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

Despite the assertion of the Nicene Creed that Jesus was one in substance with
the Father, the most persistent belief - persistent in that it had deep roots in the
Christian tradition - was subordinationism. Subordinationism was a broad
movement that included Arius as well as many others who had developed their
ideas independently of him, among them earlier scholars such as Origen. They
believed that Jesus was a later creation by God the Father, of lesser divinity and
thus subordinate to him in some way. The subordinationists drew their strength
from a mass of biblical texts that appeared to support their case. From the Old
Testament there was a verse from Proverbs (8:22) - ‘God created me, Wisdom, at
the beginning of time’ - which, if Wisdom could be seen as an allegory for
Christ, seemed to make clear that Jesus was a later, if early, creation of God. In
the New Testament, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (the so-called
synoptic gospels) were rich in subordinationist texts. So when Jesus says, ‘Of
that day and hour knoweth no man, neither the angel in heaven, nor the Son, but
only the Father’ (Mark 13:32), ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?’(Matthew 27:46), or ‘The Father is greater than I’ (John 14:28), he is clearly
attributing some form of superiority to God the Father. Peter’s statement in Acts
2:36 that ‘God has made [sic] him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you
crucified’ was another important subordinationist text, as were a host of others
that appeared to show Jesus as anguished, ignorant, hungry or tired. 4 As will be
seen, anyone who wished to argue that Jesus was equal in divine majesty to God
the Father would need to exercise considerable literary ingenuity to find
alternative explanations of these texts. To the subordinationists they seemed
incontrovertible, and this helps to explain why the gulf between them and the
followers of the Nicene Creed, with their insistence on ‘one substance’, became
so wide.
Subordinationism was also supported by Platonism, especially in the way that
Plato was interpreted by the first century AD Jewish philosopher Philo.
Increasingly Platonists talked of the supreme Good, the apex at the top of the
hierarchy of Ideas or Forms. Philo, who had never heard of Jesus and was
concerned only with the Hebrew scriptures, claimed that Plato’s Forms had been
known to the prophets. As Plato had argued that the Forms existed eternally,
Philo concluded that they could have been understood before Plato, for instance
by someone supremely wise like Moses. ‘Who is Plato but Moses speaking
Greek?’ he asked. The question then was how the Forms might reveal
themselves in the material world. In his philosophy, Philo gave central
importance to logos, reasoned thought, as a Platonic Form that existed