Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  For ancient Jews, being the “Son of God” did not mean being divine (see chapter 3). In the Old Testament, “son of God” can refer to a number of different kinds of individuals. The very human king of Israel was called the son of God (2 Samuel 7:14), and the nation of Israel was thought of as the son of God (Hosea 11:1). Being the son of God normally meant being the human intermediary for God on earth. The son of God stood in a special relationship with God, as the one God had chosen to do his will. In Mark, Jesus is the son of God because he is the one God has appointed as the Messiah, who is to die on the cross to bring about atonement as a human sacrifice. But there is not word one in this Gospel about Jesus actually being God.

  Whereas the earliest Christians appear to have thought that Jesus became God’s son at his resurrection (and also the Messiah and the Lord), as put forth in the speeches in Acts, others eventually came to think that he was already God’s son at his baptism.

  The progression of this idea does not stop there, however. Some years after Mark was written, the Gospel of Luke appeared; now Jesus is not merely the Son of God at the resurrection or starting with his baptism; he is the son of God for his entire life. And so, in Luke, unlike in Mark, we have an account of Jesus being born of a virgin. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Luke understands that it is at the point of his conception that Jesus becomes the son of God—literally, God impregnates Mary through his Spirit. Mary learns this from the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation:

  The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born from you will be holy; he will be called the Son of God. (Luke 1:35)

  The “therefore” is very important in this sentence (one should always ask, what is the “therefore” there for?). It is because Mary conceives through the Holy Spirit of God that Jesus can be called the Son of God. This is the moment in which Christ comes into existence for Luke. He is the Son of God because God is literally his Father. As a result, he is the Son of God not only after the resurrection or for his public ministry but for his entire life.

  The last of our Gospels to be written, John, pushes the Son-of-God-ship of Jesus back even further, into eternity past. John is our only Gospel that actually speaks of Jesus as divine. For John, Christ is not the Son of God because God raised him from the dead, adopted him at the baptism, or impregnated his mother: he is the Son of God because he existed with God in the very beginning, before the creation of the world, as the Word of God, before coming into this world as a human being (becoming “incarnate”).

  And so we have the exalted words of the opening of John’s Gospel (John 1:1–14):

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.

  This is the view that became the standard Christian doctrine, that Christ was the preexistent Word of God who became flesh. He both was with God in the beginning and was God, and it was through him that the universe was created. But this was not the original view held by the followers of Jesus. The idea that Jesus was divine was a later Christian invention, one found, among our Gospels, only in John.

  The Divinity of Christ in John’s Community

  What led Christians to develop this view? The Gospel of John does not represent the view of one person, the unknown author of the Gospel, but rather a view that the author inherited through his oral tradition, just as the other Gospel writers record the traditions that they had heard, traditions in circulation in Christian circles for decades before they were written down. John’s tradition is obviously unique, however, since in none of the other Gospels do we have such an exalted view of Christ. Where did this tradition come from?

  Scholars have long puzzled over this question, and a kind of consensus has emerged among interpreters of the Gospel of John over the past twenty-five or thirty years. This is a view that was developed by two giants of New Testament interpretation at the end of the twentieth century, one a Protestant and the other a Roman Catholic, both of them teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York. J. Louis Martyn and Raymond Brown both argued that the exalted Christology in John’s Gospel derives from changes in the understanding of Christ that occurred within John’s Christian community, prior to his writing his Gospel. These changes were affected by the social experiences of the community.7

  The theory behind this view is that every community—whether a family unit, a close-knit town, a fraternity or sorority, a civic organization, or a church—has traditions that it tells about itself in order to help constitute itself as a community. Communities have stories in common. And the way it tells its stories is related to the things that happen to it as a community.

  Take a simple example. Suppose that in your family there was one real troublemaker, your younger brother. He was always getting into trouble and making mischief. Twenty years later, when you tell the stories of what he was like as a kid, the stories are always molded by what happened afterward. Suppose Tommy grew up to be a successful investment banker, the pride and joy of the family. When you tell the stories about him as a young brat, it is always with a smile on your face—“Ah, Tommy. He was always in trouble, that kid. You remember that time…?” But suppose things turned out differently. What if Tommy grew up to be an ax murderer? Now you might tell the very same stories very differently, with tears in your eyes. “Tommy, Tommy. We never could control that kid; he was always trouble. You remember that time…?”

  The way you tell your community’s traditions reflects the events that have happened in the meantime. Suppose you have a set of traditions from a certain community that are told a certain way, but you don’t have any other access to what happened in that community historically? In theory you could take the way they tell their stories and work backward to figure out what has happened to lead them to tell the stories the way they do. That’s what Louis Martin and Raymond Brown did with the traditions in the Gospel of John. They reconstructed the history of John’s community as a way of explaining why they told the stories about Jesus as they did.

