Chapter 15

The Resurrection: From the Messiah to the Son of God

In This Chapter

● Listening to the stories of the risen Jesus

● Taking away meaning from the resurrection stories

● Fighting about the nature of Jesus in the early church

Most people’s biographies end with their deaths. Had Jesus of Nazareth’s story ended this way, his relatives and friends may have remembered him for a couple of generations as a great teacher and miracle worker who died a noble death. No gospels would have been written, no Christian religion would have developed, and world history would probably look a whole lot different.

In Jesus’s case, an event after his death so stunned his frightened followers that they emerged from hiding to spread the word that he had risen from the dead and was alive in a new way. They couldn’t describe clearly what they had experienced, and their stories didn’t completely match up. However, they traveled far and wide — and many of them later died — to share this good news with the world.

In this chapter, you explore the reports of Jesus’s resurrection and trace its impact on the followers he left behind. You also discover the low and high Christologies that the New Testament authors developed, follow these Christologies as Greco-Roman philosophy transformed them, and enter the Christian debates over just who this Christ was.

The Resurrection: Raising Problems for Historians

The story of Jesus’s resurrection is the core of Christian faith, but it poses problems for historians. For instance:

● The resurrection itself is never narrated. But, I don’t expect that it would help if it was recorded. After all, historians are pretty skeptical of miracles (see Chapter 12).

● When stories are told of an empty tomb or resurrection appearances, they all differ from each other and reflect experiences of the transcendent that are difficult to understand and impossible to test.

● The early Christians readily admit that the only witnesses are those who already believed in Jesus (Acts 10:41). The exceptions are Paul and possibly Jesus’s brother James (see 1 Corinthians 15:7-8 and John 7:5).

● Early Christians also make no bones about the fact that Christian belief depends on an incredible story and their ineloquent testimony (1 Corinthians 1:18-25; 15; John 20:29).

Yet here’s the conundrum for historians: There’s no feature of the Jesus story that satisfies so many of the criteria of historicity (which I cover in Chapter 3). Consider the following:

● It’s traced to many eyewitnesses. Paul, for example, claims more than 515 eyewitnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

● It’s embarrassing (consider the divergent stories and women as witnesses, for example).

● It’s an early tradition on which all the other traditions in the gospels are predicated (no one would have bothered to write gospels if the resurrection hadn’t occurred).

● It’s reported in multiple, independent sources (Paul, Mark, John, and possibly Q 11:29-30, 32).

● It’s discontinuous with Jewish beliefs about resurrection because, as far as we know, no one had ever claimed that someone had actually risen, that this proved the person’s unique status, and that this resurrection had something to offer everyone (namely, that if they believed in it, they too would rise). Early Christians had to pour tremendous energy into understanding it themselves.

● It’s coherent not so much with the historical details of Jesus’s life, but with the rise of early Christianity.

Because the story satisfies so many of the criteria of historicity, it seems that something must have happened. But what exactly happened, and what it meant or means, can’t be pinned down so easily. All that a historian can do is explore the changing shape of Christian beliefs in the various communities that believed in the risen Jesus, which is what you discover in the rest of this chapter.

Telling the Stories of Jesus's Resurrection

Stories of Jesus’s resurrection found their way into the letters of the apostle Paul in the mid-first century CE and into the gospel accounts 20 to 40 years later. In these early sources, the authors report that Jesus rose “on the third day” and that he appeared to various people. To this narrative tradition, Paul adds his teaching about the significance of this event for Christian believers. This message is the core of early Christian preaching because the resurrection is the core of Christian faith.

Paul's letters: Reporting the resurrection first

The earliest reports of the resurrection come from Paul’s letters. His earliest references are pretty brief (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 and 4:13-14, c. 51 CE; Galatians 1:1, c. 54 CE). The most extensive account is in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 (c. 56 CE):

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], and then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, from whom most remain until now, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James [the brother of Jesus], and then to all the apostles. Last of all, as though to a miscarriage, he appeared also to me.

—1 Corinthians 15:3-8

Because Paul refers in 1 Corinthians to a tradition about the resurrection that he received from the other followers of Jesus, this resurrection tradition predates him and may go back to his first visits with the companions of Jesus in the late 30s and early 40s CE (Galatians 1:13-24; Acts 7:54-8:3; 9:1-30). Paul tells us little about the historical Jesus apart from this tradition (see only 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Romans 1:3; 9:5; 2 Corinthians 5:16). Clearly, the resurrection is, in his view, the most important aspect of the Christian proclamation (1 Corinthians 15:14-20).

