MB is not necessarily wrong in his improvisations. Nevertheless, building one’s reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel on a reconstruction of other hypothetical Gospels (e.g. “Mk1,” “Jn2,” “Mt1”) increases the possibility for error. (It goes without saying that other scholars do not typically accept discrete and datable pre-versions of Mark, Matthew, and John.) Thankfully, MB puts his improvisations in double angled brackets “<< >>” (62). These are MB’s most important editorial signs because they mark where he is being a maximalist editor and where his restorations are in fact most doubtful.
Unfortunately, the double angled brackets do not appear in MB’s English translation of Marcion’s Gospel.
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MB’s knowledge of statistics and computational linguistics is impressive. Yet some of MB’s conclusions are not actually based on linguistic or numerical data in any direct sense, such as the idea that “Joshua of Nazareth [MB’s name for Jesus] is pictured from first to last in Qn as a new Aesop” (21). That’s a scholarly deduction that goes beyond data science and brings us into the wild and wonderful world of scholarly interpretation.
Improvisations
Now let’s get into the weeds of MB’s reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel. One should carefully consider places where MB fills in the data for Marcion’s Gospel even when it is unattested by patristic witnesses. MB’s term for this filling in is “improvisation.” (Readers can run a pdf-search for “improvis-” in MB’s work; it is telling.) The following observations only serve as examples of MB’s improvisation.
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Adela Yarbro Collins: “This book is of interest to a wide readership. It will help historical critics understand what “divinity” meant in the ancient world. It will also help theologians understand the origins of Christology. I recommend it to students, scholars, and any reader curious about Jesus.”
Stanley Stowers: “M. David Litwa’s Iesus Deus marks a major breakthrough in scholarship on early Christianity. The book manages to overcome the scholarly apologetic segregation of early Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ from Greek and Roman dominated Mediterranean culture and to demonstrate the fit of these beliefs in that Hellenistic context. A great deal of writing about the ‘purely Jewish’ Christ crumbles with this book.”
David Aune: “In Iesus Deus, M. David Litwa surveys six of the more significant ways in which early Christians from the first through the third centuries CE drew on common reservoir of ancient Mediterranean conceptions of deity as models for expressing the ultimate significance of Jesus, namely his divine origin and deity. These six themes include divine conception (focusing on Luke 1), punitive protection of honor (Jesus as the enfant terrible of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas), superhuman moral benefaction (Origen’s argumentation in the Contra Celsum), epiphanic or theophanic manifestation (the Gospel transfiguration narratives), corporeal immortalization (the Gospel resurrection accounts), and the reception of a proper divine name (Phil 2:9-11 in the light of Roman imperial practice). This is an extraordinarily well-written, nuanced, convincingly argued and methodologically sophisticated comparative study which breaks new ground in understanding a centrally important aspect of the formation of early Christology. The author rightly criticizes the continued tendency to bifurcate “Judaism” and “Hellenism,” and in his use of comparative method rejects superficial conceptions of “borrowing” by appealing to the shared existence of an “embedded Hellenization” that pervaded ancient Mediterranean cultures. The author makes use of an impressive array of primary and secondary sources over which he has enviable control. This book gets four stars and should be required reading for all serious students of early Christian thought.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The “Deification” of Jesus Christ
Chapter 1: “Not through Semen, Surely”: Luke and Plutarch on Divine Birth
Chapter 2: “From Where Was this Child Born?”: Divine Children and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Chapter 3: “Deus est iuvare”: Miracles, Morals, and Euergetism in Origen’s Contra Celsum
Chapter 4: “And he was Metamorphosed”: Transfiguration as Epiphany
Chapter 5: “We Worship One who Rose from His Tomb”: Resurrection and Deification
Chapter 6: “The Name Above Every Name”: Jesus and Greco-Roman Theonymy
BECOMING DIVINE: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture
This book was originally accepted for publication by SUNY Press, but I offered it to Wipf & Stock (Cascade imprint) because I felt that they could distribute it to a wider audience. Written in an accessible style, is designed for the general reader and for classroom use. Chapter 3 (on Paul) provides a summary of my longer (2012) study called We Are Being Transformed. I post a brief description of the whole book below, then a table of contents, and after it the pdf version of the cover, which includes the endorsements.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
“Some have called it the essence of sin, others the depth of salvation. Regardless of one’s evaluation of it, however, deification throughout Western history has been a part of human aspiration. From the ancient pharaohs to modern transhumanists, people have envisioned their own divinity. These visionaries include not only history’s greatest megalomaniacs, but also mystics, sages, apostles, prophets, magicians, bishops, philosophers, atheists and monks. Some aimed for independent deity, others realized their eternal union with God. Some anticipated godhood in heaven, others walked as gods on earth. Some accepted divinity by grace, others achieved it by their own will to power. There is no single form of deification (indeed, deification is as manifold as the human conception of God), but the many types are united by a set of interlocking themes: achieving immortality, wielding superhuman power, being filled with supernatural knowledge or love—and through these means transcending normal human (or at least “earthly”) nature.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Merging with the Sun: The Deification of Amenhotep III
Chapter 2: The New Dionysus: Divine Assimilation in the Greco-Roman Ruler Cult
Chapter 3: “You Have Been Born a God”: Deification in the Orphic Gold Tablets
Chapter 4: “We are Being Transformed”: Paul and the Gospel of Deification
Chapter 5: “Immortalized in This Very Hour”: Deification in the “Mithras Liturgy”
Chapter 6: “I Have Been Born in Mind!”: Deification in the Hermetic Literature
Chapter 7: “I Have Become Identical With the Divine”: Plotinus on Deification
Chapter 8: “The Flash of One Tremulous Glance”: Augustine and Deification
Chapter 9: “I Am the Truth”: The Deification of Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj
Chapter 10: “God’s Being is My Life”: Meister Eckhart’s Birth in God
Chapter 11: “Uncreated by Grace”: Deification in Gregory Palamas
Chapter 12: “By Faith a Human Becomes God”: Martin Luther on Deification
Chapter 13: “Then They Shall be Gods …”: The Mormon Restoration of Deification
Chapter 14: “Rather be a God Oneself!” Nietzsche and the Joy of Earthly Godhood
There is not just a desire but a profound human need for enhancement – the irrepressible yearning to become better than ourselves. Today, enhancement is often conceived of in terms of biotechnical intervention: genetic modification, prostheses, implants, drug therapy – even mind uploading. The theme of this book is an ancient form of enhancement: a physical upgrade that involves ethical practices of self-realization. It has been called ‘angelification’ – a transformation by which people become angels. The parallel process is ‘daimonification’, or becoming daimones. Ranging in time from Hesiod and Empedocles through Plato and Origen to Plotinus and Christian gnostics, this book explores not only how these two forms of posthuman transformation are related, but also how they connect and chasten modern visions of transhumanist enhancement which generally lack a robust account of moral improvement.
This book studies posthuman transformation (becoming angels and demons) among poets, philosophers, and theologians of the ancient Mediterranean world. It brings together Hellenic, Jewish, Christian, and gnostic authors, and connects their visions of moral transformation to modern Transhumanist visions of biotechnical enhancement.
M. David Litwa, Ph.D. 
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