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

by Bart D. Ehrman

In a sense, then, this poem provides us with a transitional Christology that combines an incarnation view with an exaltation view.

But the statement makes sense if Paul believed that Christ was a preexistent angelic being. In that case, it is important to point out that Jesus was born in a human way:

Jesus, for Paul, was the Angel of the Lord. And so he too

was God’s Wisdom, before coming into this world.

Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship.

If someone as early in the Christian tradition as Paul can see Christ as an incarnate divine being, it is no surprise

that the same view emerges later in the tradition.

With John we are dealing not just with a different author, but with an entirely different world. Among other things, in this Gospel there are not simply allusions to Jesus’s divine power and authority. There are bald statements that equate Jesus with God and say that he was a preexistent divine being who came into the world.

On the other hand, I was taken aback when I realized that all the perspectives in John’s Gospel are shared by Jesus himself and the author.

in John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.

I need to be clear: Jesus is not God the Father in this Gospel. He spends all of chapter 17 praying to his Father, and, as I pointed out earlier, he is not talking to himself. But he has been given glory equal to that of God the Father. And he had that glory before he came into the world.

For John, he was already both “God” and “with God” in his preincarnate state as a divine being.

The Prologue as a Preliterary Poem It is widely held among scholars that the Prologue is a preexisting poem that the author of John has incorporated into his work—possibly in a second edition.

It was only when the Logos became a human being that Jesus Christ came into existence. So Jesus Christ is the Logos that has become a human; but Jesus did not exist before that incarnation happened. It was the Logos that existed before.

As I intimated before, the Prologue is not saying that Jesus preexisted, that he created the universe, that he became flesh. Instead, it is saying that the Logos did all these things.

other point needs to be reemphasized at this stage however. If one uses the term high Christology to talk about this kind of incarnational view, the Prologue of John would be presenting a very high Christology indeed—higher than that even in the Philippians poem.

Quite the contrary, even before he appeared, he was the Logos of God himself, a being who was God, the one through whom the entire universe was created.

my objective is something else—to explain the two dominant Christological options of the early Christian movement: the older Christology “from below,” which I am calling an exaltation Christology, arguably the very first Christological view of the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven; and the somewhat later Christology “from above,” which I am calling an incarnation Christology.

This view did not originate with the Gospel of John, as I used to believe (as have a lot of other scholars). It was in place well before Paul’s letters, as evidenced in the fact that the pre-Pauline Christ poem of Philippians attests

Once Christians thought of Jesus as an angel—and that could have happened very early, perhaps in the first years of the movement—the way was opened for the idea that he had always been an angel, and therefore a preexistent divine being. And so an incarnation Christology was born.

Just as in the Prologue of John, Christ the Logos was made flesh; here, he is Wisdom made flesh. In fact “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (1:19). We have now moved into an entirely different realm from the earlier exaltation Christologies.

ever” (1:8). The book of Hebrews wants to stress that Christ is superior to the angels in part because of its overriding emphasis: Christ is superior to simply everything in Judaism—angels, Moses, the Jewish priests, the Jewish high priest, the sacrifices in the temple, and on and on.

Hebrews—presenting a kind of amalgam of the two views. Eventually, however, incarnation Christologies emerged as dominant in the Christian tradition.

Jesus was God; he was not God the Father; yet there was only one God.

it was important to decide whether or not to believe that God exists. There may be only a slim chance that he does. Still, if someone decides to believe, there could be a fantastic reward if he is right and no real downside if he is wrong. On the other hand, if he decides not to believe, no real benefits come from the decision, but there could be very real and harmful downsides (such as eternal punishment). And so, even though the chances of being right may be remote, it is better to believe than not to believe.

The problem is that deciding for or against a particular religious point of view is not like flipping a coin, where there are only two possible options and outcomes. There are hundreds of religions in the world.

This chapter is mainly about the views that lost and came to be declared heresies; the next chapter explores those that won and came to be declared orthodox.

ONE OF THE MOST interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy and heresy is the fact that views that were originally considered “right” eventually came to be thought of as “wrong”; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical.

It is not that the second-century “heresy-hunters” among the Christian authors attacked the original Christians for these views. Instead, they attacked the people of their own day for holding them; and in their attacks they more or less “rewrote history,” by claiming that such views had never been held by the apostles at the beginning or by the majority of Christians ever.

It is always difficult to reconstruct a group’s views if all you have are writings by their enemies who are bound and determined to attack them.

Throughout our sources the Ebionites are portrayed as Jewish Christians—that is, Christians who continued to think it was necessary for the followers of Jesus to keep the Jewish law and Jewish customs, that is, to retain (or acquire) a Jewish identity.

Another group that held to such “adoptionist” views—the view that Christ was not by nature divine but was adopted to be God’s son—emerged not out of Jewish Christianity, but from purely gentile stock. This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder, a shoemaker, who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus. Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists.

The author of “The Little Labyrinth” indicates that the Theodotians maintained that their view—that Jesus was completely human, and not divine, but that he was adopted to be the Son of God—had been the doctrine taught by the apostles themselves and by most of the church in Rome until the time of Bishop Victor, at the end of the second century.

almost all the evidence points in the other direction, showing that it was precisely orthodox scribes who modified their texts in order to make them conform more closely with orthodox theological interests.

Of course, every group representing every view of early Christianity claimed that its views were the original teachings of Jesus and his earthly followers—but in the case of the adoptionists, they may well have been right.

According to this view, Christ was not really a man but only “appeared” to be. He in fact was completely God. And God, for these believers, could not be a human any more than a human can be a rock.

Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century—but still during the times of the New Testament. One would be hard-pressed to see them as views adopted by the original followers of Jesus, however.

As a result, the first clear attestation of a docetic view comes only near the end of the New Testament period, in the book known as 1 John.

And so, only those who acknowledge that Christ came “in the flesh” can be considered true believers.

It is widely believed among scholars that 1 John was written by someone living in the same community in which the Gospel of John was written and circulated.

maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view

Ignatius takes a strong stand against any such understanding that Christ was not a real flesh-and-blood human being who physically suffered and died.

The best known docetist of the second Christian century was a famous preacher and philosopher, who was eventually branded as an arch-heretic, named Marcion.

Unlike the antichrists mentioned in 1 John, Marcion did not take his theological cues from the Gospel of John but from the writings of the Apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the great apostle who alone understood the real meaning of Jesus.

For Paul, following the dictates of the law could not make a person right with God; only faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus could do that. Marcion took this differentiation between law and gospel to an extreme by saying that in fact they were completely at odds with one another. The law was one thing, the gospel another.

But if Christ belonged to the spiritual loving God rather than to the just Creator God, that must mean he did not belong in any sense to the creation itself. Christ could not, therefore, have actually been born and could not actually have any attachment to this material world, which was the world created by and judged by the God of the Jews. And so Jesus came into the world not as a real human being with a real birth. He descended from heaven in the appearance of a full-grown adult, as a kind of phantom who only appeared to have human flesh.

The orthodox view that triumphed over Marcion and other docetic Christians like him insisted that even though Christ was divine, he was also actually, really human.

One solution to this problem was deemed completely wrong-headed and heretical: that Jesus Christ was in fact two entities, a human Jesus who temporarily came to be inhabited by a divine being, who departed from him before his death. Some such view was held by a variety of Christian groups that modern scholars have called Gnostic.

As we have seen, Christian Gnostics maintained that salvation came not through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through proper “knowledge” of the secrets Christ revealed to his followers.

They are written in the ancient Egyptian language known as Coptic; originally the books were apparently all authored in Greek, so the surviving copies are later translations.