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

CHAPTER 2

Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism

WHEN I FIRST STARTED my teaching career in the mid-1980s I was offered an adjunct position at Rutgers University. Since part-time adjunct faculty members rarely make much money, I worked other jobs to make ends meet, including one at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A long-term project was under way there called the Princeton Epigraphy Project. It involved collecting, cataloguing, and entering into a computer database all of the Greek inscriptions in major urban centers throughout the ancient Mediterranean. These were eventually published in separate volumes for each location. I was the research grunt for the person in charge, who, unlike me, was a highly trained classicist who could read an inscription like a newspaper. I had the job of entering and editing the inscriptions. One of the localities that I had responsibility for was the ancient city of Priene, on the west coast of Turkey. I had never heard of Priene before that, but I collected and catalogued all the inscriptions that had ever been found there and previously published.

Move the calendar up to 2009 and my life was very different indeed. As a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina, I had the ability to travel far and wide. And I did. That summer, I decided to tour around Turkey with my good friend Dale Martin, professor of New Testament at Yale, and check out various archaeological sites. We spent two weeks there, with very few advance plans, simply going wherever we wanted to go. It was terrific.

One of the highlights was going to the ruins of ancient Priene. It’s an amazing site, in a striking mountain setting. Over the years German archaeologists have made significant digs there, but it is for the most part still deserted. There are ruins of temples, houses, shops, and streets. There is a theater that could seat five thousand. An interesting bouleuterion—a council house, where the local governing council members gathered for their meetings—still stands in its square shape with seats on three sides. A temple of Athena Pollis is a major structure, its columns fallen and the drums that once made up columns scattered on the ground. And there are lots of Greek inscriptions, just sitting out here and there waiting to be read.

That afternoon, looking at one of the inscriptions, I had a blinding realization. It was one of those thoughts that was completely obvious—an idea that scholars had discussed for many years but that had never hit me, personally, with full force. How could that be? Why had it never impressed me before? I had to sit down and think hard for fifteen minutes before I could move again.

At that time I had been making some initial sketches for this book and was planning on writing about how Jesus became God as a purely internal Christian development, as a logical outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus as they developed after some of his followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead (as I’ll explain in later chapters). But I didn’t have a single thought of putting that development in relationship to what was going on beyond the bounds of the Christian tradition. And then I read an inscription lying outside a temple in Priene. The inscription referred to the God (Caesar) Augustus.

And it hit me: the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God. Could this be a historical accident? How could it be an accident? These were not simply parallel developments. This was a competition. Who was the real god-man? The emperor or Jesus? I realized at that moment that the Christians were not elevating Jesus to a level of divinity in a vacuum. They were doing it under the influence of and in dialogue with the environment in which they lived. As I said, I knew that others had thought this before. But it struck me at that moment like a bolt of lightning.

I decided then and there to reconceptualize my book. But an obvious problem also hit me. The first Christians who started speaking about Jesus as divine were not pagans from Priene. They were Jews from Palestine. These Jews, of course, also knew about the emperor cult. In fact, it was practiced in some of the more Greek cities of Palestine during the first century. But the first followers of Jesus were not particularly imbued with Greek culture. They were Jews from rural and village parts of Galilee. It may be the case that later, after the Christian church became more heavily gentile, with pagan converts making up the majority of its members, the heightened emphasis on Jesus as God (rather than the emperor as God) made sense. But what about at the beginning?

So I started thinking about divine humans within Judaism. Here was an immediate enigma. Jews, unlike their pagan neighbors, were monotheists. They believed in only one God. How could they say that Jesus was God and still claim there was only one God? If God was God and Jesus was God, doesn’t that make two Gods? I realized that I needed to do some research into the matter to figure it out.

Judaism in the Ancient World

THE FIRST STEP, OF course, must be to lay out in basic terms what Judaism was in the ancient world, around the time of Jesus. My focus is on what Jews at the time “believed” since I am interested in the question of how belief in Jesus as God could fit into Jewish thinking more broadly. I should stress that Judaism was not principally about belief per se; for most Jews, Judaism was a set of practices every bit as much, or even more, than a set of beliefs. Being Jewish meant living in certain ways. It meant engaging in certain “religious” activities, such as performing sacrifices and saying prayers and hearing scripture read; it meant certain kinds of lifestyles such as observing food regulations and honoring the Sabbath day; it meant certain ritual practices, such as circumcising baby boys and observing Jewish festivals; it meant following certain ethical codes, such as can be found in the Ten Commandments. All of this and much more is what it meant to be Jewish in antiquity. But for the purposes of this chapter, I am principally interested in what Jews of the time thought about God and the divine realm, since it is these thoughts that can make sense of how a man like Jesus could be considered divine.

Saying what Jews thought is itself highly problematic, since lots of different Jews thought lots of different things. It would be like asking what Christians think today. Someone may well say that Christians believe that Christ is fully divine and fully human. And that would be true—except for those Christians who continue to think that he really was God and was human only in appearance, or for those Christians who think that he was an inordinately religious man but was not really God. You can pick almost any doctrine of the Christian church and find lots of people who identify themselves as Christians thinking something different from what other Christians think about it. It’s like what some Episcopalians say about themselves today: get four in a room and you’ll find five opinions. So too with ancient Jews.

Widespread Jewish Beliefs

WITH ALL THESE CAVEATS in mind, I can try to explain briefly what most Jews at the time of Jesus appear to have believed. (A full treatment, of course, would require a very large book of its own.)¹ Jews on the whole were monotheists. They knew that the pagans had lots of gods, but for them there was only one God. This was their God, the God of Israel. This God had created the world and all that was in it. Moreover, he had promised the ancestors of Israel an enormous body of descendants who made up Israel. He had called Israel to be his people and made a covenant—a kind of pact, or peace treaty—with them: he would be their God if they would be his people. Being his people meant following the law he had given them—the law of Moses, which is now found in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which together are sometimes called the Torah (the Hebrew word for law).

This was the law that God had revealed to his prophet Moses after he saved the people of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus. The law included instructions on how to worship God (for example, through sacrifices), how to be distinct as a social group from other peoples (for example, through the kosher food laws), and how to live together in community (for example, through the ethical injunctions of the Ten Commandments). At the heart of the Jewish law was the commandment to worship the God of Israel alone. The very beginning of the Ten Commandments states: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3).

By the days of Jesus, most (but not all) Jews considered other ancient books to be sacred along with the Torah. There were writings of prophets (such as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah) that described the history of ancient Israel and proclaimed the word of God to the dire situations people had faced during difficult times. There were other writings such as the books of Psalms and Proverbs that were invested with special divine authority. Some of these other books restated the teachings of the Torah, speaking the words of the law to a new situation. The book of Isaiah, for example, is emphatic in its monotheistic assertions: “I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” (Isa. 45:5); or as can be found later in the same chapter of the prophet:

Turn to me and be saved,

All the ends of the earth!

