…while
working on this book [How Jesus Became God], Ehrman
arrived at a dramatic about-face on fundamental issues relating to the
Christian religion. Ehrman had previously assumed that the deification of Jesus
did not take place until some six decades after his Crucifixion, around the
years 90 or 95. Ehrman now acknowledges that Jesus’ followers — the inner
circle who knew him personally — came to believe he was divine almost
immediately after they became convinced of his Resurrection, a historical
revision that moves up the timeline by several generations. – Huffington
Post article
Professor Bart Ehrman’s new
book How
Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee hit the
shelves and online bookstores yesterday. It will no doubt quickly become a favorite
resource for Muslim apologists who swoon over all things Ehrman, even though it
is also bound to upset a number of the oft-refuted theories many Muslims still tenaciously
and errantly cling to, such as the idea that unitarianism was the rule rather
than the exception among ancient monotheistic Jews, or that the deity of Christ
originated among the Gentile churches of Antioch (ala Wilhelm Bousset), or with the apostle Paul (ala James Tabor), or that it didn’t come
along until late in the first century (ala
James Dunn), or that it wasn’t invented until the time of the Nicene council (ala Geza Vermes), etc. [Nota Bene: While unbelieving scholars are largely in agreement on
the negative conclusion they want to
reach here, i.e. Jesus is not God and Savior, they do not now and never have
represented a united front against orthodox Christianity in terms of the
premises or facts they believe justify or conduct them to the desired
conclusion. As well, neither now nor ever have unbelieving scholars been in agreement
on the positive conclusions they
reach concerning who Jesus was, with some saying he was a disillusioned
apocalytpicist, or a failed revolutionary, or “Elijah, or John the Baptist
brought back from the dead, or one of the prophets of old,” and so on ad infinitum.]
As the quote from the
Huffington post article says above, this represents a dramatic reversal on
Ehrman’s part, and, we might add, and as the above evinces, puts him at odds
with a number of other liberal scholars who are looked upon as heroes by their indiscriminating
Muslim acolytes. Ehrman’s new view also puts him much closer, at least in terms
of the time line on the origin of belief in the deity of Christ, to the views
of scholars like Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and Martin Hengel, all of
whom have argued strenuously and cogently for early High Christology.
Ehrman does of course employ
a number of strategies to avoid the most natural conclusion that follows from
admitting that Jews were not monolithically unitarian, and that belief in the
deity of Christ originated early with those who knew Jesus’ personally and
intimately. But for the most part these strategies are not at all new and have
received responses that are more than adequate, which makes the most
interesting aspects of the book those places where Ehrman, as a high profile representative
of that segment of critical scholarship that is animated by the spirit
anti-Christ (1 John 2:18ff., 4:1ff.; 2 John 1:7), changes his own previously held position and gives up precious
ground naively thought by some to be securely in the possession of
non-Christians. To say the least, Ehrman’s admissions will be of considerable
interest to Christians, and they will be useful for putting in check overly
selective uses of Ehrman on the part of Muslims (and others) that are bound to
follow the publication of this book.
For those who are interested
in learning more about how Ehrman’s new book ends up being a boon in certain
ways to Christianity and how it is utterly destructive of Islamic pretensions
to having the truth about Jesus, I will begin posting a series of articles on
this tomorrow evening from Sam Shamoun, if the Lord Jesus wills it.
Also, if you are interested
in pursuing this topic in more depth, a book length reply has already been
written by Christian scholars: How
God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature---A
Response to Bart Ehrman.
In the meantime, here is Rob
Bowman’s initial brief review of both of these books.
