How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (38 page)

Christianity has long been an exclusivistic religion—meaning that historically, a person who chose to be a follower of Christ could not also be a Muslim or a Hindu or a pagan. And this exclusivism does not merely keep a person from being a Christian and something else; it also keeps a person from being a different kind of Christian with a different kind of Christian belief. As it turns out, there are many different kinds of Christians, some of whom claim that if you do not adopt their particular version of the faith, you cannot be saved. I know of some Baptist churches that insist that if you are not baptized in
their
Baptist church, you are lost. Being baptized in some other Baptist church is not good enough—let alone in a Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or other kind of church. With hard-core conservative forms of Christianity like this, it is obviously not a matter of taking the “wager” and choosing between just two options. There are tons of options, any one of which might be “right.”

This stress within Christianity that there is a right view and lots of wrong views; that the wrong views are found not only outside Christianity, but also inside it; and that wrong views could lead a person straight to the depths of hell, is not simply a modern invention. It goes back to the early years of the church. It was certainly in place in the second and third Christian centuries. By that time it had become exceedingly easy to castigate anyone as a “heretic” for holding to an alternative way of looking at God, and Christ, and salvation. Deciding who was right and who was wrong, and what views were true and what views were false, became an overpowering concern among the Christian leaders. This is because many Christians after the New Testament period had come to think that Christ was the only way of gaining salvation. Moreover, this salvation came only by having the correct understanding about God, Christ, salvation, and so on. For that reason, discerning right and wrong beliefs—ascertaining what was “orthodox” (right) and “heretical” (false)—became an obsession of many of the leaders of the early church.

T
HERE WERE NUMEROUS VIEWS
of Christ throughout the second and third Christian centuries. Some of Jesus’s followers thought he was a human but was not (by nature) divine; others thought he was divine but not a human; others thought he was two different beings, one human and one divine; yet others—the side that “won” these debates—maintained that he was human and divine at one and the same time and yet was one being, not two. These debates, however, need to be placed in their broader context. For Christians were arguing not simply about the identity and nature of Christ, but about all sorts of other theological issues that were circulating at the time.

There were debates about God, for example. Some Christians maintained that there was only one God. Others argued that there were two Gods—that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of Jesus. Yet others argued that there were twelve gods, or thirty-six gods, or even 365 gods. How could someone with those views even be Christian? Why didn’t they simply read their New Testament and see that they were wrong? The answer, of course, is that the New Testament did not yet exist. To be sure, all of the books that were later collected and placed in the New Testament and deemed, then, to be holy scripture were in existence. But so were lots of other books—other Gospels, epistles, and apocalypses, for example—all of them claiming to be written by the apostles of Jesus and claiming to represent the “true” view of the faith. What we think of as the twenty-seven books of “the” New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.
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There were other wide-ranging debates as well. Was the Hebrew Bible—the Jewish scriptures—part of the revelation of the true God? Or was it simply a sacred book of the Jews, of no relevance for Christians? Or even more extreme, was it authored by a lower, malevolent deity?

What about the world we live in? Was it the creation of the one true God? Or was it the inferior creation of the God of the Jews (who was not the God of the Christians)? Or was it a cosmic disaster and inherently evil?

The reason most Christians today would have no trouble answering any of these questions is that one perspective from early Christianity emerged as triumphant in the debates over what to believe and how to live. This is the side that insisted that there was only one true God; he had created the world, called the Jews to be his people, and given them his scriptures. The world had been created good, but it had become corrupt because of sin. Eventually, though, God would redeem the world and all of his true followers in it. This redemption would come through his Son, Jesus Christ, who was both God and human at one and the same time, the one who died for the salvation of all who believe in him.

That this view would emerge as triumphant was not at all a foregone conclusion in the early Christian centuries. But triumph it did, and it became the dominant Christian belief until now. Here, I focus on the debates concerning the views of Christ, especially as he was regarded as God.

Scholars often describe these theological debates as struggles between “orthodoxy” and “heresy.” These are rather tricky terms, in no small measure because what they literally mean is not how they are used by historians who are today engaged in the study. Literally, the word
orthodoxy
means
right belief.
The word
heresy
literally means a
choice
—that is, a choice not to believe the “right belief.” A synonym for heresy is
heterodoxy
, which literally means
different belief
—that is, different from the belief that is “right.” The reason historians do not use these terms according to their literal meanings is that historians are not theologians (or if they are theologians, they are not practicing theology when they are writing history). A theologian may be able to tell you what the “right” thing to believe is, and what “wrong” things should not be believed. But the historian has no access—as a historian—to theological truth or to what is “right” in the eyes of God. The historian has access only to historical events. And so the historian can describe how some early Christians thought there was only one God and others thought there were two, or twelve, or thirty-six, or 365; but the historian cannot say that one of these groups was actually “right.”

Still, historians do continue to use the terms
orthodoxy
,
heresy
, and
heterodoxy
to describe the early struggles over truth. This is not because historians know which side, ultimately, was right, but because they know which side, ultimately, prevailed. The side that eventually won the most converts and decided what Christians should believe is called “orthodox,” because it established itself as the dominant view and thus
declared
it was right. A “heresy” or a “heterodoxy,” from a modern historical perspective, is simply a view that lost the debate.

I stress this point because if, in this chapter, I describe a view as orthodox or as heretical, I’m not making a claim about what I think is true and right or false and wrong. I’m referring instead to a position that either came to dominate the tradition or lost the battle.