For I am God, and there is no other.

By myself I have sworn,

From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness

A word that shall not return:

“To me every knee shall bow,

Every tongue shall swear.” (Isa 45:22–23)

Isaiah is here expressing a view that became important later in the history of Judaism. Not only is God the only God there is, but eventually everyone will realize it. All the peoples of earth will, in the future, bow down in worship before him alone and confess his name.

Can There Be a Spectrum of Divinity in Judaism?

WITH THE STRESS ON the oneness of God throughout scripture, how is it possible to imagine that Jews could have something like a divine pyramid? Within the pagan system it was possible to imagine not only that divine beings temporarily became human, but also that humans in some sense could be divine. But if there is only one God, how could that be possible?

In this chapter I argue that it was in fact possible and that Jews also thought there were divine humans. Before going into detail about how this could happen, however, I need to make two general points about Jewish monotheism. The first is that not every ancient Israelite held a monotheistic view—the idea that there is only one God. Evidence for this can be seen already in the verse I quoted from the Torah above, the beginning of the Ten Commandments. Note how the commandment is worded. It does not say, “You shall believe that there is only one God.” It says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This commandment, as stated, presupposes that there are other gods. But none of them is to be worshiped ahead of, or instead of, the God of Israel. As it came to be interpreted, the commandment also meant that none of these other gods was to be worshiped alongside of or even after the God of Israel. But that does not mean the other gods don’t exist. They simply are not to be worshiped.

This is a view that scholars have called henotheism, in distinction from the view I have thus far been calling monotheism. Monotheism is the view that there is, in fact, only one God. Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshiped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.

By the time of Jesus, many, possibly most, Jews had moved into the monotheistic camp. But doesn’t that view preclude the possibility of other divine beings in the divine realm? As it turns out—this is my second point—that is not the case either. Jews may not (usually) have called other superhuman divine beings “God” or “gods.” But there were other superhuman divine beings. In other words, there were beings who lived not on earth but in the heavenly realm and who had godlike, superhuman powers, even if they were not the equals of the ultimate God himself. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, there are angels, cherubim, and seraphim—attendants upon God who worship him and administer his will (see, for example, Isa. 6:1–6). These are fantastically powerful beings far above humans in the scale of existence. They are lower-level divinities. By the time of the New Testament we find Jewish authors referring to such entities as principalities, dominions, powers, and authorities—unnamed divine beings in the heavenly realm who are active as well here on earth (e.g., Eph. 6:12; Col. 1:16). And these divinities stand in a hierarchical scale, a continuum of power. Some cosmic beings are more powerful than others. So Jewish texts speak of the great angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. These are divine powers far above humans, though far below God as well.

The point is this: even within Judaism there was understood to be a continuum of divine beings and divine power, comparable in many ways to that which could be found in paganism. This was true even among authors who were strict monotheists. They may have believed that there was only one supreme being who could be called God Almighty, just as some pagan philosophers thought there was only one ultimate true god above all the others at the top of the “pyramid.” And some, possibly most, Jews insisted that this one God alone was to be worshiped. But there were other Jews whom we know about who thought it was altogether acceptable and right to worship other divine beings, such as the great angels. Just as it is right to bow down before a great king in obeisance to him, they believed it is right to bow down before an even greater being, an angel, to do obeisance.

We know that some Jews thought it was right to worship angels in no small part because a number of our surviving texts insist that it not be done.² You don’t get laws prohibiting activities that are never performed. No city on earth would have a law against jaywalking or against speeding if no one had ever done either. Ancient authors insisted that angels not be worshiped precisely because angels were being worshiped. Even those who were worshiping angels may have thought that doing so was not a violation of the Ten Commandments: God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism.

It is within this context that I move to my central concern here: divine beings who become human within Judaism, and humans who become divine. I consider three categories roughly corresponding to the three ways a human could be divine in the pagan world. Within Judaism we find divine beings who temporarily become human, semidivine beings who are born of the union of a divine being and a mortal, and humans who are, or who become, divine.

Divine Beings Who Temporarily Become Human

ANGELS IN ANCIENT JUDAISM were widely understood to be superhuman messengers of God who mediated his will on earth. It is striking that various angels sometimes appeared on earth in human guise. More than that, in some ancient Jewish texts there is a figure known as “the Angel of the Lord,” who is regarded as the “chief” angel. How exalted is this figure? In some passages he is identified as God himself. And yet sometimes he appears as a human. This is the Jewish counterpart to the pagan view that the gods could assume human guise to visit the earth.

The Angel of the Lord as God and Human

An example early in scripture can be found in Genesis 16. The situation is this. God has promised Abraham that he will have many descendants, that he will, in fact, be the father of the nation of Israel. But he is childless. His wife Sarah hands her servant Hagar over to him so he can conceive a child with her. Abraham willingly complies, but then Sarah becomes jealous of Hagar and mistreats her. Hagar runs away.

“The Angel of the Lord” then finds Hagar in the wilderness and speaks to her (Gen. 16:7). He tells her to return to her mistress and lets her know that she, Hagar, will have a son who will be the ancestor of a (different) great people. But then, after referring to this heavenly visitant as the Angel of the Lord, the text indicates that it was, in fact, “the LORD” who had spoken with her (16:13). Moreover, Hagar realizes that she has been addressing God himself and expresses her astonishment that she had “seen God and remained alive after seeing him” (16:13). Here there is both ambiguity and confusion: either the Lord appears as an angel in the form of a human, or the Angel of the Lord is the Lord himself, God in human guise.

A similar ambiguity occurs two chapters later, this time with Abraham. We are told in Genesis 18:1 that “the LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre.” But when the episode is narrated, we learn that “three men” come to him (18:2). Abraham plays the good host and entertains them, preparing for them a very nice meal, which they all three eat. When they talk to him afterward, one of these three “men” is identified explicitly as “the LORD” (18:13). At the end of the story we are informed that the other two were “angels” (19:1). So here we have a case where two angels and the Lord God himself have assumed human form—so much so that they appear to Abraham to be three men, and they all eat the food he has prepared.

