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

CHAPTER 1

Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

WHEN I TEACH MY introductory course on the New Testament, I tell my students that it is very difficult to know where to begin our exploration. Is it best to start with our earliest author of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who wrote more of the books of the New Testament than any other author? Or is it best to start with the Gospels, which, while written after Paul, discuss the life of Jesus, who lived before Paul wrote his letters? In the end I tell them that probably it is best to begin by telling the story of a highly unusual man who was born in the first century in a remote part of the Roman empire, whose life was described by his later followers as altogether miraculous.¹

One Remarkable Life

BEFORE HE WAS BORN, his mother had a visitor from heaven who told her that her son would not be a mere mortal but in fact would be divine. His birth was accompanied by unusual divine signs in the heavens. As an adult he left his home to engage on an itinerant preaching ministry. He went from village to town, telling all who would listen that they should not be concerned about their earthly lives and their material goods; they should live for what was spiritual and eternal. He gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no ordinary human, but that he was the Son of God. And he did miracles to confirm them in their beliefs: he could heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. At the end of his life he aroused opposition among the ruling authorities of Rome and was put on trial. But they could not kill his soul. He ascended to heaven and continues to live there till this day. To prove that he lived on after leaving this earthly orb, he appeared again to at least one of his doubting followers, who became convinced that in fact he remains with us even now. Later, some of his followers wrote books about him, and we can still read about him today. But very few of you will have ever seen these books. And I imagine most of you do not even know who this great miracle-working Son of God was. I have been referring to a man named Apollonius, who came from the town of Tyana. He was a pagan—that is, a polytheistic worshiper of the many Roman gods—and a renowned philosopher of his day. His followers thought he was immortal. We have a book written about him by his later devotee Philostratus.

Philostratus’s book was written in eight volumes in the early third century, possibly around 220 or 230 CE. He had done considerable research for his book, and his stories, he tells us, were largely based on the accounts recorded by an eyewitness and companion of Apollonius himself. Apollonius lived some years after a similar miracle-working Son of God in a different remote part of the empire, Jesus of Nazareth. Later followers of these two divine men saw them as being in competition with one another. This competition was part of a bigger struggle at the time between paganism—the forms of religion supported by the vast majority of everyone who lived in antiquity, who embraced a variety of polytheistic religions—and Christianity, a newcomer on the religious scene, which insisted that there was only one God and that Jesus was his Son. Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader’s life to score their debating points.

The Historical and Legendary Apollonius

Scholars have had to investigate the Gospels of the New Testament with a critical eye to determine which stories, and which parts of stories, are historically accurate with respect to the historical Jesus, and which represent later embellishments by his devoted followers. In a similar way, scholars of ancient Roman religion have had to analyze the writings of Philostratus with a keen sense of skepticism in order to weed through the later legendary accretions to uncover what we can say about the historical Apollonius. Generally it is agreed that he was a Pythagorean philosopher—that is, a proponent of the views of the fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher Pythagoras. He lived during the second half of the first century (Jesus lived during the first half). Apollonius traveled through the eastern parts of the Roman empire as a moral and religious preacher. He often lived in temples and was free with his advice to religious and city officials. He had numerous pupils and was well received among many of the Roman elite in the places where he stayed. He was especially concerned that people abandon their rampant materialism and live for what mattered, that is, the affairs of the soul.

For the current study, what is more important than the life of the historical Apollonius is the set of legends that sprang up about him and that were widely believed among people of the time. His great philosophical insights eventually led many people to assume that he could not have been a mere mortal, but that he was himself a god striding the earth. Just over a century after his death, Apollonius was awarded a holy shrine in his home city of Tyana, dedicated by none other than the Roman emperor Caracalla, who ruled from 198 to 217 CE. We are told that the emperor Alexander Severus (222–235 CE) kept an image of Apollonius among his various household gods. And the emperor Aurelian (270–275 CE), an ardent worshiper of the Sun God, also revered him as divine.

The story of Apollonius’s birth, as recounted in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, is particularly worth our consideration. The “annunciation” story is both like and unlike the story earlier found in the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38). When Apollonius’s mother was pregnant with him, she had a vision of a divine being, the Egyptian god named Proteus, renowned for his great wisdom. When she asked who her child would be, the god answered, “Myself.” The birth was similarly miraculous. The mother was told to go with her servant girls into a field, where she fell asleep on the grass, only to awake to the sound of swans flapping their wings. She prematurely then gave birth. The local people said that a bolt of lightning appeared in the sky at just that moment, and just as it was about to strike the earth, it “hung poised in the air and then disappeared upwards” (Life of Apollonius 1.5). The people concluded: “No doubt the gods were giving a signal and an omen of his brilliance, his exaltation above earthly things, his closeness to heaven, and all the Master’s other qualities” (1.5). This sign is obviously different from a star that led a group of wise men to a child, but it is in the same celestial ballpark. The local people concluded that Apollonius was, in fact, the Son of Zeus.

At the end of his life Apollonius was brought up on charges before the emperor Domitian. Among other things, he was accused of receiving the worship that is due only to the gods. Again, the parallels to the story of Jesus are patent: he too was brought before officials (in his case, the leaders of the Jews and then the Roman governor Pilate) and was said to have entertained exalted views of himself, calling himself the Son of God and the king of the Jews. In both cases the officials were persuaded that these claims of self-exaltation were a threat to the well-being of the state, and for both men, readers were assured that in fact these self-claims were completely justified.

Philostratus indicates that there were different reports of Apollonius’s “death.” In one version he is said to have died on the island of Crete. He had allegedly gone to a sanctuary dedicated to a local god that was guarded by a group of vicious watchdogs. But rather than raising a ruckus, the dogs greeted Apollonius in a friendly manner. The sanctuary officials discovered him and placed him in chains, thinking he must have used sorcery to get by the dogs. But at midnight Apollonius set himself free, calling to the jailers to watch what was to happen next. He ran up to the doors of the sanctuary, which flew open of their own accord. He then entered the sanctuary, the doors shut by themselves, and from inside the (otherwise empty) sanctuary were heard the voices of girls singing: “Proceed from earth! Proceed to heaven! Proceed!” Apollonius was being told, in other words, to ascend to the realm of the gods. He evidently did so, as he was no more to be found on earth. Here again, the parallels to the stories of Jesus are clear: at the end of his life Jesus caused a disturbance in a temple, he was arrested and brought up on charges, and after leaving this earthly realm he ascended to heaven, where he continues to live.