Which Christian holiday is more important, Christmas or Easter?

The massive marketing blitz and gift-buying frenzy that rev up every November and December lead many people to think that Christmas is the most important holiday for Christians. But the traditions of the Easter celebration run longer and deeper, tracing back to the earliest days when Christians began gathering to eat the Lord's Supper (see Chapter 14).

The first evidence for an annual Easter holiday is the mid-second century CE, when a debate broke out among Christians about how closely to follow the Jewish calendar. Should the celebration occur on the first day of Passover, which can fall on any day of the week, or on the following Sunday, after the resurrection day in the gospels? The question wasn't settled until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Since then, however, Western and Eastern Orthodox Christians have developed different practices. All Christians celebrate Easter on or after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, but they all use different calendars that calculate the Spring Equinox and the moons differently.

The name Easter, which is used in English-and German-speaking countries, is taken from a pre-Christian spring festival for Eostur, the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of the Dawn (Venerable Bede, On the Reckoning of Time 15).

The first evidence of Christian celebrations for Christ's birth comes from Clement of Alexandria in about 200 CE, but he finds the custom strange; it seems he found it more reasonable to try to calculate the year of Jesus's birth given the limited gospel evidence (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 1.21). Jesus's birth doesn't become a common tradition celebrated around the Winter Solstice until the fourth century CE.

The gospels and The Acts of the Apostles: Developing stories of the empty tomb

The gospel narratives expand on the resurrection proclamation by supplying stories of what the first eyewitnesses actually saw. The gospels all agree on the following details:

● Jesus died on the cross, and female disciples (Mary Magdalene’s name is constant) were there to testify to it (Mark 15:37-41; Matthew 27:50-56; Luke 23:46-49; John 19:25-30).

● Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea on the eve of the Sabbath (Mark 15:42-47; Matthew 27:57-61; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42). Mark says that Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish assembly composed of the high priest and other leading priests and Sadducees).

Luke follows that tradition, but Matthew simply says that Joseph was a rich man. Both Luke and John report that he was a disciple of Jesus.

● Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty on the first day of the week, after the Sabbath had ended. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, she’s with some other women who have come to anoint the body (Mark 16:1-8; Matthew 28:1-8; Luke 24:1-11). In John’s gospel, she comes to the tomb alone (John 20:1-2).

● The risen body of Jesus is real but different. He eats and bears the wounds of his crucifixion, but he can also appear suddenly and pass through locked doors. He isn’t a ghost, but he isn’t immediately recognizable, either.

● Jesus isn’t a zombie. Far from a reanimated corpse enslaved to some malignant master, Jesus’s flesh has been transformed and his power unleashed.

Apart from these elements, the accounts in the four gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles differ.

Mark 16:1-8: The dead end that grows

In Mark, female disciples find the stone rolled away from Jesus’s tomb, and then they see a young man dressed in white, who tells them that Jesus has risen and is heading to the Galilee (Mark 8:31; 9:9, 31; 10:34; 14:28). The man commissions the women to report Jesus’s status to the disciples and Peter. Their response? The women flee from the tomb astonished and are too terrified to tell anyone anything. That’s where the earliest manuscripts of Mark’s gospel end! This ending doesn’t make any sense; if the women never told anyone about their experiences, how does Mark know the story? In fact, the ending was so unsatisfactory that later editors came along and tacked on two new endings, the so-called “longer ending” (Mark 16:9-20) and “shorter ending” (no verse numbers).

Matthew 28:1-20: Obeying the man in white

In Matthew’s story, Mark’s young man in white descends from heaven with an accompanying earthquake and rolls back the stone before the very eyes of Mary Magdalene and the other women. Taking a seat on the stone, the man invites the women to see for themselves that the tomb is empty (the Roman guards who are posted to prevent Christians from stealing the body see the divine messenger too, and in a nice bit of gospel irony become “like dead men”). The man commissions the women to tell the disciples what has become of Jesus. Unlike in Mark’s original story, the women in Matthew’s story go tell the disciples, and they also meet Jesus along the way. Jesus appears to the disciples on a mountain in the Galilee and promises to be with them perpetually, sounding the note of “God with us,” which is heard in the gospel’s opening scene (Matthew 1:23).

