Consisting roughly of 50% good scholarship and 50% question begging, Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God is a great popular level look into how liberal scholars deal with the history of the early church. I would recommend this book to orthodox Christians who are stable in their faith and willing to do their homework in responding to these arguments. One gets a sense of how non-Christian scholars handle Scripture, and also how their presuppositions determine their conclusions. It’s also useful for engaging with Muslim apologists, many of whom accept Ehrman’s skepticism of the New Testament documents uncritically. This book is helpful to that end since Ehrman disagrees with the Muslim view of the crucifixion (most Muslims believe that Jesus wasn’t actually crucified) and poo-poos popular Muslim reconstructions of the New Testament period. Finally, Ehrman gives us a great example of the fallacious reasoning characteristic of the emotional anti-Christian when he engages in speculation that the cause of Christian anti-semitism is the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, whom they charged the Jewish people with killing.
Most illuminating is Ehrman’s admission that he had in previous years used circular reasoning when looking at passages where Paul clearly referred to Jesus as divine and pre-existent. When interpreting these passages as a younger agnostic, he saw them through his presupposition that the early church’s beliefs about Jesus evolved from seeing him as a prophet exalted by God to God incarnate. Since, according to Ehrman, the earliest gospel (Mark) expresses the former view and the last (John) the latter, and Paul’s letters were written before either, it simply couldn’t be the case that Paul thought of Jesus as a divine person incarnate:
“…in some passages Paul seems to affirm a view of Christ that, until recently, I thought could not possibly exist as early as Paul’s letters, which are our first Christian writings to survive. How could Paul embrace ‘higher’ views of Christ than those found in later writings such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Didn’t Christology develop from a ‘low’ Christology to a ‘high’ Christology over time? And if so, shouldn’t the views of the Synoptic Gospels be “higher” than the views of Paul?” (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).
A key example of this reasoning is in Ehrman’s discussion of Romans 9:5, a passage which seems to explicitly call Jesus God but which more liberal translators have reworked to avoid this conclusion. Ehrman admits:
“My view for many years was that the second translation [the liberal one] was the right one and that the passage does not call Jesus God. My main reason for thinking so, though, was that I did not think that Paul ever called Jesus God anywhere else, so he probably wouldn’t do so here. But that, of course, is circular reasoning, and I think the first translation makes the best sense of the Greek, as other scholars have vigorously argued” (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).
Here Ehrman admits that he was reading his beliefs into the text instead of translating it accurately. Even so, it wasn’t until Ehrman found another way to understand Jesus being thought of by Paul as divine–that of not being absolutely divine but a divine-like angelic creation–that he was willing to consider the plain reading. As long as Paul doesn’t have a full-fledged orthodox Christology, Ehrman is willing to make some concessions on his extreme evolutionary view of Christological development. Ehrman’s admission of his own self-delusion is commendable, but it also demonstrates how bias can affect how one reads Scripture, and that it affects liberals just as much as it does conservatives. Unfortunately, Ehrman appears to still be under the sway of his faulty presuppositions. Also of note is Ehrman’s claim that one cannot do history if that one is willing to accept supernatural occurrences as possible. I would recommend Eddy and Boyd’s The Jesus Legend for a counterpoint to Ehrman’s naturalistic philosophy of history.
Apart from Ehrman’s strong belief that Jesus was crucified, he says other things that strongly counter the way many Muslim apologists argue in regard to early Christianity. Where many of these Muslim apologists (and, frankly, ignorant anti-Christians of all stripes) argue that the Council of Nicea was forced by Constantine to conclude that Jesus was God and that still it was a close vote, Ehrman argues quite the opposite:
“To Constantine, the issues seemed petty. What does it really matter whether there was a time before which Christ existed? Is that really the most important thing? Not for Constantine. As he says in his letter: ‘I considered the origin and occasion for these things . . . as extremely trivial and quite unworthy of so much controversy’ (Life 2.68)” (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).
“Sometimes you will hear that at Nicea it was ‘a close vote.’ It was not close. Only twenty of the 318 bishops disagreed with the creed when it was finally formulated. Constantine, who was actively involved with some of the proceedings, forced seventeen of those twenty to acquiesce. So only three did not eventually sign off on the creed: Arius himself and two bishops from his home country of Libya. These three were banished from Egypt. A couple of other bishops signed the creed but refused to agree to the anathemas at the end, which were directed specifically against Arius’s teachings. These bishops too were exiled” (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).
Thus, while Constantine was happy to view the council’s decision as binding, he did not particularly care what they decided.
Another strange feature of this book is Ehrman’s assertion that belief in Jesus as God is the cause of Christian anti-semitism, since it was believed that “the Jews” killed not just a prophet, but God Himself. However, countless Christians who profess belief in Jesus’ divinity do not think Jews should be oppressed or blamed as a race for the death of Jesus, including the Jews who made up all of the earliest Christian church. Jews were oppressed by pagan empires long before Christianity arose, and have been oppressed by non-Christian states long after, including in the atheistic Soviet Union. While the charge of deicide may have been used as an excuse to oppress Jews from time to time, the root issue in Christian oppression is not one of whether Jesus is seen as God, but of the Christian faith’s relationship to the state and to violence. This misguided and perhaps even malicious conflation of the Church and the State’s violent prerogatives comes out of an ignorance of Jesus’ teaching on these matters.