The most famous instance of such ambiguity is found in the story of Moses and the burning bush (Exod. 3:1–22). By way of background: Moses, the son of Hebrews, had been raised in Egypt by the daughter of Pharaoh, but he has to escape for murdering an Egyptian and is wanted by the Pharaoh himself. He goes to Midian where he marries and becomes a shepherd for his father-in-law’s flocks. One day, while tending to his sheeply duties, Moses sees an astonishing sight. We are told that he arrives at Mount Horeb (this is Mount Sinai, where later, after the exodus, he is given the law) and there, “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush” (Exod. 3:2). Moses is amazed because the bush is aflame but is not being consumed by the fire. And despite the fact that it is the Angel of the Lord who is said to have appeared to him, it is “the Lord” who sees that Moses has come to the bush, and it is “God” who then calls to him out of the bush. In fact, the Angel of the Lord tells Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). As the story continues, the Lord God continues to speak to Moses and Moses to God. But in what sense was it the Angel of the Lord that appeared to him? As a helpful note in the HarperCollins Study Bible puts it: “Although it was an angel that appeared in v. 2, there is no substantive difference between the deity and his agents.”³ Or as New Testament scholar Charles Gieschen has expressed it, this “Angel of the Lord” is “either indistinguishable from God as his visible manifestation” or he is a distinct figure, separate from God, who is bestowed with God’s own authority.⁴

Other Angels as God and Human

There are numerous other examples both in the Bible and in other Jewish texts in which angels are described as God and, just as important, in which angels are described as humans. One of the most interesting is Psalm 82. In this beautiful plea that justice be done for those who are weak and needy, we are told, in v. 1, that “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” Here, God Almighty is portrayed as having a divine council around him; these are angelic beings with whom God consults, as happens elsewhere in the Bible—most famously in Job 1, where the Satan figure is himself reckoned among these divine beings.⁵ In the Job passage the divine beings making up God’s council are called “sons of God.” Here in Psalm 82 they are called “children of the Most High.” But more than that, they are called “Elohim” (82:6)—the Hebrew word for “God” (it is a plural word; when not referring to God, it is usually translated as “gods”). These angelic beings are “gods.” Here in the psalm they are rebuked because they have no concern for people who are lowly, weak, and destitute. Because of the failures of these “gods,” God bestows upon them the ultimate punishment: he makes them mortal, so that they will die and cease to exist (82:7).

Thus angelic beings, children of God, can be called gods. And in a variety of texts we find that such beings become human. Here I might turn to some instances outside the Bible. In a Jewish text that probably dates to the first Christian century, the Prayer of Joseph, we find the Jewish ancestor Jacob speaking in the first person and indicating that he is in fact an angel of God: “I, Jacob, who is speaking to you am also Israel, an angel of God. . . . I am the first born of every living thing to whom God gives life.”⁶ “Uriel, the angel of God, came forth and said that I, Jacob, descended to earth and tabernacled [dwelled in a tent] among people and that I have been called by the name Jacob.” He is further called “the archangel of the power of the Lord” and is said to be the “chief captain” among the sons of God. Here again, the chief angel appears as a human being on earth—in this case, as the patriarch Jacob, otherwise known from the book of Genesis.

As a second example I turn to another Jewish book from about the same time, called the Apocalypse of Abraham. This book describes a vision allegedly experienced by the patriarch Abraham, father of the Jews. Abraham hears a voice but does not see anyone who is speaking; in astonishment he falls to the ground, as if lifeless (10.1–2). And while facedown on the ground he hears the voice of God saying to an angel named Jaoel to go and strengthen him. Jaoel appears to Abraham “in the likeness of a man” (10.4) and raises and strengthens him. He tells Abraham that he is the angel who brings peace to warring factions in heaven and who works miracles not only on earth, but also in Hades, the realm of the dead. When Abraham looks at the angel, he sees a body like sapphire, a face like chrysolite, hair like snow, a rainbow on his head, royal purple garments, and a golden staff in his hand (11.2–3). Here then is a mighty angel, who temporarily becomes incarnate, in order to effect God’s will on earth—in this instance to be with Abraham in his various activities on earth.

Humans Who Become Angels

Other Jewish texts speak not only of angels (or even God) as becoming human, but also of humans who become angels. Many people today have the view that when people die, they become angels (well, at least if they’ve been “good”). This is a very old belief indeed. In the book of 2 Baruch, one of the great apocalypses that has come down to us from early Judaism (an apocalypse is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities), we learn that righteous believers will be transformed “into the splendor of angels . . . for they will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and be equal to the stars. . . . And the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels” (2 Bar. 51.3–10).⁷ Here, then, those who are righteous become angels who are greater than other angels—greater even than the stars, which many ancient people believed to be fantastically great angels.

Some ancient Jewish texts portray particular individuals as being transformed into angels at death. One of the supremely mysterious characters in the Hebrew Bible is the ancient figure Enoch. We do not learn much about him in the terse comments of the principal passage that mentions him in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 5. We learn that he was the father of Methuselah, the oldest man who ever lived in scripture (969 years, according to Gen 5:27), and the great-grandfather of Noah. But what is most striking is that when Enoch was 365 years old, he passed from this earth—but without dying: “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Gen. 5:24). This laconic statement generated enormous speculations and speculative literature throughout ancient Judaism. Several ancient apocalypses are attributed to Enoch. Who better to know about the future course of history or of the heavenly realm than one who was transported to heaven without dying first?

In a book called 2 Enoch, written possibly around the time of Jesus, we learn one opinion about what happened to Enoch when he was taken up into the divine realm (2 En. 22.1–10). We are told that he came into the presence of the Lord himself and did obeisance to him. God tells him to stand up and says to his angels, “Let Enoch join in and stand in front of my face forever.”⁸ God then tells the angel Michael: “Go, and extract Enoch from his earthly clothing. And anoint him with my delightful oil, and put him into the clothes of my glory.” Michael does so. Enoch reflects on his transformation in the first person: “And I looked at myself and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference.” As a result of this angelification, if we can call it that, Enoch’s face became so bright that no one could look at it (37.2), and he no longer needed to eat or sleep (23.3; 56.2). In other words, he became identical to an angel.

Something similar is said to have happened to Moses. The death of Moses is described in cryptic terms in the Bible where we learn that he died alone and no one ever knew the location of his grave (Deut. 34:5–6). Later Jewish writers maintained that he was taken up to heaven to dwell. And so, for example, in the apocryphal book of Sirach we learn that God made Moses “equal in glory to the holy ones, and made him great, to the terror of his enemies” (45.1–5). He thus is equal to the angels. Some authors think of him as even greater than the angels, as in a book attributed to a person known as Ezekiel the Tragedian, who indicates that Moses was given a scepter and summoned to sit on a throne, with a diadem placed on his head, so that the “stars” bowed down to him. Recall: stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they.