As a philosopher Apollonius taught that the human soul is immortal; the flesh may die, but the person lives on. Not everyone believed him. But after he departed to heaven he appeared in a vision to a follower who doubted him. Apollonius convinced this follower that he was still alive and was still present among them. Jesus too, of course, appeared to his disciples after his resurrection and convinced them, including doubting Thomas, of his ongoing reality and life in heaven.

Apollonius and Jesus

Modern scholars have debated the significance of the obvious connections between Jesus and Apollonius, but it is not merely a recent debate. In the early fourth century CE, a pagan author named Hierocles wrote a book called The Lover of Truth that contained a comparison between these two alleged Sons of God and celebrated the superiority of the pagan version. We no longer have the book in its entirety. But some years after it was written, it was explicitly refuted in the writings of the fourth-century church father Eusebius—sometimes known as the “father of church history” because he was the first to produce a history of Christianity from the time of Jesus up to his own day. Another of Eusebius’s books was directed against Hierocles and his celebration of Apollonius. Luckily for us latter-day readers, Eusebius quotes in places the actual words of his opponent. Near the outset of his book, for example, Hierocles wrote:

In their anxiety to exalt Jesus, they run up and down prating of how he made the blind to see and worked certain other miracles of the kind. . . . Let us note, however, how much better and more sensible is the view which we take of such matters, and explain the conception which we entertain of men gifted with remarkable powers. . . . During the reign of Nero there flourished Apollonius of Tyana . . . [who] worked any number of miracles, of which I will omit the greater number and only mention a few. (Life of Apollonius 2)²

Hierocles mocks the Gospels of the New Testament, as they contain tales of Jesus that were “vamped up by Peter and Paul and a few others of the kind—men who were liars and devoid of education and wizards.” Reports about Apollonius, on the other hand, were written by highly educated authors (not lower-class peasants) and eyewitnesses to the things they saw. Because of his magnificent life, and the manner of his “death”—as “he went to heaven in his physical body accompanied by the gods”—“we must surely class the man among the gods.” The Christian Eusebius’s response was direct and vitriolic. Apollonius was not divine, but evil; he was not a son of God, but a man empowered by a demon.

If this little debate is looked at from a historical perspective, there can be little doubt that Eusebius ended up winning. But that would not have been a foregone conclusion when Hierocles wrote his book, before Christianity had become more powerful. Apollonius and Jesus were seen as competitors for divine honors: one a pagan worshiper of many gods, the other a Jewish worshiper of the one God; one a promoter of pagan philosophy, the other the founder of the Christian religion. Both of them were declared to be God on earth, even though they both were also, obviously, human. In a sense, they were thought of as divine men.³

What is striking is that they were not the only two. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that people know about today, there were lots of people like this in the ancient world. We should not think of Jesus as “unique,” if by that term we mean that he was the only one “like that”—that is, a human who was far above and very different from the rest of us mere mortals, a man who was also in some sense divine. There were numerous divine humans in antiquity. As will become clear, I’m not dealing with whether or not they were really divine; I’m saying that’s how they were understood. Recognizing how this could be so is the first step in seeing how Jesus came to be thought of in these terms. But as we will see, Jesus was not originally thought of in this way—any more than Apollonius was during his lifetime. It was only after his death that the man Jesus came to be thought of as God on earth. How did that happen? The place to start is with an understanding of how other humans came to be considered divine in the ancient world.

Three Models of the Divine Human

CHRISTIANITY AROSE IN THE Roman empire immediately after the death of Jesus around the year 30 CE. The eastern half of the empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture—so much so that the common language of the eastern empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written, was Greek. And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds. Jews of the time had many distinctive views of their own (see the next chapter), but in many key respects of concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors. This is important to know because Jesus himself was a Jew, as were his immediate followers—including the ones who first proclaimed that he was not a mere mortal, but was actually God.

But how was it possible for God, or a god, to become, or to appear to become, a human? We have seen one way with Apollonius of Tyana. In his case, his mother was told before his birth that he would be the incarnation—the “coming in the flesh”—of a preexistent divine being, the god Proteus. This is very similar to later theological interpretation of Jesus—that he was God who became incarnate by being born of his mother Mary. I don’t know of any other cases in ancient Greek or Roman thought of this kind of “god-man,” where an already existing divine being is said to be born of a mortal woman. But there are other conceptions that are close to this view, and here we consider three of them.

Gods Who Temporarily Become Human

One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.

One of the most intriguing tales found in Ovid involves two elderly peasants, Philemon and Baucis, who live in Phrygia (a region of what is now Turkey). In this short account, the gods Jupiter and Mercury are traveling in the region disguised as mortals. Despite coming to a thousand homes, they can find no one who will take them in to give them a meal and allow them to rest. They finally happen upon the poor cottage of Philemon and Baucis, who bear their poverty well, “thinking it no shame.” The elderly couple bid the visitors welcome, invite them into their poor home, prepare for them the best meal they can, and bathe their weary feet with warm water. In response, the grateful gods ensure that the wine bowl is never empty; as much as they all drink, it remains full.

Then the gods make their announcement: “We two are gods.”⁴ In response to their treatment in Phrygia, the gods declare:

This wicked neighborhood shall pay

Just punishment; but to you there shall be given

Exemption from this evil.

Jupiter asks the couple what they most desire. After they talk it over, Philemon tells the king of the gods that he and his wife want to be made priests who will guard the gods’ shrine, and when it is time for them to die, they want to die together:

Since in concord we have spent our years,

Grant that the selfsame hour may take us both,

That I my consort’s tomb may never see,

Nor may it fall to her to bury me.

