How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (4 page)

According to his later biographer, the Greek scholar Plutarch, whose book on famous Greek and Roman men provides us with biographies of many of the greatest figures of the time, many people believed that Alexander was one of Zeus’s offspring. Alexander’s actual father was the famous and powerful Philip, king of Macedonia, who had fallen in love with a woman named Olympias. According to Plutarch, the night before the two were to consummate their marriage, Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt came down from heaven and entered her. Presumably, this was Zeus doing his magic. Philip, in the meantime, apparently looked in on his wife that night and saw a serpent engaged in conjugal embrace with her. As Plutarch indicates, and as one might understand, this sight very much cooled Philip’s passion for his bride. In ancient times Zeus was often represented in the form of a snake, and so, for those who believed this tale, the child—Alexander—was no mere mortal. He was the son of a god.

In mythology we have even more striking accounts of Zeus, or his Roman counterpart, Jupiter, engaging in such nocturnal activities. No story is more intriguing than the tale of the birth of Hercules. The tale takes many forms in antiquity, but perhaps the most memorable is the hilarious recounting found among the plays of the Roman comic playwright Plautus, in his work
Amphytrion
. The play is named after one of the main characters, a military general of Thebes who is married to an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Alcmena. Amphytrion has gone away to war, leaving his pregnant wife at home. Jupiter casts his lustful gaze upon her from heaven and decides that he has to have her. And he knows just how to do it.

Jupiter disguises himself as Amphytrion and tells Alcmena that he has come home from battle. She welcomes him with open arms and takes him to bed. So much does Jupiter enjoy the ensuing activities that he orders the constellations to stop in their circuit. In other words, he makes time stand still until he—even he, the mighty god with divine capacity for enjoyment—has his fill. The constellations resume their motion, Jupiter returns to his heavenly home, and Alcmena is obviously worn out from the very long frolic.

As it turns out, the real Amphytrion returns home that morning. And he is more than a little surprised and dismayed to find that his wife does not welcome him with all the enthusiasm that one might expect after such an extended absence. From her perspective, of course, this is completely understandable: she thinks that she has just spent a very long night in her husband’s arms. Be that as it may, there is an interesting gestational result of this episode. Alcmena had already been made pregnant by Amphytrion. But she becomes pregnant yet again by Jupiter (some of these mythological tales were not strong on anatomy or biology).
⁵
The result is that she bears twins. One is the divine Hercules, the son of Jupiter; the other is his twin brother, a mortal, Iphicles.

The tale of Amphytrion and Alcmena, of course, is a myth, and it is not clear that anyone actually “believed” it. It was instead a great story. Still, the idea behind it—that a mortal woman could give birth to a child spawned by a god—was plausible to many people of the ancient world. It would not be unusual for them to think that some of the great beings who stride the earth—great conquerors like Alexander, for example, or even great philosophers with superhuman wisdom such as Plato
⁶
—may well have been conceived in ways different from us mere mortals. They may have had a divine parent so that they themselves were, in some sense, divine.

I should stress that when Alcmena gave birth to Hercules, the son of Jupiter, it was not an instance of a virgin birth. Quite the contrary. She had already had sex with her husband, and she had what you might call divine sex with Jupiter. In none of the stories of the divine humans born from the union of a god and a mortal is the mortal a virgin. This is one of the ways that the Christian stories of Jesus differ from those of other divine humans in the ancient world. It is true that (the Jewish) God is the one who makes Jesus’s mother Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:35). But the monotheistic Christians had far too an exalted view of God to think that he could have temporarily become human to play out his sexual fantasies. The gods of the Greeks and Romans may have done such things, but the God of Israel was above it all.

The third model of understanding divine humans in Greek and Roman circles provided the most important conceptual framework that the earliest Christians had for conceiving how Jesus could be both human and divine. It is not a view about how a divine being could become human—through a temporary incarnation or a sexual act—but about how a human being could become divine. As it turns out, this allegedly happened numerous times in Greek and Roman antiquity.

One of the most striking examples involves the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus. We have several accounts of the life of Romulus, including one produced by a great early historian of Rome, Livy (59
CE
–17
CE
), who in one place states the opinion that Romulus was a “god born of a god” (
History of Rome
1.16). The event that most interests us involves the end of Romulus’s life.

There were, to be sure, rumors of divine involvement in Romulus’s conception. His mother was a Vestal Virgin, a sacred office that required—as the name indicates—a woman to abstain from sexual relations. But she became pregnant. Obviously, something went wrong with her vows. She claimed that the god Mars was responsible, and possibly some people believed her. If so, it simply shows again how a divine-human union could be taken to explain the appearance of remarkable humans on earth.

But it was Romulus’s
dis
appearance from life that was even more astonishing. According to Livy, by the end of Romulus’s life Rome had been established, the Roman government had been formed with the Senate in place and Romulus as king, the army was fully functioning, and everything was well positioned for the beginnings of the greatest city in history. During the final episode of his life, Romulus had gathered with members of the Senate to review the military troops at the Campus Martius. Suddenly a huge thunderstorm arose. After major claps of thunder, Romulus was enveloped by fog. When the fog lifted, he was nowhere to be seen.

