![]() Bird argues, to the contrary, that ontological language and categories were used to describe Jesus as an eternal, true, and unbegotten deity from the earliest decades of the nascent church. ![]() ![]() The application of ontological categories to Jesus is normally considered something that only began to happen in the second and third centuries as the early church engaged in platonizing interpretations of Jesus. Most studies of the origins of early Christology focus on christological titles, various functions, divine identity, and types of worship. In Jesus among the gods, Michael Bird gives renewed attention to divine ontology-what a god is-in relation to literary representations of Jesus. But was this doctrinal position crafted from whole cloth in the era of the great ecumenical councils? How did earlier Christ-followers understand Jesus in light of their convictions about the one supreme deity and in the context of a cultural milieu saturated with gods? In his divinity, orthodox Christianity claimed, he shared fully in the nature of the uncreated creator God. ![]() After several centuries of controversy, the early church came to an uneasy consensus that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. ![]()
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