How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (8 page)

The point is this: even within Judaism there was understood to be a continuum of divine beings and divine power, comparable in many ways to that which could be found in paganism. This was true even among authors who were strict monotheists. They may have believed that there was only one supreme being who could be called God Almighty, just as some pagan philosophers thought there was only one ultimate true god above all the others at the top of the “pyramid.” And some, possibly most, Jews insisted that this one God alone was to be worshiped. But there were other Jews whom we know about who thought it was altogether acceptable and right to worship other divine beings, such as the great angels. Just as it is right to bow down before a great king in obeisance to him, they believed it is right to bow down before an even greater being, an angel, to do obeisance.

We know that some Jews thought it was right to worship angels in no small part because a number of our surviving texts insist that it
not
be done.
²
You don’t get laws prohibiting activities that are never performed. No city on earth would have a law against jaywalking or against speeding if no one had ever done either. Ancient authors insisted that angels
not
be worshiped precisely because angels
were
being worshiped. Even those who were worshiping angels may have thought that doing so was not a violation of the Ten Commandments: God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism.

It is within this context that I move to my central concern here: divine beings who become human within Judaism, and humans who become divine. I consider three categories roughly corresponding to the three ways a human could be divine in the pagan world. Within Judaism we find divine beings who temporarily become human, semidivine beings who are born of the union of a divine being and a mortal, and humans who are, or who become, divine.

A
NGELS IN ANCIENT
J
UDAISM
were widely understood to be superhuman messengers of God who mediated his will on earth. It is striking that various angels sometimes appeared on earth in human guise. More than that, in some ancient Jewish texts there is a figure known as “the Angel of the Lord,” who is regarded as the “chief” angel. How exalted is this figure? In some passages he is identified as God himself. And yet sometimes he appears as a human. This is the Jewish counterpart to the pagan view that the gods could assume human guise to visit the earth.

An example early in scripture can be found in Genesis 16. The situation is this. God has promised Abraham that he will have many descendants, that he will, in fact, be the father of the nation of Israel. But he is childless. His wife Sarah hands her servant Hagar over to him so he can conceive a child with her. Abraham willingly complies, but then Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar and mistreats her. Hagar runs away.

“The Angel of the Lord” then finds Hagar in the wilderness and speaks to her (Gen. 16:7). He tells her to return to her mistress and lets her know that she, Hagar, will have a son who will be the ancestor of a (different) great people. But then, after referring to this heavenly visitant as the Angel of the Lord, the text indicates that it was, in fact, “the L
ORD
” who had spoken with her (16:13). Moreover, Hagar realizes that she has been addressing God himself and expresses her astonishment that she had “seen God and remained alive after seeing him” (16:13). Here there is both ambiguity and confusion: either the Lord appears as an angel in the form of a human, or the Angel of the Lord is the Lord himself, God in human guise.

A similar ambiguity occurs two chapters later, this time with Abraham. We are told in Genesis 18:1 that “the L
ORD
appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre.” But when the episode is narrated, we learn that “three men” come to him (18:2). Abraham plays the good host and entertains them, preparing for them a very nice meal, which they all three eat. When they talk to him afterward, one of these three “men” is identified explicitly as “the L
ORD
” (18:13). At the end of the story we are informed that the other two were “angels” (19:1). So here we have a case where two angels and the Lord God himself have assumed human form—so much so that they appear to Abraham to be three men, and they all eat the food he has prepared.

The most famous instance of such ambiguity is found in the story of Moses and the burning bush (Exod. 3:1–22). By way of background: Moses, the son of Hebrews, had been raised in Egypt by the daughter of Pharaoh, but he has to escape for murdering an Egyptian and is wanted by the Pharaoh himself. He goes to Midian where he marries and becomes a shepherd for his father-in-law’s flocks. One day, while tending to his sheeply duties, Moses sees an astonishing sight. We are told that he arrives at Mount Horeb (this is Mount Sinai, where later, after the exodus, he is given the law) and there, “the angel of the L
ORD
appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush” (Exod. 3:2). Moses is amazed because the bush is aflame but is not being consumed by the fire. And despite the fact that it is the Angel of the Lord who is said to have appeared to him, it is “the Lord” who sees that Moses has come to the bush, and it is “God” who then calls to him out of the bush. In fact, the Angel of the Lord tells Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). As the story continues, the Lord God continues to speak to Moses and Moses to God. But in what sense was it the Angel of the Lord that appeared to him? As a helpful note in the
HarperCollins Study Bible
puts it: “Although it was an
angel
that appeared in v. 2, there is no substantive difference between the deity and his agents.”
³
Or as New Testament scholar Charles Gieschen has expressed it, this “Angel of the Lord” is “either indistinguishable from God as his visible manifestation” or he is a distinct figure, separate from God, who is bestowed with God’s own authority.
⁴

There are numerous other examples both in the Bible and in other Jewish texts in which angels are described as God and, just as important, in which angels are described as humans. One of the most interesting is Psalm 82. In this beautiful plea that justice be done for those who are weak and needy, we are told, in v. 1, that “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” Here, God Almighty is portrayed as having a divine council around him; these are angelic beings with whom God consults, as happens elsewhere in the Bible—most famously in Job 1, where the Satan figure is himself reckoned among these divine beings.
⁵
In the Job passage the divine beings making up God’s council are called “sons of God.” Here in Psalm 82 they are called “children of the Most High.” But more than that, they are called “Elohim” (82:6)—the Hebrew word for “God” (it is a plural word; when not referring to God, it is usually translated as “gods”). These angelic beings are “gods.” Here in the psalm they are rebuked because they have no concern for people who are lowly, weak, and destitute. Because of the failures of these “gods,” God bestows upon them the ultimate punishment: he makes them mortal, so that they will die and cease to exist (82:7).

