myDiDivine

{DB} How the Jews Came to Believe That Jesus Was G d: If all the Jews - or even a substantial number - expected that the Messiah would be divine as well as human, them the belief in Jesus as G d is not the point of departure on which some new religion came into being but simply another variant {and not a deviant one} of Judaism. As controversial a statement as this may seem, it must first be understood in the context of a broader debate about the origins of the divinity of Jesus.

The theological idea that Jesus actually was G d, however refined by the later niceties of trinitarian theology, is referred to as a "high Christology," in opposition to "low Christologies" according to which Yeshua was essentially an inspired human being, a prophet or teacher, and not G d. "Christology" is the term in Christian theology and the history of Christianity for all of the issueas and controversies that make up the story & the doctrine of the Christ. In the fifth century, for instance, the great controversy about whether Jesus had one human nature and one divine nature or one combined divine-human nature was called the "Christological controversy."

Many other issues have been discussed and thought about under the rubric of Christology, however ...

Was Jesus divine from birth or an ordinary human later adopted by G d & MADE divine? How did Jesus effect salvation ~ through his crucifixion, his teaching, his showing the way for humans to become divine?

It has frequently been asserted that low Christologies are "Jewish" ones, while high Christologies have come into Christianity from the Greek thought world. Oddly enough, this position has been taken both by Jewish writers seeking to discredit Christianity as a kind of paganism and by orthodox Christian scholars wishing to distinguish the "new religion" from the old one as far and as quickly as possible.

This doubly defensive approach can no longer be maintained. The question of the origins of high Christology is one that continues te animate a great deal of scholarship on the prehistory of Christianity, or the history of pre-Christianity as attested in the New Testament, for at first glance it would seem to violate the absolute principle of Jewish monotheism. In a recent article, Andrew Chester has helpfully summarized the various positions that are currently held & defended by scholars on this question, which can be divided into four broad schools of thought.

According to the first, which has been popular among liberal Protestants for over a century, the idea of the divinity of Christ could only have been a relatively late & "Gentile" development that marks a decisive break with anything that could reasonably be called Jewish.

The argument goes that the early Jewish believers in Jesus believed in him as an inspired teacher, perhaps a prophet, perhaps the Messiah but only in the human sense. It was only later on, this view would hold, after the majority of Christians were no longer Jews, that the idea of Jesus as G d came in, possibly under the sway of the "pagan" ideas of many of the new Christian converts. Essential elementary questions, my dear Watson!