If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?

this is fresh air I'm Terry gross when my guests Bart Ehrman was a young evangelical Christian he wanted to know how God became a man but now as an agnostic and historian of early Christianity he wants to know how a man became God when and why did Jesus's followers start saying Jesus is God and what did they mean by that Herman's new book is called how Jesus became God the exultation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee Erman is the author of several popular books about early Christianity including misquoting Jesus and Jesus interrupted he's a distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Bart Ehrman welcome back to fresh air explain the fundamental question that you're asking in your new book well the question is how it is that a Jewish preacher who was predicting the imminent end of the age as he knew it and ended up being crucified for his message how is it that we went from a crucified peasant to the second member of the Trinity Jesus eventually comes to be seen of as God and the book is about how that happened why did you want to ask that question in my various books I tried to deal with big issues and I think this is the biggest issue I've ever dealt with and the reason is that if Jesus had not been declared God by his followers his followers would have remained a sect within Judaism a small Jewish sect and if that was the case they would not have attracted large number of Gentiles if they hadn't attracted a large number of Gentiles there wouldn't have been the steady rate of conversion over the first three centuries to Christianity would have been a small Jewish sect if Christianity had not become sizable minority in the Empire the Roman Emperor Constantine almost certainly would not have converted but then there wouldn't have been the masses of conversions after Constantine and Christianity would not have become the state religion of Rome if that hadn't happened it would never have become the dominant religious cultural political social economic force that it became so that we wouldn't have even had the Middle Ages the Renaissance the Reformation or modernity as we know it and so this is a big question it all hinges on this claim the early Christians had that Jesus was God are you saying that Christians made the claim that Jesus is God in order to grow bigger to grow beyond being a small cult no I don't think they had any idea that that that would happen the earliest Christians thought that Jesus had been taken up into heaven and made a divine being and that he was coming back and they thought it was going to happen very soon so they had no idea that they were going to revolutionize Western civilization they didn't think there was going to be a Western civilization the end was going to come so did Jesus's earliest followers consider him to be God well what I argue in the book is that during his lifetime Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God and that none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God the way it works is that you do find Jesus calling himself God in the Gospel of John or alas gospel Jesus says things like before Abraham was I am and I am the father are one and if you've seen me you've seen the father these are all statements that you find only in the Gospel of John and that's striking because we have earlier Gospels and we have the writings of Paul and in none of them is there any indication that Jesus said such things about him I think it's completely implausible that Matthew Mark and Luke would not mention that Jesus called himself God if that's what he was declaring about himself that would be a rather important point to make so this is not an unusual view among scholars it's simply the view that that the Gospel of John is providing a theological understanding of Jesus that is not what was historically accurate Jesus was referred to as the king of the Jews did he call himself that and what did that mean in its time do we know can we have any idea what that meant in its time yeah we do know and it actually to be a king of the Jews simply meant literally being the king over over Israel it is a very difficult question to get to what Jesus taught about himself because of the nature of our Gospels but one thing is is relatively certain that the reason the Romans crucified Jesus was precisely because he was calling himself the king of Israel now Jesus obviously was not the king so what might he have meant by it well what scholars have long thought is that Jesus was talking about not not being put on the throne by means of some kind of political show of power but that Jesus thought the world as he knew it was coming to an end and God was going to bring in a Kingdom a new Kingdom in which there would be no more injustice or oppression or poverty or suffering of any kind and in this kingdom Jesus appears to have thought that he himself would be the future king and so Jesus meant this not in in the regular political sense but in a kind of apocalyptic sense that at the end of the age this is what was going to happen he was going to be installed as king so Jesus saw himself as the Messiah what else did that mean in its time well a lot of Christians today have a wrong idea about what the Messiah was supposed to be the word Messiah is a Hebrew word that literally means The Anointed One this was used in reference to the kings of Israel the ancient kings of Israel when they became King during the coronation ceremony would have oil poured on their head as a sign of divine favor and so the king of Israel was called God's anointed one the Messiah there came a point at which there was no longer a king ruling Israel and some Jewish thinkers began to maintain that there would be a future king of Israel a future Anointed One and they called that one the Messiah and so the Messiah for most Jews simply refer to the future king of Israel and so when Jesus told his disciples that he himself was the Messiah he was saying that in the