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

by Bart D. Ehrman

There is no need for me to go into a lengthy discussion of early Christian Gnosticism in this context; there are numerous excellent studies.4 For my purposes here it is enough to say that a variety of groups after the New Testament period—all of whom claimed, of course, to represent the “original” views of Jesus and his disciples—maintained that the material world we inhabit is a wicked, fallen place and that it stands at odds with the greater, purely spiritual realm to which ultimately we belong. The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret “knowledge” (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home. In this view, Jesus is the one who came down from the heavenly realm to provide us with this secret knowledge. These groups are called Gnostic because of their emphasis on gnosis/knowledge.