How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 6

The Beginning of Christology

Christ as Exalted to Heaven

WHEN I BECAME SERIOUS about my Christian faith in high school, my social life was rather profoundly affected. Not right away, but eventually. My first serious relationship was with a girl named Lynn, whom I started to date as a sophomore, the year before I became born again. Lynn was a wonderful human being: intelligent, attractive, funny, caring. She was also Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before, and I don’t recall that our respective religions had much, if any, bearing on our relationship. I was an altar boy at the Episcopal church every Sunday, and she went to synagogue on Saturday. Or at least I assume she did; looking back, I don’t remember whether her family was religious in any traditional sense of the word—attending services or even keeping Jewish holidays. I suppose they were rather secular Jews. Frankly, at the time, when it came to a girlfriend, I had other things on my mind than alternative worship practices.

Lynn was one of three daughters living with a single mom. They were like my family, somewhere in the middle to upper middle class, with many of the same values and outlooks on life as mine. Lynn and I had terrifically good chemistry and ended up spending a lot of time together, as we got increasingly serious throughout that sophomore year. But then disaster struck. (I had a very limited understanding of the possibilities of disaster at the time.) Lynn’s mom was offered a better job in Topeka, Kansas, and they were going to move there from Lawrence. Her mom and I had always gotten along extremely well, but she was firm: even though the towns were only about twenty-five miles apart, this move should mark the end of our “going together” (as we called it back then). We should meet other people and have normal social lives. And so we did. I was heartbroken, but life must go on.

Soon after that, I was born again. Lynn and I still talked on the phone—and even saw each other on occasion. I vividly remember one conversation we had after I had “received Christ.” I was trying to persuade her that she too should ask Jesus into her heart. She was understandably confused—in no small part because I myself had no clue what I was talking about. After a long talk in which I tried to explain it all in my amateurish way, she finally asked, “But if I already have God in my life, why do I need Jesus?” It was a stunner of a question for me. I was completely flummoxed. I was clearly not a good bet for a career in theology.

Lynn’s question would not have flummoxed the earliest Christians. Quite the contrary, the first followers of Jesus had very clear ideas about who Jesus was and why he mattered. A look at the historical record shows that they not only talked about him all the time, they came up with increasingly exalted things to say about him and magnified his importance more and more with the passing of time. Eventually, they came to claim that he was God come to earth.

But what did the earliest Christians say about him right after they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead? In this chapter I explore the earliest Christologies—understandings of Christ—of the earliest Christians.

The Beliefs of the Earliest Christians

FOR THE PURPOSES OF this discussion, I am using the term Christian in its most basic sense, as referring to anyone who, after Jesus’s life, came to believe that he was the Christ of God and was determined both to accept the salvation he brought and to follow him. I do not think that “Christian” is an appropriate term for Jesus’s followers before his death; but used in the way I’ve just described makes good sense for those who came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and thought of him as one who was specially chosen by God to bring about salvation.

The first who came to this belief were his own remaining disciples—or at least some of them—and possibly others of his followers from Galilee, including Mary Magdalene and some other women. As it turns out, it is extremely difficult to know what these people believed as soon as they accepted the idea that Jesus had been raised from the dead, in no small measure because we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement.

Our Oldest Surviving Christian Sources

The first Christian author we have is the Apostle Paul, whose earliest surviving writing is probably 1 Thessalonians, written possibly around 49 or 50 CE—fully twenty years after Jesus had been crucified. Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement. Two years or so after Jesus’s death, say 32 or 33 CE, when Paul first heard of Jews who believed Jesus to be the messiah—a crucified man!—he rejected their views with vehemence and set about persecuting them. But then in one of the great turnarounds in religious history—arguably the most significant conversion on record—Paul changed from being an aggressive persecutor of the Christians to being one of their strongest proponents. He eventually became a leading spokesperson, missionary, and theologian for the fledgling Christian movement. He later claimed that this was because he had had a vision of Jesus alive, long after his death, and concluded that God must have raised him from the dead.

Paul believed he was personally called by God to engage in missionary activities among the gentiles, persuading these “pagans” that their own gods were dead, lifeless, and of no use, but that the God of Jesus was the one who had created the world and entered history in order to redeem it. Only belief in the messiah could put a person into a right standing before God, because the messiah had died for the sins of others, and God, in order to show that this death did indeed bring atonement, had raised him from the dead. Arguably, Paul’s greatest contribution to the theology of his day was his hard-fought view that this salvation in Christ applied to all people, Jew and gentile alike, on the same grounds: faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Being Jewish had nothing to do with it. To be sure, Jews were the “chosen people,” and the Jewish scriptures were a revelation from God. But a gentile did not have to become a Jew in order to have salvation through the death and resurrection of the messiah. For Paul, salvation certainly had come “from the Jews,” since Jesus was, after all, the Jewish messiah; but once this salvation had come to the world, it was good for the entire world, not just for Jews. It was the means of salvation that God had planned from eternity for all people.

As a Christian missionary Paul traveled from one urban center to another preaching this message, and he established churches in various parts of the Mediterranean, especially in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Macedonia, and Achaia (modern Greece). After he started a Christian community and got it on its feet, he would head to another city and start a community there as well, and then move on again. As he heard news from one community or another of the problems they were having, he wrote back to them to instruct them further about what they should believe and how they should behave. The letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament are some of these communications. As I have indicated, 1 Thessalonians was probably the first. The others were all written over the course of the next decade, in the 50s. Of the thirteen letters that are under Paul’s name in the New Testament, critical scholars are reasonably sure that Paul actually wrote seven of them—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon (the others were written by later followers of Paul in different contexts); these are called the undisputed Pauline letters, since almost no one disputes that Paul was their author.¹ These are our earliest surviving writings from an early Christian.

The Pauline letters are extremely valuable for knowing what Paul thought and for seeing what was happening in the Christianity of his day. But what if we want to know not simply what was happening in Paul’s churches in, say, 55 CE, twenty-five years after Jesus’s death, or how Matthew’s community was understanding Jesus around 85 CE, some fifty-five years after Jesus’s death? What if we want to know what the very earliest Christians believed, say, in the year 31 or 32, a year or two after Jesus died?

This is obviously a big problem, since, as I have said, we don’t have any writings from that time. And the one New Testament writing that allegedly records what was happening at the earliest period in Christian history—the book of Acts—was written around 80–85 CE, again, fifty or fifty-five years after the time we are for now most interested in. Moreover, the author of Acts, whom we continue to call Luke, did what all historians of his day did: he told his story in light of his own beliefs, understandings, and perspectives, and these affected how he recounted his material, much of which he no doubt inherited from storytellers among the Christians who had long been recounting—and therefore changing and embellishing—the stories of the early years of the faith.

