One of the questions I regularly get is how we can imagine that Jews — specifically, the Jewish followers of Jesus after his death —  could possibly imagine that he had become God.  They were monotheists.  How could someone in addition to God be or become God?  That maybe makes sense in pagan circles, where there are many gods and a rather fluid transition between humanity and divinity.  But not in Judaism, right?

Well, wrong.

As it turns out Jews also sometimes thought that a human could become divine.  In this post I’ll talk about one variant of this view, that mortal humans could become divine superhumans, angels.  In later posts I’ll talk about an even more bizarre view (bizarre, that is, in the context of Judaism) that humans could become gods.  Jews believed that?  Who woulda thought?

This is how I begin to explain the matter in my book How Jesus Became God.

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Many people today have the view that when people die, they become angels (well, at least if they’ve been “good”).  That is a very old belief indeed.  In one of the great apocalypses that has come down to us from early Judaism, the book of 2 Baruch, we learn that righteous believers will be transformed “into the splendor of angels… for they will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and be equal to the stars….  And the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels” (2 Baruch 51.3-10).[1]  Here, then, those who are righteous become angels who are greater than other angels – greater even than the stars, who were believed by many ancient people to be fantastically great angels.

Some ancient Jewish texts portray particular individuals as being transformed into angels at death.  One of the supremely mysterious characters in the Hebrew Bible is the ancient figure of Enoch.  We do not learn much about

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