Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This view goes under a number of names in the history of theology. Sometimes it is called modalism, since it teaches that the one God has different modes of existence. To illustrate: I am a son in relationship to my father, a father in relationship to my son, and a husband in relationship to my wife. I’m not three people but one person, defined differently in my different relationships. God was the creator of all things and he became a human; he was not two Gods but one God.

  Sometimes this view is known as Sabellianism, named after Sabellius, a particularly notorious but historically rather unimportant person who eventually was excommunicated for holding this opinion. And sometimes it is given the derisive term invented by the heresy hunter Tertullian to encapsulate its view: Patripassianism—a term that literally means “the Father suffers.” Tertullian mocked the view because it maintained that it was God the Father himself who died on the Cross, in the form of the son.

  Tertullian tells us that in his own day, the end of the second century, this view was endorsed by two of the bishops of Rome (two of the early popes) along with most of the Roman church. It was in response to this view that Tertullian and others like him started developing the idea that God the Father is a different person from God the Son. They are both God, but nonetheless there is only one God. How can that be? Ultimately it is a mystery. But this was to become the orthodox teaching, with refinements and serious tweakings after Tertullian’s day. Christ is God, and so is God the Father; but the two are one.

  Moreover, since Jesus in the Gospel of John speaks of the Holy Spirit coming to earth as “another Advocate” (John 14:16) after he returns to heaven, the Spirit also is God. He, too, is not the same as God the Father or God the Son. And so there is a “triune” God. Three persons, one God.

  This might sound all very confusing, but Tertullian is adamant on the point. In his attack on the Patripassianists, he especially wants to insist that God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit are distinct. As he says:

  The Father is one, and the Son is one, and the Spirit is one;…they are distinct from one another…. the Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other in the mode of their being. (Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 9)

  He continues with what strikes many people today as impeccable reasoning:

  A father must have a son, in order to be a father; so likewise a son, to be a son, must have a father. It is, however, one thing to have, and another thing to be. For instance, in order to be a husband, I must have a wife; I can never myself be my own wife. (Against Praxeas, 10)

  He then throws down the gauntlet to the Patripassianists, with the kind of satirical wit that he became famous for:

  If you want me to believe him to be both the Father and Son, show me some other passages where it is declared, ‘The Lord said to himself, “I am my own Son, today have I begotten myself.” (Against Praxeas, 11)

  And yet Tertullian wants to insist that even though the three persons of the godhead are distinct, they are not different in substance. All are God. And so he speaks of “the unity of the trinity” and argues that they differ “on the ground of personality, not of substance—in the way of distinction, not of division…. I hold one only substance in their coherent and inseparable [persons]” (Against Praxeas, 12).

  With the passing of time, these kinds of nuanced distinctions become increasingly technical. But already, in response to the modalists of his day, Tertullian had begun to speak of a trinity, one God manifest in three different persons.

  Arianism

  In some passages of Tertullian, however, it becomes clear that even though he thinks the Father is God and the Son is God, and that there is only one God, there is nonetheless a kind of hierarchy. The Father is greater than the Son, even though they are of the same substance. Otherwise he wouldn’t be the Father.

  For well over a century theologians continued to debate this question of the relationship of the Father to the Son. This was at the heart of the debate generated in the early fourth century by Arius, a famous Christian teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, a leading center of theological reflection. By the time of Arius, the proto-orthodox Christians had for the most part succeeded in wiping out, or at least completely marginalizing, such early Christian heresies as the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the various groups of Gnostics. Just about everyone in the Christian church at large agreed that Jesus was himself divine, but that there was only one God. But how exactly did it work? How could they both be God?

  Arius had a very simple solution for which he could claim considerable support from the New Testament and from earlier Christian thinkers: Christ was a divine being, but he was subordinate in power and essence to God the Father. Originally there was only one God, but in eternity past, God begat a second divine being, his son, Christ. Christ was the one through whom God created the universe, and it was Christ who became human at the incarnation.

  In this view there was a time in eternity past before which Christ did not exist. He came into being at some point. And even though he was divine, he was not equal to God the Father; since he was the Son, he was subordinate to God the Father. They were not “of the same substance”; they were in some ways “similar” in substance.8

  This view was exceedingly popular in its day, but a number of Christian theologians took exception to it. The best-known opponent was a young deacon in the church of Alexandria, Athanasius, whom we met in connection with the New Testament canon, in chapter 6. Athanasius and others like him argued that Christ was of the very same substance as God the Father, that they were complete equals, and that there never was a time when Christ did not exist.

  This may seem like a bit of nitpicking to modern people, but at the time it was an enormous dispute between the Arians and those who were opposed to them. Much of the Christian Church was divided over the issue of whether Jesus was of the same substance as the Father—the Greek term was homoousias (“same substance”). Or was he only of “similar substance,” homoiousias? As later historians pointed out, this appears to be a debate over the letter i. But that letter packed a significant punch it its day. The church was split over it.

