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In such a world order, henotheism—the belief in a High God who rules over all the other gods—makes perfect sense. As more authority is vested in a single individual on earth, more authority is given to a single god in heaven, be it Marduk in Babylon, Ashur in Assyria, An in Isin, Amun-Re in Egypt, Khumban in Elam, Khaldi in Urartu, Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Rome, Odin among the Norse, Tian in the Zhou Dynasty of China, and so on. The problem is that the higher a deity climbs within its pantheon, displacing other, lower gods, the more it has to take upon itself the attributes traditionally
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To accept the proposition of a sole, singular god without human form, attributes, or qualities would require either an enormous cognitive effort on the part of the worshipper or a profound disruption in a religious community’s spiritual evolution—a spiritual crisis so great that it would force people to overlook all the contradictory traits inherent in the idea of a singular god and override their natural inclination to fashion that god in their own image.
In the Ancient Near East, a tribe and its god were considered a single entity, bound together by a covenant in which the tribe cared for the god by offering it worship and sacrifices, and the god returned the favor by protecting the tribe from harm—be it from flood or famine or, more often than not, from foreign tribes and their gods. In fact, warfare in the Ancient Near East was considered less a battle of armies than a contest between gods.
This explicit identification of a tribe with its national god had profound theological implications for ancient peoples. When Yahweh helped the Israelites crush the Philistines, it proved that the Israelite god was more powerful than the Philistine god, Dagon. But when the Babylonians destroyed the Israelites, the theological conclusion was that Marduk, the god of Babylon, was more powerful than Yahweh.
It was precisely at this moment of spiritual distress, when the kingdom of Israel had been laid waste and the temple of Yahweh torn down and defiled, that a new identity was forged, and with it a wholly new way of thinking about the divine.
Moses is in this desert wasteland, the Bible says, because he is fleeing the wrath of the pharaoh. According to the book of Exodus, the Israelites who, a few generations earlier, had followed the descendants of the patriarch Abraham into the land of Egypt, had grown so numerous and powerful that they were stripped of their wealth and freedom and forced into slavery.
The problem is that no archaeological evidence has ever been unearthed to indicate the presence of Israelites in ancient Egypt. That is a remarkable statement considering the sophisticated bureaucracy of the Egyptian state in the New Kingdom (the period in which the Moses story is supposed to have taken place) and its legendary penchant for recordkeeping.
Moses is to return to Egypt, free the Israelite slaves from bondage, and shepherd them back to their home in the Land of Canaan: “Thus will you say to the children of Israel, ‘Yahweh, the god of your fathers, the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the god of Jacob, has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:15). This claim would have come as something of a surprise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because the fact of the matter is that these biblical patriarchs did not worship a Midianite desert deity called Yahweh. They worshiped an altogether different god—a Canaanite deity they knew as El.
The Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy)—is actually a composite work stitched together from various sources spanning a period of hundreds of years.
By meticulously tracing each of these separate narrative threads, biblical scholars have managed to identify at least four different written sources that make up the bulk of the early books in the Bible. These are named the Yahwist, or J, source (j is pronounced as y in German), which dates to the tenth or ninth century B.C.E. and runs through large parts of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers; the Elohist, or E, source, which dates to the eighth or seventh century B.C.E. and is mostly confined to Genesis and parts of Exodus; the Priestly, or P, source, which was written either during or immediately
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However, the primary difference between the Yahwist and Elohist sources in the Pentateuch is that God is called by a different name in each. The god of the Elohist is El or Elohim (the plural form of El), which is rendered in most English translations of the Bible as God, with a capital G: “After these things, God [Elohim] tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1). In contrast, the god of the Yahwist tradition is known as Yahweh, usually rendered in English Bibles as the Lord, spelled with all capital letters: “The LORD [Yahweh] said, ‘Surely I have seen the misery of my people who are in Egypt’” (Exodus
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A mild, distant, fatherly deity traditionally depicted either as a bearded king or in the form of a bull or calf, El was the High God of Canaan. Known as the Creator of Created Things and the Ancient of Days, El also functioned as one of Canaan’s chief fertility gods. But El’s primary role was as the celestial king who served as father and preserver of the earthly kings of Canaan.
El was also unquestionably the original god of Israel. Indeed, the very word Israel means “El perseveres.”
while it may seem incongruous that the Israelites living in Canaan would have so eagerly adopted a Canaanite god as their own, the influence of Canaanite theology runs deep in the Bible—so deep, in fact, that it isn’t always so easy to draw a clear distinction ethnically, culturally, or even religiously between the Canaanites and the Israelites, certainly not in the early history of Israel (c. 1200–1000 B.C.E.).
