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

by Bart D. Ehrman

what is more important than the life of the historical Apollonius is the set of legends that sprang up about him and that were widely believed among people of the time. His great philosophical insights eventually led many people to assume that he could not have been a mere mortal, but that he was himself a god striding the earth. Just over a century after his death, Apollonius was awarded a holy shrine in his home city of Tyana, dedicated by none other than the Roman emperor Caracalla, who ruled from 198 to 217 CE. We are told that the emperor Alexander Severus (222–235 CE) kept an image of Apollonius among his various household gods. And the emperor Aurelian (270–275 CE), an ardent worshiper of the Sun God, also revered him as divine.

The story of Apollonius’s birth, as recounted in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, is particularly worth our consideration. The “annunciation” story is both like and unlike the story earlier found in the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38). When Apollonius’s mother was pregnant with him, she had a vision of a divine being, the Egyptian god named Proteus, renowned for his great wisdom. When she asked who her child would be, the god answered, “Myself.” The birth was similarly miraculous. The mother was told to go with her servant girls into a field, where she fell asleep on the grass, only to awake to the sound of swans flapping their wings. She prematurely then gave birth. The local people said that a bolt of lightning appeared in the sky at just that moment, and just as it was about to strike the earth, it “hung poised in the air and then disappeared upwards” (Life of Apollonius 1.5). The people concluded: “No doubt the gods were giving a signal and an omen of his brilliance, his exaltation above earthly things, his closeness to heaven, and all the Master’s other qualities” (1.5). This sign is obviously different from a star that led a group of wise men to a child, but it is in the same celestial ballpark. The local people concluded that Apollonius was, in fact, the Son of Zeus.

Modern scholars have debated the significance of the obvious connections between Jesus and Apollonius, but it is not merely a recent debate. In the early fourth century CE, a pagan author named Hierocles wrote a book called The Lover of Truth that contained a comparison between these two alleged Sons of God and celebrated the superiority of the pagan version. We no longer have the book in its entirety. But some years after it was written, it was explicitly refuted in the writings of the fourth-century church father Eusebius—sometimes known as the “father of church history” because he was the first to produce a history of Christianity from the time of Jesus up to his own day. Another of Eusebius’s books was directed against Hierocles and his celebration of Apollonius. Luckily for us latter-day readers, Eusebius quotes in places the actual words of his opponent. Near the outset of his book, for example, Hierocles wrote: In their anxiety to exalt Jesus, they run up and down prating of how he made the blind to see and worked certain other miracles of the kind. . . . Let us note, however, how much better and more sensible is the view which we take of such matters, and explain the conception which we entertain of men gifted with remarkable powers. . . . During the reign of Nero there flourished Apollonius of Tyana . . . [who] worked any number of miracles, of which I will omit the greater number and only mention a few. (Life of Apollonius 2)2

Paul sees a man who is crippled, and through the power of God he heals him. The crowds who have seen this miracle draw what for them is the natural conclusion: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men” (Acts 14:11). It is striking that they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul—the one who has been doing all the talking—Hermes. These identifications are no accident. Zeus was the Greek counterpart of the Roman Jupiter, and Hermes was the counterpart of Mercury. The people in Lystra know the tale of Philemon and Baucis and think that the two gods have appeared once again in their midst. So convinced are they of this that the local priest of Zeus brings out oxen and garlands to offer sacrifices to the two apostles, who have a very difficult time persuading everyone that they are only human, “of like nature with you.” Paul uses the occasion, as was his wont, to preach his gospel message in order to convert the people. Even so, not everyone was convinced: “With these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them” (14:18). It is no wonder these worshipers of Zeus at Lystra were so eager to recognize that the gods temporarily become human among them; they remembered well what happened another time they refused to offer worship where worship was due. Whether the story in Acts is a historical recollection of Paul’s missionary activities or simply an intriguing legend that sprang up in later times (like the story of Philemon and Baucis itself) is immat...