A question discussed in The Divine Pyramid by Bart Ehrman

In my previous posts I have been insisting that if one wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, one has to ask “in what *sense*” is he God? Now is a good time for me to lay out how I understand ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today – at least the people I run across – imagine the divine realm.

As I pointed out earlier, people today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite and eternal; we are finite and temporal. There is an unbridgeable gap between us and God. (Although in Christian theology, it is Jesus who bridges that gap by being a divine being who becomes human; in traditional theology, he did that so that we humans could then become divine)

People in the ancient world did not think of the divine realm in that way. True, the major Gods were enormously powerful and knowing and were immortal (you couldn’t kill them, and they couldn’t kill each other! And they never died). But there were lots of different gods with lots of different power and knowledge. And many of the gods (nearly all of them) came into being at some point in the past. They haven’t always existed. Like us, they get born. And like us, gods have strengths and weaknesses, and rarely were gods imagined as all-knowing, and almost never as all-powerful.

But there were gods and there were gods. I try to illustrate the divine realm to my students by speaking in terms of a divine pyramid.

So, imagine a pyramid. At the very top (where it is narrowest) some ancient pagans located a single most powerful (all powerful? ) divinity – call him Zeus, or Jupiter, or an Unknown God, or something else. This God was far more powerful than we can possibly imagine. Possibly he is the source of all things. Below this single divine power, on the next rung of the pyramid, were the great gods known to us from Greek and Roman mythology: the Greek Zeus (if he’s not at the top), and Hera, and Ares, and Aphrodite – or their Roman equivalents Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Venus, and all the rest, the gods of Mount Olympus. These gods by and large have little to do with us, as they have their own concerns. But occasionally they interact with us. They too are enormously powerful, immortal, and superhuman in every way (even though in the myths they appear to be all *too* human with their jealousies, and anger, and loves, and lusts, and other human emotions; but it’s not clear that most ancient people – and certainly not most educated ancient people – actually believed the myths as telling events that truly happened).

On the next lower rung on the pyramid, below the Olympian gods, were other gods of a more local nature and purpose. There were, in fact, gods of virtually every locality and function. Gods who inhabited and were in charge of certain mountains and fields and forests and rivers and streams; gods of war, love, health, childbirth, weather; gods of the local cities and towns, gods of the home, gods of the hearth, gods of the family. The gods on this realm were far less powerful and ubiquitous than the great Gods. But they were also far more powerful that we mere mortals.

On the next lower rung on the pyramid, was an even less powerful group (and more numerous) set of divine beings sometimes called DAIMONIA. It’s not helpful or accurate to translate this term as “demons” – even though that is the precise equivalent – because these were not necessarily divine entities that always did harm and were out to hurt people. Sometimes they were, but sometimes they were good too. These are the divine beings closer to us, who have more to do with our daily affairs. They can be fickle, and some are nasty, but others were not. I prefer calling these daimonia, rather than demons, since demons in the Christian tradition are always malevolent.

And there is another rung even below these daimonia, which is made up of beings who are in some sense partially divine, either because they were born to the union of a god and a mortal (like Hercules or Dionysus), or because they were adopted by a divine being to be his son, or because they were so powerful or wise that it was hard to imagine them as merely mortal (such as the emperor, or a great philosopher like Plato).

Below that level of the pyramid were humans, some of whom were more god-like than others. Like my first wife used to say many years into our marriage: “I married a Greek God, and now I’m married to a goddam Greek.”

The point is that divinity was a kind of graded, graduated affair. To call the emperor “God” was not to say that he was the one on the top of the pyramid. Quite the contrary! He wasn’t even on the level of the daimonia. But he was God, *in some sense.*

Some of you (I can hear you thinking as I type) are wondering if any of this has any relevance to Judaism. The answer is yes, in some ways, and I’ll deal with that question eventually. For now let me simply stress that when Christians were most forthright in calling Jesus “God” without qualification (as in “Jesus is God” – a statement you hardly ever [maybe once?] get in the NT, but start getting frequently in the second century) Christianity had by and large stopped being a primarily Jewish affair and was, rather, primarily a Gentile affair. That is, most of its adherents were converts from paganism, who brought their views of the divine realm with them into the new faith they adopted.

Categories: Bible, Christianity