Bart D. Ehrman. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. New York: HarperOne, 2014. See here to buy the book.
How did Jesus, a Jew from a monotheistic culture, come to be seen by
his followers as God? Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar who was once a
conservative Christian and became an agnostic, tackles this question in How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.
Ehrman argues that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who may have
believed that he would soon become the Messianic king of Israel. Jesus
envisioned a heavenly figure known as the “Son of Man” (who appears in I
Enoch) coming to earth soon, overthrowing evil and establishing
Paradise, and setting up Jesus as the king of Israel. After Jesus was
put to death by the Romans, thereby shattering his disciples’ hopes that
he would be the Messiah in any conventional sense of the term, some of
Jesus’ disciples saw visions that convinced them was Jesus was still
alive. As that belief gained steam, early followers of Jesus concluded
that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status after Jesus’ death,
meaning that Jesus was still the Messiah, but that he was enthroned in
heaven and would return to earth. According to Ehrman, there was also
an early view that Jesus had pre-existed his time on earth, that he was
an angel who became a human being, then was exalted to a divine status.
For Ehrman, these ideas about Jesus are understandable in light of
Greco-Roman, and also Jewish, ideas about divinity. Both Gentile and
Jewish culture contained the idea that a man could become divine, and
that a god or an angel could assume a human form (which Ehrman
acknowledges is different from an incarnation). Within Hellenistic
Jewish literature, there is the notion that an aspect of God could be
personal, or that God had a divine intermediary (a logos, or wisdom),
and Ehrman contends that these themes could be relevant to how Jesus
came to be conceptualized. Ehrman also explores Christology after the
time of the New Testament, as he goes through Justin Martyr, Novatian,
Tertullian, and others. In Ehrman’s picture, views once considered
acceptable (i.e., the idea that Jesus was exalted to a divine status
after his death, and the view that the pre-existent Jesus had a
beginning and was subordinate to God the Father) came to be considered
heresy within Christianity.
This book has been critiqued and analyzed numerous times in the
blogosphere and in print, and my write-up here will not be a thorough
critique, though I will say that I find Ehrman’s scenario to be
plausible and sensible. While I have read a number of reviews of the
book, I am glad that I finally read the book itself. Ehrman is a gifted
writer, who is able to make scholarly debates accessible to a popular
audience. I myself have academic training, but, as a reader, I
appreciate when someone is able to summarize issues and phrase them in
an accessible, friendly, lucid, conversational, and enjoyable (yet not
corny) manner, while still providing documentation from primary
sources. Ehrman’s personal stories certainly enhanced the enjoyability
of the book for me as a reader, for they showed how Ehrman’s research
fit into his journey, particularly his journey in relation to religion.
The book also provided me with useful information about conceptions of
divinity in the Greco-Roman world. I have read about this topic in
non-popular scholarly works, but Ehrman summarized the issues very
lucidly, while giving examples of what he was discussing.
The book is not just related to Jesus’ divinity and monotheism, for
Ehrman also participates in debates about whether Jesus’ resurrection is
historically authentic. In my opinion, Ehrman’s best argument with
regard to this issue is his argument that all sorts of people—-even
groups—-have seen visions, and that some Christian apologists are
overreaching when they claim that early Christian visions of the risen
Jesus demonstrate the truth of Christianity. Regarding Ehrman’s
argument that Jesus after his crucifixion probably was not buried, I
refer readers to Greg Monette’s post
about this subject, which critiques Ehrman’s argument through appeal to
primary sources. When Ehrman addresses the question of whether
historians can say that Jesus rose from the dead, his discussion is a
mixed bag. Ehrman does well to make the point that saying that Jesus’
resurrection is not subject to historical investigation is not the same
as saying that it did not happen; on the other hand, he seems to believe
that historians should prefer naturalistic explanations as more likely
than supernatural ones. Personally, I would say that the farthest even
believing scholars can go, from a historical standpoint, is to argue
that Jesus’ tomb was empty, that the disciples saw visions that
convinced them that Jesus rose from the dead, and that certain
naturalistic ways to account for this fall short; I agree with Ehrman
that going further and saying that Jesus rose from the dead is faith,
not history. In terms of what historians can say about this issue, I
think that they would do well to say that it is a mystery.
Ehrman also makes points that are relevant to the question of whether
the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony. Ehrman believes that there
are some things in the synoptic Gospels that probably go back to the
historical Jesus, and he endorses the conventional scholarly criteria of
authenticity as ways to discern this. At the same time, Ehrman also
thinks that, after people saw visions of the risen Jesus, they started
telling stories, and stories got invented and exaggerated, resulting in
the oral tradition that is behind the Gospels, which (according to
Ehrman) were written decades after the time of Jesus by anonymous
people, not the people to whom they are ascribed. (As Ehrman asks,
would Aramaic-speaking Galileans produce the refined Greek works that
the Gospels are?) On eyewitness testimony, Erhman refers to
non-Christian claims to eyewitness testimony: viewings of Romulus
ascending to heaven; the claim that Apollonius’ miracles were attested
by an eyewitness; and sightings of UFOs.
Moreover, while scholar Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
that the Gospels telling certain people’s names is an act of referring
to them as eyewitnesses, Ehrman refers to an article by Bruce Metzger
(whom conservative scholars love to quote or appeal to on other issues),
“Names for the Nameless,” which was in Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten,
volume 1, pages 79-99. Ehrman summarizes the article as follows: “Here
he showed all the traditions of people who were unnamed in the New
Testament receiving names later; for example, the wise men are named in
later traditions, as are priests serving in the Sanhedrin when they
condemned Jesus and the two robbers who were crucified with him” (page
155). (See my post here
about how Bauckham addresses this sort of issue.) Ehrman here is not
directly responding to Bauckham, but rather Ehrman is seeking to account
for the development of the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea buried
Jesus, especially since an arguably earlier tradition said that the
Jewish leaders as a group buried him (Acts 13:28-29); for Ehrman, we may
be seeing the literary practice of naming a character. While Ehrman in
this book does not explicitly interact with Bauckham, Ehrman’s points
may be relevant to Bauckham’s argument, and I am looking forward to
Ehrman’s coming book that more explicitly tackles the question of
whether the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony.
I’ll stop here.