Three Models of the Divine Human
CHRISTIANITY AROSE IN THE Roman empire immediately after the death of Jesus around the year 30 CE. The eastern half of the empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture—so much so that the common language of the eastern empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written, was Greek. And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds. Jews of the time had many distinctive views of their own (see the next chapter), but in many key respects of concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors. This is important to know because Jesus himself was a Jew, as were his immediate followers—including the ones who first proclaimed that he was not a mere mortal, but was actually God.
But how was it possible for God, or a god, to become, or to appear to become, a human? We have seen one way with Apollonius of Tyana. In his case, his mother was told before his birth that he would be the incarnation—the “coming in the flesh”—of a preexistent divine being, the god Proteus. This is very similar to later theological interpretation of Jesus—that he was God who became incarnate by being born of his mother Mary. I don’t know of any other cases in ancient Greek or Roman thought of this kind of “god-man,” where an already existing divine being is said to be born of a mortal woman. But there are other conceptions that are close to this view, and here we consider three of them.
Gods Who Temporarily Become Human
One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.
One of the most intriguing tales found in Ovid involves two elderly peasants, Philemon and Baucis, who live in Phrygia (a region of what is now Turkey). In this short account, the gods Jupiter and Mercury are traveling in the region disguised as mortals. Despite coming to a thousand homes, they can find no one who will take them in to give them a meal and allow them to rest. They finally happen upon the poor cottage of Philemon and Baucis, who bear their poverty well, “thinking it no shame.” The elderly couple bid the visitors welcome, invite them into their poor home, prepare for them the best meal they can, and bathe their weary feet with warm water. In response, the grateful gods ensure that the wine bowl is never empty; as much as they all drink, it remains full.
Then the gods make their announcement: “We two are gods.”4 In response to their treatment in Phrygia, the gods declare:
This wicked neighborhood shall pay
Just punishment; but to you there shall be given
Exemption from this evil.
Jupiter asks the couple what they most desire. After they talk it over, Philemon tells the king of the gods that he and his wife want to be made priests who will guard the gods’ shrine, and when it is time for them to die, they want to die together:
Since in concord we have spent our years,
Grant that the selfsame hour may take us both,
That I my consort’s tomb may never see,
Nor may it fall to her to bury me.
Jupiter grants their wishes. The neighborhood is destroyed. The shrine appears, and Philemon and Baucis become its guardians. When it comes time for them to die, the two are simultaneously turned into two trees that grow from one trunk, so that just as they had long harmonious lives as a couple, so they are joined in death. Later worshipers at the shrine not only acknowledge the ongoing “life” of the pair, but they also believe that the two have in effect been divinized and deserve to be worshiped:
They now are gods, who served the Gods;
To them who worship gave is worship given.
This beautiful and moving tale of love in life and death is also a tale of gods who temporarily become—or appear to become—human, and humans who become gods. When Philemon and Baucis are worshiped as gods, it is not because they are now as mighty as great Jupiter and Mercury. They are thought of as very low-level divinities, mortals who have been elevated to the divine plane. But divine they are. This is a key and important lesson for us. Divinity came in many shapes and sizes; the divine realm had many levels.
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. The divine realm had numerous strata. Some gods were greater, one might say “more divine,” than others, and humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods. Moreover, the gods themselves could and occasionally did come down to spend time with us mere mortals. When they did so, it could lead to interesting or even disastrous consequences, as the inhospitable inhabitants of Phrygia learned to their great discomfort.
The lesson was not lost on later inhabitants of the region, as we learn from the pages of the New Testament itself. In the book of Acts we have an account of the Apostle Paul on a missionary journey with his companion Barnabas in this same region, visiting the town of Lystra (Acts 14:8–18). Paul sees a man who is crippled, and through the power of God he heals him. The crowds who have seen this miracle draw what for them is the natural conclusion: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men” (Acts 14:11). It is striking that they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul—the one who has been doing all the talking—Hermes. These identifications are no accident. Zeus was the Greek counterpart of the Roman Jupiter, and Hermes was the counterpart of Mercury. The people in Lystra know the tale of Philemon and Baucis and think that the two gods have appeared once again in their midst. So convinced are they of this that the local priest of Zeus brings out oxen and garlands to offer sacrifices to the two apostles, who have a very difficult time persuading everyone that they are only human, “of like nature with you.” Paul uses the occasion, as was his wont, to preach his gospel message in order to convert the people. Even so, not everyone was convinced: “With these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them” (14:18).
It is no wonder these worshipers of Zeus at Lystra were so eager to recognize that the gods temporarily become human among them; they remembered well what happened another time they refused to offer worship where worship was due. Whether the story in Acts is a historical recollection of Paul’s missionary activities or simply an intriguing legend that sprang up in later times (like the story of Philemon and Baucis itself) is immaterial for our consideration here: in the Roman world it was widely thought that gods could take on human guise, such that some of the people one might meet on occasion may well indeed be divine. The ancient Greek and Roman mythologies are full of such stories.
Divine Beings Born of a God and a Mortal
Even though Apollonius was understood to be a preexistent god come in the flesh, this was not the normal Greek or Roman way of understanding how a divine human could be born of a mortal. By far the more common view was that a divine being came into the world—not having existed before birth—because a god had sex with a human, and the offspring then was in some sense divine. In Greek myths it was Zeus who most frequently engaged in these morally dubious activities, coming down from heaven and having a rather exotic sexual encounter with an attractive woman he had to have, which led to a highly unusual pregnancy. But tales of Zeus and his mortal lovers were not simply a matter of entertaining mythology. Sometimes such tales were told of actual historical figures, such as Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).