That afternoon, looking at one of the inscriptions, I had a blinding realization. It was one of those thoughts that was completely obvious—an idea that scholars had discussed for many years but that had never hit me, personally, with full force. How could that be? Why had it never impressed me before? I had to sit down and think hard for fifteen minutes before I could move again.
At that time I had been making some initial sketches for this book and was planning on writing about how Jesus became God as a purely internal Christian development, as a logical outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus as they developed after some of his followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead (as I’ll explain in later chapters). But I didn’t have a single thought of putting that development in relationship to what was going on beyond the bounds of the Christian tradition. And then I read an inscription lying outside a temple in Priene. The inscription referred to the God (Caesar) Augustus.
And it hit me: the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the 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
THE 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
WITH 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 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 LORD, 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)