Read Online How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman - Free Book Online
Authors: Bart D. Ehrman
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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.
Judaism in the Ancient World
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.
Widespread Jewish Beliefs
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
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.
Judaism in the Ancient World
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.
Widespread Jewish Beliefs
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
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