Bart Ehrman’s “How Jesus Became God” (Part 2): Jesus you say? Take me to the Greek!

In Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God, he argues (as the title suggests) that the historical Jesus was just a man—an apocalyptic prophet who expected the end of the world within his lifetime, but who was crucified by Rome. We’ll call this Point A. Yet that gradually over the years, his followers ended up telling enough stories about him and embellishing those stories little by little, to where eventually (by the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325), Christians claimed that Jesus was “God.” We’ll call this Point Z. In between those two points, over the course of 300 years, various Christian groups held a wide number of Points B-Y, so to speak.

Now, according to what I was taught in graduate school, the first step to try to understand what the early Christians said about Jesus is to try to understand the New Testament writings within the context of first century, second temple Judaism. That seems rather logical.

Ehrman, though, doesn’t start there. Oh, he gets to talking about that eventually in his book, but he actually starts, not with Judaism, but with Greek and Roman paganism.

The Story of Apollonius
In fact, Ehrman begins in an admittedly clever way by telling the story of man whose description would make people assume it was Jesus: a mother who was visited by an angel and told her child would be divine, signs in the heavens at his birth, an itinerant preacher who talked about spiritual things and performed miracles and raised the dead, followers who thought he was the Son of God, eventually put on trial by Roman authorities, ascended to heaven, appeared to his followers to prove he was alive, and whose followers wrote books about him.

But the man Ehrman was describing wasn’t Jesus of Nazareth. It was Apollonius, a Pythagorean philosopher who lived shortly after the time of Jesus. Now Ehrman doesn’t suggest those things about Apollonius were actually true. Clearly, Ehrman thinks Apollonius was just a man. But he starts his book this way as a way to show that back then stories like this were associated with people more than just Jesus, and that these types of stories were a way that someone’s followers would claim, not that their leader was “God,” but rather was special, greater than just your everyday human being, and hence “divine” in some sense.

Now some might see this about Apollonius and think, “Wow, that’s just like Jesus—maybe there really wasn’t anything special about Jesus. Maybe his followers really did make it up, just like the followers of Apollonius did.” If not, what Ehrman relates next might convince a few more of that very thing.

Ehrman states that Hierocles, a fourth century pagan author of The Lover of Truth compared Apollonius to Jesus and mocked the Gospels, claiming they were just stories “vamped up by Peter and Paul and a few others of the kind—men who were liars and devoid of education by wizards.” By contrast, the stories about Apollonius were written by highly-educated authors, not lower-class peasants (17). In response, Ehrman tells us, Eusebius, the writer of the first history of the Church, said not only was Apollonius not divine, but he was evil and empowered by a demon.

I’m guessing most people’s responses to that would be something like this: “Okay, Hierocles seems a bit snooty and elitist, but Eusebius sounds like a raging fanatic!” And to be honest, I think that is kind of what Ehrman wanted to accomplish—make both sides look silly, and the Christian side fanatical.

But what he doesn’t do is really engage in a discussion as to the circumstances and reasons for the stories of Apollonius. Yes, he notes that the story of Apollonius was written by a man named Philostratus around AD 220-230, and that Philostratus claimed his stories were based on eyewitness accounts. But then he just moves on, leaving one with the impression that this is a serious challenge to what the gospels say about Jesus.

Now I find that piece of information about Philostratus very interesting. After all, as we will see in the book, even though Ehrman acknowledges that the gospels were written roughly between AD 70-90, a main pillar in his argument is that you simply cannot trust what they say because the gospels were written so much later than the purported events of the life of Jesus. Thus, he comes to the gospels with (I would argue) a hyper-skepticism that the text does not warrant. By ancient standards, having texts that date within a generation of the events in question is considered extremely early, and therefore, carry with it a higher probability of reliability. Yes, that doesn’t mean you just blindly accept what they say. But it does mean you’ve got texts that are really early, despite what Ehrman claims.

And this is what makes his appeal to the Apollonius story so odd. He acknowledges that it was written 200 years after Apollonius, and he doesn’t really even question why Philostratus would make such claims. Do we have any textual evidence that Apollonius’ followers actually claimed this stuff about him from the time he was alive? No. We do know, though, that Jesus’ followers did make such claims early on. And thus, we know that by the time Philostratus wrote his story about Apollonius, that Christians had been saying such things about Jesus for 200 years.

Furthermore, since we have evidence (in the writing of Hierocles) that the pagans of the early 4^rd century appealed to Apollonius as a way to disparage the Christian movement, it’s not too much of a stretch to assume there was somewhat of an agenda involved here.

Simply put, what is more believable? (A) That both Jesus’ followers and Apollonius’ followers happened to claim the exact same things roughly at the same time, and yet we just don’t have evidence that Apollonius’ followers said these things until 200 years later? Or (B) Jesus’ followers claimed these things about Jesus, and by the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, as Christianity continued to grow, and paganism started to fade, some pagans invented the story of Apollonius, purposely portraying him in the same way as Christ as a way to disparage and squelch the growing Christian movement?

