In my last post I summarized several key factors in the early Christian discovery of the deity of Jesus. These were:<\/p>\n
Jesus Spoke with God’s Own Authority
Jesus Forgave Sins as if He Were God
Jesus Assumed the Character of Divine Wisdom
Jesus Claimed Unprecedented Intimacy with God
The Death and Resurrection Showed that Jesus was the Divine Savior<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThese factors, when viewed in light of the resurrection, highlighted the deity of Jesus.<\/p>\n
The Influence of Greco-Roman Culture Reconsidered<\/b><\/p>\n
Earlier in this series I summarized one of the most common arguments that seeks to explain why Jesus was considered to be divine. This argument points to the influence of Greco-Roman culture upon Christianity. The earliest Christians were monotheists who thought of Jesus only as an inspired man, proponents of this view claim, but when Christianity spread into the Roman Empire, where the line between divinity and humanity was frequently crossed, Jesus was deified. This began to happen in the latter decades of the first century A.D., and was completed in the fourth century.<\/p>\n
This argument sounds plausible until you examine the evidence. As I have demonstrations, the best evidence we have indicates that the very first Christians began to speak of Jesus as if he were, not just an inspired man, but the Lord himself. Moreover they worshiped him and prayed to him. This happened within ten or at most fifteen years after the death of Jesus. And it took place, not in the Greco-Roman ideological marketplace, but within the confines of faithful, monotheistic Judaism. Thus, the theory of a late, pagan-inspired deification of Jesus just doesn’t fit the historical facts. <\/p>\n
If more proof were needed that the discovery of Jesus’ divine nature occurred within a predominantly Jewish worldview, one needs only review the points I made earlier in this part. It’s only within the context of Judaism that Jesus’ authoritative speech, forgiveness of sin, adoption of Wisdom’s ethos, and unprecedented intimacy with God the Father point to his divine identity. I don’t have the space here to discuss many of the other ways Jesus spoke and acted as if he were, not only the Lord’s anointed, but the Lord himself. As N.T. Wright has shown in his voluminous writings on Jesus, Jesus acted as if he was fulfilling Old Testament prophetic hopes focused on the Lord’s return to Zion and restoration of Israel. In a broad way, Jesus was doing that which the Lord, through the Hebrew prophets, had promised to do himself.<\/p>\n
Closing Thoughts<\/b><\/p>\n
It seems clear to me that the historical evidence we have shows unmistakably that some of the earliest Christians considered Jesus to be divine. The beliefs of these folk are embedded in the earliest Christian writings we have, the documents of the New Testament. Of course there may have been some followers of Jesus who did not think of him as God in the flesh. Ironically, the main Christological debate in the second century A.D. did not have to do with whether Christ was divine, but whether he was human. The Gnostics argued for a divine but not really human redeemer. Orthodox believers defended the humanity as well as divinity of the savior. (Photo: Pieter Rubens, “The Resurrection of Christ,” 1611-1612)<\/p>\n