(16 votes, average: 4.94 out of 5)
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.
This can get interesting: among other things, it shows how humans could sometimes also be divine in ancient thought. Wanna see? Join the blog: you get at least five posts each and every week, with archives back to 2012!
thank you Bart; this is really informative.
But might I propose that your metaphors of divine entities as a ‘pyramid’ or ‘spectrum’ may be misleading in one particular respect; as they can be taken to imply a graded continuity of divinity?
Whereas, if we take Paul at 1 Corinthians 8: 5-6
” .. in fact there are many gods and many lords; yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”
So, for Paul, there is no difficulty in recognising that many and varied divine ‘gods’ and ‘lords’ figure within God’s creation. And too that the one ‘Lord’ Jesus Christ (the Son) is distinct from the one ‘God’, the Father.
But nevertheless, for Paul, the one Jesus Christ is emphatically not one of the varied “many gods and many lords”. Rather, I propose, Paul finds a ready-made logical space for Jesus Christ within the Jewish tradition of the distinct ‘Wisdom of God”; as in 1 Corinthians 1:24 ” Christ is the power of God and the Wisdom of God”.
Do you agree?
Yes, I wouldn’t push the pyramid too hard or on simply everyone. Some, e.g., saw two at the top. And one problem is that it assumes there are more divine men than daimonia: not true. But I would say that Paul does have an graded view of superhuman beings: he certainly held to angels and archangels, I should think, e.g., and Christ above all of them, but Christ lower than God the father.
Indeed Bart, Paul always sees Christ as subject to the Father;
but Paul also implies that in the new Creation, where there is now One God the Father, and One Lord Jesus Christ, then all other divinities, the ‘many Gods and many Lords’ including angels and archangels, are demoted. As for example; that all former pagan gods, Paul believes, have now become daimonia. 1 Corinthians 10:20;
“I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. ”
Where I am still unclear is who else might be at the ‘top table’ of divinity in Paul’s typology. The Wisdom of God seems to be there, but not, it seems, the Law of God – as Paul apparently ties the dissemination of the Law to lesser, angelic, mediators whose function has now passed. Galatians 3:19;
“Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained through angels by a mediator.”
Bart, in this quote from I Corinthians 10:20:
“I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. ”
The Greek word is daimonion. It is regularly translated as demons and consequently there has always been a negative aspect applied to this word in this passage, as if Paul is saying that those Pagans are sacrificing to evil and I don’t want you to be partners with this evil. But, this is wrong. There is no good or evil implied – is that correct? And Paul is referring to daimonion as you describe above. I think that is an important point. But I want to make sure I am understanding correctly. Thanks…
A daimon in Greek was not necessarily wicked, no. It was a very inferior kind of divine being. IN early Christian sources it is almost always a negative term. It is hard ot know if Paul is referring to the evil part or the inferiority part or both.
Where demons of the christian tradition come from? From the greek tradition or from the jewish tradition? if it is the latter where did it come from? From the greek influence?
They are mainly from the Greek tradition.
In my mind,,,,,,,,,,,from the Greek and Persians (which was a great power in 500 BC) traditions. Zoroastrian Persians at the time occupied the middle east and long into southern Europe, and was also thos liberated the Jews from Babylon, and the Zoroastrian king was even called by the Jews “the anointed one”. This system was both very spiritual and dualistic, with the opposite power or more as “vectors” in reality it was evil / or it opposite principle to the ideal state of Asha (perfect state), called Ahriman and his “helpers”. This system could have been very influential for both the Jewish and Hellenistic systems and had this complete dualistic system and principles. In a personifized form, demons and evil spirit was derived from.
Is this related to the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being?
Great question: I’m not sure what it’s most immediate antecedents were.
Beautiful post. I could talk about this a day. Especially intoxicated lol. But unfortunately, I have a career and things need to be accomplished in my life. This is very informative, thank you. Looking forward to you platinum member internet group meeting! I really wanted to do the trip with you a while back. That would have been awesome!
Do you think that if Christianity had remained a Jewish sect that the understanding of Jesus as a divine man would be different from how that things actually turned out?
