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

by Bart D. Ehrman

the earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a “skeptical” view or a “secular” view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.)

Brown pointed out that you can trace a kind of chronological development of this view through the Gospels.9

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 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.

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.

“You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9–11). This voice does not appear to be stating a preexisting fact. It appears to be making a declaration.

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. One of the passages that has been changed in a significant way by later scribes involves the story of Jesus’s baptism in Luke.

One might infer from this account as well that Jesus is the Son of God because of the circumstances of his unusual birth. But in the case of Matthew, this conclusion would indeed need to be made by inference: Matthew says nothing of the sort. There is no verse in Matthew similar to what Luke says in Luke 1:35.

It has frequently been noted that Isaiah actually does not prophesy that the coming messiah will be born of a virgin. If you read Isaiah 7 in its own literary context, it is clear that the author is not speaking about the messiah at all.

As a Christian living centuries later, Matthew read the book of Isaiah not in the original Hebrew language, but in his own tongue, Greek. When the Greek translators before his day rendered the passage, they translated the Hebrew for word young woman (alma) using a Greek word (parthenos) that can indeed mean just that but that eventually took on the connotation of a “young woman who has never had sex.”

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.

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.

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.

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

Confirmation for this view comes from the related fact that several of the key concepts in the passage cannot be found elsewhere in Paul’s writings. Again, this includes some of the central concepts of the passage:

Since the second half of the poem does not “work” very well in the context, it is almost certainly the case that this was indeed a preexistent poem that was familiar to Paul and, probably, to the Philippians as well.

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.” In this understanding, the words image and form are synonyms.

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. He is in the image of Adam, who is in the image of God. But he reverses Adam’s sin by his obedience, and only then

It seems strange to many people today that Christ could be a divine being yet not be fully equal with God. But it is important to remember what we found in Chapter 1. Our notion that there is an inseparable chasm between the divine and human realms, and that the divine realm has only one level or layer to it, is not the view held among Greeks, Romans, and Jews in the ancient world—or by Christians.

If Jesus really were equal with God from “the beginning,” before he came to earth, and he knew it, then surely the Synoptic Gospels would have mentioned this at some point.

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. Let me explain. Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education. Yet there are passages in John in which the narrator sounds just like Jesus, so much so that you cannot tell, in places, who is doing the talking.

We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus.

The Logos in the Christ poem of the Prologue of John, then, is being understood very much like Wisdom in other Jewish texts.

No one should think that Philo, or the Jewish writings about Wisdom, are the actual literary source for the Prologue’s poetic celebration of the Logos. My point instead is that what is said about the Logos here at the beginning of John is very similar to what Jewish authors were saying about both Logos and Wisdom.

Deciding who was right and who was wrong, and what views were true and what views were false, became an overpowering concern among the Christian leaders.

This is because many Christians after the New Testament period had come to think that Christ was the only way of gaining salvation. Moreover, this salvation came only by having the correct understanding about God, Christ, salvation, and so on. For that reason, discerning right and wrong beliefs—ascertaining what was “orthodox” (right) and “heretical” (false)—became an obsession of many of the leaders of the early church.

Several groups in the second Christian century appear to have held on to the very ancient understanding of Christ as a human being who had been adopted by God at his baptism.

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.

The Theodotians (Roman Adoptionists) 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

The second is that even though the orthodox claimed that this kind of manipulation of texts was a heretical activity, in the manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today 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.

Christological extremes—on one hand were adoptionists, who claimed that Christ was human but not, by nature, divine; on the other were docetists, who claimed that Christ was divine but not, by nature, human.

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.

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.