How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Bart D. Ehrman (author),
Harper One publishers, March 2013, eBook ISBN: 0061778184
Bart Ehrman’s latest book, How Jesus Became God, has so many positive qualities recommending it, that
it is one of those books which can appeal to Christians as well as non-believers. That Ehrman wants his
book to appeal to Christians is evident by the many occasions he pauses to explain his personal views on
the key aspects of Christian theology. Several chapters open with his remembrances of his school years
spent at the Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, both of them institutions at the forefront of
Baptist, conservative training. His spiritual journey is the reverse of most people’s, in that he started as a
devout believer and proselytizer in the Evangelical faith, and gradually moved to doubt and ultimately
rejection of most of Christian doctrine. He describes himself now as an agnostic.
What he really wants to be known as, however, is an historian. Many times he explains to the reader
what New Testament scholars do who are trying to understand the history of early Christianity. First, they
set aside their religious beliefs. To do history it is necessary to concentrate on that which can be
established through fact and reason, with no reliance whatever on faith. Ehrman points out that many
respected theologians are also eminent Biblical and New Testament scholars, because they are able to
separate their two personalities of scholar and Christian believer. This is rather easier for Ehrman,
because he has abandoned his Christian beliefs, but this does not mean the work is any easier.
An example from Chapter Three (Did Jesus Think He Was God?) shows the rigorous thinking which is
necessary to conduct historical research on the Bible. The first problem arises from the fact that there
are no first-person accounts of Jesus or his mission available to us. Ehrman cites Paul as the best, earliest
source we have, but still, Paul wrote his seven attributable Epistles twenty or more years after Jesus died,
and Paul admits he never met the man. This would explain why Paul has so little information in his Epistles
about Jesus as a person. The Gospels, on the other hand, have much more information because they are
miniature biographies. But they were written forty or more years after Jesus’ death, by writers who wrote
under pseudonyms. The Gospels cannot be taken as factual on their face, because they contradict each
other on almost all significant points (especially the Resurrection).
Scholars must therefore use contextual analysis to derive any conclusions about Jesus as an historical
figure. Which statements about Jesus are to be found in all four gospels? These are more likely to be true
than a statement found in only one gospel. Which statements put Jesus in an embarrassing light? These
are more likely to be true because it shows the gospel writer was interested more in history than arguing
for a theological interpretation of Jesus’ life. The Gospel of John, which can be identified as the last to be
written, around 90 CE, is almost entirely a polemic about Jesus as the Logos, or Word of God in the Hebrew
Biblical sense. The other three gospels are completely different. They are earlier, they do not claim Jesus
was God, and their sources can be identified. Both Matthew and Luke have material that exists in none
of the other gospels, so scholars identify these unknown sources as M and L, respectively. They also have
material which clearly comes from the earlier Gospel of Mark, but then all three of these evangelists have
material that is the same, and this must have come from still another source, which scholars call Q.
All of this analysis, so far, is based on the stories Mark, Matthew and Luke tell about Jesus (John has yet
more stories all his own). But scholars also can tell a lot about certain passages in the gospels which are
sharply different in style from the rest of the gospel. The author suddenly uses words or syntax completely
different from their normal writing, so these passages must have come from some earlier source. This
analysis is especially important in Paul’s Epistles, because material can be identified that might have
appeared ten years or less from Jesus’ death. When the same material shows up in the gospels, it now
becomes possible to peer into the thinking of people who knew Jesus directly or were at least trying to
make sense of his life and mission immediately after his crucifixion.
Ehrman explains what he as an historian is trying to do with this methodology. “[It is] Not simply a matter
of willy-nilly picking the verses that I want. I’m looking for a message that is independently attested in all
of our early sources…” Here is the essential difference between the religious approach to the Bible and
the historical approach. As anybody can agree who thinks objectively about the sermons, lectures, and
lessons that are taught by pastors, priests, theologians and other religious authority figures, picking and
choosing which verses to use as an illustration of a point is the expected method for religious analysis and
discourse. It has always been this way in Christianity. Occasionally a religious leader may grapple with
inconsistencies and contradictions in scripture, but their primary purpose is not to investigate such
problems for the sake of the investigation itself. Ehrman points out that fundamentalists in particular
(and he used to be one), have no interest in what can be learned about Jesus from rigorously analyzing
scripture, which is why fundamentalists are not to be found among historians of the Bible.