Absolutely. There’s no way, in my view, that he would have become seen as an eternal being completely equal with God.
You close this essay noting that the gentiles “outnumbered” the Jews who converted to Christianity by the 2nd century. Well before Constantine’s conversion in the early 4rth century, isn’t it also fair to say that the gentiles quickly “outranked” the Jews in terms of early church leadership? Is there strong evidence that most early church leaders were not Jewish? (for example, they record/tell us they are gentiles). Of course I’m talking about those who came after the disciples and Paul’s passing, beginning late 1rst century.
The earliest leaders in Jerusalem, of course, were Jews. The earliest leaders everywhere else by, say, the 50s and probably earlier, were almost certainly gentile. We know most about Paul’s churches, and none of them would have had Jewish leaders; or in the other churches we know something about (Rome, etc.)
Doesn’t Christianity have the same levels with different names? I am thinking about Archangels, saints and others in that vein. (Don’t we have patron saints (1,776 of them) in the sense of being in charge of various facets of life and certain places and goods. St Christopher for travellers; St Patrick for drinkers of beer 😉 Check: https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php for the full list!
Yup, it does. Many Xns won’t call these other beings “divine” or “divinities” — but by the standards of other religions that’s exactly what they are: superhuman immortals.
In Late Antiquity, the Quran is the only text that sees God as Unique, who does not beget and is not begotten. God is never called father of angels or men. Angels created from light (nur) and jinn created from fire (nar), Jews and Christians who are children of Adam created from black mud, are denied even the status of semi-divine or adopted sons (against bene elohim in Genesis and Job, and against first adopted then deified believers in Paul, Peter, John, etc.). Stars are not angels, but simply useful for orientation during travel at sea and in the desert. The devil has no power over death or the physical world (such as storms or human possession), only power to whisper and influence humans for a limited time. All will die at the end, the angel of death being the last to die. Only the Face of God will remain, who will create a new creation.
Unfortunately, centuries later Muslim mystics influenced by Judeo-Christian theologies and Persian-Hindu culture promoted veneration of saints, prophets and angels, however, taking heat for probably compromising the Quranic exclusive Monotheism.
It’s also possible that belief in intermediate beings in the Other World who were intermediaries with the higher realms predated the Quran and continued to thrive, but not spoken about, in religion as practiced by the people (folk religion).
Michael, I’m thinking saints are not gods. they are better than average kinds of folks whom the RC church has decided are great people and are now in heaven (for sure) and you can pray to them there for help. I think the RC’s got rid of Christopher due to lack of historical evidence. I think it’s tradition that gives the aspect that you should pray to certain saints for certain things. There are actually many patron saints of beer https://vinepair.com/articles/patron-saint-of-beer/
There is no reason you can’t pray to your own Aunt Sophie whom you believe to be in heaven for help; and the idea of “god” is not pertinent there either, to my mind.
This is very helpful. Thank you. How about the phrase “son of God”? It is used rather broadly and generously in the Hebrew Bible, but refers to only one human in the New Testament. Sometimes, it seems, the “sons of God” in the HB are divine in some sense (e.g., Job 1:6 and 2:1). But most of the time they’re not. If I understand you correctly, for Mark, say, Jesus becomes a god in some sense when God says, “You are my son” (1:11). That’s quite a transition: from many sons of God, most of whom are not divine (in any sense of the word) to one and only one divine (in some sense) son of God.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by saying someone is or is not divine. But I believe Paul indicates that all believers are sons of God as well. See, e.g. Rom 8:14; Gal. 3:46.
Small Marcion’s Pyramid – Unknown God ( called father of Jesus), Jesus (called Lord), YHWH (called Demiurge). In LXX The Son of Most High is YHWH, in Mark 5:7 and Luke 1:32 is Jesus. Maybe Margaret is wrong – Jesus is not YHWH.
LXX was biography o YHWH for Marcion and story of his relation with small nation(J.Lieu).
Unknown God is hidden according to Luke 10:22, but present in LXX in Mark and Luke.
