What is divinity?
What does it mean to be divine?
Is there a pyramid-scale of divine status?
In other words, is divinity like a high school cafeteria with all the cools seniors at one end and the dorky freshmen at the other?
Today I’m continuing the video series on “Why Bart Ehrman is Cheating” in his book How Jesus Became God.
In this 9 minute video I look at how Ehrman talks about “divinity” and how it looks like a high pyramid with the seniors on top and the freshmen on the bottom.
But Ehrman’s view—while getting some things right—distorts the Jewish understanding of God and the spiritual realm.
Enjoy this third video (here are the first and second videos in the series). The transcript is below.
If you are in the process of deconstructing faith, please check out my 5 fundamental shifts to make while deconstructing.
Disrupt the social media algorithms!!!
Sign up for my newsletter and receive the FREE Does God Really Like Me? ebook.
TRANSCRIPT
What does it mean to be divine? What is divinity? And do entities cross between the divine realm and the human realm.
This is the next topic that Bart Ehrman discusses in his book, How Jesus Became God. He talks about the idea of the divine realm, and who is in it, and whether can humans be elevated or exalted into the divine realm.
In other words, we’re gonna talk about the divine realm & the high school cafeteria.
So first, we are going to look at what Ehrman claims about the divine, and how he is kinda right.
Second, we will look at how he ignores a key distinction that makes his claims totally wrong (the creator-creation distinction).
As always, I’ll be asking whether it is true that early followers of Jesus cheated by later claiming Jesus was God (as Ehrman claims), or whether Ehrman is cheating with the evidence to make it look that way.
Ehrman is right. Kinda.
Ehrman want us to think of the divine realm as a pyramid, as a hierarchy. Think of High School. At the top, you have the seniors, and at the bottom are the freshman. And everyone else in-between. But they are all in high school.
Us Westerners do need to rethink the divine realm. Ehrman notes that we think of God as up there, in heaven, the divine realm, and us humans down here—and there is nothing in between.
But in the ancient world, and much of the non-western world today, things are not so nice and tidy. The divine realm, or the spiritual world, is full of entities, of spiritual beings, of many gods of different powers.
And the gods occasionally became human, or at least pretended to be human to do different things, sometimes to help humans, sometimes to have sex, sometimes to just mess with us.
Just read the Homer’s Odyssey and see all the interactions between gods and humans, and lesser gods and greater gods.
And in ancient Rome, we also know that sometimes humans were promoted into this divine realm. The emperor, the Caesar, was revered as a god, was acknowledge as a god.
Caesar is like the really, really cool freshman that got invited to eat with the seniors for lunch.
So Ehrman suggests, if we see that someone like Caesar could be exalted to divine status, why couldn’t Christians also do that with Jesus.
But, you might be thinking, Jesus, and his followers were Jewish, not Greek. So we can’t rely on what those pagans thought about the divine realm, about this divine pyramid, this high school hierarchy.
AND YOU’D BE CORRECT.
And that’s why Ehrman turns to a Jewish understanding of the divine realm.
In short, he paints a very similar picture of a many tiered reality of divine beings with God at the top. And not only that, but Ehrman offers evidence that humans also entered the divine realm in some writings, people like Enoch, Abraham, and Moses, and maybe even the kings of Israel were thought to be like God—in a sense.
All this adds up to…
It isn’t really cheating at all for early followers of Jesus to exalt a merely human to divine status, because Greeks and Jews were already doing.
It’s not cheating if everyone is doing it right?
WRONG!
Because Ehrman is cheating when it comes to the divine realm.
He makes it seem like the Jewish God is just on top of the divine pyramid—not just the senior, but maybe the football star, the homecoming king.
But Ehrman forgets or ignores a KEY distinction, a KEY idea.
This is the creator-created distinction.
God, for Israel, was the creator of everything—everything in the visible, human realm, and everything in the divine or spiritual realm.
And the creator alone is to be worshipped, and nothing in creation is to be worshipped.
Ehram sees Israel’s God as the top of the class, but part of the same hierarchy as all the other gods. And in this view, it is possible to think that Jews could see Jesus as entering into this class, this high school hierarchy, because it was no big deal.
Ehrman is arguing that Jewish monotheism wasn’t as exclusive as it sometimes seemed, but maybe there was room for a different kind of divine being, and underclassman of sorts.
But this is exactly not the case for Judaism.
God is not one being in a class of other gods. God is not part of the upperclass in High School, and really the prom king, football star, and class president all rolled into one.
Israel’s God was the creator. Without him there would be no senior class, no homecoming, not football team, no student body. There would be no school and no one to go to school. There would be nothing.
God is not in or on the pyramid of divinity.
God is something altogether different.
Who is really cheating?
So it is NOT the case that early followers of Jesus cheated by exalting him to divine status just like everyone did with Caesar, and that it was no big deal because there are lots of levels to divinity and Jesus can just fit somewhere on there.
No, Ehrman is cheating by conflating the Jewish view of God with a more pagan view by ignoring the creator-created distinction.
As we will see over and over, it was a gigantic step for Jewish followers of Jesus to think or claim that Jesus was God. So the reasons for doing so would have to be extremely compelling.
Ehrman starts off by moving the goal posts and making it seem that it wasn’t a big problem for Jews to claim that a human, creatures, is God.
On To Jesus
Did early followers of Jesus think Jesus was God because Jesus claimed to be, or just because they put words in his mouth later.
That’s what we’ll look at next time.
Please like, subscribe, and share this—and check out all Grassroots Christianity is doing.