Jupiter grants their wishes. The neighborhood is destroyed. The shrine appears, and Philemon and Baucis become its guardians. When it comes time for them to die, the two are simultaneously turned into two trees that grow from one trunk, so that just as they had long harmonious lives as a couple, so they are joined in death. Later worshipers at the shrine not only acknowledge the ongoing “life” of the pair, but they also believe that the two have in effect been divinized and deserve to be worshiped:

They now are gods, who served the Gods;

To them who worship gave is worship given.

This beautiful and moving tale of love in life and death is also a tale of gods who temporarily become—or appear to become—human, and humans who become gods. When Philemon and Baucis are worshiped as gods, it is not because they are now as mighty as great Jupiter and Mercury. They are thought of as very low-level divinities, mortals who have been elevated to the divine plane. But divine they are. This is a key and important lesson for us. Divinity came in many shapes and sizes; the divine realm had many levels.

Today, we think of the realm of divinity, the realm of God, as completely Other and separate from our human realm. God is up there in heaven, we are down here on earth, and there is an infinite gulf between us. But most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way. The divine realm had numerous strata. Some gods were greater, one might say “more divine,” than others, and humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods. Moreover, the gods themselves could and occasionally did come down to spend time with us mere mortals. When they did so, it could lead to interesting or even disastrous consequences, as the inhospitable inhabitants of Phrygia learned to their great discomfort.

The lesson was not lost on later inhabitants of the region, as we learn from the pages of the New Testament itself. In the book of Acts we have an account of the Apostle Paul on a missionary journey with his companion Barnabas in this same region, visiting the town of Lystra (Acts 14:8–18). Paul sees a man who is crippled, and through the power of God he heals him. The crowds who have seen this miracle draw what for them is the natural conclusion: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men” (Acts 14:11). It is striking that they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul—the one who has been doing all the talking—Hermes. These identifications are no accident. Zeus was the Greek counterpart of the Roman Jupiter, and Hermes was the counterpart of Mercury. The people in Lystra know the tale of Philemon and Baucis and think that the two gods have appeared once again in their midst. So convinced are they of this that the local priest of Zeus brings out oxen and garlands to offer sacrifices to the two apostles, who have a very difficult time persuading everyone that they are only human, “of like nature with you.” Paul uses the occasion, as was his wont, to preach his gospel message in order to convert the people. Even so, not everyone was convinced: “With these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them” (14:18).

It is no wonder these worshipers of Zeus at Lystra were so eager to recognize that the gods temporarily become human among them; they remembered well what happened another time they refused to offer worship where worship was due. Whether the story in Acts is a historical recollection of Paul’s missionary activities or simply an intriguing legend that sprang up in later times (like the story of Philemon and Baucis itself) is immaterial for our consideration here: in the Roman world it was widely thought that gods could take on human guise, such that some of the people one might meet on occasion may well indeed be divine. The ancient Greek and Roman mythologies are full of such stories.

Divine Beings Born of a God and a Mortal

Even though Apollonius was understood to be a preexistent god come in the flesh, this was not the normal Greek or Roman way of understanding how a divine human could be born of a mortal. By far the more common view was that a divine being came into the world—not having existed before birth—because a god had sex with a human, and the offspring then was in some sense divine. In Greek myths it was Zeus who most frequently engaged in these morally dubious activities, coming down from heaven and having a rather exotic sexual encounter with an attractive woman he had to have, which led to a highly unusual pregnancy. But tales of Zeus and his mortal lovers were not simply a matter of entertaining mythology. Sometimes such tales were told of actual historical figures, such as Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).

According to his later biographer, the Greek scholar Plutarch, whose book on famous Greek and Roman men provides us with biographies of many of the greatest figures of the time, many people believed that Alexander was one of Zeus’s offspring. Alexander’s actual father was the famous and powerful Philip, king of Macedonia, who had fallen in love with a woman named Olympias. According to Plutarch, the night before the two were to consummate their marriage, Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt came down from heaven and entered her. Presumably, this was Zeus doing his magic. Philip, in the meantime, apparently looked in on his wife that night and saw a serpent engaged in conjugal embrace with her. As Plutarch indicates, and as one might understand, this sight very much cooled Philip’s passion for his bride. In ancient times Zeus was often represented in the form of a snake, and so, for those who believed this tale, the child—Alexander—was no mere mortal. He was the son of a god.

In mythology we have even more striking accounts of Zeus, or his Roman counterpart, Jupiter, engaging in such nocturnal activities. No story is more intriguing than the tale of the birth of Hercules. The tale takes many forms in antiquity, but perhaps the most memorable is the hilarious recounting found among the plays of the Roman comic playwright Plautus, in his work Amphytrion. The play is named after one of the main characters, a military general of Thebes who is married to an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Alcmena. Amphytrion has gone away to war, leaving his pregnant wife at home. Jupiter casts his lustful gaze upon her from heaven and decides that he has to have her. And he knows just how to do it.

Jupiter disguises himself as Amphytrion and tells Alcmena that he has come home from battle. She welcomes him with open arms and takes him to bed. So much does Jupiter enjoy the ensuing activities that he orders the constellations to stop in their circuit. In other words, he makes time stand still until he—even he, the mighty god with divine capacity for enjoyment—has his fill. The constellations resume their motion, Jupiter returns to his heavenly home, and Alcmena is obviously worn out from the very long frolic.

As it turns out, the real Amphytrion returns home that morning. And he is more than a little surprised and dismayed to find that his wife does not welcome him with all the enthusiasm that one might expect after such an extended absence. From her perspective, of course, this is completely understandable: she thinks that she has just spent a very long night in her husband’s arms. Be that as it may, there is an interesting gestational result of this episode. Alcmena had already been made pregnant by Amphytrion. But she becomes pregnant yet again by Jupiter (some of these mythological tales were not strong on anatomy or biology).⁵ The result is that she bears twins. One is the divine Hercules, the son of Jupiter; the other is his twin brother, a mortal, Iphicles.

