How Jesus Became God - A Review

I’ve just finished reading Bart D. Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.

This is my fourth Ehrman book.  He’s a New Testament scholar and professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  I heard him speak some time ago here in Berkeley and was quite taken with his ability to express complex ideas in plain language.  Since then I have read the views of this one-time Sunday School teacher and preacher who chucked his fundamentalist understanding of the Christian Scriptures and went on to become a serious historian.  I like, by the way, how he managed to do the smart thing of building on what he knew when changing careers. 

The only problem with publishing so much (some twenty-five books and counting) is that he tends to repeat himself.  That’s fine, I suppose, and I’m willing to grant that as he continues to read and research and to think, he may be not so much repeating himself as casting what he has said before in a broader, or at least different, context.

The previous books of his I’ve delved into include Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why; Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them); and Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine.  The subtitles would seem to have been generated by the publisher (they are in the third person) and not the author, with an eye to selling to a broad audience.

That’s a bit dishonest.  While it’s true he has a wonderful way with words and writes about things this fundamentalism-infatuated country really ought to know, he also can be deadly dry and serious.  Such was the case in the latter half of How Jesus Became God, where, after tracing the notion of divinity among the early followers of Christ, he fills out the picture with the battles over what would come to be established doctrine.  So you learn how various power groups battled over whether Christ would be fully human, fully divine, first one then the other, or both at the same time.  What makes this of great interest to Christians and others living in a christianesque or post-christian cultural world is learning that virtually every possibility has been held at one time or another, and Christ’s divinity came about only long after the flesh and blood man of Galilee had been dead for some time, almost as if to suggest that if you knew the guy, knew his acne and bad breath, you would be far less likely to see him as a God.  These concepts are important enough to have names: incarnational Christology - the belief that Jesus started as God and took on human form; and exaltation Christology - the belief that Jesus was exalted as a human being in whom God was "well pleased" - so pleased, in fact, that in the end he became divine.

The first serious thinking I did while reading the book came with the notion of the development of the concept of divinity in the first place, and the fact that we live in a cultural space today when things are pretty much in black and white.  There is the Divine Being, and there are us human beings.   We are mortal, fallible and weak; He (capital H, male pronoun) is omnipotent, omniscient and Perfection personified.  But that’s not the only way of looking at the concept of divinity.  In fact, even today, the Roman Catholic church sees divinity as a spectrum of holiness.  We like to put Satan at one extreme and Almighty God at the other.   We put man at the center and make him a pawn in a game between Perfect Good on the one hand and Perfect Evil on the other, notions we personify and give the names of God and the Devil.

But it turns out that we have created in our imagination a number of gradations in between.  What exactly do we think saints are?  After they die, I mean, not while they perform magical or even simply lofty acts while alive.  How do we explain the “beatification” process?   Where do the angels fit in?  What’s the difference between a saint and an angel?  What are demons?  What do we do with all these creatures?  And what, exactly, does the expression Son of Man mean?   I always thought it referred to the fact that Jesus was born to humans.  That’s not exactly true.  Ehrman’s explanation is not totally satisfactory (it’s actually a precursor in the Book of Daniel of a messiah figure), but he makes you wonder how many more of your assumptions you might ought to question.   And what, exactly, is a hypostasis?   Is it something too obscure for most of us, a piece of theologian-jargon?  Or is there something to the idea that the “Wisdom” of God is different from other kinds of wisdom and from other abstract concepts?  And does that fact demonstrate that we can consider even words as having a divine nature?   Logos, for example.  I know this may not read easily here in summary form, but if you bury yourself in Ehrman’s history, I suspect you’ll find yourself as intrigued as I became.

As a historian, Ehrman places Jesus in a world where even the Emperor was considered a divinity.  The larger Greek and Roman worlds were filled with multiple gods, each with distinctive features and roles to play in messing with the fate of man.  It did not take a great leap of faith for folk to wonder, once word got out that Jesus had appeared to a number of people in the flesh, had been seen eating and drinking (and was thus still human and not merely a specter), just how “divine” this Jesus of theirs actually was.

