The Deification of Jesus - Part 2

In the previous post, I began an exploration of the images of Jesus as Divine from the perspective of a Christian non-literalist.  The goal is to examine where these images came from and the reasons they were created.  I want to explore their meanings to those who created them and discover what meaning they may hold for myself and others today.

In the first instalment, I looked at the image of Jesus as one with God in the Trinity Doctrine popular today.  The argument was made that this doctrine was not original to the earliest traditions of Christianity or the Gospels of the New Testament, but evolved over time to meet the needs of the Christian community.

 
I investigated the nature of the information we have on Jesus' own ideas of himself and his teachings.  I noted that Jesus himself left no written record of his thoughts and teachings that would identify his view of himself.  Our understanding comes from the letters and Gospels of the New Testament which were written twenty to over fifty-five years after his death.  I also postulated that the images of Jesus given in the Gospels were reflective of who he had become to the individual communities each Gospel was written in and was reflective of what he meant to them and was formed by their needs and circumstances.


I also began to explore the concept that the deification of Jesus in general was not original to the earliest traditions and also developed over time.  As part of this, I investigated the diversity of early Christian thought in writings not included in our New Testament and how these perspectives and beliefs were actively suppressed and mainly eradicated in the latter portion of the First Century and beginning of the Second Century by a Roman Church seeking to impose an orthodoxy and a unified faith in order to face persecution by the Roman Empire.  Many of these traditions did not view Jesus as divine and criticized what are now common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naïve misunderstandings.

In this post, I will look at the progression of images of Jesus as more than man in the Gospels of the New Testament.  The main division in thought in the Gospels on the person of Jesus is between the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the much later Gospel of John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels because they share many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and using the same wording.  It is contended that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke drew on material from the earlier Gospel of Mark.  It is also viewed that Matthew and Luke, where they have shared material that does not appear in Mark, both drew from an additional lost document, called 'Q'.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels 

A number of books have been written about how Christianity changed to a view of Jesus as God:

 “How Jesus Became God” by Bart D. Ehrman. Copyright © 2014 by Bart D. Ehrman.

"How on Earth Did Jesus Become God?" by Larry Hurtado (Eerdmans, 2005).

The Synoptic Gospels portray a Jesus who identifies himself as the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed, and in no way divine, or in someway God himself. In these Gospels, Jesus is referred to as the, "Son of God", the title sometimes used for the king of Israel endorsed by God. Like the kings of Israel who were given this title in the past, there is no indication that this was meant to imply that the person was a god, or in someway supernatural. The same holds true of the Epistles and the other books of the New Testament written before the Gospel of John.
The Synoptic Gospels were written in the 60's A.D., 30 to 40 years after Jesus death, while the Gospel of John was written around 85. With that in mind, Bart Ehrman, makes the following point about the Gospel of John's assertions about the divinity of Jesus;

Look at the matter in a different light. As I pointed out, we have numerous earlier sources for the historical Jesus: a few comments in Paul (including several quotations from Jesus’s teachings), Mark, Q, M, and L, not to mention the finished Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In none of them do we find exalted claims of this sort. If Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming himself to be a divine being sent from God—one who existed before the creation of the world, who was in fact equal with God—could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important? And yet none of these earlier sources says any such thing about him. Did they (all of them!) just decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about Jesus?

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/did_jesus_think_he_was_god_new_insights_on_jesus_own_self_image/

John stands alone among the Gospels in portraying Jesus as God, but these images in John also begs the question of what the author meant by these images.  Did John and his community take them literally, or were they engaging in symbolism and metaphor?  The civilizations of the Near East were masters of literature and sophisticated nuanced thought.  It is only our modern arrogance that views ancient civilizations as less intelligent and more simple-minded than our own.  This is the same mindset that postulates that aliens must have helped construct the pyramids of Egypt and Central America because "primitive" earlier civilizations would never be able to produce feats of engineering unmatched by our own.  The cultures of the time in the Near East, however, held a level of sophistication in literature that surpassed ours.  While today we have a general mindset that focuses on the literal, on science, data, and experimental knowledge to make sense of our world, ancient peoples were masters in the use of literary tools such as metaphor and symbolism to gain insight into the world they lived in.

Having laid this long groundwork for approaching images of Jesus as, "more than human", or divine, in the next post I will look at some of these specific images themselves.