How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (31 page)

Sometimes this view is also referred to as an
adoptionist
Christology, because in it Christ is not thought to be a divine being “by nature.” That is, he did not preexist before he was born in the world, he was not a divine being who came to earth, he was not of the same kind of “essence” as God himself. He was instead a human being who has been “adopted” by God to a divine status. Thus he was not God by virtue of who he was, but by virtue of the fact that the Creator and Lord of all things chose to elevate him to a position of prominence, even though he began as a lowly human.

The problem with this adoptionist nomenclature—as with the term low Christology—is that it speaks of this view of Christ in a rather condescending way, as if it were an inadequate understanding (Jesus was originally “just” a man; he was “only” an adopted son). It is true that the view that Jesus began as a human but was exalted to a divine status was indeed superseded by another perspective—the one that I deal with in the next chapter. That other view indicates that Jesus was a preexistent divine being before he came into the world. That view is sometimes referred to as a
high Christology
—since in it Christ is understood to have started out “up there” with God in the heavenly realm. In that view Christ was not adopted to be the Son of God; he already was the Son of God by virtue of who he was, not by virtue of what God did to him in order to make him something other than what he was by nature.

All the same, even though later theologians came to consider a “low” or “adoptionist” Christology to be inadequate, I do not think we should overlook just how amazing this view was for the people who first held it. For them, Jesus was not “merely” adopted to be God’s son. That’s the wrong emphasis altogether. They believed that Jesus had been exalted to the highest status that anyone could possibly imagine. He was elevated to an
impossibly
exalted state. This was the most fantastic thing anyone could say about Christ: he had actually been elevated to a position next to God Almighty who had made all things and would be the judge of all people. Jesus was THE Son of God. This was not a low, inferior understanding of Christ; it was an amazing, breathtaking view.

For this reason, I usually prefer not to speak of it as a “low Christology” or even as an “adoptionist Christology,” but as an
exaltation Christology
. In it, the man Jesus is showered with divine favors beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, honored by God to an unbelievable extent, elevated to a divine status on a level with God himself, sitting at his right hand.

Part of what has convinced me that this understanding of Christ should not be shunted aside as an inferior view involves new research on what it meant to be adopted as a son in the Roman empire, which was the context, of course, within which these views of Christ were formulated. Today we may think that an adopted child is not a parent’s “real” child, and in some circles, unfortunately, this is taken to mean that the child does not “really” belong to the parent. Many of us do not think this is a useful, loving, or helpful view, but there it is: some people have it. So too when thinking about God and his Son. If Jesus is “only” adopted, then he’s not “really” the Son of God, but he just happens to have been granted a more exalted status than the rest of us.

A study of adoption in Roman society shows that this view is highly problematic and, in fact, probably wrong. A significant book by New Testament specialist Michael Peppard,
The Son of God in the Roman World
, deals with just this issue, to show what it meant at that time and place to be an adopted son.
⁵
Peppard persuasively argues that scholars (and other readers) have gotten it wrong when they have maintained that an adopted son had lower social status than a “natural” son (that is, as a son actually born of a parent). In fact, just the opposite was the case. In elite Roman families, it was the adopted son who really mattered, not the sons born of the physical union of a married couple. As one very obvious example, Julius Caesar had a natural son with Cleopatra who was named Caesarion. And he had one adopted son, a nephew whom we’ve already met and whom he made his son by adoption in his will. Which was the more important? Caesarion is a mere footnote in history; you’ve probably never heard of him. And Octavian? Because he was the adopted son of Caesar, he inherited his property, status, and power. You know him better as Caesar Augustus—the first emperor of the Roman empire. That happened because Julius Caesar had adopted him.

It was in fact often the case that a person who was a son by adoption in the Roman world was given a greater, higher status than a child who was a son by birth. The natural son was who he was more or less by accident; his virtues and fine qualities had nothing to do with the fact that he was born as the child of two parents. The adopted son on the other hand—who was normally adopted as an adult—was adopted precisely because of his fine qualities and excellent potential. He was made great because he had demonstrated the potential for greatness, not because of the accident of his birth. This can be seen in the praise showered upon the emperor Trajan by one of his subjects, the famous author Pliny the Younger, who stated that “your merits did indeed call for your adoption as successor long ago.”
⁶

This is why it was often the case that adopted sons were already adults when made the legal heir of a powerful figure or aristocrat. And what did it mean to be made the legal heir? It meant inheriting all of the adoptive father’s wealth, property, status, dependents, and clients—in other words, all of the adopted father’s power and prestige. As Roman historian Christiane Kunst has put it: “The adopted son . . . exchanged his own [status] and took over the status of the adoptive father.”
⁷

When the earliest Christians talked about Jesus becoming the Son of God at his resurrection, they were saying something truly remarkable about him. He was made the heir of all that was God’s. He exchanged his status for the status possessed by the Creator and ruler of all things. He received all of God’s power and privileges. He could defy death. He could forgive sins. He could be the future judge of the earth. He could rule with divine authority. He was for all intents and purposes God.

These various aspects of his exalted state are closely connected with the various honorific titles Christians bestowed upon Jesus in his exalted state. He was the Son of God. By no stretch of the imagination did that mean that he was “merely” the “adopted” Son of God. It entailed the most fantastic claims about Jesus that these people could imagine: as the Son of God he was the heir to all that was God’s. He was also the Son of Man, the one whom God had entrusted to be the future judge of the entire world. He was the heavenly messiah who was ruling—now—over the kingdom of his Father, the King of kings. And in that capacity as the heavenly ruler, he was the Lord, the master and sovereign over all the earth.