But that then begs the question, if he was divine, did he become divine at birth?  At his baptism?  At his resurrection?  It would take centuries for the followers of this man they believed to be the messiah to work out.  And it’s interesting to note that it had to be worked out post-scripturally, by church authorities, since the Bible doesn’t give the answer to that question.  In fact, the Bible reveals only that the questions started coming early on, and were not answered by the time the books of what we call the Bible were codified.

This would not seem to bother Catholics all that much.  They have a tradition of the “magisterium” – the teachings of the church stemming from the seventy or so “church fathers” from the second century on – men like Augustine and Origen (who was eventually bounced out) and Jerome and Athanasius and John Chrystostom.  But for Protestants, for whom scripture alone (sola scriptura) is the authority on Ultimate Truth, it can be more than a little disconcerting to discover what the Bible presents is not so much “answers,” as fundamentalists like to believe, as differing points of view, which, of course, is the source of debates about what actually happened in Jesus’s lifetime and what it means and the entire field of theology in the first place.

Many will want to buy the book to find these contradictions that abound in the bible, to find proof that the literal fundamentalists don’t really know the Bible they would shove down our throats.  But Ehrman is not very helpful here.  He makes it clear that he has no intention of addressing the question of whether the resurrection actually took place.  That’s a question of belief.  As a historian, he can only observe that people believed it took place and trace the consequences of that belief.    Life goes on, believers on one side, empiricists on the other.

I had a friend who used to steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms, take them home and cut them up.  He covered the walls of his garage with butcher paper and he would paste biblical stories alongside analogous stories in the Koran, as a way to understand the Koran.  His saw the Koran as essentially a desire to “correct” biblical errors, and was interested in finding out which parts of the bible they selected to correct.  I was reminded of him when reading Ehrman’s suggestion that we read the Gospels “horizontally” – side by side - and not in isolation – to see what they cover and don’t cover, where they overlap and what one leaves out that you have to get from another.

These questions then lead naturally to the next question.  What about the contradictions contained in the Gospels that were left out?  What are we to do with the information contained in them?   A believer has a ready answer:  God decided which books he wanted us to read.   There is no evidence of that, of course, and a historian looking for answers only finds more questions.

We laugh at the idea of medieval scholars debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but overlook the fact we’re still debating other questions that may to folks in the future appear to be equally silly.  Why do we ask the questions we do?  Where do they come from?  What are we not asking?

To read a book such as this is to find yourself opening yourself up to an explosion of questions, and in the end, it may be this experience of mind-expansion that matters more than the particulars of any scholarly investigation.  The details of how Jesus became divine are interesting in themselves, but so is the discovery of how many long-held assumptions you have that could use some questioning.  If Ehrman were writing less of a popularizing book, he might have located his writing in the work of other biblical scholars.  He does make passing reference to one theologian, Raymond Brown, but this book was clearly written, in large part, as were his previous books, for the general public and not for other scholars.  His claims about how Jesus became God or vice versa are not original.  Ehrman’s goal was to make these claims readable to modern audiences.

I have deliberately not tried to address the claims Ehrman makes.  I am in the camp of Ehrman's general audience (not scholarly audience) readers, interested to some degree in biblical scholarship, but not one of Ehrman's colleagues.  For what it's worth, a number of scholars who disagree with Ehrman's claims took the time to write a rebuttal.  Just as Ehrman's title reflects his position as an exaltationist Christologist, the title of his opponents' book, How God Became Jesus, marks their approach as incarnationalist.  If it's not too much dancing on the head of a pin, you can hear their arguments here.   Without chiming in on the criticisms, I have to note that one of them is that Ehrman closes his mind to the possibility of divine intervention in history.  Well, yes. As Ehrman took pains to say, he is a historian, not a believer.  

It’s probably in the nature of religion that some people become obsessive about their search for answers.  These days few people are exercised over whether Christ became God at his birth, or his baptism, or his resurrection.  It’s enough for them to think that Jesus wants them for a sunbeam to shine the whole day through.  Or to be their friend sitting next to them in the cab of their truck as they thunder across the plains delivering wheat to the population west of the Rockies.  It’s refreshing to discover religionists, frankly, still inspired to go beyond America’s package tour approach to the topic.  Refreshing to find somebody who tells you he may have lost his faith that Jesus was a god, but not his admiration for the historical apocalyptic preacher who believed the world was about to end and was so admired by his followers that they came to believe he could walk on water and raise people from the dead.   He must have been one hell of a guy, Ehrman thinks, and you find yourself agreeing with him.

