Ehrman Epilog: After Nicaea

And now it is with great pleasure that I finish the Epilog of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God.

So far:
Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies
8. After the New Testament (2nd and 3rd centuries)
9. Paradoxes on the Road to Nicaea

The Epilog both gives a little of what happened after Nicaea, while also giving Ehrman's personal conclusion.

1. For Ehrman, he notes that his own story is a mirror opposite of that in the early church. While views of Jesus in the early church got "higher and higher." His own understanding went "lower and lower." He still resonates with the ethical teaching of Jesus (e.g., love your neighbor), although even here he believes that Jesus' teaching had a rationale from Jewish apocalyptic that is quite unlike his own thinking. Ehrman doesn't believe that a heavenly figure called the "Son of Man" is soon going to rush in to set the world straight.

Here he says something that is true to at least some extent. We have a tendency to "recontextualize" Jesus. If you were to look at the many portraits of Jesus that have been written (even painted) over the last centuries, you would find that biographers of Jesus have a tendency to create him in their own image. I absolutely believe it is true that the Jesus you hear from the pulpits today is a Jesus that makes sense to each particular preacher.

We may quote the same words from the Bible about Jesus and tell the same biblical stories, but the meanings we give those words and stories tend to be a Jesus who reflects our values and ways of looking at things. Imagine my surprise, for example, to hear people today reading Jesus as a Tea Party type! No doubt whatever the next subcultural Christian fling of the next decade is, it will likely--surprise, surprise--see Jesus as its home boy too.

2. The development Ehrman has painted in his book goes as follows: "Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status at his resurrection; to being a preexistent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him" (353).

There are two points especially where Ehrman's reconstruction is idiosyncratic from a majority opinion of scholarship. One is his sense that Jesus looked to the coming of a different figure from him, a being called the Son of Man. The other is his sense that Jesus was understood to be an angel. Both are ideas that surfaced in the early 1900s. Neither have gained much of a following among scholars.

There has of course been the rise in the last twenty years of an "early high Christology" model in certain circles. Ehrman gives the famous Martin Hengel quote about more happening in the first twenty years of early Christianity than since (371). Larry Hurtado has also argued strongly for a striking worship of Jesus that rose in the earliest days after Jesus was on earth. Richard Bauckham has also argued as intelligently as anyone for an inclusion of Christ within God's divine identity from the earliest points.

Ehrman does not completely disagree. Indeed, although he argues for development here, he sees the worship of Christ as a divine being a very early development.

What is a believer to make of this discussion? For me, the key is to see this as a conversation from the outside of Jesus looking on. In other words, we are asking about the evolution of how Jesus was understood, not about who Jesus actually was. Jesus was of course the same person all along, regardless of how understandings about him developed.

Here's the point. By faith, Jesus was the second person of the Trinity from eternity past. When he came to earth and became a man, he arguably put the vast majority of his omniscience in some divine subconscious and learned things like a normal human. That is to say, he did not know everything about who he was all at once. He may not have "remembered" that he was the second person of the Trinity until his resurrection!

The understanding of Christ in the church may have taken some time to unfold as well, but this is not a matter of who Jesus actually was while he was on earth. It is a question of our unfolding understanding of Jesus. All that is to say that the development of understanding of Jesus in the early church--however it unfolded--does not contradict orthodox faith in who Jesus is.

3. Ehrman spends part of this chapter talking about the impact of Constantine making Christianity legal on its flavor. Since Constantine now believed exclusively in the Christian God, emperor worship immediately stopped. Predictably, conversion to Christianity went into hyperdrive. I can't confirm his numbers but he suggests Christianity went from being about 5% of the Roman Empire when Constantine legalized it to about 50% by the end of the 300s. Obviously we can question whether this was real conversion or rather convenience.

He argues that Jews were then increasingly persecuted. It's one thing when persecuted Christians say vitriolic things about Jews. It's another when Christians in power say those things. Ehrman argues that Jews were soon marginalized into a position far worse than they had been--and they were none popular before. I can't confirm the tone he gives about Ambrose in this section, but he suggests that Ambrose pressured the emperor at that time from punishing a mob that had destroyed a synagogue and from letting them rebuild it.

This is, by the way, why I favor a form of separation of church and state that is friendly toward all religions, including Christianity (thus, I mean a form that is different from the model that seeks to drive all religion out of the public sphere). When a religion is in power, no matter what religion it is, it almost always has a tendency to oppress those who are not part of it. I love a quote allegedly by Charles Spurgeon about why the Baptists never burned anyone at the stake. His answer, "Because we were never in power."

4. Finally he deals with some post-Nicaea "heresies." He makes a point with which I agree. The vigor with which these "heretics" were opposed was ignorant of the developments that had already taken place. Apollinaris believed that Jesus' soul was the Logos. So it was as if he had a divine mind and a human body. This attempt to work things out was seen to negate Jesus' full humanity and was condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Ehrman says, "he was not allowed any longer to worship in a Christian church in public" (368).

Obviously I don't agree with Apollinaris and maybe he was a contentious guy. If it was his divisiveness that kept him out of churches, I can understand that. If it was some self-ignorant self-righteousness on the part of those who hereticized him, I have problems with that. It reminds me of John Piper's sense that Wesleyan-Arminians should not be teaching at truly evangelical institutions.

Nestorius similarly was trying to work out the mystery of Christs being both fully human and fully divine after Nicaea. Apparently, his views came close to sounding like Christ was two persons, a divine one and a human one. Again, he was condemned.

A final "wrong turn" was that of Marcellus of Ancyra, who saw Christ as emerging from within God the Father for the space of creation, destined to return within the Father after the universe was set right. A fascinating proposal, in the end rejected in 381 at Constantinople.

5. So ends the book. In dealing with these issues in the 90s, I ended up putting a stake in Chalcedon, the Council of 451. By faith, I affirm that God is three persons but one substance, that the substance should not be divided and the persons should not be conflated (Nicaea). By faith I affirm that Jesus was both fully God and fully human, two natures but one person (Chalcedon).

As one person put it: "One canon, two testaments, three creeds, four councils, five centuries."

This benchmark has allowed me personally to let the interpretation of New Testament texts go where I think they want to go. I have grown to hate what I see as revisionary interpretation meant to make sure that interpretations of the New Testament match orthodox faith. The drive to do so is understandable. Having made all that fuss in the Reformation of getting back to the Bible alone, imagine how embarrassing it would be if the Bible itself undermined orthodoxy. So there is a lot of interpretive pressure evangelical Bible scholars feel to make the books come out "right."

That does raise a question. As Ehrman's last few chapters have argued, the debates of the 300s and 400s became increasingly minute. These debates arguably entered into territory where the Bible just didn't go, trying to answer questions the Bible just didn't ask. The debates increasingly became philosophical.

To what extent does the Protestant principle of "back to the Bible" apply to these debates? For example, I'm not sure how anyone would use the Bible to hereticize Marcellus above. Is it acceptable to be a "Marcellian" today? Of the three creeds mentioned above, I'm quite happy that John Wesley only accepted the teaching of the Athanasian Creed, not its condemnations of those who disagree.

We also have the occasional oneness Pentecostal come through our programs. I don't agree with their theology, but I don't personally doubt their rightness with God. If these discussions tell me anything, it's that Pietism is a very coherent position. God is more interested in what is going on in people's hearts than their heads.

Ehrman Chapter 9: The Council on the Trinity

Only the Epilog after this post, on chapter 9 of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God.

So far:
Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies
8. After the New Testament (2nd and 3rd centuries)

And now chapter 9, "Paradoxes on the Road to Nicaea"...

Like the last chapter, I did not find a great deal in this chapter to disagree with. The bottom line, as it has been all along, is whether you believe God was leading the Church to Nicaea or whether you see the process as nothing more than the power plays and coincidences of history. It is of course possible that Ehrman is off on some details, but if so I am not expert enough to see it.

1. So it seems accurate to say that, with each decision Christians made to accept one alternative and reject another, they were on a path toward Nicaea. I have heard it said that Nicaea was the inevitable outcome if the church was to affirm everything it needed to affirm while denying everything it needed to deny.

