How Jesus Became God

Explores the historical significance of the Christian belief in Jesus's divinity, in terms of its effects on Western civilisation and traces 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.