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Loading...In my previous posts I have been insisting that if one wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, one has to ask “in what *sense*” is he God? Now is a good time for me to lay out how I understand ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today – at least the people I run across – imagine the divine realm.
As I pointed out earlier, people today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite and eternal; we are finite and temporal. There is an unbridgeable gap between us and God. (Although in Christian theology, it is Jesus who bridges that gap by being a divine being who becomes human; in traditional theology, he did that so that we humans could then become divine)
People in the ancient world did not think of the divine realm in that way. True, the major Gods were enormously powerful and knowing and were immortal (you couldn’t kill them, and they couldn’t kill each other! And they never died). But there were lots of different gods with lots of different power and knowledge. And many of the gods (nearly all of them) came into being at some point in the past. They haven’t always existed. Like us, they get born. And like us, gods have strengths and weaknesses, and rarely were gods imagined as all-knowing, and almost never as all-powerful.
But there were gods and there were gods. I try to illustrate the divine realm to my students by speaking in terms of a divine pyramid.
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According to the TV shows, “Xena the Warrior Princess” and “Hercules the Legendary Journeys”, the Greek gods could be killed by a number of special weapons. I guess this is a modern myth built on an ancient myth 🙂
Surely the Johannine gospel was written in the socio-historical context of one group of Christian Jews in conflict with non-Christian Jews? That is, the background theology is thoroughly Jewish. Yet it has the highest christology.
Paul was a devout Jew, yet he has a high-ish christology.
Xena!! Why didn’t I think of that!
Yes indeed — I hope to get to the socio-historical explanation of the Johannine community’s views eventually. For now I’ll devote some posts to how Jews too could imagine divine humans…..
Reading the Divine Pyramid post, your ex made my day — good humor.
When Colossians refer to Jesus as “firstborn of all creation”, was the author thinking of Jesus as a created being who chronologically was made first before other created beings, or was he thinking of Jesus as the heir of all creation?
Did the Arians have a New Testament canon similar to the one by the Nicene faction – if so, did the Arians try to justify their christological position by citing the NT? Do you think Arianism can be exegetically justified from the NT?
It’s really hard to know what hte author of Colossians had in mind, other than that he seems to be thinking of Christ as Wisdom (a la Prov. 8). And yes, Arians had exactly the same canon and used it extensively for their views. My sense is that their views are as biblical as the Athanasian alternative, if not more so. Nowhere does the NT indicate, e.g., that Christ is “of the same substance as the Father,” or that there never was a time before which he was not. (!)
How did the Arians get round the Johannine prologue which identifies the pre-incarnate Jesus with God?
The Arians did think Jesus was God! He was God the Son who was created by God the Father in the remote distant eternity past, and he was the one who created the universe.
I was thinking the modern-day apocalyptic sect, WatchTower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses), is a modern version of Arianism. But from your response, namely the Arians did think Jesus was God, there is a distinction. Both groups affirm Jesus created the world (presumably both time and space), Jesus deserves worship, Jesus was pre-existent, Jesus was created by God. But WatchTower Society emphatically deny Jesus is God, while the Arians affirm he is God. I think too often Christian groups presume they know what is meant by the predicate “is God”. Despite his evangelical convictions, in “Jesus and Victory of God” (1996) NT Wright was careful not to allow his theology, especially one conditioned by the patristic creeds, to colour his historical exegesis, at least so far as the God-question is concerned.
Christianity is simply a pseudo-monotheistic religion. In reality they’ve got three gods: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. The new religion wanted to be seen as the ‘legal heir’ of Judaism (and therefore have some immediate legitimacy and thus be exempt, like the Jews, from worshipping the Pagan gods), that’s why they then needed to create the illogical, incoherent and impossible concept of ‘the Trinity’ in order to uphold this illusion of being monotheistic.
Will you be arguing for a gentile takeover in the interpretation of Jesus’ story, or a theological hybrid of both gentile and Jewish ideas?
Your ex-spouse quote is a good one. For better or worst, they know us the best. They know where the bodies are buried!
My view is that both Jews and Gentiles who followed Jesus came to see him as God, and both had precedents for how it could work in their various traditions.
This helps explain why, in the Old Testament, God is often portrayed as having human qualities, like jealousy.
“Some of you (I can hear you thinking as I type) are wondering if any of this has any relevance to Judaism. The answer is yes, in some ways, and I’ll deal with that question eventually.”
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. PLEASE relate this to Judaism soon. In the meantime, are there any books you can recommend that would discuss this?
Starting with today’s post!
I’ve long assumed humans’ belief in gods grew out of their perceived need to find *causes* for everything. Is that right? Early on, they grasped the concept of cause and effect. So many things *were* clearly caused, deliberately or otherwise, by the actions of humans or animals! So they thought things for which they couldn’t see a cause (e.g., thunderstorms) must have been caused by invisible entities. If they had *dreams* comparable to ours, that may have increased their willingness to believe in beings who were sometimes visible and sometimes not.
