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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One of the Main Ways that the Earliest Christians Distinguished Themselves from the Surrounding Culture
In the first century, while Christianity was still in its infancy, the Greco-Roman world paid little attention. For the most part, the early Christian movement was seen as something still underneath the Jewish umbrella.
But in the second century, as Christianity emerged with a distinctive religious identity, the surrounding pagan culture began to take notice. And it didn’t like what it saw. Christians were seen as strange and superstitious–a peculiar religious movement that undermined the norms of a decent society. Christians were, well, different.
So, what was so different about Christians compared to the surrounding Greco-Roman culture? One distinctive trait was that Christians would not pay homage to the … Continue reading...
New Publication: “Manuscripts, Scribes, and Book Production in Early Christianity”
A number of years ago my wife purchased a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. Now, she reads a number of her books digitally. And she is not alone. It seems like our modern world has become to digest books more and more in a digital format–e-readers, ipads, digital phones, etc. Much of this technical innovation is positive. People can easily access material in ways never before available.
However, in the midst of this technological innovation, our modern concept of the “book” has been transformed. It has largely ceased to be a physical object that you can touch, hold, and smell, and now has become entirely digital. Books are merely words, and … Continue reading...