How God Became Jesus: A Book Reflection

As many of you know, both Husband and I are quite interested in Christian apologetics. One individual commonly brought up as a counter-Christian resource in apologetic debates and discussions is Christian-turned-agnostic Bart Ehrman. He wrote a popular-level book about when and what level of Christology emerged in the 0th generation of Christianity: How Jesus Became God. So, several Christian scholars collaborated to publish another popular-level book engaging with the strengths and weaknesses of Ehrman's book: How God Became Jesus. Let's explore the second book this week! As a reminder, here's the general outline of this post: I will . . .

1. Contextualize the author's writings as a whole (bibliography)
2. Bring the author's major ideas to the present day
3. Comment on major sections of the book, or important chapters, depending on organization

Bibliographies

Given that this is the first book reflection I've done on an edited, multi-author book, the bibliography section will be rather long. I've presented brief contributor descriptions and solo-authored books from each of these distinguished biblical scholars.

Michael Bird

Bird, the editor of this book and greatest contributor by number of chapters, is an Australian Anglican priest converted from atheism. He is fond of creative turns of phrase and analogies within titles of books and the books themselves that he writes. Here's a partial list of his works from Goodreads.

• Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible. I've read this one; it would be helpful for newer Christians and American evangelicals in particular.
• Bourgeois Babes, Bossy Wives, and Bobby Haircuts: A Case for Gender Equality in Ministry. This showcases his propensity for turns of phrase!
• Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction
• What Christians Ought to Believe: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine Through the Apostles' Creed
• Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message
• The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus
• Religious Freedom in a Secular Age: A Christian Case for Liberty, Equality, and Secular Government
• Romans (The Story of God Bible Commentary)
• Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology. This may be aimed at Ehrman or colleagues who agree with him, based on topics discussed in the book walk-through below.
• Jesus is the Christ: The Messianic Testimony of the Gospels
• Are You the One Who Is to Come?: The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question
• An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans
• A Bird's-Eye View of Paul
• Jesus Among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World
• Crossing Over Sea and Land: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period

Craig Evans

Evans, an academic biblical scholar whose interests include Christian apologetics to Muslims and explaining/evaluating archaeological evidence about first-century Judaism and Christianity, has a list of books on his personal website.

• What Grace Is: Meditations on the Mercy of Our God
• Jesus and the Manuscripts
• Jesus and the Remains of His Day: Studies in Jesus and the Evidence of Material Culture
  
• God Speaks: What He Says. What He Means.
• From Jesus to the Church: The First Christian Generation
• Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence
• Matthew: New Cambridge Bible Commentary
• The Holman QuickSource Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels
• Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies: A Guide to the Background Literature
• From Prophecy to Testament: The Function of the Old Testament in the New
• Jesus and the Ossuaries: What Jewish Burial Practices Reveal about the Beginning of Christianity
• Jesus and His Contemporaries: Comparative Studies
• Word Biblical Commentary Vol. 34b, Mark 8:27-16:20
• Word and Glory: On the Exegetical and Theological Background of John's Prologue
• Luke: New International Bible Commentary

Simon Gathercole

Gathercole, a New Testament scholar at the University of Cambridge, is interested in classics and New Testament interpretation. The book list here is from Goodreads and Cambridge.

• The Gospel of Thomas: Introduction and Commentary
• Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul
• The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Sources
• The Pre-existent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark and Luke
• Where is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul's Response in Romans 1-5

Charles Hill

Hill, professor emeritus at Reformed Theological Seminary, also wrote several books focused on New Testament and early church topics. Book list is from Goodreads.

• Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity
• The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church
• From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp: Identifying Irenaeus' Apostle Presbyter and the Author of Ad Diognetum
• The First Chapters: Dividing the Text of Scripture in Codex Vaticanus and its Predecessors
• The Return of Jesus Christ: God's Plan
• Who Chose the Gospels?

Chris Tilling

Finally, Tilling, who contributed a single chapter, works at St. Mellitus College. He tends to co-author, edit, and focus on articles more than on books. His solo-authored book, via Goodreads, is

• Paul's Divine Christology

Major Ideas

When we look at the works of all these authors together, we see several themes emerging. These themes include history, orthodoxy, Christology, and evidence. Due to the length of the rest of this post, I'll provide only a brief summary of each idea here.

