Some later Jews took this message a step further and claimed that Moses was, in fact, divine. The clearest expression of this view comes in the works of the aforementioned Philo of Alexandria. Philo was deeply imbued in Greek philosophical thought, as we have seen, and was particularly invested in showing how the Jewish scripture, if properly understood by means of allegorical, or figurative, modes of interpretation, presents and supports the teachings of the great Greek philosophers (or rather, how the teachings of the Greek philosophers are already found in the Hebrew Bible). Judaism, for Philo, presented the best of what the greatest philosophers of the world had ever taught.
Philo was highly prolific, and we still have a number of his writings, including a biography of Moses that praises the great lawgiver of the Jews as a highly learned and insightful man. In these and other writings Philo celebrates both Moses and the deeply philosophical law that he proclaimed. For Philo, Moses was “the greatest and most perfect man that ever lived” (Life of Moses 1.1). In interpreting the passage laid out above, Exodus 4:16, Philo indicates that Moses appeared to others as a god—but he was not really God in essence (The Worse Attacks the Better 161–62). Here, Philo is playing with the idea that there are levels of divinity. In fact, he thought that through his life, Moses “was gradually becoming divine” (Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 9–10). Since Moses was a prophet and friend of God, “then it follows that he would naturally partake of God himself and of all his possessions as far as he had need” (Life of Moses 1.156). That is why some people had wondered whether Moses did not have a merely human mind but rather “a divine intellect” (Life of Moses 1.27).
In the Hebrew Bible, Moses receives the law directly from the hand of God, as he alone ascends Mount Sinai to commune with God (Exod. 19–20). Philo maintained that because of Moses’s contemplation of God, “he also enjoyed an even greater communion with the Father and Creator of the universe” (Life of Moses 1.158). As a result, Moses was to be God’s heir: he would have as his inheritance “the whole world” (Life of Moses 1.157). Moreover, even though he was not God Almighty himself, Moses, according to Philo, “was called the god and king of the whole nation” (Life of Moses 1.158). Here then we see Moses called what the king of Israel is called—and what, in a different context, the emperor of the Romans was called: god.
Like other specially favored humans who had a particularly close relationship with God—so close that Moses himself could be considered in some sense divine—at the end of his life Moses was highly exalted by God and made immortaclass="underline" “When he was about to depart from hence to heaven, to take up his abode there, and leaving this mortal life to become immortal, having been summoned by the Father, who now changed him, having previously been a double being composed of soul and body, into the nature of a single body, transforming him wholly and entirely into a most sun-like mind” (Life of Moses 2.228).
Or as Philo states even more forcefully elsewhere: “Having given up and left behind all mortal kinds, he is changed into the divine, so that such men become kin to God and truly divine” (Questions on Exodus 3.29). Here, then, is a close Jewish analogy to what we have found in pagan sources: a powerful, wise, and great man rewarded after his life by being made divine. At times, Philo goes even further and imagines Moses as a kind of preexistent divine being sent to earth for a time: “And even when [God] sent him as a loan to the earthly sphere and caused him to dwell there, he fitted him with no ordinary excellence, such as that which kings and rulers have, . . . but he appointed him as god, placing all the bodily region and the mind which rules it in subjection and slavery to him” (Sacrifices 8–10).
Jewish Divine Men
IT MAY NOT HAVE come as a huge surprise to learn that pagans who held to a range of polytheistic religions sometimes imagined that humans could be divine in some sense. It is more surprising, for most people, to learn that the same is true within Judaism. It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists. But even as they believed that there was only one God Almighty, it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases. Moreover, there was some sense of continuity—not only discontinuity—between the divine and human realms. And there was a kind of spectrum of divinity: the Angel of the Lord, already in scripture, could be both an angel and God. Angels were divine, and could be worshiped, but they could also come in human guise. Humans could become angels. Humans could be called the Son of God or even God. This did not mean that they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God.
Thus, even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity. And even among Jews at the time of Jesus there was not a sense of an absolute break, a complete divide, an unbridgeable chasm between the divine and the human. So, if one wants to know whether an angel could be thought of as a god, one has to ask, “in what sense?” The same is true with humans. If the king, or Moses, or Enoch as the Son of Man, or anyone else is said or thought to be God, it needs to be explained in what sense this is the case. Is this a person who was adopted by God to be his son? Who was born to a human by divine intervention? Who was made into an angel? Who was exalted to God’s throne to be his co-ruler? Or something else?
We will have to ask such questions when exploring early Christian views of Jesus. Yes, I will argue, soon after Jesus’s death, the belief in his resurrection led some of his followers to say he was God. But in what sense? Or rather, in whatever senses—plural—since, as we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.
But before we go there, we need first to explore the man Jesus himself—the historical Jesus. Did his followers think he was divine while he was still treading the dusty paths of Galilee? Did he himself think he was divine?
CHAPTER 3
Did Jesus Think He Was God?
WHEN I ATTENDED Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work. Like most of my fellow students, I was completely untrained and unqualified to do what I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training. And so during one semester we had to devote maybe two to three hours a week to “door-to-door evangelism,” trying to convert people cold-turkey, a fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary, also carried out two-by-two. Another semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station. People would call up with questions about the Bible or with problems in their lives, and I would, well, give them “all the answers.” I was all of eighteen years old. One semester I was a chaplain during one afternoon a week at Cook County Hospital. I was way out of my depth with that one.
Then, when I was a senior, my roommate Bill and I decided that we wanted to do our ministry as youth pastors in a church. Through Moody, we were hooked up with a terrific church in Oak Lawn, a southern suburb of Chicago. It was Trinity Evangelical Covenant Church—part of a small denomination that originated as a Swedish pietist movement that split from the Lutherans.