Ehrman Bart D. - How Jesus became God: the exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee

To Sarah

I WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE the scholars who have assisted me by reading an earlier draft of this book and providing extensive and helpful comments. If everyone had such insightful and generous friends and colleagues, the world would be a much happier place. My readers have been Maria Doerfler, a remarkable and wide-ranging scholar just now starting to teach church history as an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School; Joel Marcus, professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, who for nearly thirty years has generously read my work and consistently spilled lots of red ink all over it; Dale Martin, professor of New Testament at Yale, my oldest friend and colleague in the field, whose critical insights have for very many years helped shape me as a scholar; and Michael Peppard, assistant professor of New Testament at Fordham University, whom I have only recently come to know and who has written a book, which I cite in the course of my study, that had a significant effect on my thinking.

I also thank the entire crew at HarperOne, especially Mark Tauber, publisher; Claudia Boutote, associate publisher; Julie Baker, my talented and energetic publicist; and above all Roger Freet, my perceptive and unusually helpful editor, who has helped make this a better book.

I am dedicating the book to my brilliant and scintillating wife, Sarah Beckwith. I dedicated another book to her years ago, but since I continuously rededicate my life to her, I think it is time to rededicate a book to her. She is the most amazing person I know.

J ESUS WAS A LOWER-CLASS Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state. Yet not long after his death, his followers were claiming that he was a divine being. Eventually they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth. And so the question: How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?

The full irony of this question did not strike me until recently, when I was taking a long walk with one of my closest friends. As we talked, we covered a number of familiar topics: books we had been reading, movies we had seen, philosophical views we were thinking about. Eventually we got around to talking about religion. Unlike me, my friend continues to identify herself as a Christian. At one point, I asked her what she considered to be the core of her beliefs. Her answer gave me pause. She said that, for her, the heart of religion was the idea that in Jesus, God had become a man.

One of the reasons I was taken aback by her response was that this used to be one of my beliefs as welleven though it hasnt been for years. As far back as high school, I had pondered long and hard this mystery of faith, as found, for example, in John 1:12, 14: In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. Even before that, I had openly and wholeheartedly confessed the Christological statements of the Nicene Creed, that Christ was

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven;

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

But I had changed over the years, and now in middle age I am no longer a believer. Instead, I am a historian of early Christianity, who for nearly three decades has studied the New Testament and the rise of the Christian religion from a historical perspective. And now my question, in some ways, is the precise opposite of my friends. As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.

The traditional answer to this question, of course, is that Jesus in fact was God, and so of course he taught that he was God and was always believed to be God. But a long stream of historians since the late eighteenth century have maintained that this is not the correct understanding of the historical Jesus, and they have marshaled many and compelling arguments in support of their position. If they are right, we are left with the puzzle: How did it happen? Why did Jesuss early followers start considering him to be God?

In this book I have tried to approach this question in a way that will be useful not only for secular historians of religion like me, but also for believers like my friend who continue to think that Jesus is, in fact, God. As a result, I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesuss divine status. I am instead interested in the historical development that led to the affirmation that he is God. This historical development certainly transpired in one way or another, and what people personally believe about Christ should not, in theory, affect the conclusions they draw historically.

The idea that Jesus is God is not an invention of modern times, of course. As I will show in my discussion, it was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesuss death. One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying Jesus is God. As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it. Moreover, to understand this claim in any sense at all will require us to know what people in the ancient world generally meant when they thought that a particular human was a godor that a god had become a human. This claim was not unique to Christians. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that we know about in our world, numerous people in antiquity, among both pagans and Jews, were thought to have been both human and divine.

It is important already at this stage to stress a fundamental, historical point about how we imagine the divine realm. By divine realm, I mean that world that is inhabited by superhuman, divine beingsGod, or the gods, or other superhuman forces. For most people today, divinity is a black-and-white issue. A being is either God or not God. God is up there in the heavenly realm, and we are down here in this realm. And there is an unbridgeable chasm between these two realms. With this kind of assumption firmly entrenched in our thinking, it is very hard to imagine how a person could be both God and human at once.

Moreover, when put in these black-and-white terms, it is relatively easy to say, as I used to say before doing the research for this book, that the early Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Lukein which Jesus never makes explicit divine claims about himselfportray Jesus as a human but not as God, whereas the Gospel of Johnin which Jesus does make such divine claimsdoes indeed portray him as God. Yet other scholars forcefully disagree with this view and argue that Jesus is portrayed as God even in these earlier Gospels. As a result, there are many debates over what scholars have called a high Christology, in which Jesus is thought of as a divine being (this is called high because Christ originates up there, with God; the term Christology literally means understanding of Christ) and what they have called a low Christology, in which Jesus is thought of as a human being (low because he originates down here, with us). Given this perspective, in which way is Jesus portrayed in the Gospelsas God or as human?