How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (47 page)

This is not the worldview I myself have. I don’t believe there is a God in heaven who is soon to send a cosmic judge of the earth to destroy the forces of evil. And yet I think that the ethical principles Jesus enunciated in that apocalyptic context are still applicable to me, living in a different context. To make sense of Jesus, I have recontextualized him—that is, made him and his message relevant in a new context—for a new day, the day in which I live.

I would argue that Jesus has always been recontextualized by people living in different times and places. The first followers of Jesus did this after they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven: they made him into something he had not been before and understood him in light of their new situation. So too did the later authors of the New Testament, who recontextualized and understood Jesus in light of their own, now even more different situations. So too did the Christians of the second and third centuries, who understood Jesus less as an apocalyptic prophet and more as a divine being become human. So too did the Christians of the fourth century, who maintained that he had always existed and had always been equal with God the Father in status, authority, and power. And so too do Christians today, who think that the divine Christ they believe in and confess is identical in every respect with the person who was walking the dusty lanes of Galilee preaching his apocalyptic message of the coming destruction. Most Christians today do not realize that they have recontextualized Jesus. But in fact they have. Everyone who either believes in him or subscribes to any of his teachings has done so—from the earliest believers who first came to believe in his resurrection until today. And so it will be, world without end.

This is certainly and most obviously true of the years we have examined in this book. It continued to be true in the years that followed, as we can now see as we consider what happened in the aftermath of the decision of the Council of Nicea that Christ was God in a particular sense, that he had been a preexistent divine being with God throughout all eternity, and that he was, in fact, the one through whom God had made all things.

I
N THE POPULAR IMAGINATION
it is widely thought that after the Council of Nicea there was a basic agreement among Christian leaders and thinkers concerning the nature of Christ and the character of the Trinity. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Nicea and its creed were not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new chapter. For one thing, the defeat of the Arian side at Nicea did not stamp out the Arian view. Constantine backed the winning side—probably less because it was what he actually believed than because it became the consensus opinion and he was principally interested in having a consensus emerge to help unify the church. But the church was not unified and would not become unified. After Constantine other emperors came and went, and over the next several decades a number of these emperors leaned toward the Arian interpretation of Christ and acted out on their convictions. There were times—possibly most of the times—when there were more Arians than anti-Arians. That is why the church father Jerome, writing in 379
CE
, could make his famous lament that “the world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian” (
Dialogue Against Luciferians
19).

As it turns out, the Arian controversy was not finally decided until the next major ecumenical council, held just two years after Jerome’s lament, the Council of Constantinople in 381. At this council the decisions of Nicea were restated and reaffirmed, and Arianism came to be a marginalized minority view widely deemed heretical.

For those standing outside these theological controversies, the differences between the views of Arius and of Arius’s opponents, such as his bishop Alexander and the young but brilliant Athanasius—himself soon to be bishop of Alexandria—are less striking than the commonalities. Even the “heretical” Arians agreed with Athanasius and others that Christ was God. He was a divine being who had existed with God before the beginning of all other things and was the one through whom God had created the universe. This was still a very “high” incarnational Christology. By the time of the debates between Arius and his opponents, and then, in after years, between the Arians and the followers of Athanasius, very few Christians doubted that Jesus was actually God. Once again, the only question was “in what sense” he was God.

What is arguably most significant is that in the fourth century, when these disputes had come to a head, the Roman emperor Constantine had converted to the faith. That changed everything. Having a Christian emperor on the throne—one who believed and propagated the belief that Christ was God—had radical implications for the various interactions between orthodox Christians and others. In what remains of this epilogue I briefly consider the implications for three realms of dispute that Christians engaged in: disputes with pagans, disputes with Jews, and disputes with one another.

S
INCE THE DAYS OF
Caesar Augustus, three hundred years earlier, inhabitants of the Roman world had understood and worshiped the emperor as a god. Moreover, from the time the earliest followers of Jesus came to believe that he was raised from the dead, Christians had understood and worshiped Christ as God. As we have seen, these two—the emperor and Jesus—were the only two figures that we know of from antiquity who were actually called “the Son of God.” And in the Christian mind, at least, this meant that the two figures were in competition. In the early fourth century, one of the competitors caved in and lost the struggle. With Constantine, the emperor changed from being a rival god to Jesus to be being a servant of Jesus.

One of the most interesting works by the church historian Eusebius is his previously mentioned
Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine
, a biographical account of the emperor that is, to say the least, effusive in its praise. Arguably the most valuable parts of the
Life
are those in which Eusebius quotes the actual words of the emperor. In a letter Constantine wrote to the Christians of Palestine, it becomes clear that Constantine does not see himself as a competitor with Christ and God the Father, but rather stands in awe of God’s power and recognizes his need to serve him as his servant on earth. At one point Constantine declares that the Christian God “alone really exists and holds power continuously through all time,” and he says that God “examined my service and approved it as fit for his purposes” (
Life
2.28). Or as he says later in the letter, “Indeed my whole soul and whatever breath I draw, and whatever goes on in the depths of the mind, that, I am firmly convinced, is owed by us wholly to the greatest God” (
Life
2.24). Clearly there is no competition here!

