The Making of a Messiah: How History and Heresy Transformed Jesus Into God

By Chaplain Hamburger / Sardar N. Durrani

A Historical and Exegetical Evaluation of Dr. Bart D. Ehrman’s Ontological Thesis:

If one could step into a chronological vortex and travel back to first-century Galilee to ask the historical Jesus of Nazareth a direct question regarding his identity—specifically, whether he believed himself to be the absolute Creator of the universe incarnate—what would he say? To the modern believer, raised under the architectural canopy of the historic ecumenical creeds, the question seems redundant, even absurd. Yet, when the heavy curtains of ecclesiastical tradition are pulled back to reveal the earliest raw materials of textual and historical evidence, an entirely different narrative emerges. In his provocative three-part seminar series, Dr. Bart D. Ehrman presents a meticulous historical thesis that challenges centuries of deep-seated orthodoxy. He argues that the historical man from Nazareth did not consider himself to be God, nor did he ever proclaim his own internal divinity. Instead, the concept that Jesus was a divine entity was a structural and theological evolution that occurred dynamically in the decades following his execution. By evaluating this journey through the lenses of ancient history and comparative biblical exegesis, we are forced into a historical detective story so compelling that one cannot easily turn away until the final, paradigm-shifting verdict is reached.

I. The Biblical Silhouette: The Striking Silence of the Synoptics
The historical inquiry into the divinity of Jesus must begin with an audit of the primary textual evidence: the canonical Gospels. Dr. Ehrman immediately points out an undeniable literary and historical chasm between the Gospel of John and its three predecessors, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Gospel of John, written late in the first century (circa 90–95 CE), Jesus’ divinity is the explicit center of gravity. Here, his language is unapologetically exalted. He proclaims, ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30), asserts that ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9), and explicitly assumes the sacred, eternal divine name of God from Exodus 3:14 when he tells his opponents, ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:58). Furthermore, John records Jesus praying for the return of ‘the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed’ (John 17:5), a narrative culminating in Thomas’s famous exclamation, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:28).

However, when historians look at the earlier Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke, written between 70 and 85 CE—a startling phenomenon presents itself: Jesus never once says any of these things. He never claims to be one with the Father, never states he existed before the creation of the world, and never utters the divine ‘I am’ formula. From a historical-critical perspective, this silence is devastating to the traditional narrative. If Matthew, Mark, and Luke knew that Jesus had gone around Galilee declaring himself to be the eternal God Almighty, it is historically inconceivable that they would simply neglect to mention it. One does not write a biography of a man believed to be God incarnate and omit the part where he explicitly says so. This indicates that the historical Jesus of the earliest oral and written traditions spoke from an entirely different theological framework.

II. The Apocalyptic Prophet and the Treasonous Claim
Who, then, did the historical Jesus believe he was? To reconstruct his actual self-understanding, historians apply rigorous criteria to isolate the earliest layers of tradition. Building on the foundational work of Albert Schweitzer, Ehrman argues that Jesus must be understood within his actual historical ecosystem: first-century Jewish apocalypticism. This worldview was characterized by cosmic dualism—the belief that the present age is controlled by forces of evil (Satan and his demons), but that God would imminently intervene to vindicate his people. This divine intervention would involve a catastrophic cosmic battle, a future bodily resurrection of the dead for final judgment (as foreshadowed in Daniel 12), and the establishment of an earthly Kingdom of God.

Jesus operated as an apocalyptic prophet warning his generation that this shift was right around the corner: ‘This generation will not pass away before all these things take place’ (Mark 13:30). Within this framework, Jesus did not view himself as God the Creator. Rather, he spoke of a separate cosmic judge coming on the clouds of heaven, a figure known in apocalyptic literature as the ‘Son of Man’ (derived from Daniel 7:13-14). In the earliest strata of Mark, Jesus differentiates himself from this coming judge: ‘Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words… of that one the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father’ (Mark 8:38). Jesus believed that when this Son of Man arrived to establish the Kingdom, he, Jesus, would be installed as its earthly king—the Messiah. Crucially, in first-century Judaism, the ‘Messiah’ was never expected to be a divine being; he was expected to be a fully human king, a descendant of David. When Jesus privately taught his twelve disciples that they would sit on twelve thrones ruling the restored tribes of Israel under his leadership (Matthew 19:28), Judas Iscariot leaked this politically toxic information to the authorities. Consequently, Pontius Pilate executed Jesus not for blasphemously claiming to be God, but for the political crime of treason against Rome: claiming to be the human ‘King of the Jews.’