Given this state of affairs with our sources, how can we get to the earliest forms of Christian belief, before the time of our oldest surviving writings? As it turns out, there is a way. And it involves passages of a sort I mentioned earlier: preliterary traditions.

Detecting Sources “Behind” Our Sources: Preliterary Traditions

The first Ph.D. seminar I took in my graduate program was called “Creeds and Hymns in the New Testament.” The professor was named Paul Meyer. He was an erudite and deeply learned New Testament scholar, respected by all the leading scholars of the day for the astonishing care he took when engaging in exegesis and, as a result, for his unusually penetrating insights into the text of the New Testament.

The idea behind the course was that some passages in the New Testament—especially in some of the epistles and in Acts—are remnants of much older traditions from the early decades of the Christian movement. For the sake of this class, we called these preliterary traditions hymns and creeds (recall: preliterary means that the traditions were formulated and transmitted orally before they were written down by the authors whose works we still have). Scholars had long supposed that some of these traditions had been sung during very early Christian worship services (hymns) and others of them were statements of faith (creeds) that had been recited in liturgical settings—for example, at a person’s baptism or during a weekly worship service.

The value of being able to isolate preliterary traditions is that they give us access to what Christians were believing and how they were extolling God and Christ before our earliest surviving writings. Some of these preliterary traditions can plausibly be located to a time within a decade or less after Jesus’s followers first came to believe he had been raised from the dead.

It is not easy to detect places where preliterary traditions survive in the New Testament writings, but as a rule there are several indicators. Not every creed or hymn (or poem) has all of these features, but the clearest such traditions have most of them. First, these traditions tend to be self-contained units—meaning that you can remove them from the literary context we now find them in and they still make sense, standing by themselves. These traditions are often highly structured in a literary sense; for example, they may have poetic-like stanzas and various lines that correspond in meaning to other lines. In other words, these traditions can be highly stylized. Moreover, one often finds that the words and phrases of these traditions are not favored, or used at all, by the author within whose works they are embedded (showing that he probably did not compose them). Even more striking, these preliterary traditions not infrequently express theological views that differ in lesser or greater ways from those found in the rest of an author’s writing. You can see how these features suggest that the tradition did not originate in the writings of the author: the style, vocabulary, and ideas are different from what you find elsewhere in his work. Moreover, in some cases the unit that has been identified in these ways does not fit very well in the literary context where it is now found—it looks like it has been transplanted there. Often, if you take the unit out of its context and then read the context without it, the piece of writing makes sense and flows perfectly well, as if nothing were missing.

In Chapter 4 we examined one piece of preliterary tradition: 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. These verses meet several of the criteria I have laid out, as we have seen: they form a tightly structured creed in two parts, each part containing four lines that correspond in meaning with one another (between the first and second parts), and they contain certain key words not found elsewhere in Paul’s letters. Paul is almost certainly quoting an earlier creed.

There are other such preliterary traditions in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts. What is striking is that a number of them embody Christological views that are not exactly those of Paul himself, or of the author of Acts. In the judgment of a wide range of biblical scholars, these views are quite ancient.² In fact, they may represent the oldest views of the very earliest Christians, views first reached when the followers of Jesus came to believe he had been raised from the dead. These particular preliterary traditions are consistent in their view: Christ is said to have been exalted to heaven at his resurrection and to have been made the Son of God at that stage of his existence. In this view, Jesus was not the Son of God who was sent from heaven to earth; he was the human who was exalted at the end of his earthly life to become the Son of God and was made, then and there, into a divine being.

The Exaltation of Jesus

WE FIND THIS VIEW of Christ in what is arguably the oldest fragment of a creed in all of Paul’s letters, as well as in several of the speeches of Acts.

Romans 1:3–4

Romans 1:3–4 appears to contain a pre-Pauline creed at the beginning of what is Paul’s longest and perhaps most important letter. I have said that Paul’s letters are, as a rule, written to churches he had established in order to help them deal with the various problems that had arisen in his absence. The one exception is the letter to the Romans. In this letter Paul indicates not only that he was not the founder of this Christian community, but that he has never yet even visited Rome. His plan is to visit it now. Paul wants to engage in a Christian mission farther to the west—all the way to Spain, which for most people living in the Mediterranean world was the “end of the earth.” Paul was one ambitious fellow. He believed God had called him to spread the gospel to all lands, and so naturally he had to go as far as was humanly possible. And that was Spain.

But he needed support for his mission, and the church in Rome was an obvious place to get it. This was a large church, located in the capital city of the empire. It could serve as a gateway to the West. We don’t know who started the church or when. Later tradition said that it was founded by the disciple Peter (allegedly the first bishop there, hence the first “pope”), but this seems unlikely: Paul’s letter provides us with the first surviving evidence for the fact that a church existed in Rome at all, and in it he greets the various people he knows there. But he never mentions Peter. This is hard to imagine if Peter was there—especially if he was the leader of that church.

Paul is writing the letter to the Romans in order to drum up support for his mission. The reason he needs to write such a long communication to accomplish this end becomes clear in the course of the letter itself. The Christians in Rome do not know fully, or accurately, what Paul’s mission is all about. In fact, they seem to have heard some rather unsettling things about Paul’s views. Paul is writing the letter to set the matter straight. So his purpose is to explain as fully and clearly as he can what it is that he preaches as his gospel. This is why the letter is so valuable to us today. It is not simply addressing this or that problem that had arisen in one of Paul’s churches. It is meant to be a clear expression of the fundamental elements of Paul’s gospel message, in his attempt to clear up any misunderstandings among Christians who were somewhat distrustful of his views.

In any situation like that, it is important for a lengthy communication to get off on the right foot. And so the beginning of Paul’s letter is significant:

¹Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, ²which he announced in advance through his prophets in the holy scriptures, ³concerning his Son, who was descended from the seed of David according to the flesh, ⁴who was appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

As in all of Paul’s letters, he begins by introducing himself by name and saying something about who he is: the slave and apostle of Christ who is committed to the gospel. Paul may be saying this because he had opponents who charged him with being a self-centered, self-aggrandizing, false apostle. But in fact, he is enslaved to Christ and is completely committed to spreading his gospel. This gospel, he tells us, is a fulfillment of what was proclaimed in the Jewish scriptures. As will be seen through the rest of this letter, this is a key claim precisely because Paul’s opponents had charged him with preaching an anti-Jewish gospel. Paul insisted that gentiles could be made right with God without being Jews. But doesn’t that undercut the privileges of the Jews as God’s chosen people and deprive the gospel of its Jewish roots? Not for Paul. The gospel is precisely the good news proclaimed by the Jewish prophets in the Jewish scriptures. And then Paul indicates what the gospel is all about. It is here, in vv.3–4 of this letter opening, that we have a statement of faith which scholars have long recognized as a preliterary creed that Paul is quoting.

