How Jesus Became God: The *Original* Idea

Well, I should have been a bit clearer. Actually, I didn’t mean quite as early as the Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee, who were simply proclaiming their experience with Jesus before those coming along later sought to explain it in letters and gospels. And my casual use of the word “suppressed” is far less nuanced than what Freeman actually meant.

Instead of those first peasants, I was thinking mostly of those later “proto-orthodox” church fathers who formulated the doctrines, dogmas, and creeds that got cemented in the fourth and fifth centuries — and which we then inherited largely unchanged since then. In this regard, Freeman’s narrative about the initial abandonment of [Greek] evidence-based reason is focused mainly on those centuries book-ended by Paul and Augustine, with a later chapter on reason’s rediscovery in the Christian world by Thomas Aquinas, many centuries later.

In developing his thesis, Freeman cites one of Paul’s genuine 7 letters (can’t remember which one, offhand) that dismissed as foolishness the wisdom of those [Greek] philosophers who placed such a high premium on premise, evidence, and reason as we understand them today. Basically, one is left with something of a Pauline “faith trumps reason” idea — which I consider somewhat akin to Luther’s famous pronouncement that “reason is the enemy of faith” (as stated in reference to the Copernican cosmology, I think).

This “faith-trumps-reason” stance seems to have pervaded — and limited — Christian understanding across the centuries, an unfortunate detour that Freeman claims began with Paul. In contrast, a “both-and” approach to faith and reason — in which biblical faith equates to divine trust (as in the original Greek) rather than to strict adherence to doctrinal belief (i.e., what it came to mean later) — would probably resonate more with thinking people of today who value both the spiritual (right-brained) and rational (left-brained) ways of knowing, respectively, in their pursuit of what’s ultimately true.

Anyway, having read the historical accounts of both Rubenstein and Freeman, I would say (but strictly as a non-scholar in this field) that the former account makes a strong case for explaining *when* Jesus became God — although there’s some of the *how* in there — whereas the latter considers more of the *how*, but essentially by exploring just one potential facet of the question largely to the exclusion of any others. So, it’s precisely these other perspectives and fuller details regarding the broad question of how Jesus became God that I eagerly look forward to reading about in your forthcoming book.