Epigraph

The originator of the heavens and the earth! How can He have a son when He has no consort, and He has created everything and has full knowledge of all things? (Al Quran 6:101)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD

Introduction

This article, in a way, could be considered a commentary of all the verses of the Quran that negate the divinity of Jesus, his literal sonship and trinity.

Bart D. Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee traces the historical development of Christian beliefs about Jesus’s divinity from Jesus’s lifetime up through the early Church councils. Ehrman, a New Testament historian, approaches the topic not as theology but as history: how did a lowly Jewish apocalyptic preacher executed by Rome come to be worshiped as God? The book proceeds chapter by chapter through the historical and cultural context, the New Testament evidence, and the ensuing theological debates. Ehrman’s thesis is that the idea of Jesus’s divinity evolved over time – it was not a claim Jesus himself unequivocally made, but a belief generated by his followers in the aftermath of his death, growing more exalted with each passing decade archive.org archive.org. By the fourth century, this belief had transformed dramatically from its first-century origins archive.org. In what follows, this summary reviews each chapter’s key arguments, evidence, and conclusions, then synthesizes the major themes and scholarly insights Ehrman provides.

Chapter 1: Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

In Chapter 1, Ehrman sets the stage by surveying how the divine and human realms were understood in the Greco-Roman world. Ancient people did not draw a strict line between gods and mortals. Instead, they envisioned a continuum or hierarchy of divine beings, semi-divine heroes, and extraordinary humans archive.org. It was not uncommon in antiquity to believe that a human could become a god or that a god could temporarily appear as human. Ehrman vividly illustrates this porous boundary with the story of Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century pagan holy man whose biography strikingly parallels Jesus’s. According to the account by Philostratus, Apollonius was miraculously born (his mother was visited by a heavenly figure announcing her child would be divine), performed miracles like healing the sick and raising the dead, and after his death appeared to his followers to prove he still lived archive.org archive.org. The reader is initially led to think this is Jesus, but Ehrman reveals it is Apollonius, whose devotees indeed revered him as a divine man or son of God archive.org. Apollonius, like Jesus, had posthumous appearances and a devoted following; in fact, some later Romans (including Emperor Caracalla) even worshiped Apollonius and dedicated shrines to him, treating him as a god archive.org. Ehrman’s point is that stories of humans being exalted to divine status were “in the air” in the Roman Empire – the concept of a human becoming god was culturally intelligible, not anathema, to ancient pagansstr.org.

Ehrman surveys other examples of this divine-human continuum in Greek and Roman thought. Heroes and rulers could be elevated to divine status. For instance, after the legendary founder Romulus vanished, one of his followers (Julius Proculus) testified that Romulus had been taken up to heaven and was now a god – paving the way for Romulus’s worship by the Romans archive.org. In historical times, Julius Caesar was posthumously deified by vote of the Roman Senate (a comet seen after his death was hailed as his divine soul ascending) archive.org. His adopted son Octavian (Augustus) then adopted the title Divi Filius, “Son of (a) God,” while still alive, and he too was hailed as a living god in parts of the Empire archive.org. Roman emperors after Augustus were routinely elevated to divine status upon death (and sometimes even before). Moreover, many pagans believed certain remarkable individuals had divine parentage. It was rumored, for example, that Alexander the Great was the son of Zeus, or that the philosopher Plato was begotten by Apollo – exceptional persons were thought to have a god as one parent archive.org. In Greek mythology, gods frequently mated with humans, producing demi-god offspring like Hercules. In sum, the Greco-Roman world had many gradations of divinity: from great heroes and kings regarded as sons of gods, up to the high God (Jupiter/Zeus) at the apex archive.org archive.org. A human could ascend the divine pyramid by various means – by apotheosis (being taken up to heaven and deified, like Romulus or Caesar), by divine birth, or by incarnation (a god appearing in human form).

Ehrman emphasizes that this cultural milieu made it conceivable for Jesus’s followers to think of him as divine. To illustrate, he draws a parallel: Roman apotheosis (a person elevated to godhood after death) is analogous to the early Christian claim that Jesus was taken up to heaven and exalted as Lord after his death archive.org. Similarly, pagan tales of gods having children with mortal women provide a loose parallel to later Christian claims of Jesus’s miraculous conception (though without literal sexual union in the Christian story) archive.org archive.org. In fact, as Ehrman notes, the author of Luke’s Gospel probably invokes such a notion in a sanctified form: Mary is told that God’s Holy Spirit will “come upon” her so that her child will be the Son of God – a description that would remind gentile readers of Zeus impregnating a woman, yet Luke carefully avoids any crass imagery archive.org. The key takeaway from Chapter 1 is that the idea of a “God-man” was not alien in the ancient context. There were many precedents of humans being worshiped as gods or of gods condescending to appear human str.org. This historical context primes the reader to understand how Jesus’s divinization could be conceived as plausible by his followers and early converts.

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