The Deification of Jesus

As a non-literalist Christian, someone who views the anthropomorphic images of God as a sentient being as metaphor, I want to explore the images of Jesus as divine.  I want to examine where these images came from and the reasons they were created.  I would also like to investigate the meaning they held to those who created them and what meaning they may hold for myself and others today.

The field of study within Christian Theology concerned with the nature and person of Jesus in the New Testament is called Christology.  Traditional Christology in most denominations identify Jesus as being a divine aspect of the threefold nature of God, what is known as a Trinitarian Doctrine. This identification of Jesus as part of the Divine and "true God", can be seen in the Nicene Creed which was adopted by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and later In 381, amended at the First Council of Constantinople into the form recited in many Churches today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.

Nicene Creed from the Common Book of Prayer 

The New Testament contains no explicit Trinitarian doctrine.  The Tanakh, or "Old Testament", explicitly contradicts it with multiple assertions that God is One.  The prime example can be found in the opening words of the Shema, the central prayer in the Jewish prayer book from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 which contains what Jesus called the Greatest Commandment.
 

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. (Mark 12:29-30 NIV)

Despite this, Christian theologians and apologists through the ages have claimed that the doctrine can be, "inferred", from what the New Testament teaches about God, and where logical explanation fails, categorize it as a, "mystery of the faith".

This doctrine was the result of an "evolution" in Christian thought over time and partly a move by Emperor Constantine to unify Christian and Pagan beliefs.

The Trinity doctrine did not come into existence as its own piece of theology. Rather, it evolved over time as the orthodox (or Alexandrine) Christian response to the Samosatene/Arian doctrine. In order to condemn Arius and the Gnostics as well, the Council of Nicaea determined that Christ and God were separate yet unified, each fully God. This was merely a statement of belief, not by itself a theological concept. http://www.earlychristianhistory.info/trinity.html

Up until the rule of Emperor Constantine, the Christians of the Roman Empire were persecuted. Constantine, however, in the early fourth century saw a chance to help restore the former glory of the Empire by bringing about religious unity. In exchange for the cooperation of the Roman Christian Bishops he made Christianity the official state religion. However, this came at great cost to the true gospel of Jesus Christ. From this time forward Christianity became a mixture of the Christian faith and Paganism.
One of the most common beliefs among Pagan cultures was in a trinity of gods. We find this among the Egyptians, Indians (of India), Japanese, Sumarians, Chaldeans, and of course, the Babylonians, to where historians trace the roots of trinitarism.http://www.biblicalunitarian.com/articles/pagan-roots-of-the-trinity-doctrine-ed-torrence-2002

The leading religious competitor in Rome was th cult of Isis which was based on a triad of gods, Osiris, Isis, and Horus.  Christianity adopted this trio of gods aspect as part of their compromise with Constantine in order to gain backing as the state religion.

The Myth of Osiris, with its central Dying and Reviving God figure, became central to the Cult of Isis which traveled to Greece after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 331 BCE. From Greece, worship of Isis was taken to Rome where her cult became the most popular religious belief in the Roman Empire before the rise of Christianity and its most stubborn opponent afterwards.

The Abydos Triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus became the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the new religion which had to destroy the old belief in order to achieve supremacy.

Joshua J. Mark, “Gods & Goddesses of Ancient Egypt - A Brief History,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, last modified April 17, 2016, 
http://www.ancient.eu/article/884/

The same can be said for the deification of Jesus in the Gospels.  It was a progression in thought that moved away from the earliest understanding of Jesus and changed that understanding to meet the needs of the later Christian communities.


At this point in this investigation, I would like to make clear that I am not condemning the doctrines of Trinity or the Divinity of Christ.  I am not saying that because they are later concepts and not authentic to the initial message that they fail to be legitimate, or that they can not be useful, or meaningful, or give us insight into "truth".

As I've mentioned in other posts, I try to approach religion following the maxim attributed to George Box about science:

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Our theologies and doctrines, and even the metaphors found in Scripture are only models and not the thing itself.  As long as we don't stretch them too far by literalizing them, these models are often useful and are a vehicle for greater understanding of the truth.  In this way they are "True".  When we strip away the literalization and view them as models, we can start to figure out the meaning and experience what they are meant to point towards.  There is much "truth" and meaning to be found in the doctrines of Trinity and the Divinity of Christ.

What I do object to, however, are attempts to claim these doctrines as "fact" rather than metaphors and to dictate a literal interpretation of these models by falsely giving them the credibility of being authentic to original Christianity and the teaching and understanding of Jesus himself.

