2.10 Early Christology

Christadelphians, as well as numerous other protestant groups, make the claim that their theology is the same as that of the first century Christians.

We don't know exactly what first century Christians actually thought, but I suspect they were a pretty diverse lot and all thought something slightly different depending on the oral tradition they had received and perhaps any written works they may have had access to.

Here I just what to look at one specific part of theology, which is Christology. The majority of Christians today believe in the Trinity. Christadelphians, among others, are different to this mainstream view and reject the doctrine of the Trinity. These are the only two real options today, but in earlier times the choices were broader.

The Ebionites

The Ebionites were a group of Jews who converted to Christianity and were around during the early centuries after Jesus. Their Jewishness had a large influence on their theology, and being Jewish they claimed that they could trace their roots right back to Jesus, who was a Jew himself. They thought that the Jewish dietary and other laws should be kept. If a person wanted to be saved through Jesus they asserted that first that person must be circumcised and become a Jew. Their view of Jesus was that he was a human and that his parents were Joseph and Mary - that he was not born of a virgin.

Much of this is clearly contrary to what Paul thought so they either didn't have his letters or rejected them as heretical. Instead they had their own scriptures which most likely included a Jewish Gospel that was probably not that dissimilar to our Gospel according to Matthew.

The Marcionites

While the Ebionites rejected Paul, the followers of Marcion accepted Paul wholeheartedly. Marcion lived in the second century in what we call Turkey. Paul drew a line between the Jewish laws and the freedom in Christ, with Paul the acceptance of Jesus meant the rejection of traditional Judaism. Marcion took this one step further. When he read the Old Testament and compared it with Paul's letters be was convinced that the God of the Old Testament was different to the God of the New Testament. The Old Testament God was the creator God while the New Testament God was the God who brought salvation. Those who have faith in Jesus can escape the jealous and vengeful Old Testament God. The New Testament Christ was not a part of the creation of the Old Testament God but something else. For the Marcionites Jesus was not a part of our physical world or a human being, he only appeared to be and was actually divine.

This view of Jesus was called docetism and held that Jesus was only a semblance without any physical reality. Passages like 1 John 4:1-3 were written to counter views like that of the Marcionites. So references to the Antichrist, a favourite subject of speculation among Christadelphians, has no meaning or application today since there are no longer any docetists.

Christian Gnostics

The gnostics seem to have held a variety of views (including non-Christian ones) and probably constituted more than one group of early Christians. Their focus was on knowledge rather than faith as being required for salvation, knowledge of who you really are and how you can escape the earthly body you are trapped in. In the gnostic system Christ had come from the divine realm to communicate with the divine essence that had become trapped in humans. Interestingly the Christ that came from the divine realm lived in Jesus who was a regular human being like you and me who had become temporarily inhabited by the divine.

They read Mark 1:10 when Jesus came up out of the water after his baptism and the dove descending as being the time when the Christ Spirit came down to dwell in Jesus. Then they use Jesus cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" in Mark 15:34 to indicate that the Christ Spirit had left the human Jesus to die on the cross alone.

The Orthodox View

In the end one view of Jesus would come to dominate - the one that attracted the most converts, and the one we are largely left with today. This view of Jesus has become the orthodox view, although it is not held by Christadelphians, and is known as the Trinity.

This view became the received view in 325 AD at the first council of Nicaea. The emperor Constantine had recently converted to Christianity and he wanted to use his new religion to bring his empire together. The only problem was that the teachings of Christianity varied greatly across the Roman world. Constantine gathered bishops from all over the empire to hammer out a 'right belief' or orthodoxy. Once this had been done the Nicene Creed was published and the doctrine of the Trinity was declared right, and that it had always been right. As we have seen though, the reality was very different with some very diverse ideas circulating from the very earliest times.

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