Luke 24:1-53: Breaking bread and opening the Bible

In Luke’s version of the resurrection story, Mary Magdalene and several other women (at least five) enter the empty tomb and are puzzled over the missing body. Two men in dazzling clothes appear to announce that Jesus is raised. They also remind the women of Jesus’s prophecies to that effect. The women rush to tell the eleven disciples, who promptly dismiss the report as idle chatter (Luke won’t tell the story of Judas’s death until Acts 1:18, but in the gospel there are only eleven of the original Twelve at this meeting). Peter rushes to the tomb and finds it empty. Luke then provides two extensive appearance stories:

● The first of these appearances came to two grieving disciples on the road to Emmaus. The disciples don’t recognize Jesus until he breaks bread with them, which recalls the Last Supper.

● The second appearance came to the other disciples back in Jerusalem. The disciples think that they’re seeing a ghost, so Jesus invites them to look at his hands and feet (presumably because they bear the wounds from crucifixion). Then he eats some baked fish with them.

In both of these appearance stories, Jesus interprets the books of the law, prophets, and psalms to show why his suffering had been necessary. Finally, Luke recounts how Jesus ascends to heaven from Bethany, at which point the appearances — and the gospel — stop.

Acts 1:1-12: Seeing proof and hearing a heavenly voice

In Luke’s second volume, The Acts of the Apostles, he says that Jesus offered “many proofs” over a 40-day period, appearing to his disciples and speaking about the kingdom of God before ascending again to heaven. (He doesn’t retell the story of the empty tomb in this book because he’s already covered that in his gospel.) Paul also has an experience of the risen Jesus, but because it’s postascension, the experience is usually called a heavenly vision rather than a resurrection appearance (Acts 26:14-19; for Paul’s version of this event, see 1 Corinthians 15:8 and possibly 2 Corinthians 12:1-7). Later in the Jerusalem Temple, Paul has an ecstatic experience in which he both hears and sees Jesus (Acts 22:18).

John 20:1-21:25: Encountering Jesus in the garden

In John’s resurrection story, Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty, and being distraught, she runs to tell the other disciples. Peter and the “beloved disciple” race to the tomb. They both see the burial cloths, but only the beloved disciple believes that Jesus has risen.

Then Mary, who’s weeping nearby, sees two angels dressed in white who ask her why she’s weeping. Jesus then does the same, but she mistakes him for the gardener until he calls her name. He appears to the other disciples in the room where they’re gathered, despite the locked doors, and breathes the Holy Spirit on them. Thomas misses the event and doesn’t believe until he can examine Jesus’s wounds with his own fingers (a chance he gets a week later).

John also includes a final story about Jesus’s appearance to seven disciples who are at the Sea of Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee). While in the Galilee, there’s a miraculous catch of fish and Jesus eats breakfast with them. Peter also gets a second chance to prove that he loves Jesus after having denied him three times after Jesus’s arrest.

Comparing the gospels to Paul’s letters

Compared to Paul’s letters (which I cover earlier in this chapter), some differences exist between the resurrection traditions:

● Paul never mentions an empty tomb or the women’s witness. Are these facts missing because they didn’t happen, because they weren’t shared with him, or because they didn’t matter?

● Paul mentions more recipients of appearances, particularly James the brother of Jesus. However, the gospels don’t mention James at all (they only cite appearances to the women, the eleven surviving members of the Twelve, and unnamed other disciples). The gospel of the Hebrews does, although it only survives in snippets quoted by other people.

Scholars think that this is because Paul lived in the first generation, when an experience of the risen Jesus granted a follower a sort of higher status (see Acts 1:21-22; 1 Corinthians 9:1-2; 15:5-9). A few decades later when the gospels were written, most of those eyewitnesses had died, and their relative status had changed as the Christian movement developed (hence James isn’t mentioned in the gospel resurrection scenes at all).

Taking Meaning from the Stories of the Resurrection

All the reports about Jesus’s resurrection and the preaching and gospel narratives in which they’re couched are written decades after the event itself. So, they mix early testimony with later reflection on the event. In the following sections, I tease out those reflections to

uncover what the early Christians thought the resurrection meant. I also show how they tied the resurrection to Jewish scriptures, how it informed their views of Jesus’s identity, message, and death, and how it shaped their hope for the end-times.