History

As some history books will tell you, there are several possible ways to define history and a related discipline, historiography. Per Britannica, there are many possible sub-disciplines to the study of the past as gathered from presuppositions, worldview/horizon, physical evidence (artifacts, writings, memories) available, and critical thinking skills. The key here is that everyone has a worldview; therefore, everyone has some sort of bias(es). Bias, however, is not automatically bad.

Orthodoxy

I refer here to definition 1 from Britannica. Religiously, orthodoxy (right/correct patterns of thought and doctrine) is differentiated from heterodoxy (incorrect but not necessarily contradictory to orthodoxy) and heresy (incorrect and contradictory to orthodoxy). A Christian worldview, like any other worldview, needs to be coherent--all its parts need to fit together logically and realistically; introducing heterodox or heretical elements can make the individual feel better but also introduce incoherence to the worldview.

Christology

Simply put, this is the study of Jesus Christ. Common questions answered in various ways by various christologies include (1) whether Jesus saw Himself as divine, (2) whether He was not divine at any time, (3) how the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ are related/interact, and (4) what Jesus did and will do. "High Christology" generally refers to the focus on the divine nature of Jesus Christ--and when Christians started thinking of Him in this way. "Low Christology" generally refers to the primary focus on the human nature of Jesus Christ--and when Christians started thinking about Him in terms of a divine nature.

Evidence

A bedrock for many beliefs and (hopefully) all academic disciplines is evidence of one or another type. Physical/material objects, testimony from eyewitnesses, ancient writings, and patterns of reasoning can constitute evidence. For the purposes of the book under review today, evidence includes manuscripts from the centuries around the New Testament autographs and archaeological finds (or lack thereof).

Book Walk-Through

While there are not sections in How God Became Jesus per se, chapters are organized thematically by each co-author's expertise, tackling various chapters in Ehrman's book.

Licona: Christology, Vocabulary, Divinity

Michael, ever the colorful writer, tackles 4 chapters of the book. Let's go chapter by chapter, claim by claim.

Chapter 1 (The Story of Jesus as the Story of God) centers on high Christology. Ehrman claims that high Christology developed some time after the birth of Christianity. Scholars who disagree (the "Early High Christology Club)": heavyweights Martin Hengel, Richard Bauckham, and Larry Hurtado. Evidence for early high Christology comes from areas such as missionary journeys, devotional habits of early Christians, and Jewish monotheism. Second, Ehrman ignores Bauckham's scholarship on Jewish monotheism entirely. Consequently, he claims that Jesus wasn't "God" until after His death (likely at Nicea in 300s AD); this requires assuming a more relaxed ancient monotheism than was actually the case. I appreciate the quote on page 21 "Not everything Ehrman says is wrong. Much we accept, and other scholars may side with him on issues here and there. However, our overall verdict is that Ehrman has not extended or enhanced our knowledge of Christian origins."

Chapter 2 (Of Gods, Angels, and Men) addresses how Jews and Christians conceptualized what "divine" meant. Ehrman claims that the concept of "god" was nebulous in the ancient world and draws possibly inappropriate parallels ("paralelomania" per Samuel Sandmel). Contrary to the "nebulous" claim, strict monotheism was in fact present in first-century Judaism, which also prohibited worship of any intermediary/angel no matter how high. Christian sources, including Revelation, also draw a firm line between Jesus and angels.

Bird explains his reaction to the parallelomania in more detail on pages 25-26:

"We must also remember thatt analogy does not mean genealogy . . . [A] good account of Christian origins will give equal attention to both its similarities and its differences with other literature . . . [We] should not use the various similarities as a reason to skim over the hard job of understanding Christian claims about Jesus, on their own terms, in their own context, and with a mind to determining their distinctive shape."

In chapter 3 (Did Jesus Think He was God?), Ehrman is reported as answering in the negative. However, he has methodological problems including careless use of manuscripts he claims are riddled with errors; and selective use of criteria for historical reliability. Bird: yes, Jesus did think He was God. How would it have been said in the first-century Jewish world? This question is very poorly understood by a lot of contemporary scholars, not to mention Muslims.

