Divine Concepts Before Jesus, in Scripture and Culture
Our first step for trying to find out how Jewish monotheists could have suddenly believed that the Messiah was worthy of worship is to consider whether any of their existing beliefs and Scripture could somehow accommodate that, or at least give us hints of how it suddenly happened in the first century. And in order to understand that, we must try to look past the paradigms that Christianity has wrought on the world, and try not to anachronistically apply our own ways of thinking. In other words, we must try to think like a Jew before Jesus came along, which is admittedly not easy. Our first step will be to “search the Scriptures” to try to see what we can learn about their earliest beliefs, which often colored later beliefs. Then we’ll come forward to the Roman era, to a culture for which we have more historical evidence apart from and sometimes different from their most ancient Scriptures.
And again, this is not an attempt to force-fit the birth of Christ-devotion into some sort of theory about how it must have developed. This is an attempt to see what earlier beliefs were, just in case we can find clues.
This should be satisfactory to the fundamentalist, as they will tend to appreciate evidences that prove either or both of two seemingly paradoxical conclusions. These are 1) any evidence that suggests Christ-devotion was a novel development, which to them will probably be suggestive that it was revealed and did not develop over time from the minds of men, and 2) that there were prophetic hints of coming Christ-devotion in the Hebrew Bible. Although the latter theory might be seen to compliment the first, as, for example, a mystery held by God until the appointed time, it also begs the question of whether Christ-devotion indeed developed from earlier belief! (Whether revealed or totally man-made.) But I’m content to leave such philosophical rabbit holes be for now, though they can be quite entertaining.
And those who lean more toward any form of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, whether old school, new, or even another form, I believe this section will be interesting to them as well. Because we really are looking for signs of where the Christ-devotion came from, or could have been justified in the minds of the first believing monotheists, to which we have no other access.
I am simply trying to see how the development might have happened, whether fast or slow, whether from earlier beliefs in part or de novo, irrespective of whether it arose from only the minds of men or from some sort of divine plan or revelation at the end of days. People can get nervous when you do that, because typically they cannot countenance approaching the precipice between world paradigms, when all the evidence you think you’ve accepted, and all the evidence you thought you could reject, might somehow need to be flipped along with your whole world. But where’s the fun in intellectual comfort?
And why shouldn’t this be interesting to everyone? After all, if there were evidence for or against accepting the Bible as containing truly divine revelation, surely it would be in the nitty-grittiest of places of inquiry, like a crucible for finding Truth, if such a thing exists. And surely our train of thought is approaching such a test by fire. But I do not claim that we will reach it, at least not in this book. But maybe it will point us in that direction, even if it’s a journey to nowhere. What else do have to do anyway?
Of Men and Gods
The first hurdle to remove from our understanding in this investigation is to dispense with a relatively modern notion of gods that, ironically, was brought about on the world by later Christian views. But it did not occur until well after the first century. In the time that New Testament was being written, it was widely accepted that there was a continuum between mere men on earth and the gods in the heavens. Gods could assume the form of men, and men could be divinized. And in between there were all sorts of at least partly divine beings, and sometimes a man could become one of them.
The idea that gods could appear as men is easy for moderns to understand. But the idea that men could somehow become divine? Not so much. How could the Egyptians, for instance, think their king was an actual god? Didn’t those kings continue to die, like mere mortals? The reason moderns have difficulty understanding this is because they think of divinity as something utterly fundamentally different from humanity. But this is actually largely a product of later Christian thought. Before Christianity altered the world’s view on the matter, virtually everyone in the ancient world believed that men could be at least partially divinized, whether before they died, or after. What is hardest for modern believers to grasp is how some such beliefs could be held by the Jews, and even were reflected in the Hebrew Bible itself! I alluded to this in chapter 4 in the discussion of the uses of the term elohim, but it bears further examination here.
So I will cite a few examples of the biblical authors’ views on there being a divine continuum, then we will return to modern scholarship’s views of how first-century Jews understood Jesus to be divine. Then we’ll try to see how such views stack up against what the New Testament authors actually said about it.
