Bart Ehrman has a very good series of posts titled “How Can Monotheists Think a Human Could Become God?” that cites cases where in the Hebrew Bible humans are exalted to divine status by YHWH. Below are links to the series of posts, with extracts from his introductions. The posts are extracts from his book How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014).
- How Can Monotheists Think a Human Could Become God? July 18, 2026. Intro in italics below.
- One of the questions I [Dr. Ehrman] regularly get is how we can imagine that Jews — specifically, the Jewish followers of Jesus after his death — could possibly imagine that he had become God. They were monotheists. How could someone in addition to God be or become God? That maybe makes sense in pagan circles, where there are many gods and a rather fluid transition between humanity and divinity. But not in Judaism, right? Well, wrong.
- As it turns out, Jews also sometimes thought that a human could become divine. In this post I’ll talk about one variant of this view, that mortal humans could become divine superhumans, angels. In later posts I’ll talk about an even more bizarre view (bizarre, that is, in the context of Judaism) that humans could become gods. Jews believed that? Who woulda thought?
- This is how I begin to explain the matter in my book How Jesus Became God.
- Jewish Precedents for Jesus Becoming God July 19, 2026
- In my previous post I showed how Jews could and did conceive of humans who became super-human beings — angels. But that’s a far cry from thinking humans could be GOD! And yet the Jewish followers of Jesus claimed that’s what he was. How’d that work exactly?
- That may come as a surprise: Jews who were monotheists thought that others could be God, along with the one God? Uh, how does that work? As it turns out, you can find it in the Hebrew Bible and in later Jewish traditions as well.
- The King of Israel Was Called … God? July 21, 2026
- In my previous post I showed that beings other than God could be called God in the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish literature. It seems strange, but there it is. I continue now with an especially important case in point: the king of Israel. In this case there is not a lot of ambiguity about the matter, as odd as that might seem.
- Bart cites: Psalm 110; Psalm 45:6-7, and Isaiah, chapter 9.
- The source he cites in this post: “The King as Son of God,” in Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) pp. 1-24.
- Was Moses Called God? July 22, 2026
- In my last couple of posts, I’ve talked about how the King of Israel could, oddly enough, be called “God.” That seems contrary to what we think of ancient Judaism, where only God can be God. But it helps explain why later Christians could call Jesus God. There was precedent for a human to be called that, even within Judaism. Possibly yet more unexpectedly, within the Jewish tradition even Moses was sometimes considered a divine being, and called God.
- In this post he cites quotes from Philo to show how God(s) were understood at the time of Jesus; i.e. the time of Philo.
