Early Christian Doctrine Archives - Page 3 of 8 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Are God and Christ the SAME Person?

In this thread on where the Trinity came from, I have been focusing on early Christology – the understandings of who Christ was. My reason for that is simple. The issue of the Trinity arose only because Christians said more than one being was God but that there was only one God. The “other” being at the outset, of course, was Christ. After his death his followers called him God. The Trinity doctrine, as I will now start to explain in greater detail, emerged by the problems that then arose: two beings who are God, but only one God. I will be getting to the Spirit later, but frankly there is not as much to say there. First I need to keep going on the idea of Jesus being God and God being God. The question that naturally arose among the Christians was how that could be the case: how could *BOTH* of them be God? In what sense? That’s an issue I dealt with in my book How Jesus Became God. Here I’ll provide some of [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-24T17:48:55-04:00April 8th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

How The Afterlife Changed After Jesus’ Life

Easter celebrates the greatest irony of the Christian religion: those who worship Jesus do not believe what he taught but what his followers taught about him after his death. That is especially true about one key question the Christian faith addresses: what does it mean to be saved after we die? Around the world today, billions of Christians believe that Jesus died and then on Easter, was raised from the dead and taken up to heaven to live with God. As a corollary, they believe that when they die, they too will go to live with God. That is not at all what Jesus thought. Jesus did not believe a person’s soul would live on after death, either to experience bliss in the presence of God above, or to be tormented for sins in the fires of hell below. Jesus did not believe the soul would go anywhere after death. As a Jew of the first century he did not think the soul could exist outside the body. Christians two thousand years later do not [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-24T17:21:03-04:00April 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

Were Jesus and Christ Two Different Beings?

As we have seen, the New Testament in places seems to indicate that of Christ was a human being who, in some sense, had been adopted by God and so made into the Son of God, a divine being. There were groups of Christians who continued to believe that for centuries. (Some still do!) Others had an opposite view, that Christ was completely God, so much so that he was not actually ever a full flesh-and-blood human being. There were lots of variations within these views, and there were other views as well, including one I call “separationism.” A separationist view is especially prominent among certain groups of early Christian Gnostics. (For a basic introduction to what Gnostics were all about, check out the lecture in the previous post OR do a word search for “Gnosticism” on the blog). Here is what I say about separationist Christologies view in my book How Jesus Became God, using as an example one of the most fascinating Gnostic writings to come down to us from antiquity, The Coptic [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-24T17:10:54-04:00March 31st, 2021|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

A Phantom Jesus: The Teachings of the Second-Century Marcion

In the past couple of posts I have talked about early Christian “docetists,” those who were so convinced that Jesus was completely God that they denied he was a “flesh-and-blood” human being. In the early Christian centuries, no one advanced that view more than the “arch-heretic” Marcion. Marcion had a huge following. In some parts of the Christian world at the end of the second century, there were apparently more Marcionites than other kinds of Christian. One could argue he his views are still broadly popular today, even among Christians who have never heard of him and among those who, if they have, would say that he was a “heretic.” Do you know Christians who think that there is a difference between the God of Wrath in the Old Testament and the God of Love in the New Testament, and who think that the Old Testament does not really apply anymore? That is a weakened version of Marcion’s thought. Or do you know people who say Christ was God and so he wasn’t [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-26T19:55:06-04:00March 20th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Christ as Non-Human (but fully God) in the Early Second Century

On this slow path we are taking to see where the doctrine of the Trinity came from (it may seem slow, but of course a full analysis would take volumes!) I have been trying to show how different understandings of Christ emerged in early Christianity – starting from the original belief of his disciples in his resurrection and exaltation, to later exaltation views (he was a man who became divine at his resurrection; NO! at his baptism; NO! at his birth) and then incarnation views (he was never a man who was not God. He was God who became a man). Paul has both views: Christ was a divine being who became human but then got exalted to a higher level of divinity; the final view is found in the Gospel of John: Christ was completely divine from the beginning, and in fact was the Creator of the universe. Wow. In the last post I showed that this incredibly “high” Christology in John was taken yet higher in the later Johannine community, as some members [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-08T15:09:19-05:00March 17th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Was Christ So Divine That He Was Not Human? The “Antichrists” of 1 John

