How Was Jesus God?
Perhaps one of the worst modern biases is that we are too familiar with the story of Jesus that changed the world. It does not seem as revolutionary to us today that the Messiah appeared as a peasant, suffered, got himself executed, and has been absent from public view ever since—at least not as revolutionary as it would have to a first-century Jew. This tale has been all too familiar to Christians since the first couple of centuries had passed after Jesus’ death. But imagine you are one of the earliest church fathers writing a defense of such Christian doctrines, and you will quickly see what a monumental task it is. And just how revolutionary Christianity was. And what was the most revolutionary teaching that Christianity brought on the world? I would argue that it was not that the Messiah had come, or even that he had come as a suffering servant, conquering death by being killed. No, I would argue that it was the new teaching that this Son of God was also God, and worthy of worship, while still maintaining the monotheism of Judaism! How did faithful monotheistic Jews believe that they were supposed to worship Jesus in addition to God, and yet keep their monotheism? Most modern Christians would probably think they have the key to this mystery, that it is simply a matter of understanding the Trinity. But there is no such explanation found in the writings of first and even second centuries. Based on their own writings, then, how are we to understand the authors of the New Testament? How did they make sense, to the extent that they did, of what modern scholars are now calling binitarian worship?
I’d like to begin this discussion with getting a potential misconception out of the way, so that what follows can be quite relevant both to unbelievers and believers. Naturally for many believers, the idea that a religious belief “developed” seems counterintuitive to the idea that revelation simply appeared in the world through the pens of inspired men, without them having any imprint on the message whatsoever. I think I’ve thoroughly disproved such an idea of inspiration throughout this book, showing that if a god inspired any part of the Bible, it was through very earthy conduits, vessels of clay, us mere humans. But even if I’m wrong about this, the idea that even true religious ideas developed in some sense need not be at odds with fundamentalist views. For instance, the New Testament itself presents an unveiling of the Hebrew Bible, as we’ve seen in previous articles; that itself is quite a development, of monumental proportions. And the book of Acts depicts the spread of the gospel throughout the world. This is geographic development of Christianity. Acts and other books also present misconceptions being clarified even among faithful believers.[1] This also is development of revelation. Paul often finds himself having to explain finer points of doctrine that his congregations had misunderstood: this too is development in the collected books of revelation as the church grew both in number and in understanding.
Larry Hurtado, today one of the most influential scholars on the subject of the earliest development of Christ-worship, does what I believe is a decent job explaining, too, how a doctrine so key as Christ-worship could develop, in a sense that would probably be acceptable to even some fundamentalists, which I will not rehash here.[2] He is on record as a professing Christian. But even if you do not agree with his explanation, I do not think it will be a barrier to understanding any of what follows. He also points out that historical-critical, secular scholars are also making the same error by concluding that Christ-worship must have simply been adapted from the polytheism of paganism: in other words, they are also not investigating the evidence for the historical development of Christ-worship, and I, too, have a simple theory as to their reasoning: they conclude as given that Christ-worship could not possibly have occurred as early as the actual evidence suggests in the monotheistic setting of Judaism; therefore, they ignore the earliest evidence. Thus, by not considering how Christ-worship actually historically developed, believers and unbelievers alike are missing out on better understanding what is arguably the most transformative event in human history, the greatest story of all time, “greatest” in the sense of both its influence and its effects on the hearts and minds of billions of humans for millennia. Below we’ll consider the earliest evidence and possibly get glimpses of how such a thing could be. For never had any Jew spoke like the New Testament writers spoke about their Messiah, at least not explicitly.