In chapter 10 (Concluding Thoughts), my biggest takeaway is Bird's summary on page 205:

"But is [Jesus as God] really a silly belief? I believe it is not. It seems to me that Jesus spoke and acted in such a way as to be claiming that he spoke and acted with, for, and as Israel's God."

Evans: Burying the Burial Evidence

In chapter 4 (Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right), Craig notes a few of Ehrman's more problematic claims: (1) crucified criminals were normally not buried, and (2) mention of an empty tomb is quite necessary in order to support the historicity of the Resurrection. Suffice it to say, contrary evidences and claims supportable by historical document include

1. Crucified criminals were normally buried; Roman governors could give bodies to the families and friends of the deceased to carry out their burial traditions. Ossuaries (where bones were placed a year after death) testify that burial did occur of the bodies where from the bones were eventually extracted. Pilate, being a mediocre administrator, may have been more prone than average to release bodies to family/friends.
2. Resurrection implies that there is no more body in a tomb. For first-century Jews, "resurrection" necessarily meant bodily raising of the corpse to life. Thus, no creed or post-Gospel text needs to mention an empty tomb in order to support that the Resurrection happened.

Gathercole: Preliterary Formulae = Preexistent Christ

In chapter 5 (What Did the First Christians Think about Jesus?), Simon Gathercole addresses the question of evidence for the full divinity and eternal preexistence of Jesus. Ehrman claims two heterodox Christologies: exaltationist and adoptionist. His sub-claims to support this include (1) Matthew and Luke not implying Jesus' preexistence, (2) Jesus being portrayed as sort-of-divine rather than fully divine in the Synoptics. Proof texts include the preliterary formulae (sayings based on oral traditions from the AD 30-50 time frame) of Romans 1:3-4, Acts 13:32-33, and Acts 2:36.

Gathercole notes against sub-claim #1 that the numerous verses using the words "I have come" in Jesus' mouth do imply that He preexisted--He had to "come" from somewhere before His earthly ministry. Against sub-claim #2, other authors in the book do address the actual first-century Jewish view of divinity (i.e., no degrees). Regarding the proof texts, Gathercole agrees that they reinforce adoptionist Christology only if they are interpreted poorly and contrary to good scholarly principles and precedent.

Hill: Paradox and Orthodox

I didn't take too many notes on chapters 8 (An Exclusive Religion: Orthodoxy and Heresy, Inclusion and Exclusion) and 9 (Paradox Pushers and Persecutors?). Hill notes that Ehrman must disobey his own history-method rules in order to claim that ante-Nicene Fathers were both innovating doctrine and hunting heretics. Ehrman additionally claims that paradoxes in Scripture can't be resolved.

Tilling: Big Words, Big Problems

In chapter 6 (Problems with Ehrman's Interpretive Categories), Chris notes--quite importantly, contra what one hears from fundamentalists on all sides--that Ehrman does have much to teach Christians, so it is important not to reject his work wholesale. He does point out the following problems with Ehrman's interpretive categories, analogical to "bad ways of explaining" how to play a game, do a task, etc.:

• Galatians 4:14 is not, in fact, central to interpretation of Christology.
• "Divine" must be defined much more narrowly than Ehrman does, in order to be useful.
• The Shema is, in fact, a key text to help us understand monotheism and faith in God, despite the fact that Ehrman manages not to examine the text at all across several chapters on the topics.
• 1 Thessalonians, whenever it was written, should be used in study of and arguments about Christology, despite the fact that Ehrman doesn't use it at all.

In chapter 7 (Misreading Paul's Christology: Problems with Ehrman's Exegesis), Tilling addresses how Ehrman looks at Pauline epistles. Page 135 summarizes his position: "I choose my words carefully here: Ehrman has botched his reading of Paul so entirely that his whole project collapses." To set matters straight, Tilling notes that appropriate characteristics for analyzing Paul's Christology: (1) monotheism in both Judaism and Christianity, (2) two senses (Jewish and Greek) of "knowing" as Paul refers to epistemology, and (3) "Christ" language including application of YHWH texts to Jesus.

I hope you found something to enjoy and think about in this post! Feel free to share and discuss in the comments.