How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (28 page)

Before these storytellers began their work of recounting the words and deeds of this divine man, the earliest believers—as soon as they had visions of Jesus and came to believe he had been raised from the dead—thought he had been exalted to heaven. His appearances to them were appearances from heaven. That was where he lived now and would live for all eternity, with God Almighty.

In some later traditions this belief came to be modified in an important way. Today, most Christians think that Jesus died; that he was raised from the dead on the third day; that he then appeared, while still on earth, to his disciples; and that only after that he went up to heaven, in his “ascension.” As it turns out, the ascension is mentioned in only one book of the New Testament, the book of Acts.
²⁴
The author of Acts—let’s call him Luke—presents an innovation here in his story of Jesus. If you will recall, Luke is especially committed to showing that Jesus’s resurrected body was a real, honest-to-goodness body. It had flesh and bones. It could be felt. It could eat broiled fish. Luke stresses this point because other Christians were saying that Jesus, at least in his resurrected form, was a spirit, not a body. For Luke, he was a body. And to make that point even more emphatic, Luke tells the story of the ascension. Possibly Luke himself came up with this story. As we have seen, according to the book of Acts, Jesus spent forty days with his disciples, showing them “with many proofs” that he really was alive again (1:3). And then, after the forty days, he physically went up to heaven—and the disciples watched him go. This account is meant to emphasize yet further the real bodily nature of Jesus after his resurrection.

But it stands in tension with the views found elsewhere in the Gospels, which say nothing about a physical ascension of a real, bony, fish-eating body. The earliest tradition was different from what is in Acts. In that earlier tradition, Jesus’s resurrection was not simply a reanimation of a body that was then to be taken up into heaven. The resurrection itself was an exaltation into the heavenly realm. “God raised Jesus from the dead” was taken to mean that God had exalted Jesus from this earthly realm of life and death into the heavenly sphere. In this older understanding, Jesus appeared to his disciples by coming down briefly from heaven. This certainly is the understanding of our earliest witness, Paul, who speaks about his own vision of Jesus in exactly the same terms as the visions of the others two or three years before him—Cephas, James, the Twelve, and so on. There was nothing categorically different about any of these appearances. They were all appearances from heaven.

If the first believers in Jesus’s resurrection understood it to mean that Jesus had been taken into heaven, how exactly did that lead them to change what they thought about Jesus? How did it mark the beginning of Christology? How did it cause his followers to believe that Jesus was God?

This is the subject of the next chapter, but for now, here’s a brief foreshadowing. The followers of Jesus, during his life, believed that he would be the king of the future kingdom, the messiah. Now that they believed he had been exalted to the heavenly realm, they realized they had been right. He was the future king; but he would come from heaven to reign. In some traditions of the Jewish king in the Hebrew Bible, as we have seen, the king—even the earthly son of David—was thought to be in some sense God. Jesus now had been exalted to heaven and is the heavenly messiah to come to earth. In an even more real sense, he was God. Not God Almighty, of course, but he was a heavenly being, a superhuman, a divine king who would rule the nations.

Before Jesus’s death the disciples believed he would sit on the future throne. If God has taken him up into heaven, he is already sitting on a throne. In fact, he is at the right hand of God. On earth the disciples considered him their master and “lord.” Now he really is their Lord. The disciples recalled the scripture that said, “The L
ORD
says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’” (Ps. 110:1). God had taken Jesus, exalted him to his right hand in a position of authority and power, made him the Lord of all, who would rule over all things. As one who ruled from beside God’s throne, Jesus was in that sense also God.

The king in Israel was also known as the “Son of God.” Jesus clearly was that—both by virtue of his being the future king and by the fact that God had elevated him to the heavenly realm. God had showered his special favor upon Jesus and made him in a unique sense the Son of God—far above the status enjoyed by the descendants of David. God had adopted Jesus to be his Son, his unique Son. Just as the emperors were sons of both God (since their adopted fathers were “God”) and gods, so too Jesus, as the Son of God, was in that sense God.

Jesus, then, was coming to rule from heaven. In his own teaching he had proclaimed that the Son of Man was to appear as the cosmic judge over the earth. But now it was obviously Jesus himself who was coming from heaven to rule. The disciples very soon—probably right away—concluded that Jesus was the coming Son of Man. So when they told stories about him later, they had him speak of himself as the Son of Man—so much so that it became one of his favorite titles for himself in the Gospels. As we have seen, the Son of Man was sometimes understood to be a divine figure. In that sense also, then, Jesus was God.

It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. In no sense, in this early period, is Jesus understood to be God the Father. He is not the One Almighty God. He is the one who has been elevated to a divine position and is God in a variety of senses. As I have been arguing and will argue extensively in the next chapter, whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God
in what sense
? It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and “of the same essence” as the Father.

W
HEN
I
BECAME SERIOUS
about my Christian faith in high school, my social life was rather profoundly affected. Not right away, but eventually. My first serious relationship was with a girl named Lynn, whom I started to date as a sophomore, the year before I became born again. Lynn was a wonderful human being: intelligent, attractive, funny, caring. She was also Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before, and I don’t recall that our respective religions had much, if any, bearing on our relationship. I was an altar boy at the Episcopal church every Sunday, and she went to synagogue on Saturday. Or at least I assume she did; looking back, I don’t remember whether her family was religious in any traditional sense of the word—attending services or even keeping Jewish holidays. I suppose they were rather secular Jews. Frankly, at the time, when it came to a girlfriend, I had other things on my mind than alternative worship practices.

