How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

EPILOGUE

Jesus as God: The Aftermath

AS I HAVE BEEN writing this book I have come to realize that the history of my own personal theology is a mirror image of the history of the theology of the early church. To use the older terminology, in early Christianity the views of Christ got “higher and higher” with the passing of time, as he became increasingly identified as divine. Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status at his resurrection; to being a preexistent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him. My own personal beliefs about Jesus moved in precisely the opposite direction. I started out thinking of Jesus as God the Son, equal with the Father, a member of the Trinity; but over time, I began to see him in “lower and lower” terms, until finally I came to think of him as a human being who was not different in nature from any other human being. The Christians exalted him to the divine realm in their theology, but in my opinion, he was, and always had been, a human.

As an agnostic, I now think of Jesus as a true religious genius with brilliant insights. But he was also very much a man of his time. And his time was an age of full-throated apocalyptic fervor. Jesus participated in this first-century Palestinian Jewish milieu. He was born and raised in it, and it was the context within which he conducted his public ministry. Jesus taught that the age he lived in was controlled by forces of evil but that God would soon intervene to destroy everything and everyone opposed to him. God would then bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth, where there would be no more pain and suffering. Jesus himself would be the ruler of this kingdom, with his twelve disciples serving under him. And all this was to happen very soon—within his own generation.

This apocalyptic message does continue to resonate with me, but I certainly do not believe it literally. I do not think that there are supernatural powers of evil who are controlling our governments or demons who are making our lives miserable; I do not think there is going to be a divine intervention in the world in which all the forces of evil will be permanently destroyed; I do not think there will be a future utopian kingdom here on earth ruled by Jesus and his apostles. But I do think there is good and evil; I do think we should all be on the side of good; and I do think we should fight mightily against all that is evil.

I especially resonate with the ethical teachings of Jesus. He taught that much of the law of God could be summarized in the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” He taught that you should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He taught that our acts of love, generosity, mercy, and kindness should reach even to “the least of these, my brothers and sisters”—that is, to the lowly, the outcast, the impoverished, the homeless, the destitute. I agree wholeheartedly with these views and try my best to live according to them.

But as a historian I realize that Jesus’s ethical teachings were delivered in a decidedly apocalyptic form to which I do not subscribe. Jesus is sometimes lauded as one of the great moral teachers of all time, and I sympathize with this characterization. But it is important to realize that the reasoning behind his moral teaching is not the reasoning most of us use today. People today think that we should live ethically for a wide variety of reasons—most of them irrelevant to Jesus—for example, so we can find the greatest self-fulfillment in life and so we can all thrive together as a society for the long haul. Jesus did not teach his ethics so that society could thrive for the long haul. For Jesus, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it. Those who lived according to the standards he set forth, loving God with all their being and loving one another as themselves, would enter into the kingdom of God that was very soon to appear. Anyone who chose not to do so would be destroyed when the Son of Man arrived in judgment from heaven. Jesus’s ethics were an “ethics of the kingdom” both because the kinds of lives his followers led when they followed these ethical principles would be the kinds of lives they would experience in the kingdom—where there would be no war, hatred, violence, oppression, or injustice—and because a person could enter into the kingdom only by living in this way.

This is not the worldview I myself have. I don’t believe there is a God in heaven who is soon to send a cosmic judge of the earth to destroy the forces of evil. And yet I think that the ethical principles Jesus enunciated in that apocalyptic context are still applicable to me, living in a different context. To make sense of Jesus, I have recontextualized him—that is, made him and his message relevant in a new context—for a new day, the day in which I live.

I would argue that Jesus has always been recontextualized by people living in different times and places. The first followers of Jesus did this after they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven: they made him into something he had not been before and understood him in light of their new situation. So too did the later authors of the New Testament, who recontextualized and understood Jesus in light of their own, now even more different situations. So too did the Christians of the second and third centuries, who understood Jesus less as an apocalyptic prophet and more as a divine being become human. So too did the Christians of the fourth century, who maintained that he had always existed and had always been equal with God the Father in status, authority, and power. And so too do Christians today, who think that the divine Christ they believe in and confess is identical in every respect with the person who was walking the dusty lanes of Galilee preaching his apocalyptic message of the coming destruction. Most Christians today do not realize that they have recontextualized Jesus. But in fact they have. Everyone who either believes in him or subscribes to any of his teachings has done so—from the earliest believers who first came to believe in his resurrection until today. And so it will be, world without end.

