How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (3 page)

At the end of his life Apollonius was brought up on charges before the emperor Domitian. Among other things, he was accused of receiving the worship that is due only to the gods. Again, the parallels to the story of Jesus are patent: he too was brought before officials (in his case, the leaders of the Jews and then the Roman governor Pilate) and was said to have entertained exalted views of himself, calling himself the Son of God and the king of the Jews. In both cases the officials were persuaded that these claims of self-exaltation were a threat to the well-being of the state, and for both men, readers were assured that in fact these self-claims were completely justified.

Philostratus indicates that there were different reports of Apollonius’s “death.” In one version he is said to have died on the island of Crete. He had allegedly gone to a sanctuary dedicated to a local god that was guarded by a group of vicious watchdogs. But rather than raising a ruckus, the dogs greeted Apollonius in a friendly manner. The sanctuary officials discovered him and placed him in chains, thinking he must have used sorcery to get by the dogs. But at midnight Apollonius set himself free, calling to the jailers to watch what was to happen next. He ran up to the doors of the sanctuary, which flew open of their own accord. He then entered the sanctuary, the doors shut by themselves, and from inside the (otherwise empty) sanctuary were heard the voices of girls singing: “Proceed from earth! Proceed to heaven! Proceed!” Apollonius was being told, in other words, to ascend to the realm of the gods. He evidently did so, as he was no more to be found on earth. Here again, the parallels to the stories of Jesus are clear: at the end of his life Jesus caused a disturbance in a temple, he was arrested and brought up on charges, and after leaving this earthly realm he ascended to heaven, where he continues to live.

As a philosopher Apollonius taught that the human soul is immortal; the flesh may die, but the person lives on. Not everyone believed him. But after he departed to heaven he appeared in a vision to a follower who doubted him. Apollonius convinced this follower that he was still alive and was still present among them. Jesus too, of course, appeared to his disciples after his resurrection and convinced them, including doubting Thomas, of his ongoing reality and life in heaven.

Modern scholars have debated the significance of the obvious connections between Jesus and Apollonius, but it is not merely a recent debate. In the early fourth century
CE
, a pagan author named Hierocles wrote a book called
The Lover of Truth
that contained a comparison between these two alleged Sons of God and celebrated the superiority of the pagan version. We no longer have the book in its entirety. But some years after it was written, it was explicitly refuted in the writings of the fourth-century church father Eusebius—sometimes known as the “father of church history” because he was the first to produce a history of Christianity from the time of Jesus up to his own day. Another of Eusebius’s books was directed against Hierocles and his celebration of Apollonius. Luckily for us latter-day readers, Eusebius quotes in places the actual words of his opponent. Near the outset of his book, for example, Hierocles wrote:

In their anxiety to exalt Jesus, they run up and down prating of how he made the blind to see and worked certain other miracles of the kind. . . . Let us note, however, how much better and more sensible is the view which we take of such matters, and explain the conception which we entertain of men gifted with remarkable powers. . . . During the reign of Nero there flourished Apollonius of Tyana . . . [who] worked any number of miracles, of which I will omit the greater number and only mention a few. (
Life of Apollonius
2)
²

Hierocles mocks the Gospels of the New Testament, as they contain tales of Jesus that were “vamped up by Peter and Paul and a few others of the kind—men who were liars and devoid of education and wizards.” Reports about Apollonius, on the other hand, were written by highly educated authors (not lower-class peasants) and eyewitnesses to the things they saw. Because of his magnificent life, and the manner of his “death”—as “he went to heaven in his physical body accompanied by the gods”—“we must surely class the man among the gods.” The Christian Eusebius’s response was direct and vitriolic. Apollonius was not divine, but evil; he was not a son of God, but a man empowered by a demon.

If this little debate is looked at from a historical perspective, there can be little doubt that Eusebius ended up winning. But that would not have been a foregone conclusion when Hierocles wrote his book, before Christianity had become more powerful. Apollonius and Jesus were seen as competitors for divine honors: one a pagan worshiper of many gods, the other a Jewish worshiper of the one God; one a promoter of pagan philosophy, the other the founder of the Christian religion. Both of them were declared to be God on earth, even though they both were also, obviously, human. In a sense, they were thought of as divine men.
³

What is striking is that they were not the only two. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that people know about today, there were lots of people like this in the ancient world. We should not think of Jesus as “unique,” if by that term we mean that he was the only one “like that”—that is, a human who was far above and very different from the rest of us mere mortals, a man who was also in some sense divine. There were numerous divine humans in antiquity. As will become clear, I’m not dealing with whether or not they were
really
divine; I’m saying that’s how they were
understood
. Recognizing how this could be so is the first step in seeing how Jesus came to be thought of in these terms. But as we will see, Jesus was not originally thought of in this way—any more than Apollonius was during his lifetime. It was only after his death that the man Jesus came to be thought of as God on earth. How did that happen? The place to start is with an understanding of how other humans came to be considered divine in the ancient world.

C
HRISTIANITY AROSE IN THE
Roman empire immediately after the death of Jesus around the year 30
CE
. The eastern half of the empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture—so much so that the common language of the eastern empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written, was Greek. And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds. Jews of the time had many distinctive views of their own (see the next chapter), but in many key respects of concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors. This is important to know because Jesus himself was a Jew, as were his immediate followers—including the ones who first proclaimed that he was not a mere mortal, but was actually God.