future when God establishes the kingdom once more I myself will be the king of that kingdom and so it's not that the Messiah was supposed to be God the Messiah was not supposed to be God Messiah was a human being who would be the future king and that's probably what Jesus taught his disciples that he was when you're asking the question of did Jesus really rise from the dead was there really an empty tomb a tomb that he had been buried in as a scholar of the historical Jesus where'd he go to try to answer those questions well there are some questions that history can answer and other things that history cannot answer what I try to teach my students is that history is not the past now that seems a little strange to my students but I explained there are a lot of things in the past that we cannot show historically for example you you can't show even if you want to you simply can't show what my grandfather ate on March 23rd 1956 I mean he ate something for lunch that day I'm sure but but there's no way we have access to it so it's in the past but it's not part of history history is what we can show to have happened in the past one of the things that historians cannot show as having happened in the past is anything that's miraculous because to believe that a miracles happen to believe that God has done something in our world requires a person to believe in God it requires a theological belief but historians can't require theological beliefs to do their work that's why historians whether they're historians of World War two or of the Napoleonic age or of ancient Alexandria Egypt historians who deal with historical subjects don't invoke miracle because it's beyond what historians can prove miracles may have happened in the past but they're not part of history so that applies to the resurrection of Jesus historians acting as historians whether they're believers or non-believers as historians they simply cannot say Jesus was probably raised by God from the dead but historians can look at other aspects of the resurrection traditions and see whether they they bear up historically so for example the question was there an empty tomb was Jesus put in a tomb and three days later that tomb was found empty well that's a historical question and to answer it it doesn't require any set of religious beliefs you can simply look at the sources and come and draw some historical conclusions ok so one of the things you look at is typically what happened to the bodies of men who are crucified and when you try to answer that question what answers do you come up with you know this is one of the things that really startled me in doing my research for this I actually changed my views about about this question about whether there was an empty tomb three days after Jesus death and the reason I changed my mind about it is because I decided to look into what we know about Roman practices of crucifixion now it's interesting that we never have any literary descriptions in any writing at all there's no description of how exactly crucifixion was performed but there are references in ancient Greek and Latin texts that refer to people who have been crucified and what is striking is that in virtually every instance we're told that the person was left on the cross in order to rot away and to be by scavengers so that the punishment of crucifixion wasn't simply the torture involved it also was the horrible effect of not being given a proper burial the desecration of the body after death absolutely the body was to be desecrated and this was scandalous to ancient people but but the Romans did it this way as a disincentive for crime so it's not just that you're going to go through a horrible death your body is going to is going to rot on the cross and scavengers are going to eat it and this is the typical procedure for crucifixion in the ancient world and so I asked in my book is it likely that there was an exception in the case of Jesus so in the Gospels of course Joseph of Arimathea asks for Jesus body and Pontius Pilate gives it to him and then Joseph puts it in his tomb and three days later that tomb was found empty well I asked the question in my book is is Pilate from what we know about him from other sources likely to have made an exception with Jesus or with anyone else is Pilate likely to have said well okay in this one case we'll actually take the carcass off the off the cross and put it in and give him a decent burial I think it's highly unlikely for reasons that I lay out in the book given what we know about Pilate from other sources what are some of the reasons you think Pilate would not have made an exception well what we know about Pilate comes to us from various sources including the Jewish historian Josephus and the the philosopher from Alexandria Egypt named Philo what we learn about Pilate from these sources is that Pilate was not a nice fellow he was not concerned about the people that he ruled he was ruthless he was a hard-hearted he was mean-spirited and he simply did not care about the religious sensibilities of the Jews in Palestine as we learn from several episodes in both Josephus and Philo and so even if the Jewish authorities who had arranged for Jesus to be crucified with Pilate even if they decided well let's give him a decent burial there's nothing in the record to suggest that Pilate would ever do that and we have no record of any governor of any province in the entire Roman Empire who would bow to the religious sensibilities of their people in order to give somebody a decent burial and so it seems unlikely to me that the exception was made in the case of Jesus say an exception was made do you have other questions about the entombment of Jesus before the resurrection yeah you know before I wrote this book and did the research on it I was convinced as many people are that Jesus was given a decent burial and on the third day the women went to the tomb found it empty and that started the belief in the resurrection apart from the fact that I don't think Jesus was given