How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (9 page)

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HAPTER 1 WE
saw a common theme in pagan mythology: divine men who were born of the union of a mortal and a god (such as the lusty Zeus). There is nothing exactly like this in ancient Jewish texts, probably because such human passions as sexual desire and lust were regularly deemed completely unsuitable for the God of Israel. Anger and wrath, yes; sexual love, no. Especially if it involved such scandalous activities as rape.

But there is something roughly analogous even in Judaism—not with God himself, but with some of his divine minions, the sons of God, the angels, who are occasionally said to have had sex with mortals and had superhuman offspring. We find the first intimation of some such thing in the early chapters of Genesis.

In a tantalizingly terse passage in Genesis 6, we learn that the “sons of God” looked down upon the earth and saw beautiful women whom they desired. “And they took wives for themselves of all that they chose” (6:2). More specifically, “the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them” (6:4). God was not pleased with this state of affairs, so he decided to limit human life to 120 years and, immediately afterward, decided further to be rid of the whole lot of them by bringing the flood, which only Noah and his family survived. And who were the offspring of these unions of the sons of God and human women? We are told that the “Nephilim” were on the earth in those days. These are the offspring, “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:4). The word
Nephilim
means “those who have fallen.” In the book of Numbers they are said to have been the giants who originally inhabited the land of Canaan (13:3). Putting all this together, one can see that divine beings—the sons of God—had sex with women on earth, and their semidivine offspring were giants. I am calling them “semidivine” both because they were born of the unions of divine beings and mortals and because they do not actually live in the heavenly realm like other divinities. But they are superior to other humans—giants who made fantastic warriors, for rather obvious reasons. As a side note, I think we can assume that in order for the sons of God to make these women their wives, they had to assume human shape. Here again, then, we have divine beings appearing as humans; and what is more, we have them generating yet other superhuman beings. This is a Jewish version of the pagan myths.

A fuller exposition of this account in the book of Genesis can be found in another Jewish apocalypse attributed to that mysterious figure of biblical history Enoch. The noncanonical book of
1 Enoch
is a complicated collection of different texts that have been spliced together by later editors. The first portion of the book, called the Book of the Watchers, comprises chapters 1–36. It originally appears to have existed independently of
1 Enoch
itself; scholars typically date it to the third century
BCE
. A good portion of the Book of the Watchers is an exposition of the brief but suggestive episode about the sons of God in Genesis 6; in
1 Enoch
these figures are called the Watchers (chaps. 6–16). Unlike in Genesis 6, here they are also explicitly called “angels.”

We are told that there were two hundred of these errant angels, and we actually learn the names of their leaders, such angelic greats as Semyaz, Ram’el, and Tam’el. In this account the two hundred descend to earth onto Mount Hermon, they each choose a wife, and they have sex with her. The offspring who result are giants indeed: we are told that they were 450 feet tall. As such huge beings, these giants have ravenous appetites; they eventually run out of food and so start eating humans. No wonder God was not pleased.

The angelic beings, the Watchers, perform other illicit activities. They teach people magic, medicine, and astrology—some of the forbidden arts—and they instruct them in metallurgy, so they can make both jewelry and weapons. Three of the angels up in heaven—Michael, Surafel, and Gabriel—look down, see what is happening on earth, and issue a complaint to God about it. God responds by sending the flood to destroy the giants (and everyone else). The Watchers are then bound and cast into a pit in the desert where they are to live in darkness for seventy generations until they are sent into eternal fire on the day of judgment. Enoch is instructed to pronounce judgment upon them: “you used to be holy, spiritual, the living ones, possessing eternal life; but now you have defiled yourselves with women and with the blood of the flesh of begotten children, you have lusted with the blood of the people” (5.4).
¹⁰
In this Jewish version, the divine beings are condemned for doing what Zeus did in the pagan stories.

The text goes on to explain that “now the giants who are born from the union of the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth. . . . Evil spirits have come out of their bodies” (15.8–9). This appears to be an explanation of where the beings who were later called demons came from. And so here we have a view even closer to that found in the pagan myths: the offspring of the union of divine and human beings are more divine beings—in this case the demonic forces that plague the world.

T
HERE ARE OTHER FIGURES
—
APART
from God himself—who are sometimes described as divine in ancient Jewish sources, both the Bible and later writings from near the time of Jesus and his followers. The first is modeled on a figure found in an enigmatic passage of scripture, Daniel 7, a figure that came to be known as “the Son of Man.”

The book of Daniel is something like a Hebrew Bible version of the book of Revelation—a book that modern fundamentalists think sets out a blueprint of human history, down to our own time. Critical scholars see it as something very different indeed, as a book of its own time and place. The ostensible setting of the book of Daniel is in the sixth century
BCE
—although scholars have long been convinced that the book was not actually written then, but centuries later in the second century
BCE
. In this book Daniel is portrayed as a Judean captive who has been taken into exile to Babylon, the world empire that destroyed his homeland in 586
BCE
. In chapter 7 Daniel describes a wild vision in which he sees four beasts arising out of the sea, one after the other. Each is awe-inspiring and truly terrible, and they wreak havoc on the earth. Then he sees “one like a son of man” coming on the “clouds of heaven” (Dan. 7:13). Here is a figure that is not beastly, but is in human form; and rather than coming from the turbulent sea of chaos, he arrives from the realm of God. The beasts that had caused such destruction on earth are judged and removed from power, and the kingdom of the earth is delivered over to the one “like a son of man.”