The tale of Amphytrion and Alcmena, of course, is a myth, and it is not clear that anyone actually “believed” it. It was instead a great story. Still, the idea behind it—that a mortal woman could give birth to a child spawned by a god—was plausible to many people of the ancient world. It would not be unusual for them to think that some of the great beings who stride the earth—great conquerors like Alexander, for example, or even great philosophers with superhuman wisdom such as Plato⁶—may well have been conceived in ways different from us mere mortals. They may have had a divine parent so that they themselves were, in some sense, divine.

I should stress that when Alcmena gave birth to Hercules, the son of Jupiter, it was not an instance of a virgin birth. Quite the contrary. She had already had sex with her husband, and she had what you might call divine sex with Jupiter. In none of the stories of the divine humans born from the union of a god and a mortal is the mortal a virgin. This is one of the ways that the Christian stories of Jesus differ from those of other divine humans in the ancient world. It is true that (the Jewish) God is the one who makes Jesus’s mother Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:35). But the monotheistic Christians had far too an exalted view of God to think that he could have temporarily become human to play out his sexual fantasies. The gods of the Greeks and Romans may have done such things, but the God of Israel was above it all.

A Human Who Becomes Divine

The third model of understanding divine humans in Greek and Roman circles provided the most important conceptual framework that the earliest Christians had for conceiving how Jesus could be both human and divine. It is not a view about how a divine being could become human—through a temporary incarnation or a sexual act—but about how a human being could become divine. As it turns out, this allegedly happened numerous times in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Romulus

One of the most striking examples involves the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus. We have several accounts of the life of Romulus, including one produced by a great early historian of Rome, Livy (59 CE–17 CE), who in one place states the opinion that Romulus was a “god born of a god” (History of Rome 1.16). The event that most interests us involves the end of Romulus’s life.

There were, to be sure, rumors of divine involvement in Romulus’s conception. His mother was a Vestal Virgin, a sacred office that required—as the name indicates—a woman to abstain from sexual relations. But she became pregnant. Obviously, something went wrong with her vows. She claimed that the god Mars was responsible, and possibly some people believed her. If so, it simply shows again how a divine-human union could be taken to explain the appearance of remarkable humans on earth.

But it was Romulus’s disappearance from life that was even more astonishing. According to Livy, by the end of Romulus’s life Rome had been established, the Roman government had been formed with the Senate in place and Romulus as king, the army was fully functioning, and everything was well positioned for the beginnings of the greatest city in history. During the final episode of his life, Romulus had gathered with members of the Senate to review the military troops at the Campus Martius. Suddenly a huge thunderstorm arose. After major claps of thunder, Romulus was enveloped by fog. When the fog lifted, he was nowhere to be seen.

As it turns out, two reports circulated about his death. One of them—the one that apparently Livy and presumably most other skeptical observers believed—indicated that the senators had taken the opportunity of the moment to get rid of a despot: they had torn Romulus to shreds and hidden his remains. The other report, which the masses believed, was one that the senators themselves propagated—that Romulus “had been caught up on high in the blast.” In other words, he had been taken up to heaven to live with the gods. The result was a sudden acclamation of Romulus’s divine status: “Then, when a few men had taken the initiative, they all with one accord hailed Romulus as a god and a god’s son, the king and Father of the Roman City, and with prayers besought his favor that he would graciously be pleased forever to protect his children” (History of Rome 1.16).⁷

Here we have a view of divine humans in a nutshell: a human can be honored by the gods by being made one of them; this happens because of the person’s great merit; as a divinity, the person deserves worship; and in his role as a god, he can protect those who bring to him their supplications.

It is interesting that Livy reports that the ascension of Romulus was later verified by a man named Proculus Julius, who declared to the assembly of the Roman people that Romulus had appeared to him alive after his death. He is recorded as saying that “the Father of this City, Romulus, descended suddenly from the sky at dawn this morning and appeared to me. Covered with confusion I stood reverently before him. . . . ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and declare to the capital of the world; so let them cherish the art of war, and let them know and teach their children that no human strength can resist Roman arms.’ So saying . . . Romulus departed on high” (History of Rome 1.16).

Romans heartily and enthusiastically embraced the divinity of the man Romulus. A trio of gods—Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—lived at the heart of ancient Rome, on the ancient hill, the Capitoline. Originally, Quirinus may have been a god worshiped among one of the groups of people, the Sabines, who were incorporated into the Roman state early in its history. But by the time of Livy’s writing, Quirinus was understood to be the divinized Romulus, worshiped right up there with the great father of the gods himself.

Julius Caesar

The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BCE. If we move the calendar forward about seven centuries, we still find men who are proclaimed to have become gods. Few are better known than Julius Caesar, the self-declared dictator of Rome who was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, by political enemies who preferred not having a dictator when all was said and done. The Roman biographer Suetonius provided a life of Julius Caesar in his Lives of the Caesars, published in 115 CE. According to Suetonius, already during his lifetime Caesar had declared that he had a divine heritage. In a funeral oration he delivered for his aunt he stated that one side of his family descended from the ancient Roman kings—through the legendary Marcus Ancius, the fourth king of Rome—and the other side descended from the gods. His family line, in fact, could be traced back to the goddess Venus.

At Caesar’s death a vicious power struggle ensued between his enemies and supporters, the latter including Mark Antony (of Antony and Cleopatra fame) in league with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who later became Caesar Augustus. At Caesar’s funeral, Antony decided not to deliver the customary funerary oration. Instead, he had a herald cry out the Senate’s decision “to render Caesar all honors, both human and divine.” In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as deification—the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods. The “common people” and even the heavens seemed to support Caesar’s deification, as Suetonius tells us: “[Caesar] died in the fifty-sixth year of his life and was included in the ranks of the gods, not only by formal decree but also by the conviction of the common people. Indeed at the first games which were given after his deification by his heir Augustus, a comet shone, appearing around the eleventh hour for seven days in succession, and it was believed to be the soul of Caesar who had been received into heaven” (The Deified Julius Caesar 88).⁸

Looking at the matter from a purely human and political point of view, there is little question about why the heir and adopted son Octavian wanted the Roman people to agree that Caesar was not only descended from a divine line, but had himself been made a divine being. If Julius Caesar was a god, what would that make his son? As New Testament scholar Michael Peppard has recently pointed out, to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.” Other people were, to be sure, named after their divine fathers: son of Zeus, son of Apollo, and so on. But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.