A Shift in Scholarship
History of Prejudices
Previously, I mentioned a shift in more modern scholarship away from viewing Christianity as a maturation of Judaism, or even as a daughter religion. Even as scholarship became increasingly secular, scholars have often been influenced by Christian notions, such as some fairly radical forms of Supersessionism, which saw the Old Testament as inferior in its understandings, and the New Testament as superior and more spiritual.[3] To better understand the earliest Christianity, though, we must first understand it as a Jewish phenomenon, for they were Jews. And, as we’ll see, nowhere is this more important than when we try to understand how Jesus became considered God.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, biblical scholarship was very close to the inflection point where it would cease to be predominantly theological, but would become ever more secular. Just as had been done with scientists’ search for naturalistic origins of species on earth, so biblical scholars sought for naturalistic developments of the texts of the Bible. Germany at the time was in the forefront of scientific, philosophic, and intellectual development, and so we find the most renowned Bible scholars to accomplish this great shift were German ones, such as Hermann Gunkel, considered by many to be the founder of form criticism, and Julius Wellhausen, whom we have already seen when we considered the documentary hypothesis of how the Torah came to be.
One of the major new paradigms under which these influential scholars operated was called by the German expression religionsgeschichtliche Schule, the “history of religion school”. Instead of accepting the Bible as simply dropped from the sky whole, scholars sought evidence of how the cultural and historical milieux of the times affected the development of the ideas and documents of the Bible. And one of the most influential scholars to look through the lens of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule to the topic of how Jesus became considered God and worthy of worship was Wilhelm Bousset, yet another German, in his seminal work Kyrios Christos, with “Kyrios” being from the Greek word for Lord, which we’ve already seen was a term also applied to God in the Septuagint. It was originally published in 1913, but it laid the foundation for what became mainstream Biblical scholarship’s view on this topic for most of the rest of the century, and it is still quite influential. As a pioneer in trying to see Christ-worship in its historical setting, there is much scholarship in Kyrios Kristos that bears considering. But like any prototype, it also has several flaws as we’ll see below, some of which continue to be influential in modern scholarship, despite being thoroughly disproved, much as Haeckel’s debunked theory that embryonic development “recapitulates” the evolutionary history of its species, which still shows up in illustrations in some modern textbooks.[4]
I would here love to cite multiple examples of how modern scholarship continues to hold on to misconceptions even after they have been disproved, or at least seriously questioned, like the Mandela Effect, but not explainable based on the fact that the people who believe the misconception are lay people, unstudied in the field in which they have the misconception. I have quite a collection now. But I must curb my interest in this topic and give only a few examples so that we can return to the topic at hand. The Qumran documents were not widely available to the public or even to scholars until decades after their discovery; during that time, all sorts of theories regarding their nature cropped up, included that they belonged to the Essenes; Professor Rachel Elior is on record as presenting excellent evidence that they were from an entirely different community, and that their content does not match up with the beliefs and practices of the Essenes; yet you continually see remarks in scholarly works that attribute these documents as produced by the Essenes without any mention that the evidence for this is quite mixed, if not very deficient.[5] Another excellent example of scholars falling victim to the Mandela Effect, despite often being well studied in the subject matter that they get wrong, is presented by Christine Hayes:[6] it is widely repeated in scholarly writings that Jewish theologians of the early rabbinic period recognized the Noahide laws as universal for the Gentiles, but this idea is actually not found among rabbinic works until the Medieval period. And it is widely repeated in scholarly works that the Temple of Jesus’ day only allowed an aniconic coinage to be used in the Temple, following Mosaic prohibition against graven or carved images, but this is simply not the case: not only did the Tyrian shekel have an image of the empire on one side, but a pagan god on the other: they used it because it had a relatively stable silver content.
