Was the Divinity of Jesus a Late Invention of the Council of Nicea? Probing Into What the Earliest Christians Really Believed
One of the most common objections to Christianity is that the divinity of Jesus was “created” by later Christians long after the first century. No one in primitive Christianity believed Jesus was divine, we are told. He was just a man and it was later believers, at the council of Nicea, that declared him to be a God.
A classic example of this in popular literature can be found in the book The Da Vinci Code:
…“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history [council of Nicea], Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
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Did the Earliest Christians Really Think Jesus Was God? One Important Example
One of the most common critiques of Christianity is that some of its major tenets are late inventions. Core Christian doctrines, we are told, were never believed in the earliest phases of the church but were developed only at a later time period. Orthodoxy, therefore, was not early but late.
The most obvious example of a doctrine that was purportedly added later (we will cover another such doctrine in a future post) is the divinity of Jesus. The popular internet-level narrative goes like this: Jesus was not God, nor did he claim to be God. He was just an ordinary man. At a later point, his followers began to … Continue reading...
Gospel Critics and the Argument from Silence
“You can’t say everything.” This is one of the refrains I often cite to my students as we discuss historical documents. When ancient authors put quill to papyrus (or parchment), we need to remember that they had a limited amount of space, a limited amount of time, a limited number of goals, and often a very specific purpose for which they wrote.
Inevitably, therefore, an historical account will include some things that other historical accounts (of the same event) might omit, and they might omit some things that other historical accounts might include.
This reality is particularly important to remember when the Gospel accounts are analyzed and compared with one … Continue reading...
Did Jesus Claim to be God? A Response to Bart Ehrman (Part 3)
Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts reviewing Bart Ehrman’s new book, How Jesus Became God–The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014). For the prior post see here and here.
Not surprisingly, one of the major tenets in Ehrman’s argument is that Jesus never considered himself to be God, nor ever claimed to be God. In order to make his case, Ehrman summarizes his arguments from his book, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford, 2001), and says that Jesus just viewed himself as an apocalyptic prophet who was ushering in the Kingdom of God (basically Albert Schweitzer redivivus).
Here … Continue reading...
Did Jesus Really “Become” God? My Review of Bart Ehrman’s Latest
Last week I mentioned that I have begun a new series on my blog responding to Bart Erhman’s latest volume, How Jesus Became God–The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014). For the prior posts in this series, see here and here. Future posts will come over the next few weeks.
Many of the posts in this series (though not all) will be drawn from my full-length review of Ehrman’s book. I have just learned that Reformation 21 has now posted that full review here.
The review covers a lot of ground, ranging from early Christian views of semi-divine figures, to whether Jesus claimed to be … Continue reading...