a decent burial that he was probably thrown into a common grave of some kind apart from that I was struck in doing my research by the fact that the New Testament never indicates that people came to believe in the resurrection because of the empty tomb and this was a striking find because it's just commonly said that that's that's what led to the the resurrection belief but if you think about it for a second it makes sense that the empty tomb wouldn't make anybody believe if you put somebody in a tomb and three days later you go back and the body is not in the tomb your first thought is not oh he's been exalted to heaven and made the Son of God your first thought is somebody stole the body or somebody moved the body or hey I'm at the wrong tomb if you don't think he's been exalted to heaven and in the New Testament it's striking that in the Gospels the empty leads to confusion but it doesn't lead to belief what leads to belief is that some of the followers of Jesus have visions of him afterwards okay then you question those visions what are your questions about the visions we know a lot about visions from modern research it turns out that about one out of eight people among us has had some kind of visionary experience in which we've seen something that wasn't really there and we're convinced that in fact it was there that's a vision now the way I write my book is that I leave open the question of what caused these visions of the disciples people who were Christian will say the reason the disciples had visions of Jesus after his death is because he was raised from the dead and he appeared to them and so they would call these visions appearances of Jesus non-christians would look at the same information and say the disciples had hallucinations and so I got interested in this question of hallucinations and started to look into it and it turns out that hallucinations are very common among people still today and to the most common kinds of hallucinations are of deceased loved ones and of revered religious figures so in terms of deceased loved ones sometimes somebody will have a vision of his grandmother in his bedroom a couple weeks after his grandmother dies that happens a lot in terms of revered religious figures we have all sorts of documented reports of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to hundreds of people at one time thousands of people at one time and so in my chapter I deal with these incidents of visions that we know about from the modern period and from history and then I point out that a historian as a historian can certainly say that some of Jesus followers had visions of him and that since they had visions of him they thought that he was no longer dead and since they were the kind of Jews who thought that afterlife was lived in the body that it wasn't that your spirit lived on after your body died but that the afterlife was a bodily existence if they thought Jesus was alive again they necessarily thought that he was alive again in his body and this is then what begins the belief in Jesus bodily resurrect you write that the first 20 years after the death of Jesus is particularly significant in perceiving Christ as God what happens during those first 20 years after his death those 20 years are really both really important and really mysterious because we don't have any Christian writings from the period the earliest Christian author we have is the Apostle Paul whose letters were written mainly in the 50s of the Common Era so if Jesus died around the Year 30 and Paul's first letter is around 50 and that's our earliest writing that means that we have a 20-year gap where we have no writings at all by any Christian and so it's a complicated period to study what I argue in my book is that in the New Testament including in the letters of Paul and in the book of Acts for example there are occasional passages that scholars have identified as what they call pre literary traditions what that means is that the the authors are quoting materials that had been in circulation prior to the time of their writing and so they're pre literary and their traditions because they've been floating around for a while what's interesting is when you isolate the pre literary traditions in Paul in the book of Acts that refer to to Jesus and his status as the son of God what these consistently point to is that Jesus became the son of God when God raised him from the dead that it was at the resurrection of Jesus that God made Jesus his son this is what I call an exaltation Christology Christology simply means your view of Christ and then exaltation Christology is one that says that Christ had been a human being and that God had exalted him to a position of divinity the earliest Christians during those first twenty years the very earliest Christians appeared to have thought that that's what happened God raised Jesus from the dead and made him a divine being there's another view of that which is that you know Jesus was always divine that's right and what I try to show in the book is that that's a later you within Christian circles that that the initial view based on these pre literary traditions is that Jesus is exalted to be divine and that as Christians thought about it more and more they they try to put it all together and so the the first Christians as soon as they believe in the resurrection they think God is taking Jesus up into heaven he's made a divine being then they thought well it wasn't just at his resurrection he must have been the son of God during his entire ministry and so Christians then started saying he must have been made the Son of God at his baptism that's a view that you appear to get in the Gospel of Mark which begins with Jesus being baptized and God declaring him his son at the baptism as Christians thought about it more they started thinking well it wasn't just the Son of God during his ministry he must have been the son of God during his entire life and so they started telling stories about how Jesus was born the son of God and