Connecting the resurrection to Jewish scripture

In 1 Corinthians, Paul proclaims “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). What he means is that the crucifixion of the messiah would sound pretty odd to just about everyone (as it does to Jews in Acts 2:13 and to Greeks in Acts 17:32). In fact, several stumbling blocks would have stopped the Jews from believing in a crucified messiah, including the following:

● The messiah was supposed to succeed. Instead of succeeding, Jesus was crucified as a criminal by the very power that a kingly messiah was supposed to overthrow.

● The messiah was supposed to usher in the messianic age.

When the messiah returned, evil and suffering were supposed to end, once and for all. But in Jesus’s case, the world pretty much went on as usual, with all its injustices and suffering.

● The messiah was supposed to be embraced by his own people. Although all of Jesus’s followers were Jews and the crowds hoped in him, Jesus was rejected by the leaders and never accepted by the whole people.

These notions about the messiah were rooted in Jewish scripture. The Jews who followed Jesus were firmly convinced that he was the messiah; for them, his resurrection was the ultimate vindication. But if these folks were going to preach to their fellow Jews, they had to overcome the stumbling blocks by mining scripture on every point (see Chapter 14 for scriptural allusions in the passion narratives). As a result of their work, they came up with the following solutions:

● The messiah hadn’t failed. Jesus’s resurrection establishes his victory over death and evil; he was indeed a king, and he would return to complete the victory. There was precedent for a suffering servant in scripture (the four oracles in Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-7; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12; though admittedly, this prophecy wasn’t about a suffering messiah). There was also a precedent for the resurrection in the story of Jonah: “Just as Jonah was in the belly of the sea monster for three days and three nights, so will the son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights” (Matthew 12:39-41 and 16:4 II Luke 11:29-30, 32; Mark 8:11-12; Jonah 2:1).

● The messianic age had dawned. The people Jesus healed, along with his own resurrection, demonstrate and offer “a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). Evil, death, and corruption no longer hold him (see Peter’s and Paul’s speeches in Acts 2:24-31; 13:29-39; Psalm 16:8-11; Isaiah 55:3). So, the completion of the messianic age would come soon, when Jesus returned (see the nearby sidebar “The rapture and the end-time script”).

● The messiah’s rejection was anticipated, just like the prophets’ rejection before him was. So, the gospel was to be taken to the Gentiles (Mark 12:1-12; Q 11:47-51; 14:15-24).

Explaining why the resurrection matters

For Paul, Jesus’s resurrection redeems the humiliation of the cross.

It gives this central symbol of shame a new purpose and power. In fact, it’s as if the cross, with its innocent victim, is a gigantic sin magnet, drawing all the curses of human sin to itself so that they can be wiped clean by God. For Paul, this is the really good news. And he couldn’t be clearer that it depends entirely on the resurrection:

. . . [If] Christ was not raised, then our proclamation is empty; empty, too, your faith . . . [If] Christ was not raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins . . . If in this life alone we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

—1 Corinthians 15:14, 17, 19-20

In the gospels, the resurrection is the climax of the story. But more than that, it represents Jesus’s vindication. Throughout the plot of the gospel, Jesus is tested and his identity is questioned by the characters in the story. At the end, he’s killed for claiming an identity too close to God’s (see Chapter 14 for a historical evaluation of that charge). For the gospel authors, the resurrection proves once and for all that Jesus was right, that he was innocent, and that he enjoys a special relationship with God that extends to believers (Mark 8:31-38; John 11:25-26).

It’s the resurrection that indicates that there was a purpose to the suffering and death of Jesus. It’s the resurrection also that encouraged early Christians to believe that they too would rise. And it’s the resurrection that quickened the Christian belief that Jesus was more than a man or a messiah. If God had saved Jesus from death itself, Jesus had a unique relationship to God indeed.

Giving names to Jesus

The resurrection led Jesus’s followers to believe not only that he had a unique relationship to God, but also that he was superior to other luminaries like King David and the angels (Psalm 110 is interpreted to this end in 1 Corinthians 15:25; Matthew 22:41-46; Acts 2:29-36; Hebrews 1:13; 10:13). These folks developed titles for Jesus to reflect their beliefs. The titles people developed reflected their Christology, or view of Jesus as the Christ or messiah. Christological views can be arrayed on a continuum between the following two types:

The rapture and the end-time script

The gospels, Paul, and the book of Revelation provide a "script" for the end-times that has remained popular to this day. Paul says:

"For the Lord himself, with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet blast of God, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we the living, who are left behind, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. In this way we will always be with the Lord. So console one another with these words" (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18).

