If Jesus had never been considered to be God, we never would have had Christianity.   That in itself is enormous.  But consider the other consequences.

If Jesus had remained, in the eyes of his disciples, simply a Jewish preacher who ended up on the wrong side of the law and was crucified for his efforts, his followers would have continued on as a sect within Judaism.   There would not have been large scale Gentile conversions to this form of Judaism, any more than there were to other forms of Judaism. 

If large numbers of Gentiles had not converted to faith in the God-man Jesus, the religion of Jesus would never have grown to be a very sizeable minority within the Roman empire by the beginning of the fourth century – when Christians numbered something like three million persons.   If they had not been this significant presence in the Empire, the emperor Constantine would almost certainly not have converted.  If the emperor Constantine had not converted, there would not have been the monumental conversions of the fourth century.  

Without these conversions, Christianity could not have become the state religion of Rome.   And as a result, it would never have become the dominant religious, social, cultural, political, and economic force of the West.  We would not have had the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or Modernity as we know it.

The process by which Jesus became God is not an event which happened to Jesus but a developing change in human thinking.

I then turned back to the rise of the Easter faith to show that it also has to be understood subjectively rather than as objective history. The Easter faith arose partly out of the continuing influence of the impact Jesus had made on those who knew him and partly out of the devastating experience they had with his death.

The process of religious thought by which Jesus became the Christ, as demonstrated by the New Testament, did not stop there but continued in the post-biblical period. For even at the end of the first century Christian thought was still a long way from what was to become the classical Christian teaching as proclaimed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 c.e.

Yet already, as the New Testament itself clearly acknowledges, a rift was beginning to emerge as a result of the speed with which thought about Jesus was developing. It is the rift between the first generation of Christians—the Jewish Christians—and the rapidly growing Gentile church spread by Paul.

The Jewish Christians, led by James and Peter (at least at first), still saw Jesus through Jewish eyes. In their view Jesus remained fully human like themselves. He fulfilled the role of Messiah but was not himself divine. The Jewish Christians rejected the later stories of the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Incarnation. In the Letter of James we may have the best example of their thinking.

They were expelled by the Romans from Jerusalem, their center, along with the Jews and they settled across the Jordan in Pella. They were rejected by the Jews because of their allegiance to Jesus and they were cold-shouldered and eventually rejected by the Gentile Christians as heretical. We hear no more of them after the fifth century.

It was the Gentile Christianity shaped by Paul which became the classical form of Christianity. The Gentile Christians increasingly saw Jesus through Greek eyes. Even Paul, though he gloried in his Jewishness, was very much a Hellenistic Jew. The New Testament largely reflects his thought and that of the Gentile Church and tends to hide from view what remains there of the thinking of the primitive Jewish church.

The Gentile mind had no trouble with regarding Jesus as divine. They saw him as the Son of God par excellence—the only Son of God. They had no expectation of a coming Messiah as the Jews had, so the word Christ (which translates Messiah) simply became used as a proper name. Jesus the Messiah became Jesus Christ or just Christ. Indeed the problem soon became not how to proclaim his divinity but how to defend his humanity. The Gnostic wing of the Christian movement wanted to say that Jesus only appeared to be a man but was really wholly God all the time.

As the church struggled to maintain both the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus it went through a series of theological controversies. Various solutions were rejected, most as heretical. At first the church tried to determine just how Jesus was related to God the Creator. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity resulted and Jesus was portrayed as the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. Then the church had to work out how human nature and divine nature could be united in the one historical personage.

The debate was never universally resolved. Those who disagreed with the findings of the Ecumenical councils were simply excommunicated from the main body. That is how the Nestorians (who affirmed two natures) and the Coptic churches (who affirmed one nature) came to be separated from the main body. What became Christian orthodoxy was the following formula arrived at by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It may be regarded as the end result of the process by which Jesus became God.

We then, following the Holy fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of the natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted nor divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, the only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ has taught us, and the Creed of the Holy Father has handed down to us