When did Christians first start to believe that Jesus was the Son of God?
One of Dan Brown's core ideas in 'The Da Vinci Code' is that the Council of Nicaea voted to make Jesus divine, in 325 AD. The Roman emperor Constantine called this vote for political reasons.
We'll look at Constantine's role later, but right now, we want to look more closely at what the first Christians really believed, and when they believed it.
Early Christian leaders
Let's start with what some early Christian leaders said. Around 225 AD - a hundred years before the Council of Nicaea, the church leader Origen said
No-one should be offended that the Saviour is also God.
From about the same time, Tertullian - another church leader - wrote about
Christ our God.
Also about this time - 200 AD - the Christian leader Clement of Alexandria said that Jesus was
...most truly manifest deity, he that is made equal to the Lord of the Universe.
A bit earlier, in 185 AD, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, said that Jesus of Nazareth is
...our Lord and God and Saviour and King.
The Christian leader Justin, who was martyred in Rome around 165 AD, said that Jesus is
... the first-begotten Word of God, is even God.
And as far back as 105 AD, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, said
God himself was manifest in human form.
So all these early Christian leaders were saying that Jesus was God long before the Council of Nicaea.
The Roman governor Pliny
An interesting sidelight on this comes from the Roman historian Pliny. He was the governor of the province of Bithynia, in present-day Turkey. In about 112 AD, he wrote to the Emperor Trajan, asking what he should do with the Christians in his province. He was executing so many of them that it was becoming a problem. The important point is that Pliny records that they worshipped Christ as a god - and this was almost at the beginning of the second century, more than two hundred years before the Council of Nicaea.
The Gospels
As well as Pliny and these Church leaders, we also have the evidence of the Gospels themselves. These say that Jesus was the Son of God - and they come from the last quarter of the first century. (Of course, Dan Brown wouldn't dispute that they say this, although he might dispute when they were written.)
Paul's letters
We saw previously that the earliest Christian documents that we have are the letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament. Within thirty years of when Jesus died, Paul was already writing about him as the Son of God - and this is two hundred and fifty years before the Council of Nicaea.
Let's go back for a moment to Dan Brown's original statement:
The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms… The scrolls highlight glaring historical discrepancies and fabrications...
But we've seen that the Dead Sea Scrolls don't contain any Gospels at all.
We've seen that the Gnostic Gospels come from the second or third century. They aren't the earliest Christian Gospels. They don't mention the Grail, and they don't 'speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms.' They don't 'highlight glaring historical discrepancies or fabrications.'
We've seen that:
- Christian leaders were describing Jesus as the Son of God more than two hundred years before the Council of Nicaea.
- The Gospels in the Bible were written in the last quarter of the first century, and they describe Jesus as the Son of God too.
- The earliest Christian documents are the letters of the apostle Paul, written twenty to thirty years after Jesus died. These also refer to Jesus as the Son of God.
It just isn't true that the earliest Gospels portrayed Jesus as just a human prophet and teacher. And the idea that Jesus was God as well as man didn't begin with Constantine. Christians had believed that Jesus was God for two hundred and fifty years before the Council of Nicaea. This was as far before the Council of Nicaea as the American War of Independence was before today.