How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (30 page)

The second key feature is that the creed states that Christ was exalted at his resurrection. It is striking that Paul indicates this happened through the “Spirit of holiness.” Not only is this phrase never found elsewhere in Paul, it is what scholars call a
Semitism
. In Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers, the way an adjective-noun construction is made is different from the way it is made in other languages such as English. In these Semitic languages, this kind of construction is made by linking two nouns with the word “of.” For example, if you want to say “the right way” in a Semitic language, you say “the way of righteousness.” And instead of “Holy Spirit,” you say “Spirit of holiness.” This creed contains a clear Semitism, which makes it highly likely that it was originally formulated among Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Palestine. And this means it could represent early tradition indeed, from the early years in Palestine after Jesus’s first followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead.

In that connection, it is particularly striking how this ancient creed understands Jesus to be the Son of God. As I have repeatedly emphasized, if someone says that Jesus is God, or that he is the Son of God, or that he is divine, one needs to ask, “
in what sense?
” The view here is clear. Jesus was “appointed” (or “designated”) the “Son of God” when he was raised from the dead. It was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Son of God. I pointed out that Paul himself probably added the phrase “in power” to the creed, so that now Jesus is made the Son of God “in power” at the resurrection. Paul may have wanted to add this phrase because according to his own theology, Jesus was the Son of God before the resurrection, but he was exalted to an even higher state at the resurrection (as we will see more fully in the next chapter). For the original framer of this creed, however, it may not have worked this way. For him, Jesus was the messiah from the house of David during his earthly life, but at the resurrection he was made something much more than that. The resurrection was Jesus’s exaltation into divinity.

I have already asked why Paul might have felt compelled to quote this small creed at the beginning of his letter to the Romans. It is important to remember that he is writing to clarify any misunderstandings about himself or his gospel message and to introduce his views to Roman Christians who may have harbored suspicions concerning them. If this reading of the situation is right, it would make sense that Paul would quote this creed. It may have been a very old creed that was widely known in Christian circles throughout the Mediterranean. It may have been long accepted as expressing the standard belief of who Jesus is: both the earthly messiah descended from David and the heavenly Son of God exalted at his resurrection. Paul would be quoting the creed, then, precisely because it was well known and because it encapsulated so accurately the common faith Paul shared with the Christians in Rome. As it turns out, Paul’s own views were somewhat different and more sophisticated than that, but as a good Christian, he could certainly subscribe to the basic message of this creed, which affirmed that at the resurrection something significant happened to Jesus. He was exalted to a position of grandeur and power, made not just the earthly messiah, but the heavenly Son of God.

This message may have resonated particularly with the Christians living in Rome. It is important to remember that the emperor of Rome, who also lived in the city, was understood by many people throughout the empire to be the son of God—that is, the son of the divinized Caesar who preceded him. As we have seen, in the entire empire, only two known people were specifically called the “son of God.” The emperor was one of them, and Jesus was the other. This creed shows why Jesus was the one who deserved this exalted title. At his resurrection, God had made him his Son. He, not the emperor, was the one who had received divine status and so was worthy of the honor of being one raised to the side of God.

Several passages in the book of Acts appear to contain old, preliterary elements with Christological views very similar to the one set forth in Romans 1:3–4. Now that we know how such elements are detected, I will not analyze them as fully.

In Chapter 4 I pointed out that the speeches in Acts were written by the author, “Luke,” himself but that he incorporated within them earlier traditions, such as the one in 13:29 which indicated that members of the Jewish Sanhedrin had buried Jesus (rather than just one of their number, Joseph of Arimathea). One of the most remarkable of all the preliterary traditions of Acts, which records Paul explaining the significance of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, comes in the same chapter just a few verses later: “We preach the good news to you, that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled for us their children by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33).

I am not sure there is another statement about the resurrection in the entire New Testament that is quite so astounding. Let me stress at the outset that in Luke’s personal view, Jesus did not become the Son of God at the resurrection. We know this because of what he says elsewhere in his two-volume work, including a statement that I will analyze later in this chapter in which even before Jesus’s birth, at the “annunciation,” Mary, Jesus’s mother, is told that since she will be made pregnant by the Holy Spirit, “therefore” the one born of her will be called “the Son of God.” Luke himself believed that Jesus was the Son of God from his birth—or rather, his conception. But this is decidedly not what the preliterary tradition in Acts 13:32–33 says. The speaker, Paul, indicates that God had made a promise to the Jewish ancestors and that this promise has been fulfilled now to their descendants by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. He then quotes Psalm 2:7 to clarify what he means: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” If you recall, in the Hebrew Bible, this verse was originally taken to refer to the coronation day of the Jewish king, when he was anointed and therefore shown to stand under God’s special favor.
⁴
“Paul,” in this speech, takes the verse not to indicate what had already happened to the king as the Son of God, but as a prophecy of what would happen to the real king, Jesus, when he was made the Son of God. The fulfillment of the psalm, Paul declares, has happened “today.” And when is that “today”? It is the day of Jesus’s resurrection. That is when God declares that he has “begotten” Jesus as his Son.

In this pre-Lukan tradition, Jesus was made the Son of God at the resurrection. This is a view Luke inherited from his tradition, and it is one that coincides closely with what we already saw in Romans 1:3–4. It appears to be the earliest form of Christian belief: that God exalted Jesus to be his Son by raising him from the dead.

