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June 22, 2018
As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.
the early Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—in which Jesus never makes explicit divine claims about himself—portray Jesus as a human but not as God, whereas the Gospel of John—in which Jesus does make such divine claims—does indeed portray him as God.
One of my theses will be that a Christian text such as the Gospel of Mark understands Jesus in the first way, as a human who came to be made divine. The Gospel of John understands him in the second way, as a divine being who became human. Both of them see Jesus as divine, but in different ways.
From a historical perspective there is an obvious question: What, actually, can we know about the resurrection?
There were numerous divine humans in antiquity.
But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.
“care of the gods,” a close equivalent to what today we would call “religion” (just as “agriculture” means “care of the fields”).
humans have become divine because of their amazing deeds.
This scholarly view was largely based on ancient writings that were produced by the literary elite, that is, the upper echelon of society. Moreover, from this perspective it looked as if the emperor cult was sponsored by the ruling authorities themselves as a kind of imperial propaganda, to make everyone in the Roman provinces understand and appreciate whom they were dealing with when they were dealing with the Roman authorities. Ultimately, they were dealing with a god.
in this former view of things the emperor was a lower-class divinity, and the worship of these human divinities was restricted to those who had already been deified at their deaths. This older scholarly view is no longer the consensus, however.
Instead, religion was all about action—what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them.
It was instead a series of local movements usually initiated by city officials of the provinces as a way of revering the power of the empire.
If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.
In this ancient way of thinking, both humanity and divinity are on a vertical continuum, and these two continuums sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other.
He himself was God, with a capital G. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but only one God? How could Jesus be God and God be God and yet there be only one God? That, in part, is the question that drives this book.
One of the mistakes that people make when thinking about the question of Jesus as God involves taking the view that eventually was widely held by the fourth Christian century—that a great chasm exists between the human and divine realms—and assuming that this view was in place during the early days of the Christian movement.
“In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?” If the divine realm is a continuum rather than an absolute, a graduated pyramid rather than a single point, then it is the sense in which Jesus is God that is the main issue at the outset.
One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God.
Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.
I realized at that moment that the Christians were not elevating Jesus to a level of divinity in a vacuum. They were doing it under the influence of and in dialogue with the environment in which they lived.
This is a view that scholars have called henotheism, in distinction from the view I have thus far been calling monotheism.
“seen God and remained alive after seeing him” (16:13). Here there is both ambiguity and confusion: either the Lord appears as an angel in the form of a human, or the Angel of the Lord is the Lord himself, God in human guise.
they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God.
But one thing they all agree on: Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.
The problems with Paul are that he didn’t actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn’t tell us very much about Jesus’s teachings, activities, or experiences. I
And why? Because it is not at all what the early Christians thought about how a person gains eternal life.
My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah.
But what he meant by “messiah” has to be understood within the broader context of his apocalyptic proclamation.
But looked at from a historical perspective, they simply cannot be ascribed to the historical Jesus. They don’t pass any of our criteria. They are not multiply attested in our sources; they appear only in John, our latest and most theologically oriented Gospel.
not consider himself to be the heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of the earth. But he did think of himself as the future king of the kingdom, the messiah.
Do we want to say that all great and successful religions come from God himself and that their founders were “God”? Was Moses God? Mohammed? Buddha? Confucius? Moreover, the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the ancient Roman world is not necessarily an indication that God was on its side.
This is because belief or unbelief in Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of faith, not of historical knowledge.
The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand?
Without such beliefs, miracles cannot be established as having happened.
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.
My view now is that we do not know, and cannot know, what actually happened to Jesus’s body. 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. Crucifixion
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.”
the disciples’ belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences.
Jesus does not appear to anyone in Mark’s Gospel, but he does in Matthew, Luke, John, and the book of Acts. Most readers have never noticed this, but
In Matthew 28:17 we are told that Jesus appeared to the eleven, but “some doubted.” Why would they doubt if Jesus was right there, in front of them? We
appears to his disciples after the resurrection and they don’t recognize who he is. This is the leitmotif of the famous story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13–31.
Why is this? One plausible explanation is that she too had a vision of Jesus after he died.
whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God in what sense? It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and “of the same essence” as the Father.
Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings.
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.
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. That happened because Julius Caesar had adopted him.
It was in fact often the case that a person who was a son by adoption in the Roman world was given a greater, higher status than a child who was a son by birth.
The emperor was the great ruler; Jesus was the great Ruler. The emperor was lord and sovereign; Jesus was Lord and Sovereign. This lower-class peasant from Galilee who had gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified was in fact the most powerful being in the universe. The emperor, according to this Christian view, was in reality no competition. Jesus’s adoptive father was not simply a preceding emperor; he was the Lord God Almighty.
Christians insisted that they believed in only one God, and yet they revered Jesus as divine and worshiped their “Lord Jesus” along with God.