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

not have occurred to you at all. A large number of scholars think that the passage does not imagine Christ existing as a divine being with God in heaven, coming to earth to die, and then being exalted even higher afterward. They think instead that the passage is talking about Christ as the “second Adam,” one who was like the first man, Adam, as described in the book of Genesis, but who acted in just the opposite way, leading to just the opposite result.14

In the book of Genesis, when God creates “man,” Adam is said to have been made in the “image” of God (Genesis 1:26). The terms image and form are sometimes used synonymously in the Old Testament. Is Christ in the “form” of God the same way that Adam was? If so, what did Adam do? He wanted to be “equal with God,” and so he grabbed for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Christ, by contrast, did not think that equality with God “was something to be grabbed.” His actions were just the opposite of Adam’s. Because of sin, Adam was destined to die—as were all of his descendants. Christ, by contrast, explicitly chose to die for the sake of those who had to die because of Adam. And because he did not grab for equality with God but died out of obedience, God did just the opposite for Christ that he did for Adam. Adam and his descendants were cursed. Christ was highly exalted above all else. So high was he exalted that it is at the name of Jesus that every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess.

This final part of the passage is actually a quotation from Isaiah 45:23, which says that it is to God alone that every knee shall bow and tongue confess. However you interpret the rest of the passage, this conclusion is stunning. Christ will receive the adoration that is by rights God’s alone. That is how highly God exalted him in reward for his act of obedience.

If this interpretation is correct, then the beginning of the passage is describing Christ not as a preexistent divine being but as very much as a human being. But even if it is not correct, the passage begins by describing Christ, not as God, but as a being in the form of God. Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being. Angels in the Old Testament are God’s messengers who can appear like God, as in passages in the Old Testament where an “angel of the Lord” appears and is actually called God (as in Exodus 3—the passage about Moses and the Burning Bush). In these cases, though, the angels may appear like God (in the “form” of God), but they are not actually God. They are God’s messengers, his angels. It is striking that a number of Jewish traditions speak of an angel being exalted to the level of God, sitting on a throne next to that of the Almighty.15

However one interprets the beginning of this passage in Philippians, one thing is clear. It does not describe a dying and rising god. Thinking that it does so requires the reader to ignore what the text actually says in the second stanza. What is most significant is that Christ—whether a preexistent divine being, Adam, or an angel (I prefer the final interpretation myself)—“emptied himself” before dying on the cross. That is to say, he deprived himself of whatever status he had when he was in the “form of god,” and he took on a completely different form, that of a “slave.” It is not as a god that he dies, but as a slave. And he is not raised as God. He is exalted to a position worthy of equal worship with God only after he is raised. That is when he is awarded divine attributes and given divine worship. This passage is thus not talking about a god who dies and then is raised, it is talking about the death of a humbled slave and his exaltation to a position of divine authority and grandeur.

The most important point I want to make, however, is this. Even those scholars who think that Paul inherited this hymn (or creed) do not think that it was the oldest form of belief about Jesus. Even if it predates Paul, it does not represent the earliest Christian understanding of Christ. However we interpret this passage, the earliest Christian traditions point in a completely different direction, emphasizing Jesus’s full humanness and saying nothing at all about his being God. The divinity of Christ is a relative latecomer to the scene of Christian theological reflections.

The broad views about Jesus in the early Christian traditions are otherwise clear. As I indicated, the earliest view was almost certainly that God exalted Jesus and made him his son when he raised him from the dead (this is roughly the view of the Philippians hymn as well, of course). And so the speeches of Acts, which must date well before any of our Gospels, and almost certainly predate the writings of Paul himself, indicate that it was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God (Acts 2:36; 13:32–33).16 That is the view of the creed that Paul quotes in Romans 1:3–4 as well.

Some Christians were not content with the idea that Jesus was the Son of God only at his resurrection, however, and came to think that he must have been the Son of God for his entire public ministry. And so we have traditions that arose indicating that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism. That may be the view still found in our earliest Gospel, Mark, who begins his narrative with Jesus being baptized and hearing the voice of God from heaven declaring him his son. In Mark Jesus is certainly not God. In fact, in one passage he clearly