To be fair to scholars who are but humans, there is a certain degree to which we are doomed to repeat errors. I myself am a generalist, relying on and synthesizing thoughts from the valuable works of specialists in their fields, so I have to be especially careful not to let scholarly accepted error creep into my work, but a certain amount is inevitable since my field of study is much broader in scope than a specialist’s, forcing me to rely on the specialists.[7]
Apartheid of Ideas
But there is much worse type of error that is repeated until it is believed. A common misconception is understandable, since we are fallible and short-lived. But the worse error is to repeat something that is quite obviously an accepted fact only within a particular school of thought or even location, without at least some due diligence to verify it, especially when one of the consequences of rejecting it meets with extreme disapproval. That should be a red flag. Professor Elior alludes to just such a reaction in the lecture cited above. It occurs in sectarian denominations, like the one in which I was raised. But people are people, so it also occurs in the halls of academia. Yes, there are parallels between radical fundamentalists and secular groups, including supposedly scientific ones. One of the best explanations of this that I’ve found is by psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson with his zebra story.[8] Briefly, the story is that scientists who study zebras had a hard time keeping up with which is which, so they got the bright idea of marking one that they were trying to study; the problem was that lions would then kill the one they marked. What they discovered was that the zebra’s camouflage was not against the grass, but against the herd; lions, as pack hunters, could best hunt an animal that they could identify as unique, not necessarily weaker or slower, as previously thought: for the Zebras, if you don’t blend in, you die. There is a similar phenomenon in academia and other groups of humans, where if you don’t go along with the accepted norms, you are singled out even by your own people, and can be vilified and even ostracized. I think this phenomenon is at least part of the explanation for how smart, educated people can hold beliefs in light of strong evidence to the contrary, even for decades. It’s also interesting that this phenomenon is evidence of sociological forces squeezing up a bell curve toward consensus, without which we might have a much flatter, eclectic, and even productive variety of viewpoints to draw from. In other words, we humans make ourselves dumber as a race.
We have myriad psychological and sociological forces working against us in the search for knowledge and wisdom, some of which can be quite complex by their nature. But there are much simpler ones, some of which are not external at all, but internal. For example, there’s the common tendency to look only for evidence that supports what we want to believe or that which “must” be true, and we thereby often ignore even quite obvious evidence to the contrary. Studies have shown that hearing the “preaching to the choir” to which we belong gives us a dopamine surge, so one might even argue that stupid is hardwired into us. And I believe that scholars were not immune to such forces when they created the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, in regard to its view of how Jesus came to be considered God, the main subject to which we finally return.
Repentance: A Turning
Bousset’s highly influential Kyrios Christos assumes that Christ-worship only occurred once Christianity spread to the pagan, polytheistic Gentiles, beyond the monotheistic Jewish Palestine. In other words, Jesus only came to be considered God under pagan influence, and it was not a Jewish idea. Despite this idea that the Christian view of Jesus as God only occurred after the Gentiles influenced it with their polytheism, Bousset is forced to conclude that this had to have happened extremely early, as Paul was obviously converted to this view within only a couple of decades after the crucifixion, and his writings exhibit quite strong language regarding Christ’s divinity. Bousset argues that the earliest Christianity within Palestine viewed Jesus as the Son of Man, a widely accepted title for the figure who would usher in the eschaton, but not as God worthy of worship. There is also a strong debate of whether Son of Man was a widely known title in Palestine, and what was meant by it.
I believe that Bousset’s arguments were so appealing and continue to be influential even today because scholars often assume that one of the core tenets of Christianity, that Jesus was somehow God, had to have developed over time, and not from a monotheistic source, the Jews: it “surely” had to have come from polytheistic Gentiles. To be fair to their position, to imagine otherwise is quite incredible, as we’ll see. But the problem is that there is just so much evidence to the contrary, much of which Bousset and scholars even to his day continue to ignore. For instance, many scholars now accept that Paul’s early views of Christ as divine preceded him, and therefore went back to the earliest Christians, as we’ll see more of below.
A new shift in modern scholarship on the subject of the earliest development of Christ-worship largely occurred as the result of Larry Hurtado’s One God, One Lord in 1988. He is one of the most cited scholars on the topic in the books I’ve read, written by some of the most prominent names in the field of New Testament scholarship today, such as in Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God and Michael Peppard’s The Son of God in the Ancient World. Hurtado has sometimes been viewed as anachronistically retrojecting orthodox Christology back too far,[9] and, as we’ll see, scholars of the 21st century have not completely given up some of the concepts found in Kyrios Cristos. Nevertheless, scholars now speak of a new religionsgeschichtliche Schule. For Martin Hengel at least, that is Hurtado’s One God, One Lord.[10] But others have used the expression in other works that come to similar conclusions around the same time, such as Jarl Fossum.[11] Now mainstream scholars finally focus on one of the most important questions regarding the birth of Christ-worship: how could this be a Jewish phenomenon?
