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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Let me return to a comment I made earlier: that even in the Gospels Jesus appears to have a heavenly body during his earthly life—one that can walk on water, for example, or be transfigured into a radiating glow in the presence of some of his disciples. 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. They recounted miracles that he had done as a divine human—healing the sick, casting out demons, walking on water, multiplying the loaves, raising the dead. Why could Jesus do these things? They were attributed to him by his later followers who already “knew” that he wasn’t a mere mortal because God had exalted him to heaven. As a heavenly being, Jesus was in some sense divine. The storytellers told their tales fully believing that he was uniquely divine, with that belief affecting how they told their stories.