This is certainly and most obviously true of the years we have examined in this book. It continued to be true in the years that followed, as we can now see as we consider what happened in the aftermath of the decision of the Council of Nicea that Christ was God in a particular sense, that he had been a preexistent divine being with God throughout all eternity, and that he was, in fact, the one through whom God had made all things.

Developments of the Fourth Century

IN THE POPULAR IMAGINATION it is widely thought that after the Council of Nicea there was a basic agreement among Christian leaders and thinkers concerning the nature of Christ and the character of the Trinity. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Nicea and its creed were not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new chapter. For one thing, the defeat of the Arian side at Nicea did not stamp out the Arian view. Constantine backed the winning side—probably less because it was what he actually believed than because it became the consensus opinion and he was principally interested in having a consensus emerge to help unify the church. But the church was not unified and would not become unified. After Constantine other emperors came and went, and over the next several decades a number of these emperors leaned toward the Arian interpretation of Christ and acted out on their convictions. There were times—possibly most of the times—when there were more Arians than anti-Arians. That is why the church father Jerome, writing in 379 CE, could make his famous lament that “the world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian” (Dialogue Against Luciferians 19).

As it turns out, the Arian controversy was not finally decided until the next major ecumenical council, held just two years after Jerome’s lament, the Council of Constantinople in 381. At this council the decisions of Nicea were restated and reaffirmed, and Arianism came to be a marginalized minority view widely deemed heretical.

For those standing outside these theological controversies, the differences between the views of Arius and of Arius’s opponents, such as his bishop Alexander and the young but brilliant Athanasius—himself soon to be bishop of Alexandria—are less striking than the commonalities. Even the “heretical” Arians agreed with Athanasius and others that Christ was God. He was a divine being who had existed with God before the beginning of all other things and was the one through whom God had created the universe. This was still a very “high” incarnational Christology. By the time of the debates between Arius and his opponents, and then, in after years, between the Arians and the followers of Athanasius, very few Christians doubted that Jesus was actually God. Once again, the only question was “in what sense” he was God.

What is arguably most significant is that in the fourth century, when these disputes had come to a head, the Roman emperor Constantine had converted to the faith. That changed everything. Having a Christian emperor on the throne—one who believed and propagated the belief that Christ was God—had radical implications for the various interactions between orthodox Christians and others. In what remains of this epilogue I briefly consider the implications for three realms of dispute that Christians engaged in: disputes with pagans, disputes with Jews, and disputes with one another.

The God Christ and the Pagan World

SINCE THE DAYS OF Caesar Augustus, three hundred years earlier, inhabitants of the Roman world had understood and worshiped the emperor as a god. Moreover, from the time the earliest followers of Jesus came to believe that he was raised from the dead, Christians had understood and worshiped Christ as God. As we have seen, these two—the emperor and Jesus—were the only two figures that we know of from antiquity who were actually called “the Son of God.” And in the Christian mind, at least, this meant that the two figures were in competition. In the early fourth century, one of the competitors caved in and lost the struggle. With Constantine, the emperor changed from being a rival god to Jesus to be being a servant of Jesus.

One of the most interesting works by the church historian Eusebius is his previously mentioned Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, a biographical account of the emperor that is, to say the least, effusive in its praise. Arguably the most valuable parts of the Life are those in which Eusebius quotes the actual words of the emperor. In a letter Constantine wrote to the Christians of Palestine, it becomes clear that Constantine does not see himself as a competitor with Christ and God the Father, but rather stands in awe of God’s power and recognizes his need to serve him as his servant on earth. At one point Constantine declares that the Christian God “alone really exists and holds power continuously through all time,” and he says that God “examined my service and approved it as fit for his purposes” (Life 2.28). Or as he says later in the letter, “Indeed my whole soul and whatever breath I draw, and whatever goes on in the depths of the mind, that, I am firmly convinced, is owed by us wholly to the greatest God” (Life 2.24). Clearly there is no competition here!

