How Jesus Became God

The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. Leading Bible scholar and historical Jesus expert, Bart Ehrman, reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state come to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty Creator of all things. But how did this transformation of Jesus occur? How did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God?

Jesus, for his immediate followers during his life was very human indeed - a teacher, rabbi, even prophet, but born like everyone else. Raised in Nazareth, not spectacular as a youth, but convinced that he was living at the end of the age, Jesus felt a call to proclaim a message of coming destruction, that God would soon intervene in history and overthrow the forces of evil to bring in a good kingdom on earth. Jesus’s followers accepted his message and saw him as a prophet of God who understood God’s will; some of them anticipated that when the new kingdom arrived, he, Jesus himself, would be its anointed king. But any such hopes about Jesus as the messiah were convincingly dashed when he was arrested by the Roman authorities, interrogated, tortured, and crucified as a lowly criminal.

In a prodigious reversal, however, the hopes of Jesus’s followers were then reconfirmed, and radically transformed, when they (or some of them) came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him to his own right hand. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection changed everything. In particular it redirected the disciples’ belief, away from the apocalyptic message that Jesus himself proclaimed to a faith in Jesus himself, away from the beliefs held by Jesus to the beliefs about Jesus.