Just as there were “adoptionist” Christians in the second century, who maintained that Christ was not really a divine being, but a human being who had been “adopted” to be divine by God (so: not pre-existent; not born of a virgin; not “equal” with God; etc.), so too, on the other end of the spectrum, there were others who claimed that he was so *entirely* God that he was not actually human. Here is how I talk about early representatives of that view in my book How Jesus Became God. **************************** We have seen that those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’ own apostles. Of course, every group representing every view of early Christianity claimed that its views were the original teachings of Jesus and his earthly followers – but in the case of the adoptionists, they may well have been right. The view we will consider now is in some ways the polar opposite: it maintained that rather than being completely human, and so not – by [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-08T15:03:26-05:00March 16th, 2021|Catholic Epistles, Early Christian Doctrine|

Was Christ Human But Not Divine? Another Early Christian View

In my previous post I talked about Jewish Christians of the early centuries who held to an “adoptionistic” view of Christ, the view that he was not by nature divine but was a human being who at some point came to be adopted to be God’s son. This view was held by other groups as well (and still is); one that we know of from ancient sources comes not from Jewish but gentile circles. This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder, a shoemaker who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus. Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists. The followers of Theodotus did think that Christ was unlike other humans in that he was born of a virgin mother (and so they may have accepted either the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke as Scripture). But other than that, as the church father and heresy-hunter (i.e., "heresiologist") Hippolytus, tells us, for them “Jesus was a (mere) man” [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-01T18:06:24-05:00March 13th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Christ as “Not God” in the Second Century: Early Jewish Adoptionists

You might think – and many people do think – that as Christianity developed, every Christian more or less went along with the “standard” or “orthodox” Christian beliefs that emerged. The term “orthodoxy” literally means “right beliefs” (or correct opinions); the word “heterodoxy” means “other opinions” (that is, other than the right ones!). A term often used alternatively for the latter is “heresy,” which literally means “choice,” used for people who “choose” to believe the wrong things. (!) As you might imagine, these are highly subjective terms A view is “right” (that is, orthodox) for you depending on what you personally believe. That’s because no one chooses to believe something they know is wrong. If they think it’s wrong, they change their view to what is right. But that means that everyone necessarily believes they are right, i.e. orthodox. Or as one wag put it, “orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is your doxy.” That also means that it’s impossible to say that one group within early Christianity was absolutely right about everything (i.e. “orthodox”) [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-01T08:28:46-05:00March 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Where Did the Trinity Come From? The (Briefer) Video Version

Now that I've established that the earliest Christians came to think Christ was God (in some sense or other) and continued to think God was God, and yet thought there was only one God -- I am able to move into the thinking and debates based on those views that eventually led to the doctrine of the trinity. This seems like a good time to share a video produced five years ago or so in which I talk about the issue at a speaking gig I did at the Coral Gables Congregational Church in (as one would expect!) Coral Gables, Florida. I did this gig soon after my book was published: "How Jesus Became God." The lecture was the third in a series I did at the church. This was back when I did lectures in front of human beings instead of in front of a computer screen. Ah, the good ole days. On future posts on the blog I'll be going into considerably more detail, but this can give you the major nuts and [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-01T08:10:32-05:00March 9th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Video Media|

