How God Became Jesus by Michael F. Bird

Author:Michael F. Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2014-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Misreading Paul’s Christology: Problems with Ehrman’s Exegesis

Chris Tilling

INTRODUCTION

In the news recently was a story about Amazon tribes in Brazil that have never before been contacted. They live their lives as nomadic hunter gatherers and have no idea about the so-called “developed” or “civilized” worlds. The report included an astonishing video of these uncontacted indigenous peoples shooting arrows at the film maker’s plane as it flew overhead. I have often wondered what it would be like to meet such tribes. How would I describe to them what that plane was, for example? I could tell them that it was a flying monster made out of stone, but though they may understand me, it wouldn’t be true. But Ehrman’s analysis of Paul makes a similar mistake. He fails to explain what is really going on in Paul’s letters. He says Paul’s Christology is one thing, when it is actually something else.

What does Ehrman say about Paul, then? He makes a case that the earliest Christologies were of the “exaltation” type, that is, that the human being Jesus was seen to be exalted to “divine” status. Next, Ehrman argues that Christ came to be understood as “a divine being — a god — [who] comes from heaven to take on human flesh temporarily.”1 In Paul, he argues, there is a transition between the earlier “exaltation” Christologies to the later “incarnation” sort.

To make this claim, Ehrman first reiterates that Christology started “low,” with the human being Jesus. But later in John, there is a clear “incarnational” view. As the earliest evidence does not see Jesus as “God during his lifetime,” eventually he was understood to be something more. When this happened, Jesus was seen as “an angel or an angel-like being,” as “a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth.”2 This, we are told, is “the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors.”3 So Paul “understood Christ to be an angel who became human.”4 Only “later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel . . . but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth.”5

Much of Ehrman’s chapter 7 then involves an analysis of Paul’s Christology. A smaller section looks at John’s gospel and a few paragraphs are devoted to Colossians and Hebrews. This leads to his conclusion that “exaltation Christologies eventually gave way to incarnation Christologies, with some authors — such as the anonymous writers of the Philippians’ Christ poem and the letter to the Hebrews — presenting a kind of amalgam of the two views.”6

What are we to make of this? Certainly, his argument is not entirely original. Charles Talbert has made an oddly similar case, though his, too, is deeply problematic.7 But more needs to be said. In chapter 6, I outlined problems associated with Ehrman’s terminology and interpretative categories, all of which function determinatively in his arguments at this point. As I now turn to Ehrman’s claims set out in his chapter 7, this will mean spending much time on his reading of Paul.

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