The more frequently asked question of, ‘How did Jesus become God?’
With regard to the topic of ‘Jesus as messiah’, most liberal theologians start their reasoning by asking, “Jesus was the messiah, so how did he become God?” Bart Ehrman even wrote a book on this topic, ‘How Jesus Became God’, and you can watch his long video about the book on YouTube.
The Massorite Talmidi community asserts emphatically that there is no saviour but YHVH (Isa 43:11). In pursuit of strengthening and solidifying this in our hearts, so that it is emotionally meaningful to us, we go even further back in time – we need to ask, how was Yeshua changed from being a faithful prophet of God, to being a messiah-saviour?
While Ehrman doesn’t think that Jesus thought of himself as a Divine Being, nevertheless, he is of the firm opinion that the first Jewish followers of Jesus came to believe he was exalted to Divine Being status at his resurrection, and that his Jewish apostles believed he was God from that time on (but I disagree, obviously). In support of his theory, he seems to have somehow got the impression that we Jews ourselves believe that Enoch and Elijah became Divine Beings when they were taken up alive into heaven, and that the Hebrew Bible says that Moses was God (no it doesn’t; Ex 7:1 is meant to be a metaphor, not be taken literally).
Oftentimes, liberal Christian theologians who still believe that Jesus was the messiah, will be confronted by the view that Jesus did not act like a messiah when he was alive. Furthermore, contrary to biblical messianic expectations (i.e. what God specifically promised by covenant for the messiah, Ps 89:22-23), he was in fact killed by his enemies. They counter these objections by saying that what changed everything was the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection presumably made God go back on God’s own promises, which causes the assertion that God does not lie or change God’s mind at Num 23:19 to become meaningless. Such theologians are basically saying that Jesus became something more in his resurrection: a Divine Being.
But then Mark’s gospel portrays the apostles as never getting to find out that he had been resurrected – they fled to the Galilee. In Mark’s pro-Paullist view, that’s why the message of the apostles is at odds with the message of Paullist Christianity, and Mark’s ‘messianic secret’ theme supposedly explains why Jews don’t accept Jesus was the messiah. Paul’s disdain of the apostles in his letters suggests that they taught something different to what Paul taught about Jesus.
So essentially, the question of how Jesus became god is therefore one of the questions often debated by modern theologians. The question I’d like to ask instead is: how did Yeshua become a messiah if, as we claim, he did not believe himself to have been a messiah, and did not fulfil any messianic acts or expectations?
Why ask the question, ‘How did the Prophet Yeshua become a messiah’?
I am convinced that making Yeshua into a messiah was but a short hop, skip and jump to him becoming God. My objective is to cut that journey of fuzzy logic off at the start, and ask, ‘How did the Prophet Yeshua become a messiah?’
Messianic expectations were rife in Yeshua’s day, and no doubt some Jews who admired him did indeed think of him as a messiah, hoping that he would free them from Roman oppression. Historically, the second-century Ebionites believed him to be a messiah, alongside the Paullist Nazarenes (descendants of Peter’s ministry in Judea, after his being influenced by Paul). However, if you are willing to step outside the box, and not just accept things as they are – if you are willing to return to the way YHVH designed things to be – you will begin to understand that the choice of any of Yeshua’s Jewish followers to turn him into the Jewish messiah, was a fateful mistake of monumental proportions, because it paved the way for Paul to turn him into a god.
One of the goals of Yeshua’s ministry was to restore the original, just ethics and compassionate values of God in Torah (cf Mt 5:17-18), which were being ignored in his time, especially by the rich and powerful. In this spirit, one of the aims of the Massorite branch of Talmidaism, is to restore the philosophy and mission of Yeshua to its original form, based on what it is theorised to have been when he was alive (prophetic and non-messianic). This is so that we, Followers of the Way, as spiritual inheritors of Yeshua’s very earliest community of Followers, can understand God and the world as Yeshua originally intended for his followers, and so that we can live out his ethical teachings and emphases as he originally taught us to live them.
