I’ve heard that in the early church the issue of Jesus’s being either the living incarnation of God on Earth, or just a really, really wise man and prophet, was kind of up in the air among various Christian groups until the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD took a series of adminstrative votes and made it part of the Christian Church Canon. Anyone that wouldn’t go along with this had their ecclesiastical arms twisted until they complied. If they were still not onboard at the end, their books were burned and they were banished.
Is this true? Was the notion of Jesus’s divinity not a uniformly accepted concept in the early church?
No, it isn’t true. Jesus’s divinity was universally accepted by the early Church. In fact, there was a Christian school of thought, called the Docetists, that declared that Jesus was fully divine and only seemed to be human. The question discussed at Nicaea was the nature of Jesus’s divinity; whether He was begotten of the Father and of the same substance, or if, as the Arian heresy had it, created by the Father and of similar substance.
I recommend reading Bart Ehrman’s book, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code; i would also urge you to read his Lost Christianities about the history of the early Church.
As I see it Jesus was fully God in the spirit, and fully man in the flesh.
What man thinks regarding Jesus should be whethet to accept him with all the ramifications attached thereto or reject him with the consequences thereof.
Not true. For all its history before the Council of Nicaea, Christianity was unofficial and illegal, and in consequence there was no authoritative way to say what was “the Church” and what wasn’t. Arianism, which flatly denied Jesus’ divinity and was condemned by the Council, is a “heresy” only in retrospect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism.)
From the time of the Apostolic Fathers (the generation right after the Apostles).
Jesus is referred to as somehow Divine. Exactly how that Divinity worked out wasn’t codified until Nicea. By the time of the Nicea, the Deity of Jesus was the dominant view, with Arius’s teaching (Jesus was God’s First Creation, the Divine Son, who then was Co- or Sub-Creator with his Father God, and worthy to receive a form of worship & to be called Divine by association) a strong second.
To the Jesus-Deity party, this teaching compromised the Oneness of God by stating that God would create a secondary “god” who then could be worshipped, it seemed more in keeping with their view of monotheism to regard Jesus as eternally an aspect/person within the One God. Also, it compromised the fullness of salvation by having our Savior regarded as a Super-Angel or Sub-deity rather than as fully God; and it compromised the full compassionate love of God by having God delegate our saving to a go-between rather than taking it on Himself.
In short, while it wasn’t a settled issue, by the time of Nicea, the main view was Jesus as God, the only real rival view was Jesus as Sub-God, while the view that Jesus was a man exalted to Divine Sonship (the Ebionite view & also held by some Gnostics who believed the Divine Christ possessed the man Jesus at his baptism by John, seemingly promoted in THE DA VINCI CODE) did not register at all within the Church.
Friar Ted has it exactly right. I would only add the words “at least” to his first sentance: From at least the time of the Apostolic Fathers (the generation right after the Apostles) Jesus is referred to as somehow Divine." There are strong hints in Paul that Christ was seen by him as divine in at least the Arian sense.
As I under stand it, Jesus considered all mankind Divine, I believe it was in John 25, when he was accused of blasphemy, He asked;" Why is it you say I blaspheme because I call God my father,when your father’s did so, and he quoted the 82d Psalm, (81st in Catholic versions). He always said, I go to my father and yours, He never seemed to make a distinction between himself and others. He taught Our Father. He never mentioned, nor hinted, at our being children of God by adoption, that was interpeted after his death.
Monavis
I should have said in John 10,(not 25) .Sorry about that. although I have read the Bible a good 25 times (over the years), I must confess I never bothered to memorize chapters and verse.
Well, you may be right about what Christ believed. John was the last of the four gospels to be written, although many scholars believe it contains authentic traditions not preserved elsewhere.
Paul, on the other hand, is our earliest source (though not an eyewitness to Jesus’s ministry), and his writings give no hint that anyone was considered divine apart from participation in Christ. (John can be interpreted similarly, BTW.)
Mark is our next earliest source, and nothing proclaiming universal divinity jumps to my mind there.
I would add Q, which is probably from about the same time as Paul, and shows no sign that Jesus was divine.
Also the Gospel of Thomas, if it can be dated to around the same time, is evidence for a moderate view of Jesus’s divinity.
And several Apostolic Fathers mention the groups of Jewish Christians who held that Jesus was a mere man.
The claim that “Jesus’s divinity was universally accepted by the early Church” is wildly inaccurate.
OTOH, the Arians did NOT deny Jesus’s divinity: they merely subordinated Jesus to God the Father. Their logic was straightforward: if Jesus was “begotten” of the Father, then he must be subordinate. There seems to have been some disagreement about whether Jesus was the first created being, or if he was “begotten” before all time in some sense that didn’t make him a “creation”.
Considering that Q is more of an idea than an actual text, I don’t think it can be included in a list of compilations that do not acknowledge the divinity of Christ.
Q is a supposition, not a document. We have no copies of Q, no copies of portions of Q, no direct references to Q - in short, no hard evidence that there is or ever was a document called Q. Q is merely a theoretical document used to explain the similarities between Matthew and Luke, but missing in Mark.
To claim Q as evidence of any insight as to the nature of Jesus is simply bad scholarship.
That Jesus was divine in some way was most certainly pretty much universally accepted. The Council at Nicea wasn’t to establish whether he was divine, but how divine he was and in what way.
Presumably, when the women (and possibly Peter and John) went to the tomb expecting to find a body, and instead found an angel (or the Risen Christ himself, according to John) standing over the linen wrappings. Of course you could say it wasn’t really settled until Jesus let Thomas touch his wounds and put his hand in his side.
Seriously, there seem to have been people who claimed Jesus was raised bodily as early as the putative event itself (though Paul was quite explicit that it was a spiritual body, not a physical one). Many Gnostics claimed otherwise, some claiming that Jesus was never crucified at all, some that he was never even born physically, but was always a purely spiritual being.