As a result of Constantine’s devotion, Eusebius writes, “by law he forbade images of himself to be set up in idol-shrines.” Moreover, he “had his portrait so depicted on the gold coinage that he appeared to look upwards in the manner of one reaching out to God in prayer” (Life 4.15, 16). In other words, Constantine reversed the three-centuries-old procedures of his predecessors. Rather than allowing himself to be depicted as a god and worshiped as a god, he insisted that he be shown worshiping the true God.

Somewhat more striking, Constantine required the soldiers in his army not to worship him, but to worship the Christian God. This applied even to the soldiers who remained pagan. Eusebius indicates that Constantine required the non-Christian soldiers in the army to gather on a plain every Sunday and recite the following prayer to the Christian God:

You alone we know as God,

You are the King we acknowledge,

You are the Help we summon,

By you we have won our victories,

Through you we have overcome our enemies . . .

To you we all come to supplicate for our Emperor Constantine and for his beloved Sons:

That they may be kept safe and victorious for us in long life (Life 4.20)

Once the emperor became Christian, it is fair to say that everything changed with respect to Christian relationships with pagans and with the Roman government. Rather than being a persecuted minority who refused to worship the divine emperor, the Christians were on the path to becoming the persecuting majority, with the emperor as the servant of the true God who encouraged, directly or indirectly, the citizens of the state to join in his Christian worship. By the end of the fourth century something like half of the entire empire was converted to orthodox Christianity; the emperor enforced laws promoting the Christian religion and outlawing pagan sacrifice and worship; and Christianity triumphed once and for all over the pagan religions that had previously accepted the emperor as divine.

The God Christ and the Jewish World

THE CHRISTIAN BELIEF THAT Jesus was God had serious ramifications for Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity, because it was widely thought that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death. If the Jews killed Jesus, and Jesus was God, does it not follow that the Jews had killed their own God?¹

This was in fact a view held in orthodox circles long before the conversion of Constantine. Nowhere does it come in a more chilling rhetorical package than in a sermon preached by a bishop of the city of Sardis in Asia Minor near the end of the second Christian century, a man named Melito. This is the first instance we have on record of a Christian charging Jews with the crime of deicide—the murder of God. Melito delivers the charge in powerful and highly effective language. I quote here only a small portion of his long sermon. The occasion was the Jewish Passover, when Jews annually commemorated the great act of God when he delivered the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt during the days of Moses. The Passover lamb that was slain on that occasion was, for Melito, an image of Christ himself, slain by the Jews. And rather than being an occasion for joyous celebration, the death of the true lamb was an occasion for hostile accusation. The Jews killed the one who had come to save them; they killed their own messiah; and since the messiah was himself divine, the Jews killed their own God:

This one was murdered

And where was he murdered?

In the very center of Jerusalem!

Why?

Because he had healed their lame,

And had cleansed their lepers,

And had guided their blind with light,

And had raised up their dead.

For this reason he suffered. . . .

Why O Israel, did you do this strange injustice?

You dishonored the one who had honored you.

You held in contempt the one who held you in esteem.

You denied the one who publicly acknowledged you.

You renounced the one who proclaimed you his own.

You killed the one who made you to live,

Why did you do this, O Israel? . . .

It was necessary for him to suffer, yes, but not by you;

It was necessary for him to be dishonored, but not by you;

It was necessary for him to be judged, but not by you;

It was necessary for him to be crucified, but not by you, nor by your right hand,

O Israel!

The rhetoric then moves to a climax as Melito delivers his ultimate charge against his enemies, the Jews:

Pay attention, all families of the nations, and observe!

An extraordinary murder has taken place

In the center of Jerusalem,

In the city devoted to God’s law,

In the city of the Hebrews,

In the city of the prophets,

In the city thought of as just.

And who has been murdered?

And who is the murderer?

I am ashamed to give the answer,

But give it I must. . . .

The one who hung the earth in space is himself hanged;

The one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled;

The one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree.

The Lord is insulted,

God has been murdered,

The King of Israel has been destroyed

By the right hand of Israel.²

It is, of course, one thing for a member of a relatively small persecuted minority that is politically powerless to attack others with such vitriolic rhetoric. But what happens when the persecuted minority comes to be a majority? What happens when it gains political power—in fact, supreme political power? What happens when the emperor of Rome himself comes to believe the Christian message? As you can imagine, what happens will not be good for the enemies who supposedly murdered the God the Christians worship.

