How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (2 page)

After I have established the views of both pagans and Jews, we can move in Chapter 3 to consider the life of the historical Jesus. Here my focus is on the question of whether Jesus talked about himself as God. It is a difficult question to answer, in no small measure because of the sources of information at our disposal for knowing anything at all about the life and teachings of Jesus. And so I begin the chapter by discussing the problems that our surviving sources—especially the Gospels of the New Testament—pose for us when we want to know historically what happened during Jesus’s ministry. Among other things, I show why the majority of critical scholars for more than a century have argued that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who predicted that the end of the age was soon to arrive, when God would intervene in history and overthrow the forces of evil to bring in his good kingdom. Once the basic tenor of Jesus’s public ministry is set, I move to a discussion of the events that led up to his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. At every point we will be intent on our one leading question for this chapter: How did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as a divine being? I will argue that he did not.

These first three chapters can be seen as the backdrop to our ultimate concern: how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers’ belief that he had been raised from the dead.

A great deal is written today about Jesus’s resurrection, both by scholars who are true believers and apologists, who argue that historians can “prove” that Jesus was raised, and by skeptics who don’t believe it for a second. It is obviously a fundamental issue for our deliberations. If the early Christians did not believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they would not have thought that he was different from any other unfortunate prophet who ended up on the wrong side of the law and was executed for his troubles. But Christians did think Jesus was raised, and, as I argue, that changed everything.

From a historical perspective there is an obvious question: What, actually, can we know about the resurrection? Here we enter into highly controversial topics, some of which I have changed my mind about in the course of doing my research for this book. For years I had thought that whatever else we might think about the stories of Jesus’s resurrection, we could be relatively certain that immediately after his death he was given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea and that on the third day some of his female followers found his tomb empty. I no longer think that these are relatively certain historical data; on the contrary, I think both views (his burial and his empty tomb) are unlikely. And so, in Chapter 4 I deal with what I think we as historians simply cannot know about the traditions surrounding Jesus’s resurrection.

In Chapter 5 I turn to what I think we almost certainly can know. Here I argue that the evidence is unambiguous and compelling: some of Jesus’s disciples claimed that they saw him alive after he had died. But how many of his disciples had these “visions” of Jesus? (I leave open the question of whether they had these visions because Jesus really appeared to them or because they were having hallucinations—for reasons I explain in the chapter.) When did they have them? And how did they interpret them?

My overarching contention is that belief in the resurrection—based on visionary experiences—is what initially led the followers of Jesus (all of them? some of them?) to believe that Jesus had been exalted to heaven and made to sit at the right hand of God as his unique Son. These beliefs were the first Christologies—the first understandings that Jesus was a divine being. I explore these “exaltation” views of our earliest surviving sources in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 7 I move to a different set of Christological views that developed later and that maintained that Jesus was not simply a human who had been exalted to the level of divinity, but a preexistent divine being with God before he came to earth as a human. I show the key similarities and differences between this “incarnation” view of Christ (in which he “became flesh”—the literal meaning of the word
incarnation
) with the earlier “exaltation” Christologies. Moreover, I explore key passages that embody understandings of the incarnation in such books as the Gospel of John, the last of the canonical Gospels to be written.

In the following chapters we will see that Christians living after the New Testament was written—into the second, third, and fourth centuries—developed views of Christ even further, with some Christians taking positions that were eventually denounced as “heresies” (or “false”) and others asserting views that were accepted as “orthodox” (or “right”). Chapter 8 deals with some of the heretical “dead ends” taken by Christian theologians of the second and third centuries. Some of these thinkers claimed that Jesus was fully human but not divine; others said he was fully divine but not human; yet others said that Jesus Christ was in fact two beings, one divine and the other human, only temporarily united during Jesus’s ministry. All of these views came to be declared as “heresies,” as did yet other views that were put forward by Christian leaders who, ironically, wanted nothing more than to embrace ideas that were “orthodox.”

The debates over the nature of Christ were not resolved by the end of the third century but came to a head in the early fourth century after the conversion of the emperor Constantine to the Christian faith. By then, the vast majority of Christians firmly believed that Jesus was God, but the question remained, “in what sense?” It is in this early fourth-century context that battles were waged in the “Arian controversy,” which I explore in Chapter 9. The controversy is named after Arius, an influential Christian teacher of Alexandria, Egypt, who held to a “subordinationist” view of Christ—that is, Jesus was God, but he was a subordinate deity who was not at the same level of glory as God the Father; moreover, he had not always existed with the Father. The alternative point of view was espoused by Arius’s own bishop, Alexander, who maintained that Christ was a being who had always existed with God and that he was, by nature, equal with God. The ultimate denunciation of Arius’s view led to the formation of the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in churches today.

Finally, in the epilogue, I deal with the consequences of these particular theological disputes after they were resolved. Once Christians far and wide accepted the view that Jesus had been fully God from eternity, equal with the Father, how did this affect the various disputes Christians had, for example, with the Romans who had earlier persecuted them and whose emperor had been widely believed to be a god? Or with Jews who were now accused not just of killing Christ, but even of killing God? Or with one another as debates over the nature of Christ continued apace, with increasingly greater nuance, for a very long time indeed?