The Catholic Church has lost its grip.  Its obsession with sexual purity and reproduction and male dominance has led to its ever increasing irrelevance.  The Evangelicals are a sad bunch of cannon fodder for the right wing in American politics.  Neither of those groups inspire people to want to dig around, as Ehrman and other historians of religion love to do, to know and to understand more about the roots of Christianity as part of World Civilization.  “Christology” – the name for that practice – does not figure in the top ten of human activities.  So I don’t image a very large audience for Ehrman’s latest.

But, if only to shut those folks up who tell you to read your Bible for answers, there is something to be said for learning how Mark was written first, copied in large part by Matthew and Luke, and how John was written much later, by a Greek-speaker far removed from the world of the other three.  And then wondering how it came to be that this most divergent of the four gospels came to be taken the most seriously.  And then maybe you’ll want to know more about this curious belief system that is Christianity.  And maybe you’ll actually read some of this history.

There’s definitely something there.  Ehrman’s books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and three of them have actually made the New York Times bestseller list. 

Just a side note.  Although this has nothing to do directly with Ehrman’s work as a scholar and historian, I note with interest that while Ehrman has left his faith behind, he has not left behind his belief in the importance of looking out for “the least of these, my brethren.”  He supports local efforts to aid the homeless, for example, and writes a blog, using money from it to support such groups as Doctors Without Borders, an organization I also admire greatly and contribute to regularly.  His organization is known as the Bart D. Ehrman Foundation, a “not-for-profit organization whose overarching purpose is to raise money for charities devoted to poverty, hunger, and homelessness.” 

One thing usually leads to another

You’re familiar with Zeno’s Paradox, right?  Sometimes called the Infinite Halfway Theory.  It’s the theory that you can never reach your goal because in order to get there you have to go half way first.  And in order to go half way, you have to go half way to half way.  And from there there is an infinite regress of prior steps you have to take before taking the next one.

My version of Zeno's theory is something I like to call movementiasis, the inability to get where you're going because of one distraction after another.   I discovered years ago that I’m one of those people who can’t get anything much done because before I finish one task, I tend to start another.  I've got four or five books going at any given time.  I can't read the Sunday papers anymore because halfway through one article I begin to wonder what else is out there to read.  

Or I get ready to go to the store and go back for my jacket, but when I do that I notice there’s a dirty dish on the table and so I put it in the sink.  But before I can do that I notice there is an unopened letter on the table, so I look for the letter opener, etc. etc.

I do get out the door eventually, but not before vacuuming the house or straightening my sock drawer, usually.

I was reading the news this morning when I came across a word I didn't know, so I decided to stop and look it up.  Don't ask me how I ended up with a commentary on Luther's Small Catechism entitled Fülle des Lebens (The Fullness of Life) by a theologian named  Klaus Schwarzwäller.  I just did.  Then I found this thing called a necrologue from which I learned that Prof. Dr. S. died at the age of 77 on December 11, 2012.  I was further informed that there is a separate necrologue for animals.

Anyway, in the sample reading of Fullness of Life provided, I came across this sentence:

Denn ihn als wahren Gott aussagen heißt ihn als den aussagen, der im Geschiebe und Gewirr und Gewusel unserer Welt gerade nicht aufgeht, auch wenn er sich ganz hierhinein begab, der vielmehr alledem, was vorfindlich, zeitlich, von Menschen gemacht oder auch festgestellt ist, gegenübersteht - unabhängig, in Verfügungsmacht, als Herr.

I know it's unseemly to speak ill of the dead, and I certainly would not want to cast aspersions on Herr Prof. Dr. S. and what for all I know might have been a stellar career as a theologian, but this sentence gives new meaning to the concept of turgidity.

My first thought was I need to run this through Google Translate.

Google Translate provided a translation exquisitely designed to illustrate the limits of machine translation:

Because testify him as true God called him to be the state that is not just rises in the sediment and clutter and bustle of our world, even if he quite in here came to pass, the contrary to all that is vorfindlich, in time, of man-made or found on facing - independent, in available power, as Lord.