Where Secular Scholars and Christians Can Agree
We should at least mention a few of the pieces of evidences that the new religionsgeschichtliche Schule began to accept that made them the “new” version of the school, what they finally accounted for, regarding the fact that Christ-worship began as a Jewish idea, and not as the Gentiles influenced Christianity’s spread. Many of these will be developed more fully below.
Some of the best evidence is right there in Paul. Despite presenting us with the new understanding of the Messiah as worthy of worship as God, he does so in a thoroughly Jewish context. Paul’s use of Kyrios for Jesus, of course suggesting his divinity,[12] is not a Gentile innovation, but, as we’ve seen, had been used by Greek-speaking Jews for God in their scriptures for at least a couple of centuries; and “Lord” had also been used in Aramaic, which Paul also uses without translation, as if the expression were common enough even among Greek-speaking believers that he need not even translate it from the Aramaic.[13] Paul also uses Kyrios to refer to Jesus by actually alluding to passages from the Hebrew Bible, as we’ve already seen.[14] Although the expression “son of God” did not necessarily indicate divinity in the Hebrew Bible, Paul also uses this very Jewish expression to show that distinct nature of Christ in connection to the Hebrew Bible, not pagan ideas.[15] But Paul uses Kyrios more to show Christ’s divinity, whereas pagan views of men as divine focuses more on sonship. There is also some fascinating evidence that Paul might have incorporated some earlier traditions about Jesus’ lordship in his writings, which we’ll consider below.
Further, scholars now recognize not only how early Christ-devotion occurred, but also how explosive it was.[16] There was not time for secondary development or outside influence, not just because it was such an early development, but because it was already so ubiquitous.
In other words, the old religionsgeschichtliche Schule was found to be anti-historical. It literally ignored evidence that had been available since the first century. Paul had been there all along, just as when Martin Luther “discovered” him. Of course the gospels were only considered as sources of truth until moderns decided they were mostly devoid of historic merit, but as we’ll consider below, they too can tell us things about Jesus, even from the perspective of a modern skeptic.
The New Gospel that Changed the World
As I’ve argued, Christ-devotion is perhaps the most critical development for us to understand before we can understand how both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament essentially conquered the whole world, with an eternal reign over the thoughts of men that is still present, despite the continued secularization of society and education. And there are a handful of reasons why it is most critical that we understand this phenomenon. The first is that Christ-devotion happened incredibly early among Jesus’ followers, even before Paul, as we’ll see below.[17] And secondly, even though we can find different views on the nature of Christ’s divinity in the earliest writings we have, as occurs till today, the core view of Christ as God and worthy of worship is positively ubiquitous among the earliest Christ-followers: it was everywhere; this was not simply a phenomenon that finally won out in later centuries, as other aspects of so-called proto-orthodoxy did; no, Christ devotion was everywhere from virtually the very beginning. Thirdly, there was no corollary in the ancient Roman world to which we can somehow compare Christ-devotion; yes, of course they believed in sons of gods, and, as we’ve seen, the view of the emperor as divine, and the son of god did in fact occur right before Jesus, but what happened with Jesus is not the same: centuries after the life of Augustus, we’d be hard pressed to find influential Augustus cults, and Mithraism which became fairly popular among Romans, and which seemed to have some analogs with Christianity, would not endure. One question I want to examine further in the next book of this series is how ancient myths were similar to the stories of the Hebrew Bible, especially the ones which would be relevant to understandings of who Jesus was; I also intend to examine some ancient mystery cults that had very peculiarly similar practices to those of Christians, especially related to communion, and the story of the dying god who is resurrected; but here it is enough to point out that Jesus-worship cannot be traced back to, say, a mix of a Dionysus cult that James and Paul somehow got involved in on the outskirts of Jerusalem: despite curious overlapping details of both Christ-worship and the stories of the Hebrew Bible with pagan sources, what the Jews who followed Jesus produced was still very unique for their time—indeed, for all time.
And fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, early Christ devotion was remarkable for a reason that bears a little more explaining. Y’all know how much I love a good circuitous route to a good point, rather than linear. Modern scholars, especially New Testament ones, have a particularly interesting criterion to determine if they’re going to consider something historical (along with others, of course). This standard basically says that if a detail isn’t something the New Testament writers would have made up, then it meets the standard for what they call “dissimilarity”, because that’s such a descriptive term for the concept…. It is easy to illustrate: for example, most modern scholars say that John the Baptist probably actually baptized Jesus because that seems like an embarrassment to early Christians, since in theory the superior baptizes the inferior. Perhaps in a following book I’ll explain what I view as both the merits and the deficiencies of the criterion of dissimilarity, but here I just want to use it to illustrate another concept. No, I’m not going to examine the early development of Christ-devotion using dissimilarity, as it is pretty much accepted. What I’d like to illustrate is what might be called a corollary to dissimilarity: when something is hard to explain, but you keep it in your holy writings, it is one thing. But when you make it perhaps the most important core doctrine of your entire religious and world view, it is quite another. And that is exactly the case with Christ-worship. In the few centuries after the crucifixion, as we’ll see, Christians positively had fits trying to explain something so seemingly paradoxical as how they could worship Jesus and God, and yet still be monotheists. Their biggest debates were focused on this topic, and they could not move on from them until the doctrine of the Trinity was somewhat established. Not only that, but, as other believers in Christ were proposing other, more “logical” paradigms with which to view Christ, those who followed what would become “proto-orthodoxy” doubled done on yet more paradoxical teachings as they did so (see below).[18] This is perhaps the biggest question of the biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. How in the cosmos could Christ-worship have become the most important and critical doctrine to ever shape the world, and yet it cannot even be explained logically? Indeed, no man ever spoke like this, at least until Jesus’ earliest followers came along. How did this belief suddenly appear? How did it persist at all, much less dominate the world? How did Christians come to conclude and understand that the folly of God was wiser than the wisdom of men?[19] And how did this foolish gospel bear fruit and grow all over the world so suddenly?[20]
Before we move on, I should point out one more thing about Christ-devotion. Great minds have struggled with how it is to be explained/believed, and yet it was the essence of the gospel for some New Testament writers, especially John. It was a matter of spiritual life and death, far more important than mere physical life or death.[21] How much more a struggle for the common man? How can the fate of one’s eternal existence depend on such a key and difficult doctrine? Such questions point to the differences between the bases for logical conclusions versus questions of faith, which moderns see as sharply mutually exclusive realms of “knowing”.[22] But I would argue that it is not so bereft of nuance as that, though this is a topic I want to dissect elsewhere. (Indeed, maybe Plato, himself a poet, was wrong that we cannot learn from poets, as Wordsworth testifies that the modern “scientific” mind, with its “meddling intellect, mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; —we murder to dissect.”[23]) Here I just want to point out that the common man, without philosophical training or the best “education” that civilization has had to offer to all those “great” thinkers who have argued for or against the basis for Christ-devotion for the past two millennia, has probably had much less trouble accepting Christ as Lord. And there have been far more common men than the “educated” ones throughout history. And often common men have been far wiser about being more decent human beings than those who had the luxury to learn and pontificate their “wisdom” to the world and posterity, much of which was so “wise” that it has since fallen into the dust bin of history, never to be reprinted, or not read by many. What if sometimes at least the wisdom of being a decent human being or—*gasp*—the ability to have faith and even humility or peace, are the greater evidence of knowledge and wisdom? What if an eternal soul-judgment could indeed be justly based on such criteria for accepting divine truths, which cold logic alone fails to fully prove? Wait, did I just use logic to suggest that logic is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end? It seems like something only the most logical mind tainted by being half human would say.[24]
“[The average peasant of the Middle Ages] had a perfect, unquestioning faith in God and the kindly saints. If he suffered man’s injustice, he had only to wait a little for the hour when all wrongs would be righted for eternity. He could not judge the system into which he was born; it was as imperative as the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of life, toil, mating, decay, and death.“
—The Middle Ages, by Morris Bishop[25]
To better understand how humans could somehow become more divine in the ancient world, even in the Hebrew Bible, check out my book here.