III. The Great Christological Backward Shift
If Jesus lived and died as a human apocalyptic prophet, how did his followers make the quantum leap to calling him God? The catalyst was the profound visionary experiences of his disciples shortly after his death, which convinced them that God had physically raised him from the dead. Because the resurrection was viewed as God’s ultimate cosmic vindication, the disciples concluded that Jesus had been elevated into the divine realm. This gave birth to ‘Exaltation Christology’—the earliest Christian view, which held that Jesus started his existence as a mortal man but was exalted into divinity after his resurrection.
Ehrman points out that the oldest texts in the New Testament—the pre-Pauline creeds embedded within Paul’s letters—explicitly document this view. In Romans 1:3-4, Paul quotes a pre-existing formula stating that Jesus was a descendant of David according to the flesh, ‘and was designated the Son of God in power… by his resurrection from the dead.’ Similarly, in Peter’s earliest recorded sermon in Acts 2:36, he proclaims, ‘God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.’ The text does not say Jesus always was Lord; it says God made him Lord as a result of the resurrection. Over the subsequent decades, early Christians engaged in a fascinating ‘backward shift’ of Christological timing. As the decades progressed, it felt textually and dynamically awkward to imagine Jesus as merely a standard human during his earthly ministry. Thus, the Gospel of Mark (c. 70 CE) pushes his divine adoption back to his Baptism, where the Spirit descends and God declares him his Son (Mark 1:11). Later, Matthew and Luke (c. 80–85 CE) push his divinity back even further to his moment of biological conception via the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35). Finally, by the end of the century, the Gospel of John pushes his divinity out of human history altogether, tracking it back into eternity past: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1).

IV. The Theological Civil War and the Nicene Compromise
This backward shift, while solving the problem of Jesus’ earthly ministry, ignited a severe structural paradox for early Christian monotheists. If the Father is God, and the pre-existent Jesus is also God, how can Christians claim to obey the strict Jewish monotheistic command, ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4)? This question sparked a theological civil war that lasted for nearly three centuries. Early groups like the Adoptionists tried to save monotheism by reducing Jesus to a purely righteous human. Conversely, the Modalists argued that the Father and Jesus were the exact same person operating in different ‘modes’ or disguises, a view mockingly labeled Patripassianism because it logically meant God the Father suffered and died on the cross.

By the fourth century, the debate culminated in a fierce dispute between Arius of Alexandria, who argued that Jesus was a created subordinate being (‘there was a time when he was not’), and Athanasius, who insisted that Jesus must be co-eternal and co-equal with the Creator. To prevent the theological fracturing of the Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine intervened politically, summoning hundreds of Christian bishops to the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Through intense philosophical deliberation and political pressure, the council officially condemned Arius and codified the Nicene Creed. They introduced the non-biblical, Greek philosophical term Homoousios—declaring Jesus to be ‘of the same substance’ or ‘one in being’ with the Father. By creating a sophisticated ontological framework where God exists as three distinct persons sharing one single, indivisible divine substance, the Church successfully maintained its claim to monotheism while finalizing the absolute deification of the Galilean prophet.

V. Conclusion: From Preacher to Preached
When viewed through the rigorous tools of historical criticism, the trajectory of Jesus of Nazareth reveals one of the most astonishing cultural and theological transformations in human history. The evidence suggests that the historical Jesus was a human apocalyptic preacher who walked the dusty roads of Galilee, proclaiming the imminent arrival of God’s physical kingdom on earth. He did not ask his followers to worship him, but rather to repent and live a life of radical service to the marginalized, as beautifully captured in his genuine apocalyptic discourse regarding the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46). Yet, through a dynamic, sixty-year process of oral transmission, visionary experiences, and theological evolution, the historical preacher organically became the cosmic preached. The human king who expected to be installed by God was transformed by his followers into the eternal God himself. For the contemporary scholar and chaplain alike, recognizing this historical arc does not diminish the profound impact of the New Testament; rather, it highlights the deeply human, brilliant, and complex historical process through which a first-century prophet became the eternal, foundational cornerstone of Western civilization.