A THEOLOGICAL BOOK CRITIQUE
A Theological Book Critique
Of the Requirements for the Course
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Day Month Year
Introduction. 3
Summary Critique 3
Critical Interaction 5
Jesus always alive 5
Jesus knew he was God 7
Conclusion 8
Introduction
How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of the Belief in Jesus’ Divinity is a collection of disputations against Bart D. Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar and professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Michael F. Bird, an Evangelical lecturer in Theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, edited the collection of six chapter-long argumentations from four authors such as Craig A. Evans, Simon J. Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, and Chris Tilling, including his own arguments. Evans is a Baptist professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia; while Gathercole lectures in Divinity at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Hill teaches New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in California; while Tilling is a New Testament Tutor at St. Mellitus College and St. Paul’s Theological Centre in London.
How God Became Jesus attempted to invalidate the scholarly views of Ehrman on Christian Christology in various areas of the divinity of Jesus. This critique will seek to evaluate the soundness of the authors’ arguments used in disputing Ehrman’s Christology, and assess the success of the book in its objectives.
Summary Critique
The collection of disputations found in How God Became Jesus tried to address the various aspects of the Christology that Ehrman proposed in his book How Jesus Became God. The Ehrmanian sub-theses discussed in this work includes the sole humanity of Jesus viewed from the so-called “exaltation Christology” (Chapter 1), his intermediary origin before he became human (Chapter 2), his lack of knowledge as being God (Chapter 3), the fiction of both the burial and resurrection stories about him (Chapter 4), and four chapters covering a critique of Ehrman’s methods of textual analysis of the biblical evidence on the question of Jesus’ divinity. The central issues, however, focused on the Ehrmanian insistence that Jesus was never divine and that he neither thought of himself as God.
Bird’s handling of the argument over the divinity of Jesus failed to make a stronger emphasis on the work of Hengel, specifically the four letters of Paul that Ehrman conceded as historical (unlike the gospel of John) amidst the less upfront disclosure of Jesus’ divinity in the synoptic gospels. There was no mention of the other New Testament letters in proving this issue of divinity. In brief, Bird had the materials in his hands; but failed to use it decisively.
In Chapter 2, Bird asserted that the Ehrmanian thesis that Jesus was like any intermediary deity of old, was a case of “parallelomania,” the comparison of contents in one document to be the same in an entirely different other document. He correctly uncovered the illogical flow of Ehrman’s position on the issue, which any careful scholar would find obvious.
In Chapter 3, Bird again made a mistake in discussing an issue that agnostics will have no means of accepting as the evidence pointing to Jesus’ self-knowledge of being God, being cloaked with languages that can be easily interpreted as metaphorical, such as “Son of Man.” Ehrman, being an agnostic, considers such devices unacceptable as evidence of fact. This issue should have been wisely excluded in this collection.
Evans successfully disputed in Chapter 4 the evasive Ehrmanian thesis that the burial and resurrection of Jesus had been fictional, which had been clearly grounded on unfounded presumptions whimsically asserted as valid when it is not. Ehrman’s conjecture of an empty tomb as impossible, expresses a logical fallacy based on loosely interpreted historical facts.
Critical Interaction
Jesus always divine: The primary thesis of Ehrman on Jesus’s divinity asserts that Jesus “was, and always has been, a human.” He claims that, after his death, the gradual but increasing religious devotion of the Christian followers pushed him to be elevated to the status of a divine. Bird, in “Chapter 2: The Story of Jesus as the Story of God,” countered the claim using John 1:1, which declared that Jesus as the Son of God and the “Word” already existed in the beginning, and that he was “with God” and he “was God.” He asserted that Jesus “never became God”; but was “always God” who “became human, the man Jesus of Nazareth.” The weakness of this argument, however, rests from the fact that Ehrman does not recognize the Gospel of John as a genuine “historical” document, but an invention of a latter Christian writer who claimed the events as real despite its lack of similar references to the accounts in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, which he considers authentic. It becomes a case of Bird’s words against Ehrman’s.