Unknown God= El Elyon= Father of YHWH=Father of Jesus.
Too simple to be true..
Under Greco-Roman religious thought, do the gods have ultimate goals, such as achieving enlightenment (as in buddhism) or union with the ultimate Brahman (as in Hinduism)? They have everyday roles of looking after cities, nations, the weather, the underworld, and other domains of human life and the cosmos. But what is the point of it all? Do the gods search for ultimate meaning in their life?
Were there Greco-Roman religious sects that had a belief in something akin to a theistic eternal creator God?
Did the Ebionites believe in the divinity of Jesus in some sense? Could their christology be much closer to the apostles’ than the proto-orthodox groups?
No, they don’t have goals. They don’t need to search for meaning. They have their own existence and are not like humans.
Then the Church turned all these gods and others into saints, angels and demons. Many churches are filled with such icons and many still pray to them. That reinforces a hereafter where they reside?
Good question. I don’t know.
Dear Bart Ehrman, I am Indian, living in tamilnadu, southern part of India. I would like to support your view by mentioning today belief in villages in state of tamilnadu, Southern part of India.
In tamilnadu,south part of India, Every family has a unique god (குல தெய்வம்) and every village has a unique god called the guardian deity (ஊர்க்காவல் தெய்வம்). There are boundaries between these gods. They are not allowed to next village by the gods next to a village they are guarding. Between these, there are categories called strong gods and weak gods. This is the traditional belief of the people living in tamilnadu, southern part of India. These are not the beliefs that existed in ancient India. The beliefs that exist in India now.
When to use the big ‘G’ or the little ‘g’. The nuns who taught me had rules to follow, but now I’ve come to realize they had an agenda.
What I have come to understand over a few minutes of reading is; if a man believes in promises from a divine being for over 25 years and has a promised son and that son is lead to believe in those promises and of his two sons one somewhat believes. And this grandson has, through a calamity of events, 12 sons. And of those 12 only 1, the second from the last, gets it. (What the promises were all about.)
Side note.
When I was a kid in Oregon (where it always rains), we called it California miss. God aimed for California and missed.) The nuns loved that one.
So the Divine being aimed for the promised land and hit Goshen. Which is where great grandfather went in the first place. And that is how a divine being gets a big ‘G’.
As for the events that made the Exodus, all I can say for now is **it happens.
Taking into account that Paul, who at one time gloried in his Jewish heritage, applied to his KYPIOΣ “Lord,” Jesus Christ, sacred scripture originally reserved for Yahweh.
So Marcion’s theology is based on Mark or Luke and Paul’s Letters. In the result a small piramid was created. Maybe not too Simple.
Verily I tell you Jesus was falsely accused by the Jews and crucified by the Romans because the author was Greek with specific sense of humor. Just kidding.
Anyway That was clever hostile takeover of LXX. Much clever then Mathew’s prophecies.
Kurios can simply mean: master of a slave, “sir,” “boss,” etc.
It seems to me from your thread on this subject that *all* the Gospel and Epistle writers were very ambiguous in their descriptions of just who Jesus was, that none of them really had a complete theology “invented” yet. Possibly they were still working it out in their minds as they wrote! As in comparing Paul’s quote above from tom.hennel (1 Corinthians 8: 5-6) and in the opening prologue of Romans 1:4 “and and who through the the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.”
Another thought came to mind the other day. Why is Jesus saying in Mark and Matthew that we must carry our cross and follow him. We all know, in this day and age, what he means by that. “Carrying our cross” is a common Christian saying for obvious reasons, but was that a common concept back then? A common “terminology” among Jesus’ contemporaries?
No, it was almost certainly a Christian invention, based on the idea that Christ’s crucifixion was horribly painful yet ultimately inconceivably good. Christians need to replicate that example, and hence the saying. Suffer for others!
So, basically, since Jesus hadn’t told anyone, including his disciples, that he was going to die on the *cross*, it was most obviously another case of the Gospel authors speechifying in Jesus’ name. Mark, being the first Gospel written, used the euphemism and then of course, Matthew and Luke copied it into theirs.