so they're developed traditions about Jesus being born of a virgin and so on our Gospels written after Mark Matthew and Luke Jesus mother is a virgin so that he's the son of God from his birth as Christians thought about it more they thought way it wasn't just the Son of God during his life he must have always been the son of God and so then you get to our last gospel the Gospel of John where Jesus is a preexistent divine being who becomes human that point of view I call not an exaltation Christology not going from a human to being made a divine being I call it an incarnation Christology where you start out as a divine being and then temporarily become human and so these are the two fundamental kinds of Christology that you get in the earliest years and exaltation and an incarnation Christology so what were some of the beliefs in ancient times in the times of Christ about divine beings and earthly people and whether they had any interaction at all and you know whether there were divine beings on earth right this is something that is not widely known outside the realms of scholars we today many of us think of Jesus as the only miracle working son of God of the ancient world as it turns out he wasn't the only one there were a lot of individuals in antiquity in greek roman and jewish circles who were thought to be both human and divine there are basically three ways that this could happen you find this in Greek and Roman mythology and you also actually find it in Jewish texts sometimes you have a human being who is a superior human being either unbelievably powerful or beautiful or wise and because of this person's superiority a god or the gods or the God of Israel exalts the person to heaven and makes that person a divine being so the person starts out as a human and becomes divine that's one way that a human can be divine a second way is that sometimes in legend and mythology a divine being will have sex with a mortal and the offspring will be a divine human so that for example that's how that's how Hercules is born Hercules mother is immortal but his father is Jupiter the king of the gods so that's a second way someone born to the union of a divine being an immortal being the third way is that sometimes divine beings can take on human shape and so when Jupiter comes down to get Hercules mother pregnant he comes down in the form of a human and so gods can temporarily become human now these ways of looking at it are found in Greek and Roman mythology but they're also found in Jewish texts the Christians took up all three ways and applied them to Jesus the earliest Christians maintained that Jesus was a human being who has made God a God a divine being later they ended up saying that Jesus was born to the union of God and immortal because the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and that's how she conceived Jesus so Jesus literally had got it as his father and then later Christians started to say that in fact Jesus was a divine being who temporarily became a human being so these three ways of understanding divine humans in the ancient world are picked up by Christians who developed their christologies accordingly so ancient Greeks and Romans believed that there were many gods and that those gods can visit and that some gods actually procreated with humans but at the same time were some people elevated almost to the status of God was I mean was Julius Caesar for instance almost deified yeah it wasn't almost deified he absolutely was deified and his adopted son Caesar who became Caesar Augustus his adopted son Octavius was very much in favor of the decision that in fact Julius Caesar had become a god because if his father had become a god what does that make him he's the son of God and so absolutely figures like Romulus became a God the founder of Rome and other people and then the Roman emperors of course were often said to have become gods either at death or sometimes even during their lives and how did that deification of the emperor fit do you think in how the romans change Christianity when Constantine converted one of the things that struck me in writing this book is I came to realize with the clarity that I hadn't seen before that right at the same time that Christians were calling Jesus God is exactly when Romans started calling their Emperor's God so these Christians were not doing this in a vacuum they were actually doing it in a context and I don't think that this could be an accident that this is the point at which the Emperor's were being called God and so by calling Jesus God in fact it was a competition between your God the Emperor and our God Jesus when Constantine the Emperor then converted to Christianity it changed everything because now rather than the Emperor being God the emperor was the worshipper of the of the God Jesus and that was quite a forceful change and one could argue it changed the understanding of religion and politics for all time so you described how in ancient times Greek and Roman mythology have gods who come to earth they have gods who mate with humans and have offspring and you say that the whole debate over the nature of Christ came to a head in the early fourth century after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity so had it Constantine a Roman emperors conversion to Christianity changed the debate about the nature of Christ's divinity well the conversion of Constantine was is absolutely everything to the success of Christianity but also to this developing idea of of who Jesus was as a divine being and their debates about why Constantine converted to Christianity some people think that he had a genuine religious experience as described in some of the ancient sources others think that it was more of a kind of a cynical political move on his part and my view is that I'm not cynical about it I think Constantine actually had a conversion but there was a political component to it Constantine was ruling over a fragmented Empire and Christianity provided precisely what he needed to to