Caesar Augustus

Julius Caesar may have been considered a god after he died, but his adopted son Octavian (emperor from 27 BCE to 14 CE) was sometimes considered a god while he was still alive. Considering a living ruler to be divine was not unheard of in the ancient world. The Egyptians had long revered their pharaohs as living representatives of deities, and the conqueror Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier, was offered and accepted the kind of obeisance reserved for the gods. But this was not done in the Roman world until the beginning of the worship of the emperor.

Legends indicated that Octavian did not have a normal human birth but, like others before him, was born of the union of a mortal and a god. According to Suetonius, Octavian’s mother, Atia, was said to have been made pregnant by the god Apollo in the form of a snake (reminiscent, of course, of the conception of Alexander the Great). Atia had been attending the sacred rites of Apollo in a temple, and in the middle of the night, while she was asleep on her litter in the temple, a snake slid up to her and then quickly departed. When she awoke, she purified herself as she would have done after having sex with her husband, and miraculously the image of a snake permanently appeared on her body. Suetonius tells us that “Augustus was born ten months later and for this reason is believed to be the son of Apollo” (The Deified Augustus 94).

Moreover, that very night, Atia’s husband, who was off at war in Thrace (northern Greece), had a dream in which he “saw his son of greater than mortal size with a thunderbolt and scepter and emblems of Jupiter Best and Greatest and a radiant crown drawn by twelve brilliantly white horses” (The Deified Augustus 94). Clearly, these were portents that this child was a divine figure, a great god on earth.

Unlike some of the later emperors, while in office Augustus was not enthusiastic about being worshiped as a god. Suetonius says that he would not allow temples in the Roman provinces to be dedicated to him unless they were jointly dedicated to the goddess Roma—the patron goddess of Rome. Sometimes cities got around this imperial reluctance by building a temple and dedicating it to the “genius” of Augustus. The word genius in this case does not mean his intellectual brilliance, but the guardian spirit that watched over his family and, especially, him as its leader, making him who he was. In a sense, by worshiping Augustus’s genius, these cities revered him in a depersonalized but highly divinized sense.

Moreover, despite his reluctance, Octavian was hailed as the “Son of God” as early as 40 BCE—years before he was emperor—and this title is found on coins as early as 38 BCE. A decree from the Greek city of Cos hails Augustus as the god Sebastos (a Greek term equivalent to the Latin “Augustus”) and indicates that he has “by his benefactions to all people outdone even the Olympian gods.” That’s pretty stiff competition for a mere mortal, but for his reverential followers, he was far more than that. After his death Augustus was deified and called “divine,” or “one who has been made divine,” or “one who has been accounted among the gods.” When his body was cremated, according to Suetonius, a high-ranking Roman official claimed that he “saw Augustus’s image ascending to the sky.” He continued to be worshiped as a god by later Romans, including later Roman emperors.⁹

The Emperor Cult

For an ancient historian, the word cult does not have the kind of negative connotations it may have today—referring to a wild sectarian religion with bizarre beliefs and practices. It is simply a shortened version of the term cultus deorum, which means “care of the gods,” a close equivalent to what today we would call “religion” (just as “agriculture” means “care of the fields”). The Roman cult of the emperor started with Augustus and continued through the emperors who followed him, many of whom lacked his reticence in being considered a manifestation of the divine on earth.¹⁰

In a speech by the famous Roman orator Quintilian (35–100 CE), we are told how the gods are to be praised by speakers giving a public address: “Some [gods] . . . may be praised because they were born immortal, others because they won immortality by their valour, a theme which the piety of our sovereign [the emperor Domitian] has made the glory even of these present times” (Institutes of Oratory 3.7.9).¹¹ Quintilian tells us that some gods were born that way (such as the great gods of Greek and Roman mythology), but others have “won immortality by their valour”—that is, some humans have become divine because of their amazing deeds. And he refers to those for whom this has happened in “these present times.” Here, he is meaning the two previous emperors, Domitian’s father, the emperor Vespasian, and Domitian’s brother, the emperor Titus, both of whom were deified.

Normally, the emperor was officially declared a god at his death by a vote of the Roman Senate. This may seem a bit odd to us today, and it is perhaps best to think of the Senate recognizing a divine figure who had been in their midst rather than making someone divine. The recognition was based on the fact that the person was powerful and beneficent. And who could be more powerful and beneficent than the Roman emperor? So-called bad emperors (there were a number of them) did not receive divine honors at death, but the good ones did. As with Octavian, many were worshiped as divine even while alive. So we find an inscription (a text carved on stone) in the city of Pergamon that gives honor to “the God Augustus Caesar,” and another in the city of Miletus dedicated to Gaius, otherwise known to history as Caligula (later considered a very bad emperor—but this inscription was made during his lifetime), which read “Gaius Caesar Germanicus, Son of Germanicus, God Sebastos.” While he was alive, at least, Caligula was sometimes considered divine.

Over the years scholars have wrestled with the problem of how to understand the development of the emperor cult throughout the Roman empire—in particular with the idea that a living person was revered as a god. Couldn’t everyone see that the man was human like everyone else? He had to eat and drink; he had other bodily functions; he had personal weaknesses as well as strengths—he was altogether mortal. In what sense could he seriously be considered a god?