The Doctrine of the Trinity: Where We Are So Far

I am in the middle of a very long thread dealing with the question of where the doctrine of the Trinity came from. I started the thread on January 7, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/is-the-trinity-in-the-bible/ , and so have been at it for nearly two months, on and off (with a other things thrown in en route, obviously). And I have gotten nowhere near, yet, to answering the question. So it goes in the world of complicated historical questions. (It is obviously a theological question, but I’m answering it historically rather than theologically). We are at a point where it would be a good time to explain where we are, why we have come this way, and where we are going. I need to begin by explaining why I have spent SO much time on the question of what it meant for early Christians to call Jesus God. It’s very simple really. Christians over time developed more and more exalted views of Jesus, from being a human messiah, to being a human sacrificed for the sins of others, [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-01T08:15:47-05:00March 7th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

In What SENSE is Jesus “God” in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? My Change of Mind

In yesterday’s post I pointed out that if one asks about an early Christian text: “Does it portray Jesus as God,” then almost always if the answer is Yes (which it usually is), it has to be qualified: “Yes, in *some sense*. “ And the question is always, in *what* sense? The reason I stress this point is that for many years – until I dug deep into research for my book How Jesus Became God – I was quite vehement, in person and in print, that the Synoptic Gospels did not portray Jesus as divine, but only the Gospel of John did. It’s true – I still think and, I suspect, always will think – that in the Gospel of John there is little doubt about the divinity of Jesus. As we have seen, the Gospel opens with the amazing poem: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-16T11:35:33-05:00February 28th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Public Forum|

What Did Ancient People Think It Meant To Call Someone God?

In the current threat I am building up to the question of where the Trinity came from. It was not the original Christian teaching. How then did it emerge as the "orthodox" view? I have started with the key issue, which is complicated enough on its own terms. How, why, and when did the followers begin to call Jesus God? That has been the posts up till now. The reason it matters for the thread is that calling Jesus God made Christians try to figure out how he could be God and God could be God yet there be only one God. The Spirit later got thrown into the mix as well, as we will see. But first I want to continue talking about the development of the view of Christ as God -- a very important development (THE most important development, one could argue) in early "Christology" (= the understanding of Christ). That is the entire topic of my fuller treatment in my book How Jesus Became God (on which also I made a Great [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-16T11:29:34-05:00February 27th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Is the “Word” (Logos) of God in John the Wisdom (Sophia) of God in Judaism?

In yesterday’s post I began to discuss the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which contains a poem that celebrates Christ as the Word of God that became human. This Word of God was with God in the beginning of all things, and was himself God; through him the universe was created and in him is life. This word took on flesh to dwell with humans, and that human – the divine word made flesh – was Jesus. Some readers over the years have wondered if this celebration of the Logos of God that becomes flesh owes more to Greek philosophy than to biblical Judaism. It’s a good question, and hard to answer. One thing that can be said is that this Logos idea does find very close parallels with other biblical texts – in particular with texts that speak of the Wisdom (Greek: Sophia) of God. Sophia and Logos are related ideas; both have to do in some respect with “reason.” Sophia is reason that is internal to a person; Logos is that reason [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-12T12:05:51-05:00February 21st, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Does Luke Present Different (Inconsistent!) Views of Christ?

In a recent post I tried to show that the author of Luke-Acts (same person; let's call him Luke) presented an "exaltation" Christology -- that is, that he thought Christ was not originally a divine being but had been exalted to divinity at some point of his existence; but unlike most of our other sources, he affirms *different* moments when this happened: at Jesus' birth, his baptism, and his resurrection. (See the post if this is not ringing a bell: https://ehrmanblog.org/the-oldest-view-of-christ-found-in-only-one-greek-manuscript-of-luke/ ). I ended the post by saying I would explain how Luke could have it all three ways. And as a reader pointed out to me, I never posted the post! So here it is. I dealt with this specific issue on the blog some years ago, and I may be older now, but I'm no wiser, at least as far as this question goes. Here's what I said then and would continue to say now: ******************************** Does Luke present a (strictly speaking) consistent view of Jesus throughout his two-volume work of Luke-Acts? I raise [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-12T12:02:07-05:00February 18th, 2021|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

But Maybe Paul Doesn’t Believe in the Incarnation….