Unlike the rest of the first chapter of Romans, these two verses are highly structured and well balanced into two thought units, in which the three statements of the first unit correspond to the three statements of the second—similar to what we saw with the creed from 1 Corinthians. Immediately before the creed Paul tells us that it is about God’s Son, and immediately afterward he says it is about “Jesus Christ our Lord.” If we set the verses between these two statements in poetic lines, they look like this:

A1 Who was descended

A2 from the seed of David

A3 according to the flesh,

B1 who was appointed

B2 Son of God in power

B3 according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

The first statement of what I have labeled unit A corresponds to the first statement of unit B: Jesus descended (from David), and Jesus was appointed (Son of God). So too the second statements of each unit: seed of David (= the human messiah), and Son of God in power (= exalted divine Son). And the third: according to the flesh, and according to the Holy Spirit. This final statement in unit B is longer than the corresponding statement in unit A because “the flesh” involves both the realm in which Jesus existed and the means by which he came to exist in it: he existed in the fleshly, earthly realm because he was born as a human. All of this is conveyed by “according to the flesh.” To make the contrast complete the author of the creed—whoever he was—needed again to address both the contrasting realm and the contrasting means by which Jesus entered it: it is the realm of the Holy Spirit, and it was entered when he was raised from the dead. Thus A3 speaks of his being made alive in this world where he was the messiah, and B3 speaks of his being brought back to life in the spiritual realm where he was made the powerful Son of God. The only phrase that does not seem needed for this correspondence of the two parts is “in power,” and scholars have widely argued that Paul added these words to the creed.³

From this creed one can see that Jesus is not simply the human messiah, and he is not simply the Son of Almighty God. He is both things, in two phases: first he is the Davidic messiah predicted in scripture, and second he is the exalted divine Son.

That this is a pre-Pauline creed that Paul is quoting has seemed clear to scholars for a long time. For one thing, as we have just seen, it is highly structured, without a word wasted, quite unlike how normal prose is typically written and unlike the other statements Paul makes in the context. Moreover, even though the passage is very short, it contains a number of words and ideas that are not found anywhere else in Paul. Nowhere else in the seven undisputed Pauline letters does Paul use the phrase “seed of David”; in fact, nowhere else does he mention that Jesus was a descendant of David (which was requisite, of course, for the earthly messiah). Nowhere else does he use the phrase “Spirit of holiness” (for the Holy Spirit). And nowhere else does he ever talk about Jesus becoming the Son of God at the resurrection. For a short two verses, those are a lot of terms and ideas that differ from Paul. This can best be explained if he is quoting an earlier tradition.

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, Jesus’s earthly messiahship as a descendant of King David is stressed. Even more striking—as I will emphasize in a moment—the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed. It is interesting as well to note—for purposes of showing that this is an existing creed that Paul is quoting—that one can remove it from its context and the context flows extremely well, as if nothing is missing (showing that it has been inserted): “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, which he announced in advance through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his son . . . Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So, Paul appears to be quoting an earlier tradition here. How early was it, and why is Paul quoting it?

In fact, the tradition appears to be one of the oldest statements of faith that survives in our earliest Christian writings. Several features of this creed make it look very ancient indeed. The first is its emphasis on the human messiahship of Jesus as the descendant of David, a view not otherwise mentioned in the writings of Paul, our earliest Christian author. As we saw in Chapter 3, there are good reasons for thinking that this was a view of Jesus that was circulating among his followers already during his lifetime: Jesus was thought to be the one who was predicted to come in fulfillment of the messianic prophecies of scripture. The earliest followers of Jesus continued to think this of him even after his death. His resurrection confirmed for them that even though he had not conquered his political enemies—the way the messiah was supposed to do—God had showered his special favor on him by raising him from the dead. So he really was the messiah. This view is stressed in the first part of the creed, as the first of the two most important things to say about him.

The second key feature is that the creed states that Christ was exalted at his resurrection. It is striking that Paul indicates this happened through the “Spirit of holiness.” Not only is this phrase never found elsewhere in Paul, it is what scholars call a Semitism. In Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers, the way an adjective-noun construction is made is different from the way it is made in other languages such as English. In these Semitic languages, this kind of construction is made by linking two nouns with the word “of.” For example, if you want to say “the right way” in a Semitic language, you say “the way of righteousness.” And instead of “Holy Spirit,” you say “Spirit of holiness.” This creed contains a clear Semitism, which makes it highly likely that it was originally formulated among Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Palestine. And this means it could represent early tradition indeed, from the early years in Palestine after Jesus’s first followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead.

In that connection, it is particularly striking how this ancient creed understands Jesus to be the Son of God. As I have repeatedly emphasized, if someone says that Jesus is God, or that he is the Son of God, or that he is divine, one needs to ask, “in what sense?” The view here is clear. Jesus was “appointed” (or “designated”) the “Son of God” when he was raised from the dead. It was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Son of God. I pointed out that Paul himself probably added the phrase “in power” to the creed, so that now Jesus is made the Son of God “in power” at the resurrection. Paul may have wanted to add this phrase because according to his own theology, Jesus was the Son of God before the resurrection, but he was exalted to an even higher state at the resurrection (as we will see more fully in the next chapter). For the original framer of this creed, however, it may not have worked this way. For him, Jesus was the messiah from the house of David during his earthly life, but at the resurrection he was made something much more than that. The resurrection was Jesus’s exaltation into divinity.

I have already asked why Paul might have felt compelled to quote this small creed at the beginning of his letter to the Romans. It is important to remember that he is writing to clarify any misunderstandings about himself or his gospel message and to introduce his views to Roman Christians who may have harbored suspicions concerning them. If this reading of the situation is right, it would make sense that Paul would quote this creed. It may have been a very old creed that was widely known in Christian circles throughout the Mediterranean. It may have been long accepted as expressing the standard belief of who Jesus is: both the earthly messiah descended from David and the heavenly Son of God exalted at his resurrection. Paul would be quoting the creed, then, precisely because it was well known and because it encapsulated so accurately the common faith Paul shared with the Christians in Rome. As it turns out, Paul’s own views were somewhat different and more sophisticated than that, but as a good Christian, he could certainly subscribe to the basic message of this creed, which affirmed that at the resurrection something significant happened to Jesus. He was exalted to a position of grandeur and power, made not just the earthly messiah, but the heavenly Son of God.

