What I have come to see is that scholars have such disagreements in part because they typically answer the question of high or low Christology on the basis of the paradigm I have just described—that the divine and human realms are categorically distinct, with a great chasm separating the two. The problem is that most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan—did not have this paradigm. For them, the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.
In the ancient world it was possible to believe in a number of ways that a human was divine. Here are two major ways it could happen, as attested in Christian, Jewish, and pagan sources (I will be discussing other ways in the course of the book):
By adoption or exaltation. A human being (say, a great ruler or warrior or holy person) could be made divine by an act of God or a god, by being elevated to a level of divinity that she or he did not previously have.
By nature or incarnation. A divine being (say, an angel or one of the gods) could become human, either permanently or, more commonly, temporarily.
One of my theses will be that a Christian text such as the Gospel of Mark understands Jesus in the first way, as a human who came to be made divine. The Gospel of John understands him in the second way, as a divine being who became human. Both of them see Jesus as divine, but in different ways.
Thus, before discussing the different early Christian views of what it meant to call Jesus God, I set the stage by considering how ancient people understood the intersecting realms of the divine and the human. In Chapter 1 I discuss the views that were widely held in the Greek and Roman worlds outside both Judaism and Christianity. There we will see that indeed a kind of continuum within the divine realm allowed some overlap between divine beings and humans—a matter of no surprise for readers familiar with ancient mythologies in which the gods became (temporarily) human and humans became (permanently) gods.
Somewhat more surprising may be the discussion of Chapter 2, in which I show that analogous understandings existed even within the world of ancient Judaism. This will be of particular importance since Jesus and his earliest followers were thoroughly Jewish in every way. And as it turns out, many ancient Jews, too, believed not only that divine beings (such as angels) could become human, but that human beings could become divine. Some humans were actually called God. This is true not only in documents from outside the Bible, but also—even more surprising—in documents within it.
After I have established the views of both pagans and Jews, we can move in Chapter 3 to consider the life of the historical Jesus. Here my focus is on the question of whether Jesus talked about himself as God. It is a difficult question to answer, in no small measure because of the sources of information at our disposal for knowing anything at all about the life and teachings of Jesus. And so I begin the chapter by discussing the problems that our surviving sources—especially the Gospels of the New Testament—pose for us when we want to know historically what happened during Jesus’s ministry. Among other things, I show why the majority of critical scholars for more than a century have argued that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who predicted that the end of the age was soon to arrive, when God would intervene in history and overthrow the forces of evil to bring in his good kingdom. Once the basic tenor of Jesus’s public ministry is set, I move to a discussion of the events that led up to his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. At every point we will be intent on our one leading question for this chapter: How did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as a divine being? I will argue that he did not.
These first three chapters can be seen as the backdrop to our ultimate concern: how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers’ belief that he had been raised from the dead.
A great deal is written today about Jesus’s resurrection, both by scholars who are true believers and apologists, who argue that historians can “prove” that Jesus was raised, and by skeptics who don’t believe it for a second. It is obviously a fundamental issue for our deliberations. If the early Christians did not believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they would not have thought that he was different from any other unfortunate prophet who ended up on the wrong side of the law and was executed for his troubles. But Christians did think Jesus was raised, and, as I argue, that changed everything.
From a historical perspective there is an obvious question: What, actually, can we know about the resurrection? Here we enter into highly controversial topics, some of which I have changed my mind about in the course of doing my research for this book. For years I had thought that whatever else we might think about the stories of Jesus’s resurrection, we could be relatively certain that immediately after his death he was given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea and that on the third day some of his female followers found his tomb empty. I no longer think that these are relatively certain historical data; on the contrary, I think both views (his burial and his empty tomb) are unlikely. And so, in Chapter 4 I deal with what I think we as historians simply cannot know about the traditions surrounding Jesus’s resurrection.
In Chapter 5 I turn to what I think we almost certainly can know. Here I argue that the evidence is unambiguous and compelling: some of Jesus’s disciples claimed that they saw him alive after he had died. But how many of his disciples had these “visions” of Jesus? (I leave open the question of whether they had these visions because Jesus really appeared to them or because they were having hallucinations—for reasons I explain in the chapter.) When did they have them? And how did they interpret them?
My overarching contention is that belief in the resurrection—based on visionary experiences—is what initially led the followers of Jesus (all of them? some of them?) to believe that Jesus had been exalted to heaven and made to sit at the right hand of God as his unique Son. These beliefs were the first Christologies—the first understandings that Jesus was a divine being. I explore these “exaltation” views of our earliest surviving sources in Chapter 6.
In Chapter 7 I move to a different set of Christological views that developed later and that maintained that Jesus was not simply a human who had been exalted to the level of divinity, but a preexistent divine being with God before he came to earth as a human. I show the key similarities and differences between this “incarnation” view of Christ (in which he “became flesh”—the literal meaning of the word incarnation) with the earlier “exaltation” Christologies. Moreover, I explore key passages that embody understandings of the incarnation in such books as the Gospel of John, the last of the canonical Gospels to be written.