I asked ChatGPT to reconstruct Geza Vermes' take on how Jesus became God.
Jesus of Nazareth, as best we can reconstruct him, was an illiterate eschatological prophet—a man of rural Galilee, speaking Aramaic to fellow Jews in the backwater villages of Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. He healed, exorcised, preached repentance, and proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. His idiom was the parable and the proverb, not the treatise. His authority was charismatic, not priestly. He was not a priest, not a scribe, not even a conventional teacher. He was a hasid, a spirit-filled man of God, moving among the marginalised.
No birth narrative, no transcendent claims, no Logos theology. Just a voice crying that the time is fulfilled.
And then—he was crucified.
This was the first trauma. The shock of the cross. His movement—small, Jewish, provincial—was thrown into disarray. The Messiah had died a shameful death. If that was the end of the story, Jesus would have joined the long list of forgotten apocalyptic preachers. But instead, his followers experienced something—visions, dreams, communal ecstasy—and they reinterpreted the disaster through the lens of Scripture. They were, after all, living in a time of the most turbulent social ferment.
The Servant Songs of Isaiah, Psalm 22, Daniel 7: these became the grammar of resurrection faith. Jesus, they came to believe, had not failed. He had been vindicated. Raised. Exalted. And so, in the Jewish-Christian community of Jerusalem, a new paradigm was born: Jesus the crucified Messiah is risen from the dead.
But this was still a Jewish frame. Still rooted in Aramaic memory and scriptural typology. Enter Paul.
Paul of Tarsus, a diaspora Jew fluent in Greek thought, experienced his own vision of the risen Christ. He never met Jesus of Nazareth, never heard his parables, never saw him heal. But he became his most influential interpreter. Paul brought a fusion theology: Jesus as Messiah and Lord, crucified and transcendent. He drew on Jewish apocalyptic and Stoic cosmology alike. Jesus became a second Adam, a divine mediator, through whom the whole creation would be reconciled. The cross was not a tragic mistake; to the contrary, it was the axis of salvation history.
Paul wrote to communities in Corinth, Galatia, Philippi—Greek-speaking, urban, mostly gentile. And this is crucial: the geographical shift from Palestine to the diaspora meant that Jesus’s story had to be told in a new idiom. Not Aramaic aphorisms but Greek letters; not Galilean exorcisms but transcendent theology.
And then came the second trauma: the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. This was the end of the world for the Jesus movement’s Jewish core. The community that had remembered Jesus as a prophet within Judaism was dispersed, discredited, or absorbed.
In the aftermath, the Gospel writers took up the task of preserving the Jesus story. But now they were two generations removed. Memory had faded. Theology had flourished. And so they did not reconstruct Jesus’s life from oral reports alone; they reverse-engineered it. The Christ they knew—the risen Lord, the object of worship—required a backstory, and they turned to the Hebrew Scriptures to supply it.
* Born in Bethlehem? Micah 5.
* Virgin birth? Isaiah 7.
* Preaching in parables? Psalm 78.
* Suffering servant? Isaiah 53.
* Triumphal entry? Zechariah 9.
* Resurrection on the third day? Hosea 6.
This was not history-writing as we understand it. It was midrash—scriptural interpretation through narrative. Jesus's biography became a theological construct, crafted in Greek for a community that had never heard him speak.
By 110 CE, the transformation was complete. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is no longer a prophet announcing the kingdom. He is the pre-existent Logos, through whom all things were made. He speaks in oracles, not riddles. He knows the future, commands his death, and ascends to heaven on his own authority.
Welcome to the High Christology.
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So what drove the paradigm shifts?
Three things:
1. Trauma: First, the crucifixion. Then the destruction of the Temple. Each demanded re-interpretation. Each catalysed theological creativity.
2. Geography: The movement from Aramaic-speaking Palestine to Greek-speaking diaspora necessitated translation—not just linguistic, but cultural, philosophical, and conceptual.
3. Time: As the eyewitnesses died, and memory faded, Scripture and theology filled the void. The story of Jesus became a sacred narrative, its origins swallowed by liturgy and creed.
The Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee was lost in the mists of history. In his place stood the Christ of Faith—crucified, risen, enthroned.
Whether that Christ bears any resemblance to the man himself is the question that haunts New Testament scholarship. But if we are to understand how Jesus became Christ, we must reckon with the creative power of history, geography, and time.
This interpretation may skirt the edge of heresy - though it’s a path well-trodden. Catholic orthodoxy once condemned heliocentrism, looked askance at Darwin, and hesitated before the yawning abyss of geological deep time. Even now, historical-critical biblical scholarship is regarded with the kind of polite unease one reserves for a brilliant but impious uncle.
But a faith that quietly walls itself off from empirical reality, or worse, demands its denial, has lost its nerve. Perhaps the real heresy lies in cowardice. Let us rather cleave to the older and bolder idea - echoing John Paul II - that faith and science, rightly understood, can never be in conflict. If they appear to be, it is we who have misread one of them.
