Bart Ehrman’s “How Jesus Became God” (Part 1): A Book Analysis Series

Over the past decade or so, Bart Ehrman has made quite a name for himself, having written numerous books about Jesus and early Christianity that, to say the very least, have stirred up some controversy. Just a quick look on Amazon turns up books by Ehrman whose titles scream, “Let’s freak people out!” –Misquoting Jesus, Jesus Interrupted, Forged, Lost Christianities, Lost Scriptures, God’s Problem, and one of his most recent books from 2015, How Jesus Became God.

In one sense, all these books really are just different versions of the central thesis that has made Ehrman famous:

• Jesus was a first century Jewish prophet who was just a man, not God.
• Jesus had proclaimed that the end of the world would happen within a generation, but it didn’t.
• After he was crucified, his early followers started to claim he was resurrected, but he really wasn’t.
• Even though his disciples proclaimed he had been exalted to heaven, they didn’t claim he was actually God.
• During the first three centuries of the Christian movement, there were many versions of Christianity, and beliefs about Jesus were all over the place—man, God, semi-divine, etc. Then came the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, where the “official Orthodoxy” was dictated by the council and all other versions declared heretical and suppressed.

The first book I ever read by Ehrman was his 2001 book, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. To be blunt, I wasn’t really impressed. I was actually thinking about doing a book review of it this spring here on my blog, but then I realized that the main thesis of that book had been incorporated into How Jesus Became God, and so I decided to focus on the latter.

And so here we are: welcome to my extended book review/analysis of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God.

Ehrman’s Fundamentalist Background
The interesting thing about Ehrman is that, although he now is no longer a Christian believer, he had actually been “saved” early on in his life, had attended Moody Bible Institute, and then did his initial graduate work at Wheaton College. Now, one of his comments in the book, I think, is very telling as to what kind of Christian he was during his Moody Bible Institute days. Looking back at that time, Ehrman says, “Even Billy Graham was too liberal for me in those days” (86).

Throughout How Jesus Became God (and I assume throughout his other books), Ehrman shares various stories of what he used to think and believe when he considered himself a Christian. Those comments make it pretty clear (to me, at least) that Ehrman was quite the Fundamentalist. I mean, hey, if you find Billy Graham to be too liberal, I think it is safe to say that you are really, really Fundamentalist.

I bring this up because I think it provides a very important key to understand where Ehrman is coming from in his books. For the longest time, when I would read some of his stuff, he just mystified me. Yes, much of the factual material he presented about the biblical texts and historical context of first century Judaism and Christianity was true, but his take on that material, and many of the conclusions he came to simply did not make sense and seemed to come from left field. “He obviously understands the core material and issues,” I would think, “so how can he claim that?”

But once I learned about his background as a Fundamentalist believer, things seemed to make more sense. To the point, I’m convinced that even though Ehrman has now walked away from the Christian faith, he still ultimately reads the biblical texts through the same Fundamentalist lens of wooden literalism. In a word, he still basically is a Fundamentalist…just of a different sort.

In fact, a few years ago I had a discussion with my dad about Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus. It had been given to my dad by a friend, and my dad was quite perplexed by it. The essence of the book is that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the Gospels (that’s true), that we instead have thousands of copies (that’s true), and that within these copies there are numerous differences (what scholars call “variants”—and again, that’s true too). But Ehrman’s conclusion was that because of all that, that we can’t really be certain about anything regarding Jesus and that the Gospels, therefore, are unreliable.

Why was my dad perplexed? Well, he had gone to Wheaton College too, and later Fuller Theological Seminary. He had taken Biblical Studies courses, as obviously Ehrman had, and in those classes, they covered the issue of manuscript evidence and textual variations. The fact is that probably 99.5% of all the textual variants in the manuscripts are either inconsequential or easily figured out. There really is nothing earth-shaking about them. Yet here was Ehrman, throwing up his hands and declaring that you couldn’t trust anything in the Gospels because of these variants.

Simply put, Ehrman’s claims were fundamentally over-reactionary and simply silly. Therefore, in Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman seemed to be saying, “Wow! The Bible isn’t a ‘perfect’ book that was written by the hand of God Himself! We don’t have the original manuscripts in pristine condition! I can’t believe anything it claims, ever…it’s not perfect!”

Well, to sound a bit childish, but “No duh!” Christians for the past 2,000 years have known about variants—who in their right mind thinks the Bible basically dropped out of heaven, in perfect condition?