  All of this mattered in part because the Roman emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and wanted to use this new religion to help unify his fractured empire. A split religion could not bring unity. The religion had to be united first. And so the emperor called a meeting in Nicaea of the most important Christian bishops in the empire, in order to debate the issues and to make a judgment to be binding on all Christians. This was the famous Council of Nicaea of the year 325 CE.

  In the end the council voted for Athanasius’s position. Contrary to what is sometimes said, it was nearly a unanimous decision, not a close vote. Still, even after that day the debates continued, and for a while in the fourth century it looked as though the Arians were going to emerge victorious after all. But eventually the orthodox position was that of Athanasius. There are three persons in the Godhead. They are distinct from each other. But each one is equally God. All three are eternal beings. And they all are of the same substance. This, then, is the doctrine of the Trinity.

  It is quite a development from anything found in the New Testament, where there is no explicit statement of anything of the sort. Not even in a document like the Gospel of John, where Jesus is thought of as divine, is there any discussion of three being one in substance. As you might expect, later scribes of the New Testament found this lack disturbing, and so in one place at least they inserted an explicit reference to the Trinity (1 John 5:7–8).9 The Trinity is a later Christian invention, which was based, in the arguments of Athanasius and others, on passages of Scripture but which does not actually appear in any of the books of the New Testament.

  Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.

  HEAVEN AND HELL

  In some corners of Christendom today, especially the on
es that I was at one time associated with, the religion is all about the afterlife. On the very personal level, people are eager to experience the joys of heaven and to avoid the fires of hell. Most Christians I meet today believe that when you die, your soul goes to one place or the other.

  I’ve never quite figured out all the inconsistencies of this view. On the one hand, the afterlife of the soul sounds like some kind dis-embodied existence, since your body stays in the grave; on the other hand, people think that there will be physical pleasure or pain in the afterlife, and that you’ll be able to recognize your grandparents. That would require having a body.

  The earliest Christians, starting with Jesus, did not believe in that sort of heaven and hell, as a place that your soul goes when you die. This, too, is a later Christian invention.

  The Early Apocalyptic Views of the Afterlife

  Scholars have widely argued that Jesus and his followers were Jewish apocalypticists. The apocalyptic view started to develop, well over a century before Jesus, as a way to deal with the problem of theodicy, or “God’s justice.” (They didn’t use that term; it was coined in the seventeenth century by the German philosopher Leibniz.) The problem of theodicy is to explain how God can be seen as just, considering the state of pain and misery in the world. Given the amount of suffering that people experience, how can one believe that a good and loving God is in charge?

  The apocalyptic view of ancient Judaism did not address this problem in modern philosophical terms, but the concerns of those who adapted this view were very similar. Beginning centuries earlier there had been thinkers in Israel who maintained that the people of God had experienced such hardship as a people and individually because they had sinned against God and God was punishing them for it. This is sometimes called the prophetic view because it is the perspective found on page after page of the prophets of the Old Testament.10

  But what happens when people do what the prophets urge, when they return to the ways of God, stop behaving in ways contrary to his laws, begin to live in the manner that he requires, and yet they continue to suffer? The prophetic view can make sense of the suffering of the wicked: they are getting what they deserve. But it cannot make sense of the suffering of the righteous. Why do the wicked prosper but the righteous suffer?

  There were different responses to that question among ancient Israelites, including the response, or rather responses, found most famously in the book of Job.11 The apocalyptic worldview takes a different tack. For apocalypticists, suffering is only a temporary state of affairs. For some mysterious reason God has relinquished control of this world to cosmic forces of evil that are wreaking havoc upon it. But soon, in the near future, God will intervene in history and make right all that is wrong. He will overthrow the forces of evil, disband the wicked kingdoms that they support, and bring in a new kingdom, here on earth, a kingdom of peace and justice. The wicked rulers of this world and all who side with them will be destroyed, and the poor and the oppressed will rule supreme.

  This view is first found in the Bible in the Old Testament book of Daniel, which was the last of the Hebrew Bible books to be written, sometime in the middle of the second century BCE. It is a view found in a number of Jewish writings produced in the centuries after Daniel, including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it is a view found on the lips of Jesus.

  Included in this view was the notion that at the end of this age, when God finally intervened, there would be a resurrection of the dead. Belief in the resurrection was directly related to the concerns of ancient theodicy. How is it that people have sided with God and been tortured and murdered as a result? Where is God in all this? And how is it that other people have sided with the powers of evil, grown rich and powerful as a result, and died and gotten away with it? Where is justice?