To summarize our findings to this point: the Angel of the Lord is sometimes portrayed in the Bible as being the Lord God himself, and he sometimes appears on earth in human guise. Still other angels—the members of God’s divine council—are called gods and are made mortals. And yet other angels make their appearances on earth in human form. Still more important, some Jewish texts talk about humans becoming angels at death—or even superior to angels and worthy of worship. The ultimate relevance of these findings for our question about how Jesus came to be considered divine should already begin to become apparent. In one of the important studies of early Christian Christology, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado states a key thesis: “I propose the view that the principal angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking . . . provided the earliest Christians with a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God without having to depart from their monotheistic tradition.”⁹ In other words, if humans could be angels (and angels humans), and if angels could be gods, and if in fact the chief angel could be the Lord himself—then to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form.

Divine Beings Who Beget Semidivine Beings

IN CHAPTER 1 WE saw a common theme in pagan mythology: divine men who were born of the union of a mortal and a god (such as the lusty Zeus). There is nothing exactly like this in ancient Jewish texts, probably because such human passions as sexual desire and lust were regularly deemed completely unsuitable for the God of Israel. Anger and wrath, yes; sexual love, no. Especially if it involved such scandalous activities as rape.

But there is something roughly analogous even in Judaism—not with God himself, but with some of his divine minions, the sons of God, the angels, who are occasionally said to have had sex with mortals and had superhuman offspring. We find the first intimation of some such thing in the early chapters of Genesis.

In a tantalizingly terse passage in Genesis 6, we learn that the “sons of God” looked down upon the earth and saw beautiful women whom they desired. “And they took wives for themselves of all that they chose” (6:2). More specifically, “the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them” (6:4). God was not pleased with this state of affairs, so he decided to limit human life to 120 years and, immediately afterward, decided further to be rid of the whole lot of them by bringing the flood, which only Noah and his family survived. And who were the offspring of these unions of the sons of God and human women? We are told that the “Nephilim” were on the earth in those days. These are the offspring, “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:4). The word Nephilim means “those who have fallen.” In the book of Numbers they are said to have been the giants who originally inhabited the land of Canaan (13:3). Putting all this together, one can see that divine beings—the sons of God—had sex with women on earth, and their semidivine offspring were giants. I am calling them “semidivine” both because they were born of the unions of divine beings and mortals and because they do not actually live in the heavenly realm like other divinities. But they are superior to other humans—giants who made fantastic warriors, for rather obvious reasons. As a side note, I think we can assume that in order for the sons of God to make these women their wives, they had to assume human shape. Here again, then, we have divine beings appearing as humans; and what is more, we have them generating yet other superhuman beings. This is a Jewish version of the pagan myths.

A fuller exposition of this account in the book of Genesis can be found in another Jewish apocalypse attributed to that mysterious figure of biblical history Enoch. The noncanonical book of 1 Enoch is a complicated collection of different texts that have been spliced together by later editors. The first portion of the book, called the Book of the Watchers, comprises chapters 1–36. It originally appears to have existed independently of 1 Enoch itself; scholars typically date it to the third century BCE. A good portion of the Book of the Watchers is an exposition of the brief but suggestive episode about the sons of God in Genesis 6; in 1 Enoch these figures are called the Watchers (chaps. 6–16). Unlike in Genesis 6, here they are also explicitly called “angels.”

We are told that there were two hundred of these errant angels, and we actually learn the names of their leaders, such angelic greats as Semyaz, Ram’el, and Tam’el. In this account the two hundred descend to earth onto Mount Hermon, they each choose a wife, and they have sex with her. The offspring who result are giants indeed: we are told that they were 450 feet tall. As such huge beings, these giants have ravenous appetites; they eventually run out of food and so start eating humans. No wonder God was not pleased.

The angelic beings, the Watchers, perform other illicit activities. They teach people magic, medicine, and astrology—some of the forbidden arts—and they instruct them in metallurgy, so they can make both jewelry and weapons. Three of the angels up in heaven—Michael, Surafel, and Gabriel—look down, see what is happening on earth, and issue a complaint to God about it. God responds by sending the flood to destroy the giants (and everyone else). The Watchers are then bound and cast into a pit in the desert where they are to live in darkness for seventy generations until they are sent into eternal fire on the day of judgment. Enoch is instructed to pronounce judgment upon them: “you used to be holy, spiritual, the living ones, possessing eternal life; but now you have defiled yourselves with women and with the blood of the flesh of begotten children, you have lusted with the blood of the people” (5.4).¹⁰ In this Jewish version, the divine beings are condemned for doing what Zeus did in the pagan stories.

The text goes on to explain that “now the giants who are born from the union of the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth. . . . Evil spirits have come out of their bodies” (15.8–9). This appears to be an explanation of where the beings who were later called demons came from. And so here we have a view even closer to that found in the pagan myths: the offspring of the union of divine and human beings are more divine beings—in this case the demonic forces that plague the world.

Other Nonhuman Divine Figures

THERE ARE OTHER FIGURES—APART from God himself—who are sometimes described as divine in ancient Jewish sources, both the Bible and later writings from near the time of Jesus and his followers. The first is modeled on a figure found in an enigmatic passage of scripture, Daniel 7, a figure that came to be known as “the Son of Man.”

The Son of Man

The book of Daniel is something like a Hebrew Bible version of the book of Revelation—a book that modern fundamentalists think sets out a blueprint of human history, down to our own time. Critical scholars see it as something very different indeed, as a book of its own time and place. The ostensible setting of the book of Daniel is in the sixth century BCE—although scholars have long been convinced that the book was not actually written then, but centuries later in the second century BCE. In this book Daniel is portrayed as a Judean captive who has been taken into exile to Babylon, the world empire that destroyed his homeland in 586 BCE. In chapter 7 Daniel describes a wild vision in which he sees four beasts arising out of the sea, one after the other. Each is awe-inspiring and truly terrible, and they wreak havoc on the earth. Then he sees “one like a son of man” coming on the “clouds of heaven” (Dan. 7:13). Here is a figure that is not beastly, but is in human form; and rather than coming from the turbulent sea of chaos, he arrives from the realm of God. The beasts that had caused such destruction on earth are judged and removed from power, and the kingdom of the earth is delivered over to the one “like a son of man.”