The Apocalyptic Jesus
What do Ehrman and other scholars learn from all this analysis? Ehrman sets the stage for his conclusions
by looking first at the nature of divinity in first century pagan and Judaic cultures. He points out that of
all the Roman emperors from Augustus to Constantine, the “good” ones, as judged by their
contemporaries, were given status as a god, or specifically a Son of God. This term connoted a pecking
order of godhood within the divine world. Zeus or Jupiter were at the top, and above even them were
mysterious figures who created the world. Below them were lesser gods, including angel-like figures who
acted as messengers for the higher gods. Humans who were declared as gods might earn this status by
being born as an actual son or daughter of a god who cohabited with a human (Hercules, Perseus and
others had this status). They could also earn divinity by bestowing great benefits on the world, which is
why Augustus even in his lifetime was so recognized by the Roman Senate. Augustus did not object to his
status as a divinity, because it permitted people throughout the empire to worship his statue, which
solidified the political importance of the role of the emperor as leader of all the people, whatever their
religious beliefs.
Ehrman also points out that the Jews had a similar practice of elevating important historical figures to
godhood, Moses being one notable example of a human who after his death was assumed to be in the
presence of the Lord Almighty. Elijah and Abraham were other such figures. There was also a concept in
Jewish scripture of the Angel of the Lord, a personage who appears in Genesis as God’s messenger and
agent. There is some suggestion that the Angel of the Lord acted on behalf of God as the creator of the
universe. God spoke his wishes regarding the creation, and the Angel complied. But there are other
strands of divinity that appear in Jewish scriptures, the most prominent being the Messiah, a figure who
Jews longed for after their Babylonian captivity, as someone who would recreate the Temple and restore
the Jews to earthly power. The Messiah was therefore an earthly leader and religious figure at the same
time, and not the “Messiah” that Christians interpret him to be today – a manifestation of the Lord God.
Further to this is a figure known as the Son of Man, who appears most frequently in the book of Daniel.
This personage will appear at the End of Time to judge all humans and throw the evil ones into the fiery
pit of Hell. All others will join him in the heavenly realm, worshipping the Lord God, with the Son of Man
sitting at his right side. Jesus made frequent references to the Son of Man, but Ehrman emphasizes
something he says is often overlooked – Jesus never defined himself as the Son of Man. He talked about
him as a third person, but in so doing, Jesus put emphasis on the apocalyptic expectations that swirled
around the End of Time. Ehrman says that for one hundred years, most critical scholars of the New
Testament have concluded that above all else, Jesus was an apocalypticist, an awkward academic term
which defines Jesus in a certain way, as a man with a mission to exhort all Jews to prepare themselves for
the imminent End of Time and the coming of a new Kingdom on earth with the arrival of the Son of Man.
The emphasis here is on “immanent” – Jesus specifically mentioned that some of his listeners would be
alive when the Son of Man appeared.
There were many other apocalypticists in first century Judea; Jesus was a figure who would be familiar to
any Jew living at the time. What set Jesus apart were his other qualities, which have given rise to people
today emphasizing these different features in comparison to other aspects of Jesus’ mission. While “most
scholars” accept that Jesus was principally concerned with the apocalypse, we’ve seen recently the
success of Reza Aslan with his book Zealot, which defines Jesus principally as a revolutionary intent on
overthrowing Roman rule in the Jewish provinces. This thesis has come under criticism not only from
those who see Jesus as an apocalyptic figure, but those who emphasize his moral teachings. How could
someone who preached about “turning the other cheek”, also preach about overthrowing the secular rule
of the Romans? Another contending description of Jesus is that of the healer and magus, or
magician/miracle worker. We might ascribe this to the late Morton Smith and other scholars who placed
Jesus within the historical first century tradition of magi. In my own books on Jesus, I rely on this
description of him as the primary focus for his mission. Indeed, Bart Ehrman opens his book with a
description of a man as equally famous in his time as Jesus for his healing skills and power to work
miracles: Appollonius of Tyana.
In terms of Ehrman’s thesis, and the point of his book, of these contending images of Jesus, that of the
apocalypticist is the one that best explains how Jesus became God. Aslan’s presentation of Jesus as a
revolutionary insurrectionist best explains why the Romans so readily crucified him, but it is Jesus as
apocalypticist which best explains why the Jewish leadership found him offensive. Jesus gave the
impression that he was an agent of the Son of Man, or perhaps the Son of Man himself. Some of his
followers saw him as the Son of God, which was yet another indication that the Jesus cult was involved in
blasphemy.
