The Big Questions About Jesus 預覽

Did the Christian Church Turn Jesus Into God?

This question is an interesting but misinformed idea used by people who try to attack the Christian faith: that Jesus was just an ordinary man. Long after his death, the Christian church suddenly said Jesus was God.

This view commonly says that around 300 years after Jesus' death, Emperor Constantine declared Jesus to be God at the Council of Nicaea, just as Dan Brown said in his novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the whole idea is just that – fiction.

Christians have been worshipping Jesus as God right from the start, as seen from the first recorded statements of the first Christians. Straight after his resurrection, the apostle Thomas said to Jesus, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28).

About 30 years after Jesus' death and resurrection, Paul wrote to the Christians in the city of Philippi that Jesus was God in human form. John, a close eyewitness, confirms Jesus' divinity with the words, "He was God" (John 1:1). John's statement has been discovered in an ancient manuscript and is carbon dated 100 years before Constantine, at the very latest.

In all of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, some fragments possibly dating from the first century itself and certainly from the second century, you find a unique feature. The early Christians were careful to mark references to Jesus with a unique mark, like underlining, that they reserved for the name of the one true God.

Most of what is said by those who want to attack the early divine status of Jesus is wrong. What happened at this famous Council of Nicaea, which Emperor Constantine convened in AD 325? This Council didn't even discuss whether Jesus was God - it was never the issue. The issue was in what way he was God. When they voted, only two of the 318 bishops disagreed with what the Christian church had been teaching all along.

Jesus always claimed to be God during his ministry here on earth, but not even his disciples accepted that at first. They were Jews, and their strongest belief was that there was not just one God but also that God was One. This is at the core of the historical challenge of trying to explain the origins of Christianity.

There was a seismic shift in reality that made them decide Jesus had been right all along and turned his followers from sniveling cowards into fearless worshippers of Jesus as God. There's only one explanation: Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead. The resurrection does change everything.

– Eliezer Gonzalez