Daniel is unable to make heads or tails of the vision, but luckily—as typically happens in these apocalyptic texts that are disclosing sublime heavenly truths—an angel is standing by to interpret it for him. The beasts each represent a kingdom that will come, in succession to one another, to rule the earth. At the end, after the fourth beast, a humanlike one will be given dominion over the earth. In the angel’s interpretation of the vision, we are told that this dominion will be given to the “people of the holy ones of the Most High” (Dan. 7:27). This may mean that just as the beasts each represented a kingdom, so too did the “one like a son of man.” The beasts were the successive kingdoms of Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece, which would each achieve world domination. The one like a son of man, then, would be the kingdom of Israel, which will be restored to its proper place and given authority over all the earth. Some interpreters have thought that since the beasts can also be taken to represent kings (at the head of the kingdoms), so too the one like a son of man—possibly he is an angelic being who is head of the nation of Israel.¹¹

However one interprets Daniel in its original second-century BCE context, what is clear is that eventually in some Jewish circles it came to be thought that this “one like a son of man” was indeed a future deliverer, a cosmic judge of the earth, who would come with divine vengeance against God’s enemies and with a heavenly reward for those who had remained faithful to him. This figure came to be known as “the Son of Man.” Nowhere is he described more fully than in the book of 1 Enoch, which we have already considered in relation to the Book of the Watchers (1 En. 1–36). The Son of Man, on the other hand, is a prominent figure in a different portion of the final edition of 1 Enoch, chapters 37–71, which are usually called the Similitudes.

There are debates about the date of the Similitudes. Some scholars put this part of the book near the end of the first century CE; probably more date it earlier, to around the time of Jesus himself.¹² For our purposes a precise date is not particularly important. What matters is the exalted character of the Son of Man. Many great and glorious things are said in the Similitudes about this person—who now is thought of as a divine being, rather than, say, as the nation of Israel. We are told that he was given a name “even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars” (1 En. 48.2–3). We are told that all the earth will fall down and worship him. Before the creation he was concealed in the presence of God himself; but he was always God’s chosen one, and it is he who has revealed God’s wisdom to the righteous and holy, who will be “saved in his name,” since “it is his good pleasure that they have life” (48.2–7).

At the end of time, when all the dead are resurrected, it is he, the “Elect One,” who will sit on God’s throne (51.3). From this “throne of glory” he will “judge all the works of the holy ones in heaven above, weighing in the balance their deeds” (61.8). He himself is eternal: “He shall never pass away or perish before the face of the earth.” And “all evil shall disappear before his face” (69.79). He will “remove the kings and the mighty ones from their thrones. He shall loosen the reins of the strong and crush the teeth of sinners. He shall depose the kings from their thrones and kingdoms. For they do not extol and glorify him and neither do they obey him, the source of their kingship” (46.2–6).

At one point this cosmic judge of the earth is called the messiah—a term we will consider more fully in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that it comes from the Hebrew word for anointed and was originally used of the king of Israel, God’s anointed one (i.e., the one chosen and favored by God). Now the ruler anointed by God is not a mere mortal; he is a divine being who has always existed, who sits beside God on his throne, who will judge the wicked and the righteous at the end of time. He, in other words, is elevated to God’s own status and functions as the divine being who carries out God’s judgment on the earth. This is an exalted figure indeed, as exalted as one can possibly be without actually being the Lord God Almighty himself. It is striking that a later addition to the Similitudes, chapters 70–71, identifies this Son of Man as none other than Enoch. In this somewhat later view, it is a man, a mere mortal, who is exalted to this supreme position next to God.¹³ As this exalted being, the Son of Man is worshiped and glorified by the righteous.

The Two Powers in Heaven

Earlier I pointed out that the injunctions against worshiping angels scattered throughout early Jewish texts suggest that indeed angels were worshiped—otherwise, there would be no reason to forbid the practice. Now we have seen that the Son of Man also was worshiped. One could easily argue that anyone or anything seated beside God on a throne in the heavenly realm deserves worship. If you’re willing to bow down and prostrate yourself in the presence of an earthly king, then surely it’s appropriate to do so in the presence of the cosmic judge of the earth.

In an interesting and compelling study, Alan Segal, a scholar of ancient Judaism, argues that early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne. Following these Jewish sources, Segal refers to these two—God and the other—as the “two powers in heaven.”¹⁴ The Son of Man figure whom we have just examined would be one such divine figure, as he shares the status and power of God. But there evidently were others who were candidates for this celestial honor, and the rabbis who were concerned about regulating what Jews should think and believe found such views unnerving, so much so that they went on the attack against them. Their attacks were effective, more or less silencing those who ascribed to these views.

Segal’s careful analysis shows that those who held to the “heretical” notion of two powers maintained that the second power was either some kind of angel or a mystical manifestation of a divine characteristic thought to be in some sense equal with God (discussed more below). They subscribed to this notion because of their interpretations of certain passages in the Bible, such as those that describe the Angel of the Lord as bearing the divine name himself, or Daniel 7 and its reference to “the one like a son of man”—a figure independent of God who is given eternal power and dominion. Yet other passages could lead to a “two-powers” doctrine, such as Genesis 1:26, in which God, in creating humans, says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Why is God speaking in the plural: “us” and “our”? According to the two-powers heresy, it was because another divine figure was with him. This also could be the person that the “elders of Israel” saw sitting on the divine throne in Exodus 24:9–10. This figure is called the God of Israel, but the people actually saw him. Elsewhere, even within the book of Exodus, it is explicitly stated that no one can see God and live (Exod. 33:20). Yet they did see God and they did live. They must, then, have seen the second power, not God.

The rabbis of the second, third, fourth, and following centuries CE condemned any such notion as a heresy. But, again, the fact that they condemned it shows that it was a view held by other Jews, and since the rabbis condemned it so thoroughly, it was probably held by a large number of Jews. Segal argues that this heresy can be traced back to the first Christian century and to Palestine itself. He maintains that one obvious target for such views were the Christians, who elevated Christ—as we will see—to the level of God. But it wasn’t only Christians who held to the two-powers heresy. Non-Christian Jews did as well, on the basis of their interpretation of passages from the Hebrew Bible.

Divine Hypostases

Scholars sometimes use technical terms for no good reason, other than the fact that they are the technical terms scholars use. When I was in graduate school we used to ask, wryly, why we should use a perfectly good English term when we had an obscure Latin or German term that meant the same thing? But there are some rare terms that simply don’t have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them. Possibly the closest common term meaning roughly the same thing would be personification—but even that doesn’t quite get it, and it too isn’t a word you normally hear as you stand in line at the grocery store.

The term hypostasis comes from Greek and refers to the essence or substance of something. In the context in which I’m using the term here, it refers to a feature or attribute of God that comes to take on its own distinct existence apart from God. Imagine, for example, that God is wise. That means he has wisdom. This in turn means that wisdom is something that God “has”—that is, it is something independent of God that he happens to have possession of. If that’s the case, then one could imagine “wisdom” as a being apart from God; and since it is God’s wisdom, then it is a kind of divine being alongside God that is also within God as part of his essence, a part of who he is.