have a kind of cultural unity in his Empire because Christianity emphasized oneness there's only one God there aren't lots of gods as in Roman paganism there's only one God he has one son there's one truth there's one faith one Hope one baptism it's all about oneness and constantine saw this as possibly a unifying factor for his fragmented Empire the problem was that Christianity itself was fragmented over this question of who Christ is is Christ a subordinate divine being who came into existence at some point in the remote past or is Christ fully equal with God and as one who's equal with God has always existed so it may seem like a kind of a refined theological debate but it was splitting the church and Constantine wanted the church to be unified because he wanted the unity of the church to help him unify his empire so and so which side did Constantine come down on Constantine himself didn't really care when when he talks about it he says he thinks it's a trivial theological matter and he doesn't really care but he wants the Christians to work it out he wants he wants them to agree whichever way they go well so he he calls a council were bishops from around the world all together to decide this issue who was Christ everyone at the council agreed that Christ was God the question was in what sense is he God they debated these issues and eventually one side went out the side that went out was the side that said Christ has always been God and he's equal with God he's not a subordinate divinity he's not lesser than God the Father he's actually equal with God the Father and this became then the standard belief from the Council of Nicaea so I'm going to ask a question that I know will strike a lot of people is really stupid so forgive me those people who think that this is stupid um in all these interpretations of Christ's divinity his divinity is connected to the God of the Old Testament yeah so it's it's it's not it's not a stupid question at all it's actually the question because Christians had a dilemma as soon as they declared that Christ was God if Christ is God and God the Father is God doesn't that make two gods and when you throw the Holy Spirit into the mix doesn't that make three gods so aren't Christians polytheists what Christians wanted to insist no their monotheists well if they're monotheists then how can all three be God so there were there are various ways of trying to explain this and one of the most popular ways that I talked about it in a chapter in my book was called modalism it's called modalism because insisted that God existed in three modes just as I myself at the same time am a son and a brother and a father but there's only one of me well these theologians said that's what God is like he's manifest in three persons but there's only one of him so he's at the same time he's Father Son and spirit and so he's in three modes of existence so there's only one of him this view was very popular it was held by some of the early bishops of Rome in other words some of the early popes but it came to be declared a heresy because it didn't emphasize enough the distinctiveness of Father Son and spirit so for example when Jesus in the New Testament praise to God obviously not talking to himself and so there's someone else and so God the Father has to be distinct from God the Son and the the church fathers who argued this have all sorts of clever ways of trying to demonstrate this one of which is if you've got a son that means you're the father but if you're the father you can't be the son to yourself you can't both be and have a son and be one person so this is the controversy that led to the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity the doctrine of the Trinity says that there are three distinct persons they are distinct they're not the same they're all three different persons they are all equally God and yet there's only one God now the best theologians have always classified that as a mystery which means that you can't understand it with your rational mind if you think you do understand it then you misunderstand it but you have the three persons all of them equally God yet there's only one God so I ask this especially for people who aren't Christian what is the Holy Spirit and where does it fit in the Trinity so throughout the Hebrew Bible the Spirit of God appears on occasion including Genesis chapter 1 God creates the heavens and the earth and the Spirit of God hovers over the water so the Spirit of God seems to be something separate from God himself and in the New Testament Jesus talks about when he leaves this earth the Holy Spirit will come as his replacement and so it came to be thought that God existed but the God had a spirit that was a separate being from him and so the Christian theologians in the third and fourth centuries started thinking that this third person was also part of the Godhead so that you had not only God the Father in Heaven and Christ his son on earth but also the spirit who is among his people and so that became part of the doctrine of the Trinity do you see the doctrine of the Trinity as almost being a transition in the Roman world from believing in many gods to monotheism well you know it's it has been seen that way and in the debates over the Trinity when there were people who wanted to insist is that the three persons are all distinct from one another the Christian opponents said your polytheists like the Roman pagans and so the balancing act was very complicated because Christian theologians wanted to insist that the son could not be the father and the spirit was not the father or the son they're all different and yet there's only one God and so they ended up with a paradoxical affirmation that you have one God manifest in three persons the three persons are distinct but they're not different in degree and they're not different in kind they're all equally God but there's only one God and so this ends up then being a paradoxical affirmation your book how Jesus became God is published to coincide