It may seem silly to moderns to read Greek tales, for instance, where the gods have to physically travel on earth to get to where they’re going, as if they were like men in physical bodies. They would even appear to men as men. But we should note that this is exactly the way the Hebrew Bible occasionally depicts God and angels, which are of course other types of divine beings, and of a lower divine status. How did Adam know when God was nearby, and so tried to hide from him? Because he heard God walking through the garden.[1] Three “men” appeared to Abraham in Genesis 18. At least two were angels. The third spoke to Abraham with the message of God, whether it was YHVH himself or merely an angel who delivered YHVH’s words. They took and ate the food Abraham prepared for them, as men who have physical bodies. When they left Abraham, they walked to Sodom. In the next chapter, the two angels eat again, this time with Lot. When an angel comes to Daniel in Daniel 10, he tells Daniel that he was delayed; not only that, but he had to wait on the “prince” Michael, another angel, to come and aid him, possibly so he could go to Daniel. So not only are these angels traveling like men at least sometimes,[2] but they’re warring.
Of course God and his angels can appear as men. And maybe at least sometimes angels are bound by space-time. These are not insurmountable concepts for modern logic, if we take as given the hypothetical existence of divine beings. But how can a man be somehow “more” divine, or even partly divine? It may surprise you to notice that the Hebrew Bible actually has a lot of interesting comments on this as well.
But before we look at what the authors of the Bible thought, it will help us to see common beliefs in the ancient world regarding divineness. Before Christianity gained massive influence over the world, it was commonly assumed that men who did extremely great things not only had the assistance of the gods,[3] but were thus often proved to be at least partly divine. Romulus, the man in the myth of the founding of Rome, was said to be “god born of a god.”[4] Alexander the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar, and many other great men of antiquity were said to have divine heritage, and were therefore in some sense also divine. But having a god impregnate an ancestor was not the only way for men to somehow become divine in some sense; some were believed to have obtained it by their own valor.[5] Older scholarship often discounted such rhetoric as mere political propaganda, concluding that people did not really believe that men could become closer to the gods somehow;[6] but scholars have begun to shift towards trying to understand what the common people actually believed, which is admittedly more difficult, since writings that have come down to us are almost completely from the less “superstitious” elite. One of the ways that we can see what all strata of people believed in the ancient world is by looking at their actions, which of course can speak louder than the written explanations of belief that have come down to us: and the evidence is clear that people did indeed treat certain men like the gods, especially in the emperor cults.[7] One of the most interesting inscriptions—especially in the context of our present study of Christ-devotion—was found in Asia Minor, one of the key hubs from which Christianity spread, in which Augustus is described as being the benefactor of all people, and “a savior who put an end to war and established all things,” having “surpassed the benefactors born before him,” thus “the birthday of the god marked for the world the beginning of good tiding through his coming.”[8] For more examples of the evidence we have for men actually being considered divine, even non-rulers, see Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, chapter 1.
I believe one of the main concepts that must be grasped in order for us moderns to at least partly understand how the ancients could consider some men divine is the viewpoint that divinity is a continuum: beings with the attribute of “divineness” fall on a spectrum of very divine, such as the supreme god, in which, as we’ve seen, the pagans also believed. And then there were other powerful gods, but not as powerful; then there were local gods, that might be the god of towns or cities. And there were even lower divine beings such as daimones, which should not be confused with our concept of “demon”. They could be either good or evil or somewhere in the middle, but they were more powerful than humans; because they were lower on the divine scale, they interacted more with humans.[9] And humans themselves could move on the scale of divinity, at least the lower end.[10]
By now, mental bells should be ringing. Of course the Bible has its counterparts to at least some of these levels of divinity. There are certainly angels throughout the entire Bible who report up to God, and these angels are often depicted with superhuman powers. By the time of the apocalyptic prophets, we even read of archangels, presumably because they are higher in rank than other angels. They are greater divine beings. Along with the Hebrew Bible’s multiple names for divine beings (see below), Ephesians 6 and Colossians 1 curiously employ multiple: rulers (arché)[11], authorities (exousia)[12], cosmic powers (kosmokratoras)[13], spiritual forces (pneumatika). By the time we get to the New Testament, we even read of demons who have supernatural powers on Earth. The references to stories of angels being cast out of Heaven is further evidence for views of hierarchy among divine beings.