When Paul's original Greek was translated into Latin, the Greek word for "caught up" was translated with the Latin verb rapiemur, meaning to be seized, snatched, or torn away. This translation gave rise to the term "rapture" for the general resurrection of the living. In Paul's gospel, the rapture is simultaneous with the end, and it's a consoling word for the faithful. But in the book of Revelation and in the readings of some Christian groups, it isn't exactly the last moment in the end-time script. The following elaborate sequence of end-time events was developed:

● First coming of Christ: The gospels narrate this event.

● Tribulation: This event includes wars, natural disasters, the persecution of believers, and the rise of false prophets and messiahs; meanwhile, the gospel spreads to all nations (Mark 13:7-23; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-7; Revelation 2:10; 7:14).

● Rapture: The gospels don't mention this event. For Paul, it seems to be the general resurrection of believers (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18). Some Christians think that the rapture will happen before the tribulation (Revelation 12:5).

● Millennium: The millennium, or the 1,000-year reign of Christ, isn't mentioned in the gospels or in Paul. In Revelation 20, the millennium seems to split the period of tribulation. Today, some Christians, called premillennialists, believe this event is inaugurated by the second coming, but others, called postmillen-nialistsand amillennialists, associate it with the Church's work on earth.

● Second coming, final judgment: Revelation expands on the gospel vision of a coming son of man and a final judgment by adding a final defeat of Satan and a vision of the new Jerusalem (Revelation 20:7-22:5). Some Christians place the second coming earlier in the script, but they keep the judgment at the end.

● Low Christological views: Many of the titles used for Jesus in the New Testament are the sort of names you might use for any person. They reflect a low Christology, or, in other words, a way of talking about Christ that emphasizes his human nature.

● High Christological views: These titles reflect the postresurrection view that Jesus is more than a human appointed by God for a specific mission. These titles demonstrate a high Christology, meaning a perspective that emphasizes Jesus’s unique status tending toward the view that Jesus is divine.

Table 15-1 lays out the low Christological titles on the left, the high Christological titles on the right, and those that merge features of both in the middle. After each title is a rough count of how many times that title occurs in the New Testament. This is just a rough grid; in practice, each title was understood in a variety of ways.

Table 15-1 The Titles of Jesus in the New Testament
Low Christology	Mixed Use	High Christology
Son of Man (84)	Messiah/Christ (527)	Lamb of God/Lamb of Passover (38)
Rabbi/Teacher (61)	Lord (516)	Savior (23)
Son of David (32)	Son of God (54)	Word of God (4)
Prophet (21)	King of ages, King of kings (41)	God (3)
Jesus of Nazareth/ Nazarene (20)	High Priest (15)	Apostle (with the meaning "the one sent from God") (2)
King of the Jews (17)	Mediator (6)	Chosen One (2)
Master (13)	New Adam (6)	Immanuel (God with us) (1)
Son of Joseph (4)

Out of all the titles that Jesus maintains, the only one that the historical Jesus may have used of himself besides “Jesus” or “son of Joseph” was “Son of Man.” Scholars think that Jesus may have used this title because it’s his regular form of self-reference in the earliest gospel, Mark, and because it was a common term synonymous with “human being.” At times, it looks like that’s all that the gospel authors mean by it too (for example, Mark 8:31; Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58). But at other points, the gospel authors follow the book of Daniel, and apply the title “Son of Man” to Jesus as a kind of heavenly figure who will come to rule the world (Q 17:24; Mark 8:38; 13:26; in Daniel 7:13-14, this figure isn’t an individual but rather the glorified people of Israel).

Two titles emerge as clear favorites — “Messiah/Christ” and “Lord.” “Lord” was a term used for human masters or superiors and also for God. The title “Messiah” or “Christ” was reserved for a designated human agent of God who would restore the kingdom, the Temple, or the world in a definitive way. Because Jesus hadn’t done this — or at least had not completed it — some of his followers apparently thought that his status as messiah would begin when he returned (see Acts 3:20-22). But most other followers christened him “Christ” in the interim so that already in Paul’s letter to the Romans “Christ” sounds like his proper name (Romans 9:5). This title is so characteristic of the early believers that within a generation they are already being called Christians themselves.