with Easter and Easter of course celebrates the resurrection of Jesus something which your book challenges as not having actually happened historically so on the one hand you can argue the timing of this is great it you know continues a debate and a conversation at exactly the right time on the other hand you could say the publication of the book is timed in a very sacrilegious way because it challenges it historically challenges the fundamental or at least a fundamental belief of Christianity how do you feel about the book being published just in time for Easter I think it's important to understand that in this book I actually do not take a stand on either the question of whether Jesus was God or whether he was actually raised from the dead I leave open both questions because those are theological questions based on religious beliefs and I'm writing the book as a historian I'm not allowing my religious beliefs or dis beliefs to affect how I tell the historical story of how Christology developed how Jesus became God and so I leave open the question of whether Jesus was raised from the dead by saying that the reason the disciples believed he was raised from the dead is because they had visions of him believers will say well that's because they Jesus really appeared to them non-christians will say well they're had hallucinations but I leave open both possibilities the same is true with whether Jesus was God I should say I had several of my colleagues read this book to give me suggestions about how to do it these colleagues are all themselves Christian they're Christian scholars and I know one of them for sure if you ask him will say is Jesus God he'll say yes Jesus is God and he doesn't disagree with anything fundamental in this book at all so I leave open the question of whether Jesus is God and opened the question of whether he was raised from the dead because I see those as theological and religious questions whereas I'm interested in the historical questions so I feel very good about this book being released at the time of Easter because I think these are important historical issues of importance of course to Christians and especially at this time of year but important as well to everybody who has any interest at all in Western civilization because this ended up being one of the most important questions for the development of our form of civilization as we've talked about before and fresh air you used to be a Christian a fundamentalist who took the Bible as literal and now you describe yourself as agnostic what meaning does Easter have to you you know I went through a number of stages as a as a Christian I was for a long time I was a very hardcore evangelical Christian problem I guess you would call me a fundamentalist and I thought back then you can prove the resurrection happened historically I had all sorts of historical proofs for it happening I came to think that you know I no longer could do that and I moved from being an evangelical Christian and for many years I was a fairly liberal Christian and for me the meaning of Easter was that in Christ God had manifested himself in this world that Easter showed that God triumphs over evil and that evil doesn't have the last word God has the last word and I still resonate with that but I'm not a believer in God anymore and so what is the meaning of Easter now for me I think Easter continues to show me that there is horrible injustice and oppression and violence in the world but that we should wrestle against it in the Christian story of God raising Jesus from the dead God was saying no to the Roman Empire and the forces that were aligned against him there are political forces in our world today that do horrible things acts of injustice and oppression creating poverty and misery and suffering and I think we should say no to them and so I understand the Easter story not to be a historical event but I still think that it says something very important about how we ought to live in the world so finally did you see the movie Noah I did not are you going to yes I am going to see it I actually enjoy watching biblical epics I teach a course at Chapel Hill called Jesus in scholarship and film where we watch a lot of Jesus movies and I think the Jesus movies have tended to be better than the movies about the Old Testament so I'm a tell me you don't like the Ten Commandments well I'll tell you it has some good moments the parting of the Red Sea is quite spectacular but yeah generally I'm not a huge Charlton Heston fan so but but Russell Crowe I can live with well what's your favorite of the Jesus movies my favorite Jesus movie is one that is not widely seen that is absolutely the best ever made it's called Jesus of Montreal it's fantastic it's about a theatre troupe that puts on a passion play in a Catholic cathedral in Montreal and the events of their lives start reflecting the the events of the Gospel story it's extremely clever and really really very interesting and thought-provoking okay well Bart Ehrman thank you so much for talking with us it's great to talk with you again well thanks for having me Bart Ehrman is a distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill his new book is called how Jesus became God you can read the introduction on our website fresh-air npr.org this is fresh air

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

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Keywords: Terry Gross, Fresh Air, How Jesus Became God, Agnostic, Atheism, Bart Ehrman, Christianity, Jesus Christ (Deity), God (Deity)

Id: Yte-ad6Y31s

Length: 37min 52sec (2272 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 07 2014

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[u/Oedium]

Interestingly, Dr. Ehrman used to hold that only the Gospel of John viewed Jesus as divine, but in the process of research for that book, he changed his position and now affirms that every writer of the gospel viewed Jesus as God, in at least a subordinationalist, if not proto-trinitarian manner.