How Jesus Became God
Here’s a fact that may startle you: not once in our earliest surviving records of Jesus does Jesus call himself god. The world’s leading scholars on Jesus — including those who fully believe in conservative Christianity — agree this was not something he said or thought about himself. (1)
How then did we get a religion that claims you must believe Jesus is God to avoid burning in hell forever? How did Jesus’s original message of love get corrupted into something he himself wouldn’t recognize?
The answer lies in centuries of theological development — and the need of the ruling class to maintain the status quo.
What did Jesus believe?
Let’s start with Jesus himself. In the earliest Gospel accounts we have — Mark, Matthew, and Luke, written 40–60 years after his death — Jesus never explicitly claims to be God.
Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man,” a cryptic title with various possible meanings in Jewish tradition. (2) He speaks of God as Father and clearly has a profound spiritual connection with the Divine. But when he prays to God, he distinguishes himself from God, and even says “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mk 10:18).
The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) is focused not on promoting belief in his own divinity, but on proclaiming God’s kingdom and teaching a radically new way of living centered on love.
Had Jesus proclaimed himself to be God — repeatedly — it seems odd that the earliest written records we have of him would go out of their way not to include it.
The Gospel of John, however, written decades later around 90–100 CE, does present a more divine Jesus who makes statements like “I and the Father are one” (10:30). But biblical scholars, both liberal and conservative, recognize that John reflects later theological developments rather than the earliest memories of the historical Jesus.
A shift after Jesus’s execution
That’s partly because it’s clear there was a shift in the way some of his followers understood Jesus after his execution. His most devoted disciples claimed to have encountered a resurrected Jesus after his death, and these experiences radically transformed their view of who Jesus was.
While the exact nature of these experiences remains historically ambiguous, their impact is undeniable. Jesus’s followers became convinced that God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead, and that soon he would return to establish the Kingdom of God he had preached about. (3)
This led to an explosion of beliefs about Jesus in early Christianity. Some communities, like the Ebionites, continued to see Jesus as a divinely chosen human prophet and messiah, but not as God himself. (4) Others, like Paul, saw Jesus as elevated to divine status after his resurrection but still distinct from God the Father. (5)
Another group, known as Adoptionists, believed Jesus was a man who was “adopted” as God’s son at his baptism or resurrection. On the other hand, Gnostic Christians viewed Jesus as a spiritual being who brought secret knowledge (gnosis) to humanity, often downplaying or rejecting his humanity.
It’s clear was agreement that Jesus was special and that he offered a way of re-connecting to God — but there was little agreement on why or how.
The Arian controversy
The debate over Jesus’s divine nature came to a head in the early fourth century (the 300s) through what became known as the Arian controversy.
Arius, a priest in Alexandria, taught that while Jesus was divine, he was created by God and therefore not eternal or equal with God the Father. This view gained significant following, threatening to split the church.
When Constantine became emperor and sought to unify the Roman Empire under Christianity, these theological divisions posed a serious political problem to that unity. In 313 CE, the Edict of Milan legalized Christianity in the empire, and 12 years later, Constantine called for a meeting of bishops to resolve the issue.
That meeting — the Council of Nicaea — ultimately rejected Arianism, establishing the doctrine that Jesus was “true God from true God, of one substance with the Father.” This wasn’t just a theological decision — it was a political one, aimed at creating religious unity to strengthen imperial control.
At Nicaea, the ruling class completed their transformation of Jesus’s radical message into a tool of social control. What began as a way of life centered on love and justice became reduced to a set of required beliefs, with eternal torture as punishment for incorrect belief.
This formulation conveniently encourages us — the working class — to accept our terrible earthly conditions while hoping for heavenly rewards — exactly what those in power need to maintain the status quo.
Why it matters
Why does this history matter? Because it reveals the profound difference between the religion OF Jesus and the religion ABOUT Jesus. The historical Jesus was not focused on getting people to believe complex theological claims about his divine nature. He was focused on teaching a way of life centered on radical love, justice, and communion with God that will bring about a complete change in the universe.
When we fixate on whether or not Jesus was God, we miss the heart of his actual message and mission. Jesus didn’t come to be worshipped — he came to show us how to live. He didn’t demand belief in his divinity — he demanded that we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.
The religion OF Jesus is about following his way of life and teachings. It’s about embodying the kind of love that crosses boundaries, challenges injustice, and creates beloved community.
As we seek to reclaim and live out the authentic message of Jesus today, we need to focus less on enforcing beliefs about his divine nature and more on embodying his way of transformative love. After all, Jesus himself said that people would know his followers not by their doctrinal precision, but by their love.
That’s the only kind of religion — one centered on love rather than dogma, on practice rather than abstract belief — that will heal our broken world today.
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FOOTNOTES:
- For detailed analysis of Jesus’s self-understanding, see Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014) and John P. Meier’s comprehensive five-volume series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Yale University Press, 1991–2016). Both scholars, through extensive historical-critical analysis, demonstrate that Jesus likely did not claim divinity for himself. Even conservative scholars like N.T. Wright, while defending Jesus’s divine status, acknowledge this was not an explicit claim made during his ministry.
- The phrase “Son of Man” (ben adam in Hebrew) appears throughout Jewish literature with multiple meanings. In everyday usage, it simply meant “human being.” In the book of Daniel, however, it describes a heavenly figure who receives authority from God. By using this title, Jesus may have been emphasizing his humanity while also hinting at his role as an apocalyptic prophet. Unlike “Messiah” or “Son of God,” the title was ambiguous enough to avoid direct confrontation with authorities.
- The centrality of the “Kingdom of God” to Jesus’s message is one of the most widely accepted facts among scholars of the historical Jesus. The phrase appears over 80 times in the Gospels, and using multiple attestation (appearing in different, independent sources) and embarrassment (sayings that early Christians would be unlikely to invent), scholars conclude this was undeniably central to the historical Jesus’s preaching. See Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (2006) and Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford, 1999).
- The Ebionites were an early Jewish-Christian group that rejected Paul’s teachings and maintained Jewish customs. Our knowledge of them comes primarily through their opponents like Irenaeus, who wrote against them around 180 CE. According to ancient sources, they used only the Gospel of Matthew (likely in Hebrew), rejected the virgin birth, and saw Jesus as chosen by God for his righteousness rather than being divine by nature. For an accessible overview of the Ebionites and other early Christian groups, see Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, 2003).
- Paul, writing in the 50s CE, has a complex view. While Paul clearly sees Jesus as a divine being who was exalted by God after his death and resurrection, he doesn’t explicitly identify Jesus as God himself. The famous hymn in Philippians 2 speaks of Jesus being elevated to divine status, not pre-existing as God from eternity. Scholars actively debate over what Paul believed. It is most likely that Paul believed different things at different times in his life, and that variety of viewpoints is reflected in his surviving writings.
