Originally Posted by Credo
Actually, it's not as contradictory as it first appears. The reason why Judaism by the time of Jesus had said there could be divine beings that were not God was to make sure that they kept a strict montheism intact (strict in the sense of conceiving of a "one God" religion in the human conception of what one means--only one thing or person that literally takes up time and space). Before the Babylonian exile, there appears to have been a thinking (that originated in Babylon/Sumer but was widespread in the ancient Middle East by about 1000 B.C.E) that there could be a multitude of divine personages, all of which could be equally gods. At the zenith of its political and pre-captivity theological formation, Israel seems to have thought of God as the divinity of Israel (He was powerful within the Israelite realm), but wasn't as powerful outside of it (this is reflected in archaeological findings from that time period and from the Psalms). Though YHWH was Israel's God, they understood that other nations had their all-powerful deity. And they thought that surely God alone was to be worshiped, but that He must, like the other pagan gods, have an entourage or something. On many Israeli tombs from 1000 B.C.E., even down to 700 B.C.E., we find inscribed on sepulchres: "To YHWH and His Asherah", which was a female Canaanite goddess that usually attended the most powerful deity in that region.
After the Babylonian captivity (around 500 B.C.E., give or take a few decades), the Jewish religious and political leaders decided to avoid any kind of idolatry. Having been raised in Babylon, away from Israel, they were told the stories about how Israel angered God by worshiping idols and other foreign gods; in God's wrath, He gave His people over to the Gentiles to teach them to stop worshiping other gods and to worship only Him. Wanting to make sure a dispersion never happened again, the leaders started to take ultra-conservative views on the one-ness of God. Before Babylon came and destroyed Israel, the people seemed to think of God's oneness (if they thought of it at all) in terms of "only", to only worship YHWH; if you worshiped YHWH's Asherah, you were seen as really worshiping YHWH, not His companion. After the destruction at the hands of Babylon, God's oneness was seen more in terms of "one", as in the number one; there is only one (1) God that we worship.
After 500 B.C.E., the tendency was to re-read Scripture; instead of reading that God personally spoke to Moses in a burning bush, it was read that God gave His words to an angel, who in turn spoke them to Moses in a burning bush; surely the Almighty would not condescend to speak one-on-one to humans, it was reasoned. By the time of the Rabbis in about 100 B.C.E., this kind of thinking had calcified. Midrash, Jewish commentary on Scripture, told the reader to interpret the stories in such a way as shown above. This was not done because the religious teachers wanted to change Scripture; they never changed the words of Scripture, they just wrote about how to interpret it for the Jewish community. This was done, rather, to help all the Jewish people avoid idolatry, thus making sure God would not scatter His people to the far corners of the world as He had done once before. Though this move was well intentioned on the part of the religious teachers and leaders, it removed the personal contact God had with people (except through prophets who were viewed as more holy than anyone and regarded with a mysterious mysticism that bordered on perceived divinity), discarded things such as God doing miracles for people and instead God sending angels to do miracles because God surely would not communicate directly with sinful human beings, and caused the people to exalt the examples and stories of the Scriptural prophets from humble, human messengers of God (as appears in the Scriptures) to superhuman mythic figures and heroes who were somehow above the daily humanness of everyone else.
Now here is where I answer your question. In the 1st century after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, this idea of Jesus being divine (in the sense of being God) because He did these things was picked up primarily by the Gentile believers, especially those not coming from the synagogue but rather from Hellenistic religions. These religions had retained this special quality of the gods doing miraculous things for people, thus proving that they were truly gods (however, I should point out that Hellenistic religions also kept their gods at a distance, so much so that they seemed to not even like people; at least the idea was still retained within Judaism that God truly loved and cared for people, even though He could not talk to them directly because of their sins).
Many of the Gentile Christians in the 1st century probably saw Jesus as God by looking at the Gospel stories through the religious environments in which they were raised. However, as these believers were continually taught the faith, it appears something must have changed; many scholars have expected that New Testament Gentile believers who saw Jesus as God would come out of the closet and say Jesus is God (not equal to but is in actuality the God of Israel, the Ancient of Days) by the beginning of the 2nd century (100 C.E.). However, as we know from history, they did not; in fact Christians, most of whom were not Jews but Gentiles after 100 C.E., were very hesitent to say that Jesus is God even up to the first quarter of the 4th century. While they felt comfortable calling Jesus the Son of God (since that was in the Gospels), they pretty much left the term open to interpretation. But as these Christians thought about Jesus' divinity throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries, more and more of them were becoming convinced that God was to be viewed more in a trinitarian monotheistic vision. To Jews during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Christians were viewed as weird monotheists--while they held some peculiar views about the Messiah, particularly in terms of Jesus of Nazareth, these followers of the Way were pretty much monotheists who held to the monotheistic view that Judaism did.
However, Christian leaders finally decided in the early 320's C.E. to come out and make a statement claiming Jesus to be God, and not just "Son of God." This statement of belief was met with a lot of resistence, especially in the East in modern-day Turkey, Palestine, and Iraq/Iran in the fertile soil of what would later produce the Greek Orthodox Church. In fact, Christians did not take the idea of Jesus as God to be a normative part of Christian belief until about 100-150 years after the Council of Nicea (C.E. 325). Christians still struggle with it today.
It's a little difficult to understand in this little response, so if I've confused you, by all means tell me and I'll try to sort things out. But I would like to point out that a lot of the phraseology in the Nicene Creed, regardless of whether or not the composers of it knew this, to prove the Godship of Jesus is taken directly from much of Apocalyptic Jewish literature dated between 200-50 B.C.E. So that's kind of interesting:) Did this...um...answer your question?
