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

by Bart D. Ehrman

The charge was that he was calling himself the king of the Jews, and either he flat-out admitted it or he refused to deny it. Pilate did what governors typically did in such cases. He ordered him executed as a troublemaker and political pretender. Jesus was charged with insurgency, and political insurgents were crucified.

Trial

Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.

we have no known instance of a living Jewish king proclaiming himself to be divine.

Jesus did not declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God.

Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that God was soon to intervene in human affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom here on earth.

what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead.

Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.

The most plausible explanation is that when the disciples fled the scene for fear of arrest, they left Jerusalem and went home, to Galilee. And it was there that they—or at least one or more of them—claimed to see Jesus alive again.

two sets of tradition—the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only later—for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead is the key to understanding why Christians eventually began to think of him as God.

In my judgment, we cannot know that Jesus received a decent burial and that his tomb was later discovered to be empty.

If the followers of Jesus knew that he “had” to be buried in a tomb—since otherwise there could be no story about the tomb being empty—and they had to invent a story that described this burial, then the only ones who could possibly do the deed were the Jewish authorities themselves. And so that is the oldest tradition we have, as in Acts 13:29.

In part, this ongoing and increasing exoneration of Pilate is enacted in order to show where the real guilt for Jesus’s undeserved death lies. For these authors living long after the fact, the guilt lies with the recalcitrant Jews.

he was a fierce, violent, mean-spirited ruler who displayed no interest at all in showing mercy and kindness to his subjects and showed no respect for Jewish sensitivities.

this progressive exoneration of Pilate serves clear anti-Jewish purposes,

Some Christians doubted that the resurrection was a physical affair. The Gospels that made it into the New Testament—as opposed to a number that did not—stress that the resurrection was indeed the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body.

the empty tomb tradition not only worked to show unbelievers that Jesus was resurrected, it worked to show believers that the resurrection was not a matter just of the spirit but of the body as well.

Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus: Jesus was raised in the body; but it was a body that was spiritual.

Why such an emphasis on the bodily nature of the resurrected Jesus? Almost certainly because other Christians were denying that it was the body that was raised.

Thus, both Luke and John want to emphasize the reality of Jesus’s resurrected body and, correspondingly, its absolute continuity with the crucified body, so that it is not obviously “transformed” into something else, as it was in Paul.

Paul’s stress that it was a different kind of body—one made of spirit instead of flesh and blood—came to be deemphasized with the passing of time.

the disciples’ belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences.

This creed says nothing about an empty tomb and indicates that the reason the disciples came to believe in the resurrection was that Jesus appeared to them.

The empty tomb narratives came later—after the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and after the writings of Paul. In other words, they were not part of the early tradition.

Jesus spent forty days with the disciples—forty days!—showing them that he was alive by “many proofs.”

My tentative suggestion is that three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.

According to our early records, the disciples had plenty of reasons for feeling guilt and shame over how they had failed Jesus both during his life and at his greatest time of need. Soon thereafter—and for some time to come?—some of them believed they had encountered him after his death. They were deeply comforted by his presence and felt his forgiveness. They had not expected to have these experiences, which had come upon them suddenly and with a vividness that made them believe that their beloved teacher was still alive.

As apocalyptic Jews, the disciples believed that the afterlife entailed a resurrection of the dead. When they experienced Jesus after he had died, they naturally understood his new life in light of their own deeply held convictions. He had been bodily raised from the dead.

a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom. That’s how the disciples interpreted Jesus’s resurrection.

his resurrection was the beginning of the general resurrection.

The disciples were bereaved and deeply grieving for their dearest loved one, who had experienced a sudden, unexpected, and particularly violent death. They may have felt guilt about how they had behaved toward him, especially in the tense hours immediately before his death. It is not at all unheard of for such people to have an “encounter” with the lost loved one afterward.

Before the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection, they thought he was a great teacher, an apocalyptic preacher, and, probably, the one chosen to be king in the coming kingdom of God.

This is the key. The disciples, knowing both that Jesus was raised and that he was no longer among them, concluded that he had been exalted to heaven.

As storytellers told the stories of Jesus’s earthly career, year after year and decade after decade, they did not separate who Jesus was after his death—the one who had been exalted to heaven—from who he was during his life.

In this older understanding, Jesus appeared to his disciples by coming down briefly from heaven.

The followers of Jesus, during his life, believed that he would be the king of the future kingdom, the messiah. Now that they believed he had been exalted to the heavenly realm, they realized they had been right. He was the future king; but he would come from heaven to reign. In some traditions of the Jewish king in the Hebrew Bible, as we have seen, the king—even the earthly son of David—was thought to be in some sense God. Jesus now had been exalted to heaven and is the heavenly messiah to come to earth. In an even more real sense, he was God. Not God Almighty, of course, but he was a heavenly being, a superhuman, a divine king who would rule the nations.

God had taken Jesus, exalted him to his right hand in a position of authority and power, made him the Lord of all, who would rule over all things. As one who ruled from beside God’s throne, Jesus was in that sense also God.

Paul’s greatest contribution to the theology of his day was his hard-fought view that this salvation in Christ applied to all people, Jew and gentile alike, on the same grounds: faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Being Jewish had nothing to do with it. To be sure, Jews were the “chosen people,” and the Jewish scriptures were a revelation from God. But a gentile did not have to become a Jew in order to have salvation through the death and resurrection of the messiah. For Paul, salvation certainly had come “from the Jews,” since Jesus was, after all, the Jewish messiah; but once this salvation had come to the world, it was good for the entire world, not just for Jews. It was the means of salvation that God had planned from eternity for all people.

A1 Who was descended A2 from the seed of David A3 according to the flesh, B1 who was appointed B2 Son of God in power B3 according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus was “appointed” (or “designated”) the “Son of God” when he was raised from the dead.

Jesus was the messiah from the house of David during his earthly life, but at the resurrection he was made something much more than that. The resurrection was Jesus’s exaltation into divinity.

It is the day of Jesus’s resurrection. That is when God declares that he has “begotten” Jesus as his Son.

the earliest form of Christian belief: that God exalted Jesus to be his Son by raising him from the dead.

Jesus was no longer simply the disciples’ master-teacher. He actually was ruling as Lord of the earth, because he had been exalted to this new status by God. And it happened at the resurrection. The man Jesus had been made the Lord Christ.

The adopted son on the other hand—who was normally adopted as an adult—was adopted precisely because of his fine qualities and excellent potential.

When the earliest Christians talked about Jesus becoming the Son of God at his resurrection, they were saying something truly remarkable about him. He was made the heir of all that was God’s.

By no stretch of the imagination did that mean that he was “merely” the “adopted” Son of God. It entailed the most fantastic claims about Jesus that these people could imagine: as the Son of God he was the heir to all that was God’s.

that is why he could occasionally reveal his glory—he was already adopted to be God’s Son at the very outset of his ministry, when John the Baptist baptized him.

If one always has to ask “in what sense” is Jesus divine, for Mark, Jesus is divine in the sense that he is the one who has been adopted to be the Son of God at his baptism, not later at his resurrection.

the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel or as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ.5 By clear implication, then, Christ is