How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (7 page)

Eventually Jesus irritated the ruling authorities during a trip he made to Jerusalem, and they had him arrested and tried. He was brought before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and after a short trial he was convicted on charges of political insurgency: he was claiming to be the Jewish king when only the Roman overlords who were in charge of Palestine and the rest of the Mediterranean could appoint a king. As a political troublemaker he was condemned to a particularly ignominious death, by crucifixion. And as far as the Romans were concerned, that’s where his story ended.

But in fact, that’s not where his story ended. And so we return to the driving question of our study: How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?

An obvious place to start to find an answer would be with the life and teachings of Jesus. But first we need to consider the religious and cultural matrix of first-century Judaism within which he lived his life and proclaimed his message. As we will see, even though Jews were distinct from the pagan world around them in thinking that only one God was to be worshiped and served, they were not distinct in their conception of the relationship of that realm to the human world we inhabit. Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.

W
HEN
I
FIRST STARTED
my teaching career in the mid-1980s I was offered an adjunct position at Rutgers University. Since part-time adjunct faculty members rarely make much money, I worked other jobs to make ends meet, including one at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A long-term project was under way there called the Princeton Epigraphy Project. It involved collecting, cataloguing, and entering into a computer database all of the Greek inscriptions in major urban centers throughout the ancient Mediterranean. These were eventually published in separate volumes for each location. I was the research grunt for the person in charge, who, unlike me, was a highly trained classicist who could read an inscription like a newspaper. I had the job of entering and editing the inscriptions. One of the localities that I had responsibility for was the ancient city of Priene, on the west coast of Turkey. I had never heard of Priene before that, but I collected and catalogued all the inscriptions that had ever been found there and previously published.

Move the calendar up to 2009 and my life was very different indeed. As a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina, I had the ability to travel far and wide. And I did. That summer, I decided to tour around Turkey with my good friend Dale Martin, professor of New Testament at Yale, and check out various archaeological sites. We spent two weeks there, with very few advance plans, simply going wherever we wanted to go. It was terrific.

One of the highlights was going to the ruins of ancient Priene. It’s an amazing site, in a striking mountain setting. Over the years German archaeologists have made significant digs there, but it is for the most part still deserted. There are ruins of temples, houses, shops, and streets. There is a theater that could seat five thousand. An interesting bouleuterion—a council house, where the local governing council members gathered for their meetings—still stands in its square shape with seats on three sides. A temple of Athena Pollis is a major structure, its columns fallen and the drums that once made up columns scattered on the ground. And there are lots of Greek inscriptions, just sitting out here and there waiting to be read.

That afternoon, looking at one of the inscriptions, I had a blinding realization. It was one of those thoughts that was completely obvious—an idea that scholars had discussed for many years but that had never hit me, personally, with full force. How could that be? Why had it never impressed me before? I had to sit down and think hard for fifteen minutes before I could move again.

At that time I had been making some initial sketches for this book and was planning on writing about how Jesus became God as a purely internal Christian development, as a logical outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus as they developed after some of his followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead (as I’ll explain in later chapters). But I didn’t have a single thought of putting that development in relationship to what was going on beyond the bounds of the Christian tradition. And then I read an inscription lying outside a temple in Priene. The inscription referred to the God (Caesar) Augustus.

And it hit me: the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God. Could this be a historical accident? How could it be an accident? These were not simply parallel developments. This was a competition. Who was the
real
god-man? The emperor or Jesus? I realized at that moment that the Christians were not elevating Jesus to a level of divinity in a vacuum. They were doing it under the influence of and in dialogue with the environment in which they lived. As I said, I knew that others had thought this before. But it struck me at that moment like a bolt of lightning.

I decided then and there to reconceptualize my book. But an obvious problem also hit me. The first Christians who started speaking about Jesus as divine were not pagans from Priene. They were Jews from Palestine. These Jews, of course, also knew about the emperor cult. In fact, it was practiced in some of the more Greek cities of Palestine during the first century. But the first followers of Jesus were not particularly imbued with Greek culture. They were Jews from rural and village parts of Galilee. It may be the case that later, after the Christian church became more heavily gentile, with pagan converts making up the majority of its members, the heightened emphasis on Jesus as God (rather than the emperor as God) made sense. But what about at the beginning?

So I started thinking about divine humans within Judaism. Here was an immediate enigma. Jews, unlike their pagan neighbors, were monotheists. They believed in only one God. How could they say that Jesus was God and still claim there was only one God? If God was God and Jesus was God, doesn’t that make
two
Gods? I realized that I needed to do some research into the matter to figure it out.

T
HE FIRST STEP
,
OF
course, must be to lay out in basic terms what Judaism was in the ancient world, around the time of Jesus. My focus is on what Jews at the time “believed” since I am interested in the question of how belief in Jesus as God could fit into Jewish thinking more broadly. I should stress that Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices every bit as much, or even more, than a set of beliefs. Being Jewish meant living in certain ways. It meant engaging in certain “religious” activities, such as performing sacrifices and saying prayers and hearing scripture read; it meant certain kinds of lifestyles such as observing food regulations and honoring the Sabbath day; it meant certain ritual practices, such as circumcising baby boys and observing Jewish festivals; it meant following certain ethical codes, such as can be found in the Ten Commandments. All of this and much more is what it meant to be Jewish in antiquity. But for the purposes of this chapter, I am principally interested in what Jews of the time thought about God and the divine realm, since it is these thoughts that can make sense of how a man like Jesus could be considered divine.