The two synoptic gospels appeared to provide no indisputable and literal declaration of the divinity of Jesus. The frequent use of the phrase “Son of God” in the gospel of Mark in Jesus sayings, when Jesus indirectly refers to his divinity, makes the synoptic gospel vulnerable to the faulty Ehrman thesis that Jesus had not been divine, but merely exalted as divine later on (Exaltation Christology), even disregarding 1:11 as mere exaltation instead of a direct affirmation of Jesus’ divinity. Meanwhile, as the gospel of Matthew succeeded in establishing the human lineage of Jesus, its witness to the divinity of Jesus is prone to misinterpretation as a divinity conferred by exaltation not by birth (1:18-23).
Luckily, in his work, Hengel did cite four Pauline letters: Rom 1:3-4; 1 Cor 8:6; Gal 4:4, and; Phil 2:5. The letter to the Romans tells about the “Son of God,” a descendant of David, who took the human nature (v. 3), and declared him as “Jesus Christ our Lord” (v. 4). This means that the “Son of God” is the same person as Jesus, a descendant of David, and that he was not human (thus implicitly “divine”) before he “took” the human nature. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul explicitly declared that it was through Jesus that all things come and found their existence. This again equivocally declares that Jesus existed before he became human, contrary to what Ehrman insisted. Moreover, the letters to the Galatians (“God sent his Son, born of a woman”) provided more textual support to the divinity of Jesus; although the Ephesians verse leaves some interpreting to do to be useful as a solid, supportive argument. The explicit Pauline witness to the divinity of Jesus provides an indisputably strong argument against the Christological thesis of Ehrman. Bird, however, failed to emphasize this argumentative strength. Instead, he explored issues on intermediaries (Bauckham), giving of devotion as an indicator of divinity (Hurtado) and roots of early church Christology (Hengel), in an effort to dispute the Ehrman thesis through developmental history, the central focus of this collection.
Jesus knew he was God: The title of Chapter 3 (“Did Jesus Think He Was God?”) is a loaded statement that alludes to Jesus’ uncertainty of his being God. It rephrased the question that Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner would have asked Jesus: “Who do you think you are – God?” Ehrman insisted that Jesus thought himself as a prophet who looked forward to the “imminent arrival of the Son of Man”. Furthermore, he claimed that the public ministry of Jesus was never “focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all”. Bird attempts to dispute these claims by showing that Jesus identified himself as “a divine agent” with divine authority. He understood the question as referring to Jesus as “conscious that in him the God of Israel was finally returning to Zion (i.e. Jerusalem)”. He contends that the signs following Jesus’ ministry provided the proof of Jesus’ “unmediated divine authority”. Still, Jesus never referred himself directly as the Son of God; but, only indirectly with scriptural undertones, using the phrase “Son of Man.” In fact, except for Peter, neither the apostles nor the disciples appeared certain if Jesus was the Son of God (Mk 8:27-30); that is, before he died on the cross and resurrected from the dead. However, even Peter referred to him only as “Christ” or the “Christ of God” (Lk 9:20), and not explicitly the “Son of God.” Nonetheless, Jesus did claim his union with God the Father (John 10:24-30).
The problem with this question, therefore, is not that the Christians believed Jesus as the Son of God but that, to an agnostic like Ehrman, the “proofs” found in the New Testament, even with the support of prophesies in the Old Testament, are at best indirect proofs acceptable only to believers. Arguing over whether Jesus thought of himself as God is an unnecessary as well as an impossible question, which may only be answered by the person who did the thinking (Jesus himself), not inquirers looking from the outside. Arguing over this question indicates a quixotic quest that Bird should not have attempted to argue with an agnostic scholar in the first place.
Conclusion
The central issues in How God Became Jesus as a scholarly argument between Christian believers led by general editor Bird, and the agnostic Ehrman centers on two points: the historicity of the divinity of Jesus and Jesus’ personal knowledge of his divinity. Bird handled these primary disputations with dismal outcomes for two reasons. First, he failed to emphasize the solid witness provided in the letters of Paul to the local churches as Hengel cited in his work. Second, he misused his discretion in arguing primarily testimonial estimations of Jesus’ knowledge of his being God as found in the New Testament, particularly in the synoptic gospels of Mark and Matthew, which Ehrman accepted as historical documents. An agnostic like Ehrman will never accept that kind of argument he will interprete as unconvincingly contrived.