To begin with, there was no single group called the Canaanites; the term is a general designation for all of the various tribes who inhabited the highlands, valleys, and coastal regions of the land of Canaan (the southern Levant, comprising parts of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine). That has made it next to impossible to cleanly single out Israelite culture, however that is defined, from the larger umbrella of Canaanite culture. Many scholars now believe that the Israelites were of Canaanite stock, part of a hill-dwelling clan that had settled the highlands and then
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Actually, it may be more accurate to say that the Israelites and Canaanites shared the same gods, because by no stretch of the imagination could the early Israelites be considered monotheistic. At best, they practiced monolatry, meaning they worshiped one god, El, without necessarily denying the existence of the other gods in the Canaanite pantheon.
the early Israelites likely viewed their god El pretty much the same way the Canaanites viewed El: as the chief deity presiding over a divine assembly of lower deities, just as Enlil, or Amun-Re, or Marduk, or Zeus, or any other High God would. They acknowledged, and occasionally even worshiped, the other deities in the Canaanite pantheon. But their allegiance was to the god after whom they were named: El.
Indeed, the story of how monotheism—after centuries of failure and rejection— finally and permanently took root in human spirituality begins with the story of how the god of Abraham, El, and the god of Moses, Yahweh, gradually merged to become the sole, singular deity that we now know as God.
Even after Moses demonstrated his god’s power and persuaded them to follow him back to “the land of Midian”—that is, “the land of the nomads of Yahweh,” where the Israelites supposedly encamped after fleeing Egypt—they continued to exhibit little loyalty to this unknown god. As Moses stood atop “the mountain of god” to receive a new covenant from Yahweh (the Ten Commandments), meant to supplant Abraham’s covenant with El, the Israelites down below had already reverted to the worship of Abraham’s god, fashioning for themselves an idol in the shape of a golden calf—the primary symbol of El.
It seems that Yahweh devotion entered the land of Canaan from the south and was centered there for much of its existence. In the northern regions of Canaan, the Israelites who had been living in the land for generations worshiped El as their High God while also acknowledging, and on occasion worshiping, the other gods of Canaan.
When the nation of Israel became the kingdom of Israel around 1050 B.C.E., the merging of Yahweh and El was reinforced. Even their names were occasionally fused together as Yahweh-El or Yahweh-Elohim, presented in most English translations of the Bible as the Lord God: “My son, give glory to the Lord God [Yahweh-Elohim] of Israel; give thanks to him and tell me what you have done” (Joshua 7:19).
Israel’s burgeoning monarchy required a national deity: a divine king to reflect the authority of the earthly king. Considering that the capital of this kingdom, Jerusalem, was located in Judah, in the south, it was only natural that Yahweh—by this time already viewed as Yahweh-El—would eventually fill that role.
While there’s some evidence for the presence of a “Yahweh-only” sect in Jerusalem, the monarchy itself neither discouraged nor encouraged the worship of other gods; they merely focused their worship on their own national god.
And then one day a stronger god, Marduk, appeared and defeated Yahweh, throwing the god of Israel down from the throne of heaven and in the process setting the stage for a new way of thinking, not just about Yahweh but about the very nature of the universe.
The introduction of monotheism among the Jews was, in other words, a means of rationalizing Israel’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. The crisis of identity posed by the Babylonian Exile forced the Israelites to reexamine their sacred history and reinterpret their religious ideology. The cognitive dissonance created by the Exile required a dramatic, hitherto unworkable religious framework to make sense of the experience.
If a tribe and its god were indeed one entity, meaning that the defeat of one signaled the demise of the other, then for these monotheistic reformers suffering exile in Babylon, it was better to devise a single vengeful god full of contradictions than to give up that god and thus their very identity as a people. And so all the historical arguments against belief in a single god were suddenly swept away by the overwhelming desire for this tiny, insignificant Semitic tribe to survive.
The very testament of faith in Judaism, known as the Shema (“Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our god, Yahweh is one”), was composed after this transformational moment in Israelite history, as was most of what we know today as the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Even the biblical material composed before the Exile—that is, the Yahwist and Elohist sources—was reworked and rewritten by the Priestly and Deuteronomistic writers after the Exile to reflect this newly found vision of One God.
This was a new kind of God, both singular and personal. A solitary God with no human form who nevertheless made humans in his image. An eternal, indivisible God who exhibits the full range of human emotions and qualities, good and bad.
The Gospel of John is unlike the three other gospels in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called Synoptic Gospels because they derive mostly from the same source material and thus tell more or less the same story about an itinerant Jewish preacher and peasant from Nazareth named Yeshua (Jesus in Greek) who performed miracles and healed the sick, who preached about the Kingdom of God, who was declared to be the Messiah and savior of the world, and who, as a result of that declaration, was arrested and executed by the Roman authorities before rising from the dead three days later.
