Refuting Bart Ehrman

How Jesus Became God

1. How Jesus Became God: Bart Ehrman's Diachronic Grid of Christology
   
   Ehrman seems certain that there is an order to them: the exaltation Christologies came first, and the incarnational Christologies were a later development. But his certainty rests not on historical study but on a predetermined chronological grid that is not provable historically. He gives us this grid, but only late in the book. He presents it as a conclusion, but actually it is a presupposition.
   

   To use the older terminology, in early Christianity the views of Christ got "higher and higher" with the passing of time, as he became increasingly identified as divine. Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status at his resurrection; to being a preexistent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him.9

   
   It is easy for the reader to get the impression that this chronology is a rational "conclusion" of unbiased historical study — instead of what it actually is, a presupposition of historical study — because of the way in which Ehrman presents the evidence. Here is how he does it. In chapter 4 he introduces the pre-Pauline tradition contained in 1 Cor 15:3 - 5, and in chapter 6 he presents the tradition in Rom 1:3 - 4. Each of these passages is interpreted to mean that Christ only "became" God after his resurrection. 10 These must represent the views of the "earliest" Christians, and, as far as the reader suspects at this point, there are no other "early" traditions out there to compete with them. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is Phil 2:6 - 11, a passage that is not introduced until chapter 7. " Phil 2:6 - 11, containing what Ehrman calls a "Christ poem," is also pre-Pauline. It, however, assumes that Christ existed before his human birth, and existed in the form of God (not simply an angel). Christ was exalted again to heaven after he had humbled himself to take human form and suffer crucifixion in obedience to God. What is more, we now learn there are other pre-Pauline attestations of similar incarnational views of Christ, such as the one Paul uses in 1 Cor 8:6 — "yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live." These pre-Pauline, incarnational traditions, we are told, are later than the pre-Pauline traditions that only viewed Jesus as divine based on his exaltation. Ehrman therefore calls the incarnational traditions "amalgams" of earlier traditions 12 But how do we know this? How do we know that the "exaltation" traditions are not in fact simply abbreviations of a fuller incarnational tradition, used to stress Jesus' humanity or his suffering or his fulfillment of prophecies about the coming Messiah? This is surely how they functioned for Paul, as abbreviations of a fuller Christology. When Paul at the beginning of Romans quoted a tradition that emphasized that Christ was descended from David "according to the flesh," and was set forth as Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead, he was certainly not thereby denying that Christ was also the preexistent Son of God by nature. When he cited a preformulated creed containing "exaltation" Christology in 1 Cor 15:3 - 5, this did not cancel out the incarnation Christology he had already expressed earlier in the same letter when he quoted an "incarnation" creed in 1 Cor 8:6. Similarly, when the pre-Pauline author of the Christ poem in Phil 2:6 - 11 put the poem together, this author too did not see the preexistence of Christ as God as contradicted by his exaltation to heavenly status after the resurrection. So, how do we know that even the authors) of the creeds used by Paul in Rom 1:3 - 4 and 1 Cor 15:3 - 5 did not also view their creeds as abbreviations of a fuller incarnational Christology? As another example, the author of 1 John writes: "This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God" (1 John 4:2). Did the author really mean that a spirit from God would not have to believe that Jesus also rose from the dead, or that he also was God "in the beginning" (1 John 1:1)? Of course not. There is an issue at hand, the issue of Jesus Christ's true humanity — "in the flesh" — and the author is specifically addressing that issue. What the spirits must confess here is just one abbreviated summary of a portion of what the author's community believed about Jesus. The New Testament authors, and Christians ever since, constantly make stain artie siu in in let that com pacover the l parter words from the Apostles' Creed: I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.3 There is nothing explicit here about Jesus' preexistence or his full deity. True, it is surely assumed in the meaning of the words "his only Son" in the first line. But according to Ehrman, such a bare statement could just as well mean that Jesus was exalted to Son of God status at his baptism or resurrection, perhaps even at his conception. Or one could say that Christ's full deity is assumed by the fact that the creed divides itself in a trinitarian way, with statements about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is no doubt true, but again, this is the assumption behind the creed; the creed itself does not spell it out. Creeds are always mere summations of what believers believe; the rest is assumed to be filled in by teaching and preaching and is usually commonly known in the community. The Apostles' Creed has much more to say about Jesus' resurrection and ascension to heaven than about his preincarnate deity. But it was constructed and used by Christians who believed in Christ's preincarnate deity and has been confessed through the centuries by people who believe in his preincarnate deity. Even the Apostles' Creed (like all of the creeds) expresses only a part of what Christians believe. The only way we know that the pre-Pauline creeds and other expressions of incarnational Christology embedded in his letters are later and the exaltation christological expressions are earlier is by accepting the predetermined chronological grid: Christology must have begun from the "lower" and moved to the "higher." But if this is predetermined, how is it "historical" and "scientific," open to testing and falsification? Here is where the naturalistic assumption makes a determinative difference in historical research. For this presupposed theory of christological development determines all of Ehrman's historical/theological judgments throughout the book. And so, the problem of a rigidly applied but unproven chronology of belief about Jesus forms a crack that extends throughout his historical reconstruction of early developments in Christology. As we saw in the last chapter, the Ebionites and other "adoptionists" in the second and third centuries are said to have held to the Christology of the earliest Christians. This claim is then drawn in to serve as one of the great ironies of Christianity: later Christians rejected as heretics the people who held the first Christian beliefs. We also saw in the last chapter that the Ebionites cannot be shown to have ever believed Jesus became God, let alone that he became God at his resurrection. Now we see that we cannot establish that the earliest Christians believed Christ was a mere man exalted to deity only at his resurrection (or his baptism). Such a view, if it ever existed, cannot be shown to be any earlier than a view that recognized Jesus' preexistent deity. None of the New Testament writers attempted a full articulation of the mysteries of the person of Jesus Christ. We might wish they had, but it is likely that even if they had been both more precise and more expansive, they would not have removed the paradox. As it is, both sides of the "paradox" are clearly held, and they are not clumsily juxtaposed but integrated in the writings of the New Testament authors. As far as we can tell, none of these writers was discomfited by the "seeming contradictions" or the supposed brutality of these two facts, that Jesus was God and that he had come in the flesh. As hard as it may seem to believe, there is no evidence of the kind of hesitation, inner turmoil, or mental torture as is supposed to be experienced by many. These authors had come to the stunning realization that Jesus was both God and man, and none of them thought that either the humanity or the divinity of Jesus, or the humanity and divinity together, rendered faith in him impossible. The "paradox" was accepted as such and did not prevent these authors advocating and commending a full faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Savior to outsiders. It was that faith. (Michael F. Bird, How God became Jesus)