From about two hundred years ago, and especially during the last 160 years, Christian scholars have begun to read the Bible historically. They found it is not written on one level nor by one author. It was composed by different people at different times and it reflects many differences of viewpoint. That is why it can now be seen to contain many inconsistencies and vast differences of viewpoint. In particular the traditional answer of how Jesus became the Christ has been replaced by a surprising variety of conflicting answers. What is even more revealing is that when we look at these answers in chronological order of composition, we find a quite fascinating process taking place. Within the space of about seventy years the chief “act of God” by which Jesus supposedly became the Christ has moved from after his death, back through his ministry, baptism, birth, to beyond the creation itself, as the final creedal term “begotten, not made” makes clear.
The reason for the apparently conflicting answers is that they were not historical events, open to public investigation, but value judgments, being made by different people at different times in a fast developing tradition. Although they were being proclaimed in the same kind of language we commonly use to announce an objective historical event, they were actually subjective judgments or evaluations on the part of those who gave them. In other words what Christian tradition has long treated as an objective account of how Jesus became the Christ turns out to be a succession of subjective judgments. The traditional, and supposedly objective, account of how Jesus became the Christ is the account of how Jesus, step by step, came subjectively to be evaluated in the minds of successive generations of those who worshiped him and thus conceived as the Christ.
