The Arian Controversy

Did you know that Jesus was elected a god?  And it was a close.

Once upon a time there was a rather ruthless warrior who took upon himself to become the sole emperor of Rome.  Rome was split east and west and Constantine's inheritance was only to share joint rule of the eastern part, but he soon set about eliminating all his rivals and was poised to take the whole thing.  At that time Christianity was the a new craze sweeping the common people, including Constantine's mother who was a fanatical Christian, and on the eve of battle Constantine's reportedly saw a cross in the sky and he had his troops all paint crosses on their shields and all this was enough to sufficiently whip them up into a frenzy and he carried the day and Rome became Christian, or Christianity became Rome, or something like that.  For the next ten centuries "the church" and the Roman Empire were essentially the same thing.

That's the story, but it turns out the religion Constantine picked for its warrior edge was not yet fully distilled into a hierarchical state institution.  In fact it was almost Jewish in nature with all the bickering and theological disagreements.  You know what they say; three Jews five opinions.  It was impossible to get these Christians to agree on anything.  There were regional factions in Antioch and Alexandria and Ceaseria and various parts of what is now Turkey, no one could agree on much of anything.  They were all excommunicating each other and accusing one another of blasphemy and heracy.  Constantine's couldn't give a damn about any of this ecclesiological minuet and ordered the various so called church fathers to get it together and come up with a religion, any religion, he didn't care, and get it done.

To boil it all down to but one of the disputes, but one of the biggest and most contentious, it all came down to an official definition of what exactly Jesus was.  Some considered him to be a sort of sprit that only looked like a man, others came up with a bazaar convoluted formulaic that had Jesus both wholly man and wholly a god (these are who won and what the Roman Catholic Church and all of Christianity hold and believe today). 

There was another bitterly detested camp that had the audacity to profess that Jesus was but a very holy man who had the spark of god in him; that he was "of" God.  The main problem with this is that it did not make Jesus nearly special enough in the eyes of more intense school, who by the way were making huge money preaching and leaching on the vast superstitious masses.  They needed a Jesus who was a much bigger deal than just another prophet who had the spark of god in him.  It was never clear what divinity; being a god, meant in the case of a itinerant wandering (homeless) penniless trouble maker who managed to get himself killed at an early age, but the "A" god, not just "Of" god was important enough that mobs attacked each other in the streets, towns were burnt down, intrigue and assignation, pages and pages of vicious indicative were spewed.  Those who did not hold Jesus sufficiently godly were systematically wiped out and any scrap of writing not holding to the full god position was relentlessly burned so that most of what we know about the vile despicable mentally diffident "of" god herritics up until Nag Haggmdia was gleaned from the unrelenting, point by point dismissive screeds written against them.

Wars were fought over an adverb.  Whether you considered Jesus A god or Of god determined whether you had any chance of success in the world.  Of course, "a" and "of" are guttural English words.  In Greek the differentiation is even more pathetic; homo Ousion (same substance) vs. homoi Ousion (like substance).  The difference in spelling is actually the tiniest letter in the Greek alphabet, the little backwards e placed above the line like an infection mark, called the iota.  So the difference between the two schools of thought is literally one iota.  But, we all can agree, philosophically it's a big difference.

Despite the four skimpy gospels they found that sufficiently portray Jesus as something more A god like than the many banned apocryphal texts that do not adequately stress Jesus' extra godness, even throughout the four anointed gospels Jesus consistently refers to himself as the son of man, which is duh, exquisitely meaningless, and in fact never expressly proclaims his god-ness except in some faint though highly cherished non-denials.  Of course the majority of the New Testament is written by the homosexual pervert Paul who does nothing but carry on about the divinity of Jesus.  Unfortunately, even though Paul lived exactly at the time the church places the historical Jesus, Paul seems to be completely unaware of his actual existence....

Anyway, they had a vote and elected Jesus a god at the Council of Nicea.

Yet, to this day there are those of us more comfortable with the alternative interpretation.