However, the most significant difference between John and the Synoptics is that while Matthew, Mark, and Luke offer a host of ideas about who Jesus was—a Jewish rabbi (Mark 9:5)? A king in the line of David (Luke 19:38)? A prophet and lawgiver like Moses (Matthew 2:16–18)?— only in the Gospel of John is Jesus unambiguously recognized as the incarnate God.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (it was not the disciple John; he was long dead by the time the Gospel was written some time around 100 C.E.) was himself a Greek-speaking Roman citizen steeped in Hellenistic philosophy. His readers were also Greek-speaking Roman citizens living in a Hellenistic world. And so, when John uses the word Logos to launch his gospel, he very likely means it the way the Greeks did: as the primal force of creation through which all things came to be.
To be clear, John is claiming that the maker of heaven and earth spent thirty years in the backwoods of Galilee, living as a Jewish peasant; that the one and only God entered the womb of a woman and was born from her; that the omniscient Lord of the universe suckled at his mother’s breast, ate and slept and shat as a helpless infant while the universe simply proceeded without him; that the creator of men was reared by men and then, at the end of his life on earth, was murdered by men.
The concept of a “god-man” was not new in the Ancient Near East. The Romans routinely deified their emperors after death, and sometimes, as in the case of Julius Caesar, during their reigns.
The Romans were likely influenced by the Greeks, who had a long history of deifying human beings. Greek theology never made a firm distinction between human and divine; the great myths of Greece teem with demigods and heroes who achieve divine status as a reward for their service to the gods.
The Greeks themselves probably picked up the practice from the Egyptians, who viewed their pharaohs as divine. Although the pharaoh could be the living embodiment of any deity in the Egyptian pantheon, he was most closely associated with the falcon-headed god Horus.
it is very likely that the Egyptians were influenced by Mesopotamian rulers. Indeed, the concept of a divine king originated in Mesopotamia and is often credited to Sargon the Great, the Akkadian ruler who briefly united nearly all of Mesopotamia under his control between 2340 and 2284 B.C.E.
the god-man is arguably the single most successful minimally counterintuitive concept in religious history. In fact, practically the only religion in the Near East without a firm tradition of deifying human beings was the religion of Jesus himself: Judaism.
It should not be surprising to learn that the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human are two sides of the same coin.
The role of human mediator to the gods naturally fell to the gods’ counterparts on earth—primarily kings, pharaohs, and emperors, but also priests and prophets, mystics and messiahs.
once the need for a human mediator is accepted, it is a short step to deifying the mediator. After all, it makes a certain amount of sense to expect the person acting as the bridge between humans and the divine to also be divine (or at least semidivine).
What made Jesus’s deification different had less to do with him than it did with the divinity he was said to embody. For while all the other god-men of the Ancient Near East were thought to be one of many human manifestations of one of many gods, Jesus was considered the sole human manifestation of the only God in the universe.
In fact, in the polarized debate over whether Jesus was a man or a second god, and in the absence of a compromise between these two positions, which would not be reached until the middle of the fourth century C.E., a great many in the early Church accepted the view that not only were there two gods in the universe—one god named Yahweh and another god named Jesus—but these two gods were enemies.
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 to the world for the first time in the form of Jesus the Christ. 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,
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Marcion and the Gnostics were not only endeavoring to explain a flawed and sinful world at odds with the notion of a flawless and sinless Creator; they were seeking to absolve Jesus of the heinous acts with which Yahweh is credited in the Hebrew Bible. But there was something else, too. In arguing for the existence of two gods, these Christians were trying to pull Christianity free of its Jewish roots, to declare it a wholly new religion, with a new revelation, and a new God.
It was in Rome that Marcion began collecting his teachings into two manuscripts, one of which outlined his theology (it is lost to history but we know at least some of what it said through the Church elders who repudiated it), and the other which became the very first attempt at putting together a New Testament.
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 in 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
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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 God, they were also arguing about the nature of authority in the nascent Church. As the acclaimed scholar of religions Elaine Pagels notes, by insisting upon belief in one God, the early church was validating the system of its governance under one bishop—that is, the bishop of Rome.
This was politicomorphism, plain and simple: “the divinization of earthly politics.” 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.”
In 202 C.E., Rome issued an edict forbidding all further conversions, and by the middle of that century, the Empire’s Christian subjects were being persecuted on a massive scale. Many Romans blamed the political and economic instability that plagued the Empire during this era on the people’s turning their backs on the old gods, and naturally much of this anger was directed toward Christians, who, if nothing else, were conspicuous in their refusal to offer sacrifices to Roman deities.
When, a few years later, Diocletian abruptly retired as emperor, he made the fateful decision to divide the Empire into a tetrarchy ruled by two sets of junior and senior emperors, one in the east and one in the west. It was an untenable situation that quickly devolved into civil war between rival claimants to the throne. In 312 C.E., one of these claimants rode with his army to the River Tiber in an attempt to reinstitute the rule of a single emperor. His name was Constantine, and he would alter the course of both Rome and Christianity forever.
