Did Earliest Christians think Jesus was God?

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On page 233 of The Da Vinci Code, the fictitious character Teabing argues:

“until [the Council of Nicaea in 325] Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”

“Not the Son of God?”

“Right. Jesus’ establishment as the ‘Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea…”

"Hold on. You're saying Jesus divinity was the result of a vote ?"

"A relatively close vote at that...Nonetheless, establishing Christ's divinity was critical to Constantine for the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. It was all about power...Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of Church and state. To re-write history Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke, so the earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned. The modern Church's desire to suppress these documents come from a since belief in their established view of Christ..."

And thus the very foundation of the entire conspiracy theory in the novel rests upon an attempt by the church through the ages to cover up the fact that Jesus' first followers did not think he was the Son of God. You might say, "Big deal, this is just fiction!" Right, but 53% of adult Americans who read the book say it has affected their personal spiritual growth and understanding. So what do we actually know? What did the first Christians think? To come to a reasonable answer, keep the following in mind:

Every major movement in history has a large core who get it and a small fringe that don't.
Imagine that you found a picture from a Martin Luther King march for civil rights that showed someone at the back of the march throwing a brick or Molotov cocktail. Would that prove that the civil rights movement was violent? No, it would prove that there were people around the fringes of the movement who just didn't get the core message. The same thing is true about the Christian movement in the years 33 A.D. - 400 A.D. The question is not can we find any old document that paints a different picture of Jesus, but rather what did most of the earliest Christians who knew him best think about Jesus ?

In the early church, there was no pope, no Vatican, no single controlling authority.
Popes did not come along until hundreds of years AFTER the Council of Nicaea. Rather, individual churches grew in the urban cities along the coast line as Christianity spread out over the Roman empire. Each local church had its own leader called a bishop or patriarch. So there was a patriarch of Alexandria, a patriarch of Jerusalem, a patriarch of Antioch, and later a patriarch of Rome. The Map of the Ancient World in the 600's - hundreds of years AFTER the Council of Nicaea shows the church still was organized by local patriarchs, not a pope in Rome. These different churches had different cultures, customs and languages. If we find these very different groups all pretty much saying the same thing, we get a pretty good idea what the core message of the early church was.
The best time to downplay the idea that Jesus was God was in the early years BEFORE Constantine

•In about 286 the pagan Roman Emperor Diocletian decreed that all churches were to be destroyed throughout the empire as well as all copies of the Christian scriptures. •All Christians had to do to avoid torture, death, being fed to wild animals or burned alive on a stake was to renounce Jesus and offer sacrifices to the Roman gods. It was not a good time to talk about Jesus being God, and yet that is exactly what the first Christians did - even though it cost them their lives. You might think they were deceived, but to deny this is what they believed is to be utterly a-historical.

OK, so what is the evidence?

57 - 80 A.D. The Book of Colossians
Respected scholars of all persuasions agree the book of Colossians was written by one of the earliest Christians between 57 and 80 A.D., i.e., while people who knew Jesus were still alive. What does this document written by one of the earliest Christians say?

Colossians Chapter 1:15-20 -

"Jesus…is the image of the invisible God…for by him all things were created…For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him”

Colossians Chapter 2:6-10 -

"So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.

How do we know this for real? Well, you could get in your car today and head for Ann Arbor Michigan. You could go to the University of Michigan and ask to see the ancient manuscript "p46" - papyrus 46 - a small fragment that has been scientifically dated to c.a. 200 AD (see above right). And there before your eyes you would see an actual copy of the book of Colossians that was made 150 years BEFORE the Council of Nicaea.

How about sources outside the bible?

107 AD Ignatius in Antioch

Jesus was “God Incarnate…God himself appearing in the form of a man”

177 AD Melito in Sardis

“He was man, yet He is God…” Click here to see the absolute conviction of Melito that Jesus was God.

Circa 200 AD Hippolytus in Rome:
Hippolytus used a baptismal creed that is almost identical to the Apostles Creed. He declares that Jesus is divine and calls him 'the Son of God'

So again, thinking about the map above, we see that Christians spread all over the empire and under no central authority all thought that Jesus was no mere mortal prophet.

How about what the opposition said ?

In 112 AD a Roman administrator known as “Pliny the younger” who was no friend of Christians wrote that they:

“ were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up…”

Well, what about the Council of Nicaea ?

We have seen above that there were many churches with no central authority. When Constantine was converted to Christianity, this began to change. But now that Christians were no longer oppressed, their differences could begin to come to the surface. A leader by the name of Arius had a different understanding of the divinity of Jesus than the majority lead by Athanasius. Constantine wanted peace in his empire so he called the council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to settle the matter. Even if Constantine's motives were purely political (which is doubtful), we need to remember that:

A new doctrine was not created at the Council of Nicaea, rather the discussion was about which of the preexisting ideas was correct.
Over 200 bishops from around the known world were called together. The vote was not close.
The debate was not over whether Jesus was divine or not, the argument was over exactly how to explain Jesus' divinity. Everyone present thought Jesus was the Son of God. Arius, the one who lost the vote, the one you would think was saying that Jesus was just a mortal prophet declared that:
- Jesus was sinless
- Jesus was created before the world
- Jesus was "God the only -begotten"

How many mortal people do you know who would meet these three criteria? So the vote was not whether Jesus was simply a mortal man or divine, it was a vote over exactly how to understand Jesus' divinity. You can disagree with their conclusion, but to say that the council of Nicaea was when Christians decided that Jesus was God is to be utterly a-historical.

Thus, the truth is the exact opposite of what was presented in the Da Vinci Code:

The actual historical evidence shows that the earliest Christians - the ones closest to Jesus, were the very ones who were most adamant that Jesus was the Son of God, and in fact they were willing to pay for that belief with their lives. So the question is back in your court - do you think Jesus was the Son of God?

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Did the first Christians think Jesus was God?