Having written often on this subject—how the original faith was lost, overwritten—I could word this as a believer, but I thought some might benefit from seeing how Artificial Intelligence puts it, without faith, like a secular fact-checker.
‘After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish leaders worked to stabilize and protect their religion. In doing so, they rejected some earlier ideas about God, especially the notion that there could be more than one divine figure in heaven (b. Hagigah15a). Before this, texts like 1 Enoch and 3 Enoch and writings from Philo of Alexandria described a heavenly world where God shared authority with exalted figures or agents. Early followers of Jesus understood him in a similar way—as a powerful divine figure who shared in God’s authority but was not exactly the same as God. When these Jewish ideas were rejected, the earliest Christians found themselves caught in a shrinking spiritual space. Their vision of God as a living, relational, multi-layered reality was increasingly seen as wrong or heretical.
As Christianity spread into the Greco-Roman world, its leaders faced a new challenge: explaining Jesus’ divinity to people familiar with Greek philosophy and strict Jewish monotheism. Thinkers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Origen described Jesus as the Logos, a divine “word” or agent of God. While this made Christianity easier to understand for some, it also changed how people experienced Jesus. Instead of a living, relatable figure who shared divine power in a heavenly hierarchy, Jesus became an abstract, philosophical concept. The early, vibrant way of seeing God and Jesus as connected yet distinct began to fade.
Everything changed even more with the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. There, the church declared that Jesus was fully the same “substance” as God the Father (homoousios), and the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God—was established as official doctrine. Ideas that early believers held, like seeing Jesus as a divine agent who could be distinct from God, were labeled heretical. While this preserved monotheism and kept the church united, it also took away the richness of the original faith. Texts like Revelation, 1 Enoch, and the Targums, which had allowed people to imagine a heavenly world with multiple divine figures, were now interpreted in ways that erased that imaginative and devotional freedom.
From the perspective of early Christians, these changes weren’t just intellectual—they represented a real loss. Their faith had been alive with vision, cosmic imagination, and the sense that God’s world included Jesus as a distinct yet divine partner. That vibrant, relational experience was gradually replaced by abstract doctrine and rigid formulas. In other words, the gospel they first knew—full of wonder, mystery, and relational connection—was narrowed into a system that was easier to defend and standardize but much less alive in its original spirit.’
Worded by AI