This message may have resonated particularly with the Christians living in Rome. It is important to remember that the emperor of Rome, who also lived in the city, was understood by many people throughout the empire to be the son of God—that is, the son of the divinized Caesar who preceded him. As we have seen, in the entire empire, only two known people were specifically called the “son of God.” The emperor was one of them, and Jesus was the other. This creed shows why Jesus was the one who deserved this exalted title. At his resurrection, God had made him his Son. He, not the emperor, was the one who had received divine status and so was worthy of the honor of being one raised to the side of God.

The Speeches in Acts

Several passages in the book of Acts appear to contain old, preliterary elements with Christological views very similar to the one set forth in Romans 1:3–4. Now that we know how such elements are detected, I will not analyze them as fully.

Acts 13:32–33

In Chapter 4 I pointed out that the speeches in Acts were written by the author, “Luke,” himself but that he incorporated within them earlier traditions, such as the one in 13:29 which indicated that members of the Jewish Sanhedrin had buried Jesus (rather than just one of their number, Joseph of Arimathea). One of the most remarkable of all the preliterary traditions of Acts, which records Paul explaining the significance of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, comes in the same chapter just a few verses later: “We preach the good news to you, that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled for us their children by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33).

I am not sure there is another statement about the resurrection in the entire New Testament that is quite so astounding. Let me stress at the outset that in Luke’s personal view, Jesus did not become the Son of God at the resurrection. We know this because of what he says elsewhere in his two-volume work, including a statement that I will analyze later in this chapter in which even before Jesus’s birth, at the “annunciation,” Mary, Jesus’s mother, is told that since she will be made pregnant by the Holy Spirit, “therefore” the one born of her will be called “the Son of God.” Luke himself believed that Jesus was the Son of God from his birth—or rather, his conception. But this is decidedly not what the preliterary tradition in Acts 13:32–33 says. The speaker, Paul, indicates that God had made a promise to the Jewish ancestors and that this promise has been fulfilled now to their descendants by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. He then quotes Psalm 2:7 to clarify what he means: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” If you recall, in the Hebrew Bible, this verse was originally taken to refer to the coronation day of the Jewish king, when he was anointed and therefore shown to stand under God’s special favor.⁴ “Paul,” in this speech, takes the verse not to indicate what had already happened to the king as the Son of God, but as a prophecy of what would happen to the real king, Jesus, when he was made the Son of God. The fulfillment of the psalm, Paul declares, has happened “today.” And when is that “today”? It is the day of Jesus’s resurrection. That is when God declares that he has “begotten” Jesus as his Son.

In this pre-Lukan tradition, Jesus was made the Son of God at the resurrection. This is a view Luke inherited from his tradition, and it is one that coincides closely with what we already saw in Romans 1:3–4. It appears to be the earliest form of Christian belief: that God exalted Jesus to be his Son by raising him from the dead.

Acts 2:36

We find a similar point of view expressed in an earlier speech of Acts. I might point out at this stage that one of the reasons we know that it was Luke who wrote the speeches of his main characters is that the speeches all sound very much alike: the lower-class, uneducated, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasant Peter gives a speech that sounds almost exactly like a speech by the culturally refined, highly educated, literate, Greek-speaking Paul. Why do two such different people sound so much alike? Because neither one of them is actually speaking: Luke is. To make up his speeches, he used some older materials, with preliterary traditions embedded in the speeches.

In Acts 2, on the day of Pentecost when a great miracle has happened and Peter is explaining its significance to the crowd that has gathered, he speaks of Jesus’s death and resurrection, stressing that “God raised this Jesus, of whom all of us are witnesses, as he was exalted to the right hand of God.” He goes on to say that this exaltation of Jesus was a fulfillment of the psalms, but this time, rather than quoting Psalm 2:7, he quotes Psalm 110:1, another verse we examined previously as referring to the divine character of the king of Israel: “The LORD says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Here the Lord God is speaking to his anointed one, who is also called the “Lord.” Peter in this speech is indicating that God was speaking the words to Jesus, whom he made the Lord—and the conqueror of all his enemies—by raising him from the dead.

Then he says something even more clearly about the resurrection of Jesus: “Let the entire house of Israel know with assurance that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The earliest followers of Jesus believed that the resurrection showed that God had exalted him to a position of grandeur and power. This verse is one piece of evidence. Here, in a preliterary tradition, we learn that it was precisely by raising Jesus from the dead that God had made him the messiah and the Lord. During his lifetime Jesus’s followers had thought he would be the future messiah who would reign as king in the coming kingdom of God to be brought by the Son of Man, as Jesus himself had taught them. But when they came to believe he was raised from the dead, as Acts 2:36 so clearly indicates, they concluded that he had been made the messiah already. He was already ruling as the king, in heaven, elevated to the side of God. As one who sits beside God on a throne in the heavenly realm, Jesus already is the Christ.

More than that, he is the Lord. During his lifetime Jesus’s disciples had called him “lord”—a term that could be used by a slave of a master, or by an employee of a boss, or by a student of a teacher. As it turns out, in Greek the term lord in each of these senses was the very same term as Lord used of God, as the “Lord of all.” Just as the term Christ came to take on new significance once Jesus’s followers believed he had been raised from the dead, so too did the term lord. Jesus was no longer simply the disciples’ master-teacher. He actually was ruling as Lord of the earth, because he had been exalted to this new status by God. And it happened at the resurrection. The man Jesus had been made the Lord Christ.

Acts 5:31

A similar view is set forth in yet another speech of Acts, which again incorporates a very early view of Christ as one who was exalted to a divine status at his resurrection. In Acts 5, Jewish authorities arrest Peter and the other apostles as troublemakers for their preaching in Jerusalem. But an angel miraculously allows them to escape, to the consternation of the authorities, who bring them in for further questioning. The high priest forbids them to teach in Jesus’s name any more, and Peter and the others reply that they will obey God rather than humans—meaning they will go on preaching. The apostles point out that the Jewish authorities were responsible for Jesus’s death, but “the God of our fathers raised Jesus . . . This one God exalted to his right hand as Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:30–31).