[1] E.g., 18:24-19:6
[2] See the introduction to Lord Jesus Christ, 2003.
[3] An example of this, though he was not unique in this approach for his time, is the renowned scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889-1963), who wrote quite a body of work on the nature of the Hebrew scriptures. His works contain many valuable insights which are rightfully taught in universities even till today. One of the most popular adaptations of his works was both adapted and translated by another renowned scholar on the Hebrew Bible, Moshe Greenberg, and is entitled The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginning to the Babylonian Exile. Kaufmann’s writing was simply too extensive for most moderns to be inclined to tackle it, without it being abridged.
[4] Of course, evolutionists and creationists have a field day arguing over this. For instance, some evolutionists claim that those drawings are there to show the history of evolutionary theory, and not to present recapitulation theory as a seriously accepted model still believed by scientists. But I have seen these drawings in texts, with no such disclaimer attached. To be fair though, kids’ textbooks are full of all sorts of errors; they are perhaps the least scholarly textbooks on the market, as illustrated so well in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen. One might expect better from college textbooks, but, alas, they too contained this error, even in the last few years. For an example of a textbook that presents Haeckel’s theory without historical contextual qualification, see Biology, by Sylvia Mader, 2010, p. 278. For unbiased testimony that it indeed has this error, without historical context, see Casey Luskin’s article “Current Textbooks Misuse Embryology to Argue for Evolution” in “Evolution News”, 2010 (available online as of this writing). And this does not just occur in a few isolated instances, but is pretty much common fare in college and grade-school textbooks.
[5] Her fascinating lecture for the University of Chicago, Divinity School, is currently available on YouTube, entitled “Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Were They Forgotten?”.
[6] What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 2015, ch. 8.
[7] If you think that I should simply become a specialist in all the fields I study, then I would ask how you expect me to extend my life by centuries. Or why you would wish such a curse on me.
[8] Just past one third of the way through this lecture, which can be found on his YouTube channel currently: “2017 Personality 21: Biology & Traits: Performance Prediction.” I am also aware that just at the mention of his name many people’s hackles bristle in offense. But even if he were the vilest man alive, his teachings on psychology would still have value. And I find people’s negative reactions to him funny, so why not throw him in here? And such reaction is a great example of the principle I’m explaining here.
[9] See New Testament History and Literature, Dale Martin, ch. 17, note 8.
[10] Some printings have his comment printed on the back of the book.
[11] See a collection of his essays in The Image of the Invisible God, published in 1995, but with content presented as early as 1991.
[12] E.g., 1 Corinthians 1:2-10
[13] It’s the last words of 1 Corinthians 16:22, where he says “Our Lord Come!”
[14] For another example, see 1 Corinthians 8:5-6; cf. Malachi 2:10.
[15] Especially in Romans and Galatians; see Son of God by Martin Hengel.
[16] E.g., Paul and Damascus and Antioch: The Unknown Years, 1997, 283-284, by Martin Hengel.
[17] I am heavily indebted to the work of Larry Hurtado here; especially see Lord Jesus Christ, 2003, where he summarizes and builds on his earlier works.
[18] I do not mean to make a value judgment on such beliefs by calling them paradoxical. To cite just one example of a paradox being a positive thing, Jesus said one must die in order to live, which technically falls under the category of literary device called a paradox. And it is a paradox that has been observed by many wise, ancient sages, which I do not dispute as valuable for many aspects of life. For instance, in a broad sense, it could be applied to the discipline of delayed gratification, or to finding the greatest meaning in life by serving others.
[19] My own adaptation of I Corinthians 1:25. Naturally, it seems logical that an omnipotent creator God would be smarter than mere humans, but my question is how much of humanity came to accept revelation that seems to be at odds with logic.
[20] 1 Corinthians 1:18; Colossians 1:6
[21] Matthew 10:28; John 3:18; 2 John 1:7
[22] For a statement with which most modern scholars and even many believers would agree, see Ehrman’s explanation of it in How Jesus Became God, ch. 4.
[23] “The Tables Turned”
[24] Spock, “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”
[25] Originally 1968. First Mariner Books Edition 2001, p. 226.