In a book that has deservedly become a classic study of the rise of anti-Judaism in the early church, called Faith and Fratricide, theologian Rosemary Ruether sets forth the social implications of Christian power in the fourth century for Jews of the empire.³ The short story is that Jews came to be legally marginalized under Christian emperors and treated as second-class citizens with restricted legal rights and limited economic possibilities. Jewish beliefs and practices were not actually made illegal, in the way pagan sacrifices were at the end of the fourth century, but theologians and Christian bishops—who now were increasingly powerful not only as religious leaders, but also as civil authorities—railed against Jews and attacked them as the enemies of God. State legislation was passed to constrain the activities of Jews.

Constantine himself passed a law that forbade Jews from owning Christian slaves. This may seem like a humane measure in our day and age, when slavery of all kinds is viewed with disgust and contempt. But Constantine did not ban slavery and was not opposed to it. On the contrary, the Roman world continued to work as a slave economy. Without slaves one could not run any serious manufacturing or agricultural business. But if the population became increasingly Christian, and Jews could have only Jewish and pagan slaves, then any chance for Jews to compete economically with Christians was curtailed.

Eventually it became illegal for a Christian to convert to Judaism. Under the emperor Theodotius I, near the end of the fourth century, it became illegal for a Christian to marry a Jew. Doing so was considered an act of adultery. Jews came to be excluded from serving in public office. In 423 CE a law was passed that made it illegal for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue. Accompanying all these forms of legislation were acts of violence against Jews that, even if not sponsored by the emperor or other state authorities, were tacitly condoned. Synagogues were burned, lands were confiscated, Jews were persecuted and even murdered—and the authorities turned a blind eye. Why not? These were the people who had killed God.

A key example illustrates the situation. In 388 CE the bishop of a town called Callinicum incited his Christian parishioners to assault the local Jewish synagogue. They did so, leveling it to the ground. When the Jewish population in town protested to the emperor Theodosius, he ordered the bishop to have the synagogue rebuilt with church money. At that point, a powerful Christian leader interposed to try to reverse the emperor’s judgment. One of the most influential bishops at the time was Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. When word of the emperor’s intervention and demand for reparation reached Milan, Ambrose wrote a harsh letter in protest, arguing that the emperor was in danger of offending his own religious duty by this intervention and insisting that the bishop should by no means be required to restore the synagogue.

Here we have a remarkable situation. Less than a century earlier, Christian leaders were being hunted down and persecuted by the ruling authorities. Now Christian leaders were reprimanding the emperor in writing and expecting that they would be obeyed. How the tables have turned!

Theodosius decided to ignore Ambrose’s protest, but as it happens, he made a trip to Milan and attended a worship service in the cathedral there. Ambrose claims, in his own account of the affair, that he preached a sermon directed to the emperor’s “misbehavior” and afterward, in the middle of the service, walked down from the altar to confront the emperor face-to-face, publicly demanding that the emperor back down. In this very public arena, the emperor felt he had no choice. He acceded to the bishop’s demand, the Christian mob in Callinicum went unpunished, and the synagogue remained in ruins (see Ambrose, Letters 40 and 41).⁴

Now, not only is Christ God, but his servants the bishops have real political power. And they are using that power in ugly ways against their longtime enemies, the Jews, those who allegedly killed their own God.

The God Christ and the Christian World

WITH THE CONVERSION OF the emperor to the belief that Christ was God and that the God of the Christians was supreme, the discourse of Christians among themselves clearly changed. Earlier arguments of Christians with Christians were over issues that came to be seen as basic and foundational. Was Christ God? Yes. Was he a human? Yes. Was he, though, just one person, not two? Yes. By the early fourth century, when Constantine converted, the vast majority of Christians agreed with those affirmations. You might think that this would put an end to the theological debates and the search for heretics in the midst of the orthodox. But the historical truth is that the debates were just starting to warm up.

I have already mentioned the fact that the Arian controversy did not die out with the Council of Nicea; it went on for another half century or more. And new debates arose, over issues that would have been unthinkable just a hundred years earlier. Theological views that developed in the wake of the conquest of orthodox understandings of Jesus as both divine and human became increasingly sophisticated and nuanced. What earlier had been acceptable positions among the orthodox came to be challenged in their minutest details. The issues may seem picayune to outside observers, but to insiders they were matters of real moment, with eternal consequences. As a result, the vitriol did not lessen now that the “major” issues had been resolved. If anything, the rhetoric was significantly ratcheted up, and error on even the smallest point became a matter of enormous importance—the stuff of excommunication and exile.