Lynn was one of three daughters living with a single mom. They were like my family, somewhere in the middle to upper middle class, with many of the same values and outlooks on life as mine. Lynn and I had terrifically good chemistry and ended up spending a lot of time together, as we got increasingly serious throughout that sophomore year. But then disaster struck. (I had a very limited understanding of the possibilities of disaster at the time.) Lynn’s mom was offered a better job in Topeka, Kansas, and they were going to move there from Lawrence. Her mom and I had always gotten along extremely well, but she was firm: even though the towns were only about twenty-five miles apart, this move should mark the end of our “going together” (as we called it back then). We should meet other people and have normal social lives. And so we did. I was heartbroken, but life must go on.

Soon after that, I was born again. Lynn and I still talked on the phone—and even saw each other on occasion. I vividly remember one conversation we had after I had “received Christ.” I was trying to persuade her that she too should ask Jesus into her heart. She was understandably confused—in no small part because I myself had no clue what I was talking about. After a long talk in which I tried to explain it all in my amateurish way, she finally asked, “But if I already have God in my life, why do I need Jesus?” It was a stunner of a question for me. I was completely flummoxed. I was clearly not a good bet for a career in theology.

Lynn’s question would not have flummoxed the earliest Christians. Quite the contrary, the first followers of Jesus had very clear ideas about who Jesus was and why he mattered. A look at the historical record shows that they not only talked about him all the time, they came up with increasingly exalted things to say about him and magnified his importance more and more with the passing of time. Eventually, they came to claim that he was God come to earth.

But what did the earliest Christians say about him right after they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead? In this chapter I explore the earliest Christologies—understandings of Christ—of the earliest Christians.

F
OR THE PURPOSES OF
this discussion, I am using the term
Christian
in its most basic sense, as referring to anyone who, after Jesus’s life, came to believe that he was the Christ of God and was determined both to accept the salvation he brought and to follow him. I do not think that “Christian” is an appropriate term for Jesus’s followers before his death; but used in the way I’ve just described makes good sense for those who came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and thought of him as one who was specially chosen by God to bring about salvation.

The first who came to this belief were his own remaining disciples—or at least some of them—and possibly others of his followers from Galilee, including Mary Magdalene and some other women. As it turns out, it is extremely difficult to know what these people believed as soon as they accepted the idea that Jesus had been raised from the dead, in no small measure because we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement.

The first Christian author we have is the Apostle Paul, whose earliest surviving writing is probably 1 Thessalonians, written possibly around 49 or 50
CE
—fully twenty years after Jesus had been crucified. Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement. Two years or so after Jesus’s death, say 32 or 33
CE
, when Paul first heard of Jews who believed Jesus to be the messiah—a crucified man!—he rejected their views with vehemence and set about persecuting them. But then in one of the great turnarounds in religious history—arguably the most significant conversion on record—Paul changed from being an aggressive persecutor of the Christians to being one of their strongest proponents. He eventually became a leading spokesperson, missionary, and theologian for the fledgling Christian movement. He later claimed that this was because he had had a vision of Jesus alive, long after his death, and concluded that God must have raised him from the dead.

Paul believed he was personally called by God to engage in missionary activities among the gentiles, persuading these “pagans” that their own gods were dead, lifeless, and of no use, but that the God of Jesus was the one who had created the world and entered history in order to redeem it. Only belief in the messiah could put a person into a right standing before God, because the messiah had died for the sins of others, and God, in order to show that this death did indeed bring atonement, had raised him from the dead. Arguably, Paul’s greatest contribution to the theology of his day was his hard-fought view that this salvation in Christ applied to all people, Jew and gentile alike, on the same grounds: faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Being Jewish had nothing to do with it. To be sure, Jews were the “chosen people,” and the Jewish scriptures were a revelation from God. But a gentile did not have to become a Jew in order to have salvation through the death and resurrection of the messiah. For Paul, salvation certainly had come “from the Jews,” since Jesus was, after all, the Jewish messiah; but once this salvation had come to the world, it was good for the entire world, not just for Jews. It was the means of salvation that God had planned from eternity for all people.

As a Christian missionary Paul traveled from one urban center to another preaching this message, and he established churches in various parts of the Mediterranean, especially in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Macedonia, and Achaia (modern Greece). After he started a Christian community and got it on its feet, he would head to another city and start a community there as well, and then move on again. As he heard news from one community or another of the problems they were having, he wrote back to them to instruct them further about what they should believe and how they should behave. The letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament are some of these communications. As I have indicated, 1 Thessalonians was probably the first. The others were all written over the course of the next decade, in the 50s. Of the thirteen letters that are under Paul’s name in the New Testament, critical scholars are reasonably sure that Paul actually wrote seven of them—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon (the others were written by later followers of Paul in different contexts); these are called the
undisputed Pauline letters
, since almost no one disputes that Paul was their author.
¹
These are our earliest surviving writings from an early Christian.

The Pauline letters are extremely valuable for knowing what Paul thought and for seeing what was happening in the Christianity of his day. But what if we want to know not simply what was happening in Paul’s churches in, say, 55
CE
, twenty-five years after Jesus’s death, or how Matthew’s community was understanding Jesus around 85
CE
, some fifty-five years after Jesus’s death? What if we want to know what the very earliest Christians believed, say, in the year 31 or 32, a year or two after Jesus died?