Gods Who (Apparently) Become Human

I’m happy to say that I began writing my book How Jesus Became God today.  Here is a chunk from the first chapter. ************************************************************************************* Christianity arose in the Roman Empire immediately after the death of Jesus around the year 30 CE.  This empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture – so much so that the common language of the empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written – was Greek.  And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their own historical and cultural context, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds.  In the next chapter I will show that even though Jews had many distinctive views of their own, in many key respects of immediate concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors.  This is important to know because Jesus himself was a Jew, as were his immediate followers – including the ones who first proclaimed that he was [...]