The Divine Realm in Antiquity
Here's a draft of another key bit from my chapter 1 of How Jesus Became God ************************************************************************************************************************ From these various examples, we can see a variety of ways that divine beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be though to be divine in the ancient world. I scarcely need to stress again that this way of looking at things stands considerably at odds with how most people understand the relationship of the human and the divine in our world, at least people who stand in the western religious tradition (Jews, Christians, Muslims). As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an immense and unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing. Humans are another thing. And never the twain shall meet. Well, almost never: in the Christian tradition they did meet once, in the person of Jesus. And our question is how that was thought to have happened. At the root of that thought, as I will be arguing, [...]