The title “Son of God” or references to Jesus as God’s son don’t necessarily imply divinity, because they had been used of Israel’s kings (Psalm 2:7-9) and of the whole people in Israel before (Exodus 4:22; Deuteronomy 1:31; 8:5; Psalm 82:6). But as Christianity developed, Christians redefined titles like “Son of Man” and “Son of God” to describe Jesus’s unique relationship to God (1 Thessalonians 1:10; Romans 1:3-4; Hebrews 2:6-9; John 5:17-29; 10:30-39; Revelation 14:14-16). In some groups, the notion develops quite early that this Son was with God but subordinate to God even before his earthly life (Philippians 2:6; John 1:1-14).

John’s gospel, which calls Jesus “the Son of God,” “the preexistent Word,” and even “God,” adds to these high Christological titles a whole bunch of additional and colorful metaphors, including

● Lamb of God (John 1:29, 36)

● Bread of Life (John 6:35)

● Light of the World (John 8:12)

● Good Shepherd (John 10:11)

● Resurrection (John 11:25)

● Vine (John 15:1)

John’s unique terms reveal a common characteristic of all these titles in the New Testament: Their meanings depend on their authors’ changing understandings of who Jesus is.

Battling over Jesus in the Early Church

Christians have never unanimously agreed about who Jesus was. From the beginning, Christians had many witnesses, competing memories, and different viewpoints, and that diversity only increased as Christianity spread into the Greek-speaking world.

Getting a grip on Greco-Roman beliefs

The increasing number of Gentile converts came to the Christian community with their own assumptions about heaven and earth and the nature of the gods (Gentiles are non-Jews). These differing assumptions posed challenges and created opportunities for the early Christian leaders (as you discover later in this chapter).

Making humans divine

The Greeks and Romans had a long tradition of worshipping many gods and heroes. It was commonplace in their lore to find ancient heroes who had undergone an apotheosis, or deification, after their lives (these two words both mean “to become divine”). In those days, some heroes had unusual births, too. For example, some were born to divine mothers and human fathers, such as Achilles, Persephone, and Aeneas, and others were the children of divine fathers and human mothers, such as Hercules, Perseus, and Plato. This tradition extended to some rulers as well, notably Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar.

The stories of divine conception and apotheosis helped to explain the superior accomplishments of a person by allowing people to imagine that these godlike folks had an infusion of supernatural power or spirit. In the case of living or recent figures, such as Alexander and Augustus, the stories promoted the veneration that they and their heirs believed they deserved for the benefits that they brought to the people.

These traditions of heroic men becoming divine influenced how the gospel authors conveyed the significance of their hero, Jesus. You see this most clearly in the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, where Jesus is conceived with the intervention of God and divine signs accompany his birth. After all, nothing says “divine” like a miraculous birth! In early Christianity, Jesus is venerated for the benefits he was thought to bring, much as these other heroes were.

Speculating divine hierarchies

Many Greeks and Romans believed in multiple gods, as the temples scattered around the Mediterranean region attest. But the Greek and Roman philosophers had shifted toward a hierarchy that suggested a single prefect being at the source of divine power. For the fourth century BCE Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, for example, this god and the lesser deities beneath it were eternal, so they couldn’t be born. Also, they had no need for sex, food, or sleep, and they couldn’t be injured.

By the time of Jesus, there were several different philosophies that were popular in the Mediterranean world. For example, consider the views of the following two prominent groups:

● The Middle Platonists: This group viewed God as a kind of fullness that overflowed into the world of matter. The highest or purest form of God was eternal, unchangeable, and rational, and the Middle Platonists referred to this being as the supreme God or simply “the Good.” This supreme God, or rather the mind or reason of this God (called the Logos or “Word”), overflowed into the realm of matter, creating an ordered cosmos. Humans are part of the cosmos, embodying a bit of the divine by virtue of their “reason” or “spirit,” but also composed of matter. In this system, matter is passive and subject to change, while God is active and changeless. So, if people wanted to be like God, they had to resist the pull of matter and cultivate the capacity for reason instead.

● The Stoics: These folks considered the Logos the supreme God rather than a sort of secondary deity, and they imagined this God to be a being that was very much involved in the world. The goal of the Stoics was to live in agreement with nature. They were more optimistic than the Middle Platonists that human reason could govern the body, and they advocated a disciplined lifestyle to keep the mind in top form.

