What Did the Earliest Christians Actually Believe?

One of the most persistent claims in modern scholarship is that the divine Jesus is a later invention — that the historical Jesus was a teacher or prophet whose followers gradually elevated him to divine status over decades or centuries. If that were true, we would expect to find early sources that show a merely human Jesus, with divine claims appearing only in later documents.

The earliest evidence points in the opposite direction. The earliest Christian documents we possess — earlier than the Gospels, earlier than most of the New Testament — already contain fully divine Christology. There is no period in the historical record where Christians treated Jesus as merely a great teacher.

This editorial examines what the first generation of Christians actually believed, using the sources closest to the events: pre-Pauline creeds, early hymns, Paul’s own letters, and the earliest post-apostolic witnesses. These are not a single stream of tradition, but multiple early layers — creed, hymn, confession, and practice — that converge on the same conclusion.

The creed embedded in 1 Corinthians 15 has already been examined in the Resurrection editorial for what it tells us about the event. Here the question is different: what does it tell us about what the earliest Christians believed?