How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

By Bart D. Ehrman

HarperCollins, 2014

I’m not attempting by this work of mine to uproot and discard the ancient and canonical texts! Here and there I correct those texts where they’re corrupt, in some places I explain obscurities, and I do this not on a whim – or with, as it were, grubby hands – but partly on the evidence of very ancient copies and partly in accordance with the best authorities.

So writes New Testament historian and bestselling author Bart Ehrman in his latest book, How Jesus Became God, and outside the atheist bubble surrounding the Northeast corridor of the United States, the declaration – and the book – will produce enormous groundswells of reaction from both sides of the theological divide.

This is true in part because Ehrman is a readable, provocative tilter at received religious dogma but also because he has, in the parlance of Hollywood, a great backstory. He was in his youth an evangelical Christian. He attended Moody Bible Institute (“where Bible was our middle name”), Wheaton College, and the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under the famed New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger. He gained a formidable knowledge of ancient languages and the methods of exegesis – and then he lost his faith. The more he learned about philology, the less he could countenance theology; the clearer he understood the deeply fragmented state of Biblical and especially New Testament documentation, the more he saw it as a purely human phenomenon.Ehrman is very popular on the lecture circuit, and his most rabble-rousing set-piece consists of a ringing recitation of the many inconsistencies that exist between the four Gospels of the New Testament. Something of the tone of that set-piece gets faithfully reproduced in virtually every one of his books, including How Jesus Became God:

Some people have argued that if Jesus really was raised from the dead, it would have been such a spectacular event that of course in their excitement the eyewitnesses would have gotten a few details muddled. But my points in the discussion so far are rather simple. First, we are not dealing with eyewitnesses. We are dealing with authors living decades later in different lands speaking different languages and basing their tales on stories that had been in oral circulation during all the intervening years. Second, these accounts do not simply have minor discrepancies in a couple of details; they are clearly at odds with one another on point after point.

One of the shoals on which his personal faith foundered was this profusion of conflicting accounts, especially when seen in light of the widely-held Christian contention of Biblical inerrancy. If God didn’t go to the trouble of ensuring accurate transmission of the Gospels, Ehrman’s anti-Damascene moment went, it didn’t make any sense to believe He went to the trouble of inspiring them in the first place. These were clearly just first-century human documents, like hundreds of others – uncertain of date or provenance, prone to copyists’ errors, rife with obvious mistakes. In Ehrman’s books and lectures, any idea of inerrancy goes right out the nearest window.

And yet, there’s Christianity. How Jesus Became God returns to subjects already well-covered by Ehrman (indeed, there’s a slightly derivative feel to much of the book): where did the idea of a Jesus as Christ originate, and how did that idea then manage to sweep all before it?

As Ehrman points out, it had competition. In the first century there were many quasi-divine preachers who worked miracles, amassed large followings, and were said by their followers to have risen from the dead after their earthly demise. Ehrman concentrates on the best-known of these, Apollonius of Tyana, the details of whose career are remarkable for being virtually identical to those of Jesus. There were plenty of such figures, and it’s part of Ehrman’s sly and practiced skill to place Jesus squarely among them right at the beginning of his discussion. These devices remind Ehrman’s secular readers of his considerable skills as a historical popularizer. And they drive his religious readers into a podium-gripping, Bible-thumping frenzy. It’s an open secret that a huge chunk of Ehrman’s bestselling sales come from his enemies buying his books en masse in order to refute them. Indeed, the ink was still wet on How Jesus Became God when a rival volume, How God Became Jesus, was dashed into Southern bookstores in agitated response.