Now granted, neither option is necessarily historically provable; but we can ask what is more probable. Personally, I’ll choose (B). But in any case, Ehrman doesn’t really address any of this, other than, “Hey look, those stories are similar!”

Models of the Divine Human in the Greco-Roman World
From that initial example, Ehrman then goes into a rather detailed analysis of various instances in Greek and Roman myths regarding this “divine-human continuum”—gods who temporarily become human (i.e. think Zeus), claims that someone was born of a god and a mortal (i.e. think Alexander the Great), and human beings who became divine (i.e. think Romulus).

And then, of course, there is Julius Caesar and later Roman emperors, who were essentially “voted into divinity” by the Roman Senate. In fact, in the first century, the emperor cult was flourishing—praising the emperor as a god was the equivalent of being a good, patriotic Roman.

Now, having mentioned emperor worship, Ehrman makes the following statement: “When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level” (40). That’s entirely true, and shouldn’t be surprising, because Romans were pagans and polytheists. They didn’t have a belief in “one God,” therefore, it wasn’t much of a stretch to declare the emperor as one of the many “gods”—yes, a human being, but a little more connected to the “gods” than your typical plebian.

There’s just one problem I have with Ehrman’s discussion: What does any of that have to do with the claims that Jesus’s initial Jewish followers made regarding Jesus? The Jews were monotheists who believed only one true God exist—theirs! So when Jesus’ Jewish disiciples made the claim that Jesus was the Son of God, perhaps the best place to start in trying to understand that isn’t the paganism of the Greco-Roman world. Whatever they meant by calling Jesus the Son of God, it’s a pretty good bet that they didn’t mean it in the way a Greco-Roman pagan meant it.

Enter the Assertions
And that is why the end of Ehrman’s first chapter is rather odd. As interesting as learning about Apollonius might be, and as good as an overview of the Greco-Roman understanding of “divinity” of some humans, Ehrman simply fails to really show how any of that relates to what the early believers claimed about Jesus. That apparently doesn’t really bother Ehrman, though, for he then just jumps into making a number of assertions about Jesus.

First, he claims that the Christian understanding of Jesus as a divine-human gradually changed over the course of the first 300 years, from where he was considered “divine” (presumably in the Greco-Roman sense—what Ehrman calls a “continuum of divinity”) to being “God” (associated with being “up there”). To let Ehrman say it in his own words: “Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense. But he had been seen as God before that, by people who did not have this fourth-century understanding of the relationship of the human and divine realms” (44).

Now, to be clear, yes, Ehrman is right in a sense—the fourth century articulation concerning the natures of Christ and the inner-workings of the Trinity were not spelled out from the very beginning. But the way he couches his argument simply is not true: he simply asserts, without any evidence, that the Jewish understanding of God and human beings was pretty much like that of the Greco-Roman world. That is just patently false. And then from that false assertion, he then makes a second claim that the fourth century articulations regarding Christ was a radical change from the original understanding of Christ (i.e. the false assertion that Jesus’ original Jewish followers had a Greco-Roman understanding of the divine and human realms).

Secondly, Ehrman also makes this assertion out of the blue: “…Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in the absolute sense” (44). Really? On what does Ehrman base that claim on? Jesus wasn’t considered to be God in any sense? And then he “became divine for his followers in some sense”? And only later did he become thought of as equal to God in the absolute sense?

That statement is as bold as it is baseless. To be fair, Ehrman will try to tease this claim out in the course of the book, but I think it is quite irresponsible to make such an assertion at this point in the book and play it off as if it were a settled fact. To even try to root that assertion in his discussion of Greco-Roman concepts of humanity and divinity is simply tortured logic.

The Final Question
Ehrman ends chapter 1 by asking a legitimately good question that more people should ask: “How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?” (45). I mean, yes, if we were to take a time machine back to AD 30 and interview his disciples, they would not be saying, “Oh yes, it is quite obvious that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made…” etc. etc. I think that goes without saying.

The problem with Ehrman’s question, though, isn’t actually the question itself, but how he has crafted his entire first chapter to get to that question. The clear implication and unproven assertion that Ehrman has basically baked into that question by means of his first chapter is this: “Well, originally, Jesus wasn’t really God in any sense. That only happened hundreds of years later, when the 4^th century Church made Jesus God in the absolute sense.

In other words, Ehrman has already rigged the game, so to speak—by the time asks this question, he’s already conditioned his readers to accept certain unproven premises that will affect how the answer is even addressed.

So what’s on tap for chapter 2? Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism (i.e. How Ehrman tries to say there’s no real difference between Judaism and Paganism! Yes, I admit, that’s a bit of a hyperbole on my part).