Here are two more “boxes” that will now appear in the sixth edition of my New Testament textbook.   If you’ve read my recent book, How Jesus Became God, you’ll see that both of these boxes are based on views that I develop at length there.   One of the tricks in writing a textbook is figuring out how to say something in a way that is succinct and interesting, when there is not much space to cover a topic fully  (so, my first box here covers in 326 words what I take an entire chapter to develop in my book!)   The problem is that sometimes the coverage is so succinct that it is no longer accurate and / or interesting.  It’s always a balancing act.

In any event, here are the two boxes.

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 Box 19.2  What Do You Think?

Humans Exalted to Heaven at the End of Their Lives

 What do you imagine the early Christians would think had happened to Jesus once they came to believe that he had not only been raised from the dead but had been exalted to heaven into the presence of God?  It might help to reflect on what ancient people generally seemed to have thought about mortals taken up to the divine realm at the end of their lives.

In the pagan tradition, the answer was clear: such a person was…

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