On Jesus: An Introduction

Last night I watched the movie Da Vinci Code star­ing Tom Hanks. It got me to think­ing. It presents one of two posi­tions that were deemed hereti­cal by the church, namely, Jesus was a mere man and not God. The movie goes so far as to pro­claim a rather far fetched fan­tasy that not only was Jesus mere man, but that he was mar­ried and had a child. The other hereti­cal posi­tion was that the Son of God never actu­ally was a man, that he never became flesh. Both ideas have their foun­da­tions in the fact that it is very hard for us to under­stand how Jesus could be both fully God and fully human.

It is inter­est­ing that by the end of the first cen­tury as seen in the writ­ings of the apos­tle John, the preva­lent thought that the church had to fight was the con­cept that Jesus never was fully human, that he never was flesh and bones. This con­cept came to full fruition in the Docetists dur­ing the sec­ond cen­tury. They taught that Jesus only appeared to be human but was never actu­ally flesh. It was as if Jesus was a ghost of some sorts and an unknown man was actu­ally cru­ci­fied by the Romans.

The Docetists were a part of a larger group called the Gnostics. Gnostic thought was based a lot on Plato’s think­ing. Spirit and flesh were com­pletely sep­a­rate and our sal­va­tion comes when we can become 100% spir­i­tual and slough off the flesh. The name Gnostic comes from the Greek work gno­sis which trans­lated means knowl­edge. They teach it is by the knowl­edge of God that we can become free.

The Gnostic chris­tians taught that if there was an actual man named Jesus, the Son entered him at some point to take on the role of the Messiah but the Son of God was not ever a man — how­ever, they also taught (or teach as there are still some Gnostics) that the Son of God was not actu­ally God either, rather he was the first cre­ated — the first Aeon as they would call him.

The Gospel of Mary which the movie refers to was a Gnostic writ­ing, prob­a­bly writ­ten some time dur­ing the sec­ond or early third cen­tury. This is where the movie kind of messes up regard­ing the Gospel of Mary. The man Jesus was a sec­ondary, two bit part in their beliefs. It was the Aeon, the Son of God, the Spiritual being that was to be wor­shiped (if any­thing). Gnostic thought would not have cared about any phys­i­cal rela­tions, only spir­i­tual ones. To their way of think­ing, if there was a man named Jesus, it wouldn’t have mat­tered if he did marry Mary Magdalene and had chil­dren — the Gnostics cer­tainly would not have tried to main­tain his blood line since it was irrel­e­vant and pos­si­bly sac­ri­le­gious. To the Gnostics which fol­lowed Christian beliefs (and most likely, there were Gnostics which totally rejected any Christian thought), it was the Aeon that mat­tered and not the flesh.

Gnostic teach­ings influ­enced a lot of other third cen­tury here­sies includ­ing Dynamic Monarchianism, Adoptionist, Modalist, and Arianism (not the Nazi stuff — the­ol­ogy named after a man named Arius). All basi­cally deny both the deity and human­ity of the Son of God to one degree or another. Some taught like the ear­lier Gnostics that He was the first­born cre­ated. Others taught he was a man that because of his obe­di­ence to God was adopted by God to become the Son tran­scend­ing his flesh or had his soul replaced by the Son of God.

All of these beliefs come about because of our inabil­ity to get our head around one of the foun­da­tional the­olo­gies of the Church, namely, the Trinity: one God but three dis­tinct per­sons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This inabil­ity results in anti-Trinitarian beliefs even today. The Unitarian church and the “Jesus Only” move­ment are both exam­ples of Christians who have rejected Trinitarian teach­ings. And of course, there are many who insists that Jesus was only a man, a good teacher, maybe even a prophet but not God.

The early church strug­gled over these the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts and I believe got it right as led by the Holy Spirit. The Trinity isn’t an easy doc­trine to under­stand but in the end, can we truly under­stand who God is? It is when we try to put God into under­stand­able bound­aries that we reduce God to a god — merely human for all that matters.

I will con­tinue this study in future posts as we exam­ine who Jesus was and is and is to come. If I can find my copy of Harold O. J. Brown’s book, Heresies: the Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present, I will cer­tainly use it as a guide and out­line as well as other resources at my dis­posal such as Systematic Theology: A Pentecostal Perspective, ed. Stanley M. Horton and the clas­sic Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin.