Forgotten Debate on Jesus’ Origin Vividly Revived

“When Jesus Became God” is a book about the so-called Arian heresy, a point of theological debate that prompted a crisis in late antiquity but is nowadays relegated to dusty tomes about church history. Was Jesus a mortal (or “begotten”) human being who was elevated to divinity by God, as the followers of an early Christian priest named Arius believed, or was he God himself?

At the heart of the debate is one of those angels-on-a-pinhead questions that is still capable of boggling the rational mind: How are we to understand the notion of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine?

Yet there is nothing dry or pedantic about Richard Rubenstein’s lively work. By resurrecting, so to speak, the Arian controversy, he succeeds in bringing fully alive a moment in history when matters of faith were capable of inspiring authentic passion in ordinary men and women.

“If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change,” said a churchman in 4th century Constantinople, “he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten.”

Indeed, the Arian “controversy,” as Rubenstein prefers to call it, was never merely a debating point in the church councils that tried but failed to resolve the question once and for all. At its hottest moments, rioters took to the streets, churchmen of high rank were lynched, and fellow Christians denounced each other as seducers and rapists as well as apostates and heretics. To impugn one of their theological adversaries, some Arian priests hired a prostitute to slip into the bedchamber of an anti-Arian bishop as he slept so that he could be denounced as a fornicator.

The principal antagonists in the Arian controversy were the priest called Arius (after whom the doctrine of Arianism was named) and a bishop called Athanasius, an Alexandrian churchman who was Arianism’s fiercest enemy. Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, was caught between them.

Rubenstein allows us to see that much more was at stake in the Arian controversy than theology. Christianity had only recently passed from an outlawed and oppressed cult to the state religion of Rome, the Roman Empire itself was in constant peril from barbarian invasion, and fear of a cataclysmic collapse of the social, religious and political order was something palpable in the civilized world.

“One cannot understand Christianity’s revolutionary appeal, or the ferocious disputes that divided the Christian community into warring camps,” explains Rubenstein, “without accounting for both sides of the equation, the hopes as well as the anxieties generated by a period of unprecedented change.”

A professor at George Mason University, where his academic specialty is “conflict resolution and public affairs,” Rubenstein is clearly a man afire with curiosity, and he invites us to look at the Arian controversy through several intriguing and illuminating lenses: the death throes of imperial Rome, the hothouse politics of the early Christian church and the life-and-death struggles that pitted Christianity against paganism, the Greek church against the Latin church and “barbarism” against classical civilization.

Yet he is neither a theologian nor a Christian. “What business,” he muses out loud, “did an American Jew have writing about the divinity of Jesus Christ?” He was attracted to the arcana of early Christian history, Rubenstein explains, by the notion that the Arian controversy marks the point in history after which Jesus could no longer be regarded as “a tzaddik, a great sage, perhaps even a prophet.” As a result, a seemingly unrepairable breach opened between Christians and Jews.

“Before it ended, Jews and Christians could talk to each other and argue among themselves about crucial issues like the divinity of Jesus,” writes Rubenstein. “When the controversy ended--when Jesus became God--that closeness faded [and] Judaism became a form of infidelity.”

So the subtext of “When Jesus Became God” is whether we have come far enough since the fall of Rome to talk to each other once again. “The great questions that had generated the controversy over Jesus’ divinity remained--and remain yet--to haunt the imagination and provoke the conscience of humankind,” concludes Rubenstein. But, tragically and ironically, what his book really demonstrates is that men and women have always succeeded in finding something to stoke their hatreds and to justify their worst acts of violence against each other, even if it is expressed in a debate over the godliness of the Prince of Peace.

Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).