Once more, then, in an early tradition we find that Jesus’s resurrection was an “exaltation” specifically to “the right hand of God.” In other words, God had elevated Jesus to his own status and given him a prominent position as the one who would “lead” and “save” those on earth.

Luke and His Earlier Traditions

One might wonder why the author of these speeches, “Luke,” would use preliterary traditions that stood at odds with how he understood Jesus himself. As I’ve pointed out, nowhere else does Luke portray the resurrection as the time when Jesus came to be exalted to be the Son of God. Yet that’s what these verses found in the speeches in Acts indicate. One might be tempted to say that these views are found in the speeches because the speeches faithfully represent what the apostles actually said on these occasions. But, as I have already pointed out, we know from ancient historians that the normal practice of an author was to write the speeches of the main characters himself, and the similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.

In fact there is a good explanation for why Luke would want to use these preliterary traditions in his speeches: because they encapsulate so well his emphasis in these addresses to “unbelievers” that God has drastically and dramatically reversed what humans did to Jesus, showing thereby that he had a radically different evaluation of who Jesus was. Humans abused and killed Jesus; God reversed that execution by raising him from the dead. Humans mocked Jesus and held him to be the lowest of the low, an inferior human being; God exalted Jesus and raised him to his right hand, making him a glorified divine figure.

These preliterary fragments provided Luke with just the material he needed to make this point, and so he used them throughout his speeches in order to stress his powerful message. The Almighty God had reversed what lowly humans had done, and Jesus, far from being a failed prophet or a false messiah, was shown to be the ruler of all. By raising Jesus from the dead, God had made him his own Son, the Messiah-King, the Lord.

Evaluating the Earliest Views of Christ

SO FAR I HAVE not given a descriptive name to this very early form of Christological belief in which God raised Jesus from the dead—not in order to give him a longer life here on earth, but in order to exalt him as his own Son up to the heavenly realm, where he could sit beside God at his right hand, ruling together with the Lord God Almighty himself. Traditionally in discussions of theology this understanding of Christ has been called a low Christology because it understands that Jesus started off as a human being who was like other humans. He may have been more righteous than others; he may have earned God’s special favor more than others. But he started out as a human and nothing more. You will notice that in the preliterary traditions I have discussed there is no talk about Jesus being born of a virgin and certainly no talk of him being divine during his lifetime. He is a human figure, possibly a messiah. But then at a critical point of his existence, he is elevated from his previous lowly existence down here with us, the other mere mortals, to sit at God’s right hand in a position of honor, power, and authority. In a moment I will register an objection to calling this a “low” Christology—but for now it is enough say that it does make sense that some theologians have called it that. In it, Jesus begins at a low point, down here with us.

Sometimes this view is also referred to as an adoptionist Christology, because in it Christ is not thought to be a divine being “by nature.” That is, he did not preexist before he was born in the world, he was not a divine being who came to earth, he was not of the same kind of “essence” as God himself. He was instead a human being who has been “adopted” by God to a divine status. Thus he was not God by virtue of who he was, but by virtue of the fact that the Creator and Lord of all things chose to elevate him to a position of prominence, even though he began as a lowly human.

The problem with this adoptionist nomenclature—as with the term low Christology—is that it speaks of this view of Christ in a rather condescending way, as if it were an inadequate understanding (Jesus was originally “just” a man; he was “only” an adopted son). It is true that the view that Jesus began as a human but was exalted to a divine status was indeed superseded by another perspective—the one that I deal with in the next chapter. That other view indicates that Jesus was a preexistent divine being before he came into the world. That view is sometimes referred to as a high Christology—since in it Christ is understood to have started out “up there” with God in the heavenly realm. In that view Christ was not adopted to be the Son of God; he already was the Son of God by virtue of who he was, not by virtue of what God did to him in order to make him something other than what he was by nature.

All the same, even though later theologians came to consider a “low” or “adoptionist” Christology to be inadequate, I do not think we should overlook just how amazing this view was for the people who first held it. For them, Jesus was not “merely” adopted to be God’s son. That’s the wrong emphasis altogether. They believed that Jesus had been exalted to the highest status that anyone could possibly imagine. He was elevated to an impossibly exalted state. This was the most fantastic thing anyone could say about Christ: he had actually been elevated to a position next to God Almighty who had made all things and would be the judge of all people. Jesus was THE Son of God. This was not a low, inferior understanding of Christ; it was an amazing, breathtaking view.

For this reason, I usually prefer not to speak of it as a “low Christology” or even as an “adoptionist Christology,” but as an exaltation Christology. In it, the man Jesus is showered with divine favors beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, honored by God to an unbelievable extent, elevated to a divine status on a level with God himself, sitting at his right hand.

Part of what has convinced me that this understanding of Christ should not be shunted aside as an inferior view involves new research on what it meant to be adopted as a son in the Roman empire, which was the context, of course, within which these views of Christ were formulated. Today we may think that an adopted child is not a parent’s “real” child, and in some circles, unfortunately, this is taken to mean that the child does not “really” belong to the parent. Many of us do not think this is a useful, loving, or helpful view, but there it is: some people have it. So too when thinking about God and his Son. If Jesus is “only” adopted, then he’s not “really” the Son of God, but he just happens to have been granted a more exalted status than the rest of us.

A study of adoption in Roman society shows that this view is highly problematic and, in fact, probably wrong. A significant book by New Testament specialist Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World, deals with just this issue, to show what it meant at that time and place to be an adopted son.⁵ Peppard persuasively argues that scholars (and other readers) have gotten it wrong when they have maintained that an adopted son had lower social status than a “natural” son (that is, as a son actually born of a parent). In fact, just the opposite was the case. In elite Roman families, it was the adopted son who really mattered, not the sons born of the physical union of a married couple. As one very obvious example, Julius Caesar had a natural son with Cleopatra who was named Caesarion. And he had one adopted son, a nephew whom we’ve already met and whom he made his son by adoption in his will. Which was the more important? Caesarion is a mere footnote in history; you’ve probably never heard of him. And Octavian? Because he was the adopted son of Caesar, he inherited his property, status, and power. You know him better as Caesar Augustus—the first emperor of the Roman empire. That happened because Julius Caesar had adopted him.