There’s certainly plenty to respond to in this latest volume. Ehrman has a very entertaining way of making statements in passing that would have had him fighting for his job – and maybe his life – in North Carolina only a generation ago. In his discussion of Paul’s first letter to the Romans, for instance, he explains why Paul was sending this lengthy epistle ahead of his arrival; “he needed support for his mission,” we’re told, “and the church in Rome was an obvious place to get it.” And he casually adds:

This was a large church, located in the capital city of the empire. It could serve as a gateway to the West. We don’t know who started the church or when. Later tradition said that it was founded by the disciple Peter (allegedly the first bishop there, hence the first “pope”), but this seems unlikely: Paul’s letter provides us with the first surviving evidence for the fact that a church existed in Rome at all, and in it he greets the various people he knows there. But he never mentions Peter. This is hard to imagine if Peter was there – especially if he was the leader of that church.

And just like that, the Throne of Saint Peter is out on the sidewalk like an end-of-semester cast-off! And Ehrman’s just getting warmed up: as its title indicates, his main preoccupation in How Jesus Became God is tracing the process by which the followers of Jesus could go from thinking of him as a charismatic Galilean preacher to thinking of him as the Son of God – or as God incarnate. The main pillar of such a categorical transformation is of course the Gospel of John, where Jesus makes frequent claims of his own divinity, declaring that he existed before the time of Abraham, that nobody comes to the Father except through him, and, flat-out in John 10:30, “I and my father are one.” Ehrman points out that such sentiments are unique to John’s gospel; there’s nothing like them in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. And since Matthew, Mark, and Luke all date considerably earlier than John, Ehrman is forthright in drawing the obvious conclusions:

Scholars have long held that the view of Christ in the Gospel of John was a later development in the Christian tradition. It was not something that Jesus himself actually taught, and it is not something that can be found in the other Gospels. In John, Jesus is a preexistent divine being who is equal with God. The earliest Christians – Jesus’s disciples, for example – did not believe this.

Not only did neither Jesus nor his earliest disciples think of him as God incarnate, Ehrman goes on, but even the basic conception of divinity-versus-mortality was radically different in the ancient world than it is in the minds of the faithful today:

Today we think of the realm of divinity, the realm of God, as completely Other and separate from our human realm. God is up there in heaven, we are down here on earth, and there is an infinite gulf between us. But most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way.

In support of this, he examines the many instances in ancient literature – both of ancient Greece and Rome and of the Near East – in which humans become divine, share in divinity, or are temporarily inhabited by divine beings. This examination extends even to the Bible itself, in which not only are several Old Testament figures described as “angels of the Lord” but in which even the Apostles are sometimes mistaken for gods after the death of Jesus.It’s all very contextualizing, grounding Jesus of Nazareth firmly in his first century milieu. It’s the kind of case many previous authors have made, including such seminal figures as Diarmaid MacCulloch, who digresses in his Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years about Christianity’s “perpetual argument about meaning and reality”:

How can God be involved in the unhygienic messiness of everyday life and remain God? There are basic problems of human dirt, waste and decay from which devotion recoils – yet without dirt, where is the real humanity of Christ, which tears other humans away from despair and oblivion towards joy and life?

New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan, the iconoclastic exemplar of the field, has written half a dozen books with that same dichotomy worming its way through their hearts. “I propose that at the heart of any Christianity there is always, covertly or overtly, a dialectic between a historically read Jesus and a theologically read Christ,” he writes, “Christianity is always, in other words, a Jesus/Christ/ianity.”Rudolf Augustein, the founder of Der Spiegel, put it even plainer in his notorious 1972 bestseller Jesus Menschensohn:

Christianity rose like a three-stage rocket, each stage an explosive error: first, the error of Jesus that the last days of the Jews had come, then the error of his apostles that he had risen again, and finally the error of Paul and the synoptic Gospels that he would soon return and judge all men.

(His book, he claims, is centrally concerned with “how the Christian church dares appeal to a Jesus who never existed, to teachings he never taught, to a mandate he never issued, and to a claim that he was God’s son, which he never presumed for himself.”)The furor here, the fuel for seminars and heated rejoinders, comes not from the exposition of Crossan’s dialectic but from its very existence, which is an affront to the rank-and-file faithful. When Ehrman raises the question of how Jesus went from human to divine in the minds of his followers, he’s approaching the liturgical concept of the Incarnation from its south side, sidling up to questions of faith through factual, textual approaches. But occasionally something of the seminarian’s agonized doubting still peeks through:

… if Christ is one God, and God the Father is God, in what sense is there only one God? And if one adds the Holy Spirit into the mix, how does one escape the conclusion either that Christ and the Spirit are not God, or that there are three Gods?