Everyone knows that at some point, the Jewish followers of Yeshua decided that Yeshua was the messiah. The 2nd-century sect of the Ebionites, for example, believed he was the messiah, along with the Paullist Nazarenes. However, since I became a Talmidi, with YHVH alone as our supreme Sovereign Saviour and Redeemer, I have strongly believed that the very first Jewish followers of Yeshua – that is, those who heard him teach during his ministry and truly listened to him – did not believe him to be a messiah. I base this on the supposition which Mark’s gospel is founded on (i.e. the ‘messianic secret’ – that no one knew he was the messiah, and that Yeshua ordered people to tell no one).
In this article therefore, I now want to explore the possible evolutionary stages of how Yeshua was transformed from a fully human prophet, into a Davidic Messiah, even before he was transformed into a god.
The process and evolution from Prophet to messiah
I surmise that the following process took a few years (from after Yeshua’s death in the year 30CE, to Paul’s fully developed messianism of the mid-40s CE). The stages of this process can best be conveyed in the form of a hypothetical, imaginary conversation, with claims by the Jewish Followers of Yeshua, and then counter-responses by Pharisees:
Jewish Followers of Yeshua: Yeshua is a prophet with a message from God, and he is warning us that there is soon going to be a terrible tribulation, so we must repent and return to God’s ways, and work to build God’s Kingdom, in order to ensure that the Jewish people survive this coming tribulation.
Pharisees: We have declared that there are no more prophets after Malachi; we will only listen to a messiah of David.
Followers: Yeshua was resurrected from the dead, and this proves that God vindicated his ministry and prophethood, and that he was a holy man of God.
Pharisees: There are no more prophets!!! We will only listen to a messiah descended from David!
Followers: (knowing that Yeshua was not of Davidic descent, and was not born in Bethlehem) Well, he was a Prophet of God, and the Bible says that Prophets are anointed ones (‘messiahs’) of God too!
[My note: for anointed prophets, see Psalm 105:15; cf. 1Kings 19:16; when a non-king is called ‘an anointed one’, it means, ‘someone appointed for a special purpose by God’)
Pharisees: That’s not enough, because he was not of David’s line
Followers: He was adopted as messiah at his baptism by John (i.e. calling him ‘son’ made him the ‘messiah’ / anointed prophet of God)
Pharisees: He’s still not from David’s line
Followers: All right, fine, yes, he was descended from King David!
Pharisees: (since every male Jew is descended from David anyway) Now you’re just making things up! We know he was born in Nazareth, so he still wasn’t the messiah.
Followers: No – he was born in Bethlehem, his parents had a short stay there, so we believe, well, they must have been to Bethlehem, mustn’t they? Look, OK, yes, Yeshua was of royal Davidic descent, and he is the promised messiah! Now you have to listen to us, something really bad is shortly going to happen! Please listen!
Pharisees: But he hasn’t fulfilled any of the prophecies concerning the Davidic messiah – he was killed by his enemies, wasn’t he? The messiah isn’t supposed to be defeated by his enemies.
….. And this is as far as a Jewish follower of Yeshua could have gone. At this point, we start heading into Paullist theology: explaining why the messiah had to die (Paul & Mark), that his death was foretold from the beginning, and that he was messiah from the time of his birth (Mt & Lk). Paul also had to come up with a reason why Gentiles should ever have any interest in a Jewish king-saviour etc etc.
Leaving behind misconceptions
1. ‘Messiah’ doesn’t mean ‘saviour’:
If you carefully read the terms of the covenant that God swore with David and his descendants (which most if not all messianists know nothing about), you will see that God never conceived of the messiah as a perfect human being, and even less so, as any kind of saviour. If the messiah was faithful to God’s ways, then God would bless Israel and protect Israel from her enemies; but if the messiah disobeyed God (Ps 89:30-32), then the messiah would be rebuked and chastised, and Israel would fall.
It was the Enochians who turned the messiah into a saviour, based on their community’s influences from Babylonian philosophy and Zoroastrian religious beliefs. These beliefs held that a king-saviour would come down from heaven and save humanity, and thus was born the idea of a Jewish messiah-saviour from non-Yahwist religions.
2. The natural Jewish reaction to the resurrection of Yeshua is not that he was a Divine Being:
Someone who was being authentic to Jewish spirituality and our original Yahwist ideals, would look at Yeshua’s resurrection differently. The Talmidi Jewish way of looking at it is this: It was God who raised Yeshua (i.e. he did not raise himself, 1Cor 6:14 – important distinction to make), and God did this to vindicate Yeshua’s prophethood, ministry and teachings, as well as to affirm his life – that he was a faithful and holy man of God.