I will not try to provide even a cursory treatment of the various theological controversies of the fourth, fifth, and later centuries, but instead will give the slightest taste, by briefly describing three views that came to be articulated, debated, and eventually denounced as heretical.⁵ This quick overview will at least give an idea of the level of argumentation carried on between Christian and Christian.

Marcellus of Ancyra

One of the major proponents of the Athanasian, anti-Arian views adopted at the Council of Nicea was the bishop of Ancyra, named Marcellus (died 374 CE). He saw himself as hyperorthodox. But he realized that the decisions leading to the creed of Nicea left considerable room for development, especially on the question of how Christ—who was coeternal and equal with God—actually related to the Father. Were Christ and the Father two separate but equal beings, or hypostases (a term that now meant something like “person” or “individual entity”)? Marcellus fully realized that a modalist view could no longer be accepted. But was there some way to preserve the oneness, the unity, of the godhead without falling into the trap of Sabellius and others like him, so that no one could charge the Christians of having more than one God?

Marcellus’s solution was to say that there was only one hypostasis, who was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his view, the Christ and the Spirit were eternal with God, but only because they were resident within him from back into eternity and came forth from the Father for the purposes of salvation. In fact, before Christ came forth from God—when he was resident within him—he was not yet the Son; he could be the Son only when he came forth at the incarnation. And so before that time he was the Word of God, within the Father. Moreover, on the basis of his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, which says that at “the end” of all things, Christ will “hand over the kingdom to God the Father,” Marcellus maintained that Christ’s kingdom was not eternal. Ultimately, God the Father is all sovereign; Christ will deliver his kingdom to the Father; and then he will return to be resident within him.

This view obviously toed the line on the major Christological issues of the second, third, and early fourth centuries. Christ was God, he became man, and he was only one person. And it was not a modalist view. But other church leaders thought it sounded too much like modalism and condemned it as a heresy. The matter was discussed and finally decided at the Council of Constantinople in 381. That is when the line was introduced into the Nicene Creed that is still said today, that “his [Christ’s] kingdom shall have no end.” This line was added to demonstrate the theological rejection of the views of Marcellus. Other church leaders disagreed with this rejection. And so the debates continued.

Apollinaris

Apollinaris (315–392 CE) was too young to have attended the Council of Nicea, but as an adult he became a friend of Athanasius and was appointed bishop of the city of Laodicea. Like Marcellus before him, he claimed to be a true supporter of the form of orthodoxy embraced by the anti-Arian creed of Nicea. But he was consumed with the question of how Christ could be God and human at one and the same time. If Jesus was a god-man, then was part of him God and another part of him a man?

We are a bit handicapped in knowing exactly how Apollinaris expressed his views, since very little of his writing survives. What he was later accused of teaching was that the incarnate Christ did not actually have a human soul. Like others at his time, Apollinaris appears to have understood that humans are made up of three parts: the body; the “lower soul,” which is the root of our emotions and passions; and the “upper soul,” which is our faculty of reason with which we understand the world. Apollinaris evidently maintained that in Jesus Christ, the preexistent divine Logos replaced the upper soul, so his reason was completely divine. And so, God and human are united and at one—there is only one person, Christ—but they are united because in the man Jesus, God had a part and a human had a part.

One result of this view was that Christ could not develop morally, or in terms of his personality, since he did not have a human soul but instead the divine Logos. This more than anything else is what led to the condemnation of the Apollinarian view. If Christ was not fully human, in every respect, he could not set an example for us to follow. We are not like him, so how can we be like him? Moreover, if Christ was not fully human, then it cannot be clear how he could redeem the entire human being. In this understanding, Christ’s salvation would extend to the human body but not to the human soul, since he didn’t have a human soul.

Or so the opponents of Apollinaris argued. He and his views were condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and even though in light of earlier controversies he seemed perfectly orthodox, he was not allowed any longer even to worship in a Christian church in public.

