Home > Work > How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
61 " The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret “knowledge” (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home. "
― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
62 " If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. "
63 " Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings. Here, unlike in Paul’s writings ... the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed. "
64 " It is because in John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips. "
65 " One authoritative account is given by the psychologist Richard Bentall in an article titled “Hallucinatory Experiences.”15 Bentall says that the first real attempt to see whether it was possible for people to have nonveridical visions without suffering from physical or mental illness came at the end of the nineteenth century. A man named H. A. Sidgewick interviewed 7,717 men and 7,599 women and found that 7.8 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women reported having had at least one vivid hallucinatory experience. The most common vision was of a living person who was not present at the time. A number of the visions involved religious or supernatural content. The most common visions were reported by people who were twenty to twenty-nine years old. "
66 " the attack "
67 " The view, that Christ was not by nature divine but was adopted to be God’s son, emerged not out of Jewish Christianity, but from purely gentile stock. This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder, a shoemaker, who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus. Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists. "
68 " It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship. "
69 " WE HAVE SEEN THAT those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’s own apostles .. Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century—but still during the times of the New Testament. "
70 " the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. "
71 " Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel. "
72 " we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement. "
73 " It will become clear in the following chapters that 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 an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development. "
74 " Lord created me at the beginning of his work, The first of his acts of long ago. "
75 " The earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a “skeptical” view or a “secular” view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.) "
76 " I was daily his delight, Rejoicing before him always, Rejoicing in his inhabited world And delighting in the human race. "
77 " whoever finds me finds life, And obtains favor from the Lord; But those who miss me injure themselves; All who hate me love death. "
78 " Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine); "
79 " But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals. "
80 " The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did. "