As a rule, older scholarship was skeptical on this point, arguing that in fact most people didn’t really think the emperor was a god and that the bestowal of divine honors was mostly a form of flattery.¹² This scholarly view was largely based on ancient writings that were produced by the literary elite, that is, the upper echelon of society. Moreover, from this perspective it looked as if the emperor cult was sponsored by the ruling authorities themselves as a kind of imperial propaganda, to make everyone in the Roman provinces understand and appreciate whom they were dealing with when they were dealing with the Roman authorities. Ultimately, they were dealing with a god. In this view, everyone knew that of course the emperor was just a mortal, as all his predecessors had been, but members of the empire participated in the imperial cult to remain on Rome’s good side.

So cities built temples dedicated not simply to one of the great gods or goddesses of Rome—Jupiter, his wife Juno, Mars, Venus, or even “Roma”—but also to the “god” emperor. And sacrifices were made to the image of the emperor, just as to the gods. Still, in this former view of things the emperor was a lower-class divinity, and the worship of these human divinities was restricted to those who had already been deified at their deaths.

This older scholarly view is no longer the consensus, however. More recent scholarship has been less interested in what the literary elite of the upper classes had to say about Roman religion and more interested in what we can learn about what most Romans—the vast majority of whom could not read, let alone write, great works of biography or history—may have thought and certainly did practice. In this newer scholarship, the category of “belief” has come to be recognized as rather complicated with regard to Roman religion. Unlike Christianity, Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion. Instead, religion was all about action—what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them. From this perspective, the emperors—both dead and living—were indeed treated in the ways gods were treated, sometimes in virtually identical ways.¹³

More recent scholarship does not consider worship of the emperor as a top-down act of propaganda, promoted by Roman officials among the poor dupes who couldn’t know any better. It was instead a series of local movements usually initiated by city officials of the provinces as a way of revering the power of the empire. Moreover, this worship happened within Rome itself, not simply out in the boonies. Many people quite likely did believe that the emperor was a god. And whether they believed it or not, they certainly treated the emperor as a god. Not only did they perform sacrifices to the (other) gods on behalf of the emperor, they also performed sacrifices to the emperor, as a god—or at least to his genius, or to his “numen”—the power within him that made him who he was, a divine being.

I have already alluded to the reason a powerful ruler would be considered divine. He was capable of doing many things, but he also put his abilities to good use, by bestowing benefits on people under his rule. Throughout the Roman world we find this emphasis on “benefaction” in the inscriptions dedicated to rulers—chiefly, but not only, the emperors. An example from a realm outside of but obviously related to the emperor cult is an inscription dedicated to the Syrian ruler Antiochus III from the second century BCE. Antiochus had freed the town of Teas from the oppression of a foreign power. In response, the town set up cult statues of Antiochus and his wife Laodice and performed sacrifices at an official public ceremony. The two statues were dedicated beside the statue of Dionysus, who was the chief god in the city, within his temple and were accompanied by the following inscription honoring Antiochus and Laodice: “Having made the city and its territory sacred . . . and having freed us from tribute . . . they should receive honours from everyone to the greatest possible extent and, by sharing in the temple and other matters with Dionysus, should become the common saviors of our city and should give us benefits in common.”¹⁴ The political benefactors are considered “religious” heroes. They have statues and a place in the temple, and sacrifices are made in their honor. In a very real sense they are the “saviors” and so are treated as such.

So too the emperors. Already we find with Augustus the province of Asia deciding to celebrate his birthday every year, as explained in an inscription in gratitude for his “benefaction of mankind” and for being “a savior who put an end to war and established all things.” Augustus had “surpassed the benefactors born before him,” so that “the birthday of the god marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming.”¹⁵

If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.

A Nonruler: The Passing of Peregrinus

To this point, in exploring humans who were thought to have become divine, I have focused principally on powerful rulers. But other great humans also had this capacity. Of course, lots of people among us are reasonably powerful, wise, or virtuous. Others are remarkably powerful, wise, or virtuous. And others are unbelievably powerful, wise, or virtuous. If someone’s power, wisdom, or virtue is almost beyond belief, it may be because the person is not a lower life-form—a mortal like the rest of us. That person may be a god in human form. Or so it was widely believed in the Greek and Roman worlds.

One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs. For satire to work, it has to be directed against something that is widely accepted. This is one reason that satire is such a perfect tool for unpacking the beliefs of other cultures. As it turns out, we have some brilliant satires from the Roman world.

One of the most entertaining satirists of ancient times was the second-century CE Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-speaking wit who proved to be the gadfly of all pretension, especially philosophical and religious. Among Lucian’s many surviving works is a book called The Passing of Peregrinus. Peregrinus was a self-styled philosopher of the Cynic mode. In ancient philosophy being a Cynic did not mean simply being cynical; it was a style of philosophy. Cynic philosophers were adamant that you shouldn’t live for the “good things” in life. You shouldn’t care what you possess, what you wear, or what you eat. You shouldn’t care for anything, in fact, that is external to you, anything that is ultimately beyond your ability to control. If your house burns down, that’s outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your house. If you get fired from your job, that’s outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your job. If your spouse divorces you or your child unexpectedly dies, those things are outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your family. What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about.

People who hold such views are not going to be interested in having a nice, comfortable life (since it can be taken away), in how other people respond to them (no way to control that), or in social convention (why should anyone care?). Cynic philosophers who acted out their convictions had no possessions, no personal loves, and often no manners. They didn’t have permanent homes and performed bodily functions in public. That’s why they were called Cynics. The word cynic is from the Greek word for dog. These people lived like dogs.

Some people from outside the ranks of Cynics highly respected them. Some people thought they could be brilliant philosophers. And some people who wanted to be thought of as brilliant philosophers became Cynics. In a sense, it was easy enough to do. All you had to do was give up everything and declare such a choice to be a virtue.