It was in fact often the case that a person who was a son by adoption in the Roman world was given a greater, higher status than a child who was a son by birth. The natural son was who he was more or less by accident; his virtues and fine qualities had nothing to do with the fact that he was born as the child of two parents. The adopted son on the other hand—who was normally adopted as an adult—was adopted precisely because of his fine qualities and excellent potential. He was made great because he had demonstrated the potential for greatness, not because of the accident of his birth. This can be seen in the praise showered upon the emperor Trajan by one of his subjects, the famous author Pliny the Younger, who stated that “your merits did indeed call for your adoption as successor long ago.”⁶

This is why it was often the case that adopted sons were already adults when made the legal heir of a powerful figure or aristocrat. And what did it mean to be made the legal heir? It meant inheriting all of the adoptive father’s wealth, property, status, dependents, and clients—in other words, all of the adopted father’s power and prestige. As Roman historian Christiane Kunst has put it: “The adopted son . . . exchanged his own [status] and took over the status of the adoptive father.”⁷

When the earliest Christians talked about Jesus becoming the Son of God at his resurrection, they were saying something truly remarkable about him. He was made the heir of all that was God’s. He exchanged his status for the status possessed by the Creator and ruler of all things. He received all of God’s power and privileges. He could defy death. He could forgive sins. He could be the future judge of the earth. He could rule with divine authority. He was for all intents and purposes God.

These various aspects of his exalted state are closely connected with the various honorific titles Christians bestowed upon Jesus in his exalted state. He was the Son of God. By no stretch of the imagination did that mean that he was “merely” the “adopted” Son of God. It entailed the most fantastic claims about Jesus that these people could imagine: as the Son of God he was the heir to all that was God’s. He was also the Son of Man, the one whom God had entrusted to be the future judge of the entire world. He was the heavenly messiah who was ruling—now—over the kingdom of his Father, the King of kings. And in that capacity as the heavenly ruler, he was the Lord, the master and sovereign over all the earth.

We may see why someone would call this a low Christology, but it certainly is not saying anything “lowly.” This is an exaltation Christology that is affirming stunning things about the teacher from rural Galilee who was exalted to the right hand of God, who had raised him from the dead.

It is also important to stress that precisely when the Christians were starting to say such things about Jesus is when the emperors were beginning to be worshiped with increased frequency throughout the Roman world. The emperor was the son of God (because he was adopted by the preceding emperor who had been divinized at his death); Jesus was the Son of God. The emperor was regarded as divine; Jesus was divine. The emperor was the great ruler; Jesus was the great Ruler. The emperor was lord and sovereign; Jesus was Lord and Sovereign. This lower-class peasant from Galilee who had gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified was in fact the most powerful being in the universe. The emperor, according to this Christian view, was in reality no competition. Jesus’s adoptive father was not simply a preceding emperor; he was the Lord God Almighty.

It is because of this exalted status that Jesus was deemed worthy of worship. If the earliest Christians held such elevated views of Jesus as the exalted Son of God soon after his resurrection, it is probably already at this early stage that they began to show veneration to him in ways previously shown to God himself. In two important books, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado has tried to solve the dilemma of how Jesus could be worshiped as a divine being so early in the history of the Christian religion—virtually right away—if in fact the Christians considered themselves monotheists, not ditheists (worshipers of two gods).⁸ Hurtado argues that both things were simultaneously true: Christians maintained there was only one God, and they worshiped Jesus as God alongside God. How was this possible? Hurtado sees Christianity as developing a binitary worship—in which Jesus was worshiped as the Lord, alongside God, without sacrificing the idea that there is only one God. In his view, Christians maintained that since God had exalted Jesus to a divine status, he had not merely permitted but even required the veneration of Jesus. Hurtado sees this as a unique development within the history of ancient religion—the worship of two divine beings within a theology that claims there is only one. In later chapters we will see how theologians eventually came to grips with this problem of how Jesus could be revered as God without sacrificing a commitment to monotheism. For now it is enough to stress that this was indeed the case: Christians insisted that they believed in only one God, and yet they revered Jesus as divine and worshiped their “Lord Jesus” along with God.

The Backward Movement of Christology

THE VIEW THAT THE earliest Christians understood Jesus to have become the Son of God at his resurrection is not revolutionary among scholars of the New Testament. One of the greatest scholars of the second half of the twentieth century was Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic priest who spent a large chunk of his career teaching students at the (Protestant) Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Brown wrote books that were challenging and insightful for fellow biblical scholars and books that were accessible and enlightening for the layperson.

Among his most famous contributions was a way of sketching the development of early Christian views of Jesus. Brown agreed with the view I have mapped out here: 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.) Brown pointed out that you can trace a kind of chronological development of this view through the Gospels.⁹ This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation. In Brown’s view this chronological sequencing of the Gospels may well indeed be how Christians developed their views. Originally, Jesus was thought to have been exalted only at the resurrection; as Christians thought more about the matter, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God during his entire ministry, so that he became the Son of God at its outset, at baptism; as they thought even more about it, they came to think he must have been the Son of God for his entire life, and so he was born of a virgin and in that sense was the (literal) Son of God; and as they thought about it more again, they came to think that he must have been the Son of God even before he came into the world, and so they said he was a preexistent divine being.

The problem with this chronological sequencing of the Gospels is that it does not reflect the actual chronological development of early Christian views of Jesus. That is to say, even though it is true that these are the views as they develop through the Gospels (from the earliest to the latest), some Christians were saying that Jesus was a preexistent being (a “later” view) even before Paul began to write in the 50s—well before our earliest Gospel was written.¹⁰ The reality is—and Brown would not have disagreed with this—views of Jesus did not develop along a straight line in every part of early Christianity and at the same rate. Different Christians in different churches in different regions had different views of Jesus, almost from the get-go. I argue that there were two fundamentally different Christological views: one that saw Jesus as a being from “down below” who came to be “exalted” (the view I’m exploring in this chapter), and the other that saw Jesus as a being originally from “up above” who came to earth from the heavenly realm (the view I’ll explore in the next chapter). But even within these two fundamentally different types of Christology, there were significant variations.

Jesus as Son of God at His Baptism

Brown does appear to be right that at some times and places, after the initial belief that God had exalted Jesus at his resurrection, some Christians came to think that the exaltation had happened before his public ministry. That is why he could do spectacular deeds such as healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead; that is why he could forgive sins as God’s representative on earth; that is why he could occasionally reveal his glory—he was already adopted to be God’s Son at the very outset of his ministry, when John the Baptist baptized him.

The Baptism in Mark

This appears to be the view of the Gospel of Mark, in which there is no word of Jesus’s preexistence or of his birth to a virgin. Surely if this author believed in either view, he would have mentioned it; they are, after all, rather important ideas. But no, this Gospel begins by describing the baptism ministry of John the Baptist and indicates that like other Jews, Jesus was baptized by him. But when Jesus comes up out of the water, he sees the heavens split open, the Spirit of God descends upon him as a dove, and a voice from heaven says, “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9–11).