The whole question of God-made-flesh is what moves How Jesus Became God, and it’s what will move the controversies that will certainly accompany this book all the way to the bestseller lists. It’s an old question – as is demonstrated by the fact that our opening quote isn’t really from Bart Ehrman at all. It’s from the great Northern Renaissance humanist Erasmus, writing 500 years ago in defense of his latest publication, a hefty edition of the New Testament in Greek, with an accompanying new Latin translation by Erasmus, all of it amplified by extensive notes and commentary. The book came off the presses at Basel in 1516 and immediately sparked the exact same kind of reactions Ehrman’s book will garner in 2014.

It wasn’t just that Erasmus risked a charge of impiety for daring to apply the impartial tools of textual analysis to Scripture, although the full ramifications of that process weren’t lost on any theologians of his day (Ehrman is entirely right: we have no original documents, and all our earliest texts are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies, with all that implies about the possibility of error or willing alteration). Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum sparked controversy also for its specific emendations, the most infamous of which dealt, like How Jesus Became God, with the central question of the Incarnation. In I John 5:7, the canonical passage read:  “For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one.” After consulting as many manuscript copies as he could get his hands on, Erasmus translated this as “There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water and the blood; and these three agree.”  On purely exegetical grounds, he rejected the Trinitarian construction of the standard version (and he was right to do so, since it was a wholesale addition made by a fourth-century scribe named Priscillian), and he was denounced. He answered his critics by assuring them that if someone could produce a manuscript that warranted the later version, he’d change his translation. He insisted that he was only interested in what the sources actually said.

Just such a manuscript was duly produced, and although Erasmus knew better than anybody that it was a forgery cooked up precisely to silence him, he meekly made the change in later editions of his New Testament. He did it to keep the peace, but the hypocrisy of it all outraged him:

You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This kind of talk is more fitting to a hack-driver than a theologian. You’re perfectly willing to allow that some clumsy scribe might make a mistake in transcription, and then you deem it a crime to fix it. The only way to determine the true text here is to examine the earliest codices.

Erasmus was working from only a handful of those codices, whereas Bart Ehrman has built a career out of drawing attention to the fact that we now have thousands of such codices, and they contain hundreds of thousands of textual variations, ranging from the trivial to the doctrine-shaking. In his smash hit Misquoting Jesus and again in How Jesus Became God, he looks on all this textual variation as ample proof that the New Testament is an ancient text just like any other, with none of the inerrancy Christians ascribe to it. “Once a natural explanation exists for a phenomenon,” Ehrman writes, “we no longer need a supernatural one.” And since miracles are by definition the least probable explanations for anything, he insists that miracles can’t be part of legitimate history.

Jesus became God in large part because his followers, like the followers of Apollonius of Tyana, told convincing stories about one such miracle above all: resurrection from the dead.  Ehrman examines those stories as they change over time, but unlike Erasmus, he doesn’t wait until subsequent editions in order to offer a sop to the faithful regarding the post-Crucifixion visions of Jesus that many of his followers had:

I do not think it would be a historical sin at all to leave the matter of external stimuli – were the visions veridical or not – undecided, so that believers and unbelievers can reach common ground on the significance of these experiences.

It’s a nice gesture, although doomed to failure; I’ve never yet met a fundamentalist Christian who’d be satisfied with significance, and it certainly doesn’t get megachurches built. In How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman is continuing his career-long argument that Christianity is based on a very human literary tradition rather than a divine intervention. His Jesus “becomes” God through accretions of error and ambition on the part of his much-later biographers, not because an excitable preacher from backwater Galilee was actually a deity. It’ll be a bitter pill for the faithful to swallow. I anticipate debates.