The earliest creeds — and the earliest belief that Jesus is God

When did Christians first believe that Jesus is God?

A popular answer, repeated in documentaries, Muslim apologetics, Jehovah's Witness literature and university lecture halls, is: slowly, and late. A Jewish prophet was gradually promoted — to Messiah, then to a divine being, then finally to God himself — and the process was completed when an emperor's council voted on it in 325.

The earliest documents we have do not fit that story. This article looks at them closely: the formulas Paul quotes, the scholarly argument about what they mean, and where that argument stands today.

Older than the letters

Paul's letters are the earliest surviving Christian writings: 1 Thessalonians and Galatians from around AD 48–50, 1 Corinthians around 53–55, Romans around 57. That alone puts them within twenty-five years of the crucifixion.

But Paul often quotes. Scholars identify pre-existing material in his letters by a set of recognisable markers:

• Technical language of tradition. "I delivered to you... what I also received" (1 Corinthians 15:3) uses the vocabulary of passing on fixed teaching.
• Vocabulary and style unlike Paul's own — words he uses nowhere else, a rhythm and parallelism that break from the surrounding argument.
• Aramaic traces in Greek letters to Greek-speaking churches.
• Self-contained structure — a unit that makes sense on its own and could be recited.

None of these markers is decisive on its own, and scholars debate particular cases. But together they allow us to reach behind the letters into the worship of the 30s and 40s.

1 Corinthians 15:3-7 — the resurrection creed

The best known is the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Cephas, the Twelve, the five hundred, James and the apostles. Its date — usually placed within a few years of the crucifixion — and its significance as evidence for the resurrection are discussed in Did Jesus rise from the dead? The evidence examined.

For the question of Christology, note two things. It calls Jesus Christ, Messiah, as a settled title. And it already interprets his death theologically — "for our sins" — and scripturally. This is not a raw memory waiting to be interpreted. It is interpretation from the start.

Maranatha — praying to Jesus in Aramaic

At the very end of 1 Corinthians, Paul writes a single word in Aramaic, untranslated, to a Greek-speaking church: Maranatha (1 Corinthians 16:22). It means "Our Lord, come!" (or, divided differently, "Our Lord has come"; the imperative is more likely, and Revelation 22:20 gives the Greek equivalent, "Come, Lord Jesus!"). The Didache, an early church manual, places it in its prayers after the Lord's Supper.

This one word carries a great deal of historical weight:

• It is Aramaic, so it comes from the Aramaic-speaking believers of Judea and Galilee — the earliest community — not from Gentile churches.
• It is a prayer, addressed directly to Jesus. Jews prayed to God; they did not pray to prophets, rabbis, martyrs or angels.
• Paul can use it without explanation, which means the Corinthians already knew it. It had travelled with the faith.

1 Corinthians 8:6 — the Shema with Jesus inside it

The centre of Jewish faith was, and is, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Pious Jews recited it daily. It was the line between Israel and the nations' many gods.

In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul is discussing exactly that line — whether Christians may eat food offered to idols. He affirms monotheism without reservation and then writes:

Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.— 1 Corinthians 8:6

The Greek Shema uses two key words: theos (God) and kyrios (Lord). Paul has divided them: "one God" — the Father; "one Lord" — Jesus Christ. And he has added to Jesus the role that Jewish texts reserved for God alone: the one through whom all things were made.

Richard Bauckham's phrase for this is christological monotheism. Paul is not adding a second god alongside Israel's God; that would wreck his argument against idols. He is including Jesus within the identity of the one God of the Shema. Many scholars, including Gordon Fee in his commentary, regard the verse as a confessional formula, quite possibly pre-Pauline. Either way, it was written to make a point Paul expected the Corinthians to accept.

Philippians 2:6-11 — the hymn to Christ

Philippians 2:6-11, often called the Carmen Christi ("hymn to Christ"), describes Christ who, "though he was in the form of God", did not regard equality with God as something to exploit, but "emptied himself" (the source of the term kenosis), took the form of a servant, and became obedient to death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him and gave him "the name that is above every name", so that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow... and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord".

Since Ernst Lohmeyer's study of 1928, many scholars have regarded this as an early hymn that Paul quotes. Others, including Fee, argue it is Paul's own elevated prose. The debate affects how early the passage is, not what it says — and Philippians is early in any case.

What it says is remarkable. The final lines echo Isaiah 45:23, where the LORD declares, in the most fiercely monotheistic chapter of the Old Testament, "I am God, and there is no other... To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance." The homage Isaiah reserves for the one God, and for no one else, is given to Jesus — and "the name above every name", in a Jewish setting, is most naturally the divine name itself. All of this is said "to the glory of God the Father": Jesus' lordship does not compete with the Father's glory but expresses it.

Romans 1:3-4 — the Son in two phases

Romans 1:3-4 speaks of God's Son, "descended from David according to the flesh", and "declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead". The unusual phrasing ("Spirit of holiness" appears nowhere else in Paul) leads many scholars to see an early formula.

Some read it as adoptionist: Jesus became Son of God at the resurrection. But Paul frames the whole formula as being about the Son, before either clause. The likelier reading is two stages in the career of one Son: messianic descent in weakness, then enthronement "in power". The resurrection did not create his sonship; it publicly installed him in it.