Daniel is unable to make heads or tails of the vision, but luckily—as typically happens in these apocalyptic texts that are disclosing sublime heavenly truths—an angel is standing by to interpret it for him. The beasts each represent a kingdom that will come, in succession to one another, to rule the earth. At the end, after the fourth beast, a humanlike one will be given dominion over the earth. In the angel’s interpretation of the vision, we are told that this dominion will be given to the “people of the holy ones of the Most High” (Dan. 7:27). This may mean that just as the beasts each represented a kingdom, so too did the “one like a son of man.” The beasts were the successive kingdoms of Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece, which would each achieve world domination. The one like a son of man, then, would be the kingdom of Israel, which will be restored to its proper place and given authority over all the earth. Some interpreters have thought that since the beasts can also be taken to represent kings (at the head of the kingdoms), so too the one like a son of man—possibly he is an angelic being who is head of the nation of Israel.
¹¹

However one interprets Daniel in its original second-century
BCE
context, what is clear is that eventually in some Jewish circles it came to be thought that this “one like a son of man” was indeed a future deliverer, a cosmic judge of the earth, who would come with divine vengeance against God’s enemies and with a heavenly reward for those who had remained faithful to him. This figure came to be known as “the Son of Man.” Nowhere is he described more fully than in the book of
1 Enoch
, which we have already considered in relation to the Book of the Watchers (
1 En.
1–36). The Son of Man, on the other hand, is a prominent figure in a different portion of the final edition of
1 Enoch
, chapters 37–71, which are usually called the Similitudes.

There are debates about the date of the Similitudes. Some scholars put this part of the book near the end of the first century
CE
; probably more date it earlier, to around the time of Jesus himself.
¹²
For our purposes a precise date is not particularly important. What matters is the exalted character of the Son of Man. Many great and glorious things are said in the Similitudes about this person—who now is thought of as a divine being, rather than, say, as the nation of Israel. We are told that he was given a name “even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars” (
1 En.
48.2–3). We are told that all the earth will fall down and worship him. Before the creation he was concealed in the presence of God himself; but he was always God’s chosen one, and it is he who has revealed God’s wisdom to the righteous and holy, who will be “saved in his name,” since “it is his good pleasure that they have life” (48.2–7).

At the end of time, when all the dead are resurrected, it is he, the “Elect One,” who will sit on God’s throne (51.3). From this “throne of glory” he will “judge all the works of the holy ones in heaven above, weighing in the balance their deeds” (61.8). He himself is eternal: “He shall never pass away or perish before the face of the earth.” And “all evil shall disappear before his face” (69.79). He will “remove the kings and the mighty ones from their thrones. He shall loosen the reins of the strong and crush the teeth of sinners. He shall depose the kings from their thrones and kingdoms. For they do not extol and glorify him and neither do they obey him, the source of their kingship” (46.2–6).

At one point this cosmic judge of the earth is called the messiah—a term we will consider more fully in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that it comes from the Hebrew word for
anointed
and was originally used of the king of Israel, God’s anointed one (i.e., the one chosen and favored by God). Now the ruler anointed by God is not a mere mortal; he is a divine being who has always existed, who sits beside God on his throne, who will judge the wicked and the righteous at the end of time. He, in other words, is elevated to God’s own status and functions as the divine being who carries out God’s judgment on the earth. This is an exalted figure indeed, as exalted as one can possibly be without actually being the Lord God Almighty himself. It is striking that a later addition to the Similitudes, chapters 70–71, identifies this Son of Man as none other than Enoch. In this somewhat later view, it is a man, a mere mortal, who is exalted to this supreme position next to God.
¹³
As this exalted being, the Son of Man is worshiped and glorified by the righteous.

Earlier I pointed out that the injunctions against worshiping angels scattered throughout early Jewish texts suggest that indeed angels were worshiped—otherwise, there would be no reason to forbid the practice. Now we have seen that the Son of Man also was worshiped. One could easily argue that anyone or anything seated beside God on a throne in the heavenly realm deserves worship. If you’re willing to bow down and prostrate yourself in the presence of an earthly king, then surely it’s appropriate to do so in the presence of the cosmic judge of the earth.

In an interesting and compelling study, Alan Segal, a scholar of ancient Judaism, argues that early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne. Following these Jewish sources, Segal refers to these two—God and the other—as the “two powers in heaven.”
¹⁴
The Son of Man figure whom we have just examined would be one such divine figure, as he shares the status and power of God. But there evidently were others who were candidates for this celestial honor, and the rabbis who were concerned about regulating what Jews should think and believe found such views unnerving, so much so that they went on the attack against them. Their attacks were effective, more or less silencing those who ascribed to these views.

Segal’s careful analysis shows that those who held to the “heretical” notion of two powers maintained that the second power was either some kind of angel or a mystical manifestation of a divine characteristic thought to be in some sense equal with God (discussed more below). They subscribed to this notion because of their interpretations of certain passages in the Bible, such as those that describe the Angel of the Lord as bearing the divine name himself, or Daniel 7 and its reference to “the one like a son of man”—a figure independent of God who is given eternal power and dominion. Yet other passages could lead to a “two-powers” doctrine, such as Genesis 1:26, in which God, in creating humans, says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Why is God speaking in the plural: “us” and “our”? According to the two-powers heresy, it was because another divine figure was with him. This also could be the person that the “elders of Israel” saw sitting on the divine throne in Exodus 24:9–10. This figure is called the God of Israel, but the people actually
saw
him. Elsewhere, even within the book of Exodus, it is explicitly stated that no one can see God and live (Exod. 33:20). Yet they did see God and they did live. They must, then, have seen the second power, not God.