As it turns out, some Jewish thinkers imagined that Wisdom was just that, a hypostasis of God, an element of his being that was distinct from him in one sense, but completely his in another. Wisdom was with God as a divine being and could be thought of as God (since it was precisely his wisdom). Other hypostases are discussed in ancient Jewish writings, but here I restrict myself to two—Wisdom and what was sometimes thought of as the outward manifestation of Wisdom, the Word (Greek, Logos) of God.

Wisdom

The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8. Here, Wisdom is portrayed as speaking and says that it was the first thing God created:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

The first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth . . .

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth. (8:22–23, 25)

And then, once Wisdom was created, God created the heavens and the earth. In fact, he created all things with Wisdom, who worked alongside him:

When he established the heavens, I was there,

When he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

When he made firm the skies above,

When he established the fountains of the deep . . .

Then I was beside him, like a master worker;

And I was daily his delight,

Rejoicing before him always,

Rejoicing in his inhabited world

And delighting in the human race. (8:27–28, 30–31)

God made all things in his wisdom, so much so that Wisdom is seen as a co-creator of sorts. Moreover, just as God is said to have made all things live, so too life comes through Wisdom:

For whoever finds me finds life,

And obtains favor from the Lord;

But those who miss me injure themselves;

All who hate me love death. (8:35–36)

This passage can be read, of course, without thinking of Wisdom as some kind of personification of an aspect of God that exists apart from and alongside him. It could simply be a metaphorical way of saying that the world is an astounding place and that the creation of it is rooted in the wise foreknowledge of God, who made all things just as they ought to be. Moreover, if you understand the wisdom of the way things are made, and live in accordance with this knowledge, you will live a happy and fulfilled life. But some Jewish readers read the passage more literally and took Wisdom to be an actual being that was speaking, a being alongside God that was an expression of God.

This view led some Jewish thinkers to magnify Wisdom as a divine hypostasis. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in a book of the Jewish Apocrypha called the Wisdom of Solomon. The book is attributed to King Solomon himself—who is acclaimed in the Bible as the wisest man ever to have lived—but it was actually written many centuries after he had been laid to rest. Especially in chapters 7–9 we find a paean to Wisdom, which is said to be “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty . . . for she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis. 7:25–26; Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine); “she is an initiate in the knowledge of God, and an associate in his works” (8:4).

Here too we are told that Wisdom “was present when you [God] made the world” (9:9)—but more than that, she actually is beside God on his throne (9:10). It was Wisdom who brought salvation to Israel at the exodus and afterward throughout the history of the nation (chaps. 10–11). Interestingly, Wisdom is said to have done not only what the Hebrew Bible claims God did (creation; exodus), but also what the “angel” of God did—for example, rescuing Abraham’s nephew Lot from the fires that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 (10:6).

In a sense, then, Wisdom could be seen as an angel, even a highly exalted angel, or indeed the Angel of the Lord; but as a hypostasis it is something somewhat different. It is an aspect of God that is thought to exist alongside God and to be worthy, as being God’s, of the honor and esteem accorded God himself.

The Word

In some ways the most difficult divine hypostasis to discuss is the Word—in Greek, the Logos. That’s because the term had a long, distinguished, and complex history outside the realm of Judaism among the Greek philosophers. Full treatment of the philosophical reflections on Logos would require an entire study,¹⁵ but I can say enough here to give an adequate background to its use in the philosophical circles of Judaism, especially regarding the most famous Jewish philosopher of antiquity, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE).

The ancient Greek philosophers known as the Stoics had extensive discussions of the divine Logos. The word Logos does mean “word”—as in the thing you speak—but it could carry much deeper and richer connotations and nuances. It is, obviously, the word from which we get the English term logic—and that’s because Logos can also mean reason—as in, “there is a reason for that” and “that view is quite reasonable.” Stoics believed that Logos—reason—was a divine element that infused all of existence. There is, in fact, a logic to the way things are, and if you want to understand this world—and more important, if you want to understand how best to live in this world—then you will seek to understand its underlying logic. As it turns out, this is possible because Logos is not only inherent in nature, it resides in us as human beings. We ourselves have a portion of Logos given to us, and when we apply our minds to the world, we can understand it. If we understand the world, we can see how to live in it. If we follow through on that understanding, we will indeed lead harmonious, peaceful, and enriched lives. But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.

Thinkers who saw themselves standing directly in the line of the great fifth-century BCE Plato took the idea of the Logos in a different direction. In Platonic thinking, there is a sharp divide between spiritual realities and this world of matter. God, in this thinking, is pure spirit. But how can something that is pure spirit have any contact with what is pure matter? For that to happen, some kind of link is needed, some kind of go-between that connects spirit and matter. For Platonists, the Logos is this go-between. The divine Logos is what allows the divine to interact with the nondivine, the spirit with matter.

We have Logos within our material bodies, so we too can connect with the divine, even though we are thoroughly entrenched in the material world. In some sense, the way to happiness and fulfillment is to escape our material attachments and attain to spiritual heights. Among other things, this means that we should not be too attached to the bodies we inhabit. We become attached by enjoying physical pleasures and thinking that pleasure is the ultimate good. But it’s not. Pleasure simply makes us long for more and keeps us attached to matter. We need to transcend matter if we are to find true meaning and fulfillment, and this means accessing the Logos of the universe with that part of the Logos that is within us.

In some respects it was quite simple for Jewish thinkers who were intimately familiar with their scriptures to connect them with some of these Stoic and Platonic philosophical ideas. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates all things by speaking a “word”: “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Creation happened by means of God uttering his Logos. The Logos comes from God, and since it is God’s Logos, in a sense it is God. But once he emits it, it stands apart from God as a distinct entity. This entity was sometimes thought of as a person distinct from God. The Logos came to be seen in some Jewish circles as a hypostasis.

Already in the Hebrew Bible the “word of the Lord” was sometimes identified as the Lord himself (see, for example, 1 Sam. 3:1, 6). In the hands of Philo of Alexandria, who was heavily influenced especially by the Platonic tradition, the Logos became a key factor in understanding both God and the world.

Philo maintained that the Logos was the highest of all beings, the image of God according to which and by which the universe is ordered. God’s Logos was, in particular, the paradigm according to which humans were created. It is easy to see here that Logos is taking on the function also assigned to Wisdom, which was thought to be the creator and ordering factor of all things. In some sense the Logos is in fact “born” of Wisdom. If wisdom is something that people have within themselves, then Logos is the outward manifestation of the wisdom when the person speaks. And so, in this understanding, Wisdom gives birth to Logos, which is, in fact, what Philo himself believed. Moreover, as the mind is to the body, so the Logos is to the world.