Colossians 1:15-20 — the firstborn of creation

Colossians 1:15-20 calls Christ "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation", and says "by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth... all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

Many critical scholars doubt that Paul wrote Colossians; many others defend it, and if he did, it dates from the late 50s or early 60s. Either way it is a first-century text, and probably again quotes a hymn. "Firstborn" here carries its Old Testament sense of rank and inheritance (Psalm 89:27), not "first created" — the passage goes on to say that all things were created in him, which leaves nothing for him to be created among.

Alongside these sit other early formulas: "Jesus is Lord" as the baptismal confession (Romans 10:9), immediately followed by Joel's promise that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13) — where "the Lord" in Joel is the LORD, Israel's God, and in Paul is Jesus. And 1 Timothy 3:16 preserves a short hymn about the one "manifested in the flesh".

The evolutionary theory and its decline

For much of the twentieth century, the dominant scholarly account was quite different. Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos (1913), the classic work of the German "history-of-religions" school, argued that:

• The earliest Palestinian community saw Jesus as the coming Son of Man, a heavenly but not divine figure.
• Worship of Jesus as Kyrios, Lord, arose later in Hellenistic Gentile churches such as Antioch, under the influence of pagan cults with their own lords.
• Paul inherited and spread this Gentile Christ-cult.

This model shaped Rudolf Bultmann and a generation of scholarship. It has weakened for several reasons. Maranatha is Aramaic. The time available is too short: Paul's letters, quoting earlier material, are only two decades from the crucifixion. Martin Hengel observed, in substance, that more happened in Christology in those first two decades than in the following seven centuries. And the Jewishness of the evidence — the Shema, Isaiah, the divine name — points to Jews reinterpreting their own monotheism, not Gentiles importing someone else's.

Developmental accounts have not disappeared. Maurice Casey's From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God (1991) and, more cautiously, James Dunn's work argued for a more gradual process and questioned whether early devotion amounted to worship in the full sense. These are serious scholars, and their arguments deserve engagement. But the centre of gravity has moved.

"Early high Christology"

The shift is associated above all with Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham — sometimes jokingly called the "early high Christology club".

Hurtado focused on practice rather than titles. In One God, One Lord (1988) and Lord Jesus Christ (2003) he documented a pattern of devotion to Jesus in the earliest communities: prayer to and through him, invoking his name in healing and exorcism, baptism in his name, a sacred meal as "the Lord's Supper", hymns sung about and to him, confession of him as Lord. In Second Temple Judaism, that pattern of worship belonged to God alone. Hurtado described the result as a "mutation" within Jewish monotheism: a "binitarian" devotion, God and Jesus, arising very early and among Jews.

Bauckham focused on divine identity. Jewish monotheism, he argued, did not define God mainly by nature or rank but by who he is and what he does: the sole Creator, the sole sovereign Ruler of all things, the one who alone is worshipped. Early Christian texts place Jesus within that identity — as agent of creation (1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:16), seated on God's own throne (Psalm 110:1 is the most quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament), and bearer of the divine name (Philippians 2:9-11).

The two approaches differ in emphasis, and scholars debate the details. But both conclude that the highest view of Jesus is not the end of a long development. It is near the beginning.

Ehrman and the responses

Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God (2014) is the most widely read sceptical treatment. It is notable for how much it concedes. Ehrman, who earlier held a more conventional evolutionary view, writes that he came to accept that Jesus was regarded as divine very early — within years, and on the basis of the resurrection experiences.

His argument is that the earliest Christians held an exaltation Christology (Jesus a man raised to divine status, as he reads Romans 1:3-4 and some speeches in Acts), and that incarnation Christology (a pre-existent divine being who became human) developed slightly later — with Paul seeing Jesus as something like a principal angel who became human, appealing to Galatians 4:14.

The reply volume How God Became Jesus (2014) and other scholars press several points:

• The supposed exaltation formulas are embedded in letters by an author who clearly believes in pre-existence, and they read more naturally as two phases of one Son than as adoption.
• Philippians 2 does not give Jesus angelic status; it gives him the homage that Isaiah reserves for the LORD, and the angelic reading of Galatians 4:14 is doubtful — the verse is a comparison ("as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus").
• Simon Gathercole has argued that pre-existence is present in the Synoptic Gospels too, in the "I have come" sayings.
• The "divine" categories Ehrman uses tend to blur the sharp line Jews drew between the Creator and everything else — the line the early formulas deliberately place Jesus on the far side of.

From hymn to creed

The great creeds of the fourth century — Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 — are often presented as a break from the New Testament. The formulas surveyed here suggest a different picture. Nicaea's vocabulary is new: homoousios, "of one being", answered a question Arius forced. But the confession it protects is the confession of 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Philippians 2: one God, the Father; one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made. The councils are discussed further in The councils and creeds, and the doctrine itself in Christology — who exactly is Jesus?

When a Jehovah's Witness at the door, a Muslim friend, or a lecturer tells you that Jesus' divinity was decided centuries later, you do not need to begin with Nicaea. Begin with a word the earliest church prayed in its own language.

"Maranatha" — Our Lord, come (1 Corinthians 16:22).