Loading...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.
******************************
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
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
Dr Ehrman
If the earliest nt manuscripts come from Egypt and according to Dr Nongbri non-canonical writings were copied more than canonical writings, how we would know that there was wide geographical uniformity early on?
Sorry — I”m not quite sure what you’re asking.
A point that seems worth making here is that “Jew” is not as neat and tidy a category as we might like it to be. In the books of Kings, almost every king gets shamed by the author for failing to adequately suppress polytheism and folkloric religion among the Jews. That means there was an ongoing popular demand for forms or religious expression other than the monotheistic worship of YHWH in Jewish society. After Alexander, there’s the influx of Hellenism to the Jewish territories, bringing the influence of a polytheistic culture that didn’t draw such strict boundaries between the human and the divine. And then you’ve got the Son of Man in the book of Daniel, who is some sort of divine figure, as well as other characters crossing human/divine boundaries in non-canonical Jewish writings all before Jesus. It’s all very messy, so one should be careful about coming up with a tidy little definition of “Jew” and then assuming that the properties of that definition must apply to all the members of the category.
Dear Bart,
I wonder if you have done any research on the 1917 Fatima Event? Three SHEPHERD children received 3 secrets from Mary and one of them is about the vision of hell. It’s the thing that scared me most haha.
Thank you!
Yes, there are a number of books written about it, as well as other visions of Mary over the years.
Thank you. What do you think of those events and the miracles Catholic church claimed?
I don’t think they literally happened, no. People thought they saw things. I talk about this (Mary visions, etc.) in my book How Jesus Became God.
To be honest, I think these apparition stories are the most compelling evidence for Christianity. I do not see how this religion can be true otherwise. btw the 1917 event was so scary haha.
Psalm 45:6-7 calls a Davidic king a god separate from Yahweh too. Not too dissimilar to the other cultures all around ancient Israel with their god-kings and deified emperors. If Jesus is thought to have been a messiah (a king), then his followers and even he himself could’ve thought he was divine even before his resurrection? The groundwork to Jesus becoming God may have already been laid by the smaller claim that he was a rightful claimant to be King of the Jews, the King like that of Psalm 45?
It’s possible. But it’s not clear if the poetic language of the Psalms was understood literally to mean that the king was *actually* God. In other traditions about the future messiah, he is never said to be God but to be one sent from God.
I accept the view that some Jews held a belief that a human being could become a divine entity but that is very different from believing a human being could become the Almighty.
Early Christians did not say that Christ became the Almighty. He was not YHWH, God the Father.
Thank you for this interesting post. I wonder, though, whether some of the language about humans “becoming angels” may slightly overstate the evidence from the passages cited. In 2 Baruch, the righteous are transformed into the “splendor of angels,” become “like the angels,” and their “excellence” is greater than that of angels. But that seems to describe glorification, likeness, and superior excellence, rather than a literal transformation into angels as such.
Similarly, in 2 Enoch, Enoch becomes “like one of his glorious ones” with no observable difference, which again seems to indicate angelomorphic glory or appearance, not necessarily ontological identity with an angel. And Sirach says Moses was made “equal in glory to the holy ones,” not simply “equal to the angels.”
Would it be more precise to say that some Jewish texts portray righteous or exceptional humans as glorified, angel-like, or visually indistinguishable from heavenly beings, rather than saying they actually become angels?
I would also be interested in the question of scale. These non-canonical texts may preserve minority or speculative traditions rather than mainstream Jewish belief. Without some indication of how widespread these ideas were, it seems risky to infer that they shaped Jewish thought generally, let alone all early Christian authors.
Yes, I suppose they were “like” angels because they were not created as angels. I’m not sure that indicates they are different (now) in essence though.
And yes, it is impossible to know anything like a majority view in ancient Judaism (or most any other religion/philosophy/etc. from thousands of years ago) given the incredibly sparse evidence we have.
Wait a minute. Let me overthink this. In life, there are mysteries. Some mysteries are for us to solve, but not all of them. These mysteries are “reserved” for God. Deuteronomy 29:29. Paul wrote that he was a steward of the mysteries of God. 1st Corinthians 4:1-2. “Jesus is the mystery of God . . . ” Colossians 1:26-27. “The mystery of Christ, hidden from past . . .” Ephesians 3:3-6.
In my opinion, the authors of the synoptic Gospels were eye-witnesses of the last week of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. They were there at Lazarus’s tomb. They experienced the midday darkness. They walked inside the empty tomb. These were mysteries.
Unfortunately, these authors were not in the group that followed the Twelve Apostles. They invented the Bethlehem Nativity, the walking on the water, the teaching of the Return of Jesus, and the casting out of demons.
But, it does not affect the Bottom Line. The Work of the Cross is idiot-proof, tamper resistant, and foolproof. The New Covenant supersedes and transcends SPACE and TIME.
Atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jews are welcomed into Heaven according to the Divine Universal Standard. Romans 2:26-29