Read Online How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman - Free Book Online Page A

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.
Can There Be a Spectrum of Divinity in Judaism?
    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,