This statement, it seems to me, is something similar to what Ehrman is saying when Trinity is a collection of "ortho-paradoxes." He grounds the Trinitarian paradoxes in two things.

First, there are the paradoxes of Scripture. The Gospel of John says that Jesus is God. But it also says that Jesus is human. Isaiah 45:21 says there is only one God. But Psalm 45:6 speaks to another God.

Second, Christians were navigating between extremes on both sides of issues. "But both of two opposing views cannot be completely wrong, or nothing is right, and so the orthodox--in attacking opposing views--had to affirm part of each view as being right and the rest as being wrong. the result was a paradox that each of the opposing sides was wrong in what it denied but right in what it affirmed" (327).

Here's another way of putting it: "If you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two" (328). "As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical."

I can't think of anything really to disagree with here.

2. In the lead up to Nicaea, Ehrman treats several individuals along the way who reflect the fluidity of faith in the centuries leading up to the great Council of Nicaea in AD325.

Justin Martyr
Justin lived in the mid-100s. Ehrman means to show that while Justin is movement toward orthodoxy, he is not there yet. I am not an expert on Justin, but it would certainly make sense if this were true.

I did wonder whether he had Justin quite right on Jesus being the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament. Given what Ehrman has said about Paul's Christology earlier in the book, it would be easy to read this section to say that Justin had the same view.

However, I have more thought that Justin saw the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament as a Christophany. A Christophany is when Jesus appears in the Old Testament in some form, such as in the form of the Angel of the Lord. This would be something quite different from Jesus being an angel who appeared. It would be Jesus appearing as an angel.

I have read a little of David Runia on the impact of Logos thinking on early Christianity. Runia does suggest that the Logos Christology we find in these early centuries (e.g., in Origin) would eventually prove inadequate in the light of full Trinitarian belief. The Logos emerges from God in relation to the creation, and this doesn't neatly fit "eternally begotten." So Runia argues, if I remember correctly, that the later church stopped using this imagery that had been used earlier, as the orthodox view became the norm.

Novatian
Novatian was a problem in the church because of the schism he led in the 200s after the persecution of Decius in 250. I believe it was he who inspired Cyprian to say that long since famous quote, "There is no salvation outside the church."

Ehrman says that "his theology, however, was completely orthodox in its day" (335). Again, while not being an expert, I suspect Ehrman is correct (although remember the distinction I made in my last post between not violating an orthodoxy and it not yet being appropriate to speak of an orthodox position yet on a particular topic). Novatian disagreed with the modalists, on the one hand, and the adoptionists on the other. For him, Christ was divine but he was distinct from God the Father.

Where Ehrman argues the later church would consider him heretical is in the fact that he saw Christ as subordinate to God. Christ is Lord and God of everything except for God the Father, to whom he is subject. I believe Ehrman rightly sees this subordinationist understanding of Christ as a view that would later be deemed incorrect.

Dionysius of Rome
As Ehrman presents the situation, one Dionysius in Rome wrote to one Dionysius in Alexandria, to steer him toward unity in his conception of the Trinity. Dionysius of Alexandria, in combating modalism was coming to close to tri-theism, in D of R's view. In D of R's view, D of A is too close to affirming three Gods to combat those who see the three persons as three faces of the same God.

Dionysius of Rome insisted that the unity within threeness had to be maintained.

3. We thus arrive at the trigger for the Council of Nicaea. The emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD313. Ehrman spends a little time discussing Constantine in this chapter. He takes the position that Constantine saw Christianity as a potential way of unifying the empire. Ehrman is also sympathetic to the view that Constantine truly believed it and thus that it would have been important for him to get the worship of Christ correct within his kingdom.

So Constantine writes the priests of Alexandria about their understanding of an Old Testament passage. Ehrman wonders if the passage was Proverbs 8, which is about wisdom as God's master craftsman in creation.

As an aside, I might say that this is a heavy role that theologians and scholars often play within a group. I sometimes get asked about various issues (I received a question via Facebook messaging just last night on the various Greek words for worship in the NT). Orthodoxy is stable. It isn't so hard to answer a question like, "What does orthodoxy teach about x," because there often are right and wrong answers. It is often possible to say, "The consensus of Christian history is this."

A question like, "What does the Bible teach," on the other hand, seems tougher to me, because the Bible is a flow of voices addressing a flow of situations. In my world, most of us who count as scholars are really scholars who try to connect specific theological traditions with other domains of scholarship. The more idiosyncratic the tradition, the more unstable the connection between scholars of that tradition and broader scholarship. As a Wesleyan, there are specific concerns that have to be kept in mind when answering a question, and from the vantage point of an outsider, these might appear to skew the answers. The same applies to other traditions.

All that is to say that I prefer to give options as answers, based on particular points of view, rather than to pretend to have the answers. I at least agree with Ehrman on this point. History is a science that arrives at greater and lesser probabilities given the evidence as we have it. The negotiation of history in relation to theology, on the other hand, is a much less straightforward dialog that has everything to do with what assumptions you start with. And that is why there are thousands upon thousands of divergent Christian opinions on things.

4. The answer to Constantine from one of the priests in Egypt, Arius, brought him into major conflict with his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Arius suggested that Jesus was indeed the "firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). He was divine. He was Lord over all creation. We must worship him.

BUT, Arius taught that only God the Father was without beginning. There was a point when the Son did not exist. For Arius, it was before time, before creation, for Christ was God's agent in creation. So, like Origen before him, Arius saw Christ as superior to all of creation, just not as "of one substance" as the Father. For Arius, like others before him, Christ was only subordinate to God the Father. He was supreme over everything else that exists.

I would agree with Ehrman that Arius' position was not yet heretical at this time. The paint is not wet. I personally don't think we can speak of orthodoxy on this subject until the consensus was firm in the 400s. To me, orthodoxy is not as simple as a vote taken by some group of men at a council. That is because, to me, orthodoxy is a matter of Spirit consensus.

Arius would lose this vote. It would take decades for what would become orthodoxy to become what I am calling a consensus. But the current position of Christendom won the day in 325. Christ is "of one being" with the Father. He is "begotten, not made." Indeed, he is "eternally begotten."

So the Spirit consensus was beginning to congeal. Christ is not a distinct being from God the Father. He is not even "similar" in being to God the Father--the compromise position suggested by Eusebius. He was "of the same substance" and co-eternal, along with the Holy Spirit.

Ehrman Chapter 8: Post-NT (2nd and 3rd Centuries)

Now chapter 8 of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies

In this chapter, Ehrman examines those views that did not end up prevailing in Christian history, the views that were eventually declared heresies (288). The basic claim of this chapter is that, as time went by, thinking about Christ continued to develop in the early church. "Views that were originally considered 'right' eventually came to be thought of as 'wrong'; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical" (289). At the same time, "heresy hunters" then rewrote history as if their (new) views were the ones the apostles had originally held and that the old majorities had been deviations.

There are two basic questions in the evaluation of this chapter. First, how accurate are the descriptions of the various Christologies? Second, how accurate is his overall thesis in this chapter?

1. Ehrman's Descriptions 
I am not an expert either on the early church fathers or the various groups he discusses, so it is quite possible that I have read right past slightly incorrect descriptions. In general, his descriptions of the various groups seemed on target to me. For a more expert response, see Charles Hill's evaluation of this chapter in chapter 8 of the response book.

Let me quickly summarize the groups mentioned in this chapter:

Groups That Denied Jesus' Divinity
a. Ebionites - In Ehrman's descriptions, the Ebionites saw Jesus as a man just like everyone else. Ehrman argues that they were Jewish Christians with views just like the earliest disciples. A problem Hill points out is that Ehrman has already claimed that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as divine, so there seems to be some disconnect here in his own thesis.

b. Theodotians - These were adoptionists, a group that believed Jesus had become Son of God either at his baptism or resurrection. Again, Ehrman connects their view to a view in the earliest church.

Groups That Denied Jesus' Humanity
a. Docetists - This is the group with which John had to contend at Ephesus, a group that believed Jesus had only seemed to have flesh. By the way, the author of 1 John seems to claim to have "touched" Jesus (1:1), something with which any reconstruction of earliest Christianity has to deal with, IMO.

b. Marcionites - Marcion (ca. 150) believed that the creator god of the OT was not the same God as the Father of Jesus. The material realm is evil, so Jesus descended in the appearance of a full-grown adult.

Groups That Split Jesus into Parts
Gnostics - In a more technical definition, the Gnostics saw Jesus as two beings, a spirit being and a human one. The spirit Christ came on Jesus at his baptism and left him before his crucifixion.

Hetero-Orthodoxies
It is interesting that Ehrman distinguishes between the groups above and the groups below. The groups that follow: 1) saw Jesus as both human and God yet 2) saw him as one person. This is thus the thread that would lead to what would become the standard view of Christ in the 300s. Ehrman's thesis, again, is that "views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies" (308).

a. Modalism - Modalism is where God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are seen as one person who is changing roles. God the Father comes down to earth as Jesus the Son, then returns as God the Holy Spirit. Groups today like oneness Pentecostals would still fall into this category.

One claim that Hill disputes about Ehrman's description of the 200s modalists is the claim that this was the majority position at Rome. Hill calls this a "generous intepretation of a slim amount of evidence" (164). Nevertheless, in looking at the quote Hill gives of Tertullian, it does look like Tertullian is saying that modalism was the most popular belief going around at the time (Against Praxeis 3). That of course doesn't mean that most church leaders held that position. Hippolytus mentions two bishops at Rome who were modalists.

b. Subordinationism - Ehrman wants to portray the views of Tertullian and Hippolytus as substandard over and against what would become the consensus a couple centuries later. In particular, Tertullian uses language that portrays the Father as greater than the Son, a view that would later be rejected (Against Praxeis 9).

Hill rejects this interpretation of Tertullian, and quotes Athanasius (the architect of the Trinity as we now know it) in relation to the language of John 14:28. I do not know enough at this point to decide between Ehrman and Hill here. I would not be surprised if Ehrman is correct.

c. Origen - I like to joke about Origen (ca. 200) being forced to pack his bags and leave heaven when he was excommunicated several hundred years after his death. Ehrman is quite correct that Origen went from being one of the greatest scholars of the early church to being a heretic in the eyes of the later church.

If Ehrman has described Origen's views correctly (and some of his description was new to me), Origen saw Jesus as the incarnation of the purest soul, which had so associated with God's Wisdom and Logos that, like a poker in a fire, had taken on all the characteristic "heat" of the fire.

2. Ehrman's Interpretation Overall
a. I do not think that Ehrman's individual interpretations of various groups are too far off the mark. I've noted some of Hill's critique and perhaps some of my patristic friends will weigh in. What is more significant as it relates to faith is Ehrman's overall argument.

Here, let me first say that some of the shock of a chapter like this one has to do with a certain Protestant assumption that we can jump straight from Revelation to Martin Luther. This is the "sola scriptura" hang-over. One of the reasons why there has been such a "Canterbury Trail" in recent decades--Protestants who are attracted to the Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox churches--is the realization that the Bible alone does not as confidently yield orthodox faith as the pre-modern assumes it does.

The most sophisticated evangelical perspective I have heard on this subject is the idea that orthodoxy was there in nuce, in a nutshell, in the New Testament writings, but that it took several hundred years to unpack it. One way I have put it is that orthodoxy was in a zipped file on the cross, but it took several hundred years to unzip the file.

But what I want to say to my target audience, the person who is reading Ehrman with an open mind, is that orthodox Christian faith does not stand or fall on whether or not the New Testament church had it all figured out. There is a catholic version of faith that sees God slowly but surely, in his own "day is like a 1000 years" time, unfolding what would become the consensus opinion by around the year 400.

Protestants tend to have trouble with this approach. Our impulse is to "get back," as if the earliest is always the better and more accurate. This is an unexamined assumption. Luther and Wycliffe used the "back to the Bible" approach to try to peal back 1000 years of church history. But it is no surprise that they soon found Socinians around in the Reformation who did not believe in the Trinity. And it is no surprise that Zwingli soon found himself fighting individuals who questioned infant baptism.

Indeed, liberal Protestantism, in my opinion, is one direct consequence of this impulse, as scholars peeled back and peeled back until all they were left with was the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Ehrman himself is a shadow of his former fundamentalist self. Indeed, this chapter reflects his shadow Protestantism, where development of doctrine is implicitly seen as an argument against the orthodox result.

b. I suppose the crucial question, however, is the extent to which the groups to which Ehrman points were mainstream and to what extent they were deviations. That is to say, is later orthodoxy in continuity with the apostles or discontinuity? He portrays orthodoxy as being in discontinuity.

It has been the standard view since Walter Bauer's, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity that it is anachronistic to speak of orthodoxy or heresy in the 100s. There was no church structure to make such a judgment. There were no popes yet. There were only individuals with authority and influence.

So there were bishops and there were writers. We know what Ignatius or Justin Martyr or Irenaeus wrote, but we should not consider them to be the position of Christianity at the time. They are just the ones whose writings reflect the historical "winners." It is a matter of faith to say that God played a role in who the winners were.

This position of faith is central to orthodox Christianity. For orthodox faith, it is not that orthodoxy "established itself" or "declared it was right" (288). It is that God was working behind the scenes, slowly but surely, to make sure that the "winner" would eventually be the right view.

I might add that Bauer's position is a little different from the feel of Ehrman. Bauer's contention was that there simply wasn't such a thing as orthodoxy in the 100s. It didn't exist yet. The impression Ehrman gives is that orthodoxy was constantly changing. This is a significant distinction, it seems to me.

And here let me reiterate again my not so latent Pietism. God is not nearly so concerned, in my opinion, with what is going on in our heads as what is going on in our hearts. It is the person who thinks beliefs are the first order of business who will be most troubled by these sorts of things. I fully believe that Origen and Athanasius had an ambrosia and a laugh together in heaven after he was declared a heretic.

I think we can quickly establish that Docetism, Gnosticism, modalism, and Origen were deviations. The earliest Christians did not question that Jesus was a real human who stood in front of them or that he was a distinct person from God the Father. The Ebionites are sometimes compared to one thread within Jerusalem Christianity, but those who do so usually consider even Paul's theology to have differed significantly from theirs.

In the end, I believe, it comes down to faith. Was God behind the scenes directing the path that Christian belief would take or was it just a mindless conflict with the final answer being a matter of chance and the winners? The same data can probably fit into either interpretation.

Ehrman Chapter 7: Jesus as God on Earth

Just three more posts after this for Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology

Now chapter 7: "Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies"

This chapter, in my opinion, is a bit of a muddle. In the previous chapter, he presented the evolution of Christology as 1) Jesus is adopted at resurrection, 2) Jesus is adopted at baptism, 3) Jesus is God's biological son from his birth, and lastly 4) Jesus was divine before he was born.

The key for me is to stop thinking of this particular Sonship language in terms of "ontology" but rather as royal language. So the early strata did speak of Jesus becoming king/being enthroned at the point of his resurrection/exaltation. Sonship language before this point can speak of destiny, because he is the one always appointed by God to be enthroned as king, whether at his birth or baptism. In any case, it need not contradict the language of enthronement at his resurrection.

In this chapter, however, Ehrman's scheme seems to shift a little:

• early exaltation Christology (which would fit the first two above)
• intermediate/transitional Christology (elements of both exaltation and incarnation Christology)
• angelic Christology (which he sees in Paul, number 4 above)
• equal to God from the beginning (John)

1. The biggest thing you should know about this chapter is that few scholars think Paul saw Jesus as an angel. It is an old idea that is a bit of an outlier and one I have always considered a fringe idea.

What makes it most iffy is the fact that it is largely based off of a highly questionable interpretation of one verse. It reminds me of my favorite interpretation of a verse in Hebrews (I won't say which one ;-) on which I base some thoughts that probably make me an outlier. I know the feeling I get when I am in that interpretive territory. It's a feeling of being out on a limb.

So Ehrman is out on a limb with his interpretation of Galatians 4:14: "as an angel of God you received me, as Christ Jesus." Ehrman says that Paul "is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing" (253). Well of course Paul is not contrasting two things. But he is not necessarily making an exact equation between two things either. That just doesn't follow. The implication is only that angels and Christ are similar in some respect, not the same.

For example, what if I say. "He laughs like a seal, like one of those pumps you sometimes hear on a plane right before it leaves the gate."  You wouldn't say, "Ken, are you saying they keep seals in the belly of airplanes?!!"  I would give you a rather strange look if you drew that conclusion. In the same way, it's quite flimsy to conclude that Paul is here saying that Christ is an angel.

It would be different if Paul regularly considered Jesus to be an angel elsewhere, but this verse is really it. Since a significant portion of this book is connected to this idea, it calls much of the book into question, in my opinion.

2. In his blog review, Hurtado applauded Ehrman for this reason: "Ehrman acknowledges that prior to immersing himself in the evidence and scholarly analysis for this book, he had assumed a much slower and more drawn-out process, but was driven to conclude that these remarkable Christological beliefs erupted much earlier and much more fully than he had thought."

Here is another quote from Hurtado: "With probably the majority of NT scholars, Ehrman emphasizes that the exalted claims about Jesus reflected in the NT (e.g., that Jesus shares divine glory, divine rule, the divine name, and is to be given universal reverence) all appeared soon in the aftermath of Jesus’ execution."

The problem is that Ehrman has changed his mind on this subject because he now thinks that Paul equated Jesus with the angel of the Lord.

Did Paul have an incarnation Christology? This is a slightly different question from how early the first Christians worshiped Jesus. Ehrman says "yes" because he thinks Paul saw Jesus as the incarnation of the angel of the Lord. Perhaps the majority of NT scholars would agree that Paul saw Jesus as pre-existing his time on earth, although disagreeing with him on the latter bit. Ehrman mentions one of the most notable remaining exceptions from the older generation, James Dunn.

I have no desire to be known for bucking the consensus on this one. I agree that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus very early on as Hurtado says. But as a scholar I feel like I should point out how thin the evidence is that Paul's writings have much to say about Jesus' pre-existence. Without drawing a conclusion on the Philippian poem, let me do my scholarly job of pointing out some things.

3. First, the argument that Paul affirmed the pre-existence of Jesus really boils down to the Philippian hymn (if it be a hymn--Ehrman and Cosgrove may be right to think of it more as a poem). All the other references to pre-existence in Paul are quite iffy. It is only because pre-existence seems so clear in Philippians that the other passages are read to imply pre-existence.

a. For example, are we really to take 1 Corinthians 10:4 as literally saying that Jesus was the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness to give them water??? Picture it, Christ rolling around the desert. (This may be his fundamentalist, anti-allegorical past coming home to roost). No, this is just an allegory. The rock that gave water to Israel allegorically represents Christ.

b. Similarly, when 1 Corinthians 15:47 says that the "second man is from heaven," it is talking about Christ's resurrection body. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom, Paul says (1 Cor. 15:50). So when we bear the image of the heavenly man (15:49), we are being transformed into a resurrection body like Jesus has. Paul is making no comment about Christ's pre-existent body here but about the transformed body of his resurrection.

c. The point of Romans 8:3 is not about God sending Christ in the likeness of human flesh (which sounds Gnostic) but in the likeness of sinful flesh. Christ came in the flesh, yes. But he did not come in sinful flesh. I hate to say it, but the whole idea that if someone is sent, they must have existed before they were sent has my "iffy" tinglers going off (sorry Simon). Language of sending only implies pre-ordination, not pre-existence.

d. In the end, there are only three passages in Paul that have any weight when it comes to the question of whether we find statements about Christ's pre-existence in Paul's writings. The first is 1 Corinthians 8:6: "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things and we for him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things and we through him."

This is a very allusive statement. I think the statement about Christ probably does evoke images of God's word and wisdom, through which God made all things. However, as I mentioned in my review of an earlier chapter, the vast majority of references to God's wisdom and word in Jewish literature are personifications, not references to hypostases. Only a few of Philo's references to the logos count as exceptions, in my opinion.

In itself, this possibly pre-Pauline credal tradition is insufficient to clarify Paul's sense of pre-existence. Is Paul and the tradition he quotes speaking literally or comparing Jesus to the wisdom of God and the purpose of creation? We have insufficient evidence from this verse alone.

e. The same could be said of the Colossian poem/hymn in 1:15-20. Leaving aside debates over Pauline authorship, the parallel with Jewish wisdom and word traditions is compelling. So we again have the question. Is Colossians making a profound comparison between Christ and God's wisdom/logos, or is the hymn being more or less literal? The conclusion you draw, I believe, will ultimately be based on your sense of Paul and early Christianity elsewhere, rather than on the basis of this passage alone.

4. So we return to Philippians. As the interpretation of Philippians 2:6 goes, so goes our conclusion on Paul's sense of Jesus' pre-existence. This is the crux interpretum for this element of Paul's thought, and it all rests on verse 6.

The interpretation of this poem is so contested it makes your head spin.  Over the years I have developed my favorite interpretations, but woe is me to think I have it figured out or that I could convince anyone for them to be their favorite interpretations too.

So, first, I don't like the way Ehrman breaks down the poem.  I prefer three stanzas, the first two of which are:

In the form of God existing,
     not plunder he considered equality with God,
     but he emptied himself,
Having taken the form of a servant.

In likeness of mortals having become
     and in shape having been found as a man,
     he humbled himself,
Having become obedient to the point of death...

Certainly the first stanza could be read in reference to pre-existence. That is the majority, consensus position. I remember at Durham when Bruce Longenecker told me he just didn't see any reason to deny pre-existence in it any more. By the way, I agree with Ehrman and most of the rest of current scholarship against Dunn that this is not an Adam Christology here.

But, if we are to bracket where we know the interpretation of this passage will go in history, I don't think it's nearly as clear as everyone seems to think. Again, I'm not at all saying that the predominant reading is wrong on pre-existence. I'm just doing a glasses check.

"Form of God" here contrasts with "form of a servant. It seems to be talking of a status or position Jesus has more than an ontology in the traditional sense. In fact, there is an instance of this use of the word form in Tobit 1:13. Given that divine language is sometimes royal language, it is at least possible to read the first stanza to say that, although Jesus had the status of a king, he did not exploit that status but emptied himself of it, assuming the status of a servant.

I'll see Ehrman's Vollenweider on the second line and raise him a Hoover. Call. The idea is one of taking advantage of a status one has (res retienda). As Son of God, king, Jesus had a divine status. But he did not consider this status one to be exploited. Rather, he emptied himself of it and took the form of a servant.

I won't suggest that this is the right interpretation of 2:6. Good grief, I don't know how we could know for sure what Paul exactly had in mind. I only wish to point out that a whole lot of scholarship thinks something is obvious that, if we take off the glasses of later interpretation, doesn't at all seem obvious to me. Still, I have no problem with the normal theological interpretation of this passage at least as a Christian reader-response.

A full study would of course have to engage Bauckham. Ah, the good old days...

5. So we finally arrive at John. I smile when I see Ehrman "doing therapy," as I call it. He's reliving the pain of coming out of fundamentalism and feeling stupid. He takes some pot shots. For example, he just has to make a side paragraph insinuating that John is anti-Jewish (277). He's sticking the knife in and turning it. Here, a key to understanding what John says about the Jews may be translating the word instead as "Judean" and taking it as a synecdoche for the Jerusalem leadership.

John clearly points to a conscious, pre-existent, personal Jesus. I want to reiterate something I said in my review of an earlier chapter. A Christian can believe that Jesus was the pre-existent Son of God and still conclude that it took some time for this understanding to unfold in the early church.

John does, in my opinion, have a somewhat unique flavor in the New Testament. That doesn't mean that it's Christology is incompatible with the rest of the New Testament. I do think that John is more symbolic and theological in its presentation of Jesus. The inspiration of John, for me, is a matter of its theology and what it teaches about Jesus. I would not be bothered if Ehrman is right that, in some places, John's words are "placed on Jesus' lips" (271). This may be a problem for a fundamentalist, but it shouldn't be a problem for a more mature faith.

6. As an epilogue, C. K. Barrett was a NT professor at Durham who also served as a Methodist preacher. Congregations occasionally commented on what they saw as a disconnect between his scholarly writings and his preaching. I've heard Graham Twelftree say the same. It's why he chose to study with Dunn, our common Doktorvater. Dunn is warmhearted but is a pretty straight shooter in whatever context he may be (including as a Methodist lay preacher).

For good or ill, I've always appreciated Dunn's quest for objectivity and try to model it in my own thinking. But I much more have the personality of Kingsley. Why cause people unnecessary crises on the details, especially if their ultimate conclusions are right?

Ehrman Chapter 6: The Beginning of Christology

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know

I'm a little late this week with Chapter 6, "The Beginning of Christology."

1. The first thing I want to point out about this chapter is that the content of this chapter is largely faith neutral. When I was finishing up seminary, I read two books by James Dunn, whom I would eventually study under to do my doctorate. The books were Unity and Diversity in the New Testament and Christology in the Making.

What attracted me to Dunn is that he doesn't have an angle. On the one hand, he is a person of faith (Scotish Presbyterian north of the border, British Methodist south), but in his interpretations he is really just interested in the truth. That certainly doesn't mean he always gets it right. But he's not interested in coming up with a conclusion that either does or doesn't fit with prior faith tradition. He's interested in what is most likely true.

These books can be a shock to the system when you grow up, as I did, reading the Bible almost entirely ahistorically and out of context. This is, basically, the entire American church. I remember Dave Smith talking about how annoying he found Dunn's books when he first read them, and yet paradigm shifting. But my main point is that Dunn sees the understanding of Christ unfolding in the early church and yet doesn't see it contradicting faith.

Ehrman doesn't draw much on Dunn in this chapter, but he does mention another scholar from that 70s era, Raymond Brown. Brown was a faith-filled Catholic (recently passed). But I have always enjoyed reading Brown because, again, he doesn't read the evidence in order to shove his Catholic faith down it. He reads the evidence for what is true... and he has faith.

That era is over. Now its all postmodern "theological interpretation," how can I cook the books so they say what I want them to say and yet look like I'm being scholarly.

2. So in Brown and Dunn's scheme, belief in Jesus' pre-existence didn't come off the press the day after he rose from the dead. Although, as far as I know, Brown believed that Jesus had existed before he came to earth, Brown did not believe that the earliest Christians fully had this understanding until the Gospel of John.

Similarly, Brown saw a development in how early Christians saw Jesus becoming Christ. In the earliest layer of tradition, they spoke of Jesus becoming Son of God at his resurrection:

• Jesus was "from the seed of David according to the flesh, but appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead" (Rom. 1:3).
• Today, after the resurrection, God has declared to Jesus, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you" (Acts 13:33).
• Today, after the resurrection, "God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:36).

So Brown thought this was the earliest layer of Christology (theology about Christ) in the New Testament. He then saw a development to where Jesus is declared Son of God at his baptism in Mark. Then there is the development to where Jesus is Son of God from his conception in Matthew and Luke. Finally, we have Jesus as Son of God from a pre-existent state in John.

3. Ehrman calls this approach an "exaltation Christology." Now I don't have Brown at hand (or Dunn) because I'm sitting in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, so I can't vouch that Ehrman has been completely fair to Brown. But I do disagree with the way Ehrman puts a number of things.

For example, Ehrman wants to show a tension between what Luke himself thinks and his quoting of earlier Christian tradition. So Ehrman thinks that Luke is quoting an earlier Christian position in Acts 2:36 and 13:33, while Luke himself believes that Jesus was Son of God from his birth.

I disagree. I don't think Luke saw any contradiction between the exaltation Christology he presents on the lips of Peter and Paul and the virginal conception. The angel does not say to Mary, "he will be called Son of the Most High from the moment the Spirit comes on you" in Luke 1:32. "Son of God" is a royal title and becomes most appropriate when Jesus is enthroned, which happened at his resurrection.

Perhaps I should add here that "Son of God" is not a genetic title but one that relates to Jesus as king. "Son of God" is the office of king, a royal title that became most fully appropriate upon enthronement (cf. 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2). I find Bauckham's stuff on this topic bizarrely anachronistic, although it is all the rage.

4. This leads to an appropriate criticism that Simon Gathercole makes of Ehrman in the response book. Quoting someone else, Gathercole says, "Any logic which relies on a conjecture is itself a conjecture" (106). This gets at a problem that is endemic to Ehrman's book. He speculates, which in itself isn't necessarily bad, but then draws conclusions from his speculations.

So Ehrman repeatedly draws conclusions from his speculations about hymnic traditions in Paul. Sometimes he is reasonable in his speculations. Sometimes he's out on a limb. But he goes on to make central arguments out of his speculations and you can't do that.

Is Luke quoting material in tension with what he himself believes? I think that's a really debatable position, yet it is a key part of Ehrman's argument.

5. Whether it applies to Christology, I did think that Ehrman is correct in his assessment of adoption in the Roman world (233-234). An adopted child, in a Roman context, was even more significant than a biological one, because such children were adopted as adults with intention. Ehrman is drawing on Michael Peppard here.

So Julius Caesar had a biological son that no one has heard of (Caesarion). But every educated person has heard of his adopted son (Augustus, first emperor of Rome).

6. I also strongly disagree with Ehrman's insinuation that Jesus didn't do a lot of miracles before his crucifixion. If you follow his own historical criteria, exorcisms and healing must have been central features of Jesus' earthly ministry.

7. In my own assessment, both Jesus and his disciples believed that Jesus was the Messiah before his crucifixion and the rumors were flying. But this was not a matter of his public pronouncement.

I don't think the disciples expected Jesus to be crucified, although I believe Jesus anticipated it. Consequently, I don't think they expected Jesus to rise from the dead either. I accept the empty tomb tradition and think their initial reaction must have been puzzlement. I agree that it was Jesus' appearance to Peter and then others that was what changed everything.

The Gospels tell us these events after decades of reflection and insight. I don't think it's a problem if it actually took some time for them to arrive at this understanding. So the earliest layer of tradition probably does, in my opinion, begin with the resurrection as the focal point of Christology. In fact, I believe the resurrection remains the focal point of Christology for the whole New Testament, with the possible exception of John.

The resurrection is when Jesus is enthroned as Son of God, meaning it is when he becomes "Son of God in power." Before that point, he is the heir apparent. Before that point, he is the one who is going to be enthroned. "Son of God" is an office when used in this sense, not a matter of genetics.

But this doesn't contradict, in my opinion, Jesus being called Son at his baptism. It doesn't contradict a virginal conception. And none of those things contradict the incarnation.

From a faith standpoint, we believe Jesus was God incarnate. We believe he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary. Our answer to the question of how that understanding developed in the early church is an interesting one. But you can answer that question differently and still affirm these central matters of faith, IMO.

Some thoughts...

Ehrman Chapter 5: The Resurrection - What We Can Know

More of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know

Chapter 5 is "The Resurrection - What We Can Know."

In the previous chapter, Ehrman's argument was basically that we can't know what happen to the body of Jesus but it wasn't buried to be sure. I'm being a little sarcastic here. I think that Craig Evans can make just as good a historical case, I suspect better, that Jesus was buried.

1. Let me shift the emphasis of chapter 5 a little. Here's the bottom line: "Some of the disciples wholeheartedly believed that they had seen Jesus after he had died" (202). This claim in this chapter will naturally lead to the next: "belief in the resurrection changed everything Christologically" (204).

How about this quote from Dale Allison, with which Ehrman agrees? "Nothing would prohibit a conscientious historian from... adopting a phenomenological approach to the data [that is, going with how things appear without concluding in relation to what was behind what appears]... Would it be an historical sin to content oneself with observing that the disciples' experiences... were genuine experiences that they at least took to originate outside their subjectivity?" (189).

Did you get that? Ehrman believes that several disciples, he thinks at least four, were completely convinced that they had seen Jesus alive after he had died!

2. Funny how you can actually turn his Debbie Downer tone into some pretty encouraging stuff. He even has me considering believing that the Virgin Mary has appeared to people. He tells of an incident in Venezuela where, on March 25, 1984, a series of people saw Mary hovering over a waterfall, including doctors, psychologists, engineers, and lawyers picnicking there (198). In another instance, Muslims saw and photographed Mary in an Egyptian suburb.

Let me repeat what I have said before. I see in page after page of this book the inadequacy of fundamentalism and its tendency to deconstruct in the hands of a good thinker. Why does he push the Virgin Mary appearances? In part because he knows that the fundamentalist crowd are anti-Catholic. I use the same tactic with King James only types, pointing out that the man most responsible for the wording of the Greek text behind the KJV was a Roman Catholic who argued against Luther and that the original King James had the Apocrypha.

He also plays on the "evidence that demands a verdict" apologetic zeal of so many fundamentalists. Listen to him here: "When I say that conservative evangelical Christians and fundamentalists are children of the Enlightenment, I mean that more than almost anyone else, thinkers among these groups are committed to 'objective truth'--which was precisely the commitment that led to the demise of Christianity in the modern world in the first place, especially in Europe" (172).

I don't know if he would still have faith if he had grown up Methodist, but it sure looks to me like his life trajectory away from faith was in part a result of the fact that he started out with such an evidentiarily unsustainable version of Christianity in the first place.

3. So what can a more faith-oriented (rather than proof-oriented) form of Christianity do with this chapter? For one, we can side with Allison over Ehrman on what the disciples' reaction to seeing Jesus would have been. Allison believes that, after seeing Jesus, the disciples would have then tried to find Jesus' body to verify that, in fact, he truly was alive again.

Ehrman disagrees (185). He thinks that, because of their apocalyptic worldview, the disciples would have automatically assumed that Jesus had physically risen from the dead and that, in fact, his resurrection indicated the beginning of the resurrection of all the dead.

Frankly, I find this sentiment both a little too simplistic and I'm not sure but that it doesn't contradict other things Ehrman says in the chapter. He even footnotes the fact that Jewish belief on the afterlife was a little more varied than this. He seems to be treating Jesus' apocalypticism as involving something like what you would get from a worldview class.

I presented a paper once to the Historical Jesus section of SBL on Jesus and resurrection and, to be frank, I didn't find that the subject seems to have played much of a role in his earthly teaching. In my opinion (and that of John Collins), resurrection was also not a major category for the Essenes at the Dead Sea. I think Ehrman is a little too confident in what the disciples would have automatically assumed after they saw Jesus alive again.

What is worse, he seems to argue in another thread of this chapter that the resurrection traditions of Jesus started out with him more spirit-bodied and progressed toward him being more physical-physical, with flesh and bones. But which is it? Did they automatically assume a body when they saw him or did they see spirit and the tradition develop toward flesh and bones? There seems to be somewhat of a tension in these two parts of his argument to me.

4. I was also annoyed with his repeated mention of Jesus having to "prove" that he was resurrected to various people in the resurrection stories. For example, the "many proofs" of Acts 1:3 are not for the disciples. They are for Luke's audience. On the basis of this statement, Ehrman acts like Jesus had to prove he was alive to the disciples (191), but the reason Luke speaks of proofs is because he wants Theophilus to be convinced. Luke isn't saying that Jesus needed to convince the disciples. Ehrman annoyingly says stuff like this several times.

5. There are things in this chapter, again, that may be distressing to a fundamentalist. Ehrman is right, IMO, that there is a consistent tradition of some of the disciples doubting. Yet Paul says Jesus appeared to the Twelve (1 Cor. 15:5). At least Ehrman acknowledges that "Paul actually knew Peter" (192), which implies to me that Paul can't be teaching something completely different from what Peter was saying happened to Jesus.

But Christian faith does not rise or fall on every detail being historical, IMO. Even Ehrman believes that several of Jesus' followers were fully convinced they had seen an (at least spiritually) embodied Jesus after his death. And, contrary to Ehrman, there are solid reasons to believe that Jesus' body was missing from the place it was known to have been laid.

This is enough to make orthodox faith reasonable, even if Ehrman can point to discrepancies in the stories here and there.

Ehrman Chapter 4: The Resurrection - What We Cannot Know

The review of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God continues. The posts so far are:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?

Today is chapter 4, "The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know."

Boy, this chapter was a "glass is pretty much empty" downer. If I were to capture his point in this chapter it would be this: From a historical perspective, just about any explanation other than Jesus really rose from the dead is more likely.

On the one hand, I thought his explanation of historical study, while pessimistic, was not far off. He recognizes, for example, that presuppositions are always involved in historical study. And he claims not to have an anti-supernaturalist presupposition. I think it's actually pretty clear that he is biased against supernaturalist explanations, but he gives lip service to the possibility that there may be a supernatural explanation surrounding a historical episode.

The philosophy of history he gives here is not far from my own. Historical inquiry tries to explain events in terms of the normal operations of cause and effect. [1] Theological faith is then an additional layer of interpretation that comes into play 1) when cause and effect seems less than adequate as an explanation, 2) especially when revelation has pointed to a miracle at that point. So, trying to speak objectively in these historical terms I have sometimes said in the past, "If resurrections happen, it is quite likely that Jesus was one of them."

Ehrman would disagree. His chief target in this chapter is the burial of Jesus. "Without an empty tomb, there would be no ground for saying that Jesus was physically raised" (168). In fact, I think he is going to argue that the earliest resurrection versions saw Jesus as spiritually raised and then the versions of the resurrections became more and more physical as time went by.

Interestingly, he does believe that at least one person and possibly more than one person thought they saw the resurrected Jesus after he died. He sees a "vision" of this sort as the seed that would lead to Christians believing that Jesus is God. That's the next chapter. But he does not think it likely that Jesus was ever buried and, thus, does not think it likely that there was ever an empty tomb.

It is a little sad that his sense of things was actually more open to an empty tomb until he started researching this book. And, unfortunately, he seems to have been reading Crossan in his research. Accordingly, all he found were the references where the Romans left people on crosses to make their point emphatically, to let the birds eat their flesh. His references to Pilate are all about his cruelty.

Craig Evans has thoroughly balanced this one set of quotes with another in chapter 4 of How God Became Jesus, including archaeological evidence of buried individuals in Israel who had been crucified. If a person wants to be objective, the bottom line is that you simply cannot say either that Pilate would or would not have let someone take Jesus' body down from the cross. Evans makes a strong case that, since Jewish leaders instigated Jesus' crucifixion, Pilate would also have let them bury the body for reasons of Jewish purity.

I find Evans' argument quite compelling. It seems very plausible historically that Jesus' crucifixion was not, in origination, an instance of Pilate rubbing Roman authority in the noses of the Jews but an example of Jewish leaders getting permission to have someone put to death. It then makes sense that Pilate would give them permission to dispose of him before the Sabbath.

Ehrman is correct that we cannot prove these things historically. But the same chapter could have been written to show that Jesus' burial and empty tomb are perfectly plausible from a historical point of view. His aim is to show both that the evidence can be explained a different way and to argue that, in relation to Jesus' burial, it is more likely that he wasn't.

I don't think he makes his case. I think he only demonstrates that the evidence for Jesus' burial can be explained in other ways. I don't think he demonstrates that it should be explained in other ways. The hints he finds are too vague to have much force. So he argues from the tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that the burial part was kind of added in. Seems less than obvious to me. He sees a discrepancy between the plural of Acts 13:29 and the singular name of Joseph of Arimathea in Mark 15:43. Since I take the sermons of Acts to be somewhat amplified versions anyway, I don't find this small difference substantial.

And while Paul has almost nothing to say of Jesus' burial, apart from this comment in 1 Corinthians 15:4, his understanding of resurrection in the rest of the chapter assumes that the previous body is the starting point for the transformation of resurrection. "The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable" (15:42). Note well--the earliest source of the resurrection sees resurrection as the transformation of the previous body, not a spiritual resurrection. If anything, Paul's writings become less clearly tied to a corporeal resurrection as time goes by, not more (cf. 2 Cor. 5).

I want to close with a warning. You can once again see the reverse image of the fundamentalism with which Ehrman started here. Those who never read chapters like these--or who are immensely stubborn intellectually--can blissfully argue for "detailed inerrancy" of the sort the Nazarenes voted down last year. But few open-minded fundamentalist souls of this sort will survive his opening assault on page 134.

It is not essential for Christian faith that we be able to historically line up the resurrection accounts in detail, in my opinion. Those who think it is may find themselves eventually like Ehrman. Zealots of this sort are often the first to lose their faith. I personally believe that Luke omits all references to Galilee intentionally so that his account flows more smoothly. The way the fundamentalist is oriented around details hits a snag on this sort of thing. I myself would not call this an error because I think Luke does it intentionally, following a different standard of history writing than we are used to today.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Christian faith rides on these "fundamental" propositions, not on being able to prove the historicity of every part of every story in Scripture, in my opinion. We will keep our smartest children from faith crisis if we keep such things in mind.

[1] There is perhaps a tinge of the postmodern in his version. He does not reference cause and effect but instead references historical explanations that are "generally held." In this sense he allows for the acceptable interpretations of the past to change over time as the current worldviews of historians change. I do consider his perspective an advance on Ernst Troelstch, whose criterion of analogy held that we cannot accept that things happened in the past that do not happen today.

Ehrman Chapter 3: Did Jesus Think He Was God?

I continue through Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God.  Here are the posts so far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism

Today is chapter 3, "Did Jesus Think He Was God?"

Before I begin, I should say that Larry Hurtado, whom I mentioned last week, did actually come out with a blog review of the book. I thought this comment was particularly striking: "Whereas in some of his previous general-reader books, Ehrman drew upon his recognized expertise (especially in NT textual criticism), in this book he deals with a subject on which he is not particularly known as a contributor...  Unfortunately, however, on several matters he seems to rely on now discredited views, or over-simplify or misunderstand things."

Now on to my review of chapter 3. I am, again, wanting to try to read this chapter as if I were someone without much knowledge of these things, someone without a lot of preconceptions, like a "none" or a Christian without a lot of preconceptions of things about the Bible.

1. Jesus' humanity
There is a quote in the conclusion of Michael Bird's response to Ehrman's chapter that is very interesting to me: "The Church cannot indefinitely continue to believe about Jesus what he did not know to be true about himself" (69, taken from J. W. Bowman, The Intention of Jesus, 1945).

While this may have been obvious to Bowman, it actually isn't entirely obvious to me. The seed of my question comes from this comment in Mark 13:32: "about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son." Clearly the New Testament did not teach that Jesus was omniscient while on earth.

How does this work for Christian theology?  The implication is that on earth Christ in some way tucked his omniscience into some divine subconscious. He did not come out of Mary's womb speaking fluent Aramaic. He probably did not know Latin while he was on earth, let alone English or German.

When did he realize he was the Messiah? Is it possible he did not realize this fact until around the time of his baptism? When did he fully realize he was God incarnate? Was it while he was still on earth?

I raise these questions to put the topic of this chapter into perspective because I disagree with Bowman. There may be truths about Jesus that he did not broadcast for good reason, and it is at least possible that there were some aspects of his messianic identity that he did not fully understand until even after his death. I think for someone hearing ideas like Ehrman's for the first time, it's significant to know that these sorts of issues have been floating around for a very long time and are well known.

2. What is essential to Christian faith?
Christian faith rises or falls on a few key truths. The central one for the New Testament is the resurrection of Jesus. Christian faith also includes the incarnation, the fact that Jesus is very God become flesh. All that is to say that we do not have to disprove everything Ehrman says in this chapter for Christianity to be true. He may actually be right about some things, as he was in the previous chapter. We are trying to sort the likely from the questionable.

3. The quest for the historical Jesus
There is a certain tendency in Ehrman's work, it seems to me and others, that is quite striking. He tends to make a big show about what we don't know or can't know... and then he goes on to act like we can and do know. His book, Misquoting Jesus, for example, made it seem like we can't know much of anything about what the New Testament originally said. But he really didn't mean it. When pushed he has admitted that we do basically know what the NT said.

So Bird points out that Ehrman does it here as well. He makes it seem like we can't know much about what Jesus really did... and then goes on to tell us fairly confidently about things Jesus said or did not say, did or did not do.

I personally find the whole "the oral tradition would have got totally messed up" shtick overplayed. Don't get me wrong. I am not denying that there are differing versions of things in the Gospels. But it's not like there weren't any checks on the early, oral Jesus traditions either. Paul wasn't nearly as isolated from Jerusalem as Ehrman suggests (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 9:5-6). Peter was around until the mid-60s at least to correct and redirect oral traditions. And if you look at the way Ehrman looks for common stories between layers of Gospel tradition, his practice shows that he really doesn't think things are as bleak as he starts out the chapter.

I frankly found Ehrman's sense of Gospel sources and criteria of authenticity somewhat amateurish, which is basically what Hurtado's review implies. I kept thinking of Bill O'Reilly's book, Killing Jesus although, to be fair, Ehrman knows more about what he's talking about than O'Reilly.

For example, I felt like I was reading B. H. Streeter in the 1924 when Ehrman was talking about distinct sources for Luke and Matthew, "L" and "M"? Good grief, the big question these days is whether there even was a Q (I still go with one, but sometimes it feels lonely--see anything by Mark Goodacre). And, as Bird and others point out, the idea of using criteria of authenticity in any kind of straightforward way hasn't exactly been the trendy thing in recent times (see anything by Anthony Le Donne or Chris Keith). Although with Bird I believe John is "a mixture of memory, metaphor, and midrash" (68), I don't think we can rule it out of hand as completely unhistorical the way David Strauss did 150 years ago (which is the feel I get from Ehrman).

4. Jesus the apocalypticist
One very solid principle in the chapter, I believe, is the idea that Jesus should generally fit historically in between Judaism/John the Baptist on the one hand and earliest Christianity on the other. I believe Ehrman is getting this from E. P. Sanders (1985), and the work that Ehrman couldn't remember on page 110, I think, is A. E. Harvey's Jesus and the Constraints of History. N. T. Wright calls this the criterion of "double similarity," I believe.

So I agree with Ehrman that the apocalyptic Jesus is more accurate than another option N. T. Wright calls the "Wredebahn," the completely de-eschatologized Jesus of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, etc. Ehrman's description of an apocalyptic worldview isn't bad, IMO (dualism, pessimism, judgment, imminence), but no individual thinker should be limited by an abstracted list like this one.

Ehrman believes Jesus thought he was the Messiah. That's more than we could say about a lot of Jesus research. I think there are good reasons for why Jesus would not have publicized this sense of his identity widely, not least the kinds of expectations of a Messiah that Ehrman mentions. Messiah's didn't turn the other cheek. Messiahs were supposed to kick the Romans out of Dodge. Messiahs certainly didn't die.

So what do I find questionable in Ehrman's conclusions about Jesus? His idea that the Son of Man was someone different from Jesus is an old one that I think goes back to Bultmann (1921). It's clever to be sure (at least for whoever first suggested it). The problem is that one of the few things that almost all historical Jesus scholars seem to agree on these days is that Jesus referred to himself as "the son of man."

Ehrman's practice of the "criteria for authenticity" is interesting but an excellent example of how you can use them to prove and disprove the same saying. For example, I LOLed in amazement to hear his analysis of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. I could hear some really bad teaching about Paul's theology in his past, as he assumed all Christians believed in Lutheran justification by faith after Jesus.

His sense of what Judas was betraying (namely, that Jesus really did think he was king of the Jews) was clever but pretty ridiculous, I thought. Ehrman somehow seems to assume that the Sanhedrin/Romans wouldn't kill someone for causing trouble whether they had a personal confession or not.

Ehrman's reconstruction here fails the most at his distinction between Jesus and the son of man. This would be a VERY unusual position for a historical Jesus scholar to take these days.

5. Jesus claim to be God?
Here is where the chapter gets most sensitive because, as Bird also mentions, there actually are significant differences in tone and presentation between John and the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus actually keeps his messianic identity a secret in Mark, but in John it feels more like Jesus went around with a megaphone saying who he was.

I have generally put it this way. John is The Message version of Jesus. It is the "hindsight is 20/20" presentation of Jesus. As Clement of Alexandria put it in the late 100s, John is the "spiritual gospel." John is a more symbolic presentation of Jesus than a video documentary. See my book on the unique portraits of the Gospels.

If you had followed Jesus around the countryside, would you have had more of a Mark impression or more of a John impression? I think pretty much everybody goes with "Mark impression" here. I think we can safely assume that, in his public persona, Jesus did not go around telling everyone he was the Messiah, let alone God. (By the way, Ehrman's reconstruction of Judas' betrayal implicitly acknowledges that Jesus did not go around announcing that he was the king to everyone.)

In the end, when I wrestled with these sorts of things 25 years ago, I concluded that the solution was to take a long view of revelation. We have a tendency, both as Westerners and especially as Protestants, to think that we need to "get back," that truth is all about the original. We can perhaps learn something from the Catholics here.

What if God unfolded the sense of who Jesus was in baby steps? The idea that Jesus was Messiah was controversial enough, given that death wasn't part of the usual expectation. Jesus does speak of his unique connection to God in the Synoptics (e.g., Matt. 11:27), but wasn't this enough until his resurrection?

I think we see in Ehrman's anti-Christianity the bas relief of his earlier fundamentalism. He grew up with a simplistic, "evidence that demands a verdict" approach, which fell apart on him. Now he uses "lack of obviousness demands a verdict" approach to attack. But what if "obvious" was never God's normal operating mode in the first place? What if belief in him is "reasonable" rather than "obvious"? What if his normal mode of revelation is one of invitation rather than absolute proof?

Next week: The Resurrection of Jesus

Ehrman Chapter 2: Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism

I am working through Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God, on Mondays.  Here are the posts so far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

Today is chapter 2, "Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism."

In this chapter, Ehrman aims to show that there was a spectrum of "divinity" within Judaism just as within the Greco-Roman world. For most of this review, I want to take the examples he gives and put them into my own sense of the flow of Jewish thought.

A key point comes at the end of the chapter and is worth starting with: "It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (83). So what is his point in the chapter then?  It would seem to be this: Humans nonetheless, "could share some of the authority, status, and power of that one God." I am good with this assessment.

However, I'm not sure that is the same thing as the next sentence: "Even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity." I don't think that's quite right. The sentence before shows that, in Judaism, it was really only when a being was representing God in a very, very narrow sense that we come anywhere close to saying such a being "shared" in the "authority, status, and power" of the one God.

That is to say, in Judaism we only get divine language used of other beings in a derivative way. No being comes close to such language on its own but only in some special relation to the one God, in a representative or reflective sense. And even then, it's not like we have a lot of examples of this sort of thing.

Old Testament Henotheism
So we start with some OT passages he mentions that reflect a henotheist view. Yes, Israel not only had its share of polytheists (the sort Elijah contended with). Yes, the Israelites were mosly henotheists and "monolaters" who only worshiped Yahweh while not denying the existence of other gods (e.g., Ps. 82; Deut. 32:8-9).

Nothing new here. Again, even he says, "by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (54). So this is fun historical background... largely irrelevant to the question of what the earliest Christians thought about Jesus.

The Old Testament King 
It might shock you to know that the Israelites could refer to their earthly king as "God," but there's nothing to see here. This is well known. Psalm 45 was originally a wedding psalm for a king. But, as Michael Bird points out, there was no confusion for anyone in ancient Israel between the king and God himself (42). The king as God's representative on earth is clearly distinguished from the God in 45:7.

The question, again, is whether this aspect of Israelite thought centuries before Jesus is relevant to the time of Jesus. It does seem to me that the incident in the play by Ezekiel the Tragedian (ca. 200BC) does indicate that some Jews at the time of Christ could think of an earthly king "sharing" the honor due God in a derivative way. But I disagree with the way Ehrman puts it.

Ehrman puts it this way: The stars "bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they" (61). I don't agree. They bow down to Moses because he is sitting on God's throne, representing the one God. It is a derivative bowing, not an instance of Moses himself being transformed into the divine. I have argued this elsewhere.

The Angel of the Lord
The Angel of the Lord is an interesting figure in the early OT. Genesis and Exodus seem to consider this messenger of Yahweh so much to be identified with Yahweh that those who see the angel are said to see God. John Collins puts it this way, "there is no substantive difference between the deity and his agents" (57).

An interesting history lesson. But is it relevant to the time of Jesus? It was some 1000 years earlier or so.

Angels Having Sex
I'm not sure this is really relevant either to the topic of how the earliest Christians came to equate Jesus with God. Yes, many Jews did believe that angels could have sex with women. 1 Enoch explains Genesis 6:1-2 in this way. As a side note, Dale Martin might suggest that many Jews thought of angels as truly masculine such that they didn't have "to assume human shape" (63). Isn't it just as likely that these Jews assumed angels were literally male?

Exalted Angels
Ehrman mentions a number of exalted angels, but you can't blur Psalm 82 with the Prayer of Joseph or the Apocalypse of Abraham. They are separated by numerous centuries. Is Ehrman's implied argument:

• The word God is plural in OT Hebrew and can mean "angels."
• There are angels who come to earth in the Prayer of Joseph and Apocalypse of Abraham. 
• Therefore, we can say that these angels who come down to earth in later texts are gods come to earth.

Maybe I'm missing something but this logic doesn't seem to work. The meanings of words at any one point in time are a function of that point in time, not hundreds of years earlier.

Humans who become angels
Again, it feels like he's mixing up some different times and places. So Enoch doesn't become an angel in Genesis or in most of 1 Enoch. There are some texts from around the time of Christ where humans become angel-like (2 Baruch). I do believe there are places where the dead are thought of as becoming angels (Acts 12:15). Basically, it's all over the map.

I'm waiting to see, though, any evidence yet that the earliest Christians thought Jesus had become an angel.

Hypostases and Philo
I think Ehrman goes too far in thinking of wisdom and word in Jewish thought as hypostases. I think for the vast majority of Jewish literature, wisdom and logos are simply personifications of God's attributes, spoken of poetically and figuratively. For example, I disagree with him in thinking that the Wisdom of Solomon thinks of wisdom as an actual being. She's still just an attribute of God, referred to poetically.

Even in Philo, I believe the word and wisdom of God are, more often than not, personifications of God's attributes. True, there are times in Philo where I think the Logos crosses a line and becomes an actual entity, "created but not created like mortals" (Heir 205-6). But there is no question in Philo's mind, even in this case, that the Logos is not "uncreated like God."

Philo's use of allegory and figural language requires some care in reading his comments. Without a sense of his overall point, you can easily mistake an allegorical comment for a literal one. For example, is Philo really talking about the literal Moses or does Moses represent something else, such as a characteristic of God.

Ehrman is right that the rabbis of the second century began to clamp down on how exalted some Jews had come to think of there being "two powers" in heaven (67-69). He is also right that, whatever the official position of a religion, people are going to believe all sorts of things on a popular level (50). I personally question whether Colossians 2 is about worshiping angels, but I suspect there were Jews who crossed the line in their devotion to angelic beings.

Is he suggesting that the earliest Christians had precedents for crossing a similar line? I guess we'll find out.

The Son of Man
Ehrman introduces us to the heavenly figure of Daniel 7 known as the "Son of Man." He is right that, in 1 Enoch, this figure sits on God's throne and judges the nations. This picture may very well have influenced the picture of Jesus sitting on a throne in Matthew 25.

I do want to make a strong distinction, however, between parallels like these generating the heart of early Christian understandings of Jesus and the possibility that the earliest Christians drew on some images like these to find ways to express what they already had experienced in relation to Jesus. In other words, resurrection faith came first. Drawing on existing imagery to describe these unbelievable events came second.

Larry Hurtado
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen a direct response to Ehrman's book on Hurtado's blog. But Ehrman does quote the classic One God One Lord at one point in support of his thesis. Hurtado concludes that "principle 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" (61).

I might selectively agree with Hurtado here, but I wonder whether Hurtado likes the way Ehrman paraphrases this quote: "to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form" (61).

I really don't think that's what Hurtado said. Hurtado, like me, believes that the earliest believers drew on Jewish precedents to describe their recent experiences. As far as I can remember, I don't think he holds to any sort of "angelic Christology," the belief that the earliest Christians saw Jesus as a kind of angel.

Next week: "Did Jesus Think He Was God?"