Bart Ehrman’s New Book “How Jesus Became God”

Over at Bart Ehrman’s blog are a couple of previews (see here) of his forthcoming book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, due out in March 2014).

Any way, I’ve been in hospital recently, and while I was there I caught up with a little bit of Martin Hengel’s short volume, The Son of God, and here is why:

Martin Hengel exposed many of the tenuous arguments put forward for an evolutionary process to christological development (e.g., Wilhelm Bousset). He argued that: “The time between the death of Jesus and the fully developed christology which we find in the earliest Christian documents, the letters of Paul is so short that the development which takes place within it can only be called amazing.”[1] If that is the case, then, he claimed “more happened in this period of less than two decades than in the whole next seven centuries, up to the time when the doctrine of the early church was completed.”[2]

Note that a response to Ehrman’s book is coming out at the same time: Michael Bird (ed.), How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature – A Response to Bart Ehrman featuring Craig A. Evans, Chris Tilling, Simon Gathercole, and Charles Hill.