There is a whole lot more that could be said about the Christ-poem in Philippians 2. You could literally write an entire book on just this passage. In fact, people *have* written books on just this passage. The most important one, a classic in the field, is by Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ (which in earlier editions was called Carmen Christi) (which is a Latin phrase that, unsurprisingly, means A Hymn of Christ :-) ). This passage has had more ink spilled over it by scholars over the last century than almost any other in the entire Bible (with the exception of John 1:1-18). In any event, to make sense of what I want to say here, it would help, if you haven’t done so, to read the other posts I’ve made on it. Here I just want to mention briefly an interpretation that is sometimes floated for the passage which takes it in a very different way indeed, as not being about incarnation at all. In this alternative interpretation, the passage is not [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-16T08:56:33-05:00February 16th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Was Christ actually God in the Flesh?

We now move from Paul's Christology that *combined* an incarnational view with an exaltation view, to a Christology that is incarnational through and through -- still in the New Testament, in the final Gospel to be written (possibly 30 years or so after Paul's death?) In it we find what is arguably the best known and most influential passage dealing with Christology in the New Testament: the Prologue of the Gospel of John, 1:1-18. It is also probably the most studied and discussed passage – even more than the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-11. The first eighteen verses of John are typically called the “Prologue” because they are clearly set apart from the rest of the Gospel as a kind of celebration of the main character of the book; these verses are written in a different writing style from the rest of the Gospel (lofty poetry), they contain key concepts not found in the rest of the Gospel (Christ as “the Word” made flesh), and yet they introduce well some of the most important views [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-03T16:54:17-04:00February 16th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

More Comments on Paul’s Rather Astounding Christ Poem

My last couple of posts have been on the "Christ Poem" found in Philippians 2:6-10. Many years ago when I talked about the poem and argued that it was in fact a poem, a reader (who apparently knew Greek!) objected that the poetic lines I suggested don't actually work. I answered that question before moving on to showing just how amazing the poem is: it ends by giving the resurrected Jesus the authority of God Almighty himself. That may not seem surprising to Christians who already think it's true. But just imagine how it would resonate with someone living in the first century who knew that Jesus was publicly executed for crimes against the state. It might help if you imagine how you would feel if someone made a claim like this for someone who was condemned as an enemy of the of the state for insurrection against the United States who suffered the death penalty -- and someone claimed he had become God, the Lord of the universe. Uh, really? Yup, that's what Paul's [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-04T19:10:58-05:00February 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

One of the Most Important Passages of the NT: Paul’s Christ Poem

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BDEhrman2021-02-04T19:11:14-05:00February 9th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

An Alternative Christology: God Became Human

In my posts on Christology so far I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status. In this view he was not God from eternity past or a pre-existent being. He was a human being who was taken up to the level of divinity at some point (or, in the case of the Virgin Birth, that he came into existence at a point in time as a person who was partially human partially divine). But there was another kind of Christology which was also very early – earlier, in fact, than our earliest surviving Christian writer, Paul. This is the view [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-04T19:11:56-05:00February 7th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!
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The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

The oldest view of Christ is found in one Greek Manuscript of Luke. I’d like to address the issue of early Christology from a slightly different angle in this post. So far I have talked about how an “exaltation” Christology, in which Jesus, the man, is made the Son of God. At some point of his existence he can be found in various parts of the New Testament (Rom 1:3-4; speeches in Acts), and how different early Christians located that exaltation to different moments in Jesus’ existence (resurrection, baptism, birth, pre-existence). As it turns out, this view of Christology relates to an important textual variant in the Gospel of Luke. Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke So, by way of background for anyone new to this kind of discussion. We don’t have the original copy of Luke’s Gospel (or of any other NT book or, actually, of any book at all from the ancient world!). What we have are copies made from copies made from copies that were made from copies. We have thousands of copies [...]

BDEhrman2022-05-11T19:55:15-04:00February 4th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

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