Saying what Jews thought is itself highly problematic, since lots of different Jews thought lots of different things. It would be like asking what Christians think today. Someone may well say that Christians believe that Christ is fully divine and fully human. And that would be true—except for those Christians who continue to think that he really was God and was human only in appearance, or for those Christians who think that he was an inordinately religious man but was not really God. You can pick almost any doctrine of the Christian church and find lots of people who identify themselves as Christians thinking something different from what other Christians think about it. It’s like what some Episcopalians say about themselves today: get four in a room and you’ll find five opinions. So too with ancient Jews.

W
ITH ALL THESE CAVEATS
in mind, I can try to explain briefly what most Jews at the time of Jesus appear to have believed. (A full treatment, of course, would require a very large book of its own.)
¹
Jews on the whole were monotheists. They knew that the pagans had lots of gods, but for them there was only one God. This was their God, the God of Israel. This God had created the world and all that was in it. Moreover, he had promised the ancestors of Israel an enormous body of descendants who made up Israel. He had called Israel to be his people and made a covenant—a kind of pact, or peace treaty—with them: he would be their God if they would be his people. Being his people meant following the law he had given them—the law of Moses, which is now found in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which together are sometimes called the Torah (the Hebrew word for law).

This was the law that God had revealed to his prophet Moses after he saved the people of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus. The law included instructions on how to worship God (for example, through sacrifices), how to be distinct as a social group from other peoples (for example, through the kosher food laws), and how to live together in community (for example, through the ethical injunctions of the Ten Commandments). At the heart of the Jewish law was the commandment to worship the God of Israel alone. The very beginning of the Ten Commandments states: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3).

By the days of Jesus, most (but not all) Jews considered other ancient books to be sacred along with the Torah. There were writings of prophets (such as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah) that described the history of ancient Israel and proclaimed the word of God to the dire situations people had faced during difficult times. There were other writings such as the books of Psalms and Proverbs that were invested with special divine authority. Some of these other books restated the teachings of the Torah, speaking the words of the law to a new situation. The book of Isaiah, for example, is emphatic in its monotheistic assertions: “I am the L
ORD
, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” (Isa. 45:5); or as can be found later in the same chapter of the prophet:

           
Turn to me and be saved,

                 
All the ends of the earth!

                 
For I am God, and there is no other.

           
By myself I have sworn,

                 
From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness

           
A word that shall not return:

                 
“To me every knee shall bow,

                 
Every tongue shall swear.” (Isa 45:22–23)

Isaiah is here expressing a view that became important later in the history of Judaism. Not only is God the only God there is, but eventually everyone will realize it. All the peoples of earth will, in the future, bow down in worship before him alone and confess his name.

W
ITH THE STRESS ON
the oneness of God throughout scripture, how is it possible to imagine that Jews could have something like a divine pyramid? Within the pagan system it was possible to imagine not only that divine beings temporarily became human, but also that humans in some sense could be divine. But if there is only one God, how could that be possible?

In this chapter I argue that it was in fact possible and that Jews also thought there were divine humans. Before going into detail about how this could happen, however, I need to make two general points about Jewish monotheism. The first is that not every ancient Israelite held a monotheistic view—the idea that there is only one God. Evidence for this can be seen already in the verse I quoted from the Torah above, the beginning of the Ten Commandments. Note how the commandment is worded. It does not say, “You shall believe that there is only one God.” It says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This commandment, as stated, presupposes that there
are
other gods. But none of them is to be worshiped ahead of, or instead of, the God of Israel. As it came to be interpreted, the commandment also meant that none of these other gods was to be worshiped alongside of or even
after
the God of Israel. But that does not mean the other gods don’t exist. They simply are not to be worshiped.

This is a view that scholars have called
henotheism
, in distinction from the view I have thus far been calling
monotheism
. Monotheism is the view that there is, in fact, only one God. Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshiped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

By the time of Jesus, many, possibly most, Jews had moved into the monotheistic camp. But doesn’t that view preclude the possibility of other divine beings in the divine realm? As it turns out—this is my second point—that is not the case either. Jews may not (usually) have called other superhuman divine beings “God” or “gods.” But there were other superhuman divine beings. In other words, there were beings who lived not on earth but in the heavenly realm and who had godlike, superhuman powers, even if they were not the equals of the ultimate God himself. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, there are angels, cherubim, and seraphim—attendants upon God who worship him and administer his will (see, for example, Isa. 6:1–6). These are fantastically powerful beings far above humans in the scale of existence. They are lower-level divinities. By the time of the New Testament we find Jewish authors referring to such entities as principalities, dominions, powers, and authorities—unnamed divine beings in the heavenly realm who are active as well here on earth (e.g., Eph. 6:12; Col. 1:16). And these divinities stand in a hierarchical scale, a continuum of power. Some cosmic beings are more powerful than others. So Jewish texts speak of the great angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. These are divine powers far above humans, though far below God as well.