The ideas of the Middle Platonists and the Stoics had little impact on the historical Jesus, as far as we can tell. But they would have an impact on how Jesus came to be understood in the Greco-Roman world (see the next section).

Fitting Jesus into Greco-Roman thinking

In order to make the Christian message intelligible for the Gentiles, Christian preachers and teachers had to translate their ideas about their risen messiah into the local lingo of Greeks and Romans. Paul admitted how difficult this translation could be when he called the Christ crucified “foolishness” to the Gentiles.

In principle, especially in the Roman system, there was often room in the pantheon for new gods. And the Greeks and Romans both had some experience with divinized men (as I explain earlier in this chapter). But Christians were claiming something else: They claimed that the risen Christ rose bodily, that a risen body and divine being were both present in him, and that his followers had seen him (not merely visions of him, but him) after he rose. It’s no wonder that the Athenian philosophers laughed Paul right off the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34).

The Greco-Roman philosophical categories of divine and human, or spirit and matter, resisted the fusion that Christian belief made. In their eyes, God was perfect, unchanging, and eternal, but humans were subject to change and death. Gods didn’t eat, drink, or sleep, but Jesus did. Jesus’s death and the fact that he ate, drank, and slept, is no problem if you’re talking about the historical Jesus, but it is a problem if you’re trying to convince an educated person in second century Alexandria that this Jesus was and is the son of God. The following sections discuss different groups of Christians that tried to define Jesus’s human and divine nature in the Greco-Roman categories they had inherited.

The apologists: Introducing Logos Christology

Christianity attracted educated men, and these men began to frame Christian beliefs in philosophical terms. These scholar-pastors were called apologists (“defenders” or “advocates” of a teaching). They acknowledged that the Bible often spoke of the divine “in language unworthy of God.” Convinced that the Bible was God’s word, they presumed deeper meanings were embedded there that they could tease out, and they used philosophy to do it. They had to go beyond the Bible to make the case for Christ.

The first thing the apologists had to work out was Jesus’s relationship with God. They were monotheists, so the last thing they wanted to do was imply that Jesus was a second god, or that the Holy Spirit was a third. They had to maintain the unity of God and the diversity within God (Jesus’s divinity) at the same time.

Middle Platonism (see the earlier section “Speculating divine hierarchies”) offered an available resource to solve the problem. Here was a system with one Supreme God who “gave off” or emanated reason. This reason, or Logos, was one with God but also interfaced with the world. Several Christian apologists like Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 CE) began to work up a “Logos Christology,” a high Christological view that saw Christ as this emanation or Word of God. In fact, John’s gospel was already starting to go in this direction in the late first century (see John 1:1-18).

The apologists were “translating” the Christian message into terms that made sense to other educated persons, and this attracted more people from those classes to the Christian faith (although it also drew scorn from others).

Pushing back to protect divine transcendence: Marcion and the Docetists

Some Christians shared the view of the apologists that God and Christ were related, but they took that relationship in another direction. They didn’t like the Logos Christology because it wasn’t “high” enough. In their view, it didn’t make Christ seem Godlike enough. Marcion of Sinope (c. 110-160 CE) and a group called the Docetists both believed this, but they focused on different things.

Marcion thought that the God of the Jewish scriptures was unworthy of being called “God” at all. After all, this God, the “Logos,” had created the material world and acted unworthily in the Bible. For Marcion, Jesus was superior to the Logos because he came directly from the Supreme God and revealed that God to the world for the first time through his superior teaching. Marcion jettisoned all the Jewish scriptures because he thought they came from the Logos, and then he stripped every reference to those scriptures from the Christian books as well. As a result, his Bible was pretty small.

Other teachers, troubled by the notion that the Supreme God would require the shameful suffering and death that Jesus endured, couldn’t imagine that Christ actually became human at all. If he truly was an emanation of the Supreme God, he couldn’t eat, drink, suffer, or die. It was a generous act of divine mercy to make him seem or appear human so that people could comprehend him, but he wasn’t actually human at all. This docetic Christology (from doked, or “to seem or appear”) was popular in many circles.