  What is striking in John is that some of the stories about Jesus, such as the one in the very opening passage (1:1–18), have a highly exalted view of him as divine (called a “high Christology”), and other passages speak of Christ in very human terms, not at all as divine but rather as a human being chosen by God to fulfill his purposes on earth (a “low Christology”; see, for example, John 1:35–52). Why do you have both of these views in the Gospel of John? You might think it is because John understands Jesus as both human and divine. But what is striking is that some passages speak of Jesus one way, and others speak of him in the other way. Martyn and Brown argued that the passages that speak of Jesus in human terms (the low Christology) were the oldest traditions embodied in the Gospel, and the passages that speak of Jesus in exalted terms (the high Christology) were ones that developed later, as experiences in the community led the Johannine Christians to start thinking of Jesus as someone who was not of this world but of the world of God.

  There isn’t space to go into all the details here, but I can say that Martyn and Brown showed what these experiences were. John’s community appears to have started out as a Jewish sect within the Jewish synagogue that accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Because of this belief they were eventually forced to leave the synagogue, and they started their own community as believers in Jesus. But they had to explain this to themselves: Why have we been rejected? Why do our families and friends not see the truth about Jesus? Why don’t they understand him?

  Drawing on their knowledge of how new communities are formed, Martyn and Brown argued that this new community came to believe that it alone had the truth and that the others could not see it. Why? Because this truth came from heaven, and those outside the community were thinking onl
y in earthly terms. Jesus, who was the truth, himself came from heaven, and since those who stand in error are earthly they cannot recognize the one who comes from above. Only John’s community has the truth. The others are in error. Only John’s community stands in the light. The others live in darkness. Only John’s community recognizes the one who comes from above. The others can see only what happens here below.

  The community started thinking of Jesus in more exalted terms to explain their own rejection by the synagogue. They began to argue that to be right with God, one needed to accept this one who had come from God. One needed to have a new birth, a birth “from above.” Those outside the community were dead and would never have life. They were not the children of God; they were the children of the Devil.

  As the community developed its views, Jesus became more and more exalted. Eventually, when the Gospel was written, the author incorporated a range of traditions that had been in circulation among them, both those that were their original views, in which Jesus was fully human, and those that came later, in which he was himself divine. And thus there developed the view that Jesus was God.

  Other Paths to the Same Destination

  The path that John’s community took to arrive at the view that Jesus was divine was not the same as other communities who arrived at the same place. Here I can give only a very brief sense of how it might have worked in one community or another.

  As we have seen, early on there were traditions about Jesus that referred to him as the Son of God. This idea would mean different things to different groups. Some Jews who came to believe in him would have thought that like King David and some other great men of God, Jesus was intimately related to God; he was the man through whom God worked and who mediated his will on earth. But what would the same idea mean to pagans who converted to believe in Jesus? In pagan mythologies there were lots of people thought to be sons of God. These people were believed to be half human and half divine because they had one mortal parent and one immortal one. These groups would make comparisons between Jesus and their pagan traditions. Examples include the Greek demigod Heracles (the Roman Hercules; compare Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth). These semidivine figures were often thought capable of great miracles (compare the Gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry), and at the end of their lives they went to live with the gods in heaven (compare the story of Jesus’ ascension). Anyone who came into the Christian faith with this understanding of what it meant to be the son of God could easily have thought of Jesus as a semidivine being, not like the traditional “Jewish” son of God, who was completely human.

  Another path to seeing Jesus’ divinity starts not with the idea of Jesus as the Son of God but with Jesus as the Son of Man. Jesus himself spoke of the coming of the Son of Man, a cosmic judge of the earth who would bring judgment in his wake, based on his understanding of Daniel 7:13–14. Once his followers came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, however, they thought that he himself would be the one who would come from heaven to sit in judgment on the earth. This is Paul’s view, expressed in 1 Thessalonians 4–5. Paul was writing to gentiles, not to Jews, and so he does not use the title Son of Man. But that is how he understood Jesus: as the future judge to come from heaven. If the Son of Man was a kind of divine figure, and Jesus was the Son of Man, that makes him a divine figure who lives with God.