Since the Logos is God’s Logos, it is itself divine and can be called by divine names. Thus Philo calls Logos the “image of God” and the “Name of God” and the “firstborn son” (e.g., Agriculture 51).¹⁶ In one place he indicates that God “gives the title of ‘God’ to his chief Logos” (Dreams 1.230). Because the Logos is God, and God is God, Philo sometimes speaks of “two gods” and in other places speaks of Logos as “the second God” (Questions on Genesis 2.62). But there is a difference for Philo between “the God” and “a god” (in Greek between o theos—meaning “God”—and theos—meaning “god”). Logos is the latter.

As a divine being apart from God, Logos obviously sounds a lot like the Angel of the Lord discussed at the beginning of this chapter. And in fact, Philo sometimes maintained that Logos was indeed this Angel of the Lord (e.g., Changing of Names 87, Dreams 239). When God was manifest to humans, it was his Logos that made the appearance. Here we see Philo’s Platonic thought at work and combining with his knowledge of scripture. God does not have direct contact with the world of matter; his contact with the world is by means of his Logos. God does not speak directly to us; he speaks to us through his Logos.

In sum, for Philo the Logos is an incorporeal being that exists outside God but is his faculty of thinking; on occasion it becomes the actual figure of God who appears “like a man” so that people can know, and interact with, its presence. It is another divine being that is distinct from God in one sense, and yet is God in another.

Humans Who Become Divine

FOR THOSE WHO WANT to know how Jesus could become God in a Jewish religion that insisted on remaining monotheistic, even more important are Jewish texts which indicate that not just angels, hypostases, and other divine entities could be called God, but humans could be as well. As it turns out, such passages can be found even in the Bible. Just as within pagan circles the emperor was thought to be both the son of god and, in some sense, himself god, so too in ancient Judaism the king of Israel was considered both Son of God and—astonishingly enough—even God.

The King of Israel

There is nothing controversial in the claim that the king of Israel was thought of as standing in a uniquely close relationship to God and was in that sense considered the Son of God. This view is found scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible. A key passage occurs in 2 Samuel 7. At this point in the narrative, Israel has already had two kings: the first king, treated with considerable ambivalence in the narrative, Saul, and the great king of Israel’s golden age, David. Despite David’s many virtues, he had a number of vices as well, and for that reason, when he expressed his wish to build a temple for God, God refused to allow it. The backstory is that since the days of the exodus, more than two centuries earlier, Israel had worshiped God in a portable facility, a large tent, the tabernacle. Now that Israel is firmly ensconced in the land, David wants to build a permanent dwelling place, a house, for God. But God tells him no. Instead, he himself will build a (metaphorical) “house” for David. David will have a son (referring to Solomon) who will build God’s temple, and from this son God will raise a house—a dynasty—to David. Moreover, this son of David will be chosen by God himself, adopted as it were, to be his own son: “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sam. 7:12–14).

This idea that God has adopted the king to be his son is consonant with other usages of the term “Son of God” in the Hebrew Bible. We have already seen that angelic beings, the members of God’s divine council, were called sons of God. These were divine beings who stood in a specially close relationship with God as his advisors, servants, and ministers—even if some of them did fall from grace on occasion, as in that little episode in Genesis 6. Moreover, the nation of Israel itself is sometimes called the “Son of God,” as in Hosea 11:1—“Out of Egypt I called my son.” Here again, Israel is God’s Son because it stands in a uniquely close relationship with God and as such is the object of his love and special favor; moreover, it is through Israel that God mediates his will on earth.

So too with the king, who stands at the head of Israel and so in an even more special sense is “the” Son of God. In Psalm 89, in which the psalmist indicates that David was anointed by God (that is, literally anointed with oil as a sign of God’s special favor; v. 20), he is said to be God’s “firstborn, the highest of the kings of earth” (v. 27). Even more remarkable is Psalm 2, in words spoken by God to the king, probably at his coronation ceremony (when he received the anointing with oil): “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (v. 7). In this case the king is not only adopted by God, he is actually born of God. God has brought him forth.

The son of a human is human, just as the son of a dog is a dog and the son of a cat is a cat. And so what is the son of God? As it turns out, to the surprise of many casual readers of the Bible, there are passages in which the king of Israel is referred to as divine, as God.

Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that this notion ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh, as a divine being.¹⁷ Even in Egypt, where the king was a god, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars. But he was a god. As we have seen, in Egyptian and Roman circles, there were levels of divinity, and so too in Jewish circles. Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the king of Israel, terms that may surprise readers who think—on the basis of the kind of thinking that developed in the fourth Christian century—that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God and humans. Nonetheless, here it is, in the Bible itself, the king is called both Lord and God.

For example, Psalm 110:1: “The LORD says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” The first term, LORD—traditionally printed in capital letters in English—is the Hebrew name of God YHWH, often spelled Yahweh. The four Hebrew letters representing that name were considered so special that in traditional Judaism they were not (and are not) pronounced. They are sometimes called the Tetragrammaton (Greek for “four letters”). The second term, “Lord,” is a different word, adn (= adonai, or adoni), which is a common term for the Lord God but is also a term that could be used, for example, by a slave for his master. What is striking here is that YHWH is speaking to “my Lord” and telling him to “sit at my right hand.” Any being enthroned with God is sharing the glory, status, and honor due to God himself. There is not a question of identity or absolute parity here—the king, sitting at God’s right hand—is not God Almighty himself. That is clear from what is said next: God will conquer the king’s enemies for him and put them under his feet. But he is doing so for one whom he has exalted up to the level of his own throne. The king is being portrayed as a divine being who lives in the presence of God, above all other creatures.

Even more stark is Psalm 45:6–7, in which the king is addressed in the following remarkably exalted terms, as a God:

Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.

Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity;

You love righteousness and hate wickedness.

Therefore God, your God, has anointed you

With the oil of gladness beyond your companions.

It is clear that the person addressed as “O God” (Elohim) is not God Almighty but the king, because of what is said later: God Almighty is the king’s own God and has “anointed” him with oil—the standard act of the king’s coronation ceremony in ancient Israel. And so God has both anointed and exalted the king above all others, even to a level of deity. The king is in some sense God. Not equal with God Almighty, obviously (since the differentiation is made clearly, even here), but God nonetheless.