This voice does not appear to be stating a preexisting fact. It appears to be making a declaration. It is at this time that Jesus becomes the Son of God for Mark’s Gospel.¹¹ Immediately after this, Jesus begins his spectacular ministry, not only proclaiming the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom, but also healing all who are sick, showing that he is more powerful than the demonic spirits in the world—so that he is no mere mortal—and even raising the dead. He is the Lord of life, already during his ministry. He demonstrates that he has been given authority to forgive sins committed not against himself, but either against others or against God. His opponents declare that “no one can forgive sins but God alone.” Jesus tells them that he, the Son of Man, has the authority on earth to forgive sins.

Jesus’s glory can also be seen in his great miracles—multiplying loaves and fishes for the multitudes, commanding the storm to be still, walking on water. Halfway through the Gospel, Jesus reveals his true identity to three of his disciples, as he goes on a mountain in the presence of Peter, James, and John and is transfigured into a radiant being while Moses and Elijah appear in order to speak with him (symbolizing the fact that he is the one predicted in the law [= Moses] and the prophets [= Elijah]). Jesus is no mere mortal. He is the glorious Son of God who has come in fulfillment of God’s plan.

If one always has to ask “in what sense” is Jesus divine, for Mark, Jesus is divine in the sense that he is the one who has been adopted to be the Son of God at his baptism, not later at his resurrection.

The Baptism in Luke

A remnant of this view can be found in the later Gospel of Luke. As we will see, Luke has a different understanding of when Jesus became the Son of God. But as we have already noticed, he will occasionally include a tradition that both predates and differs from his own views. This happens in the scene of Jesus’s baptism. Here the matter is a little bit difficult to explain. In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul’s writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament. What we have are later copies—in most instances, copies that were made many centuries later. These various copies all differ from one another, often in small ways, but sometimes in rather significant ways. One of the passages that has been changed in a significant way by later scribes involves the story of Jesus’s baptism in Luke.

Scholars have long debated what the voice actually said at Jesus’s baptism in this Gospel. This is because most manuscripts indicate that the voice said the same thing that it says in Mark, “You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased.” But in several of our old witnesses to the text, the voice says something else. It quotes Psalm 2:7: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” There are good reasons for thinking that this is what Luke originally wrote in this passage (Luke 3:22).¹² It is a very stark saying, since it is when Jesus was baptized that he was “begotten”—that is, born—as the Son of God. The reason later scribes may have wanted to change the verse should be obvious: when scribes were copying their texts of Luke in later centuries, the view that Jesus was made the Son at the baptism was considered not just inadequate, but heretical. For later scribes, Jesus was the preexistent Son of God, not one who became the Son at the baptism.

Luke himself—whoever he was—does not think Jesus was a preexistent Son of God. As it turns out, he does not think Jesus became the Son at the baptism either, as we will see. Then why does he have the voice say this? Again, Luke is fond of incorporating a variety of preliterary traditions that he had heard, even if they differ from his own views. And so in a speech of Acts he can include a tradition that says Jesus became the Son of God at his resurrection (13:33); in his Gospel he can include one that says Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism (3:22); and he incorporates another tradition that says he became the Son of God at his birth (1:35). Maybe Luke simply wanted to stress that Jesus was the Son of God at all the significant points of his existence: birth, baptism, and resurrection.

Jesus as Son of God at His Birth

In the final form of Luke’s Gospel, it appears that Jesus is to be thought of as becoming the Son of God, for the first time, at the moment of birth. Or, to be more precise, at the moment of his conception. We saw in Chapter 1 that in the pagan world there were a variety of ways that a human could be thought of as having become divine. Some humans were made divine at their deaths, when they were taken up to the heavenly realm to live with the gods (e.g., Romulus). This would be comparable to Christian traditions that Jesus was exalted to God’s right hand as his Son at the resurrection. In other pagan traditions a divine human was born that way, after a god such as the lusty Zeus had sex with a beautiful woman he could not resist. The offspring was literally the son of Zeus (e.g., Heracles [Roman: Hercules]). There are no Christian traditions in which this happens. The God of the Christians was not like the philanderer Zeus, filled with lust and full of imaginative ways to satisfy it. For the Christians, God was transcendent, remote, “up there”—not one to have sex with beautiful girls. At the same time, something somewhat like the pagan myths appears to lie behind the birth narrative found in the Gospel of Luke.

The Birth of Jesus in Luke

In this Gospel, Jesus was born of Mary, who had never had human sex. She had never had divine sex either, exactly, but it was God, not a human who made her pregnant. In the famous “annunciation” scene, the angel Gabriel comes to Mary, who is betrothed to be married but has not yet gone through the ceremony or had any physical contact with her espoused, Joseph. Gabriel tells her that she is specially favored by God and will conceive and bear a son. She is taken aback—she has never had sex: How can she conceive? The angel tells her in graphic terms: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the Power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the one who is born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). I call this description “graphic” because there is nothing in it to make the reader think that the angel is speaking in metaphors. In a very physical sense the Holy Spirit of God is to “come upon” Mary and “therefore”—an important word here—the child she bears will be called the Son of God. He will be called the Son of God because he will in fact be the Son of God. It is God, not Joseph, who will make Mary pregnant, so the child she bears will be God’s offspring. Here, Jesus becomes the Son of God not at his resurrection or his baptism, but already at his conception.

The Birth of Jesus in Matthew

It is interesting to observe that the Gospel of Matthew also has an account of Jesus’s birth in which his mother is a virgin. One might infer from this account as well that Jesus is the Son of God because of the circumstances of his unusual birth. But in the case of Matthew, this conclusion would indeed need to be made by inference: Matthew says nothing of the sort. There is no verse in Matthew similar to what Luke says in Luke 1:35. Instead, according to Matthew, the reason Jesus’s mother was a virgin was so that his birth could fulfill what had been said by a spokesperson of God many centuries earlier, when the prophet Isaiah in the Jewish scriptures wrote, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14). Matthew quotes this verse and gives it as the reason for Jesus’s unusual conception—it was to fulfill prophecy (Matt. 1:23).

