509 B.C.E. to 27 B.C.E.
In the years of Roman Republic, no man was called a god (or even a king). However, 200 years of peace under a ruler imperator, (Emperor) gradually relaxed the fears of Romans of having a dictator. Surely the gods had bestowed unusual approval! An Emperor, surely was a son of a god, or 'divine.'
The Emperorship, with its divine trappings, was a new trend in the early days of Christianity. Pagan Christian converts brought this ‘divine’ terminology into their new Christian communities and applied these terms onto Jesus. Further, Christians used these terms to promote (“sell”) Jesus to potential pagan converts. Non Pagan congregations (Jewish Christians) had no inclination to absorb Pagan Gentiles, but Paul actually changed Christianity, by letting Pagans switch their allegiances from mythological or human gods to Jesus but continue their practices under a different label. This is easily demonstrated. When the Roman Pantheon was converted into a church, the Pagan idols were replaced by Christian idols; Pagan holidays became Christian, etc.
The Watchtower (bullshit) ‘scholars’ pretend it was creeping apostasy, after the death of the Apostles, which ‘corrupted’ pure Christian teaching. In fact, historically, there never was a pure Christian orthodoxy. Each congregation; each territory; each geographical instance of ecclesia; reflected local, syncretic, heterogeneous opinions.
Few Christian denominations today consider the external influences of pagan Roman converts, as being in many ways the driving force behind the development of a high Christology. (Divinity of Jesus) It is an important social—even political context—for understanding Paul’s language of Lord, Savior, Son of God, gospel, etc.
As Biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman has said: “Readers of the Bible who are not trained in history tend not to think in terms of historical context and so simply read the words of these ancient authors as if they were writing in twenty-first century America. But these authors were not American, and they were not writing in modern times. They lived in a different part of the world, in a different culture, with different customs, and different assumptions about the world and life in it. If you pretend that they were writing in our own context, instead of theirs, you take their words out of context. And anytime you take a text out of context, you change its meaning.”
If you are curious about 1st Century tendencies toward regarding remarkable men as supernaturally endowed, please consider the following.
From the beginning his mother knew that he would be no ordinary person. Prior to his birth, a heavenly figure appeared to her, announcing that her son would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. This prophecy was confirmed by the miraculous character of his birth, a birth accompanied by supernatural signs. The boy was already recognized as a spiritual authority in his youth; his discussions with recognized experts showed his superior knowledge of all things religions. As an adult he left home to engage in an itinerant preaching ministry. He went from village to town with his message of good news, proclaiming that people should forgo their concerns for the material things of this life, such as how they should dress and what they should eat. They should instead be concerned with their eternal souls.
He gathered around himself a number of disciples who were amazed by his teaching and his flawless character. They became convinced that he was no ordinary man, but was the Son of God. Their faith received striking confirmation in the miraculous things that he did. He could reportedly predict the future, heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. Not everyone proved friendly, however. At the end of his life, his enemies trumped up charges against him and he was placed on trial before Roman authorities for crimes against the state.
Even after he departed this realm, however, he did not forsake his devoted followers. Some claimed that he had ascended bodily into heaven; others said that he had appeared to them, alive, afterward, that they had talked with him and touched him and become convinced that he could not be bound by death. A number of his followers spread the good news about this man, recounting what they had seen him say and do. Eventually some of these accounts came to be written down in books that circulated throughout the empire.
But I doubt that you have ever read them. In fact, I suspect you have never heard the name of this miracle-working “Son of God.” The man I have been referring to is the great neo-Pythagorean teacher and pagan holy man of the first century C.E.,Apollonius of Tyana, a worshiper of the Roman gods, whose life and teachings are still available for us in the writings of his later (third-century) follower Philostratus, in his book The Life of Apollonius.
Apollonius lived at about the time of Jesus. Even though they never met, the reports about their lives were in many ways similar. At a later time, Jesus’ followers argued that Jesus was the miracle-working Son of God, and that Apollonius was an impostor, a magician, and a fraud. Perhaps not surprisingly, Apollonius’s followers made just the opposite claim, asserting that he was the miracle working Son of God, and that Jesus was a fraud.
What is remarkable is that these were not the only two persons in the Greco-Roman world who were thought to have been supernaturally endowed as teachers and miracle workers. In fact, from the tantalizing but fragmentary records that have survived we know of numerous other persons also said to have performed miracles, to have calmed the storm and multiplied loaves, to have told the future and healed the sick, to have cast out demons and raised the dead, to have been supernaturally born and taken up into heaven at the end of their life. Even though Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God that we know about in our world, he was one of many talked about in the first century.
Clearly, then, if we want to study the stories about Jesus – and about his followers – we need to situate them in their own historical context, in the world of the first Christian century. The stories about Jesus were told among people who could make sense of them, and the sense they made of them related to their own world, which knew of divine beings who were also human. The environment in which Jesus was born and in which Christianity emerged is known as the Greco-Roman world.
(Bart Ehrman, ehrmanblog.com)