Fundamentalists, that’s who. (Here is one of my favorite clips from “The Colbert Report,” when Stephen Colbert interviews Ehrman about Misquoting Jesus):

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/yji71b/the-colbert-report-bart-ehrman

But sadly—and this is actually important—not just Fundamentalists. In actuality, whether one reads it in the works of former Fundamentalists-turned-atheists like Dan Barker or John Loftus, or the more famous writers of the New Atheist Movement (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens)—these voices, along with that of Ehrman’s and modern-day Fundamentalists, share the common assumption that Christianity claims the Bible is perfect, and if it’s not—if there is even one textual difference or variant—then that calls the whole ball of wax into question.

And that, I submit, is tragic. Such a mindset forces you to either bury your head in the sand or throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Ehrman’s Introduction
That being said, I’m going to write a series in which I go through the arguments Bart Ehrman makes in his book, How Jesus Became God. As I said before, much of what he says specifically about many of the basic biblical issues and scholars discuss is, in fact, true. Heck, he’s a Biblical Studies professor at the University of North Carolina—he clearly knows his stuff. Nevertheless, though, I think he is wrong when it comes to virtually every conclusion he makes about early Christianity, the formation of the New Testament, and, of course, the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

And, like I’ve said above, I think when it comes down to it, the reason he goes wrong in his conclusions is because even though he has walked away from the Christian Fundamentalist faith of his younger years, he still is held captivate by many of presuppositions and assumptions of that Fundamentalist worldview.

We see hints of this in the introduction to How Jesus Became God.

In the very beginning of his introduction, Ehrman asks the fundamental question that guides the entire book: “How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things? How did Jesus become God?” (1). That, mind you, is a great question that deserves a lot of thinking, study, and contemplation. And so, in one respect, Ehrman’s book serves a very good purpose, in that it is getting people to look long and hard at a question that most seem to simply dismiss.

Another important point that Ehrman makes in his introduction is this: most modern people don’t realize that our modern conception of reality is very different than the conception of reality that people in the ancient world hand. Simply put, we in the modern world are heavily influenced by Enlightenment/Dualistic thinking: we assume that there is this infinite chasm between the “supernatural world” and the “natural world.” We picture God as “up there in heaven/the divine realm,” and ourselves as “down here on the earth/the human realm.”

In the ancient world, though, they did not hold to such a dualistic conception of reality. Ancient Judaism did not view YHWH as some sort of detached deity who created the natural world, wound it up like a clock, and then left it to run on its own. No, although they certain viewed YHWH as separate from His creation, they still viewed Him as intimately involved in it. This is a basic worldview concept that we must keep in mind if we are going to gain a better understanding of much in the Bible.

The way Ehrman phrases this, though, I have to admit, gave me a bit of a pause: “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.”  Yet for ancient people, “the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap” (4).

What gave me pause was that although, generally-speaking, this is true, the way Ehrman phrases it sets up one of the arguments he will make in the book: namely that there is, within Judaism, a belief of a continuum of beings, from the “100% God” down to the “100% human beings,” and that in-between the two there was a belief in essentially semi-divine beings. And although there certainly are passages in the Bible that, upon an initial reading, might seem to imply that, the fact is, it’s very thin ice, exegetically-speaking.

Nevertheless, that will be something we look into more thoroughly as we go through the book.

For now, let me conclude with Ehrman’s initial comments about Jesus himself.

• First, Ehrman claims that the different Gospels give conflicting pictures of Jesus. He claims that Mark presents Jesus as a human being who “became divine” by adoption or exaltation (i.e. see Jesus’ baptism), whereas John presents Jesus as being an eternally divine being who became incarnated (i.e. see John’s prologue).
• Second, although Ehrman believes the Gospel accounts that tell us Jesus really was crucified, he doesn’t not believe those same accounts that tell us he was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, and that three days later the tomb was empty.
• Finally, Ehrman’s take on what prompted the disciples’ claims of Jesus resurrection is this: “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.” (7)

Basically, Ehrman believes the disciples had visionary experiences of Jesus now seated at the right hand of God, and that led them to proclaim that he had been raised from the dead.

How Jesus Became God is a fascinating book…and in my opinion, ultimately wrong on most every level. Over the course of the next month or so, I hope you enjoy this series on the book. I will address more thoroughly the three views about Jesus that Ehrman articulates in his introduction as he himself fleshes out his views in the course of his book.