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

by Bart D. Ehrman

JESUS WAS A LOWER-CLASS Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state. Yet not long after his death, his followers were claiming that he was a divine being. Eventually they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth. And so the question: How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?

In this book I have tried to approach this question in a way that will be useful not only for secular historians of religion like me, but also for believers like my friend who continue to think that Jesus is, in fact, God. As a result, I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesus’s divine status. I am instead interested in the historical development that led to the affirmation that he

For most people today, divinity is a black-and-white issue. A being is either God or not God. God is “up there” in the heavenly realm, and we are “down here” in this realm. And there is an unbridgeable chasm between these two realms. With this kind of assumption firmly entrenched in our thinking, it is very hard to imagine how a person could be both God and human at once.

The problem is that most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan—did not have this paradigm. For them, the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.

Here are two major ways it could happen,

By adoption or exaltation. A human being (say, a great ruler or warrior or holy person) could be made divine by an act of God or a god, by being elevated to a level of divinity that she or he did not previously have.

By nature or incarnation. A divine being (say, an angel or one of the gods) could become human, either permanently or, more commonly, temporarily.

One of my theses will be that a Christian text such as the Gospel of Mark understands Jesus in the first way, as a human who came to be made divine. The Gospel of John understands him in the second way, as a divine being who became h...

other author? Or is it best to start with the Gospels, which, while

have been referring to a man named Apollonius, who came from the town of Tyana. He was a pagan—that is, a polytheistic worshiper of the many Roman gods—and a renowned philosopher of his day.

What is striking is that they were not the only two. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that people know about today, there were lots of people like this in the ancient world.

It was only after his death that the man Jesus came to be thought of as God on earth. How did that happen?

They are thought of as very low-level divinities, mortals who have been elevated to the divine plane. But divine they are.

But most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way. The divine realm had numerous strata. Some gods were

greater, one might say “more divine,” than others, and humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods. Moreover, the gods themselves could and occasionally did come down to spend time with us mere mortals. When they did so, it could lead to interesting or even disastrous consequences, as the inhospitable inhabitants of Phrygia learned to their great discomfort.

In the book of Acts we have an account of the Apostle Paul on a missionary journey with his companion Barnabas in this same region, visiting the town of Lystra (Acts 14:8–18).

The people in Lystra know the tale of Philemon and Baucis and think that the two gods have appeared once again in their midst.

By far the more common view was that a divine being came into the world—not having existed before birth—because a god had sex with a human, and the offspring then was in some sense divine.

The third model of understanding divine humans in Greek and Roman circles provided the most important conceptual

but about how a human being could become divine.

One of the most striking examples involves the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus.

Here we have a view of divine humans in a nutshell: a human can be honored by the gods by being made one of them; this happens because of the person’s great merit; as a divinity, the person deserves worship; and in his role as a god, he can protect those who bring to him their supplications.

Few are better known than Julius Caesar, the self-declared dictator of Rome who was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, by political enemies who preferred not having a dictator when all was said and done.

It is simply a shortened version of the term cultus deorum, which means “care of the gods,” a close equivalent to what today we would call “religion”

Unlike Christianity, Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion. Instead, religion was all about action—what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them.

FROM THESE EXAMPLES, WE can see a variety of ways in the ancient world that divine

beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be thought to be divine.

In this ancient way of thinking, both humanity and divinity are on a vertical continuum, and these two continuums sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other.

INSTEAD OF A CONTINUUM, possibly it is helpful to understand the ancient conception of the divine realm as a kind of pyramid of power, grandeur, and deity.

This god—whether Zeus, or Jupiter, or an unknown god—stood at the apex of what we might imagine as the divine pyramid.

Below this god, on the next lower tier, were the great gods known from tales and traditions that had been passed down from antiquity, for example, the twelve gods on Mount Olympus described in the ancient myths and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, gods such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Mercury, and so on.

On a lower tier of the pyramid were many, many other gods. Every city and town had its local gods, who protected, defended, and aided the place.

The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods.

Below these levels of gods there were still other tiers. There was a group of divine beings known as daimones. Sometimes this word gets translated as “demons,” but that word as we think of it today gives the wrong connotation.

The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions.

In the divine pyramid a yet lower tier, near or at the bottom, would be inhabited by divine humans.

A great general, a king, an emperor, a great philosopher, a fantastic beauty—these could be more than human. Such people could be superhuman. They could be divine.

We too, as I have pointed out, are on a continuum. Some among us are quite lowly—those whom the likes of Lucian of Samosata, for example, would consider the scum of the earth. Others of us are about average in every way. Others of us think that we, and our entire families, are well above average. Some of us recognize that there are fellows among us who are superior in remarkable ways. For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.

By the time of the fourth Christian century—some three hundred years after Jesus lived, when the empire was in the process of converting from paganism to Christianity—many of the great thinkers of the Roman world had come to believe that a huge chasm separated the divine and human realms. God was “up there” and was the Almighty.

There was just us down here, the lowly sinners, and God up there, the supreme sovereign over all that is.

Jesus himself eventually came to be thought of as belonging not down here with us, but up there with God. He ...

But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but on...

God and God be God and yet there be ...

One of the mistakes that people make when

century—that a great chasm exists between the human and divine realms—and assuming that this view was in place during the early days of the Christian movement.

When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase

the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?”

It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.

One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God.

Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.