The literalization of these models as "fact", as verbatim and complete descriptions of the physical universe, does disservice to the search for "truth".  It tells us that there is only one right view, that all others are wrong and should be dismissed and can give us no insights.  Can you imagine if we approached science that way?  The planetary model of the atom used to be helpful in our understanding of physics.  This model pictured the atom like a planetary system with the neutron and proton being similar to a star and electrons orbiting around like planets.  This model outgrew its usefulness as new information showed ways in which this analogy did not fit the data.  The model, although incomplete and not consistent with current information, continues to be popular and is still used in representations and logos for atomic energy.  It is probably what most people would identify as being what atoms, "really are".  Could you imagine if we told scientists that this model is the truth, the one factual understanding of physical reality, and that any differing models to explain new experimental findings and data will not be allowed, that to contradict this model is a heresy?

To counter this, we need to investigate what the earliest Christian views were and how they changed over time.  Ideally it would be nice to know who Jesus thought he was himself.  However, like Socrates, he never recorded his own words and thinking.  We only know of the teaching of Socrates through the writing of his student Plato.  We only know of the teaching and actions of Jesus through the letters of Paul and others and the writers of the Gospels. 

Jesus Christ
Superstar
Do you think you're what they say you are?

(Lyrics from the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, Jesus Christ Superstar)

In the song, "Superstar" in Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical, "Jesus Christ Superstar", Judas questions why Jesus did the things he did and the chorus replies with the line, "Jesus Christ Superstar - Do you think you're what they say you are?"  Of course, we don't really know who he thought he was, we only have a record of what others said he was and of the words put into his mouth by others.
Jesus' death was sometime between 30 and 33 A.D. Paul, who never met Jesus while he was alive, experienced his conversion around 35. He wrote his letter to the Galatians sometime between 48 and 58. The Gospel of Mark was written in the 40's and the Gospel of Matthew in the 50's. The Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were written in the early 60's. And the late comer, the Gospel of John, was written around 85, a full 52 to 55 years after Jesus' death.http://www.newtestamenthistorytimeline.com/

This, however, does not cover the extent of early Christian writings, some just as early, or earlier.  We tend to have the false impression from our reading of what we have included in our, "New Testament", that early Christians all shared a unified message with the same thoughts and beliefs.  According to the research of scholars like Elaine Pagels in her study of the Gnostic Gospels, this couldn't be further from the truth.  The discovery of a trove of early Christian texts near Nag Hammadi show a wide diversity in Christian thought and traditions, some much earlier than the Gospels of the New Testament

...some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era--including a collection of early Christian gospels, previously unknown. Besides the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip,the find included the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel to the Egyptians, which identifies itself as "the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit]." Another group of texts consists of writings attributed to Jesus' followers, such as the Secret Book of James, theApocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and the Apocalypse of Peter.
...sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naïve misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is theApocryphon (literally, "secret book") of John , which opens with an offer to reveal "the mysteries [and the] things hidden in silence" which Jesus taught to his disciple John.
(The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Vintage Books, New York: 1979)
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/Pagels-Gnostic-Gospels.html

Much of this diversity in early Christian tradition was lost due to efforts to suppress and eradicate them by the Roman Church. Before the rule of Emperor Constantine, in the face of persecution by the Roman Empire, the Roman Bishops moved to unify and codify the Christian faith. The Bishop Irenaeus, in the early Second Century, insisted that the four Gospels which we now see in the New Testament of today were the only legitimate ones. In his, Adversus Haereses, he writes:

The Gospels could not possibly be either more or less in number than they are. Since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is spread over all the earth, and the pillar and foundation of the Church is the gospel, and the Spirit of life, it fittingly has four pillars, everywhere breathing out incorruption and revivifying men. 

Irenaeus dedicated himself to establishing an orthodoxy and refuting the dissenting views of the Gnostics, who said that they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself.

Irenaeus maintained that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles and that the bishops provided the only safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irenaeus

All writing, particularly that which purports to report historical events, contains the bias of its writer.  When we look at the Gospels of the New Testament, we do well to remember that these are testaments of who the person of Jesus had become to the individual communities of the writers.

How then can we determine what is most faithful to the original teachings and thoughts of Jesus?  I would contend that those books written closer to the time of Jesus are probably more authentic to his actual teaching and words than those written later. As well, where material is held in common between the Gospels, it also suggests authenticity.

In my next post, I will continue this study by looking at the difference in thought on who Jesus was in the Gospels of the New Testament.