It has frequently been noted that Isaiah actually does not prophesy that the coming messiah will be born of a virgin. If you read Isaiah 7 in its own literary context, it is clear that the author is not speaking about the messiah at all. The situation is quite different. It takes place in the eighth century BCE, during a calamitous time. Isaiah is talking to the king of Judah, Ahaz, who is very upset, and for good reason. The two kingdoms to the north of Judah—Israel and Syria—have attacked his capital city of Jerusalem to force him to join them in an alliance against the rising world power of Assyria. He is afraid that these two northern opponents will lay his kingdom to waste. Isaiah, the prophet, tells him that it is not so. There is a young woman (not a virgin) who has conceived a child, and she will give birth to a son, who will be called Immanuel, which means “God is with us.” That God is “with” the Judeans will become clear, because before the child is old enough to know the difference between good and evil, the two kingdoms that are attacking Jerusalem will be dispersed, and good times will return to Ahaz and his people. That’s what Isaiah was referring to.

As a Christian living centuries later, Matthew read the book of Isaiah not in the original Hebrew language, but in his own tongue, Greek. When the Greek translators before his day rendered the passage, they translated the Hebrew for word young woman (alma) using a Greek word (parthenos) that can indeed mean just that but that eventually took on the connotation of a “young woman who has never had sex.” Matthew took the passage to be a messianic tradition and so indicated that Jesus fulfilled it, just as he fulfilled all the other prophecies of scripture, by being born of a “virgin.” It does not take too much thought to realize, though, that Matthew may have been giving “scriptural justification” for a tradition he inherited that originally had a different import: like Luke’s tradition, the one that came to Matthew may originally have spoken of Jesus as the unique Son of God because he was born of a virgin, with God as his father.

Whether this is the case or not, I should stress that these virginal conception narratives of Matthew and Luke are by no stretch of the imagination embracing the view that later became the orthodox teaching of Christianity. According to this later view, Christ was a preexistent divine being who “became incarnate [i.e., “human”] through the Virgin Mary.” But not according to Matthew and Luke. If you read their accounts closely, you will see that they have nothing to do with the idea that Christ existed before he was conceived. In these two Gospels, Jesus comes into existence at the moment of his conception. He did not exist before.

Whether or not Matthew’s tradition originally coincided with Luke’s view that Jesus was conceived by a virgin without sexual intercourse so that he was literally the Son of God, this view, as most pronounced in Luke, is a kind of “exaltation” Christology that has been pushed back just about as far as such a view can go. If an exaltation Christology maintains that a human has been elevated to a divine status, then there is no point for that to happen earlier than the moment of conception itself. Jesus is now the Son of God for his entire life, beginning with . . . his beginning. One could argue, in fact, that this has pushed the moment of exaltation so far back that here we no longer even have an exaltation Christology, a Christology from “down below.” For here, Jesus is not portrayed in any sense as beginning life as a normal human who because of his great virtue or deep obedience to the will of God is exalted to a divine status. He starts out as divine, from the point of his conception.

Jesus as the Exalted Son of God

THOSE OF US WHO are deeply invested in the early Christian traditions would give a great deal to discover a Gospel written by one of the first followers of Jesus a year or so after his resurrection. Unfortunately, we almost certainly never will. Jesus’s disciples were lower-class, illiterate peasants from remote rural areas of Galilee, where very few people could read, let alone write, and let alone create full-scale compositions. We don’t know of a single author from that time and place, Jewish or Christian, who was capable of producing a Gospel even had she or he thought of doing so. The first followers of Jesus probably never thought of doing so. They, like Jesus, anticipated that the end of the age was imminent, that the Son of Man—now thought to be Jesus himself—was soon to come from heaven in judgment on the earth and to usher in God’s good kingdom. These people had no thought of recording the events of Jesus’s life for posterity because in a very real sense, there was not going to be a posterity.

But even if the original apostles had been forward-looking and concerned about the needs of posterity (or at least the longings of twenty-first-century historians), they would not have been able to write a Gospel. The only way they could pass on the story of Jesus was by word of mouth. And so they told the stories to one another, to their converts, and to their converts’ converts. This happened year after year, until some decades later, in different parts of the world, highly educated Greek-speaking Christians wrote down the traditions they had heard, thereby producing the Gospels we still have.

Even so, historians can at least dream, and even if it is an idle dream, it is worth considering what a Gospel written in the year 31 CE by one of the surviving disciples might have looked like. If the views I have presented in this chapter are anywhere near correct, this imagined Gospel would look very different from the ones we have now inherited—and its view of Jesus would not at all be the view that came to be dominant among later theologians when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman world.

This nonexistent Gospel would be filled with the teachings of Jesus as he went from village to town proclaiming that the kingdom of God was soon to arrive with the coming of the Son of Man. The day of judgment was imminent, and people needed to prepare for it. My guess is that this Gospel would not be filled with the miraculous things that Jesus had done. He would not spend his days healing the sick, calming the storm, feeding the multitudes, casting out demons, and raising the dead. Those stories were to come later, as Jesus’s followers described his early life in light of his later exaltation. Instead, this Gospel would tell in detail, probably from eyewitness reports, what happened during the last week of Jesus’s life, when he made a pilgrimage with some of his followers to Jerusalem and enraged the local authorities with his outburst in the temple and his incendiary preaching of the imminent coming of judgment—a cataclysmic destruction that would be directed not only against the Roman oppressors, but also against the ruling authorities among the Jews, the elite priests and their followers.

The great highlight of the Gospel, though, would come at the end. Jesus had been rejected by the scribes and elders of the people and handed over to Pontius Pilate, who found him guilty for insurrection against the state. To put a decisive end to his troublemaking, rabble-rousing nonsense, Pilate had ordered him crucified. But even though Jesus had been unceremoniously executed by the power of Rome, his story was not yet over. For he had appeared to his disciples, alive again. How could he still be alive? It was not because he survived crucifixion. No, God had raised him, bodily, from the dead. And why is he still not among us? Because God not only brought him back to life, he exalted him up to heaven as his own Son, to sit on a throne at God’s right hand, to rule as the messiah of Israel and the Lord of all, until he comes back as the cosmic judge of the earth, very soon.

In this Gospel Jesus would not have become the Son of God for his entire ministry, starting with his baptism, as in the Gospel of Mark and in a tradition retained in the Gospel of Luke. And he would not have been the Son of God for the whole of his life, beginning with his conception by a virgin who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit so that her son would be God’s own offspring, as in Luke and in traditions preserved by Matthew. Nor would he be a divine being who preexisted his coming into the world, as attested by such authors as Paul and John. No, he became the Son of God when God worked his greatest miracle on him, raising him from the dead and adopting him as his Son by exalting him to his right hand and bestowing upon him his very own power, prestige, and status.