Christianity is a big part of our culture, and even non-Christians have to make some sense of it. I like Bart Ehrman’s treatments of Biblical research. He’s skeptical but not belligerent. I’ve previously read his Misquoting Jesus and enjoyed it. How Jesus Became God addresses questions I’ve been curious about: Why do Christians think he was God incarnate? What exactly do they mean by it? The average Christian isn’t sure, and the more you dig into the questions, the weirder it gets.

Ehrman accepts the existence of the historical Jesus but says he never claimed to be divine. His status gradually grew after his death. Jesus’s followers believed he had risen from the dead, so he was the “Son of God” in some sense, at least after his resurrection. By steps which Ehrman traces, the idea expanded. First he gained special status after the resurrection; then he was anointed of God through his ministry, then from his birth, and at last from the beginning of time. Many variations of these views existed side by side, with their advocates calling each other heretics. The Nicean Council tried to standardize the belief, but it wasn’t till years later that Christianity mostly settled down to the currently standard view.

This view is that Jesus is God but isn’t God the Father; that God is one but also three; that the Son was begotten of the Father but always existed from the beginning of time. Make sense of that if you can. For most Christians, these details don’t matter, but early Christians thought that if they didn’t get Jesus’s nature exactly right, they might go to Hell for blasphemy. Apparently God is full of mercy but will torture believers forever if they don’t pass a theology quiz.

Ehrman notes that the only Gospel in which Jesus claims to be a divine being is John, which scholars think was written later than the others. If he really made such claims, he notes, it’s strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t mention them.

In Ehrman’s view, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, expecting the world to end soon and be replaced by the Kingdom of God under his leadership. He thought he was a Messiah but not a divine being. There were many others like him. Ehrman thinks the reason Christianity was so successful was that Jesus’s followers had “visions” of him as a resurrected person. He uses the term as a neutral one, not taking a position on whether they were real or not. There comes one of the problems with the book: it promotes a compartmentalized way of thinking. Ehrman refuses to take a stand as a historian on whether the resurrection happened or not.

He writes: “Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of ‘knowing.’ This effectively grants equal validity to both. Elsewhere he claims, “University intellectuals almost never speak of ‘objectivity’ any more, unless they happen to live on the margins of intellectual life.” If objectivity is impossible, if research and bald assertion have equal epistemological status, then anything goes.

Ehrman’s description of the official Christian (or at least Catholic) position on Jesus’s nature makes it sound even crazier than I had thought. He argues convincingly that Jesus probably didn’t have a proper burial but was just thrown on a pile of bodies; that was what the Romans did with crucified people. But if Jesus wasn’t buried in a tomb, there couldn’t have been an empty tomb to find. The whole account unravels, yet Ehrman won’t say that the claims of Jesus’s recognition are groundless fantasy.

These notions aren’t harmless stories. As Ehrman notes, Christian authorities have had many people tortured and executed for heresy. The Jewish people were persecuted for centuries for killing the immortal God. Nonsense should be called out as nonsense when it affects people’s lives.

Even so, How Jesus Became God is very readable, and Ehrman’s explanation of the development of Christian beliefs is fascinating. If that’s a subject that interests you, I think you’ll like the book.