How Jesus Can Be Both God and Man

Summary

An exploration of Christology — the question of how Jesus can be both fully God and fully human — across the first three centuries of the church. Starting from the observation that the New Testament tells two stories about Jesus at once (a flesh-and-blood man and the eternal God), it walks through the teachers who tried to keep only one of those stories — Marcion, Valentinus, the Adoptionists, the Subordinationists, and finally Arius — and shows how figures like Irenaeus and Athanasius answered them, culminating in the Council of Nicaea's affirmation that Jesus is fully divine and fully human.

Key Points

Two true stories about one person

• The New Testament presents Jesus in two ways that have to be held together. There is the human story almost everyone accepts: born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, a tradesman turned rabbi who taught, gathered followers, and was crucified — who walked, slept, wept, hungered, bled, and died.
• There is also the divine story only Christians confess: that he came down from heaven, existed eternally, was with God and was God, shared in creating the world, was worshiped, and ascended after rising from the dead.
• The first Christians became convinced both were somehow true at once — that in this ordinary human, the God of Israel was fully present. One of the earliest names for him, Emmanuel, means "God with us."
• The whole field of Christology is the attempt to say how the two stories fit, and why it matters.

Marcion: a divine Jesus who was never human

• Around AD 140 a wealthy shipowner named Marcion joined a church in Rome but was expelled four years later for his teaching.
• Captivated by the loving Father-God Jesus described, Marcion couldn't square that God with the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom he judged to be a different — and evil — deity. Since that God made the physical world, Marcion concluded the material world itself was evil.
• He therefore denied Jesus could be truly human (that would make him part of an evil creation): Jesus only appeared as a grown man and was never really born.
• Marcion accepted only a sliver of the writings most Christians already treated as Scripture, cutting anything that stressed Jesus' humanity or Jewishness and keeping a trimmed set of Paul's letters and an edited Luke.

Valentinus: secret knowledge to escape the body

• Around the same time, Valentinus of Alexandria likewise believed the world was made by an evil god, but his focus was different.
• He taught that we are souls trapped in corrupt bodies, and that Jesus came as a divine being to deliver secret knowledge — gnosis — to help us escape the body and return to a spiritual heaven (hence the later label "gnostic").
• Where Marcion narrowed the Christian writings, Valentinus expanded them, reading hidden meanings into Jesus through other philosophies, myths, and mystical texts.
• Both ended up as Docetists — holding that Jesus only seemed to be human. Each drew on the New Testament but selectively, picking verses that fit a conclusion they had already reached.

Irenaeus and the rule of faith

• Near the end of the second century, Irenaeus, a theologian in Gaul, recognized that these were really arguments about how to read the Bible: Marcion was subtracting from it, Valentinus adding to it.
• He argued Scripture must be read as a whole — neither cherry-picked nor filtered through one's own outside framework.
• His standard, the rule of faith, was not his private opinion but the posture of those who had actually known Jesus: the New Testament records the real experiences of real people, remembered in worship and handed down from the first followers.
• By that measure both Marcion and Valentinus erred, because if Jesus was only pretending to be human, then God was never truly with us.

How could a human be God?

• Others struggled with the opposite difficulty. Some said Jesus was simply a man, born of Mary and Joseph and empowered by the Spirit — a prophet or teacher with special access to God.
• The Adoptionists went further, saying Jesus was adopted into divinity at a moment in time, often identified as his baptism.
• The Subordinationists held that Jesus was always divine but not fully equal to the Father — a kind of demi-god — pointing to verses where Jesus says the Father is greater than he.

Arius and the road to Nicaea

• About 150 years after Valentinus, another Alexandrian, Arius, sparked one of the fiercest debates in early Christian history.
• Arius agreed Jesus was divine, involved in creation, existing before time, truly incarnate, and worthy of worship — but insisted the Son was a created being, not eternal like the Father and not the same in essence.
• He read Scripture sincerely, citing Colossians' "firstborn of all creation" and the created "Wisdom" of Proverbs 8, hoping to protect strict monotheism. The cost, though, was a Jesus who was neither fully human nor fully divine.

What Nicaea affirmed

• The dispute came to a head at the Council of Nicaea, where the two stories of Jesus were the central question, with the whole faith resting on the answer.
• Athanasius played a key role with a simple argument everyone accepted: only God can save, and only the Creator can redeem creation. Since the New Testament consistently calls Jesus the Savior, Jesus must be God.
• He added that Christians had worshiped Jesus from the beginning; if Jesus were not divine, that worship would be idolatry — so by urging continued worship of a non-divine Christ, Arius was effectively encouraging idolatry.
• Reading the Bible as a whole, the council refused to drop either story. The Gospel of John was decisive: the Word "was God" yet also "became flesh and dwelt among us." The verdict: Jesus is fully human, living in a real time and place, and fully, eternally God.
• This became the heart of the first official Christian creed — "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father… and became man" — a shared summary born of prayer, debate, and Scripture.
• The creed gave only one line to the Holy Spirit because his divinity wasn't yet seriously contested; later questions and later councils would take that up.

Notable Quotes

"The Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." — John 1:1, 14

"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God… true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father… who for us and for our salvation came down and became man." — The Nicene Creed (AD 325)