But one could argue—and probably should argue—that in fact Christian thinking about Jesus had come an enormous way just twenty years after his death. It must have been no more than twenty years after Jesus died, possibly even fewer, that the Christ poem in Philippians was composed, in which Jesus was said to have been a preexistent being “in the form of God” who became human and then because of his obedient death was exalted to divine status and made equal with God, the Lord to whom all people on earth would bow in worship and confess loyalty. One German scholar of the New Testament, Martin Hengel, has famously claimed that “with regard to the development of all the early Church’s Christology . . . more happened in the first twenty years than in the entire later, centuries-long development of dogma.”6
There is a certain truth to this claim. Of course, a lot did indeed happen after the first twenty years—an enormous amount. But the major leap was made in those twenty years: from seeing Jesus as his own disciples did during his ministry, as a Jewish man with an apocalyptic message of coming destruction, to seeing him as something far greater, a preexistent divine being who became human only temporarily before being made the Lord of the universe. It was not long after that that Jesus was declared to be the very Word of God made flesh, who was with God at creation and through whom God made all things. Eventually Jesus came to be seen as God in every respect, coeternal with the Father, of the same substance as the Father, equal to the Father within the Trinity of three persons, but one God.
This God Christ may not have been the historical Jesus. But he was the Christ of orthodox Christian doctrine, the object of faith and veneration over the centuries. And he is still the God revered and worshiped by Christians throughout our world today.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
1.Those who have read my other books will recognize the story, as I have had occasion to tell it before. See my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 32–34.
2.Translation of F. C. Conybeare, Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), vol.2.
3.Since Philostratus was writing after the Gospels were in circulation, it is entirely possible—as many critics have pointed out—that he was influenced by their portrayal of Jesus and that, as a result, he himself created the similarities between his account of Apollonius and the Gospel stories. That may indeed be true, but my point is that his pagan readers would have had no difficulty accepting the idea that Apollonius was another “divine man,” like others who were widely known.
4.Translation of A. D. Melville, Ovid: Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). All quotations are drawn from Book VIII, 190–93.
5.My friend Michael Penn, professor of religious studies at Mount Holyoke, informs me that there are indeed cases of twins from different fathers—a phenomenon known as heteropaternal superfecundation—but the woman’s two eggs need to be fertilized within a relatively short interval from one another. Amphytrion had been away at war presumably for several months.
6.According to the Greek biographer of philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, Plato was sometimes considered to have been a son of the God Apollo (Lives of Eminent Philosophers 3.1–2, 45).
7.Translation of B. O. Foster, Livy: History of Rome Books I–II, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1919).
8.For Suetonius, I am using the translation of Catharine Edwards, Suetonius: Lives of the Caesars (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).
9.For the information in this paragraph, see John Collins, in Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 53.
10.There are numerous valuable studies of the emperor cult. For one that has become something of a classic of modern scholarship, see S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). More recently, see Jeffrey Brodd and Jonathan Reed, Rome and Religion: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Imperial Cult (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). Among studies of the imperial cult in relation to early Christianity, the following two are particularly noteworthy: Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), and most recently, Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).
11.Translation of H. E. Butler, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1920).
12.For more on this point of view, see the older classic study by Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Middletown, CT: American Philological Association, 1931).
13.See the discussions in the books cited in note 10.
14.From Price, Rituals and Power, 31.
15.From Price, Rituals and Power, 54.
16.Translation of A. M. Harmon, Lucian V, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936).
17.Price, Rituals and Power, 55.
18.For the idea of a divine pyramid, see Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1983).
19.For a discussion of this view, and why it is a mistake to assume it when dealing with antiquity, see especially Peppard, Son of God, 9–49.
Chapter 2: Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
1.For an authoritative account, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).
2.See the scholarly discussions of Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), and Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).
3.The HarperCollins Study Bible, ed. Harold W. Attridge (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 88.
4.Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 68.
5.It is important to note that the term satan in Job 1 and 2 is not a proper name but means the accuser. It refers to an angel in God’s divine court who is in the role of “prosecutor.”
6.Translation of J. Z. Smith in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.1, Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), slightly modified.
7.Translation of A. F. J. Klijn, “2 (Syriac Apocalypse of) Baruch,” in Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.1.
8.Translation of F. I. Andersen, in Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.1.
9.Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM Press, 1988), 82.
10.Translation of E. Isaac, in Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.1.
11.See John J. Collins, “Pre-Christian Jewish Messianism: An Overview,” in Magnus Zetterholm, ed., The Messiah in Early Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 16.