When that didn’t work, I set about doing a gloss of each individual word.

That gave me:

Denn ihn als wahren Gott aussagen heißt ihn als   den aussagen,      der im

For    him as  true    God  to testify means him as the one to testify,  who in the

Geschiebe und Gewirr und Gewusel unserer Welt  gerade    nicht aufgeht, auch

shoving and confusion and bustle     of our   world just now not rises,        also

wenn er sich       ganz      hierhinein begab,       der vielmehr alledem,     was

if       he himself entirely  hitherto     gave over, who rather    all that,      what

vorfindlich, zeitlich,     von Menschen gemacht oder auch  festgestellt ist

           at hand,    transitory,  by  man          made       or    also  established has been

gegenübersteht - unabhängig, in Verfügungsmacht, als Herr.

confronts –         independent, in power-to-dispose, as  Lord.

And that, I suspected, not only did not move me forward, or arguably even sideways; it actually seemed to move me backwards.

So I did what you often have to do when confronted with badly written language.  You swim in it for a while, hoping that somehow you might grog the meaning through your pores.

After a brief time, here’s what I came up with:

To testify that he is the true God means to declare that, for all that he was of the here and now, he stands, independently, as Lord, with the power to dispose, in opposition to the hustle and bustle of our world, to all that is at hand and transitory, made or established by man.

Don't ask me what it means.  I just work here, kind of.  That version at least flows somewhat better in English, but I have little confidence I have come up with the best way of doing justice to Schwarzwäller’s original.  If you can do better, by all means clue me in.  I have no illusions about my translation skills, and will not be offended by corrections or other suggestions.

I could, of course, take it to one of those sites translators use to share their translation problems with other translators.  But that strikes me as cheating, somehow.  Sort of like asking for directions when you are lost.   I try to avoid people who do that.

Next steps?  I could order Fülle des Lebens from Amazon.  Perhaps if I read the entire book, the context would help me with the translation.  There are copies available in the United States in the $80-100 price range.   But I don't want to read the book.

I could ruminate on why Luther was such an anti-Semite, and go back and read the parts of his writing where he urges people to drive the Jews out of town and burn down their houses.  But that, too, is a distraction I’ve done before and don’t need to repeat, particularly.

I’ve forgotten now how I got into this.  Looking something up, no doubt, and getting distracted.

I read in  Schwarzwäller’s obituary, by the way, that in lieu of flowers he wanted people to contribute to "Bread for the World."   While the good Professor Dr. Schwarzwäller may have made sausage of the German language, it appears he was a mensch.

Conchita Wurst,
previously known as Thomas Neuwirth

And speaking of sausage, did you hear about the gender-f*ck transvestite named Thomas Neuwirth, from Austria, who just won the Eurovision Song Contest?  Her stage name is Conchita Wurst.

Wurst is German for sausage, as you know. 

But did you also know that Conchita is Spanish for “little cu*t”?

Didn’t think so.

Russia, Ukraine, Belarus all tried to keep her out of the competition, but the West won out.

And she goes and wins!

I remember how embarrassed I was forty-five years ago now, when a bunch of drag queens poured out of the Stonewall Inn, on Christopher Street in New York, and set off the modern gay rights movement around the world.  (What we call “Gay Pride” they call “Christopher Street Day” in Berlin, for example.)  I still felt at the time that we needed to “pass for straight” in order to make any progress.  Can’t believe how much has happened since those early days and how my views, like President Obama's, have evolved.

It’s not all forward movement, of course.  Here in the U.S. we still have Sarah Palin, the one-heartbeat-from-the-presidency idiot John McCain chose as his running mate, addressing the NRA Convention in Indianapolis attended by 70,000 people and telling them if she were running the country she would “baptize” terrorists with water-boarding.  No kidding.  That really happened.    

But at least in Europe, Catholic Austria has put forward as its candidate for one of the largest singing contests in the world, a drag queen named “Little C*nt Hot Dog,” and my sense of despair for the human race has been held at bay for another day.