3. The Pharisees’ rejected prophets
Most people are unaware that the Pharisees did not accept any prophet after Malachi. This is an obstacle that is a really important historical fact to realise and take in, because it would have fateful consequences on how Yeshua’s followers presented Yeshua to the Jewish people. If the Pharisees had not rejected prophets, then there would never have been any impetus or motive to turn Yeshua into a messiah. He would instead have become another tribulation prophet, of the same stature and calibre as Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Furthermore, if Yeshua was simply a persecuted prophet, then there would never have been any need to explain or justify his death; after all, it is expected that a prophet will be hounded, suffer and sometimes die at the hands of those who hated him. Consequently, there would never have been any need to find predictions of his death in scripture either. His death was the death of a prophet, who died as a Jewish martyr at the hands of the Romans.
4. Not all the gospels assume that he was born in Bethlehem
The earliest gospel, Mark, records Nazareth as Yeshua’s home-town (Mk 6:1, 6:4). The neighbours in Nazareth have no knowledge of claims that he was of Davidic descent – these claims do not form part of any derisive comment they make. They also have no awareness that he might have been born in the more auspicious town of Bethlehem. Mark’s gospel has no birth narratives, presumably because Yeshua’s birth was not important to Mark – neither who he was descended from, nor where he was born.
The Gospel of John also has no assumptions that Yeshua was born in Bethlehem. When people criticise him, they say:
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46)
And in Jn 7:42, people don’t believe he is the messiah, not just because he wasn’t born in Bethlehem, but also because it was widely known that he wasn’t descended from David:
“Has not the scripture said that the Christ is descended from David, and will come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?”
5. There won’t be just one messiah
The Davidic covenant says that there isn’t just one messiah, but a line of messiahs (Ps 89.29, 89:36). Read that again: there will not be just one messiah ( = anointed king), but many, one after the other (indicated by the use of ‘children / ‘they’ / ‘their’, not ‘child’ / ‘he’ / ‘his’ in Ps 89:30-32).
Knowing this part of the Davidic covenant, a messianist who insists that Yeshua was of Davidic descent needs to ask: if people like James, Simon, Joses and Judas were his cousins through his father’s brother (Clophas), then following messianic logic, surely they were also of Davidic descent, so why were they not proclaimed messiah after his death? I would suggest that the reason why none of his male cousins were chosen as messiah after him, was because like Yeshua, none of them were direct male-line descendants of David.
Why a prophet was not enough for the Pharisees
As I mentioned earlier, there is an unquestionable fact, which it is absolutely vital to be aware of, in order for Talmidis to comprehend why the later Jewish followers of Yeshua had little option but to turn Yeshua into a messiah (even though he wasn’t, and even though he did not believe himself to be one). It is the most important key to understanding how the Prophet Yeshua became a messiah.
The Pharisees had declared that there were no more prophets after Malachi (presumably, so that God had no vehicle to tell them that some of the decisions that the Pharisees had made were wrong, and were against the spirit of the Torah). Pharisees would only listen to the messiah, but the messiah they created was almost supernatural, and they knew such a magical human being was never going to come; the Jewish people would always have to turn to them for answers.
It was really important for Yeshua’s followers, with their mission to save as many of their fellow Jews as possible from the coming tribulation (the destruction of Jerusalem and the Roman Exile), that their fellow Jews pay heed to the warnings of Yeshua’s message.
The Pharisees would only heed a messiah of David. I believe that this is the one, singular reason why the Jewish followers of Yeshua eventually had no choice but to turn Yeshua into a messiah, even though he wasn’t born in Bethlehem, and even though he wasn’t of Davidic descent.
Summary
Yeshua was neither a direct descendant of David, nor was he born in Bethlehem. He didn’t view himself as a messiah, nor as any kind of Divine Being. However, the Pharisees were the largest religious group, and due to the refusal of the Pharisees to acknowledge contemporary prophets, and that they would only heed a messiah – and due to the urgent nature of their master’s warnings – they felt it necessary to change Yeshua’s biography to make him into a messiah. From there, he was ready to be transformed into a god by Paul (because if he was only a prophet, there would also have been no need to explain or justify his death; in Talmidi Jewish terms, his death was the tragic death of a Jewish martyr.