How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (6 page)

Lucian claims to have witnessed the event and thought the entire episode was ridiculous and absurd. He says that on the way back from the scene he met people who were coming—too late—to see the great man display his godlike courage and resilience to pain. Lucian informed them that they had missed the festivities, but he told them what happened, and did so as if he himself were a believer:

For the benefit of the dullards, agog to listen, I would thicken the plot a bit on my own account, saying that when the pyre was kindled and Proteus flung himself bodily in, a great earthquake first took place, accompanied by a bellowing of the ground, and then a vulture, flying up out of the midst of the flames, went off to Heaven, saying, in human speech, with a loud voice, “I am through with the earth; to Olympus I fare.” (
The Passing of Peregrinus
39)
¹⁶

And so Peregrinus, in the shape of a bird (not the noble eagle but the scavenger vulture), allegedly ascended to Mount Olympus, home of the gods, to live there, divine man that he was. To Lucian’s unmitigated amusement, he then met another man who was also telling about the event. This man claimed that after it was all over, he had met the supposedly dead Peregrinus, who was wearing a white garment and a garland of wild olive. Moreover, this man indicated that before this meeting, when Peregrinus had met his fiery fate, a vulture had arisen from the fire and flown off to heaven. This was the vulture that Lucian himself had invented! And so stories go, as they are invented, told by word of mouth, and then come to be taken as gospel truth.

Lucian, of course, mocked the entire proceeding and concluded his account by speaking not of Peregrinus’s divinity, but of his utter, and rather lowly, humanity: “So ended that poor wretch Proteus, a man who (to put it briefly) never fixed his gaze on the truth but always did and said everything with a view to glory and the praise of the multitude, even to the extent of leaping into fire, when he was sure not to enjoy the praise because he could not hear it” (
The Passing of Peregrinus
42).

F
ROM THESE EXAMPLES, WE
can see a variety of ways in the ancient world that divine beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be thought to be divine. Again, this way of looking at things stands considerably at odds with how most people today understand the relationship of the human and the divine, at least people who stand in the western religious traditions (Jews, Christians, Muslims). As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing; humans are another—and never the twain shall meet. Well, almost never: in the Christian tradition they did meet once, in the person of Jesus. Our question is how that was thought to have happened. At the root of that idea is a different sensibility about the world, one in which divinity is not absolutely but only relatively remote from humanity.

In this ancient way of thinking, both humanity and divinity are on a vertical continuum, and these two continuums sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other. By contrast, most modern people, at least in the West, think that God is above us all in every respect and in infinite degree. He is completely Other. And there is no continuum in God. For one thing, there aren’t any other gods that could provide a continuum. There is only one God, and he is infinitely beyond what we can think, not just relatively better in every way. True, some humans are more “godlike” than others—and in some traditions there does appear to be some crossover to the divine (e.g., with Roman Catholic saints). But even there, at the end of the day, God is wholly Other compared with everyone and everything else and is on an entirely different plane, by himself.

But not for most ancient people. Apart from Jews in the ancient world—whom I will address in the next chapter—everyone was a polytheist. There were lots of gods, and they were on graded levels of divinity. This can be seen in the way ancient people talked about divine beings. Consider the following inscription from the city of Mytilene, which wanted to honor the emperor as a god. This decree speaks of those humans who “have attained heavenly glory and possess the eminence and power of gods.”
¹⁷
But then it goes on to say that the divine status can always be heightened for the divine emperor: “If anything more glorious than these provisions is found hereafter, the enthusiasm and piety of the city will not fail in anything that can further deify him.” It is these last words that are the most important: “can further deify him.” How can they
further
deify someone who is already a deity? They cannot if being a deity means being at a fixed, certain level of divinity. But they can if being a deity placed a person on a continuum of divinity, say, at the lower end. Then the person could be moved up. And how is the person to be moved up? The decree is quite clear: the reason the emperor has been regarded as divine in the first place is because of what he has done for the people of Mytilene, “the provisions” that he has made for them. If he comes through with even more benefactions, then he will become even more divine.

When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level.

I
NSTEAD OF A CONTINUUM
, possibly it is helpful to understand the ancient conception of the divine realm as a kind of pyramid of power, grandeur, and deity.
¹⁸
Some ancient people—for example, some of those more philosophically inclined—thought that at the very pinnacle of the divine realm was one ultimate deity, a god who was over all things, who was infinitely, or virtually infinitely, powerful and who was sometimes thought to be the source of all things. This god—whether Zeus, or Jupiter, or an unknown god—stood at the apex of what we might imagine as the divine pyramid.