This chapter is mainly about the views that lost and came to be declared heresies; the next chapter explores those that won and came to be declared orthodox. I begin with three heretical views that were decisively ruled out of bounds by the emerging orthodox opinion. These views can be set out as three contrasting ways of understanding Christ. Some Christians denied that Christ was God by nature; for them, he was “only” a human who was adopted to be divine. Others denied that Christ could be human by nature; for them, he only “appeared” to be a man. Yet others denied that Jesus Christ was a single being; for them, he was two separate beings, one human and one divine. All three of these views ended up being theological “dead ends.” A lot of people went down these paths, but they eventually led nowhere.
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O
NE OF THE MOST
interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy and heresy is the fact that views that were originally considered “right” eventually came to be thought of as “wrong”; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of the first heretical view of Christ—the view that denies his divinity. As we saw in Chapter 6, the very first Christians held to exaltation Christologies which maintained that the man Jesus (who was nothing more than a man) had been exalted to the status and authority of God. The earliest Christians thought that this happened at his resurrection; eventually, some Christians came to believe it happened at his baptism. Both views came to be regarded as heretical by the second century
CE
, when it was widely held that whatever else one might say about Christ, it was clear that he was God by nature and always had been. It is not that the second-century “heresy-hunters” among the Christian authors attacked the original Christians for these views. Instead, they attacked the people of their own day for holding them; and in their attacks they more or less “rewrote history,” by claiming that such views had never been held by the apostles at the beginning or by the majority of Christians ever. They were instead innovations that needed to be trounced and rejected by all true believers.

Several groups in the second Christian century appear to have held on to the very ancient understanding of Christ as a human being who had been adopted by God at his baptism. It is unfortunate that we do not have writings from any of these groups that lay out their views in detail. Instead, for the most part, all we have are the writings of the Christian authors—usually “heresy-hunters,” known to scholars as
heresiologists
—who opposed them. It is always difficult to reconstruct a group’s views if all you have are writings by their enemies who are bound and determined to attack them. But sometimes that is all we have, and such is the case here. Scholars have long known that it is necessary to take the heresiologists’ claims with a pound of salt. But even so, it does seem plausible in this case that some Christians continued to hold the views ascribed to them by their enemies. One such group has been known as the Ebionites.

The Ebionites are attacked by a number of our heresiologists, including one we will have occasion to discuss at greater length, a church leader in Rome from the early third century named Hippolytus. Throughout our sources the Ebionites are portrayed as Jewish Christians—that is, Christians who continued to think it was necessary for the followers of Jesus to keep the Jewish law and Jewish customs, that is, to retain (or acquire) a Jewish identity. There was a certain logic to this view: if Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law, then it makes sense that he embraced a Jewish religion and that to be his follower a person needs to be Jewish. But as Christianity increasingly became gentile (non-Jewish), it also makes sense that it eventually departed from its Jewish roots and came to oppose key aspects of Judaism, as we will see at greater length in the epilogue.

Some scholars have maintained that the Ebionites could trace their theological lineage back to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish believers who congregated in Jerusalem in the years after Jesus’s death around the leadership of his brother James. In terms of their Christological views, the Ebionites do indeed appear to have subscribed to the perspective of the first Christians. According to Hippolytus, in his lengthy book
Refutation of All Heresies
, the Ebionites maintained that they could be made right with God, or “justified,” by keeping the Jewish law, just as Jesus himself was “justified by fulfilling the law.” Being made right with God, then, was a matter of following Christ’s example, and anyone who did so also became a “Christ.” In this view, Christ was not different “by nature” from everyone else. He was simply a very righteous man. Or as Hippolytus puts it, the Ebionites “assert that our Lord Himself was a man in a like sense with all (the rest of the human family)” (
Refutation
22).
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In the opinion of Hippolytus and his orthodox peers, nothing could be farther from the truth. For them, Christ was God—not because he was exalted to a divine status, but because he was a preexistent divine being who had always been with God and was equal with God, even before he was born.

Another group that held to such “adoptionist” views—the view that Christ was not by nature divine but was adopted to be God’s son—emerged not out of Jewish Christianity, but from purely gentile stock. This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder, a shoemaker, who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus. Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists.

The followers of Theodotus did think that Christ was unlike other humans in that he was born of a virgin mother (and so they may have accepted either the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke as scripture). But other than that, as Hippolytus tells us, for them “Jesus was a (mere) man” (
Refutation
23). Since Jesus was unusually righteous, at his baptism something special happened: the Spirit of God came upon him, giving him the power to do his great miraculous deeds. As Hippolytus presents it, the Theodotians were split among themselves concerning Jesus’s relationship to God: some of them maintained that Jesus was a “mere man” who was empowered by the Spirit he received at the baptism; others apparently believed that at that point Jesus became divine; yet others maintained that “he was made God after the resurrection from the dead” (
Refutation
23).

The longest refutation of the Theodotians’ perspective comes in the writings of Eusebius, whom we have already met as the “father of church history.” As happens so frequently throughout his ten-volume work on the history of the church, Eusebius quotes at length an earlier writing that attacks a heretical view, without, however, indicating who the author was. A later church father called the writing in question “The Little Labyrinth” and indicated that it was produced by the great theologian Origen, whose own Christological views I will discuss below. As it turns out, some modern scholars have argued that it was instead written by Hippolytus. In either event, this source appears to have been written in the early third century, and it is directed against the adoptionists who maintained that “the Savior was merely human.”