But how can humans be anywhere on this divine scale? Well, didn’t God at the very beginning put his own spirit and image into man? In The Life of Adam and Eve, written around the time of Jesus’ birth, we see the angels being forced to reverence that image in Adam himself.[14] We’ve already noted the use of elohim, the plural of “god”, used for God himself, the angels, and man himself in chapter 4 above. And Jesus does not fail to notice this use either: in John 10 when they picked up stones to kill him because he was making himself equal with God, he curiously does not defend the uniqueness of himself[15] as Christian apologists might do, but quotes Psalm 82 in order to show the divinity in humans![16] And that divinity, as we’ve seen in other pagan beliefs, is due to divine sonship.
It should be obvious by now that moderns, including Bible believers, are curiously disconnected from the beliefs of even the biblical authors regarding the nature of divinity being on a continuum between man and God, not separated via an empty chasm between the earthly and God. This modern view is a gross anachronism, and did not reach full development until centuries after Christ.[17] In the next part of this article, we’ll see even more examples of the divination of men, even in the Hebrew Bible.
[1] Genesis 3:8
[2] There are of course exceptions. When they pull Lot out of Sodom before the destruction came, it almost sounds like they flew him out, holding his hand.
[3] Recall from chapter 6 above that the gods were often responsible for many earthly occurrences that moderns now simply consider natural, such as storms, plagues, or good crops. And the Hebrew God much more so, as he made all the cosmos and controlled everything.
[4] History of Rome, by Livy, 1.16
[5] E.g., Institutes of Oratory, by Quintilian (35-100 CE), 3.7.9
[6] E.g., The Divinity of the Roman Emperor, by Lily Taylor, 1931
[7] See especially Rituals and Power, by Simon Price, p. 31.
[8] From Rituals and Power, by Simon Price, p. 54
[9] See Paganism in the Roman Empire, by Ramsay MacMullen.
[10] E.g., see Rituals and Power, p. 55, quoted from an inscription in Mytilene.
[11] Also see Romans 8:38. Also used for (corresponding?) earthly rulers in Luke 12:11; I’m no Greek scholar, but arché has the sense of “principal”, and is not just applied to rulers, but also is used to mean “beginning” (e.g., John 16:4) and can also be used for “corners” (e.g., Acts 10:11), so I am guessing that it is cognate with the word akrogoniaiou, meaning chief cornerstone, also used by Ephesians (2:20), and referring to the chief “principality”, Jesus. Regardless, arché itself is applied to Jesus as chief “principality” explicitly in Ephesians 1:21, and elsewhere.
[12] Which can also apply to earthly authorities (e.g., Matthew 8:9) or even heavenly authority given to men (e.g., Matthew 10:1).
[13] This term literally means “spiritual things” (e.g., 1 Corinthians 2:13; 9:11); the “powers” or “forces” part of the English translations is only implied in the Greek of Ephesians 6
[14] Chapter 13
[15] Of course, the author of John did in fact believe that Jesus was very unique, and obviously more divine than men. But it’s interesting that he chose this argument, which is curiously in line with Paul’s incredibly convincing sermon to the Gentiles in Athens in Acts 17, that they are in fact all offspring of God.
[16] One of the ways that some modern Christians understand this passage as not violating their own concept of an empty chasm between the divine and humanity (rather than a continuum populated in the middle by other divine beings) is by explaining Psalm 82, not as a council of the gods where God is the greatest god, but where the passage is referring to men who are God’s ministers of justice on earth, as judges. (cf. the use of elohim for judges in Exodus 21:6; 22:8, 9, 28) Indeed, Jesus’ interpretation seems consistent with the view that men are what’s being considered. But as we’ve already seen, many ancients had a view of the earthly mirroring the heavenly: at the very least, interpreters around the time of Christ might have seen the passage as applying to any “sons of God”, both to men and gods/angels, who alone could become “like” men and fall/die, as Psalm 82 speaks of. See, e.g., Revelation 20. Recall also that Paul calls the gods of the pagans “demons”. (1 Corinthians 10:20, 21; cf. Revelation 9:20). And while we’re considering evidence that the concept of “as above so below” ties into the topic of there being a divine continuum (chapter 6 above), it should be noted that pagan myths spoke of divine mortals becoming stars, and the Bible itself uses stars as symbols of both earthly and divine powers. (E.g., Daniel 8:10; 12:3) As we’ve seen, both the king of Babylon and Jesus are spoken of as the “morning star”, the greatest among the other lights/rulers, not the only one.
[17] See especially The Son of God in the Roman World, by Michael Peppard, pp. 9-50.