesus were not calling him God during his lifetime and that he did not refer to himself as a divine being who had come from heaven.

Instead, it was the resurrection that provided the turning point in understanding who Jesus was, as an exalted being.

From there, it was a very small step to thinking that Jesus was this kind of being by nature, not simply because of his exaltation.

In fact, it came to be thought that he had always been that kind of being.

Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors.

He does not spell out in systematic detail his views of Christ.

The Synoptics simply accept a Christological view that is different from Paul’s. They hold to exaltation Christologies, and Paul holds to an incarnation Christology. That, in no small measure, is because Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.

As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh.

As I have said, scholars have long considered the passage to be a pre-Pauline tradition that Paul includes here in his letter to the Philippians. It is not simply something Paul composed on the spot, while writing his letter.

Jesus was in God’s form before he became a human; that he had open to him the possibility of grasping after divine equality before coming to be human; and that he became human by “emptying himself.”

It is a pre-Pauline tradition.

In his letter to the Galatians, he stresses that it was specifically a death by crucifixion that mattered for salvation. If Jesus had been stoned to death, for example, or strangled, that would have been one thing. But because he was crucified, in particular, he was able to bear the “curse” of sin that other people deserved. And that is because the scriptures indicate that anyone who “hangs on a tree” is cursed by God (Gal. 3:10–13). This is a reference to the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 21:23, which states: “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

By quoting the poem Paul obviously is indicating that he agrees with its teaching about Christ.

According to this interpretation, when the poem indicates that Christ was in the “form of God,” it is not suggesting some kind of preexistent state in heaven. He was instead like Adam, who was made in the “image of God.”

Paul, then, saw Christ as a kind of second Adam who reversed the sin, condemnation, and death brought about by the first Adam.

In short, according to this interpretation, Christ is not portrayed as a preexistent divine being in the Philippians poem. He is human, like other humans.

First, if Paul (or the author of the poem) really wanted his reader to make the connection between Jesus and Adam, he surely would have done so more explicitly.

Second, in the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, it is not Adam who wants “to be like God”—it is Eve.

Third, and possibly most important, from other passages in Paul it does indeed appear that he understands Christ to have been a preexistent divine being.

In fact, Paul says, “the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). Just as Christ provides life to people today when they believe in him, so too he provided life to the Israelites in the wilderness.

Adam came into being in this world; Christ existed before he came into this world. He was from heaven.

I want to stress that Christ appears to be portrayed here, in his preexistent state, as a divine being, an angel—but not as God Almighty. He is not the Father himself, since it

is the Father who exalts him. And he is not—most definitely not—“equal” with God before he becomes human.

Christ must have been a lower divine being before he humbled himself by becoming human and dying. When it says, then, that he was “in the form of God,” it does not mean that he was the equal of God the Father. It means he was “Godlike,” or divine—like the chief angel, the Angel of the Lord, as referred to in passages of the Hebrew Bible.

He was God because God had made him so. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there was only one God?