Thus angelic beings, children of God, can be called gods. And in a variety of texts we find that such beings become human. Here I might turn to some instances outside the Bible. In a Jewish text that probably dates to the first Christian century, the
Prayer of Joseph
, we find the Jewish ancestor Jacob speaking in the first person and indicating that he is in fact an angel of God: “I, Jacob, who is speaking to you am also Israel, an angel of God. . . . I am the first born of every living thing to whom God gives life.”
⁶
“Uriel, the angel of God, came forth and said that I, Jacob, descended to earth and tabernacled [dwelled in a tent] among people and that I have been called by the name Jacob.” He is further called “the archangel of the power of the Lord” and is said to be the “chief captain” among the sons of God. Here again, the chief angel appears as a human being on earth—in this case, as the patriarch Jacob, otherwise known from the book of Genesis.

As a second example I turn to another Jewish book from about the same time, called the
Apocalypse of Abraham
. This book describes a vision allegedly experienced by the patriarch Abraham, father of the Jews. Abraham hears a voice but does not see anyone who is speaking; in astonishment he falls to the ground, as if lifeless (10.1–2). And while facedown on the ground he hears the voice of God saying to an angel named Jaoel to go and strengthen him. Jaoel appears to Abraham “in the likeness of a man” (10.4) and raises and strengthens him. He tells Abraham that he is the angel who brings peace to warring factions in heaven and who works miracles not only on earth, but also in Hades, the realm of the dead. When Abraham looks at the angel, he sees a body like sapphire, a face like chrysolite, hair like snow, a rainbow on his head, royal purple garments, and a golden staff in his hand (11.2–3). Here then is a mighty angel, who temporarily becomes incarnate, in order to effect God’s will on earth—in this instance to be with Abraham in his various activities on earth.

Other Jewish texts speak not only of angels (or even God) as becoming human, but also of humans who become angels. Many people today have the view that when people die, they become angels (well, at least if they’ve been “good”). This is a very old belief indeed. In the book of
2 Baruch
, one of the great apocalypses that has come down to us from early Judaism (an
apocalypse
is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities), we learn that righteous believers will be transformed “into the splendor of angels . . . for they will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and be equal to the stars. . . . And the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels” (
2 Bar
. 51.3–10).
⁷
Here, then, those who are righteous become angels who are greater than other angels—greater even than the stars, which many ancient people believed to be fantastically great angels.

Some ancient Jewish texts portray particular individuals as being transformed into angels at death. One of the supremely mysterious characters in the Hebrew Bible is the ancient figure Enoch. We do not learn much about him in the terse comments of the principal passage that mentions him in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 5. We learn that he was the father of Methuselah, the oldest man who ever lived in scripture (969 years, according to Gen 5:27), and the great-grandfather of Noah. But what is most striking is that when Enoch was 365 years old, he passed from this earth—but without dying: “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Gen. 5:24). This laconic statement generated enormous speculations and speculative literature throughout ancient Judaism. Several ancient apocalypses are attributed to Enoch. Who better to know about the future course of history or of the heavenly realm than one who was transported to heaven without dying first?

In a book called
2 Enoch
, written possibly around the time of Jesus, we learn one opinion about what happened to Enoch when he was taken up into the divine realm (
2 En.
22.1–10). We are told that he came into the presence of the Lord himself and did obeisance to him. God tells him to stand up and says to his angels, “Let Enoch join in and stand in front of my face forever.”
⁸
God then tells the angel Michael: “Go, and extract Enoch from his earthly clothing. And anoint him with my delightful oil, and put him into the clothes of my glory.” Michael does so. Enoch reflects on his transformation in the first person: “And I looked at myself and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference.” As a result of this angelification, if we can call it that, Enoch’s face became so bright that no one could look at it (37.2), and he no longer needed to eat or sleep (23.3; 56.2). In other words, he became identical to an angel.

Something similar is said to have happened to Moses. The death of Moses is described in cryptic terms in the Bible where we learn that he died alone and no one ever knew the location of his grave (Deut. 34:5–6). Later Jewish writers maintained that he was taken up to heaven to dwell. And so, for example, in the apocryphal book of Sirach we learn that God made Moses “equal in glory to the holy ones, and made him great, to the terror of his enemies” (45.1–5). He thus is equal to the angels. Some authors think of him as even greater than the angels, as in a book attributed to a person known as Ezekiel the Tragedian, who indicates that Moses was given a scepter and summoned to sit on a throne, with a diadem placed on his head, so that the “stars” bowed down to him. Recall: stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they.

To summarize our findings to this point: the Angel of the Lord is sometimes portrayed in the Bible as being the Lord God himself, and he sometimes appears on earth in human guise. Still other angels—the members of God’s divine council—are called gods and are made mortals. And yet other angels make their appearances on earth in human form. Still more important, some Jewish texts talk about humans becoming angels at death—or even superior to angels and worthy of worship. The ultimate relevance of these findings for our question about how Jesus came to be considered divine should already begin to become apparent. In one of the important studies of early Christian Christology, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado states a key thesis: “I propose the view that the principal angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking . . . provided the earliest Christians with a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God without having to depart from their monotheistic tradition.”
⁹
In other words, if humans could be angels (and angels humans), and if angels could be gods, and if in fact the chief angel could be the Lord himself—then to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form.