Hammering out an orthodox teaching

Some of the Christian bishops and leaders in the first couple of centuries, who were apologists in their own right, rejected the negative views of Jewish scripture and the material world that Marcion and the docetists presumed (see the preceding section). So, they countered by stating more clearly who they thought Christ was, and then they confidently labeled their teaching orthodox (“right opinion” or “right teaching”). But even among these orthodox leaders, some sticking points still remained. One of the toughest, for example, was that Christians had to figure out how to talk about the unity and diversity within God, and especially about the relationship between God the Father and Jesus Christ the son. They worked these issues out over a couple of centuries of debates as they tackled particular questions about Jesus.

Defining degrees of divinity

One of the most intractable points among Christian believers was the relationship of God and Christ; here, the Logos Christology (which I cover earlier in this chapter) was as much a part of the problem as it was a part of the solution. A lot of people felt that the two beings still sounded like two separate gods, so they insisted that the Supreme God — not some subsidiary emanation — was incarnate in Christ (although they differed among themselves in exactly how this worked). These folks were called the Monarchians.

Others, like Tertullian of Carthage (155-230 CE), countered that this theory would mean that God suffered, which they couldn’t accept. So, Tertullian and others like him began to speak of a single God who expressed himself in three ways (father, son, and spirit), and of a Christ who was one person, but two substances (flesh and spirit, or human and divine).

Arius (c. 250-336 CE), who granted that Christ the Logos was divine, doubted that he was of the same degree of divinity as the Supreme God. Because the Christ was begotten of God, and God isn’t begotten, Arius reasoned that Christ couldn’t be God (clear as mud, right?). In other words, this wasn’t a case of low Christology, but a case of not-quite-high-enough Christology. Arius thought Christ was divine, just not as divine as the Supreme God.

Settling on substance: The Council of Nicaea

Something had to be done to settle the situation among the competing groups of Christian believers. The first step was to sort out the relationship of God the Father, Jesus Christ the son, and the Holy Spirit. So, a council of Christian bishops was called in 325 CE at the Emperor Constantine’s palace in the Turkish town of Nicaea. At this council, the bishops settled on the formula that Christ was “of the same substance as the Father.” Some folks attempted to change the language later, but the “same substance” language was ratified in the Nicene Creed in 381 CE. This creed remains the doctrine in most Christian denominations today.

Examining the Christological conflicts

The Council of Nicaea may have sorted out Jesus’s relationship to God the Father and to the Holy Spirit, but it left some unanswered questions about Jesus himself.

For instance, the Nicene Creed stated that Christ was two natures and one person. For some believers, however, that didn’t keep God and man separate enough. In the early 400s CE, Nestorius, the Patriarch in Constantinople, said that Christ was two natures and two persons, the divine Logos and the man Jesus. He thought that

Mary bore the man Jesus, but not the divine part of him, and so he rejected Mary’s title of Theotokos, or God-bearer.

Some Christians rebuffed Nestorius’s position at the Council of Ephesus in 431. But his position remains the belief of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Assyrian/East Syrian Church. Some denominations of these churches, like the Chaldean Catholics (in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon) have changed their beliefs and are now in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Other Christians took the opposite position to correct Nestorius. If Nestorius laid the emphasis on two persons and so risked dividing Christ, the Monophysites countered that Christ wasn’t just one person but also one undivided nature (monophysis literally means “one undivided nature”). There were a couple of different versions of this Christology. One said that Jesus’s human nature was basically obliterated in his divinity (this view is called Eutychianism). Another Christology held that Jesus kept a human body and soul, but his human mind was overtaken by the divine Logos (this view is called Apollinarianism).

Monophysite teachings were condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. The council taught that Jesus Christ was and is truly God and truly man, and that these natures remain distinct despite the union of them in one person. This dyophysite, or “two-natures” position is the faith of the Eastern Orthodox denomination, the Roman Catholic denomination, and most Protestant denominations today.

The majority position wasn’t unanimous, however. The Oriental Orthodox Churches rejected Chalcedon. They agreed that there were two natures, but they felt that these natures were united not in one person but in one nature. They prefer to call their position miaphysite, or “one nature,” rather than monophysite. This way they indicate that they agree with the two-natures notion to a degree.

The following modern-day churches adhere to this doctrine:

● The Armenian Apostolic Church

● The British Orthodox Church of the UK

● The Coptic Orthodox Church

● The French Orthodox Church in France

● The Indian Orthodox Church

● The Syriac (or Syrian) Orthodox Church