Larry Hurtado, historian of earliest Christianity

Sources

• Author summary of the argument (opens in a new tab)

  Larry W. Hurtado, “Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity” (Eerdmans, 2003). - Author summary of the argument:

Objections & responses

Hurtado shows early devotion to Jesus, but he is careful to call it binitarian rather than a full Trinity, and he doesn’t claim the first Christians held Nicene theology.

That is an accurate summary of Hurtado, and his care is worth respecting. He argues for an early mutation of Jewish monotheism in which Jesus is included in devotional practice reserved for God, and he declines to translate that directly into fourth-century categories. That is enough for this claim, which says only that Jesus was worshiped as divine before any council met. The step from early devotional inclusion to Nicene definition is what the rest of this case argues, and it is a step, not a leap.

Hurtado was a committed Christian. Don’t his conclusions just match his faith?

He was, and that should be said plainly. But his thesis has been tested against the sources by scholars who are not, including Bart Ehrman, who in How Jesus Became God accepts that Jesus was regarded as divine in some sense very early, within the first years after the crucifixion. The disagreement among specialists is about what kind of divinity the first Christians attributed to Jesus, not about whether the devotion was early.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The divinity of Jesus was not invented at the Council of Nicaea; Christians worshiped Jesus as divine long before any council met.