How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (33 page)

The great highlight of the Gospel, though, would come at the end. Jesus had been rejected by the scribes and elders of the people and handed over to Pontius Pilate, who found him guilty for insurrection against the state. To put a decisive end to his troublemaking, rabble-rousing nonsense, Pilate had ordered him crucified. But even though Jesus had been unceremoniously executed by the power of Rome, his story was not yet over. For he had appeared to his disciples, alive again. How could he still be alive? It was not because he survived crucifixion. No, God had raised him, bodily, from the dead. And why is he still not among us? Because God not only brought him back to life, he exalted him up to heaven as his own Son, to sit on a throne at God’s right hand, to rule as the messiah of Israel and the Lord of all, until he comes back as the cosmic judge of the earth, very soon.

In this Gospel Jesus would not have become the Son of God for his entire ministry, starting with his baptism, as in the Gospel of Mark and in a tradition retained in the Gospel of Luke. And he would not have been the Son of God for the whole of his life, beginning with his conception by a virgin who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit so that her son would be God’s own offspring, as in Luke and in traditions preserved by Matthew. Nor would he be a divine being who preexisted his coming into the world, as attested by such authors as Paul and John. No, he became the Son of God when God worked his greatest miracle on him, raising him from the dead and adopting him as his Son by exalting him to his right hand and bestowing upon him his very own power, prestige, and status.

I
HAVE TAUGHT AT TWO
major research universities since beginning my career. For four years, in the mid-1980s, I taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and since 1988 I have been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have taught a wide range of students in every respect, including with respect to religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pagans, atheists. My Christian students have been internally diverse as well, from hard-core fundamentalists to liberal Protestants to Greek Orthodox to Roman Catholic to . . . name your denomination. Over the years it has struck me that even though my Christian students come from such a range of backgrounds, when it comes to their views of Christ, they are remarkably constant. The majority of them think that Jesus is God.

In traditional theology, as we will see in later chapters, Christ came to be regarded as both fully God and fully human. He was not half of each—part God and part human. He was God in every respect and human in every respect. My students tend to “get” the God part, but not so much the “human” part. For many of them, Jesus really was God walking the earth; and because he was God, he was not “really” human but was only in some sort of human guise. As God, Jesus could have done anything he wanted to do. If he had chosen, he could have spoken Swahili as an infant. Why not? He was God!

But being human means having human weaknesses, limitations, desires, passions, and shortcomings. Did Jesus have these? Was he “fully” human? Did he ever treat someone unfairly? Did he ever say something nasty about someone? Did he ever get angry without good reason? Was he ever jealous or covetous? Did he ever lust after a woman or a man? If not—in what sense, really, was he “fully” human?

I obviously don’t expect my students to be advanced theologians—and my classes are not about theology. They are about the history of early Christianity and, especially, about historical approaches to the New Testament. But it is interesting, even in the class context, to see that my students’ Christological views tend to be drawn more from the Gospel of John than from the other three, earlier Gospels. It is in the Gospel of John, and only in John, that Jesus says such things as “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58) and “I and the Father are one” (10:30). In this Gospel Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And in this Gospel Jesus talks about existing in a glorious state with God the Father before he became human (17:5). That’s what many of my students believe. But as they study the New Testament more, they come to see that such self-claims are not made by Jesus in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. So who is right?

Scholars have long held that the view of Christ in the Gospel of John was a later development in the Christian tradition. It was not something that Jesus himself actually taught, and it is not something that can be found in the other Gospels. In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians—Jesus’s disciples, for example—did not believe this. And there are clear historical reasons for thinking they did not. The earliest Christians held exaltation Christologies in which the human being Jesus was made the Son of God—for example, at his resurrection or at his baptism—as we examined in the previous chapter. John has a different Christology. In his view, Christ was a divine being who became human. I call this an
incarnation Christology.

W
E HAVE ALREADY SEEN
that early Christians had views corresponding to two of the common Greek, Roman, and Jewish notions of how a human being could also be divine: by being exalted to the divine realm or by being born to a divine parent. What I am now calling incarnation Christologies are related to the third model of a divine human, in which a divine being—a god—comes from heaven to take on human flesh temporarily, before returning to his original heavenly home. The word
incarnation
means something like
coming in the flesh
or
being made flesh.
An incarnation Christology, then, maintains that Christ was a preexistent divine being who became human before returning to God in heaven. Here, Jesus is not understood to be a human who is elevated to a divine status; instead, he is a heavenly being who condescends to become temporarily human.

