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May 2 - June 25, 2019
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,
in the Roman world it was widely thought that gods could take on human guise, such that some of the people one might meet on occasion may well indeed be divine.
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.
But tales of Zeus and his mortal lovers were not simply a matter of entertaining mythology. Sometimes such tales were told of actual historical figures, such as Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).
that a mortal woman could give birth to a child spawned by a god—was plausible to many people of the ancient world.
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.
Romulus had appeared to him alive after his death.
by the time of Livy’s writing, Quirinus was understood to be the divinized Romulus, worshiped right up there with the great father of the gods himself.
In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as deification—the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods.
to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.”
only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.
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.
Religion wasn't what you believed, it was what you did
This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.
One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs. For satire to work, it has to be directed against something that is widely accepted. This is one reason that satire is such a perfect tool for unpacking the beliefs of other cultures.
And so Peregrinus, in the shape of a bird (not the noble eagle but the scavenger vulture), allegedly ascended to Mount Olympus, home of the gods, to live there, divine man that he was. To Lucian’s unmitigated amusement, he then met another man who was also telling about the event. This man claimed that after it was all over, he had met the supposedly dead Peregrinus, who was wearing a white garment and a garland of wild olive. Moreover, this man indicated that before this meeting, when Peregrinus had met his fiery fate, a vulture had arisen from the fire and flown off to heaven. This was the
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At the root of that idea is a different sensibility about the world, one in which divinity is not absolutely but only relatively remote from humanity.
When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level.
Below
Daimones
For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.
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.
Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.
Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices every bit as much, or even more, than a set of beliefs.
not every ancient Israelite held a monotheistic view—the idea that there is only one God.
It does not say, “You shall believe that there is only one God.” It says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This commandment, as stated, presupposes that there are other gods.
But that does not mean the other gods don’t exist. They simply are not to be worshiped.
Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshiped.
Jews may not (usually) have called other superhuman divine beings “God” or “gods.” But there were other superhuman divine beings. In other words, there were beings who lived not on earth but in the heavenly realm and who had godlike, superhuman powers, even if they were not the equals of the ultimate God himself.
even within Judaism there was understood to be a continuum of divine beings and divine power, comparable in many ways to that which could be found in paganism. This was true even among authors who were strict monotheists.
We know that some Jews thought it was right to worship angels in no small part because a number of our surviving texts insist that it not be done.
Within Judaism we find divine beings who temporarily become human, semidivine beings who are born of the union of a divine being and a mortal, and humans who are, or who become, divine.
To summarize our findings to this point: the Angel of the Lord is sometimes portrayed in the Bible as being the Lord God himself, and he sometimes appears on earth in human guise. Still other angels—the members of God’s divine council—are called gods and are made mortals. And yet other angels make their appearances on earth in human form. Still more important, some Jewish texts talk about humans becoming angels at death—or even superior to angels and worthy of worship. The ultimate relevance of these findings for our question about how Jesus came to be considered divine should already begin to
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Putting all this together, one can see that divine beings—the sons of God—had sex with women on earth, and their semidivine offspring were giants.
Gen. 6 semidivine beings
And so here we have a view even closer to that found in the pagan myths: the offspring of the union of divine and human beings are more divine beings—in this case the demonic forces that plague the world.
However one interprets Daniel in its original second-century BCE context, what is clear is that eventually in some Jewish circles it came to be thought that this “one like a son of man” was indeed a future deliverer, a cosmic judge of the earth, who would come with divine vengeance against God’s enemies and with a heavenly reward for those who had remained faithful to him. This figure came to be known as “the Son of Man.”
it comes from the Hebrew word for anointed and was originally used of the king of Israel, God’s anointed one (i.e., the one chosen and favored by God). Now the ruler anointed by God is not a mere mortal; he is a divine being who has always existed, who sits beside God on his throne, who will judge the wicked and the righteous at the end of time.
It is striking that a later addition to the Similitudes, chapters 70–71, identifies this Son of Man as none other than Enoch. In this somewhat later view, it is a man, a mere mortal, who is exalted to this supreme position next to God.
early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne.
2 powers doctrine
The rabbis of the second, third, fourth, and following centuries CE condemned any such notion as a heresy. But, again, the fact that they condemned it shows that it was a view held by other Jews, and since the rabbis condemned it so thoroughly, it was probably held by a large number of Jews. Segal argues that this heresy can be traced back to the first Christian century and to Palestine itself.
Other hypostases are discussed in ancient Jewish writings, but here I restrict myself to two—Wisdom and what was sometimes thought of as the outward manifestation of Wisdom, the Word (Greek, Logos) of God.
For Platonists, the Logos is this go-between. The divine Logos is what allows the divine to interact with the nondivine, the spirit with matter.
Already in the Hebrew Bible the “word of the Lord” was sometimes identified as the Lord himself (see, for example, 1 Sam. 3:1, 6).
In sum, for Philo the Logos is an incorporeal being that exists outside God but is his faculty of thinking; on occasion it becomes the actual figure of God who appears “like a man” so that people can know, and interact with, its presence. It is another divine being that is distinct from God in one sense, and yet is God in another.
Moreover, this son of David will be chosen by God himself, adopted as it were, to be his own son:
This idea that God has adopted the king to be his son is consonant with other usages of the term “Son of God” in the Hebrew Bible.
Israel is God’s Son because it stands in a uniquely close relationship with God and as such is the object of his love and special favor; moreover, it is through Israel that God mediates his will on earth.
there are passages in which the king of Israel is referred to as divine, as God. Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that this notion ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh, as a divine being.
The king is being portrayed as a divine being who lives in the presence of God, above all other creatures.
Moses is not said actually to be God, but he will function as God.
Some later Jews took this message a step further and claimed that Moses was, in fact, divine.