The Son of Man has Returned
While the crucifixion might have in ordinary circumstances caused the collapse of the Jesus cult, it did not
do so, because something else came up that gave an urgent impetus to the movement. That was the
development of the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead. In the following chapters, Ehrman explores
the relationship of this idea to the explosive growth of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
What seems clear to scholar/historians like Ehrman is that almost immediately after the death of Jesus,
his followers began to believe in and spread stories about his miraculous resurrection from the tomb.
Scholars know this from piecing together parts of Paul’s Epistles which read more like poetry or hymns,
and which seem to reflect the very earliest Christian thinking about the resurrection, perhaps just a few
years after the crucifixion. This poem says: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and
he was buried. Christ was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and he appeared to
Cephas [Peter].” What appears to me to be the most significant part of this poem is the reference to
Christ dying for our sins; this is the first appearance of the redemption theology that Paul was most famous
for, and which was not accepted by all the disciples. Paul does make it clear, though, that he received this
poem from others. The concept that Christ was a sacrificial victim, unfairly murdered, must have called
out for an explanation. One explanation that came to dominate the Christian movement was that the
Jews gave him up to Pontius Pilate, demanding he be crucified. Two thousand years of anti-Semitic
repression by the church was one result of this way of thinking. But if Jesus had been viewed by his
followers as a messianic leader, either as the Messiah or the Son of Man, than some theological
explanation was also called for. Those who knew their Jewish scripture could easily find a verse
prophesying the blood sacrifice of someone like Jesus of Nazareth.
As to the resurrection after three days, most scholars think the reference can be found in Hosea 6:2:
“After two days he will revive us; after the third day he will raise us up, so that we may live before him.”
Others say the story of Jonah in the whale is the proper reference, and Ehrman leans toward that
explanation. What is more important to Ehrman, however, is that nowhere does Paul mention an empty
tomb, or Joseph of Arimathea, or any woman whatever seeking the body of Jesus. These stories appear
to be accretions to the resurrection claim.
As a scholar/historian, Ehrman has to spend some time explaining why it is not important what he thinks
of the resurrection. Clearly he does not agree that it occurred as an actual, historical fact. He now believes
John Dominic Crossan was right twenty years ago, when he postulated that Jesus’ body was thrown to the
dogs, in the traditional Roman manner of dealing with the corpses of condemned criminals. Ehrman goes
through many reasons why there was no tomb, and he postulates that stories of the resurrection could
be similar to many modern testimonies from people who have highly convincing visions or dreams that
they have met someone who has died. One feature of these visitations from the dead, at least as
determined by medical researchers, is that the person having such an experience has gone through a deep
personal shock at the death of a loved one, who then returns in a way that feels as if they had not died
after all. If the close followers of Jesus were deeply and emotionally invested in his person and mission,
and if his crucifixion was a surprise and a shock, then it would be completely reasonable to expect some
followers to have a vision that he had returned from the dead.
The other salient question that his followers would then ask would be: where did Jesus go? He did not
have one of those out-of-body experiences of someone in serious medical trauma, who visits heaven but
then returns to their same body to live out the rest of their life. Jesus, according to his followers, visited
many people, showed some of them his wounds, and then ascended into heaven. It is the resurrection
and the ascension that matter here, because why would Jesus be taken up into heaven other than to sit
at the right hand of the Father, as the Son of God, or the Son of Man? But this idea created an enormous
dissonance: was Jesus a man, or a god? From this contradiction came several centuries of conflict and
political maneuvering, and this story constitutes the last third of Ehrman’s book.
True God or True Man?
Clearly Bart Ehrman worked very carefully on this last part of the book. How do you summarize three
centuries of debate and conflict in such a short space? He uses simple, non-scholarly language to get his
points across. His underlying theme is one of shifting definitions within the Christian community of what
is orthodox (proper religious thinking), vs. what is heterodox (heretical thinking). Often the accepted
standard of fifty or one hundred years ago comes to be viewed as a heresy. In the process we meet great
Doctors of the Church (theologians), such as Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, and Hippolytus. All of these
thinkers/leaders battle the heresies of their day, or redefine previously acceptable thinking as heretical
thinking.
The very earliest Christians conflated the idea that Jesus was the Son of Man (an earthly leader and
descendant of King David – hence the need for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, the seat of the house of
David), with the idea that he was also the Son of God, an exalted figure with divine status in heaven. An
argument then developed as to the point before, during, or after his life when Jesus took on divine status
– the point of exaltation, in other words. Paul and other early Christians argued that it took place at the
resurrection, but later thinking began pushing the exaltation forward. Some said it occurred at the time
he was baptized by John the Baptist, which influenced the thinking of the gospel writers, who added
elaborations to the baptism story, in which God spoke from the heavens, announcing at that moment that
he had “begotten,” or given birth to, Jesus as his Son. Other gospel writers had God merely saying he was
“well-pleased” with Jesus.