Lucian thought the whole Cynic business was a sham, an attention-grabbing ploy with no serious substance behind it. And so he mocked Cynics and their ways. No one earned his opprobrium more than a Cynic named Peregrinus. In The Passing of Peregrinus (meaning, the death of Peregrinus) Lucian tells the real story behind this famous Cynic whom others in his time considered to be so deeply profound and philosophical that they suspected he was in fact a divine being—which is precisely what Peregrinus wanted, in Lucian’s view. Lucian gives a hilarious account of Peregrinus’s life, but here I’m interested in the events surrounding his death. In a sense, the entire book is looking forward to the death of this self-aggrandizing proponent of selfless debasement.

Peregrinus reportedly presented himself as being the god Proteus in the flesh. And he wanted to demonstrate his divine virtue by the way he died. As a Cynic he proclaimed—hypocritically, in Lucian’s view—the need to abstain from all the pleasure and joy of this life. He decided to prove his point by voluntarily undergoing a violent and painful death, so as to show how he thought that people should in fact live. He planned, and proclaimed, that he would immolate himself. According to Lucian, he did just that, before a large crowd that had gathered to observe the event.

After announcing his intentions and hyping the event at great length (itself a form of self-aggrandizement, as Lucian portrays it), at a set time, around midnight, and near the Olympic games (where crowds would be sure to gather), Peregrinus and his followers built an enormous pyre and lit it. According to Lucian, Peregrinus hoped to be stopped by those who could not bear to see him pass from human existence, but when it came to the moment, Peregrinus realized he had no choice but to go through with the deed. He cast himself into the raging fire and so ended his life.

Lucian claims to have witnessed the event and thought the entire episode was ridiculous and absurd. He says that on the way back from the scene he met people who were coming—too late—to see the great man display his godlike courage and resilience to pain. Lucian informed them that they had missed the festivities, but he told them what happened, and did so as if he himself were a believer:

For the benefit of the dullards, agog to listen, I would thicken the plot a bit on my own account, saying that when the pyre was kindled and Proteus flung himself bodily in, a great earthquake first took place, accompanied by a bellowing of the ground, and then a vulture, flying up out of the midst of the flames, went off to Heaven, saying, in human speech, with a loud voice, “I am through with the earth; to Olympus I fare.” (The Passing of Peregrinus 39)¹⁶

And so Peregrinus, in the shape of a bird (not the noble eagle but the scavenger vulture), allegedly ascended to Mount Olympus, home of the gods, to live there, divine man that he was. To Lucian’s unmitigated amusement, he then met another man who was also telling about the event. This man claimed that after it was all over, he had met the supposedly dead Peregrinus, who was wearing a white garment and a garland of wild olive. Moreover, this man indicated that before this meeting, when Peregrinus had met his fiery fate, a vulture had arisen from the fire and flown off to heaven. This was the vulture that Lucian himself had invented! And so stories go, as they are invented, told by word of mouth, and then come to be taken as gospel truth.

Lucian, of course, mocked the entire proceeding and concluded his account by speaking not of Peregrinus’s divinity, but of his utter, and rather lowly, humanity: “So ended that poor wretch Proteus, a man who (to put it briefly) never fixed his gaze on the truth but always did and said everything with a view to glory and the praise of the multitude, even to the extent of leaping into fire, when he was sure not to enjoy the praise because he could not hear it” (The Passing of Peregrinus 42).

Divine Humans in the Greek and Roman Worlds

FROM THESE EXAMPLES, WE can see a variety of ways in the ancient world that divine beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be thought to be divine. Again, this way of looking at things stands considerably at odds with how most people today understand the relationship of the human and the divine, at least people who stand in the western religious traditions (Jews, Christians, Muslims). As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing; humans are another—and never the twain shall meet. Well, almost never: in the Christian tradition they did meet once, in the person of Jesus. Our question is how that was thought to have happened. At the root of that idea is a different sensibility about the world, one in which divinity is not absolutely but only relatively remote from humanity.

In this ancient way of thinking, both humanity and divinity are on a vertical continuum, and these two continuums sometimes meet at the high end of the one and the low end of the other. By contrast, most modern people, at least in the West, think that God is above us all in every respect and in infinite degree. He is completely Other. And there is no continuum in God. For one thing, there aren’t any other gods that could provide a continuum. There is only one God, and he is infinitely beyond what we can think, not just relatively better in every way. True, some humans are more “godlike” than others—and in some traditions there does appear to be some crossover to the divine (e.g., with Roman Catholic saints). But even there, at the end of the day, God is wholly Other compared with everyone and everything else and is on an entirely different plane, by himself.

But not for most ancient people. Apart from Jews in the ancient world—whom I will address in the next chapter—everyone was a polytheist. There were lots of gods, and they were on graded levels of divinity. This can be seen in the way ancient people talked about divine beings. Consider the following inscription from the city of Mytilene, which wanted to honor the emperor as a god. This decree speaks of those humans who “have attained heavenly glory and possess the eminence and power of gods.”¹⁷ But then it goes on to say that the divine status can always be heightened for the divine emperor: “If anything more glorious than these provisions is found hereafter, the enthusiasm and piety of the city will not fail in anything that can further deify him.” It is these last words that are the most important: “can further deify him.” How can they further deify someone who is already a deity? They cannot if being a deity means being at a fixed, certain level of divinity. But they can if being a deity placed a person on a continuum of divinity, say, at the lower end. Then the person could be moved up. And how is the person to be moved up? The decree is quite clear: the reason the emperor has been regarded as divine in the first place is because of what he has done for the people of Mytilene, “the provisions” that he has made for them. If he comes through with even more benefactions, then he will become even more divine.

When ancient people imagined the emperor—or any individual—as a god, it did not mean that the emperor was Zeus or one of the other gods of Mount Olympus. He was a divine being on a much lower level.

The Divine Pyramid

INSTEAD OF A CONTINUUM, possibly it is helpful to understand the ancient conception of the divine realm as a kind of pyramid of power, grandeur, and deity.¹⁸ Some ancient people—for example, some of those more philosophically inclined—thought that at the very pinnacle of the divine realm was one ultimate deity, a god who was over all things, who was infinitely, or virtually infinitely, powerful and who was sometimes thought to be the source of all things. This god—whether Zeus, or Jupiter, or an unknown god—stood at the apex of what we might imagine as the divine pyramid.