We may see why someone would call this a low Christology, but it certainly is not saying anything “lowly.” This is an exaltation Christology that is affirming stunning things about the teacher from rural Galilee who was exalted to the right hand of God, who had raised him from the dead.

It is also important to stress that precisely when the Christians were starting to say such things about Jesus is when the emperors were beginning to be worshiped with increased frequency throughout the Roman world. The emperor was the son of God (because he was adopted by the preceding emperor who had been divinized at his death); Jesus was the Son of God. The emperor was regarded as divine; Jesus was divine. The emperor was the great ruler; Jesus was the great Ruler. The emperor was lord and sovereign; Jesus was Lord and Sovereign. This lower-class peasant from Galilee who had gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified was in fact the most powerful being in the universe. The emperor, according to this Christian view, was in reality no competition. Jesus’s adoptive father was not simply a preceding emperor; he was the Lord God Almighty.

It is because of this exalted status that Jesus was deemed worthy of worship. If the earliest Christians held such elevated views of Jesus as the exalted Son of God soon after his resurrection, it is probably already at this early stage that they began to show veneration to him in ways previously shown to God himself. In two important books, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado has tried to solve the dilemma of how Jesus could be worshiped as a divine being so early in the history of the Christian religion—virtually right away—if in fact the Christians considered themselves monotheists, not ditheists (worshipers of two gods).
⁸
Hurtado argues that both things were simultaneously true: Christians maintained there was only one God, and they worshiped Jesus as God alongside God. How was this possible? Hurtado sees Christianity as developing a
binitary worship
—in which Jesus was worshiped as the Lord, alongside God, without sacrificing the idea that there is only one God. In his view, Christians maintained that since God had exalted Jesus to a divine status, he had not merely permitted but even required the veneration of Jesus. Hurtado sees this as a unique development within the history of ancient religion—the worship of two divine beings within a theology that claims there is only one. In later chapters we will see how theologians eventually came to grips with this problem of how Jesus could be revered as God without sacrificing a commitment to monotheism. For now it is enough to stress that this was indeed the case: Christians insisted that they believed in only one God, and yet they revered Jesus as divine and worshiped their “Lord Jesus” along with God.

T
HE VIEW THAT THE
earliest Christians understood Jesus to have become the Son of God at his resurrection is not revolutionary among scholars of the New Testament. One of the greatest scholars of the second half of the twentieth century was Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic priest who spent a large chunk of his career teaching students at the (Protestant) Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Brown wrote books that were challenging and insightful for fellow biblical scholars and books that were accessible and enlightening for the layperson.

Among his most famous contributions was a way of sketching the development of early Christian views of Jesus. Brown agreed with the view I have mapped out here: the earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a “skeptical” view or a “secular” view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.) Brown pointed out that you can trace a kind of chronological development of this view through the Gospels.
⁹
This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation. In Brown’s view this chronological sequencing of the Gospels may well indeed be how Christians developed their views. Originally, Jesus was thought to have been exalted only at the resurrection; as Christians thought more about the matter, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God during his entire ministry, so that he became the Son of God at its outset, at baptism; as they thought even more about it, they came to think he must have been the Son of God for his entire life, and so he was born of a virgin and in that sense was the (literal) Son of God; and as they thought about it more again, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God even before he came into the world, and so they said he was a preexistent divine being.

The problem with this chronological sequencing of the Gospels is that it does not reflect the actual chronological development of early Christian views of Jesus. That is to say, even though it is true that these are the views as they develop through the Gospels (from the earliest to the latest), some Christians were saying that Jesus was a preexistent being (a “later” view) even
before
Paul began to write in the 50s—well before our earliest Gospel was written.
¹⁰
The reality is—and Brown would not have disagreed with this—views of Jesus did not develop along a straight line in every part of early Christianity and at the same rate. Different Christians in different churches in different regions had different views of Jesus, almost from the get-go. I argue that there were two fundamentally different Christological views: one that saw Jesus as a being from “down below” who came to be “exalted” (the view I’m exploring in this chapter), and the other that saw Jesus as a being originally from “up above” who came to earth from the heavenly realm (the view I’ll explore in the next chapter). But even within these two fundamentally different types of Christology, there were significant variations.

Brown does appear to be right that at some times and places, after the initial belief that God had exalted Jesus at his resurrection, some Christians came to think that the exaltation had happened before his public ministry. That is why he could do spectacular deeds such as healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead; that is why he could forgive sins as God’s representative on earth; that is why he could occasionally reveal his glory—he was already adopted to be God’s Son at the very outset of his ministry, when John the Baptist baptized him.

This appears to be the view of the Gospel of Mark, in which there is no word of Jesus’s preexistence or of his birth to a virgin. Surely if this author believed in either view, he would have mentioned it; they are, after all, rather important ideas. But no, this Gospel begins by describing the baptism ministry of John the Baptist and indicates that like other Jews, Jesus was baptized by him. But when Jesus comes up out of the water, he sees the heavens split open, the Spirit of God descends upon him as a dove, and a voice from heaven says, “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9–11).