As it turns out, two reports circulated about his death. One of them—the one that apparently Livy and presumably most other skeptical observers believed—indicated that the senators had taken the opportunity of the moment to get rid of a despot: they had torn Romulus to shreds and hidden his remains. The other report, which the masses believed, was one that the senators themselves propagated—that Romulus “had been caught up on high in the blast.” In other words, he had been taken up to heaven to live with the gods. The result was a sudden acclamation of Romulus’s divine status: “Then, when a few men had taken the initiative, they all with one accord hailed Romulus as a god and a god’s son, the king and Father of the Roman City, and with prayers besought his favor that he would graciously be pleased forever to protect his children” (
History of Rome
1.16).
⁷

Here we have a view of divine humans in a nutshell: a human can be honored by the gods by being made one of them; this happens because of the person’s great merit; as a divinity, the person deserves worship; and in his role as a god, he can protect those who bring to him their supplications.

It is interesting that Livy reports that the ascension of Romulus was later verified by a man named Proculus Julius, who declared to the assembly of the Roman people that Romulus had appeared to him alive after his death. He is recorded as saying that “the Father of this City, Romulus, descended suddenly from the sky at dawn this morning and appeared to me. Covered with confusion I stood reverently before him. . . . ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and declare to the capital of the world; so let them cherish the art of war, and let them know and teach their children that no human strength can resist Roman arms.’ So saying . . . Romulus departed on high” (
History of Rome
1.16).

Romans heartily and enthusiastically embraced the divinity of the man Romulus. A trio of gods—Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—lived at the heart of ancient Rome, on the ancient hill, the Capitoline. Originally, Quirinus may have been a god worshiped among one of the groups of people, the Sabines, who were incorporated into the Roman state early in its history. But by the time of Livy’s writing, Quirinus was understood to be the divinized Romulus, worshiped right up there with the great father of the gods himself.

The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753
BCE
. If we move the calendar forward about seven centuries, we still find men who are proclaimed to have become gods. Few are better known than Julius Caesar, the self-declared dictator of Rome who was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44
BCE
, by political enemies who preferred not having a dictator when all was said and done. The Roman biographer Suetonius provided a life of Julius Caesar in his
Lives of the Caesars
, published in 115
CE
. According to Suetonius, already during his lifetime Caesar had declared that he had a divine heritage. In a funeral oration he delivered for his aunt he stated that one side of his family descended from the ancient Roman kings—through the legendary Marcus Ancius, the fourth king of Rome—and the other side descended from the gods. His family line, in fact, could be traced back to the goddess Venus.

At Caesar’s death a vicious power struggle ensued between his enemies and supporters, the latter including Mark Antony (of Antony and Cleopatra fame) in league with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who later became Caesar Augustus. At Caesar’s funeral, Antony decided not to deliver the customary funerary oration. Instead, he had a herald cry out the Senate’s decision “to render Caesar all honors, both human and divine.” In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as
deification
—the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods. The “common people” and even the heavens seemed to support Caesar’s deification, as Suetonius tells us: “[Caesar] died in the fifty-sixth year of his life and was included in the ranks of the gods, not only by formal decree but also by the conviction of the common people. Indeed at the first games which were given after his deification by his heir Augustus, a comet shone, appearing around the eleventh hour for seven days in succession, and it was believed to be the soul of Caesar who had been received into heaven” (
The Deified Julius Caesar
88).
⁸

Looking at the matter from a purely human and political point of view, there is little question about why the heir and adopted son Octavian wanted the Roman people to agree that Caesar was not only descended from a divine line, but had himself been made a divine being. If Julius Caesar was a god, what would that make his son? As New Testament scholar Michael Peppard has recently pointed out, to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.” Other people were, to be sure, named after their divine fathers: son of Zeus, son of Apollo, and so on. But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.

Julius Caesar may have been considered a god after he died, but his adopted son Octavian (emperor from 27
BCE
to 14
CE
) was sometimes considered a god while he was still alive. Considering a living ruler to be divine was not unheard of in the ancient world. The Egyptians had long revered their pharaohs as living representatives of deities, and the conqueror Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier, was offered and accepted the kind of obeisance reserved for the gods. But this was not done in the Roman world until the beginning of the worship of the emperor.

Legends indicated that Octavian did not have a normal human birth but, like others before him, was born of the union of a mortal and a god. According to Suetonius, Octavian’s mother, Atia, was said to have been made pregnant by the god Apollo in the form of a snake (reminiscent, of course, of the conception of Alexander the Great). Atia had been attending the sacred rites of Apollo in a temple, and in the middle of the night, while she was asleep on her litter in the temple, a snake slid up to her and then quickly departed. When she awoke, she purified herself as she would have done after having sex with her husband, and miraculously the image of a snake permanently appeared on her body. Suetonius tells us that “Augustus was born ten months later and for this reason is believed to be the son of Apollo” (
The Deified Augustus
94).

Moreover, that very night, Atia’s husband, who was off at war in Thrace (northern Greece), had a dream in which he “saw his son of greater than mortal size with a thunderbolt and scepter and emblems of Jupiter Best and Greatest and a radiant crown drawn by twelve brilliantly white horses” (
The Deified Augustus
94). Clearly, these were portents that this child was a divine figure, a great god on earth.

Unlike some of the later emperors, while in office Augustus was not enthusiastic about being worshiped as a god. Suetonius says that he would not allow temples in the Roman provinces to be dedicated to him unless they were jointly dedicated to the goddess Roma—the patron goddess of Rome. Sometimes cities got around this imperial reluctance by building a temple and dedicating it to the “genius” of Augustus. The word
genius
in this case does not mean his intellectual brilliance, but the guardian spirit that watched over his family and, especially, him as its leader, making him who he was. In a sense, by worshiping Augustus’s genius, these cities revered him in a depersonalized but highly divinized sense.