How Jesus Became God

The historical significance of the Christian belief in Jesus's divinity, in terms of its effects on Western civilization; learning about different scholarly views of the historical Jesus; tracing the diversity of early Christian thought.

The accounts of divine mortals in the ancient world; the overlap between the human and divine worlds in Greco-Roman polytheistic religions; exploring three age-old models of divine men in both mythology and Christian scripture.

Delving into the interface between the human and the divine in pagan cultures; examining narratives describing people born of the sexual union of gods with mortals; looking at cases of humans who were exalted to the status of gods.

Accounts of divine humans and other godlike beings within ancient Judaism; exploring conceptions of divine beings that appear in human form in Genesis and Exodus; studying narratives of humans who become angelic beings in other Jewish texts.

How beings other than the one true God could be considered God in ancient Judaism; learning about the divine figure of the Son of Man and the Jewish conception of a second God; how divine attributes of God were personified.

Why the New Testament Gospels are the only useful early sources on Jesus's life; studying the criteria used by scholars to evaluate the Gospels as history; investigating Jesus's apocalyptic worldview, which envisioned the imminent end of history.