Jesus and the Divine Realm
THIS VIEW OF THE divine realm did not change significantly until later Christians changed it. It is hard to put a finger on when exactly it changed, but change it did. By the time of the fourth Christian century—some three hundred years after Jesus lived, when the empire was in the process of converting from paganism to Christianity—many of the great thinkers of the Roman world had come to believe that a huge chasm separated the divine and human realms. God was “up there” and was the Almighty. He alone was God. There were no other gods and so there was no continuum of divinity. There was just us down here, the lowly sinners, and God up there, the supreme sovereign over all that is.
Jesus himself eventually came to be thought of as belonging not down here with us, but up there with God. He himself was God, with a capital G. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but only one God? How could Jesus be God and God be God and yet there be only one God? That, in part, is the question that drives this book. But the more pressing and immediate question is about how this perception started in the first place. How did Jesus move from being a human to being God—in any sense?
I should stress those final three words. One of the mistakes that people make when thinking about the question of Jesus as God involves taking the view that eventually was widely held by the fourth Christian century—that a great chasm exists between the human and divine realms—and assuming that this view was in place during the early days of the Christian movement. This mistake is made not only by laypeople, but also, widely, by professional theologians. And not just theologians, but scholars of all sorts—including biblical scholars (or maybe, especially biblical scholars) and historians of early Christianity. When people who make this mistake ask “how did Jesus become God?,” they mean, how did Jesus move from the realm of the purely human—where there are millions of us with varying degrees of talent, strength, beauty, and virtue—to the realm of God, God himself, the one and only Almighty Creator and Lord of all that is? How did Jesus become GOD?19
This is indeed an interesting question—because it did indeed happen. Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense. But he had been seen as God before that, by people who did not have this fourth-century understanding of the relationship of the human and divine realms. When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?” If the divine realm is a continuum rather than an absolute, a graduated pyramid rather than a single point, then it is the sense in which Jesus is God that is the main issue at the outset.
It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.
One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God. People saw Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, and even a prophet. Some people thought of him as the (very human) messiah. But he was born like everyone else and he was “like” everyone else. He was raised in Nazareth and was not particularly noteworthy as a youth. As an adult—or possibly even as a child—he became convinced, like many other Jews of his time, that he was living near the end of the age, that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in a good kingdom here on earth. Jesus felt called to proclaim this message of the coming apocalypse, and he spent his entire public ministry doing so.
Eventually Jesus irritated the ruling authorities during a trip he made to Jerusalem, and they had him arrested and tried. He was brought before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and after a short trial he was convicted on charges of political insurgency: he was claiming to be the Jewish king when only the Roman overlords who were in charge of Palestine and the rest of the Mediterranean could appoint a king. As a political troublemaker he was condemned to a particularly ignominious death, by crucifixion. And as far as the Romans were concerned, that’s where his story ended.
But in fact, that’s not where his story ended. And so we return to the driving question of our study: How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?
An obvious place to start to find an answer would be with the life and teachings of Jesus. But first we need to consider the religious and cultural matrix of first-century Judaism within which he lived his life and proclaimed his message. As we will see, even though Jews were distinct from the pagan world around them in thinking that only one God was to be worshiped and served, they were not distinct in their conception of the relationship of that realm to the human world we inhabit. Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.
CHAPTER 2
Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
WHEN I FIRST STARTED my teaching career in the mid-1980s I was offered an adjunct position at Rutgers University. Since part-time adjunct faculty members rarely make much money, I worked other jobs to make ends meet, including one at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A long-term project was under way there called the Princeton Epigraphy Project. It involved collecting, cataloguing, and entering into a computer database all of the Greek inscriptions in major urban centers throughout the ancient Mediterranean. These were eventually published in separate volumes for each location. I was the research grunt for the person in charge, who, unlike me, was a highly trained classicist who could read an inscription like a newspaper. I had the job of entering and editing the inscriptions. One of the localities that I had responsibility for was the ancient city of Priene, on the west coast of Turkey. I had never heard of Priene before that, but I collected and catalogued all the inscriptions that had ever been found there and previously published.
Move the calendar up to 2009 and my life was very different indeed. As a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina, I had the ability to travel far and wide. And I did. That summer, I decided to tour around Turkey with my good friend Dale Martin, professor of New Testament at Yale, and check out various archaeological sites. We spent two weeks there, with very few advance plans, simply going wherever we wanted to go. It was terrific.
One of the highlights was going to the ruins of ancient Priene. It’s an amazing site, in a striking mountain setting. Over the years German archaeologists have made significant digs there, but it is for the most part still deserted. There are ruins of temples, houses, shops, and streets. There is a theater that could seat five thousand. An interesting bouleuterion—a council house, where the local governing council members gathered for their meetings—still stands in its square shape with seats on three sides. A temple of Athena Pollis is a major structure, its columns fallen and the drums that once made up columns scattered on the ground. And there are lots of Greek inscriptions, just sitting out here and there waiting to be read.