Below this god, on the next lower tier, were the great gods known from tales and traditions that had been passed down from antiquity, for example, the twelve gods on Mount Olympus described in the ancient myths and in Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, gods such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Mercury, and so on. These gods were fantastically powerful, far beyond what we can imagine. The myths about them were entertaining stories, but many people thought these myths were just that, stories—not historical narratives of things that actually happened. Philosophers tried to “demythologize” the myths, that is, to strip them of their obvious literary features to see how, apart from a literal reading, they told deeper truths about the world and reality. At any rate, these gods were worshiped as the most powerful beings in the universe. Many of them were adopted by cities and towns as their patron gods; some were acknowledged and worshiped by the state as a whole, which had clear and compelling reasons to want the mighty gods to look favorably upon it in times of both war and peace.

But they were not the only divine beings. On a lower tier of the pyramid were many, many other gods. Every city and town had its local gods, who protected, defended, and aided the place. There were gods of every imaginable function: gods of war, love, weather, health, childbirth—you name it. There were gods for every locale: gods of forests, meadows, mountains, and rivers. The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship
one
god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots of what we might call religious tolerance.

Below these levels of gods there were still other tiers. There was a group of divine beings known as
daimones
. Sometimes this word gets translated as “demons,” but that word as we think of it today gives the wrong connotation. Some of these beings could be malevolent, to be sure, but not all of them were; and they were not fallen angels or wicked spirits that could possess people and make them do hurtful things such as fling themselves in harm’s way or twist their heads 360 degrees or projectile vomit (as in the movie
The Exorcist
). The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions. If displeased, they could do harmful things. It was important to keep them happy by paying them their due in reverence and worship.

In the divine pyramid a yet lower tier, near or at the bottom, would be inhabited by divine humans. This is where the “pyramid” analogy breaks down because we should not think that these divine humans were more numerous than the other deities above them. In fact, it was relatively rare to run across people who were so mighty, wise, or gorgeous that they must in some sense be divine. But it did happen on occasion. A great general, a king, an emperor, a great philosopher, a fantastic beauty—these could be more than human. Such people could be superhuman. They could be divine. Maybe their father was a god. Maybe they were a god temporarily assuming a human body. Maybe because of their own virtue, power, or physical features they were thought to have been accepted into the divine realm. But they were not like the rest of us lowly humans.

We too, as I have pointed out, are on a continuum. Some among us are quite lowly—those whom the likes of Lucian of Samosata, for example, would consider the scum of the earth. Others of us are about average in every way. Others of us think that we, and our entire families, are well above average. Some of us recognize that there are fellows among us who are superior in remarkable ways. For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.

T
HIS VIEW OF THE
divine realm did not change significantly until later Christians changed it. It is hard to put a finger on when exactly it changed, but change it did. By the time of the fourth Christian century—some three hundred years after Jesus lived, when the empire was in the process of converting from paganism to Christianity—many of the great thinkers of the Roman world had come to believe that a huge chasm separated the divine and human realms. God was “up there” and was the Almighty. He alone was God. There were no other gods and so there was no continuum of divinity. There was just us down here, the lowly sinners, and God up there, the supreme sovereign over all that is.

Jesus himself eventually came to be thought of as belonging not down here with us, but up there with God. He himself was God, with a capital
G
. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but only one God? How could Jesus be God and God be God and yet there be only one God? That, in part, is the question that drives this book. But the more pressing and immediate question is about how this perception started in the first place. How did Jesus move from being a human to being God—in
any
sense?

I should stress those final three words. One of the mistakes that people make when thinking about the question of Jesus as God involves taking the view that eventually was widely held by the fourth Christian century—that a great chasm exists between the human and divine realms—and assuming that this view was in place during the early days of the Christian movement. This mistake is made not only by laypeople, but also, widely, by professional theologians. And not just theologians, but scholars of all sorts—including biblical scholars (or maybe,
especially
biblical scholars) and historians of early Christianity. When people who make this mistake ask “how did Jesus become God?,” they mean, how did Jesus move from the realm of the purely human—where there are millions of us with varying degrees of talent, strength, beauty, and virtue—to the realm of God, God himself, the one and only Almighty Creator and Lord of all that is? How did Jesus become GOD?
¹⁹

This is indeed an interesting question—because it did indeed happen. Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense. But he had been seen as God before that, by people who did not have this fourth-century understanding of the relationship of the human and divine realms. When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what
sense
did Christians think of Jesus as God?” If the divine realm is a continuum rather than an absolute, a graduated pyramid rather than a single point, then it is the
sense
in which Jesus is God that is the main issue at the outset.

It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.

One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God. People saw Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, and even a prophet. Some people thought of him as the (very human) messiah. But he was born like everyone else and he was “like” everyone else. He was raised in Nazareth and was not particularly noteworthy as a youth. As an adult—or possibly even as a child—he became convinced, like many other Jews of his time, that he was living near the end of the age, that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in a good kingdom here on earth. Jesus felt called to proclaim this message of the coming apocalypse, and he spent his entire public ministry doing so.