  For apocalypticists there would be justice. Not in this life or this age, but in the resurrection, in the age to come. God would raise all people from the dead, bodily, to give them an eternal reward or an eternal punishment. No one would escape. Evil would not have the last word; God would have the last word. And death would not be the end of the story.

  So taught the early Jewish apocalypticists, and so taught Jesus. The Kingdom of God was soon to appear with the coming of the Son of Man. People needed to prepare for it by mending their ways and siding with God, even though it meant suffering in this age. But a new age was coming in which God and his ways would rule supreme, in the Kingdom of God to come, here on this earth. All would eventually be made right with this world, and everyone would be brought back to life, bodily, to see and experience it.

  This was also the teaching of the apostle Paul and, so far as we can tell, of all the earliest Christians. One key difference between Paul and Jesus is that Paul believed that Jesus himself would bring this kingdom when he returned in glory (1 Thessalonians 4–5). Moreover, for Paul the resurrection at the end of the age has already in some sense begun. That is one reason Jesus’ resurrection was so significant for Paul. Since the resurrection is to occur at the end of the age, and since Jesus has already been raised, that shows we are living at the end of the age. That is why Paul speaks of living in the end times.

  But what happens to a person who dies before the end of the age? Paul evidently came to believe that there is some kind of interim existence with Christ for those who die before the return of Jesus. That’s why he told the Philippians, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (1:21). He evidently believed that believers in Jesus would have some kind of temporary body given them in heaven, but this was a purely temporary arrangement. When Christ returned in glory, the “dead in Christ will rise first,” and then all those still living, Paul among them, would be gloriously transformed, so that their bodies would be made immortal (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; 1 Corinthians 15:50–57). They would then live eternally, here on earth.

  Thus, for Jesus, Paul, and the earliest Christians, eternal life was a life lived in the body, not above in heaven but down here where we are now. Paul emphasizes this point strenuously in the book of 1 Corinthians. The fact that Jesus’ body was raised from the dead shows what the future resurrection would involve: bodies being raised physically from the dead and transformed into immortal bodies. Paul scoffed at his opponents in Corinth for thinking they had already experienced a spiritual resurrection, so that they were enjoying the full benefits of salvation now, in the spirit. The resurrection was physical, and since it was physical, it obviously had not happened yet. This world is still carrying on under the forces of evil, and only at the end will all be resolved and the followers of Jesus be vindicated, transformed, and given an eternal reward.

  This is also the view of the Apocalypse of John. After all the catastrophes that hit this planet at the end of time—catastrophes that the author revels in telling, in chapter after gory chapter—“a new heavens and a new earth” will appear. There will be a future resurrection of all who died; there will be a new, heavenly Jerusalem that descends from the sky to replace the old, corrupt, and now destroyed Jerusalem as the City of God. It will have gates of pearl and streets of gold. And that is where the saints will live forever, here on earth (see Revelation 21).

  The Transformation of the Apocalyptic Vision

  What happens when this expected end doesn’t happen? What happens when the apocalyptic scenario that Jesus expected to occur in “this generation” never comes? When Paul’s expectation that he will be alive at the second coming of Christ is radically disconfirmed by his own death? When the resurrection of the dead is delayed interminably, making a mockery of the widespread belief that it will happen “soon”?

  One thing that happens, of course, is that some people begin to mock. That is the problem addressed in the last book of the New Testament, 2 Peter, whose author insists that when God says that it will all happen very soon, he means by the divine calendar, not the human. And one needs always to remember that “with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Following this lo
gic, if the end is supposed to come next Tuesday, it could be a Tuesday four thousand years from now.

  When the end does not come, people who want to remain faithful to the original vision of Jesus and his disciples have to grapple seriously with the fact that an essential element of that vision appears to have been wrong. Of course the faithful would not claim that Jesus was wrong. More likely, he was misunderstood. And so there begins a long and significant process of reinterpretation, in which the original message comes to be transformed into a less tactile, less tangible, less easily disconfirmed view. Specifically, the teaching of a future resurrection of the body, in which the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished here on earth, gets transmuted into a message of heaven and hell, where judgment comes not at the end of the age but at the end of one’s life. Your soul goes to one place or the other.

  I suggested in chapter 5 that Jesus’ message—like that of other apocalypticists—can be understood as a kind of horizontal dualism between this age here on earth and the age to come, also here on earth. I call it a horizontal dualism because it can be imagined as a horizontal time line divided into half. At the end of this age, which is imminent, there will be a judgment and we will enter into the new age, on the other side of the dividing line.

  When the end never came, Christian thinkers reconceptualized this time line and in a sense rotated it on its axis, so that now the “end” involves not a horizontal dualism but a vertical one. Now it is not a matter of two ages, this one and the one to come, but of two spheres, this world and the world above. No longer is the physical resurrection discussed or even believed. Now what matters is this world of suffering below and a world of ecstasy in heaven above.