 Photo credits:  Roadsigns, Conchita Wurst

Sound Princesses and Puckered Lips

My mind has been reliving memories of Japan lately.  I don't know why.  That wonderful photo of Mt. Fuji from a friend's balcony (to the left) set it off, I think.  And friend Bill's response.  Bill spent some time there visiting me and never once got a glimpse of Mt. Fuji.  He's persuaded that Fuji is all a scam to attract tourists.  Once they get there, he says, they realize it was all a phony come-on.

Fortunately, even without Mt. Fuji, Japan is a land of endless delights.   Some are joys to behold – the gardens, the flower arrangements, the kimonos.   And some surprise and tickle the imagination - macho gangster-types walking around in pink slippers, hot café au lait in vending machines.

One of the things about Japan that Westerners often comment on is the number of ways that differences between men and women still show up, whether in the men-only practice of teeth-sucking or the women-only practice of hiding behind the hand when laughing.   “Femininity” has traditionally been associated with delicacy, modesty and refinement, and coarseness and aggressivity with males.  It's grossly unfair, of course, to compare what most would consider the positive aspects of one group with the negative aspects of another, but behind these stereotypes there can be some truth.

Consider the otohime machines in a women’s public toilet, for example.  Paruresis, you see.  My new word for the day.  Just to get an idea of the spread of the concept, I typed paruresis into Google translate to see what it might be in other languages.  A Chinese translation popped up immediately.  It’s 害羞膀胱, pronounced haishu panguang, and it translates shy bladder.  It’s the phobia some people have of being unable to urinate when somebody is close enough to see or hear what they are up to.    

Otohime, 音姫, to return to the Japanese context, translates sound princess. It's a machine that makes the sound of flushing water.  So common was the delicate fear of Japanese ladies of being overheard making tinkle noises that they used to flush the toilet constantly while taking a whiz,

resulting in a massive waste of water.  Lost in translation is the fact that there was an actual princess with that name (different characters, of course).  Note, in the picture at the right, that there is a volume control to match the strength of your desire to mask the sounds of nature.

Since a public campaign to get women to stop this waste of water failed miserably, Toto Toilets came to the rescue with the sound princess, originally a battery-operated device attached to the wall, and, more recently, as the picture above illustrates,  a feature of the bathroom plumbing system in modern houses.   Before you begin your business, you wave your hand in front of the sensor (or push the button) and voilà, your own personal Niagara.

Unfortunately, I’ve been told, many women fear people can distinguish the sound it makes from the flushing of a real toilet and thus they would be revealing their desire to avoid embarrassment by making use of the device, so they don’t use the machine, and keep flushing the actual toilet instead.  At least some women use it, however, and it is estimated twenty or so litres of water are saved by this modern technical advance.

What prompted this reverie on bathroom practices was an article I just came across about another Japanese female sensitivity – being caught opening your mouth too wide.  Having an “ochobo-guchi,” (“puckered lips” – i.e., “small” -mouth) in Japanese – is much to be desired.  Or so they tell me.  Personally I have a preference for women unafraid to guffaw.

In any case, apparently this hamburger chain called “Freshness Burger” found that their equivalent of the “big mac” wasn’t selling very well.  The problem was women on a date didn’t want to be caught opening their mouths enough to have at it.   The Japanese version of "ladies don't eat grinders."  The solution?  A new kind of napkin, or "wrapper" to hide the mouth when eating.

I've often quoted my friend Luis’s description of Japan as the land where “the world’s best microsystems are invented to deal with some of the world’s worst macrosystems.”   Here’s another example.  The PR campaign to save water didn't work.  Why should a PR campaign to become unafraid to get your lips around a fast-food behemoth?  Never underestimate the world of commerce's ability to accommodate reality.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so have a look at this link to the YouTube illustration of what I’m talking about.

Whether you’re a “vive la différence conservative or whether this story makes you groan at the slow pace of gender equality, I trust you’ll appreciate Japan’s never-ending supply of creative ideas.

And lest you think we're the only place on the planet that can twist language into a knot to serve political or commercial purposes - and in this case both at the same time - consider the name the company is using to market these masks to keep women "modest."  They're called "liberation wrappers."  Women are being "liberated" from "ochobo" syndrome, you see.