As a result of Constantine’s devotion, Eusebius writes, “by law he forbade images of himself to be set up in idol-shrines.” Moreover, he “had his portrait so depicted on the gold coinage that he appeared to look upwards in the manner of one reaching out to God in prayer” (
Life
4.15, 16). In other words, Constantine reversed the three-centuries-old procedures of his predecessors. Rather than allowing himself to be depicted as a god and worshiped as a god, he insisted that he be shown worshiping the true God.

Somewhat more striking, Constantine required the soldiers in his army not to worship him, but to worship the Christian God. This applied even to the soldiers who remained pagan. Eusebius indicates that Constantine required the non-Christian soldiers in the army to gather on a plain every Sunday and recite the following prayer to the Christian God:

           
You alone we know as God,

           
You are the King we acknowledge,

           
You are the Help we summon,

           
By you we have won our victories,

           
Through you we have overcome our enemies . . .

           
To you we all come to supplicate for our Emperor Constantine and for his beloved Sons:

           
That they may be kept safe and victorious for us in long life (Life 4.20)

Once the emperor became Christian, it is fair to say that everything changed with respect to Christian relationships with pagans and with the Roman government. Rather than being a persecuted minority who refused to worship the divine emperor, the Christians were on the path to becoming the persecuting majority, with the emperor as the servant of the true God who encouraged, directly or indirectly, the citizens of the state to join in his Christian worship. By the end of the fourth century something like half of the entire empire was converted to orthodox Christianity; the emperor enforced laws promoting the Christian religion and outlawing pagan sacrifice and worship; and Christianity triumphed once and for all over the pagan religions that had previously accepted the emperor as divine.

T
HE
C
HRISTIAN BELIEF THAT
Jesus was God had serious ramifications for Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity, because it was widely thought that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death. If the Jews killed Jesus, and Jesus was God, does it not follow that the Jews had killed their own God?
¹

This was in fact a view held in orthodox circles long before the conversion of Constantine. Nowhere does it come in a more chilling rhetorical package than in a sermon preached by a bishop of the city of Sardis in Asia Minor near the end of the second Christian century, a man named Melito. This is the first instance we have on record of a Christian charging Jews with the crime of deicide—the murder of God. Melito delivers the charge in powerful and highly effective language. I quote here only a small portion of his long sermon. The occasion was the Jewish Passover, when Jews annually commemorated the great act of God when he delivered the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt during the days of Moses. The Passover lamb that was slain on that occasion was, for Melito, an image of Christ himself, slain by the Jews. And rather than being an occasion for joyous celebration, the death of the true lamb was an occasion for hostile accusation. The Jews killed the one who had come to save them; they killed their own messiah; and since the messiah was himself divine, the Jews killed their own God:

           
This one was murdered

           
And where was he murdered?

           
In the very center of Jerusalem!

           
Why?

           
Because he had healed their lame,

           
And had cleansed their lepers,

           
And had guided their blind with light,

           
And had raised up their dead.

           
For this reason he suffered. . . .

           
Why O Israel, did you do this strange injustice?

           
You dishonored the one who had honored you.

           
You held in contempt the one who held you in esteem.

           
You denied the one who publicly acknowledged you.

           
You renounced the one who proclaimed you his own.

           
You killed the one who made you to live,

           
Why did you do this, O Israel? . . .

           
It was necessary for him to suffer, yes, but not by you;

           
It was necessary for him to be dishonored, but not by you;

           
It was necessary for him to be judged, but not by you;

           
It was necessary for him to be crucified, but not by you, nor by your right hand,

           
O Israel!

The rhetoric then moves to a climax as Melito delivers his ultimate charge against his enemies, the Jews:

           
Pay attention, all families of the nations, and observe!

           
An extraordinary murder has taken place

           
In the center of Jerusalem,

           
In the city devoted to God’s law,

           
In the city of the Hebrews,

           
In the city of the prophets,

           
In the city thought of as just.

           
And who has been murdered?

           
And who is the murderer?

           
I am ashamed to give the answer,

           
But give it I must. . . .

           
The one who hung the earth in space is himself hanged;

           
The one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled;

           
The one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree.

           
The Lord is insulted,

           
God has been murdered,

           
The King of Israel has been destroyed

           
By the right hand of Israel.
²

It is, of course, one thing for a member of a relatively small persecuted minority that is politically powerless to attack others with such vitriolic rhetoric. But what happens when the persecuted minority comes to be a majority? What happens when it gains political power—in fact, supreme political power? What happens when the emperor of Rome himself comes to believe the Christian message? As you can imagine, what happens will not be good for the enemies who supposedly murdered the God the Christians worship.