Where Judaism made what some perceive as a leap forward was in having its deity demand good moral behavior from humans. But the problem with that type of religion is that a society can set up ridiculous rules for “good behavior” – with no allowance for changing times and situations – and keep insistng that God demands they be enforced.
There are lots and lots of theories about where “religion” originally came from — but the one you state is certainly one of them!
I think Devers has some excellent research on this topic including the formalization of “religions” from what used to be folk beliefs. The gradual phase-out of the female deities – despite their wide-spread popularity & belief among vast majority of the local populations in the region of Canaan. Traces of these folk religions are still evident in the Hebrew Bible as the various writers and “fathers” of Judaism refined the rules & regs along with the consequences of non-belief.
Not sure where the “good moral behavior” shows up in the Hebrew Bible; more people die in the OT than died in both World Wars! How about the wonton slaughter of every man, woman, child, and breathing creature in, let’s say, oh, every single town in the region? Really? Not even the cows or goats were spared? Yeah. Moral. Right.
Thanks…please keep this going. It is helping me get a clearer picture of this issue of the nature of god and/or the gods.
The nature of “god” & the gods is the nature of man. We imbue god with whatever powers abilities or beliefs we want them to have. God didn’t make man in his own image, man created god in his own image.
This explains how second-century gentiles interpreted the NT portray of Jesus. But I guess that main point is to understand what NT portray of Jesus meant to be in I century.
Did hellenistic thought radically changed the ancient christology(es), the NT meaning of Jesus, or they just re-read them using different, new concepts?
I’ll be arguing that Jewish concepts could lead to the idea of Jesus as divine as well!
I’m new to the blog and find all of this extremely fascinating and educational. The “divine pyramid” concept introduced in this post reminds me of Michael Heiser’s research on what he calls the “divine council” (http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/). Is this relevant to what you are discussing here or is it a different concept altogether?
I”m not sure — I’ll have to take a look!
Are there any biblical verses that favour Nicene doctrine of the Trinity against Arianism?
According to the Niceans, they all do. 🙂 And according to the Arians, none of them do. The reality is that the biblical authors were not thinking in the same categories or ways as the fourth century theologians engaged in these struggles.
Dr. Bart Ehrman:
Below that level of the pyramid were humans,
Steefen:
Are you talking about deceased humans?
In ancient Roman religion, the Manes are “those who dwell below” deities, souls of deceased loved ones, pertaining to a domestic, local, and/or personal cult. The Manes were honored during the Parentalia and Feralia in February.
In the second edition of my book, I discuss the sacrifice of Jesus is taken from the sacrifice of Decius Mus, an ancient Roman general. Josephus corrupts his name to Decius Mundus, a sacrifice for the world, to provide context for his Testimonium Flavianum: on the third day, the sacrificed savior for the world says tells a believer, I’m not the God who loves you, I’m the man who wanted to make love with you, (even though you’re married).
No, I’m referring to humans. The diagram is meant to be simple — there are more complexities!
Reminds me of “The Praise of Folly”. How even the Divine infallible beings conceived by man were yoked by the nature of Folly.
BY FAR ONE OF YOUR BEST !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can read this once a day lol
Would you say that the Daimonia were basically angels? Some good and some evil?
Daimonia were divine beings lower and less powerful than the gods who were more intimately involved with people’s lives, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil.
The concept of the Trinity is baffling in its complexity and so many Christians say it is the great mystery. When I first read Karl Adam’s book, “The Christ of Faith: the Christology of the Church”. you encounter the convoluted lengths necessary to make it a seemingly coherent doctrine and still it makes no sense as monotheism and it remains paradoxical as well as the “real” nature of Jesus. This puzzling question seems to defy rational explanation in its own terms so we do our best to make it sensible. I applaud all efforts to come to terms with this mind bending doctrine and see why there are so many diverse explanations. We can only try and perhaps it leads us to a mathematical proposition that proves that there can be no proof. Forgive me if I clouded the issue more but it has always absorbed my bewildered thoughts for such a long period of my life as I searched for certainty.. I am glad that there is an attempt to define all the terms and place them in a historical context. This is the best way to give the whole question some rational meaning – other than a solution based on faith alone. Thanks to this blog and all its participants and its originator and his scholarship in bringing much light to this topic.
Question Bart.
Mark 15:35 so if some believe that John The Baptist was Elijah ? ” SO WHY WAS JESUS CALLING FOR JOHN ” then held wine up to him on a stick, without being educated on traditions back then not even going to ask what was the need for that.
just bloggin is all
He’s actually calling on God (Eloi), and the bystanders misunderstood him to be saying “Elijah”
Yes King James Version bart!
I know this
And I know it might have been vinegar as we’ll and Reed.
Thanks for posting this one, although I sent another with corrections made 🙂
All my post are
Freedom. Of speech
Freedom of religion
And god given right.
And the bible is more then just a feeling of comfort. Thank you for posting my post