A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

V
TRUE GOD FROM TRUE GOD?
ON the death of Constantine in 337, the debate between Arius and Alexander
remained unresolved. There were two rival conceptions of Jesus’ divinity
embedded in the Christian communities. Alexander had argued that Jesus was
always fully God and had existed eternally alongside God the Father. This view
had been accepted at Nicaea with the addition of the term homoousios, ‘of the
same substance’, to describe their shared status. Arius, on the other hand, argued
that Jesus had been created as a subordinate god within time, the Son of the
Father who became Father only at the moment of Jesus’ creation. The evidence
seems to suggest that after Nicaea, Constantine was shrewd enough to accept
that the debate was impossible to resolve. His policy was to be tolerant of
differing beliefs while remaining intolerant of any bishops, such as Athanasius
of Alexandria, who caused or intensified unrest in their communities. For
Constantine, as with most emperors, good order was more important than correct
doctrine.
The original conception of Jesus in the context of the Jewish world in which
he lived and taught was that he was fully human. It was impossible to conceive,
in fact blasphemous for a Jew to believe, as it would later be for Muslims, that
he could be divine. This possibility could not even be considered until
Christianity spread from the Jewish into the Greek world where the boundaries
between human and divine were less clearly defined. Even here there were many
Christians who continued to see Jesus as no more than a man, though one of
great spiritual qualities. One Theodotus, a cobbler from Constantinople who
came to Rome about 190 and gathered his own congregation in the relatively
fluid Christian world of the period, used logical analysis derived from Aristotle
and the mathematician Euclid to conclude that, while the Holy Spirit was
involved in the conception of Jesus, this did not give Jesus divine status - he was
always ‘a mere man’. Theodotus was excommunicated by Victor, the Bishop of
Rome, but his congregation seems to have still been alive in the 260s, though by
this time some of them believed that Jesus had finally become divine, at the
resurrection.