The timing mattered, because the entire character of Jesus changes depending upon when Jesus became
a God. Soon the Baptism was not deemed an orthodox view, and Jesus was said to have become a god at
the moment of Mary’s conception by the Holy Spirit. The contradictions, however, would not go away. If
Jesus was the Son of God, was he inferior to God, or equal to God? If he was equal to God, how could
there not be two Gods, which violated the monotheism that Christianity had inherited from Judaism?
It gets difficult keeping track of the various Christian offshoots that dealt with these issues, but Ehrman
does better than most in presenting the main branches of Christianity. The Ebionites saw themselves as
the descendants of the Jerusalem community, in that they acted as Jews who followed the Christos, but
also were strictly observant of Jewish religious practices. The Theodotians saw Jesus as a mortal who was
strictly human, but who was then adopted by God to serve a sacramental role. In their thinking, there
was no Incarnation that turned Jesus into the Son of God; he was selected by God to be his Son. This
theory was consistent if not derivative from the Roman practice of adoption; often in a Roman family, the
adopted son was more important than the biological offspring.
The Docetists took the opposite view. They denied that Jesus was human at all, and they are mentioned
in the Epistle of John (not to be confused with the Gospel of John). The writer of this Epistle, who is
unknown to us other than through the three Epistles under his name in the New Testament, charges that
the Docetists had at one time been a part of his congregation of Christians, but left because they did not
accept Christ “in the flesh”. They thought of him as divine from the beginning, with no aspect of humanity.
Associated with this theology was a preacher named Marcion, who in the second century expanded on
Paul’s epistles by claiming that the God who gave Jews the law, because they were his Chosen People,
condemned them for their failure to live up to the law. This God had nothing to do with a second God
who sent Jesus to earth as a fully divine creature who was to redeem mankind from its inability to live up
to the demands of the first God. Similarly, Jesus could have nothing to do with this first God, because
Jesus preached love and kindness, the antithesis of violence. This doctrine immediately found adherents
but opponents as well, since it violated monotheism and took away Jesus’ humanity. Eventually it was
condemned as rank heresy.
The Gnostics, like the Docetists, did not believe there was a single creator God who incarnated or adopted
Jesus as his son. Instead, they postulated a universe of thousands of divine entities who were flawed, and
who created the world that we know. There were many branches of Gnosticism, but most Gnostics
believed that Jesus was divine in nature rather than human in flesh (a Docetist argument), and that he
came to earth to explain the mysteries inherent in the universe. This was the “knowledge”, or “gnosis”,
of the religion. Ehrman points out one logical attraction of Gnosticism – it explained how evil came into
the world, as a consequence of a flaw in the divine order.
Gnosticism was not so much condemned as it was ignored or fought against by other Christian groups.
Ehrman shows how this process played out over many centuries, with increasing attempts by various
Christian thinkers to find a way to merge Jesus into God, yet preserve his humanity. Eventually a solution
was found that involved three gods in one, including the Holy Spirit in conjunction with the Father and
the Son. This Triune God was the focus of intense controversy and even bloodshed, but as Christianity
found more adherents in the third and early fourth centuries, eventually politics intervened in the form
of Emperor Constantine, who adopted Christianity as a state religion and forced the bishops to come up
with a single, universal theology. It turned into a matter of votes, but the Triune God had already made
sufficient progress that this would have been the likely solution even without Constantine. Ehrman says
that still today these ideas are difficult to digest by many, even among the faithful.
Ehrman leaves off at this logical conclusion in the story – the adoption of Christianity as the state religion
of the Empire. He could certainly go on from there, and perhaps one day he will. He has made a cogent,
understandable case that the route by which Jesus traveled from a Galilean peasant preacher to God
Himself was fundamentally a human process, which can be easily understood and defended without the
slightest bit of supernatural interposition or inspiration. This is a quite significant accomplishment on
Ehrman’s part, especially since he wrote this book to be accessible to a broad public audience. It is this
sort of writing which has the power to transform modern Christianity. It allows thinking Christians, and
those who are not Christians, to reopen old conflicts thought to have been decided over 1,500 years ago.
As such, it breaks down authority and the power of clergy to dictate modern theology, and that will have
significant long term consequences.
Garrett Glass
jehoshuathebook.com