  Or consider a third way. During Jesus’ life his followers thought of him as their master and called him lord, as slaves called their masters, or employees called their employers. After his followers came to believe in his resurrection, however, the term “lord” took on a different connotation. God had given Jesus an exalted status. He was the ruler—not an earthly ruler but a heavenly ruler. He had been made “the Lord.” Soon Christians thought that he was the Lord of all, ruling from heaven. But who could rule from heaven but a divine figure? Moreover, early Christians realized that it is God himself who is called the Lord in the Old Testament. They came to think that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status. And soon they reasoned that if he was divine, he must have existed before he appeared on earth.

  This view is already found in our earliest author, Paul, who speaks of Jesus as the one who was with God before he came into the world and who had a level of equality with God; but he chose instead to come into the world to suffer death for the sake of others, after which God exalted him again, brought him to heaven, and “gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.” In the Old Testament it is only to God that every knee shall bow (Isaiah 45:23). Now it is to Jesus as well (Philippians 2:6–11).

  The view of Jesus as divine did not develop in every early Christian community at the same time or in the same way. For centuries there continued to be some communities that did not hold to this view, such as the Ebionites. In some communities the view came into being remarkably early (evidently in Paul’s). In others there is no evidence that it happened at all (Matthew or Mark’s). In others it took several decades (John’s). But by the second and third centuries it became quite a common doctrine as these various communities exchanged views. Jesus was not simply the Jewish son of God whom God had exalted at his resurrection. He was himself God. This was one of the most enduring theological creations of the early Christian church.

  THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

  The belief in the divinity of Jesus created an obvious problem for early Christian theologians who wanted to reject the pagan notion that there are many gods, and stay within the firm monotheistic tradition of Judaism. As the Jewish Scriptures indicate,

  Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel…

  I am the first and I am the last;

  besides me there is no God. (Isaiah 44:6)

  But what were Christians holding to the divinity of Christ to think? If Christ is God and God is God, are there not two Gods?

  How Many Gods? Some of the Responses

  As is true of all the theological questions of the early Christians, there was a range of answers to this question. The Jewish-Christian Ebionites were adamant on this point: since there can be only one God, Christ is not God. For Christ to be God, there would be two Gods. To the Ebionites, Jesus is the Messiah (in Jewish circles the Messiah was never thought to be God), the man God had chosen to fulfill his will on earth by dying for sins. He was therefore special before God, adopted by God to be his son. But he was a man from first and last, not at all divine.

  The Marcionites took the opposite view: Jesus was not human at all, precisely because he was God. God cannot be a human any more than a human can be a rock. Divinity and humanity are two different things, not to be confused. But the Marcionites evidently did not think that Jesus and God the Father were two different Gods. Instead, the two different Gods were the God of the Jews, the wrathful God of the Old Testament, and the God of Jesus, the God of love and mercy. It is hard to know how Jesus related to this latter God, since none of the church fathers who quote Marcion’s writings ever spell the matter out. But in some places it appears that Jesus may have been thought of as God himself, come to earth.

  The various groups of Gnostics had no difficulty in declaring that Christ was a divine being. For them there were lots of divine beings, and Christ was one of them. The God who declared that he alone was God and “there is no other” (Isaiah 45:18) was not the true God. He was the lower, inferior divinity who created the world. Far above this jealous and ignorant divinity was the higher divine realm in which all the divine beings dwelt.

  All of these alternative approaches to the problem were eventually rejected as heretical. But how then was one to deal with the problem? If one wanted to remain monotheistic, as the protoorthodox clearly wanted to do, and yet insist on the deity of Christ, as they also wanted to do, how was it possible without compromising one view or the other?

  Two Hetero-Orthodox Solutions

  In the history of scholarship on early Christianity, orthodoxy (the “right belief”) is sometimes set against “heterodoxy” (meaning �
��a different belief”). Using this parlance, heterodoxy is the same as heresy. Of course, as noted, everyone considers themselves orthodox—everyone thinks they are right. People who think their beliefs are wrong change what they believe in order to believe the right beliefs. Or, as one wag has put it, orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy.

  As early Christianity developed there were various attempts to explain how Jesus can be divine if there is only one God. Most of these attempts, while acceptable in some times and places, eventually came to be ruled out of court. For some protoorthodox thinkers they were perfectly acceptable, for others they were heretical. So I’ve invented a term for them: “hetero-orthodox” solutions. The two best known are Patripassianism (as it was called by its opponents) and Arianism.

  Patripassianism

  From the writings of such church fathers of the second and third centuries as Hippolytus and Tertullian, we know that at one time the most popular view among Christian thinkers and church leaders was one that self-consciously and aggressively asserted the oneness of God. This view held that there was only one God and that Jesus is the incarnation of God here on earth. In other words, God the Father and God the Son are not two separate entities. God the Son is God the Father when the latter becomes incarnate.

  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.