In the earliest period of Christianity, the understanding of Jesus grew out of oral traditions of divinity that were common across cultures. Ancient peoples saw divinity not as a fixed category belonging only to gods, but as something humans could share in to varying degrees. Kings, heroes, and other chosen figures embodied this mixture: human yet endowed with qualities associated with the gods. Jesus was recognized in this same way—not as God Himself, but as one chosen by God, bearing divine qualities that set him apart from those around him. The disciples saw in him nobility of spirit, preeminence of character, and an extraordinary measure of God’s presence. This did not erase his humanity; indeed, denying his humanness was considered a mark of false teaching.
Jesus spoke of preexistence, and his followers understood this in continuity with earlier Jewish writings. The Book of Enoch describes a Son of Man as if he existed even before the Flood, while David refers to “my lord” in a way that implies preexistence. These texts show that the concept of a preexistent, chosen figure was already present in Jewish thought, and the disciples recognized Jesus as the fulfillment of this. To them, he was not the eternal God made flesh but a human chosen to be the Christ, embodying the Spirit that had been active from ancient times. God remained the Father, while Jesus was His Christ, a human uniquely endowed with divine presence.
In the generations after Jesus, this understanding began to shift. The subtle oral categories of chosenness and shared divine qualities became less clear as Christianity spread in a Greco-Roman world, where divinity increasingly meant full ontological deity. Jewish monotheism, sharply distinguishing God from all else, collided with growing reverence for Jesus, prompting theological development. Over time, Jesus came to be spoken of not merely as chosen by God but as truly God Himself, and Trinitarian theology formalized this shift.
Yet the revelation at the heart of Jesus’ own time was not that he was God in essence but that the divine qualities manifest in him were not generic traits of the gods. They were the qualities of one God in particular, the Father. To recognize Jesus as the Christ was to see in his human life the unique presence of the Father without confusion between the two. Though this early understanding became obscured in later centuries, it reveals how the first disciples perceived both his humanity and his extraordinary chosenness.
By Stephen D Green, with ChatGPT aiding the flow of the wording for clarity