How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee Hardcover – March 25, 2014

I was flipping through this book and found that Dr. Ehrman had followed a path similar to my own, attending Moody Bible Institute and later losing his faith in Christianity and God, so I decided to buy the book. I found the book extremely clear and easy to understand, and I was familiar with many of the theological debates about the New Testament textual evidences and about early church heresies and disputes, so nothing in here was particularly shocking to me, though it could certainly have shock value to anyone who thinks they just read the Bible, believe it all, and come up with orthodox evangelical theology.

One point that I find particularly persuasive, in terms of the question of whether Jesus himself claimed to be God or the Son of God and equal with God, is his comment, repeated a couple of times, about how different the Gospel of John is. Anyone with a more than passing knowledge of the 4 gospels sees this, and anyone with a study bible knows that the gospel of John was written last, probably at least 60 or 70 years after the death of Jesus.

But the key point he makes is that Mark, for instance, never has Jesus say any of the exalted, poetic things that John puts in his mouth. So Ehrman's question is: if, in fact, Jesus went around saying "Before Abraham was, I am," how could Mark have left that out? How could the 3 synoptic gospels have such subtle hints of God-claims, if Jesus actually said the things John attributes to him? To have heard those things from the mouth of Jesus, but just passed them over when writing down the gospels is not imaginable. If I had a hero or leader who taught me a lot of things, and who also claimed frequently to be the son of John D. Rockefeller, it would be pretty strange for me to write a book about him and leave out that last key point, even though it would not technically be false to omit it--but something that would add to the credibility of what he said would be an odd thing to omit.

The reason I don't give the book 5 stars is that it is almost over-simplified and repetitive in some ways. I feels to me like lecture notes written up as a book, where each time class meets, the professor starts by reviewing where we were last time. It does make the book very clear, but almost too much so. And sometimes, I just felt tired of the conclusions of biblical textual scholars--this book claims to have been written by Paul, but we don't think it was for reason x, this passage says y, but it was most likely added and so it actually means z, etc. The textual; critics may be right, but it just isn't persuasive to most readers that a letter that says, I, Paul, am writing to you in Colossae," (or wherever) was actually written 100 years after Paul's death. And I recall that a lot of scholarship about the Old Testament doubts the accuracy of OT texts, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. So although I am not a believer, I just find some of the scholarly reasoning tedious.

The audience that would gain the most from this book are doubters, ie people within Christianity who are feeling uncomfortable with it, wondering if it's true, and want to know more about how we got from the time of Jesus to where we are now. Any study of how we got our bible, how orthodoxy came to be arrived at, how the early church actually functioned, is salient for a person who wants to know whether what they have been taught about the Bible and about Jesus really holds water. If you read this book and then conclude that Jesus was eternally the Son of God who came down from heaven, then you are standing on firmer ground. And if you find that ground shifting under your feet, keep inquiring until you find a satisfactory place to stand.

From a strictly layman's historical view, it is an interesting essay on how a prophet two thousand years ago could come to be declared a "God".

BE WARNED...purely historical accounts, and scientific interpretations regarding the origins of the divinity of Jesus Christ, do not mix well with "Faith" and "Religious Belief Systems". This is not a book for those who read the bible as the unchanging word of God. This is an account of how the author sees human interactions, verbal traditions, cultural interactions, and mixed interpretations of the many languages in which the bible was written, and their impact on current belief systems. It's not written in stone, it's not infallible, it's just an interesting insight as to how one author sees how the Jesus story came to be what it is today.

This is a fantastically written book. Ehrman writes in a very accessible and fluid way. He begins each chapter with a personal anecdote that makes the over all narrative more enjoyable and more personal. Ehrman has taken quite the theological journey in his life and this made him into a very through and honest historian. He is first and foremost a historian and you will see how painstakingly he worked to convey only what is known and why and acknowledging when facts are not know. Despite not being a Christian he also deals with the topic of belief and faith in a very respectful way. Ehrman is after the truth, objectively, but is also an honest human being who is attuned to the beliefs and sensibilities of others and presents his facts while being kind to those who do not share his lack of faith. Overall, a great read that informed my view of Jesus immensely, this should be standard reading for anyone who is a believer or seminarian and definitely those interested in Christian history and the theological development of it.