But how was it possible for God, or a god, to become, or to appear to become, a human? We have seen one way with Apollonius of Tyana. In his case, his mother was told before his birth that he would be the incarnation—the “coming in the flesh”—of a preexistent divine being, the god Proteus. This is very similar to later theological interpretation of Jesus—that he was God who became incarnate by being born of his mother Mary. I don’t know of any other cases in ancient Greek or Roman thought of this kind of “god-man,” where an already existing divine being is said to be born of a mortal woman. But there are other conceptions that are
close
to this view, and here we consider three of them.

One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43
BCE
–17
CE
). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume
Metamorphoses
, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.

One of the most intriguing tales found in Ovid involves two elderly peasants, Philemon and Baucis, who live in Phrygia (a region of what is now Turkey). In this short account, the gods Jupiter and Mercury are traveling in the region disguised as mortals. Despite coming to a thousand homes, they can find no one who will take them in to give them a meal and allow them to rest. They finally happen upon the poor cottage of Philemon and Baucis, who bear their poverty well, “thinking it no shame.” The elderly couple bid the visitors welcome, invite them into their poor home, prepare for them the best meal they can, and bathe their weary feet with warm water. In response, the grateful gods ensure that the wine bowl is never empty; as much as they all drink, it remains full.

Then the gods make their announcement: “We two are gods.”
⁴
In response to their treatment in Phrygia, the gods declare:

           
This wicked neighborhood shall pay

           
Just punishment; but to you there shall be given

           
Exemption from this evil.

Jupiter asks the couple what they most desire. After they talk it over, Philemon tells the king of the gods that he and his wife want to be made priests who will guard the gods’ shrine, and when it is time for them to die, they want to die together:

           
Since in concord we have spent our years
,

           
Grant that the selfsame hour may take us both,

           
That I my consort’s tomb may never see,

           
Nor may it fall to her to bury me.

Jupiter grants their wishes. The neighborhood is destroyed. The shrine appears, and Philemon and Baucis become its guardians. When it comes time for them to die, the two are simultaneously turned into two trees that grow from one trunk, so that just as they had long harmonious lives as a couple, so they are joined in death. Later worshipers at the shrine not only acknowledge the ongoing “life” of the pair, but they also believe that the two have in effect been divinized and deserve to be worshiped:

           
They now are gods, who served the Gods;

           
To them who worship gave is worship given.

This beautiful and moving tale of love in life and death is also a tale of gods who temporarily become—or appear to become—human, and humans who become gods. When Philemon and Baucis are worshiped as gods, it is not because they are now as mighty as great Jupiter and Mercury. They are thought of as very low-level divinities, mortals who have been elevated to the divine plane. But divine they are. This is a key and important lesson for us. Divinity came in many shapes and sizes; the divine realm had many levels.

Today, we think of the realm of divinity, the realm of God, as completely Other and separate from our human realm. God is up there in heaven, we are down here on earth, and there is an infinite gulf between us. But most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way. The divine realm had numerous strata. Some gods were greater, one might say “more divine,” than others, and humans sometimes could be elevated to the ranks of those gods. Moreover, the gods themselves could and occasionally did come down to spend time with us mere mortals. When they did so, it could lead to interesting or even disastrous consequences, as the inhospitable inhabitants of Phrygia learned to their great discomfort.

The lesson was not lost on later inhabitants of the region, as we learn from the pages of the New Testament itself. In the book of Acts we have an account of the Apostle Paul on a missionary journey with his companion Barnabas in this same region, visiting the town of Lystra (Acts 14:8–18). Paul sees a man who is crippled, and through the power of God he heals him. The crowds who have seen this miracle draw what for them is the natural conclusion: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men” (Acts 14:11). It is striking that they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul—the one who has been doing all the talking—Hermes. These identifications are no accident. Zeus was the Greek counterpart of the Roman Jupiter, and Hermes was the counterpart of Mercury. The people in Lystra know the tale of Philemon and Baucis and think that the two gods have appeared once again in their midst. So convinced are they of this that the local priest of Zeus brings out oxen and garlands to offer sacrifices to the two apostles, who have a very difficult time persuading everyone that they are only human, “of like nature with you.” Paul uses the occasion, as was his wont, to preach his gospel message in order to convert the people. Even so, not everyone was convinced: “With these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them” (14:18).

It is no wonder these worshipers of Zeus at Lystra were so eager to recognize that the gods temporarily become human among them; they remembered well what happened another time they refused to offer worship where worship was due. Whether the story in Acts is a historical recollection of Paul’s missionary activities or simply an intriguing legend that sprang up in later times (like the story of Philemon and Baucis itself) is immaterial for our consideration here: in the Roman world it was widely thought that gods could take on human guise, such that some of the people one might meet on occasion may well indeed be divine. The ancient Greek and Roman mythologies are full of such stories.

Even though Apollonius was understood to be a preexistent god come in the flesh, this was not the normal Greek or Roman way of understanding how a divine human could be born of a mortal. By far the more common view was that a divine being came into the world—not having existed before birth—because a god had sex with a human, and the offspring then was in some sense divine. In Greek myths it was Zeus who most frequently engaged in these morally dubious activities, coming down from heaven and having a rather exotic sexual encounter with an attractive woman he had to have, which led to a highly unusual pregnancy. But tales of Zeus and his mortal lovers were not simply a matter of entertaining mythology. Sometimes such tales were told of actual historical figures, such as Alexander the Great (356–323
BCE
).