We find a similar point of view expressed in an earlier speech of Acts. I might point out at this stage that one of the reasons we know that it was Luke who wrote the speeches of his main characters is that the speeches all sound very much alike: the lower-class, uneducated, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasant Peter gives a speech that sounds almost exactly like a speech by the culturally refined, highly educated, literate, Greek-speaking Paul. Why do two such different people sound so much alike? Because neither one of them is actually speaking: Luke is. To make up his speeches, he used some older materials, with preliterary traditions embedded in the speeches.

In Acts 2, on the day of Pentecost when a great miracle has happened and Peter is explaining its significance to the crowd that has gathered, he speaks of Jesus’s death and resurrection, stressing that “God raised this Jesus, of whom all of us are witnesses, as he was exalted to the right hand of God.” He goes on to say that this exaltation of Jesus was a fulfillment of the psalms, but this time, rather than quoting Psalm 2:7, he quotes Psalm 110:1, another verse we examined previously as referring to the divine character of the king of Israel: “The L
ORD
says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Here the Lord God is speaking to his anointed one, who is also called the “Lord.” Peter in this speech is indicating that God was speaking the words to Jesus, whom he made the Lord—and the conqueror of all his enemies—by raising him from the dead.

Then he says something even more clearly about the resurrection of Jesus: “Let the entire house of Israel know with assurance that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The earliest followers of Jesus believed that the resurrection showed that God had exalted him to a position of grandeur and power. This verse is one piece of evidence. Here, in a preliterary tradition, we learn that it was precisely by raising Jesus from the dead that God had made him the messiah and the Lord. During his lifetime Jesus’s followers had thought he would be the future messiah who would reign as king in the coming kingdom of God to be brought by the Son of Man, as Jesus himself had taught them. But when they came to believe he was raised from the dead, as Acts 2:36 so clearly indicates, they concluded that he had been made the messiah already. He was already ruling as the king, in heaven, elevated to the side of God. As one who sits beside God on a throne in the heavenly realm, Jesus already is the Christ.

More than that, he is the Lord. During his lifetime Jesus’s disciples had called him “lord”—a term that could be used by a slave of a master, or by an employee of a boss, or by a student of a teacher. As it turns out, in Greek the term
lord
in each of these senses was the very same term as
Lord
used of God, as the “Lord of all.” Just as the term
Christ
came to take on new significance once Jesus’s followers believed he had been raised from the dead, so too did the term
lord
. Jesus was no longer simply the disciples’ master-teacher. He actually was ruling as Lord of the earth, because he had been exalted to this new status by God. And it happened at the resurrection. The man Jesus had been made the Lord Christ.

A similar view is set forth in yet another speech of Acts, which again incorporates a very early view of Christ as one who was exalted to a divine status at his resurrection. In Acts 5, Jewish authorities arrest Peter and the other apostles as troublemakers for their preaching in Jerusalem. But an angel miraculously allows them to escape, to the consternation of the authorities, who bring them in for further questioning. The high priest forbids them to teach in Jesus’s name any more, and Peter and the others reply that they will obey God rather than humans—meaning they will go on preaching. The apostles point out that the Jewish authorities were responsible for Jesus’s death, but “the God of our fathers raised Jesus . . . This one God exalted to his right hand as Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:30–31).

Once more, then, in an early tradition we find that Jesus’s resurrection was an “exaltation” specifically to “the right hand of God.” In other words, God had elevated Jesus to his own status and given him a prominent position as the one who would “lead” and “save” those on earth.

One might wonder why the author of these speeches, “Luke,” would use preliterary traditions that stood at odds with how he understood Jesus himself. As I’ve pointed out, nowhere else does Luke portray the resurrection as the time when Jesus came to be exalted to be the Son of God. Yet that’s what these verses found in the speeches in Acts indicate. One might be tempted to say that these views are found in the speeches because the speeches faithfully represent what the apostles actually said on these occasions. But, as I have already pointed out, we know from ancient historians that the normal practice of an author was to write the speeches of the main characters himself, and the similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.

In fact there is a good explanation for why Luke would want to use these preliterary traditions in his speeches: because they encapsulate so well his emphasis in these addresses to “unbelievers” that God has drastically and dramatically reversed what humans did to Jesus, showing thereby that he had a radically different evaluation of who Jesus was. Humans abused and killed Jesus; God reversed that execution by raising him from the dead. Humans mocked Jesus and held him to be the lowest of the low, an inferior human being; God exalted Jesus and raised him to his right hand, making him a glorified divine figure.

These preliterary fragments provided Luke with just the material he needed to make this point, and so he used them throughout his speeches in order to stress his powerful message. The Almighty God had reversed what lowly humans had done, and Jesus, far from being a failed prophet or a false messiah, was shown to be the ruler of all. By raising Jesus from the dead, God had made him his own Son, the Messiah-King, the Lord.

S
O FAR
I
HAVE
not given a descriptive name to this very early form of Christological belief in which God raised Jesus from the dead—not in order to give him a longer life here on earth, but in order to exalt him as his own Son up to the heavenly realm, where he could sit beside God at his right hand, ruling together with the Lord God Almighty himself. Traditionally in discussions of theology this understanding of Christ has been called a
low Christology
because it understands that Jesus started off as a human being who was like other humans. He may have been more righteous than others; he may have earned God’s special favor more than others. But he started out as a human and nothing more. You will notice that in the preliterary traditions I have discussed there is no talk about Jesus being born of a virgin and certainly no talk of him being divine during his lifetime. He is a human figure, possibly a messiah. But then at a critical point of his existence, he is elevated from his previous lowly existence down here with us, the other mere mortals, to sit at God’s right hand in a position of honor, power, and authority. In a moment I will register an objection to calling this a “low” Christology—but for now it is enough say that it does make sense that some theologians have called it that. In it, Jesus begins at a low point, down here with us.