I have already made the case that followers of Jesus were not calling him God during his lifetime and that he did not refer to himself as a divine being who had come from heaven. If they had done so, surely there would be a heavy dose of such views in our earliest records of his words—in the Synoptic Gospels and their sources (Mark, Q, M, and L). Instead, it was the resurrection that provided the turning point in understanding who Jesus was, as an exalted being. I contend that the earliest exaltation Christologies very quickly morphed into an incarnation Christology, as early Christians developed their views about Jesus during the early years after his death. The stimulus for the transformation of Christology was probably provided by a theological view that I have already discussed. One needs to ask: What did Jews think that a person became if he was taken up to heaven? As we have seen in the case of Moses and others, such a person was thought to have become an angel, or an angel-like being.
¹

In the most thorough investigation of Christological views that portray Jesus as an angel or an angel-like being, New Testament scholar Charles Gieschen, helpfully defines the Jewish notion of an angel as “a spirit or heavenly being who mediates between the human and divine realms.”
²
Once Jesus was thought to be exalted to heaven, he was quickly seen, by some of his followers, to be this kind of heavenly mediator, one who obediently did God’s will while he was here on earth. From there, it was a very small step to thinking that Jesus was this kind of being
by nature
, not simply because of his exaltation. Jesus was not only the Son of God, the Lord, the Son of Man, the coming messiah; he was the one who mediates God’s will on earth as a heavenly, angelic being. In fact, it came to be thought that he had always been that kind of being.

If Jesus was the one who represented God on earth in human form, he quite likely had always been that one. He was, in other words, the chief angel of God, known in the Bible as the Angel of the Lord. This is the figure who appeared to Hagar, and Abraham, and Moses, who is sometimes actually called “God” in the Hebrew Bible. If Jesus is in fact this one, then he is a preexistent divine being who came to earth for a longer period of time, during his life; he fully represented God on earth; he in fact can be called God. Exaltation Christologies became transformed into incarnation Christologies as soon as believers in Jesus came to see him as an angelic being who performed God’s work here on earth.
³

To call Jesus the Angel of the Lord is to make a startlingly exalted claim about him. In the Hebrew Bible, this figure appears to God’s people as God’s representative, and he is in fact called God. And as it turns out, as recent research has shown, there are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion. Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors. Later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel—even the chief angel—but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth.

I
HAVE READ
,
PONDERED
, researched, taught, and written about the writings of Paul for forty years, but until recently there was one key aspect of his theology I could never quite get my mind around. I had the hardest time understanding how, exactly, Paul viewed Christ. Some aspects of Paul’s Christological teaching have been clear to me for decades—especially his teaching that it was Jesus’s death and resurrection that makes a person right with God, rather than following the dictates of the Jewish law. But who did Paul think Christ was?

One reason for my perplexity was that Paul is highly allusive in what he says. He does not spell out in systematic detail his views of Christ. Another reason was that in some passages Paul seems to affirm a view of Christ that, until recently, I thought could not possibly exist as early as Paul’s letters, which are our first Christian writings to survive. How could Paul embrace “higher” views of Christ than those found in later writings such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Didn’t Christology develop from a “low” Christology to a “high” Christology over time? And if so, shouldn’t the views of the Synoptic Gospels be “higher” than the views of Paul? But they’re not! They are “lower.” And I simply did not get it, for the longest time.

But now I do. It is not a question of “higher” or “lower.” The Synoptics simply accept a Christological view that is
different
from Paul’s. They hold to exaltation Christologies, and Paul holds to an incarnation Christology. That, in no small measure, is because Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.

Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something over and over and not having it register. I have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians hundreds of times in both English and Greek. But the clear import of what he says in Galatians 4:14 simply never registered with me, until, frankly, a few months ago. In this verse Paul calls Christ an angel. The reason it never registered with me is that the statement is a bit obscure, and I had always interpreted it in an alternative way. Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways.
⁴

In the context of the verse, Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst and they helped restore him to health. Paul writes: “Even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Jesus Christ.”

I had always read the verse to say that the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor,
or
even Christ himself. In fact, however, the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different. As Charles Gieschen has argued, and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel by New Testament specialist Susan Garrett, the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel
or
as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel,
such as
Christ.
⁵
By clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.

The reason for reading the verse this way has to do with the Greek grammar. When Paul uses the construction “but as . . . as,” he is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing. We know this because Paul uses this grammatical construction in a couple of other places in his writings, and the meaning in those cases is unambiguous. For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul says: “Brothers, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ.” The last bit “but as . . . as” indicates two identifying features of the recipients of Paul’s letter: they are fleshly people and they are infants in Christ. These are not two contrasting statements; they modify each other. The same can be said of Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians 2:17, which also has this grammatical feature.

But this means that in Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel. Garrett goes a step further and argues that Galatians 4:14 indicates that Paul “identifies [Jesus Christ] with God’s chief angel.”
⁶

If this is the case, then virtually everything Paul says about Christ throughout his letters makes perfect sense. As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh. Paul says all these things about Christ, and in no passage more strikingly than in Philippians 2:6–11, a passage that scholars often call the “Philippians Hymn” or the “Christ Hymn of Philippians,” since it is widely thought to embody an early hymn or poem devoted to celebrating Christ and his incarnation.