Nestorius

As a final example of a controversy that emerged from the conquest of orthodoxy, I turn to a later figure whose views came to be attacked, even though he himself wanted nothing more than to represent the orthodox views of the faith. Nestorius (381–451 CE) was a leading Christian spokesperson of his day who was appointed to the prestigious position of bishop of Constantinople in 428 CE. The controversy surrounding Nestorius and his views relates to an issue I have not yet addressed. Once it came to be affirmed that Christ was God by nature, from back into eternity, theologians began to ask what it meant to say that Mary was his mother. Mary herself, of course, came to be exalted as a person of unique standing, and legends and traditions about her proliferated. Theologians who considered her role in the salvation brought by Christ began now to call her Theotokos, which means “one who gives birth to God” but came to mean, more roughly, “the mother of God.”

This term was in wide use by the time of Nestorius in the early fifth century, but he came to object to it, publicly. In Nestorius’s view, to call Mary the mother of God sounded too much like Apollinarianism—that Mary gave birth to a human being who had the Logos of God within him instead of a human soul. Nestorius believed that Christ was fully human, not partially so, and also that Christ was fully God, not partially so. Moreover, the divine and the human cannot intermingle, since they are different essences. Both the divine and the human were present in Christ at the incarnation.

In stressing this view that Christ was both fully God and fully human, Nestorius came to be seen as someone who wanted to argue that Christ was two different persons, one divine and one human—with his human element tightly embracing the divine so that they stood in a unity (much like a “marriage of souls”). But by this time orthodox Christians had long maintained that Christ was just one person. In the end, Nestorius’s enemies attacked this “two-person” Christology by arguing that it divided Christ and thereby made him a “mere man” rather than some kind of “divine man.” As a result, Nestorius and his views were condemned by Pope Celestine in 430 and by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.

My point in looking at these three later heresies is not to give a full survey of Christological discussions of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is rather to illustrate the fact that once Christ was declared to be God from back into eternity who had become a human, all the problems of interpretation and understanding were not solved. Instead, new problems were introduced. And once these were resolved, yet more theological issues came to the fore. Theology became more nuanced. Views became more sophisticated. Orthodox theology became even more paradoxical. Many of these issues were not finally resolved in any “official” way until the Council of Chalcedon in 451. But even that “resolution” did not end all disputes about God, Christ, the Trinity, and all related topics. Disputes would rage for many centuries to come and in fact continue in our own day.

Conclusion

IN NONE OF THE Christian controversies I have discussed in this epilogue was there any question of whether Jesus was God. Jesus was in fact God. All of the participants in these debates had a “Nicene” understanding of Christ: he was God from back into eternity; there never was a time when or before which he did not exist; he was the one through whom God had created all things in heaven and on earth; he was of the same substance as God the Father; he was in fact equal with God in status, authority, and power. These are all quite exalted things to say about an apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee who was crucified for crimes against the state. We have come a long way over the three hundred years since Jesus’s death.

But one could argue—and probably should argue—that in fact Christian thinking about Jesus had come an enormous way just twenty years after his death. It must have been no more than twenty years after Jesus died, possibly even fewer, that the Christ poem in Philippians was composed, in which Jesus was said to have been a preexistent being “in the form of God” who became human and then because of his obedient death was exalted to divine status and made equal with God, the Lord to whom all people on earth would bow in worship and confess loyalty. One German scholar of the New Testament, Martin Hengel, has famously claimed that “with regard to the development of all the early Church’s Christology . . . more happened in the first twenty years than in the entire later, centuries-long development of dogma.”⁶

There is a certain truth to this claim. Of course, a lot did indeed happen after the first twenty years—an enormous amount. But the major leap was made in those twenty years: from seeing Jesus as his own disciples did during his ministry, as a Jewish man with an apocalyptic message of coming destruction, to seeing him as something far greater, a preexistent divine being who became human only temporarily before being made the Lord of the universe. It was not long after that that Jesus was declared to be the very Word of God made flesh, who was with God at creation and through whom God made all things. Eventually Jesus came to be seen as God in every respect, coeternal with the Father, of the same substance as the Father, equal to the Father within the Trinity of three persons, but one God.

This God Christ may not have been the historical Jesus. But he was the Christ of orthodox Christian doctrine, the object of faith and veneration over the centuries. And he is still the God revered and worshiped by Christians throughout our world today.