Below this god, on the next lower tier, were the great gods known from tales and traditions that had been passed down from antiquity, for example, the twelve gods on Mount Olympus described in the ancient myths and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, gods such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Mercury, and so on. These gods were fantastically powerful, far beyond what we can imagine. The myths about them were entertaining stories, but many people thought these myths were just that, stories—not historical narratives of things that actually happened. Philosophers tried to “demythologize” the myths, that is, to strip them of their obvious literary features to see how, apart from a literal reading, they told deeper truths about the world and reality. At any rate, these gods were worshiped as the most powerful beings in the universe. Many of them were adopted by cities and towns as their patron gods; some were acknowledged and worshiped by the state as a whole, which had clear and compelling reasons to want the mighty gods to look favorably upon it in times of both war and peace.

But they were not the only divine beings. On a lower tier of the pyramid were many, many other gods. Every city and town had its local gods, who protected, defended, and aided the place. There were gods of every imaginable function: gods of war, love, weather, health, childbirth—you name it. There were gods for every locale: gods of forests, meadows, mountains, and rivers. The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots of what we might call religious tolerance.

Below these levels of gods there were still other tiers. There was a group of divine beings known as daimones. Sometimes this word gets translated as “demons,” but that word as we think of it today gives the wrong connotation. Some of these beings could be malevolent, to be sure, but not all of them were; and they were not fallen angels or wicked spirits that could possess people and make them do hurtful things such as fling themselves in harm’s way or twist their heads 360 degrees or projectile vomit (as in the movie The Exorcist). The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions. If displeased, they could do harmful things. It was important to keep them happy by paying them their due in reverence and worship.

In the divine pyramid a yet lower tier, near or at the bottom, would be inhabited by divine humans. This is where the “pyramid” analogy breaks down because we should not think that these divine humans were more numerous than the other deities above them. In fact, it was relatively rare to run across people who were so mighty, wise, or gorgeous that they must in some sense be divine. But it did happen on occasion. A great general, a king, an emperor, a great philosopher, a fantastic beauty—these could be more than human. Such people could be superhuman. They could be divine. Maybe their father was a god. Maybe they were a god temporarily assuming a human body. Maybe because of their own virtue, power, or physical features they were thought to have been accepted into the divine realm. But they were not like the rest of us lowly humans.

We too, as I have pointed out, are on a continuum. Some among us are quite lowly—those whom the likes of Lucian of Samosata, for example, would consider the scum of the earth. Others of us are about average in every way. Others of us think that we, and our entire families, are well above average. Some of us recognize that there are fellows among us who are superior in remarkable ways. For ancient people, some of us are so vastly superior that we have begun to move into the realm of the divine.

Jesus and the Divine Realm

THIS VIEW OF THE divine realm did not change significantly until later Christians changed it. It is hard to put a finger on when exactly it changed, but change it did. By the time of the fourth Christian century—some three hundred years after Jesus lived, when the empire was in the process of converting from paganism to Christianity—many of the great thinkers of the Roman world had come to believe that a huge chasm separated the divine and human realms. God was “up there” and was the Almighty. He alone was God. There were no other gods and so there was no continuum of divinity. There was just us down here, the lowly sinners, and God up there, the supreme sovereign over all that is.

Jesus himself eventually came to be thought of as belonging not down here with us, but up there with God. He himself was God, with a capital G. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but only one God? How could Jesus be God and God be God and yet there be only one God? That, in part, is the question that drives this book. But the more pressing and immediate question is about how this perception started in the first place. How did Jesus move from being a human to being God—in any sense?

I should stress those final three words. One of the mistakes that people make when thinking about the question of Jesus as God involves taking the view that eventually was widely held by the fourth Christian century—that a great chasm exists between the human and divine realms—and assuming that this view was in place during the early days of the Christian movement. This mistake is made not only by laypeople, but also, widely, by professional theologians. And not just theologians, but scholars of all sorts—including biblical scholars (or maybe, especially biblical scholars) and historians of early Christianity. When people who make this mistake ask “how did Jesus become God?,” they mean, how did Jesus move from the realm of the purely human—where there are millions of us with varying degrees of talent, strength, beauty, and virtue—to the realm of God, God himself, the one and only Almighty Creator and Lord of all that is? How did Jesus become GOD?¹⁹

This is indeed an interesting question—because it did indeed happen. Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense. But he had been seen as God before that, by people who did not have this fourth-century understanding of the relationship of the human and divine realms. When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?” If the divine realm is a continuum rather than an absolute, a graduated pyramid rather than a single point, then it is the sense in which Jesus is God that is the main issue at the outset.

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.

One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God. People saw Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, and even a prophet. Some people thought of him as the (very human) messiah. But he was born like everyone else and he was “like” everyone else. He was raised in Nazareth and was not particularly noteworthy as a youth. As an adult—or possibly even as a child—he became convinced, like many other Jews of his time, that he was living near the end of the age, that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in a good kingdom here on earth. Jesus felt called to proclaim this message of the coming apocalypse, and he spent his entire public ministry doing so.

Eventually Jesus irritated the ruling authorities during a trip he made to Jerusalem, and they had him arrested and tried. He was brought before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and after a short trial he was convicted on charges of political insurgency: he was claiming to be the Jewish king when only the Roman overlords who were in charge of Palestine and the rest of the Mediterranean could appoint a king. As a political troublemaker he was condemned to a particularly ignominious death, by crucifixion. And as far as the Romans were concerned, that’s where his story ended.

But in fact, that’s not where his story ended. And so we return to the driving question of our study: How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?

An obvious place to start to find an answer would be with the life and teachings of Jesus. But first we need to consider the religious and cultural matrix of first-century Judaism within which he lived his life and proclaimed his message. As we will see, even though Jews were distinct from the pagan world around them in thinking that only one God was to be worshiped and served, they were not distinct in their conception of the relationship of that realm to the human world we inhabit. Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.