He also spends a fair amount of time explaining why it is impossible for historians to validate miracles, a person's divinity or specific religious events like Christ's resurrection. He looks at how this type of change happened in Greek and Roman culture, in Jewish culture, and how Paul and later disciples of Christ were influential in transforming their crucified prophet into their risen Lord. He examines the exaltation of Jesus from an apocalyptic preacher from Galilee into a figure fully equal with God. The book basically explores how the crucified Jesus transformed into not just the Messiah, but the Lord of all creation. Revelation 3:16 'How Jesus Became God' is a good packaging of current scholarship on the historical Jesus for the neophyte. 'So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth'.

Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.Īs a historian - not a believer - Ehrman answers the questions: How did this transformation of Jesus occur? How did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? The dramatic shifts throughout history reveal not only why Jesus's followers began to claim he was God, but also how they came to understand this claim in so many different ways.

Only when some of Jesus's followers had visions of him after his death - alive again - did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. Ehrman explores how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty Creator of all things.Įhrman sketches Jesus's transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. In an audiobook that took eight years to research and write, leading Bible scholar Bart D.

Ehrman how jesus became god