Book review by
Kevin Baldeosingh
It’s an old theological debate: was Jesus the same as God or a separate being who had god-like powers? And, of course, there are the educated or non-Christian persons who believe Jesus was just a religious leader with no supernatural powers (and, in the past decade or so, a more vocal minority who believe he didn’t even exist).
Bart Ehrman is probably the world’s best-known Bible expert, thanks to the many popular books on Biblical exegesis he has written.
Ehrman started his career as a fundamentalist Christian who thought the Bible was the inerrant word of God but, by the time he became a PhD in Religion (a real PhD, meaning he had to be able to read Biblical documents in their original languages, not buy his degree from a Christian “university”) he had changed his views.
“I started out thinking of Jesus as God the Son, equal with the Father, a member of the Trinity,’ he writes; “but over time, I began to see him in ‘lower and lower’ terms, until finally I came to think of him as a human being who was not different in nature from any other human being...As an agnostic, I now think of Jesus as a true religious genius with brilliant insights.”
Ehrman argues that the question of how Jesus came to be seen as God is separate from any question as to whether he was really the son of God or not, since the issue he is dealing with is a matter of history.
This argument is somewhat disingenuous, however, since most Christians see Jesus as a divine being who, if not actually God, was certainly a demi-god.
Ehrman, however, notes that the Bible itself is equivocal on this issue.
“How did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as a divine being? I will argue that he did not,” Ehrman writes, adding, “Jesus is hardly ever, if at all, explicitly called God in the New Testament...the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were found only in the Gospel of John, the last and most theologically loaded of the four Gospels.
“If Jesus really went around calling himself God, wouldn’t the other Gospels at least mention the fact?”
The central question Ehrman tackles is why Jesus’s early followers started considering him to be God.
He notes that “numerous people in antiquity, among both pagans and Jews, were thought to have been both human and divine.”
Ehrman suggests that Jesus’s followers may have misunderstood what Jesus meant when he called himself a messiah, since Jesus may have meant that he would be king of Israel whereas his followers thought he meant he was the last prophet of God.
Ehrman adds: “The stories of Jesus’s resurrection were expanded, embellished, modified and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years.”
This is why the earliest Bible documents (which were themselves written hundreds of years after Jesus’s purported death) do not refer to Jesus as a god, whereas later ones do.
Thus, what historical evidence there is cannot fully explain how Jesus came to be seen as divine.
“Faith is not historical knowledge and historical knowledge is not faith,” he concludes.
BOOK INFO
How Jesus became God by Bart D Ehrman
Publisher: HarperOne, 2015.
ISBN- 10-0061778192;
416 pages