These later debates are intriguing, and highly significant, in their own right. But my strong contention is that they cannot be understood without grasping the history of what went before. And so in our historical sketch we will be particularly interested in the key Christological question of them all: How is it that the followers of Jesus came to understand him as divine in
any
sense of the term? What made them think that Jesus, the crucified preacher from Galilee, was God?

W
HEN
I
TEACH MY
introductory course on the New Testament, I tell my students that it is very difficult to know where to begin our exploration. Is it best to start with our earliest author of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who wrote more of the books of the New Testament than any other author? Or is it best to start with the Gospels, which, while written after Paul, discuss the life of Jesus, who lived before Paul wrote his letters? In the end I tell them that probably it is best to begin by telling the story of a highly unusual man who was born in the first century in a remote part of the Roman empire, whose life was described by his later followers as altogether miraculous.
¹

B
EFORE HE WAS BORN
, his mother had a visitor from heaven who told her that her son would not be a mere mortal but in fact would be divine. His birth was accompanied by unusual divine signs in the heavens. As an adult he left his home to engage on an itinerant preaching ministry. He went from village to town, telling all who would listen that they should not be concerned about their earthly lives and their material goods; they should live for what was spiritual and eternal. He gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no ordinary human, but that he was the Son of God. And he did miracles to confirm them in their beliefs: he could heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. At the end of his life he aroused opposition among the ruling authorities of Rome and was put on trial. But they could not kill his soul. He ascended to heaven and continues to live there till this day. To prove that he lived on after leaving this earthly orb, he appeared again to at least one of his doubting followers, who became convinced that in fact he remains with us even now. Later, some of his followers wrote books about him, and we can still read about him today. But very few of you will have ever seen these books. And I imagine most of you do not even know who this great miracle-working Son of God was. I have been referring to a man named Apollonius, who came from the town of Tyana. He was a pagan—that is, a polytheistic worshiper of the many Roman gods—and a renowned philosopher of his day. His followers thought he was immortal. We have a book written about him by his later devotee Philostratus.

Philostratus’s book was written in eight volumes in the early third century, possibly around 220 or 230
CE
. He had done considerable research for his book, and his stories, he tells us, were largely based on the accounts recorded by an eyewitness and companion of Apollonius himself. Apollonius lived some years after a similar miracle-working Son of God in a different remote part of the empire, Jesus of Nazareth. Later followers of these two divine men saw them as being in competition with one another. This competition was part of a bigger struggle at the time between paganism—the forms of religion supported by the vast majority of everyone who lived in antiquity, who embraced a variety of polytheistic religions—and Christianity, a newcomer on the religious scene, which insisted that there was only one God and that Jesus was his Son. Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader’s life to score their debating points.

Scholars have had to investigate the Gospels of the New Testament with a critical eye to determine which stories, and which parts of stories, are historically accurate with respect to the historical Jesus, and which represent later embellishments by his devoted followers. In a similar way, scholars of ancient Roman religion have had to analyze the writings of Philostratus with a keen sense of skepticism in order to weed through the later legendary accretions to uncover what we can say about the historical Apollonius. Generally it is agreed that he was a Pythagorean philosopher—that is, a proponent of the views of the fifth-century
BCE
Greek philosopher Pythagoras. He lived during the second half of the first century (Jesus lived during the first half). Apollonius traveled through the eastern parts of the Roman empire as a moral and religious preacher. He often lived in temples and was free with his advice to religious and city officials. He had numerous pupils and was well received among many of the Roman elite in the places where he stayed. He was especially concerned that people abandon their rampant materialism and live for what mattered, that is, the affairs of the soul.

For the current study, what is more important than the life of the historical Apollonius is the set of legends that sprang up about him and that were widely believed among people of the time. His great philosophical insights eventually led many people to assume that he could not have been a mere mortal, but that he was himself a god striding the earth. Just over a century after his death, Apollonius was awarded a holy shrine in his home city of Tyana, dedicated by none other than the Roman emperor Caracalla, who ruled from 198 to 217
CE
. We are told that the emperor Alexander Severus (222–235
CE
) kept an image of Apollonius among his various household gods. And the emperor Aurelian (270–275
CE
), an ardent worshiper of the Sun God, also revered him as divine.

The story of Apollonius’s birth, as recounted in Philostratus’s
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
, is particularly worth our consideration. The “annunciation” story is both like and unlike the story earlier found in the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38). When Apollonius’s mother was pregnant with him, she had a vision of a divine being, the Egyptian god named Proteus, renowned for his great wisdom. When she asked who her child would be, the god answered, “Myself.” The birth was similarly miraculous. The mother was told to go with her servant girls into a field, where she fell asleep on the grass, only to awake to the sound of swans flapping their wings. She prematurely then gave birth. The local people said that a bolt of lightning appeared in the sky at just that moment, and just as it was about to strike the earth, it “hung poised in the air and then disappeared upwards” (
Life of Apollonius
1.5). The people concluded: “No doubt the gods were giving a signal and an omen of his brilliance, his exaltation above earthly things, his closeness to heaven, and all the Master’s other qualities” (1.5). This sign is obviously different from a star that led a group of wise men to a child, but it is in the same celestial ballpark. The local people concluded that Apollonius was, in fact, the Son of Zeus.