God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Yahweh, and your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones.

Who in the sky can be compared to Yahweh? Who among the sons of god is like Yahweh, a god feared in the council of the holy ones, greater and more fearful than any of those who surround him? PSALMS 89:5–7; SEE ALSO PSALMS 82, 97, AND 99

The Godof Moses

Yahweh began to embody the imagery of the storm god Baal, the Rider of the Clouds,

He immersed himself in Greek philosophy and Christian thought, and he seems to have had a deep familiarity with the Hebrew scriptures. Yet it was precisely this depth of knowledge in both the ancient Jewish religion and the brand-new and not yet unified Christian sect that had so recently arisen from it that caused Marcion such consternation. For no matter how he tried, Marcion could not reconcile the God he encountered in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, with the God that Jesus called Father.

The Yahweh of the Bible is a blood-soaked “Man of War” (Exodus 15:3; Isaiah 63:3)—a jealous deity who gleefully calls for the slaughter of anyone who fails to worship him (Exodus 22:20). This is a God who once had forty-two children mauled to death by bears simply because they had teased one of his prophets for being bald (2 Kings 2:23–24). How could the one and only God of the universe be so petty and parochial, so possessive and rapacious? And, more to the point, what could this God have to do with the God revealed by Jesus: a God of love

and forgiveness, peace and mercy?

Marcion accepted Jesus’s divinity; he fully agreed with John’s position that the Logos was God. When he spoke of “the God revealed by Jesus,” he meant the God revealed in the form of Jesus. At the same time, Marcion recognized Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, as the creator of the world. In fact, he seems to have read the book of Genesis literally. But his reading only made Jesus and Yahweh s...

destruction, of enmity and hate? Did not Jesus say that “you shall know them by their fruits?” (Matthew 7:16). If that was true, then the fruits of th...

The only answer that made sense to Marcion was that there must be two gods: the cruel creator God of the Hebrew Bible known as Yahweh, the God of Israel, and the loving, merciful God, who had always existed as the Logos but who was revealed ...

Marcion was by no means alone among early Christians in coming to this conclusion. A large number of Greek-speaking Christians, whom we today refer to loosely as Gnostics (from the Greek word gnosis, or “knowledge”), also differentiated between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of Jesus, though, unlike Marcion, most Gnostics refused to acknowledge Yahweh as the creator of the world. They believed creation was the work of a lesser god called the Demi...

“And he is impious in his arrogance,” writes the Gnostic author of The Secret Gospel of John. “For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.”10 It was the Demiurge who had laid waste to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Demiurge who had murdered most of humankind in a catastrophic flood, the Demiurge who had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. “But of what sort is this God?” complained the Gnostic ...

After five years of meticulously sketching out his argument, Marcion gathered the leaders of the Church in Rome and presented them with his theology of two gods. He began by arguing that Jesus was God incarnate, a position held by many—though not all—of the Church leaders

the room. But then Marcion went on to claim that Jesus was not the God they all knew as Yahweh. Rather, he was a completely different, and hitherto unknown, God who had only just been revealed to humanity. The very purpose of Christ’s descent to earth, he told them, was to set humanity free from the evil creator God of the Bible. This meant the religion formed in Jesus’s name, Christianity, could no longer be linked to the Judaism out of which it emerged. The Hebrew scriptures were obsolete; what was needed was a new Bible. And, as luck would

It’s fair to ask why the elders of the Church in Rome were so adamant about maintaining Jewish monotheism. Even at this early stage of its history, Christianity didn’t bear much resemblance to Judaism. It had declared a wholly new faith, demonized the Jews as the killers of

Christ, begun composing its sacred texts in Greek rather than Hebrew, and imposed upon Jesus a divinity that contradicted Judaism’s very definition of God as singular and indivisible.

The truth is that the early Church’s desire to maintain fealty to the Jewish belief in one God may have been as much for political reasons as it was for theological ones. For when Marcion and the Gnostics feuded with these Christian leaders over the nature of Go...

the early church was validating the system of its governance under one bishop—that is, the bishop of Rome. “As God reigns in heaven as master, lord, commander, judge, and king,” Pagels writes, “so on earth he delegates his will to members of the church hierarchy, who serve as generals who command an army of subordinates; kings who rule over ‘the people’; judges who preside in God’s place.”14

The influential Church elder Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35–108 C.E.) framed this position into a succinct slogan: “One God, One Bishop.” Any violation of the former would necessarily diminish the authority of the latter. The Christian’s duty, in the words of Ignatius, was to obey the bishop “as if he were God.” As Clement I (d. 101 C.E.), the first bishop of Rome and thus the first pope, warned, anyone who failed to “bow the neck” to his authority as bishop was guilty of rebelling against God and should be put to death. The Church hierarchy’s insistence on maintaining One God, One Bishop made little impact either on the followers of Marcion or on the many Gnostic sects that flourished in the early years of Christianity. What it did do, however, was lodge a contradiction in the heart of the burgeoning faith. Because if the Church was going to insist upon accepting the Jewish definition of God that arose out of the Babylonian Exile—God as singular and indivisible—then they needed to come up with a way to explain how a Jewish peasant from the low hills of Galilee could also be God. It was an issue that threatened to tear the Church apart and put an end to Christianity just as it was about to achieve its greatest success. —