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

by Bart D. Ehrman

A remnant of this view can be found in the later Gospel of Luke. As we will see, Luke has a different understanding of when Jesus became the Son of God. But as we have already noticed, he will occasionally include a tradition that both predates and differs from his own views. This happens in the scene of Jesus’s baptism. Here the matter is a little bit difficult to explain. 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. One of the passages that has been changed in a significant way by later scribes involves the story of Jesus’s baptism in Luke.