I would guess that 60-70% of the world’s population in late antiquity was Asian living in areas that were a religious systems like.
* Hinduism with different views, but that our world was created by a divine mind / consciousness. This system is very spiritual from its origins and speaks of falling and rising consciousness
* Buddhism that came around 500 BC. in VERY populated areas where creation is eternal and the origin and purpose are purely spiritual.
* Zoroatrianism where the primary deity, Ahura Mazda, which in its essence is indefinable where our world was emined from, and also the different kingdoms both divine kingdoms (angles and archangles) and the physical kingdom. Here, too, it is created by a consciousness, and in their (temporal) dualistic system where life ends in the “a house of lies” (lower state of consciousness) or in a “house of light (a higher state of consciousness,) until evil is destroyed. and everything goes into the “house of light”.
In my view, most people in the world (considered the civilized world) were influenced by religions (Hinduism (s) , Buddhism, Zoroastrianism that some today call “esoteric systems”. Their origin, and their highest deyity is undescribable and all existence came out of this essence.
“The Socrates depicted in Plato’s dialogues spoke of a daimonion signal that came to him. That word daimonion is an adjective meaning “daimôn-ish” — divine, or maybe what the English of earlier centuries called “weird.”
What do you think of this Bart?
For Socrates, as for many Greeks, the daimon was a lower level divinity; in his case, it was attached to him kind of like people today might think of a guardian angel.
If the very apex of the pyramid is so alien as to be incomprehensible, you are dealing with an entity that would be rather hard to love or relate to in any way. Too strange, too terrible. So it would be more comforting to have a lower order divinity as intermediary. In Catholicism the saints and the virgin Mary are not to be worshipped, but they can be prayed to and they are seen as intermediate beings who can be beneficial. Actually, I like the idea of ancestor worship– they’ve gone on to a higher realm, partake of divinity in some sense, and yet, they know us. They are family. I suppose Jesus could have served as an intermediate being, until the exaltations got out of hand and the situation just got crazy– the trinity, for instance. Exaltation gone bananas. Of course, some people like bananas…
RICHWEN90- FWIW, ancestor worship is defined in dictionary.com as “(in certain societies) the veneration of ancestors whose spirits are frequently held to possess the power to influence the affairs of the living.” So they sound a bit like the saints.. why pray to them (the saints) if they have no power to influence? And one can easily do a thought experiment in which Aunt Martha is just as good as many saints that went through the Church process, so she is probably in heaven, so why not pray to her?
If you haven’t read about it, the Chinese Rites Controversy involved the Jesuits saying ancestor worship is OK for Catholics in China because it’s secular, and the Dominicans thinking “not so fast, Jebbies! sounds like religion to us..”. All kinds of interesting history about the interweaving of traditional Chinese and Christian practices, plus of course politics and inter-order feuding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy
Fascinating info on the Chinese Rites Controversy! My first wife was Chinese and tried to explain ancestor worship to me. It seemed reasonable enough. It was more like “reverence” than “worship”, actually, from what I could understand. But they were presences in some higher realm and could be helpful and ought to be honored. For that matter, apply that principle to a departed friend or spouse or child or sibling… the heavenly realm then is not so strange, and our loved ones are not so far removed from us. Comforting, if nothing else.
So…the divine realm is a pyramid scheme!
Oh man– another giant ponzi! The fifo’s and Bernie Madoff with our spiritual loot (stature) from the git-go.
Bart, I recently heard a friend talk about early (pre-Nicaea) Christianity and that that God was a very open God…in other words, He could take all your criticism and welcomed it. You could actually question Him without fear of damnation. This related to the meaning of “sin”, as my friend put it, “something lacking”. My friend spoke of prostitutes and the then widely practiced trade of human trafficking. So people in those situations could look to a religion that would help them by providing hope for a future time. Bart, I cannot find much online to back this up…what do you think and is there anywhere you might direct me to find more on this topic? Is it related to Pelagius/Pelagianism? And thank you!
I”m not sure where your friend is getting this from. (E.g., not Paul or the book of Revelation!). Pelagius, of course, was long after Nicea.