Sunday Review: How Jesus Became God (book)

It all started with his supposed resurrection

By Morris Dean

The Nicene creed includes the affirmation that

I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds...one in Being with the Father.

That is, Jesus is believed to have always been God. There is some irony, then, in the title of Bart D. Ehrman's 2014 book, How Jesus Became God, which refers not to the fact of Jesus's being God, but to the belief. How did that belief come about?

The Christ worshiped today

is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had [with the First Council of Nicea, 325 C.E.] become fully God. [p. 352, concluding paragraph of  Chapter 9]

    In the epilogue following that conclusion, Ehrman acknowledges that there is a certain truth to New Testament scholar Martin Hengel's "famous claim that 'with regard to the early Church's Christology [understanding of Christ]...more happened in the first twenty years than in the entire later, centuries-long development of dogma.'" [pp. 370-371, emphasis mine] And Ehrman's book reflects this by devoting its first six chapters and much of its seventh to the how of Jesus's "becoming God" during those very early years following the execution of Jesus.
    The first two chapters examine historically the ways in which certain humans could already come to be considered divine in ancient Greece and Rome (Chapter 1) and in Judaism (Chapter 2). (There were quite a few ways, and this is very interesting reading, whether or not you care about Jesus's case.)
    The pivotal third chapter examines the question, "Did Jesus think he was God?" Ehrman cautions the reader that the canonical Gospels (Mark, Matthew & Luke, and John – in the order in which they were written, in Greek, by learned men who had never met Jesus and had little in common with him or his followers) were relying primarily on traditional oral accounts. From a close examination of these accounts, and of the Book of Acts (also written by "Luke") and the letters of Paul, as well as from his survey of the work of other scholars, Ehrman concludes that Jesus did not think that he was God.

The short answer to how Jesus came to be considered divine is that a few key individuals had powerful visions of Jesus after his death that they interpreted as his having come back to life, and they took this "appearance" as a sign – or a proof – that Jesus was, or had become, divine. Ehrman himself puts "appearance" in quotes; he doesn't believe that Jesus was resurrected or actually appeared to anyone. But he doesn't

take a stand on this issue of whether Jesus really appeared to people or whether their visions were hallucinations, so my case does not rise or fall depending on whether the visions were veridical or not. As an agnostic, I personally do not believe Jesus was raised from the dead and so I do not believe he "appeared" to anyone. But what I have to say about the disciples' visions are things I could have said just as easily back in the days when I was a firm believer. [p. 187]

Constantine I (306-337) converted to Christianity,
disavowed the divinity with which previous,
pagan emperors had been endowed

Chapters 8 & 9 are as fascinating as anything that came before. They discuss the further development of believers' widely diverging understandings of Christ over the early centuries following his death, during which an orthodox view emerged and heretical views were suppressed. As he always is, in book after book, Ehrman is careful to explain what he's talking about:

The stress within Christianity that there is a right view and lots of wrong views...was certainly in place in the second and third Christian centuries. By that time it had become exceedingly easy to castigate anyone as a "heretic" for holding to an alternative way of looking at God, and Christ, and salvation. Moreover, this salvation came only by having the correct understanding about God, Christ, salvation, and so on. For that reason, discerning right and wrong beliefs – ascertaining what was "orthodox" (right) and "heretical" (false) – became an obsession of many of the leaders of the early church.[p. 285]

Like a number of Ehrman's books that I have read, he candidly discusses his own evolution from firm believer to agnostic. The epilogue, for example, opens:

As I have been writing this book, I have come to realize that the history of my own personal theology is a mirror image of the history of the theology of the early church....Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status at his resurrection; to being a preexistent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him. My own personal beliefs about Jesus moved in precisely the opposite direction....The Christians exalted him to the divine realm in their theology, but in my opinion, he was, and always had been, a human. [pp. 353-354]

    A subtextual title for Ehrman's book might be How Jesus Became Human Again. That story all started with Ehrman's inability to believe any longer in Jesus's supposed resurrection. This reviewer is sympathetic.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean