Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

the fact that they are not clearly discussed in any of our sources. On this everyone should be able to agree. Even more important, there is no evidence that such gods were known or worshipped in rural Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, in the 20s CE. Anyone who thinks that Jesus was modeled on such deities needs to cite some evidence—any evidence at all—that Jews in Palestine at the alleged time of Jesus’s life were influenced by anyone who held such views. One reason that scholars do not think that Jesus was invented as one of these deities is precisely that we have no evidence that any of his followers knew of such deities in the time and place where Jesus was allegedly invented. Moreover, as Mettinger himself acknowledges, the differences between the dying and rising gods (which he has reconstructed on slim evidence) and Jesus show that Jesus was not modeled on them, even if such gods were talked about during Jesus’s time.

But there is an even more important reason for thinking that Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of a dying and rising god. The earliest Christians did not think that Jesus was God.

Jesus as God

That the earliest Christians did not consider Jesus God is not a controversial point among scholars. Apart from fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals, scholars are unified in thinking that the view that Jesus was God was a later development within Christian circles. Fundamentalists disagree, of course, because for them Jesus really is God, and since he is God, he must have known he was God, and he must have told his followers, and so they knew from the beginning that he was God. This view is rooted in the fundamentalist doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture, where everything that Jesus is said to have said, for example in the Gospel of John, is historically accurate and beyond question. But that is not the view of critical scholarship. Whether or not Jesus really was God (a theological, not a historical, question), the earliest followers did not think so. As I indicated at the very beginning of this book, the questions of how, when, and why Christians came to regard Jesus as God will be the subject of my next book, not this one. But I do need to stress the point here: this was a later development in Christian thinking.

It is striking that none of our first three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—declares that Jesus is God or indicates that Jesus ever called himself God. Jesus’s teaching in the earliest Gospel traditions is not about his personal divinity but about the coming kingdom of God and the need to prepare for it. This should give readers pause. If the earliest followers of Jesus thought Jesus was God, why don’t the earliest Gospels say so? It seems like it would have been a rather important aspect of Christ’s identity to point out. It is true that the Gospels consistently portray Jesus as the Son of God. But that is not the same thing as saying that he was God. We may think it is since for us the son of a dog is a dog, the son of a cat is a cat, and the son of a god, therefore, is a god. But the Gospels were not written by people living in the twenty-first century with modern understandings (or even in the fourth century with fourth-century understandings). The Gospels were written in a first-century context and were ultimately guided by Jewish understandings, especially as these were mediated through the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament. The Old Testament speaks of many individuals and groups who were considered to be son(s) of God. In no instance were these persons God.

And so, for example, the king of Israel was explicitly said to be “the son of God” (for example, Solomon, in 2 Samuel 7:11–14). This certainly did not make the king (especially Solomon) God. He was instead a human who stood in a close relationship with God, like a child to a parent, and was used by God to mediate his will on earth. So too the nation of Israel was sometimes called “the son of God” (for example, Hosea 11:1). This did not make the nation divine; Israel was instead the people through whom God mediated his will on earth. When the future messiah was thought of as the son of God, it was not because he would be God incarnate but because he would be a human particularly close to God through whom God worked his purposes. Jesus, for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is that human.

This is the view, of course, that the Gospel writers inherited from the oral and written traditions on which they based their accounts. Jesus is not called God in Q, M, L, or any of the oral accounts that we can trace from the synoptic Gospels. But we can go yet earlier than this. As I pointed out, we have very primitive views of Jesus expressed in such pre-Pauline traditions as the one he cites in Romans 1:3–4, where Jesus is said to have become the son of God (not God) at his resurrection. That is, at Jesus’s resurrection God adopted him into sonship. So too with the speeches of Acts, which we examined earlier (see Acts 2:36; 13:32–33). God exalted Jesus and made him his son, the Christ, at the resurrection.

This is in all probability the earliest understanding of Jesus among his followers. While he was living they thought that perhaps he would be the future messiah (who also, as we have seen, was not God). But this view was radically disconfirmed when he was arrested by the authorities, put on trial, and then tortured and crucified. This was just the opposite fate from the one that the messiah was supposed to enjoy. For some reason, however, the followers of Jesus (or at least some of them) came to think that he had been