A yet more astonishing example comes in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 9, which celebrates a new king who has been given to the people. Anyone who knows Handel’s Messiah will recognize the words; but unlike in Handel, the passage in its original context in Isaiah appears to be referring not merely to the birth of the king, but to the birth of the king as the son of God—in other words, it is about his coronation. At this coronation, a “child” has been given to the people—that is, the king has been made the “son of God.” But what is said about the king is truly remarkable:

For a child has been born for us,

A son given to us;

Authority rests upon his shoulders;

And he is named

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God [El],

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

His authority shall grow continually,

And there shall be endless peace

For the throne of David and his kingdom. (Isa 9:6–7)

That this passage is referring to the king of Israel is obvious by the final line. This is a king from the line of David: most scholars think it is a reference to the king at the time of Isaiah’s prophecy, King Hezekiah. He is acclaimed as the “son” of God, one with great authority and one who will bring endless peace. Clearly, this person is not God Almighty himself, since his authority is said to “grow continually,” and one can hardly imagine God not having final, ultimate, and complete authority from the outset. Nonetheless, the epithets delivered for the king are astounding. He is called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father.” As the son of God, he is exalted to the level of God and so has God’s status, authority, and power—so much so that he can be called God.

Moses as God

It is interesting to note that not only the king of Israel, human as he was, is lauded with divine status and even the term “God,” but so too in ancient Jewish texts was that great savior and lawgiver of the people, Moses. The root of this tradition is in the Torah itself, from an intriguing passage in Exodus 4. God is commissioning Moses to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh and demand that he set free the enslaved people of Israel. Moses resists God’s demands and says that he is not an eloquent speaker but is “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exod. 4:10). God does not accept the excuse: he himself is the one who gives speech to humans. Moses continues to resist, and God finally strikes a compromise: Moses’s brother Aaron will accompany him, and Aaron will do all the talking, based on what Moses instructs him. And then God makes this remarkable statement: “[Aaron] indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him” (Exod. 4:16). Here, Moses is not said actually to be God, but he will function as God. He will be the one who tells Aaron God’s message to be delivered to Pharaoh, and in that sense he will “serve as God.”

Some later Jews took this message a step further and claimed that Moses was, in fact, divine. The clearest expression of this view comes in the works of the aforementioned Philo of Alexandria. Philo was deeply imbued in Greek philosophical thought, as we have seen, and was particularly invested in showing how the Jewish scripture, if properly understood by means of allegorical, or figurative, modes of interpretation, presents and supports the teachings of the great Greek philosophers (or rather, how the teachings of the Greek philosophers are already found in the Hebrew Bible). Judaism, for Philo, presented the best of what the greatest philosophers of the world had ever taught.

Philo was highly prolific, and we still have a number of his writings, including a biography of Moses that praises the great lawgiver of the Jews as a highly learned and insightful man. In these and other writings Philo celebrates both Moses and the deeply philosophical law that he proclaimed. For Philo, Moses was “the greatest and most perfect man that ever lived” (Life of Moses 1.1). In interpreting the passage laid out above, Exodus 4:16, Philo indicates that Moses appeared to others as a god—but he was not really God in essence (The Worse Attacks the Better 161–62). Here, Philo is playing with the idea that there are levels of divinity. In fact, he thought that through his life, Moses “was gradually becoming divine” (Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 9–10). Since Moses was a prophet and friend of God, “then it follows that he would naturally partake of God himself and of all his possessions as far as he had need” (Life of Moses 1.156). That is why some people had wondered whether Moses did not have a merely human mind but rather “a divine intellect” (Life of Moses 1.27).

In the Hebrew Bible, Moses receives the law directly from the hand of God, as he alone ascends Mount Sinai to commune with God (Exod. 19–20). Philo maintained that because of Moses’s contemplation of God, “he also enjoyed an even greater communion with the Father and Creator of the universe” (Life of Moses 1.158). As a result, Moses was to be God’s heir: he would have as his inheritance “the whole world” (Life of Moses 1.157). Moreover, even though he was not God Almighty himself, Moses, according to Philo, “was called the god and king of the whole nation” (Life of Moses 1.158). Here then we see Moses called what the king of Israel is called—and what, in a different context, the emperor of the Romans was called: god.

Like other specially favored humans who had a particularly close relationship with God—so close that Moses himself could be considered in some sense divine—at the end of his life Moses was highly exalted by God and made immortal: “When he was about to depart from hence to heaven, to take up his abode there, and leaving this mortal life to become immortal, having been summoned by the Father, who now changed him, having previously been a double being composed of soul and body, into the nature of a single body, transforming him wholly and entirely into a most sun-like mind” (Life of Moses 2.228).

Or as Philo states even more forcefully elsewhere: “Having given up and left behind all mortal kinds, he is changed into the divine, so that such men become kin to God and truly divine” (Questions on Exodus 3.29). Here, then, is a close Jewish analogy to what we have found in pagan sources: a powerful, wise, and great man rewarded after his life by being made divine. At times, Philo goes even further and imagines Moses as a kind of preexistent divine being sent to earth for a time: “And even when [God] sent him as a loan to the earthly sphere and caused him to dwell there, he fitted him with no ordinary excellence, such as that which kings and rulers have, . . . but he appointed him as god, placing all the bodily region and the mind which rules it in subjection and slavery to him” (Sacrifices 8–10).

Jewish Divine Men

IT MAY NOT HAVE come as a huge surprise to learn that pagans who held to a range of polytheistic religions sometimes imagined that humans could be divine in some sense. It is more surprising, for most people, to learn that the same is true within Judaism. It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists. But even as they believed that there was only one God Almighty, it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases. Moreover, there was some sense of continuity—not only discontinuity—between the divine and human realms. And there was a kind of spectrum of divinity: the Angel of the Lord, already in scripture, could be both an angel and God. Angels were divine, and could be worshiped, but they could also come in human guise. Humans could become angels. Humans could be called the Son of God or even God. This did not mean that they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God.

Thus, even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity. And even among Jews at the time of Jesus there was not a sense of an absolute break, a complete divide, an unbridgeable chasm between the divine and the human. So, if one wants to know whether an angel could be thought of as a god, one has to ask, “in what sense?” The same is true with humans. If the king, or Moses, or Enoch as the Son of Man, or anyone else is said or thought to be God, it needs to be explained in what sense this is the case. Is this a person who was adopted by God to be his son? Who was born to a human by divine intervention? Who was made into an angel? Who was exalted to God’s throne to be his co-ruler? Or something else?

We will have to ask such questions when exploring early Christian views of Jesus. Yes, I will argue, soon after Jesus’s death, the belief in his resurrection led some of his followers to say he was God. But in what sense? Or rather, in whatever senses—plural—since, as we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.

But before we go there, we need first to explore the man Jesus himself—the historical Jesus. Did his followers think he was divine while he was still treading the dusty paths of Galilee? Did he himself think he was divine?